3 20 57 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6356a46b8bc98643a5a69457472ad514.pdf 1192c57fbef50a4794d752b6f7fb204d 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 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 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. 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context John Owens Address for Weigle Inauguaration Title A name given to the resource Address of John W. Owens at the Inauguration of Richard D. Weigle Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1950-10-28 Description An account of the resource Address of John W. Owens at the Inauguration of St. John's College President Richard D. Weigle on October 28, 1950. 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 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource John W. Owens Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource inauguration Inauguration https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/aa349d2c0fb8d1eed65617704914eb85.pdf 80a1265f25857aa152629bdf1e8924e9 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 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 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. 57 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Inaugural Proceedings and Lectures 1980 Title A name given to the resource Inaugural Proceedings and Lectures of 1980 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 09/27/1980 - 09/26/1980 & 10/04/1980 - 10/03/1980 Description An account of the resource Program of the Inaugural Proceedings and Lectures of 1980 including: The Duties of Higher Education to America, an Address by Edwin Jules DeLattre, President of St. John's College and An American Scholar: The Young James Madison, Lectures by William J. Bennett, President of the National Humanities Center. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Santa Fe, NM Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Subject The topic of the resource inauguration https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bd4dcfbfd62ac3a4edcc825f161d9145.mp3 3d65949a2c1e97994ec33c4279219327 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 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 audiotape (Tape 225) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:17:10 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 Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan answer questions about the history and development of the St. John’s College Program (Part 2 of 2) Description An account of the resource Audio recording of Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan discussing and answering questions about the history and development of the St. John's program. Recorded in two parts on August 25, 1966 as a supplement to Warren C. Bomhardt’s Master’s Thesis, “The St. John’s College Program: its history and development” for Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, 1968. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Barbara, CA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966-08-25 Type The nature or genre of the resource audio Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/4050" title="Part 1">Part 1</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Barr Buchanan 1966-08-25 (part 2) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Barr, Stringfellow, 1897-1982 Buchanan, Scott, 1895-1968 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Bomhardt, Warren C. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7545db4228dd9721eecc4fbb46481783.mp3 0652d23669b76cd7db3569168cb444c4 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 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 audiotape (Tape 225) Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:29:45 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 Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan answer questions about the history and development of the St. John’s College Program (Part 1 of 2) Description An account of the resource Audio recording of Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan discussing and answering questions about the history and development of the St. John's program. Recorded in two parts on August 25, 1966 as a supplement to Warren C. Bomhardt’s Master’s Thesis, “The St. John’s College Program: its history and development” for Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, 1968. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Barbara, CA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1966-08-25 Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/4051" title="Part 2">Part 2</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Barr Buchanan 1966-08-25 (part 1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Barr, Stringfellow, 1897-1982 Buchanan, Scott, 1895-1968 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Bomhardt, Warren C. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/07e212fd4022d23ffb87df44e011afb2.pdf 1538ee55ca16380a5942c5075bc01cd1 PDF Text Text On Nature and Grace: The Role of Reason in the Life of Faith Peter Kalkavage St. John's College, Annapolis Theology on Tap Harry Browne's 2 July 2013 "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made." Romans 1:20 My goal this evening is to praise reason-that is, speculative reason-in the context of Christian faith. Speculative here refers to reason that seeks the truth for its own sake. Many voices inspired my effort: Clement of Alexandria, who extolled the wisdom of ancient Greek philosophers; Anselm, who spoke of faith seeking understanding; Augustine, whose path to God incorporated the philosophic eros for deathless truth; Bonaventure, who coined the remarkable phrase and title, itinerarium mentis in Deum, the mind's journey into God; and Dante, for whom the hallmark of heaven is the perfection of the mind. A more recently composed inspiration has been John Paul's great encyclical Fides et ratio ("Faith and Reason"). The hero of my reflections is Aquinas. As a young student, Thomas was unresponsive and seemed dull. But Albert the Great said something about him that turned out to be prophetic: "We call this young man a dumb ox, but his bellowing in doctrine will one day resound throughout the world." Aquinas is regularly in need of being rediscovered. I say this because he is a logically rigorous author, whom some readers find �dry and uninspiring. Admittedly, his writing lacks the emotional power of Augustine's Confessions, the rhetorical energy of Anselm's Proslogion, and the inspired poetic flights of Dante. Aquinas does not tell stories. He argues and makes distinctions. He is what most people associate with the term "scholastic." And yet there are in the Summa, as I hope to show, great beauties that cannot be found in other works of theology. Aquinas is the greatest Christian theologian of nature and the natural. Nature for him is not the sensuous, immediately given nature that St. Francis loved, nature as the world of trees and birds, of the sun and moon. I am sure Thomas loved these things too, but nature for him is something else. It is the realm of the universal and particular, cause and effect, matter and form, essence and existence. It is the nature of Aristotle. This is nature as the intelligible order of things that reveals itself to philosophic reason unaided by grace. But Christianity also goes beyond Aristotle. Nature in Christian thought is the creation of a loving God. We may therefore say that the world for Thomas does not merely have but is blessed with intelligibility,just as man is blessed with reason. Nature's beauty is not confined to the senses but extends to the mind. Shall we say that we experience traces of God in a beautiful sunset or mountain range, or in stunning works of art and music, and not in the rational order of things, the order that God infused into matter? Such an admission would be absurd, indeed blasphemous, since God is the source of the natural order. Reason, as the power of studying and beholding this order, is inherently good. We should therefore be able to glimpse something of the mind of God in things like the amazing structure and workings of our bodies and the mathematical order of the universe. If Aquinas were alive today, he would surely continue his inquiry into nature, unimpeded by any fear that such studies would undermine his faith. He would 2 �devote himself to quantum physics, relativity, genetics, and evolution-theories that call his beloved Aristotle into question. He would persist in believing that reason is inherently good and that all truths lead to God. The Summa Theologica is a very big book with a vast range of topics. These include the function and extent of reason in matters of faith, the existence and essence of God, the order of creation, our passions, virtues, and vices, angels and demons, the sacraments, the Trinity, laws human and divine, the resurrection of soul and body, prayer, vows, and the vision of God reserved for the blessed. In spite of its difficulty, it is a good book for casual browsing. Open it to any page at random and you will find something interesting and instructive. The book is filled with arguments, but it is also a treasure house of memorable sentences. I have selected one of these as the focus of my talk. The sentence is about the great theme of Nature and Grace, and has always been my favorite in the entire Summa: "Since therefore grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity ." 1 The sentence occurs in Part I of the Summa, Question 1, The Nature and Extent of Sacred Doctrine, Article 8, Whether Sacred Doctrine Is a Matter of Argument? Not surprisingly, Thomas's answer to this question is a resounding "yes." Before we examine the sentence in detail, let me describe the overall manner in which Aquinas approaches a theological problem. As you know, the Summa consists of so-called "questions," that is, topics that are to be investigated. Each questions is divided into "articles." Every article begins with a well-defined question that invites a "yes" or "no" answer. In the case of Article 8, as we have seen, the question is: Whether sacred Quotations from the Summa Theologica are from the translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Christian Classics, Westminster MD: 1981. 1 3 �doctrine is a matter of argument? Then Thomas proceeds to a numbered set of so-called "objections." These usually but not always argue for positions that Thomas eventually refutes. Then comes a turning point signalled by the dramatic On the contrary. This section responds to the objections taken as a whole and cites Scripture or the Church Fathers. Thomas then moves to a longer, more discursive section introduced by the words I answer that. It mixes arguments from Scripture with arguments based on natural reason, very often on the writings of Aristotle. The article comes full circle with the enumerated Replies to the Objections. These are often the most revealing part of a given article, since here Thomas exposes the error peculiar to each objection. Thomas's way of structuring his argument is pedagogically effective. In addition to addressing the theological problem at hand, the argument, in its carefully devised form, habituates the learner to thinking in an orderly and logical way. The method also reminds us that the tenets of Christian faith are often anything but clear and self-evident. There are reasonable differences of opinion and potential confusions that require careful analysis, sound judgment, and a judicious reading of Scripture. In addition, Thomas's methodical discernment alerts the reader to the possibility of being deceived by false opinions that have the outward lustre of piety and right-mindedness. In this way, the Summa, especially in the Replies to the Objections, teaches us how to discern and expose that most dangerous of intellectual animals-the half-truth. Consider, for example, the first objection in our article: "It seems this doctrine is not a matter of argument. For Ambrose says: 'Put arguments aside where faith is sought."' How can anyone disagree with this view, which seems obvious, or dispute the authority of St. Augustine's great teacher? Were it not for Thomas's discerning response, 4 �or something like it, a devout Christian might think: "Yes, that's right. One shouldn't use arguments from human reason in matters of faith but stick to revelation, since it is the direct word of God." But as Thomas goes on to show, the objection assumes, wrongly, that the use of argument in sacred doctrine is an attempt to prove the truth of faith by means of natural reason, which would undermine faith by making natural reason supreme. That is not reason's function in theology, as Aquinas explains in the I answer that: "As other sciences do not argue in proof of their principles, but argue from their principles to demonstrate other truths in these sciences: so this doctrine does not argue in proof of its principles, which are the articles of faith, but from them it goes on to prove something else, as the Apostle [Paul] from the resurrection of Christ argues in proof of the general resurrection (1 Cor. 15) ." Thomas's argument proceeds not from the danger of undermining faith but from the general form of science. Anyone who thought that theology was the attempt to provide rational demonstrations of faith would only demonstrate his ignorance of what a science is. Sciences cannot argue unless they have something to argue from, something that is ultimately incapable of proof. These are called first principles. In the case of theology, as Thomas explains, first principles do not come from natural reason but from revelation. To be sure, this limits the power of reason, which can neither prove its first principles nor in this case intellectually intuit them. But it also opens up a huge arena in which reason is free, indeed obliged, to search out the logical connections between one article of faith and another. One cannot argue rationally for either the resurrection of Christ or the general resurrection of all human beings, for both are matters of faith. But one can argue, as Paul does, that the one resurrection is the ground of the other. 5 �An important assumption underlying this approach is that revealed truth is logically self-consistent. Like the truth that is the object of mathematics or physics, revealed truth is a coherent whole and not a mere list of disparate propositions. It is to this whole of truth, this "system," that theological inquiry devotes its unstinting efforts. Theology aims at demonstrating the harmony of apparently umelated or even conflicting elements within the body of sacred doctrine. In this quest for harmonization, theology comes to resemble music. Let us recall the sentence I mentioned earlier: "Since therefore grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity." It occurs in the Reply to the Second Objection. This second objection is more complicated than the first. It states that arguments are either from authority or from reason. If sacred doctrine argues from authority, then it is using what everyone acknowledges to be the weakest form of proof and therefore uses for support what is unbefitting the dignity of sacred doctrine. And if it argues from reason, then it is using something that in spite of its strength within its own realm is unbefitting the end of sacred doctrine. Thomas cites Gregory here: "faith has no merit in those things of which human reason brings its own experience." The first part of the argument against argument rests on the misapplication of a generality. In its attempt to safeguard the dignity of sacred doctrine, the objection fails to distinguish different kinds of authority, as Thomas will explain. According to the second part of the argument, the use of reason would subvert the end of sacred doctrine, which is salvation through faith, not reason. The logic of the whole objection rests on an either/or. The objection seeks to reduce both sides of this either/or to absurdity, thereby proving its 6 �point. It assumes that there is no third possibility by which sacred doctrine may use argument without imperilling itself, no third path. This is what our harmonic theologian Thomas will reveal in his reply to the objection. He will open up a third path. Whereas the Reply to Objection 1 is very short, the one that responds to Objection 2 is quite long. That is because Thomas must cover a lot of ground. He must find a way to interweave faith, reason, argument, and authority. The interweaving will be made possible by the harmonious interplay of nature and grace. Thomas first takes up the thorny issue of authority. He agrees with the general point of the objection: an argument from authority is the weakest form of argument. Strictly speaking, such an argument is irrational, since it depends not on the content of a proposition but rather on who said it. As I say, this is a thorny issue. We appeal to authority all the time, not just in matters of religious faith. We trust some people more than others, some authors more than others, some doctrines more than others. Even avowed relativists do this. There are, moreover, degrees and kinds of trust. Sometimes trust has something to stand on, some ground. But sometimes it is no more than a hunch or gut feeling. Life is riddled with such acts of faith. To return to the second reply in Article 8, there are different forms of authority. Sacred doctrine is a special case. That is because its first principles come from faith, not reason, and rely on the authority of Scripture, more precisely on those to whom God has chosen to reveal himself. This leads Thomas to assert that although the argument from authority based on reason is in general the weakest, the argument based on divine revelation is the strongest. "Strongest" here does not mean "has the power to convince the greatest number of people." It does not refer to the subjective effect of the argument 7 �but to the objective cause of truth, which is God. This leads us to the crucial question: In what sense does natural reason function as an authority in sacred doctrine? Thomas repeats what we already know: that natural reason cannot presume to argue for the first principles of faith, and that its theological vocation is not to validate faith but to bring clarity and coherence to what faith has already revealed. This is Anselm's "faith seeking understanding." Then comes the crucial sentence: "Since therefore grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity." The first thing to notice is that the sentence does not say "grace perfects nature" but rather "grace does not destroy nature but perfects it." Thomas means to ward off an opinion that an unreflective Christian might hold, that nature and grace are inimical to each other, or more broadly that the supernatural is anti-natural. He means to defend grace as an altogether positive force. The core of Thomas' s sentence is an analogy between the order of knowing and the order of loving. The unity of knowledge and love is characteristic of Thomas, and of Catholic Christianity in general. The most famous instance is the Divine Comedy, where Dante's vision of God is mediated by the poet's love for Beatrice. Beatrice incarnates the unity of nature and grace, of reason and faith. Her physical beauty, most evident in her eyes and smile, makes the grace of God stunningly visible. To address the objection regarding the use of argument in sacred doctrine, Thomas harmonizes knowing and loving. Each realm contains a hierarchy: faith is higher than reason, and charity is higher than natural love or what Thomas calls "the natural bent of the will." The two higher levels correspond to grace, the two lower to nature. Grace as a whole is higher than 8 �nature as a whole. But these two realms are not static rungs. There is an organic connection: the higher realm presupposes the lower and works within it and for its sake. Let us begin with the realm of knowing, which for Thomas embraces both reason and faith. Reason should minister to faith, that is, serve faith. How does it do this? The simple answer is that it engages in theological science. Theology has many functions. It clarifies first principles and strictly distinguishes them from the conclusions drawn from faith. It removes apparent absurdities and obstacles to faith. It raises and seeks to answer questions that believers might have. It clarifies the content of faith and so gives the believer a detailed account of what he believes. It generates plausible but erroneous or at least partially true opinions in order to expose their shortcomings. In this way, it staves off various heresies. Theology inculcates in believers the habit of thinking clearly about the most important thing in their lives. It serves as a check on emotionality and sentiment, which tend to warp our judgment and lead us astray in matters of faith. Finally, it is a check on self-appointed reformers within the Church, who seek to remake sacred doctrine in the image of their own ideologies, whether theological, social, political, or economic. At this point, we may wonder: With all this emphasis on reason and intellect, where is the sense for the mystery of faith? My first answer is that the great Christian mystics, though not engaged in argumentation, nevertheless sought union with God through their intellects. This is beautifully conveyed by that phrase and title of Bonaventure's that I cited earlier: "the mind's journey into God." The true mystic is not gloppy or vague. On the contrary, he is terrifyingly focused and disciplined. Through prayer, fasting, and intense concentration, he goes through carefully ordered levels or stages of divine immersion and divine ascent. 9 �My second answer is that natural reason has its own way of preserving the sense of mystery, albeit indirectly. This is because the more we follow the path of theological inquiry, the more we come to realize that our conclusions depend on belief in things that ultimately defy natural reason and could only have been revealed by a supernatural source: a God who became man, a God who is One and Three, love that extends to enemies, and victory over death. When pursued in the right spirit, theological inquiry, by seeking to exhaust the realm of natural knowledge, makes the believer keenly and even happily aware of the limit of that knowledge. It is like a runner who runs as fast as he can and waves his arms in an effort to fly. Unless he is insane, he does this comically, since he realizes that his effort will never succeed. But his failure to fly does not refute or belittle his natural power of running. It is rather the happy experience and felt realization of that which surpasses him. Our comic runner marvels at beings that by nature fly and feels a kinship with them. By feeling his limits in the power of his muscles and bones, in the hard work of his heart and lungs, he may come to enjoy his running even more, since he knows it embodies the aspiration of his whole being to take wing. My image of the happy runner who joyfully embraces his limit leads me to a larger reflection. It seems to me that there is a deep connection between the study of God and the study of music. In each case, we use our rational powers to describe and as far as possible explain something wondrous. In each case, mystery remains. In our music program at St. John's College we read an author named Victor Zuckerkandl. What he says about music applies to theology: No one need fear that such an investigation will violate the mystery and do away with the miracle. Music is not a fata morgana and not a fake that it should dissolve before knowledge. On the contrary, the true miracle will appear the more miraculous the closer our 10 �knowledge can approach it.2 I conclude this section on the order of knowing with an observation: Not all Christians are up to or interested in the elaborate workings of Christian theology. Not everybody philosophizes, not everybody theologizes. Not everybody has to. As Paul reminds us, the gifts of the Spirit are many, and no single person has them all. But what binds both sorts of people together, intellectual and non-intellectual believers alike, is the shared faith in the ultimate vision of God. You do not need to be an intellectual to long to see, see with one's mind, the face of God. Augustine in his Confessions gives us a beautiful example of this. In Book 9 he tells the story of what happened shortly before the death of Monica, Augustine's mother, when he and Monica were at Ostia, near Rome. They were looking out a window into a garden while conversing about eternal life: We ascended higher yet by means of inward thought and discourse and admiration of your works, and we came up to our own minds. We transcended them, so that we attained to the region of abundance that never fails, in which you feed Israel forever upon the food of truth, and where life is the Wisdom by which all these things are made, both which have been and which are to be.3 This experience of transcendence is shared. Monica did not need to be an intellectual like her wayward son in order to aspire to the supernatural Feast that was made for us all. Having talked about the order of knowing, I now tum to the order of loving. Experience tells us that the two orders are intertwined. To love something is to want to know everything about it. To love someone is to want to know everything about that person. In matters of love no detail is too small, no fact insignificant. What lover would want to believe in but not see the beloved, or prefer a picture to the beloved's actual 2 3 The Sense of Music, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ: 1971, p. 9. Confessions, tr. John K. Ryan, Doubleday, New York: 1960,p. 221. 11 �presence, or a recording to the beloved's living voice? This does not mean that lovers do not delight in veils, signs, poetic symbols, and implied meanings. But these are all part of the knowledge and intimacy that love seeks. They are the indirect, playful ways in which lovers are revealed to each other. Our experience of earthly love points to why theology is one of love's highest labors, for the mind too is a lover. The exertions of argumentative reason in matters pertaining to God are all efforts on the part of the thinker to know the God whom the thinker desperately loves. We must bear in mind, however, that theology does not exist solely for the divine delectation of the theologian. It is also for the edification, to use Paul's word, the building-up of God's people, his Church on earth. As Thomas writes in his Prologue, the "Master of Catholic Truth" has an obligation to teach both the proficient and beginners. The Summa, he says, quoting Paul, is the milk on which beginners must be nourished before they move on to the meat. Given the difficulty of the Summa, we marvel at what theological meat might taste like! What I mean to suggest is that Thomas's book is a work of charity. It embodies a love that seeks to guide and care for the Church, which draws its strength from sound doctrine. Thomas cares for the young soul in particular, that is, the soul young in faith. As we have seen, Thomas's sentence connects the realms of knowing and loving, and points out an upper and a lower level within each: grace and nature, respectively. Natural reason ministers to faith by first adopting faith as a source of first principles and then proceeding to clarify the manifold content of faith. Something like this must be happening in the order of loving as well, the order in which "the natural bent of the will ministers to charity." I think what this means is that 12 �the will is naturally directed to God as its ultimate object and First Principle. Our hearts were made to love the highest good, just as our minds were made to seek the highest truth. That is our nature. As Augustine so beautifully puts it, "our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" (Confessions I, 1). Natural love loves God; it just doesn't-can't-love him enough. Left to itself, natural love cannot obey the commandment Jesus gives in Matthew: "You must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (5:48)-that is, perfect in love. Charity through grace takes hold of the naturally loving will and lifts it beyond its natural capacity in order to fulfil its supernatural destiny. It perfects natural love by making the will perfectly adequate to its object. Here is how Thomas defines charity: "By charity I mean the movement of the soul towards the enjoyment of God for His own sake" (II, II, Q. 23, Art. 2, On the contrary). The perfected love of neighbour is a participation in this perfected love of God. Thomas's point is that grace does not enter the realm of natural love and replace that love with something alien to it. Rather it causes the love that is already there, and which God has made, to transcend itself so that it may be fully itself, fully adequate to its intended object. To be sure, grace, Thomas argues, is creative (II, II, Q. 23, Art. 2). It produces something that was not there before and cannot be there unless grace is infused. But there is a there there to begin with-natural love as the host of supernatural help. The natural bent of the will thus ministers to faith, serves faith, by being at the service of infused grace. And just as natural reason has as its vocation the acceptance of first principles that do not come from natural reason but only from faith, so too natural love has as its vocation the receptivity to being transformed and uplifted by a power beyond itself. Furthermore, natural love is always moving us in the right direction, 13 �toward the highest good. It just needs help to get there, the help that is grace. The natural bent of the will, natural love, ministers to faith because all our finite loves, and even our . most trivial likings, are images of the Higher Love. Natural love, like natural reason, is a runner who longs to fly. In conclusion, for Thomas there is cooperation- not war, as some Christian thinkers have affirmed- between the realms of nature and grace: between reason and faith, and between natural love and divine love. Since grace works by infusion, something has to be there beforehand to receive grace. Moreover, grace does not merely change nature but perfects it. It is the vocation of our nature to be graced in both knowing and loving. The harmonious union of nature and grace is the soul ofThomas's whole teaching. It embodies his faith in the goodness of God and the goodness of what God has made. And so my praise of reason, and of Aquinas, reaches its end. I close with a passage from a letter written by one of Thomas' s biggest fans, the southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor: I couldn't make any judgment on the Summa, except to say this: I read it every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during the process and say, 'Tum off that light. It's late,' I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, 'On the contrary, I answer that the Light, being eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,' or some such thing. In any case I can personally guarantee that St. Thomas loved God because for the life of me I cannot help loving St. Thomas.4 The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald, Vintage Books, New York: 1980. 4 14 � 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 14 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On nature and grace: the role of reason in the life of faith Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on July 2, 2013 by Peter Kalkavage as part of "Theology on Tap" series at Harry Browne's. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter 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 2013-07-02 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FaFi-KalkavageP039 On Nature and Grace- the Role of Reason in the Life of Faith Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/bd5025b3411237a1f62ee37a5b29c0e7.pdf 26840d66d98f714e4cff6460761df042 PDF Text Text ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1~ n~ ~1 rn1~1~ 11111111111111111 31696 01136 5465 Teaching Dante's Divine Comedy Peter Kalkavage St. John's College, Annapolis This material may be protected by Copyright !av~ (Titlv '17 1.J.S. Code) "The ideal way of reading The Divine Comedy would be to start at the first line and go straight through to the end, surrendering to the vigour of the story-telling and the swift movement of the verse, and not bothering about any historical allusions or theological explanations which do not occur in the text itself" Dorothy Sayers, Introduction to her translation of the Divine Comedy Reading Dante for the first time can be one of life's greatest moments, just as introducing the Divine Comedy to young adults is one of the greatest joys a teacher can experience. But we must be careful that we make the most of our opportunity. First-time readers must be encouraged to throw themselves headlong into the Divine Comedy. Teachers must conjure the spirit of intellectual adventure rather than provide "background information," which puts the poem in the past. We should not lecture first-time readers about Italian political history, or about the influence of this or that author, or about the Middle Ages, or introduce them to theories about the poem before they have had a chance to think about the poem for themselves. The scholarship comes later, and becomes a labor of love, after readers have been gripped by the poem and desire to know it more deeply and in more detail. The Divine Comedy more than invites the scholarly approach. The poem is steeped in history. It bristles with topical references of all sorts: historical personages and events, families ancient and modem, books and authors ancient and modem, a flood of references to the Bible, astronomical and geographical references. When Dante is not dropping names,we find him alludingto various people, places, and events through a glass darkly, as if to enshroud them with a mystic veil. Many of the people to whom he refers are Italians even highly educated readers would not know about without the help of notes. Then there are the many allegorical references where something stands medievally for something else-only it's not clear what. What is the first-time reader of Dante to do? �What is the teacher of Dante to do ifhe wishes to provoke deep reading rather than mere scholarship? At several points in his lectures, Aristotle draws a distinction between what is first to us and first in itself. The natural path of learning begins with what is first to us and proceeds to what is first simply. The distinction is of the utmost importance in teaching Dante. Where do young readers begin? What is first to them? Certainly not the Guelphs and Ghibellines, or the Donation of Constantine, or Averroism. They begin with their own expenence. This includes their questions, opinions, worries, hopes, fears, frustrations, and desires, as well as anything they happen to have read. In the Divine Comedy, Dante talks about himself. He tells us about his personal lostness and the ultimate finding of his vocation. The Comedy is a poem of ideas: it is about universals of every conceivable sort, just it is about the providential shape of history. But it is also a confession of Dante's personal experience. In introducing Dante to students, we must second this personal "pull" that the poem exerts on the reader. What Is the Divine Comedy? Before addressing matters of pedagogy, let me offer a brief description of the poem itself The description will highlight some of the largest things I hope students come to see, admire, enjoy, and perhaps even love. The Divine Comedy is the world's most comprehensive poem. Dante appears as both poet and pilgrim. He recounts a journey that started in a dark wood and ended with the vision of God. Much happens in between. The journey is the unfolding and revelation of the eternal order in time. It spans the three-fold cosmos mirrored in the poem's three-fold structure: Inferno (that is, Lowest Region) or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. As Dante imaginatively re-enters the experience of his miraculous journey, he takes us along with him. We, along with the pilgrim Dante, are constantly made to wonder: Why is the world the way it is? Why all these levels? Why is this soul here, and that one there? 2 �The poem consists of one hundred cantos: an introductory canto followed by three sets of thirty-three. The three main divisions of the poem-Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso--are called canticles. Canto and canticle come from the Latin cantare, which means "to sing." The Divine Comedy is an exquisitely ordered series of songs. In imitation of ancient epic poetry, Dante begins each song-cycle with a call for divine inspiration. In the Inferno, he invokes the Muses and the gift of poetic ingenuity, in the Purgatorio the Muses again and especially Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry, and in the Paradiso Apollo. The invocations are typical of Dante's repeated efforts in the poem to preserve pagan ideas within a Christian world. But why do this? What do Christians need to learn from pagans? The Comedy sings the praises of the divinely established world order. It presents the reader with a synoptic view of the entire physical, moral, political, and spiritual cosmos. A strong antidote indeed to the poison of the dark wood! But Dante's journey is not simply that of an Everyman. He makes the trip not just to see the Whole and tell the tale but to be reunited with his girlfriend. The Comedy tells us how Dante, who fell in love with the angelic Beatrice when they were only children, eventually came to be reunited with her. The dark wood was a fall from everything Beatrice embodied. This beatific woman is Dante's most direct link with God, and only by being reconciled with her can he ascend to the final fulfillment of all desire. The reunion turns out to be anything but pleasant. Having reached the peak of Mount Purgatory, where the Garden of Eden is located, Dante must endure Beatrice's rebuke and his own burning shame before continuing his journey. What does it mean, we wonder, for the love of a woman to take a man to God? Grace is everywhere for Dante. It is at work in the universal scheme of world history, just as it is at work in the ultimately mysterious details of our individual lives. Grace is a kind of mediation, and Dante never tires of singing its praises. Mediation is what Christianity is all about for him. When Dante is on the brink of eternal loss, Mary in her compassion turns to Lucy, who turns to Beatrice, who turns to Virgil. A chain of 3 �mediators reaches from Heaven all the way down to Hell. The chain continues as Dante progresses. Virgil leads him back to Beatrice, who is superceded by St. Bernard, who prays to Mary that Dante may reach the end of his desires and remain uncorrupted when he returns to his mortal life. Every soul Dante meets along the way, even the souls in Hell-even Satan himself--contributes something to Dante's advancement. What is the Divine Comedy? It is not only the world's most comprehensive poem. It is also the world's most hopeful and most grateful poem. The Comedy is profoundly anti-tragic. What Are the Problems? By and large, students take to the Divine Comedy. It is, after all, a dam good read. As Dorothy Sayers has observed, it is really a novel in poetic form. Students usually have only to read it in order to be drawn into its world in one way or another. The poem is a rich field of ideas and images that can lure different readers down different paths of reflection. But there are problems. The biggest problem is the one I mentioned earlier-all the references. The best way to handle the problem is to steer away from questions and concerns that distract students with historical facts. There is no denying that the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca, to take a famous example, becomes more interesting and complex the more one knows about historical facts not found in the poem. But no first-time reader needs to know these facts in order to be deeply moved by Francesca, and to be stirred to thought by her and her lover's damnation. Students tend to be more imaginative than we think and can usually piece together a lot from the little Dante often provides. It matters little or not at all whether they are piecing together exactly what we want them to piece together, so long as they are engaged by the poem, attentive to the text, involved in class discussion, and thinking. So the first rule of thumb is this: Pose questions that inspire real thinking, and resist the professorial temptation to infonn. Tmst the students' imagination. 4 �There are obviously limits to this advice. At times Dante's allegorism is baftling, and no amount of pondering a piece of symbolism on one's own goes anywhere. Notes are essential. The idea here is to get back to the story as soon as possible. When Dante is driven back down the sunny hill by the lion, the leopard, and the she-wolf, it is much less important for a first-time reader to know what each of these beasts stands for than to reflect on how inveterate bad habits, our beasts in the soul, intimidate us and thwart the noblest of intentions. Then there is the figure of Beatrice. Is she real or only a symbol? On this point I urge students to take seriously the possibility that Dante means her to be taken as a real person, as the girl he fell in love with when they were only children. By assuming that she is real as well as symbolic, students can be encouraged to puzzle over the place of erotic love in the poem, in man's relation to God, and indeed in their own lives. A potential liability can thus be transformed into a pedagogical advantage. The Comedy compels us to rethink the nature and implications of romantic love. From Dante's perspective, to fall in love is to be violently struck by the divine. It is to be called forth from the grave of the mortal and the mundane into what Dante calls "new life." Believers and non-believers alike will have trouble with this idea for all sorts of reasons. Believers are sometimes offended by Dante's theological eroticism. Non-believers may find it objectionable or else just plain weird. The idea is to appeal to the students' imagination rather than to the customs of "courtly love." We must ask them: What if Dante is right about love? What would it mean for romantic love to be the beginning of our highest education and the call of the divine? Fortunately, one of the most sublime achievements of the poem helps offset the disadvantage of often not knowing who or what is being referred to in Dante's allusions. I am thinking of the beautifully crafted stories we hear along the way. I try to make the most of these stories when I teach Dante. Sometimes I simply ask students, either at the beginning of the discussion or else somewhere in the middle, what they think of Francesca, or Ulysses, or Piccarda on the basis of how Dante has chosen to present them. 5 �I urge students to indulge their natural curiosity for the details and destinies of other people's lives. Here Dante gives students a precious opportunity to hone their judgment of human character and choice, and to refine their sense for the general teachings of the poem. Most important of all, students are invited to examine their own lives, dilemmas, and choices. Occasionally one hears it said that the Inferno is interesting, but the other two parts of the poem are not. Readers who stay with Dante usually grow out of this impression. Still, one must give the devil his due. Hell is garish and gory. It appeals to our love of sensationalism. Plus, the young admire rebels, and there is an undeniable nobility to at least some instances of defiance that we meet in Hell. Dante invites us to admire the greatness of certain sinners even as we condemn their sin. Why is he doing this? What is the ground of human greatness? What does greatness add to our understanding of damnation, hope, and bliss? Such questions can be highly useful in getting students to go deeper into Dante's world and to explore their own opinions about what is, and what is not, worthy of admiration. For way too many readers, Dante is the poet of Hell. It is a great mistake to let students read the Inferno but not the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Given the chance and the proper encouragement, students can be brought to see that the latter two canticles not only contain greater poetry than we find in the Inferno but also take on larger themes, themes that must be pondered if Hell itself is to be rightly understood. Purgatory in particular can be very appealing to the young. Here alone in Dante's three-fold world there is time, change, journeying, soul-searching, and a deep fellowship between those beyond and those here, all of whom struggle, with the help of grace, to rise above sin and ascend to Joy. Dante's Purgatory feels human. It appeals to the struggling humanity in us all, regardless of our religious beliefs or unbelief. It does not take much to get students, who, after all, are struggling with all sorts of personal problems, to begin to appreciate the virtues of a place dedicated to the clarification of our priorities, the perfection of our loves, and the revision of our pasts. I have led classes that concentrated on the Inferno 6 �for a period of several weeks. In the last two weeks, I always assign parts of the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Even a bit of the whole is better than Hell by itself. My hope is that students will be enticed to read more about the upper regions on their own. Just as we must not give up on students' imagination, we must not giveup on their susceptibility to the beautiful and sublime. Hell can also be the ultimate stumbling block for readers who refuse to entertain even the possibility of damnation. To these readers it is useful to pose a series of questions: Does an individual human life have eternal significance? Do we have souls, and are those souls deathless? If we have deathless souls, and the world is such that everything in it ultimately comes to occupy its rightful place, then by living a certain life, by making certain decisive choices, we in effect "put ourselves" somewhere in the cosmos. To confront the possibility of a Hell is to realize that certain choices resound in eternity and are irrevocable. We can permanently ruin ourselves, and this ruin brings with it certain consequences within the world order. The torments we witness in Dante's Hell-and many of them are incredibly gruesome-are opportunities to ponder the specific selfdestructive nature and effects of sin. It is as though Dante were telling the reader, "You have no idea how much is at stake, how horrible sin really is, and what sin does-what this sin does-to a human soul." Much of the Divine Comedy goes against the grain of student opinion and belief Believers and non-believers alike are sometimes offended by Dante's arrogance. Who is he to decide who is saved and who is damned? Isn't he simply using his poem as an outlet for his personal grudges and loyalties? And even apart from Dante's manifest presumption and agenda, how could a loving and just God ever permit a Hell to exist in the first place? As for the first of these objections, there is not much one can do except redirect students to the reading of the text and the issues it raises. It may be useful to respond in the following way: Yes, Dante is presumptuous, and he has an agenda. But what can we learn from him? What does the poem itself show us and cause us to think about? 7 �The second objection is more serious. It is far from clear how it can be that Hell was made by "primal love," as Dante reads on Hell's gate (Inferno 3). Dante himselfis deeply troubled by what he reads. The eternal order that the pilgrim Dante comes to experience does not always harmonize with our sense of justice and rationality. We wonder why Statius is saved but Virgil is not, or how it can be just that great pagans like Ulysses did anything to merit eternal torment, or how a pagan can make it to Heaven (Paradiso 20. 67 ff.). The poem invites us to search for possible answers to these questions. But the answers are far from self-evident and are not to be had in the poem without the experience of perplexity and even shock. Herein lies Dante's intellectual honesty. Christian though he is, Dante refuses to bury perplexity and shock under the cloak of dogma. We teachers too must be intellectually honest. We must not explain away problems by appeals to historical categories and medieval Church doctrine. Students must be challenged to rethink their assumptions and beliefs. They must be challenged, in the case of Hell for example, to rethink the faulty assumption that what offends their sensibilities is therefore unjust and irrational. But objections, offence, and general resistance are all part of the human experience that goes into reading Dante's intensely judgmental poem. When students object to something, it is because they have at least begun to take it seriously. Another problem for first-time readers is politics. Why does Dante take politics so seriously? What does it mean for a Christian, who inhabits the City of God, to be so fiercely caught up in the City of Man? Here it is useful to encourage students to think beyond Dante's Italy. Why should Christians not take a lively interest in politics? Should God care for our individual lives and not for the largest temporal communities to which we belong, for human beings and not for human history? Are we not the instruments of this care, workers in the temporal vineyard? We need not agree with Dante's political views to admire his belief, in the face of all the injustice he witnessed and the disappointments he suffered, that the world is well governed and that the good wins out in the end. In this regard, it is useful to urge students to think about politics as an expression of hope. 8 �2. Why is Cato, the warden of Purgatory, so harsh with all those who approach the mountain? 3. Why is Virgil allowed to lead Dante through Purgatory? What is he getting, if anything, out of this trip? 4. Why is the terrace of pride adorned with stunning works of art? 5. Virgil tells Dante, after they have walked through the flames that purge lust, that Dante is now free (27.140-142). What does that mean? What is the freedom that souls gain by goingup the mountain? On the Paradiso: 1. Why does Heaven have levels? Why a hierarchy? 2. Hell is the place for those who have lost the good of the intellect. In what sense is Paradise the place for those who have found the good of the intellect? 3. At one point, Beatrice expresses her approval that Dante can find Paradise somewhere other than in her eyes (18. 21). What does this show us about the function of Dante's love for Beatrice? 4. What exactly happens to Dante in that final amazing moment when he sees God? Why do we not hear about how Dante descended from that divine pinnacle back into his mortal life? 5. How does the Paradiso help us understand why the poem is a comedy? A Possible Journey through a Canto It may be useful to consider how a first discussion of the Inferno might go. There is a lot to choose from in selecting an opening question: the dark wood, the sunny hill and the three beasts, the appearance of Virgil, the chain of divine compassion, the Indifferent, Limbo, the hard words on Hell's gate, the carnal sinners. All this in only the first five cantos! I usually go straight to Francesca. Hers is the first autobiography Dante hears on his journey. 10 �Teaching through Questions Good teaching of any sort incorporates the asking of good questions. In this section I offer a set of five opening questions on each canticle. The purpose of these questions is to open a path of inquiry: to evoke the students' active wonder and the striving for insight. How the questions are to be followed up · is a matter not of method but of judgment. If the idea is to get students to engagein conversation with one another, a good rule of thumb is to ask the question but not jump in too soon to provide direction: patience pays. A teacher's best questions are, of course, the ones he poses for himself as well as for his students. In introducing Dante, teachers must remember that they too are "in the middle of our life's way." On the Inferno: 1. Why would anyone need to descend into Hell in order to correct his former life and ascend to Heaven? Why go down in order to go up? 2. Hell is the place for those who have lost the good of the intellect (3. 18). Why is sin an intellectual loss? Do the sinners we meet manifest a loss of intelligence? 3. Ulysses is one of the grandest figures in Hell. What do we learn from the story of his last voyage? How is the story related to the sin of evil counsel-and to Dante's own journey? 4. At one point, Virgil reprimands Dante for weeping out of pity (20. 28). Does Dante want us to feel pity for the damned? What would it mean to feel such pity? What would it mean not to? 5. What do we make of the fact that Dante and Virgil get clear of Hell by using Satan as a ladder? On the Purgatorio: 1. What is the difference between the torments of Hell and those of Purgatory? 9 �We begin with a question: Why are Paolo and Francesca in Hell? The answer seems simple: Because this is the place for "carnal sinners who subject reason to desire" (5.3839). That of course is the formal answer, and it is important that somebody refer to it. But Purgatory also has carnal sinners, and, as we find out later, there are (former) carnal sinners in Paradise-King David, for example. The difference must be that the carnal sinners in Hell did not repent of their sin. Usually the discussion gets to this point fairly soon, and without reference to Purgatory and Paradise. Then the discussion can go deeper. Why did Francesca not repent of her sin? Usually someone suggests that she had no time, that her husband came home unexpectedly and murdered her and her lover. But how much time does it take? Casting ahead to purgatorial stories, Buonconte ends a sinful life on the name of Mary and sheds a tear. It is enough. But one need not bring this into the discussion to urge students to go deeper into the source of Francesca's damnation. To understand why she is in Hell, we must look to what Francesca actually says in the speeches Dante gives her. In this famous canto Dante constructs a window into a human soul. Francesca speaks for all lovers who gave up everything for the sake of love. Here students must be encouraged to look very carefully at the details of her beautifully crafted speeches. One might call attention to important details during the discussion and simply ask students what they make of them. These include Francesca's gracious and beguiling manner; her incantatory repetition of the word Love; the wistful recollection of her birthplace; the wordless Paolo who weeps while she speaks; her heartbreaking statement that the greatest misery is the remembrance of former happiness in present woe; her claim that when someone falls in love with you, you are compelled to love that person in return; Dante's deathlike swoon as a response to Francesca's second speech. In particular one might ask at some point: Why does Francesca put the blame for her and her lover's sin on a book? What does reading have to do with the way we lead our lives and the choices we make? Can we be corrupted by literature? At some point in the discussion, unless somebody else has already brought it up, I encourage students to think 11 �about speech as seduction. Is Francesca trying to do to Dante (and indirectly to us) what the story of Lancelot and Guinevere did to Paolo and Francesca: seduce him into believing that romantic love, the boy-god Eros, justifies anything? I encourage students to think beyond the natural sympathy we have for Francesca and to be suspicious of her and her erotic creed. In this way I try to get them to think about our extreme vulnerability to selfdeception and the sophistries of the heart. Why is Francesca in Hell? Because she did not repent But why did she not repent? Because, as her speeches testify, she gloried, and still glories, in her sin-because she clings eternally to the belief that romantic love justifies anything. That this belief can lead to eternal torment might well make us swoon, especially if we think, with Dante, that love is the most important thing in life and should be obeyed in all things. Students can get a lot out of the Francesca canto and its juicy details. The canto offers many opportunities for students to confront and examine their assumptions and beliefs. These include the beliefthat what Francesca did was not really all that bad and maybe not even a sin at all; that even if it was a sin, she was overcome by love, which no one can resist; that in general we are the victims of circumstance, society, passion, and our natures; that Francesca is enviable because she yielded to a "great passion" and is now with her lover for all eternity; that being in love means being obsessed with one person to the utter exclusion of all other concerns; that vows are not sacred because, after all, people change. Closing Remarks So here is my advice for teachers of Dante who guide their students through question and discussion rather than lecture. First, resist the temptation to provide background information. Second, arouse the students' thinking by asking questions that have no factual or easy answers. Third, seize opportunities to connect the poem to everyday life and experience. Fourth, make the most of the details in the stories that souls tell along the 12 �way. Fifth, use the students' objections and disagreements to get them to formulate and examine their own assumptions and opinions. Sixth, think less about pedagogy and more about the substance of the poem. Dante is so utterly provocative that students are bound to have strong reactions that can, with a bit of skill and patience on our part, become the starting-point for a good discussion. Seventh, and finally, encourage students not just to study the poem but to enjoy it.. Calhheir attention to those aspects of the poem that work on us apart from whether we know what they mean: the vivid descriptions of characters, places and events; the sudden shifts in poetic tone; the swift pace of the narrative; the beauty, and at times disarming homeliness, of Dante's similes. All this goes into what we, as teachers of great works, must seek to do: not bury the book in the past but make it alive in the student's present. Recommended Translations My favorite edition of the Divine Comedy is that of John Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). The prose translation is faithful to the Italian; the numbered footnotes are very concise; the list of contents at the beginning of each canto is helpful; and the commentary is written by a man who clearly loves Dante and finds his teachings insightful. An index of persons and places appears at the end. Also highly recommended is the edition of John Singleton (Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). It is especially helpful for anyone who wants detailed notes. The prose translation is very literal. Of the poetic renderings of the Comedy the one that is closest to the letter of Dante's text is that of Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1982). For a delightful translation that captures Dante's vitality in the original rhyme scheme, the reader is strongly encouraged to consult the edition by Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (New York: Penguin Books, 1949). The notes and commentary are imaginative and highly useful. 13 �Select Bibliography for Teachers The most interesting book on Dante is The Figure of Beatrice by Charles Williams (New York: Hippocrene Books, Inc., reprinted 1983). It is unusual and provocative. For a powerful modem story about damnation and hope, clearly inspired by Dante, see Williams' novel, Descent into Hell. Of the more scholarly books on Dante, the following are the best: John Freccero's Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Gfoseppe Mazzotta' s Dante: Poet of the Desert, History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Erich Auerbach's Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Gloucester, MA: Meridian Books, 1973) contains two helpful Dante-related essays: "Figura" and "St. Francis of Assisi in Dante's Commedia." For an insightful account of Dante's political thought, see Joan Ferrante's The Political Vision ofthe Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). For essays that attempt careful readings of specific cantos, see my "Dante and Ulysses: A Reading of Inferno XXVI" (The St. John's Review, Vol. XL, 3, 1990-91); "Peter of the Vine: The Perversion of Faith in Inferno 13" (The St. John's Review, Vol. XL V, 1, 1999); and "Love, Law, and Rhetoric: The Teachings of Francesca in Dante's Inferno" (The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics, Chapter 3, ed. Henry T. Edmondson III, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2000). 14 � 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 14 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Teaching Dante's <em>Divine Comedy</em> Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered in 200x by Peter Kalkavage. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter 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 2000-2010 (circa) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FaFi-KalkavageP028 Teaching Dante's Divine Comedy Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e889a6d304d4561f47fb9c46ed10382e.pdf d43e6407c7b6b0e216e6803dbe68644a PDF Text Text Cemetery Thoughts Peter Kalk:avage 28 November 2011 "Gesang ist Dasein." Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (3) I remember my first encounter with Valery's Le cimetiere marin. Like all first-time readers, I was baffled by the poem's dense imagery and its curious blend of mysticism and intellect. The language was obscure, as were the transitions from line to line, and from stanza to stanza. But the intensely metaphysical-mystical aspect of the poem strongly attracted me, along with its stunning formal perfection, play of sounds and seductive rhythms. Over the years I have grown closer to the poem and have learned a great deal from it about what a great poem is. The epigram from Pindar's Pythian Ode II, addressed to Hieron of Syracuse, may be regarded as Valery's note to self: "Do not, dear soul, eagerly pursue deathless life, but exhaust the resource that is within your means [emprakton]." The French poet here joins the Greek poet in urging his "dear soul" -the soul he loves and which he seeks to keep clear of danger-to resist the temptation of longing for immortality. He will inure his soul against eros, as it appears in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. The poem's overt anti-Christian teaching must be combined with this critique of Plato and the philosopher's "supersensible world." The poem, in its own way, is in league with Hegel's ideabrilliantly displayed in "Force and the Understanding" -that there is only one world. The world of appearance, Erscheinung, is the only world that is. For Valery, this identity is not dialectical in Hegel's sense: there is no identity between time and conceptual �unfolding. In the end, the thought of the poem is much closer to that of Heidegger and his Sein-zum-Tod. The Roman numeral headings are part of the poem and serve to mark time monumentally. They also emphatically demarcate the stages of the poet's consciousness, as the poet meditates, enraptured, on the play of images that are before him: the glittering, beguiling surface of the sea and the human artefact, the cemetery, which reminds the poet of his mortality and of the attempt to transcend mortality through various sorts of dreams and illusions, both pagan and Christian. The Roman numerals are imposingly classical. They recall the grandeur of an empire that is now only an abiding memory. A 614 rhythm pervades the whole. It is present in the IO-syllable line (4+6), and in the 24 stanzas (the poem is six-by-four), which seem to be in 6 groups of 4. The 6/4 rhythm recalls the French dance known as courante- "running" or "coursing." The number 24 represents the elements of the Greek language, the books of Homer, the hours of a day, and no doubt much more. The Roman numerals go with another prominent aspect of the poem: the abundance of Latinate words like edifice, altitude, terrestre, to name a few. We must be careful not to breeze past these deliberate Latinisms, which are embedded in modern French (and English). They are part of the word-image world and echo of antiquity the poet means to conjure. Their sound, their look on the page, and their historical resonance affirm the poet's austere anti-romantic stance. They also suggest, to our modern ears, a scientific detachment from the human-all-too-human-the objective stance of a soul that braces itself for the irrefutable facticity of Dasein or what is inescapably there. 2 �I "This tranquil roof, where doves (or pigeons) walk." The first line immerses us in perplexing symbols. It is not "the" or "a" tranquil roof but this one, ce-the roof that is there, now. The poet beholds, and in reading the poem we are one with his beholding. Reality is dream here: the sea-surface is not a roof, but it looks like one; the little boats on the water are not birds, but they look like birds. The world is the world of representation, the world of potent revelatory symbols. To read the poem, we must give ourselvesyield-to this receptive dreamy mood that will reveal, at times, harsh unyielding truths. The dream-state is also a state of acute awareness, the state in which things usually hidden from us, or which we hide from ourselves, come to light. The sea-surface moves but not in a linear fashion. It vibrates, pulsates. We view this quivering surface, this wave-motion, as framed by the solid objects in our foregroundby the pines (which are ever green, a symbol of eternal life) and by the tombs (the image of inevitable death). The quivering is not merely visual, in other words, but also eidetic. The sea quivers between the poles of life and death. As we shall see, it contains these poles in its dialectical nature, its unity of opposites. It is high noon or, as the poet calls it, Midi le juste. It is the time of day when the sun achieves the peak of its arc and divides this arc into two equal parts-equitably,justly. At high noon there is no escape from the burning light-the truth-that descends on sea and cemetery alike. One thinks of Joseph Conrad's statement that his goal as a writer of fiction was "to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe." Conrad obviously did not mean that he was interested in theodicy, in justifying the world. He meant rather that his vocation was not to flinch; it was to capture in writing the world as 3 �it is and as it appears, in defiance of all wishful thinking. The composer-god is not a being but a state or condition, the condition of Midi le juste. The Sun, if we may call it that, com-poses or puts together a cosmic scene by means of fire: fire is the element here of divine demiurgy, the fire of creation. But the scene is composed in another way too: it is the serene godlike composure and peace of a settled way of things-a way that abides. The scene inspires this very state in the thinker-poet who beholds, whose toit already hints at the intimate bond between outer world and inner world (tai)-between the composed-ness of the scene and the godlike composure of the theoros, the one who looks on thoughtfully. The sea undergoes composition out of fire. To call it "the sea, the sea" is true to the appearances. The repetition, the rhythm and music of the line, is the appearance in the poem itself of the undulating sea-surface-and also the poet's moving in sync with it. A wave indeed has a linear component: it travels. But its periodicity is a kind of rest: the laws of nature that govern oscillation are the "look of eternity" that shines through the turbulent world and stabilizes it. One perceives this lawfulness in the eternal return of waves: the visible music of Same in Other. All this the poet sees and in seeing thinks. "O," he says-and the exclamation, the affect of wonder and passionate openness to the whole, resounds through the poem. It recalls Valery's statement that all lyric poetry "is the development of an exclamation." Indeed, the poem is full of exclamation points, the first of which occurs right after the line "La, mer, la mer, toujours recommencee!'' There is thought,pensee, and there is re- com-pense afterwards. The I thinks and is gratified, at peace with having thought, with intellectually having seen. The recompense is sweet payback for the act of thinking. Penso, in Latin, is to weigh, also to counterbalance in an act of justice. (Think of 4 �"compensate.") It is also to weigh in one's mind, to ponder or consider. Here pensee is godlike, as the poet, in response to the gift-image of the divine poetry of world-making, identifies with the gods, who contemplate and are calm. The poet, in beholding the expanse of glittering undulating action (the flash of the whole's beguiling surface), is compensated for his thought by a godlike peace: he beholds, in a privileged dream of the mind, the composure and calm of Olympian theoria. The last line of the stanza-Q'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!-beautifully captures, in its lulling lingering sound, the state of prolonged godlike peace. But later (and inevitably), thought will become the thought of the mortal human that suffers the fate of mortal self-consciousness. The poet will become pensive and melancholy. His pensee will become grave, ponderous, and oppressive, as he descends from the glittering surface of eternal shining-forth (Spinoza's natura naturans) to the humiliation of imperfection, limit, and death. II The poem as a whole reads like the revelation of (anti-Christian) mysteries: the secrets of change. The poem starts high: with images of godlike peace. And yet the fascinating tremble of the glittering whole must contain death: for a spark to appear, a spark must die. Scintillation is a perpetual life-out-of-death. This is the "pure work" of stanza II. The flashes look like thousands upon thousands of diamonds. But they cannot be diamondhard. To use Spinoza's terms, they are passing modes in the great sea of substanceNatura as the god who constantly appears in boundless effulgence. Already in II, the poet is aware that surface means surface of what is not the surface, the surface of a concealed 5 �depth. This is the abyss: the sea as both infinite expanse and infinite depth. It is not "the" sun but "a" sun that reposes. Following Heraclitus-"the sun is new each day"-the poet is true to how the world appears. It is as though the sun died every day and was every day created anew: its etemality is eternal rebirth. The sun seems to rise up out of the abyss and sink back down into it. Also, to call the sun un soleil saves the appearance of motion that has been suspended. The poet is experiencing the Sun not as the body that appears to move, or the object of scientific theory (sun as revolving body or body around which we revolve), but as this burning light-source that is there right now in the scene, as if in a painting, and that seems in the privileged moment of high noon to hover and cease to move. In the poet's experience, which the poem invites us to share, the Sun is a revelatory wonder-inspiring symbol. Why are the ouvrages pure? Perhaps because they are the sheer flashing forth from. their first principle: they are not altered in any way, not mixed and corrupted by consoling myths of origination. Nature is, in a sense, the true and only God-Nature not as effect (natura naturata) but as "eternal cause," as infinite productivity and being-atwork (natura naturans). Time scintillates rather than marches on. This is because the poet is seeing an image of the whole of all things sum.med up. In his godlike (and ironic) lookout point on the hilly cemetery, he is above it all, at least for now. Le Temps scintille et le Songe est Savoir: "Time scintillates and the Dream. is to know." Two senses are at work here in the second half of this provocative concluding line. In the first, the dream. is to know because the hum.an soul, in its eros, longs to know the absolute, to see what the gods see. The philosophic intellect gazes at the phenomenal world and is tempted to go beyond it, to the 6 �noumenal res ultimae or "things-in-themselves." This is the ultimate Dream of Man, the butterfly that Man chases without ever catching. But in another, more positive sense, the poet's dream-state, which appears wondrously as a divine gift (a sort of pagan grace), the truth that is appearance is revealed-not to discursive reasoning or philosophy but to poetic intuition and receptivity to the play of images. Time may be said to scintillate only from this divine perspective that regards things sub specie aeternitatis (Spinoza again). Otherwise, from the ordinary finite perspective of thinghood, time marches on. This fmal line, Le Temps scintille et le Songe est savoir, has special weight, as if it were the culmination of the previous lines in the stanza. The capitals highlight Temps and Songe, give the words universal stature, and also cause them to be intimately paired. Time is time that is summed up, seen from the eternal (or apparently eternal) vantage point; and songe is not any dream but rather this privileged Dream that is a state of poetic cognition. III This is a truly beautiful stanza, breathtaking in fact in its sound, rhythm, and imagery. Yvor Winters singles it out for special praise, as though to say: "Now that's poetry." Note the hypnotic effect of the repetition of parallel grammatical structures-the wave-like flow of appositions. And not a complete sentence to be found! No main verb. The treasure is "stable." That is, it is solidly, dependably there-a structure. It is lasting-the source and fund that is never exhausted and never to be budged. It is a certain kind of structure-a temple or structure for the gods. Simple-yes, unadorned with artifacts of human sentiment and consolation and therefore truthful. The fire- 7 �composed sea-surface, the dream-image of the whole, is a fitting temple for the goddess of wisdom-a temple of Minerva. It is not a mass of water but a mass of calm: a massive condition or state. We can see the glittering sea-roof; it is visible. But what is visible is, again, not water, not a thing, but reserve. Reserve is a source and place of storage but also a condition. To be reserved is to be discrete, to have one's inner state composed and held in check. There are depths within, but they are discretely covered, kept secret, by the glittering surface. The simple Greek temple stands in sharp contrast with the cemetery's symbols of Christian consolation-with non-pure, non-simple adornment. The water, Eau, is also an eye, Oeil-the lens-shaped body of water that the poet beholds. It is supercilious because it evinces the gesture or affect of a raised eyebrow or supercilium. This imagined expression of ironic disdain goes with the images of purity, simplicity, reserve and Olympian aloofness. The poet addresses this Eye or shiny haughty surface as something that guards within it sleep under a veil of flame. The shiny surface connotes the daylight world of consciousness. But beneath (ah, beneath!) there is "so much sleep" (the sheer amount is wondrous), so much potency that is down there below the conscious world-the world of unconscious, unsounded depth. The poet continues this sequence of mystical-seeming appositions, as he goes from treasure to temple to mass to reserve to water to eye to--silence! "O my silence," that is, "O that which is within me that is deeper than my most brilliantly conceived words! That which 'sleeps,' buried beneath my words and my intentions! This is my pure potencywhat has not yet risen, and may never rise, to the level of consciousness and language." Edifice in the soul: the word edifice is one of those deliberate Latinisms with which the poem abounds. It is a fussy learned word, which means originally the making (facio) of a 8 �temple (aedes). The sea is a kind of undulating never-failing structure made of flashes and foam. Note that the poet has refrained from thinking of the sea as watery or wet: for now, sight alone matters. The poet sees himself, the edifice that is himself, in the edifice that is the sea, with its shining rooftop and its dark Underneath. The poet has built himself up over the course of years. He has absorbed, and even enhanced, what we call culture. He embodies the House of Culture (Bildung) that has been built up over the course of centuries. Much of the poem is, indeed, about the poet's record of an experience in which inner and outer mirror each other--each other's structures, each other's truths, each other's play of divine Up Here and mortal Down There. The mais, "but," is important. The poet has been reminded of his inarticulate, perhaps inarticulable, depths-the "silence" that is the unfathomable mysterious source and foundation of his brilliant light-filled words, his glittering, rhythmically undulating poiemata or "makings." The poet must be imagined as peering down into himself, as if from a height: he is experiencing his depth from a height. The mais brings him back up to his surface: "Yes, I am an abyss, like this seascape in front of me. And yet this Dark, this Silence, is crowned with a glittering surface-like my poems, which somehow emerge from the Down There that is also my Not Yet." Both together-abyss and surface, the Dark Down There and the Bright Up Here-form the edifice that is a source of the poet's abiding wonder. Tait here is experienced as Toi. IV The word "temple" derives from tempus, time. "Temple of Time" is an etymological spelling out, a lesson for mortals about the unity of the divine and the deathbound. The 9 �temple to Minerva was the glittering sea-surface. But now a metamorphosis occurs, as the image shifts-the poet's meditation shifts-from sea to cemetery. The cemetery is truly a temple of time, that is, the sanctified solidly present home of mortality. The monuments endure and are made of stone, but each proclaims to those of unclouded mind: "It is a stone-like lasting truth that we all die because change rules the whole." The cemetery is summed up in the feeling-filled exhalation we call a sigh (soupir). It is the affect of mortal self-consciousness as it contemplates the last release of breath and the final destination. To think of death is to go down into our abyss. We each carry a personal grave within ourselves in our dark, pre-representational self-consciousness. To reflect on ourselves, on our interior, is to go down into ourselves, to retreat from the daylight world of representation and the consoling aspect of solid thinghood. The poet mounts to this "pure point." Physically, he had to climb a hill to be where he is now, sitting in a raised cemetery that overlooks the sea. But his soul also mounts to the truth that surrounds and pervades him. The poet settles into this truth of death and grows accustomed to the cemetery-mode, as though it were a rarefied ether that required more than human lungs. He is surrounded, he says, by "my sea-outlook." The poet is one with the objective truth that reveals itself. He is keenly aware of himself as this individual here at this time in this place and is justly proud of his ascent to the divine above-it-all perspective that he now enjoys. He refers to his "supreme offering to the gods." No doubt this refers to his godlike creativity-his writing of poems, like this one. The scintillation has generative force: it suffuses the whole place, the whole altitude or lofty state to which the poet has accustomed himself, with a "sovereign disdain." Although in a cemetery, where once living beings descend into the earth, the poet experiences the place as one of 10 �godlike recognition, where, as we have seen, dream is knowledge. v The poet shifts from the cemetery-temple to the profound and intimate bond between pleasure and death. Pleasure, delight, is produced in the act of consumption. The eating of fruit is, of course, a chemical transformation in which something Other than me becomes the Same as me in the act of eating-assimilation. But the poet is interested in another feature of this common act. We eat because we desire. But what do we desire? Not only sustenance but also pleasure and gratification. Fruit is juicy, sweet and satisfying-a fitting symbol of life itself. It delights, like the sound of the delicious line: Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance (the favorite line of students in a Valery preceptorial I once led). But the delight is born only when the fruit is destroyed, consumed. We think here of Hegel's notion of desire (Begierde)-negativity, the drive to negate what is Other. The cemetery is the place of preserved absence: the once-living beings have been consumed by their fire of life. Their form has been turned into their absence, as the poet will soon remind us-a fruitful absence that feeds the surrounding grass, plants and trees. This is the implied connection between stanzas IV and V. We are the always-consumed fruit of the Whole. We are being urged to think that somehow we are to the cosmos what fruit is to our faculty of taste, that the cosmos gathers delight from our vanishing form. In the curious chain of ever-changing images, the poet moves from fruit to smoke- another form of absence (and of exhalation). He drinks in, breathes in, his "future smoke," future fumee. The sound captures the fizzle of out-going fire. This future smoke is life after it has gone up in flames as a natural result of the life-process. Again, this 11 �seems to recall Heidegger's Sein-zum-Tod. The smoke image is combined with the sound of the waves as they hit the shore: it is the cosmos singing its endless song of change, beautifully caught in the musically shushing sound of the French changement. The sky or heaven, the great Ouranos, sings to the poet's consumed soul. The transformation of form into absence, life into death and cosmic renewal, is the music of the whole. It is not the soul music of the Timaeus, with its eternal form-like ratios. VI We dwell with the sky, which the poet addresses as though it were a god. The sky combines beauty and truth in its song of change. "Look at me, who changes!" This is both confession and boast, as the poet puts himself into the light of truth. The pride to which he refers recalls the earlier suggestion of the poet as a being committed to and in the grip of intellectual activity. As maker and thinker, the poet is godlike, but there is also a "strange or unaccustomed laziness," that is, non-activity, non-actuality. Non-actuality, yes, but "full of power or possibility." In the wake of (apres) all the poet's proud productivity and sleep-like potency, the poet "abandons himself' to the sunlit place of the dead. He gives himself up resolutely to everything that the light is and illuminates. The reference to the poet's "shadow," which is also of course his Shade, is stunning. He sees his shadow because the sun strikes his body, which, being opaque, turns light to dark, prevents the light from going straight through him. Shadow becomes symbol once it is cast on the gravestones: it is the poet's future "smoke" and "shade"-his future union with the dead. The quivering, frail movement of this shadow tames the poet by schooling his fierce pride of life, his productive potency and his will to stay integral and individual. 12 �Frail movement masters human will and human pride, however strong. VII The poet's soul is exposed to the torches of the solstice, that is, to the high point of the sun's annual arc. This conspires with high noon, the high point of the sun's diurnal arc, to intensify the force and violence of the sun as focus or burning point. The poet both endures and supports (se soutient) the "admirable justice of the light with pitiless weapons." The light is not a god who loves man. It is Apollo, the god without pity whose arrows pierce as they illuminate. As my mother used to say when she told me something she knew I didn't want to hear, "The truth hurts." Yes, sometimes it does. And some endure the hurt of the pitiless Light, while others cover it up with consoling myths about the best of possible worlds and a timeless Beyond. The poet stands on the side of deadly Apollo: he seconds the piercing rays that destroy illusion and preserve "justice" by showing things to be exactly as they are. The poet is acknowledging his place within the Whole. Indeed, he has a new pride: a mirror's pride! "I give you back pure [notice the justice-word "render"] to your original place [that is, your origin]." Why pure? Because the poet does not flinch and does not mythologize or corrupt. He takes it, as it were, like a man. But he also acknowledges that in thus taking it, he fulfills what would otherwise be left unfulfilled: the Whole' s awareness of itself (the self-consciousness of Apollo). "Regard yourself!" he exclaims. That is, "Behold yourself face to face." The poet is a shadow being. We already know that. But his shadow-nature is necessary to the Whole, integral to the structure or edifice of the Whole. This idea is new to the poem's unfolding. If the Apollo-source is to be one with itself, if it 13 �is to reflect itself and be fully circular and all-embracing, it needs an opaque surface. The poet is that surface. His opacity, his shadow nature, which includes everything that makes him non-divine and mortal, fulfills a cosmic function. The world, as we later hear, is the Great Diamond, which, like all diamonds, has its fault line. Imperfection is not the result of man's Fall. On the contrary, imperfection-ontological evil-is woven into the very fabric of the Whole. Creation is the fall. This idea is made explicit in Valery's Serpent poem, where the biblical Serpent (imagined as a sophisticated French seducer, dandy and metaphysician) champions gnosticism and sings the praises of Non-being. I cannot leave the stanza without remarking on the perfect sound of its final line, in which the poet has captured in words the garbled, opaque character of his inner being: d'ombre une morne moitie. vm Light, so prominent in the preceding stanzas, now vanishes, as the poet descends into his dark interior, a descent induced by the meditation on the sea. He sounds his depths, which resound in the lightless world of pre-representational self-consciousness. Sound leads the way, as the poet accumulates Hegel-sounding terms of self-reference: "O for me alone, to myself, in myself." He travels backward, as it were, from the bright sea-surface of his poetic words and the world of representation to the pre-posited dark Inner that is the wellspring and living heart of the poem. He puts himself in the very moment of poetic unfolding: pre-creation. He is between the void of non-being and the "pure event" of poetic discovery (that next word, that next line, that next image). The poem will be his grandeur, but it is not there yet: it is still a house-a-building. The poet has placed himself 14 �into the very temporality and Dasein of the poem itself, which has a source and a living heart. He waits. He cannot will the next word, the next line, the next image into being. As Nietzsche tells us, a thought comes when it wants to. The poet's Inner is a vast container or cistern-bitter like the sea, somber like the cemetery. Bitter because it is the nothing that is the self, somber because it is a depth one goes down into (like a grave). The future of the poem is also the future of the "poem" that is the rest of the poet's mortal life. What will come out of the hollow that is my self? Who knows! The inner cistern is in any case a sort of echo chamber in the soul. With what does it resonate? With the poet's pure unpredictable potentiality-an "always future hollow," that is, a depth that is truly pro-fond or has its bottom (fond) always ahead of itself (pro). Heraclitus again comes to mind: "You would in your going never traverse the boundaries of the soul, so deep is its logos." IX The sea is a "false captive of the foliage." From the poet's visual perspective, the sea is framed, contained, by various tree branches. But it is not really contained: it transcends all frames and contains all things. The golfe or abyss "eats away" the thin fence-work: it is a golfe mangeur. No doubt this is because of the diffraction of the reflected light. But it also refers to the whole as that which ultimately devours all boundaries, which are, in the end, thin and weak. Again, not really a being but an all-embracing condition (of change), the sea as image of the whole contains even what is long past. On intimate terms with the sea, the poet interrogates it dreamily: Do you know? That is: Do you have within you? The poet closes his eyes, perhaps not all the way. As we 15 �know, this act increases the effect of dreaminess, blurring, diffraction. The secrets are things hidden from the poet's eyes: he cannot see beneath the dazzling sea-surface. Also, he is thinking of the mystery that is his total self: his body, his brow, the thought behind the brow. This thought, the poet's fascination with the Whole, draws him to this "bony place." It is, as it were, the inevitable encounter of spirit and skull. The glimmer of the sea mirrors the glimmer of his thought: the sparkle "thinks there" of his absent ones. The mes here does not refer to the poef s personal dead but rather to all the absent things that are in the poet's mind and have become intimately "his." He is personally identifying with their absence, which he experiences as an eternal vanishing. x The poet reflects further on the connection between sea and cemetery. The cemetery is enclosed, sanctified (ultimately not by a Church but by the truth-revealing Sun), and full oflight-energy. The Latinate "terrestrial" gives an objective, scientific dignity to the place that is "offered up" as a sort of earthy death-gift to the light. The poet likes being where he now is, in the place lorded over, dominated, by cypresses (trees that are shaped like flames). The place is "composed of gold," that is, put together and settled by the rays of Apollo. The hard gravestones "tremble" because of the light that falls on them, graces them. They too are a symbol of change. And the sea? It is "faithful." As the next stanza makes clear, the sea is the faithful watchdog that guards the mysteries of change. La mer sleeps "over" and "above" the gravestones like a good mere. Here we must put ourselves into the poet's visual perspective, from which the sea, as observed from the raised bit of earth, appears to be above the tombs. That is how it would look in a painting. 16 �XI The "splendid bitch," that is, the dormant sea (symbol of abiding change), keeps off the idolaters. Here, again, we must be careful to note the Latinate splendide, or else the word becomes superficial: splendid means "shining, glorious." The idolaters are Christians, and possibly other believers in personal immortality, who would corrupt and darken the scene and its revelations with wishful thinking and the denial of world and change. The poet is the "good shepherd," who, in this inverted world, makes sure people do not follow Christ and his promise of a timeless Kingdom. With an amazing near-comic irony, the sunlit gravestones become "mysterious sheep"-mysterious because they guard the mystery of change, the having-been of those once present who are now absent (as individuals). Tue tombs are ''tranquil," that is, sealike: composed and dignified. The seeming of the tombs, their being as symbols, keeps away the thought of providence ("prudent" doves), heaven ("empty dreams"), and angels ("curious" because always poking their noses into our lives to see what's going on, perhaps in order to record it). XII "Having come here." A simple beginning to a fascinating stanza, the theme of which seems to echo Heraclitus: "a dry soul is wisest and best." Tue future is lazy because the dead aren't going anywhere and have nothing to do: they have no agenda. They are now perpetually lying down on the job. The insect, the cicada, is precisely formed (net), even skeletal in its design. It scratches the dryness and makes the sound it makes: it joins the 17 �symphony of the shore's song of change. All is dryness. This is the new idea, the Dry, which comes after the stanza about the corrupting influence of "wet" sentimental notions and symbols. The sun is bountiful, a source of life and warmth. But it also dries out and cooks what it illuminates and warms (recall Baudelaire's carcass poem). Thanks to the sun, once-juicy beings become desiccated, stripped down, skeletal, reduced and analyzed into their elements. Here again, the physical mirrors the intellectual and the unflinching. "Analysis kills." Yes, and in so doing it reveals elemental truth. Moisture is "received into the air" and becomes "I know not what severe essence." It is sublimated. "Severe" because strictly reduced, as well as harsh with respect to our sensibilities, which like to hold on to the individuality and wholeness of self and thing. Life is "vast" in the Latin sense of the term: not so much expansive as wasted. In another inverted world of symbols, life, because it is the place of constant desiccation and moistbecoming-dry, is drunk on everything that passes away in this process. It is an orgy of evaporation, a constant influx of moisture that once was. We recall the fruit and its disappearing form in the earlier stanza. Life is drunk on absence or non-being, on a disappearing act that never quits. "Bitterness is sweet, and the mind clear." To the poet's mind, which supports and seconds the fact and mystery of change-of life as the process oflife-becoming-death---desiccation is an essential condition oflife's sweetness; and the mind that can grasp and accept this is "clear," that is, unclouded by sentiment. XIII We are at the midpoint of the poem's arc and life, as the poem itself reminds us (Midi lahaut). The dead are hidden well-that is, well taken care of qua dead people-in the 18 �earth. This continues the composite image of watchdog, shepherd and sheep. Now, in addition to the Dry, we get the Warm. The earth keeps the dead nice and toasty. It keeps the mystery of change dry (uncorrupted and unsentimental). Again there is the reminder of the cosmic condition-high noon, when the sun hovers in a moment of seeming eternity, the Now of terrible revelation and poetic "absolute knowing." Again the Whole is personified as intellect. We think of the myth in the Timaeus, where the cosmic sphere resembles a gigantic always revolving, always thinking head. The cosmic sphere (for that is what the sky looks like) thinks itself as it sparkles and creates (like the ultimate Poet that it is) and fits itself, is at home with itself. The Whole is a tete complete, a filled-out or complete head, and a "perfect diadem." The line scans the same both forwards and backwards, in imitation of the Whole's perfection. "I am the secret change in you," says the poet. The large theme here is the one that pervades the poem: the poet sees in the scene an image and symbol of himself as poet and thinker. Why secret? Because of the poet's mortal opacity, his participation in murk and muddle. The poet completes the perfect head and diadem by virtue of his imperfection, his otherness with respect to divine effulgence. XIV Change is a feature of the whole: there is nothing hidden about it. But the sort of change that the poet qua human uniquely embodies is his inner changeableness and emotionality: his fear, repentance, doubt and hesitancy. These are all negative and retreating emotions, feelings that cause us to feel our limits. "You [the poet addresses the Whole with the familiar] have only me to contain" all these things. The idea here is that these 19 �imperfections had to exist if there was to be any creation at all (creation is a fall from the "purity of non-being" [the Serpent poem]). The imperfections had to go somewhere, and human selfhood was that place. Humanity is the dumping ground for necessary cosmic imperfection made self-aware. And yet, it is for that same reason the elevation of our imperfection to the status of a cosmic requirement. This idea seems to derive ultimately from Plato's Timaeus, where human corruption completes and perfects the cosmic Animal. The poet experiences himself as the "fault" of the cosmic diamond, the Whole that shines forth. Then there occurs one of several ellipses in the poem ( ... ), as the poet shifts, through the word "but," to the change that is going on underground. There is a whole race of people down there-not a people determined by age, sex, race, nationality, personality, etc., but rather a ''vague" people. That is, their outlines are blurred. But also they are a vagrant people: they wander in the sense that their being is in constant biochemical transformation. They wander in a "night" "all laden with marble." If they could look up, their perceived "sky" would be the dark underside of the gravestones, and there would be no stars or moon! The vague people are constantly ''traveling," migrating, into the roots of the trees. They have taken their part, taken sides, with the fact of change. They live change, or are utterly committed to the change-advocates (as opposed to those who sentimentally resist change). They have taken this side "slowly," that is, in a gradual process of chemical breakdown and transference of nutrients. Perhaps lentement also refers to our all-too-human unwillingness to take the side of change, which involves the dissolution of the individuality to which we desperately cling. But slowly-that is, by and by-we come to be participants and advocates of change, if not in word then in deed. 20 �xv Being dead is a congealing. This is another inverted world of symbols. The dead are reduced and dissolved, yes. But they have also been compacted and concretized into "a thick absence." This is one of the poem's most amazing images. The thickness is the material substance of nutriment formed by decomposition. The earthy or red clay has "drunk" the white kind (bone and whatever marrow it contains). Death is life's way of recycling life. The decomposing dead and the nutrients they contain are a gift passed on to the flowers. But then the poet turns to questions that will lead quickly back to the harsh truth of change and the evanescence of feeling. "Where are the familiar phrases of the dead, the personal way of being, singular [or colorful] souls?" Well, they have gone back to their origin in the Whole and its song of change. This fact is stated with brutal irony: "The worm wends its way (or files) where tears used to form." The worm of mortality replaces and triumphs over all mortal care. XVI The poet's reflection on the passage of all human things into death continues. He lists the scenes of youth and its flirtations: "the shrill cries of tickled girls [in flirtation]/ the eyes, the teeth, the moistened eyelashes/the attractive breast that plays with the fire [of sexual arousal], the blood [passion] that shines on lips that offer themselves/ the final gifts [that men want to touch] and the fingers that defend them." All this--not just the beings, bodies, and parts of bodies, but the whole vibrant scene of lusty youth-goes under the 21 �earth and enters the cosmic j eu or game, the play of coming to be and passing away. XVII The poet now turns to himself with the formal or respectfully distant (and ironic) vous. "And you, great soul-who do you think you are? Do you think yourself, a dignified and non-silly being, immune to the game of the preceding stanza? Do you have lingering dreams of immortality, a dream that will no longer have the colors of a mere seeming or lie, colors that wave and light make here on eyes of flesh? Do you think you will one day, after death, 'see' the Thing-in-Itself and the deathless Ideas of things in their hyperuranian heaven? Do you think, great soul that you are, that you are less mortal than the tickled girls? Will you sing, write poems, when you are vaporous?" In this last question, the poet slyly deletes the vous from the quand clause: his future will indeed be a deletion. Then the poet sides with change: "Go! All flees!" He embraces his mortal fate, answers his question. His presence, he says, is porous. That is, his presence and beingthere is not solid but full of holes: it is riddled with non-being. He then adds, cryptically, "holy impatience dies too!" Impatience is the refusal to wait it out, also the refusal to suffer the change that all things must suffer. "Holy" impatience probably refers to the Christian holdout who says no to change and refuses to enter into the game, and who is impatient for immortality. That refusal, in the end, becomes part of the game. It too dies. XVIII The rejection of the belief in personal immortality now reaches its peak. Immortality is "skinny," "black" and "gilded." She is a consoler "frightfully laurelled." The description 22 �is perhaps prompted by a figure the poet has seen among the monuments. This consoling mother figure makes of death "a maternal breast." She represents "the beautiful lie" and the "pious ruse." We all recognize death and yet we all (or most of us) reject it: the empty skull and the eternal grin (death's last laugh)! The stanza is explicit and needs little commentary. Making Lady Death into a mother figure recalls these lines from Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning: "Death is the mother of beauty, mystical/Within whose burning bosoms we devise/Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly." XIX This stanza goes much deeper than the preceding one, which is bluntly dismissive in its tone and language. The peres profonds are our ancestors, who were also our teachers and guides. They are deep down now but once may have been profound in the other sense of the term. In any case, they are now "uninhabited heads," heads with nobody home. Their profundity is now only their being buried deep in the earth. Indeed, the poet says addressing them directly: "You are the earth, and you confound our steps." Once, our profound fathers guided our steps. But now their gravestones just make walking harder, just as their death is a stumbling block for us, as we make our way through life. Note again that the poet suggests a personal deletion by suppressing the implied subject vous. The profound fathers are eaten by physical worms as they lie "under the table" of the graveyard. But the true worm, which eats away at every still living self-consciousness, is busily at work above the table. We who live on the surface of the earth are on the table of life as food for this gnawing worm. We are devoured more deeply, more truly than the profound fathers. This true worm-the ver that is verum-is "irrefutable." That is, he is 23 �an undeniable part of human experience: the abiding essence of man as selfconsciousness and desire. This worm in the self-.which is the self qua self-referringlives on life (that is, on the living). He never takes a day off: il ne me quitte pas. xx The poet continues to meditate on the Inner Worm. What is its right name? Love of self (amour-propre)-or maybe hate of self? The hate reminds us of the verb remordre: to experience remorse is to bite oneself back, to punish oneself. The poet observes that the "secret tooth" of this worm is so close to everything he is and does that it talces on all names. The statement reminds us of La Rochefoucauld's long maxim on amour-propre, which pervades our being, takes on many names and lives even in his (apparent) death and denial. The worm of selfhood is everywhere: its name really doesn't matter. "It sees, it wants, it dreams, it touches. It likes my flesh." This Worm is so intimately bound up with me that it even follows me to bed and invades my dream life. There is no getting away from it, no rest. "I live to belong to this living thing" that constantly feeds on me, and is me. XXI I always like getting to the Zeno stanza, which Valery (with his accustomed cheek) claims to have thrown into the poem to please the philosopher types. The repetition of Zeno's name captures the zing of Zeno's argumentative arrows, the brilliance of his paradoxes. Zeno is from Elea and a student of Parmenides, the philosopher who denied the reality of motion. Zeno is cruel because he arouses thought only to stop it in its tracks 24 �and kill it. His paradoxes are, simultaneously, birth and death. He stirs us into thought and then blocks our way. (As Aristotle says somewhere in his Physics, Zeno's paradoxes are bad for our intellectual digestion: they "block" us.) This too is related to the warning against every form of immortal longing, not just the Christian form. Philosophy leads to antinomies and nothing more. It is, in the end, a tragic love affair and instance of Hegel's Unhappy Consciousness, perhaps best summed up in the critical philosophy of Kant. In any case, the arrow in this stanza is both the arrow in the famous paradox and the arrow that is the paradox, the logistical zinger. The arrow quivers, flies-and yet does not fly! Zeno is the enemy of change. He sings a beguiling song that tries to counter the song of change in stanza V. The intellectual ring of the famous paradox gives birth to me, wakes me up intellectually, and the arrow that is the argument kills me, aborts my effort to think about the world of change and to make progress. From the Eleatic enemy of change the poet now returns to the sun. He exclaims: "Ah!" This "Ah!" is not a continuation of the wonder the poet felt earlier. The role of the sun within the poet's ever-shifting meditation has changed. The poet has caught it in the act of changing, seen its potential for distraction-and Zeno has brought this to light. The "Ah!" expresses a truth just discovered about a familiar but until now hidden object. The sun does everything we have seen in the poem: it is fiery demiurge and cosmic composer. But it is also a great tempter-the tempter (see the Serpent poem). The sun suspended at high noon seems to stand still in a moment of absolute knowing and intellectual stasis. But its shining there, its holding out the prospect of changeless Being (Eleaticism), is in fact a great shadow in the mind. It moves like the shadow of a tortoise for the soul. It is glory-seeking Achilles frozen, crippled, in a moment of non-action and thereby falsified. 25 �Philosophic thought has robbed Achilles of his fire-like glory, which he can achieve only if he is allowed to stride forward-to his death. In sum, Homer is more truthful than Zeno, or Plato. He does not reduce motion, especially tragic motion, to a changeless Idea. XXII The poet rebels. Zeno has made him rebel. Momentarily charmed by the prospect of changeless Being as it gleams in the sun-god as eternal symbol, the poet utters a decisive (that is, a cutting) "Non, non!" He commands himself to get up, to get on with life, to move into "the next era." This is striking language for an individual. It is as though the poet feels in himself the need for a whole age of humanity to move into its future, to break free of ideas that constrain its bond with temporal unfolding and possibilities that have yet to emerge. "Break," he tells his body, "this pensive [or ponderous] form." Rodin's gnarled Thinker comes to mind. "Breathe in," he tells his breast, "the birth of the wind." The poet, held in a seemingly timeless meditation on life, death, and self, experiences a rebirth, a resurgence of the primordial will to live. The stanza suggests, or perhaps asserts, that thought and life are irreconcilable opposites, that thought (pens er) is inevitably melancholic and static (ponderous or weighty). Thought is a spell in need of eventually being broken. It is the ultimate Siren song that charms and distracts intellectual non-Christians like our poet. A freshness of the wind restores the poet's soul, which has been stolen away by the Muse of eventually morbid contemplation. "O salty potency!" the poet exclaims, as he exhorts himself (and us) to run into the wave, that is, to stop gazing meditatively at the water and actually get wet and lively! 26 �XXIIT Just as the previous stanza began with "no," this one begins with "yes"-as if to say, "Yes, you beguiling one, I too am under your spell, which is undeniable." "Yes! Great sea gifted with deliriums." We have gone from the sun to an exhortation to run into the water, and then back to the beguiling sea-surface, which now, in light of the previous stanza, has become a mythic monster, the Hydra. The "great sea" causes delirium, a profound confusion of mind-a bad sort of drunkenness and obsession (hence the Pindar quote). The surface is like the smooth undulating skin of a panther and a Greek horseman's cloak, or chlamys, riddled with thousands upon thousands of"idols of the sun," that is, idols of immortality. The image recalls Bacon's four Idols but here no doubt refers to the various theories of philosophers. It recalls Schopenhauer's observation that "we find philosophy to be a monster with many heads, each of which speaks a different language" (The World as Will and Representation I, 17). (Once Valery admitted that thinking, for him, was a kind of idol or false god, but the best idol he knew.) The by now familiar use of inversion reappears: the numberless glittering lights on the sea-surface are really black holes, pits in the fabric of becoming, into which aspiring minds fall (compare Melville's obiter dictum about how many minds have fallen into "Plato's sweet head" in MobyDick). The poet perceives the sea at this point of his meditation as "absolute hydra," that is, the Water-Monster of Absolute Knowing, or rather the desire for this knowing (which, as Kant asserted, reason can never possess but can never stop seeking). The Hydra is drunk on its blue flesh: it constantly eats itself, is turned on itself in an act of eternal self- 27 �reflection and self-consumption (again Rodin's gnarly thinker). The poet addresses the Water-Monster with the familiar: ''you who bite back [Quite remords] your glimmering tail in a tumult like silence." It is the image of infinite desire that feeds on desire and never transcends itself. It is the "place" where the silence of eternity is indistinguishable from mere noise. In gazing at the tranquil roof, one might think that the sea is summed up in the calm of the gods and in the knowing silence of repose. But that is not the whole truth. This silence, from the perspective that has now emerged, is a violent tumult that is like silence. XXIV Stanza XXIII is the only stanza that does not end with a strong mark of punctuation. It ends with a comma, whose "dynamic quality" pushes on into the final stanza of the poem, as the poet turns away from the Water-Monster of infinite desire to the wind of rebirth and renewed life. The wind rises, says the poet: "one must try to live!" He does not say that one must live but that one must try to. Life is an effort, an act of will or resolve. One must try to live in the face of all that has been revealed and experienced in the poem. High noon is a privileged moment, as is the human act of solitary contemplation. But it is still only a moment of life, not the whole. And so, at the end of this deep and complex experience, the poet reenters the realm of life and human feeling. He experiences the return of time as a process of moving forward. The wind, which is prominent here, is the very life-breath of the Whole that saves the poet from melancholic meditation. The wind (penuma and spirit) opens and closes the notebook in which the poet has been writing: it infuses the pages with a kind of life, 28 �corporeal life. The wave now is experienced not as moving on eternally but as finding its welcome climax on the rocks: it issues forth in a spray, as we may imagine, of delight (an echo of the earlier fruit). The poet addresses his pages full of brilliant words-words, which, like the sea-surface, have a rhythm of their own. "Fly away, pages all dazzling!" he says, as if the book had become a great bird now ready to take on new life and face the public. He exhorts the waves to break on the shore, and the waters to break the tranquil roof that for so long held and fascinated him He wants the surface to be tranquil no more. And he imagines the little boats as now pecking at and penetrating the sea-surface, no longer merely walking on it. The dream of knowing that the sea has evoked must in the end be dispelled through a combination of effort and yielding. A poem, once written, must at some point be given up ... Summary The poem is an artfully composed record of a human experience. It both expresses that experience and makes a statement about it. The poem invites us to be part of the poet's inspired dream-state. It encloses a sort of intellectual hypnosis in which truths otherwise not sufficiently felt and known come to light in a privileged moment of revelationpoetic cognition. The poet is at first, and for a while, under the spell of high noon. He meditates on the mirroring of Self and World, Poetic Composition and Cosmopoiesis, and the likeness between Poet and God as Demiurge. Pondering the brilliant surface of things leads to pondering what is beneath: the surface reveals that there is a depth, and the poet, resolved to endure the Truth-Ray of pitiless Apollo, goes down into that depth-and down into himself. He encounters the pure potency that is the mysterious source of his 29 �godlike brilliance. Tiris is the resonant Non-Being he carries within himselfand which presages his inevitable Non-Being in death. This meditation and self-encounter brings out and emphasizes the ponderous nature of penser or thought. The poet is not pure intellect, and he is not yet dead. He must therefore break the spell of thought and resolve to come back to life. He must regain the human perspective and recover the exuberance and nonthought that is life. He must also stop writing the poem. He must let go of this dazzling bird so that it may fly out of his hands, out of his control, and into the world. At some point, pure potencyfor a poet or maker-must die as potency. It must give way to the poem that has a life of its own: it must yield to actuality. A poem, as a finished product, is oddly at odds with change or process, even though it can, as in the present case, brilliantly capture in its musical way movement as a series of psychical states. What, then, is a poem in the cosmic song of change? What does its perfection and finish tell us about our striving to be more than process, more than change? Is a poem, in the end, inescapably the manifestation of our longing to be-immortal? 30 � 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Cemetery thoughts Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on November 28, 2011 by Peter Kalkavage. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kalkavage, Peter 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 2011-11-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context FaFi-KalkavageP043 Cemetery Thoughts Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1b231d39b8883a7c5da34ddca0d8ec23.mp3 310589d7bc2d7850fc682baa45abc8bb 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 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 wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:51:28 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 Utopia, ideology and grand strategy in the 21st century Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on April 13, 2018 by Dr. Arthur Herman as part of the LCDR Erik S. Kristensen Lecture Series. The lecture is the part of a joint lectures series between St. John's College and the U.S. Naval Academy to honor the memory of Lieutenant Commander Erik S. Kristensen. An alumnus of the United States Naval Academy and the St. John's College Graduate Institute, Kristensen, a Navy SEAL, was killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in 2005. This lecture series aims to create even greater ties between the two schools, as well as to educate the public about civil-military relations and the place of the liberal arts in education of naval and military professions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Herman, Arthur Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-13 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A signed permission form has been received stating, "I hereby grant St. John's College permission to: Make an audio recording of my lecture, and retain copies for circulation and archival preservation in the St. John's College Greenfield Library. Make an audio recording of my lecture available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Herman, Arthur 4-13-18 (Kristensen lecture) Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Macfarland, Joseph C. Kristensen lecture series U.S. Naval Academy https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/629840f409ae13d9d94fb9c566abaaf5.mp3 cae98e3a405613c74c89f2d1b55328b4 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 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 vinyl record Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:09:33 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound <strong>Ode to St. John’s College<br /></strong><strong>Music by Elizabeth Ellen Starr<br /></strong><br />We sing to thee, our mother dear, (our mother dear,)<br />Our hearts are warm, our voices clear, (our voices clear;)<br />As to thy praise we sing,<br />As to thy praise we sing,<br />Down through the sounding aisles of time<br />We send thy praise in tuneful rhyme,<br />And make thy old halls ring,<br />And make thy old balls ring.<br /> <br /><strong>Chorus:</strong> To thee, St. John's, we gladly sing,<br />To thee we sing, we sing, we sing;<br />To thee our sounding praises bring,<br />Our praises bring, our praises bring,<br />We hail thee, love thee, bless the day<br />That brought us 'neath thy guardian sway,<br />Thy guardian sway.<br /> <br />Farewell! old bell! go on and ring (go on and ring,)<br />High in thy lofty turret swing (turret swing)<br />But not for us thy peal -<br />But not for us thy peal.<br />Farewell, green sward and sheltering trees.<br />'Tis not for us thy whispering breeze<br />Shall through your branches steal<br />Shall through your branches steal.<br /> <br />Oft from the strife of coming years (of coming years;)<br />Oft from the mingled hopes and fears, (hopes and fears,)<br />Our hearts will turn to thee<br />Our hearts will turn to thee.<br />Thy restful paths, thy sunny slopes;<br />Thy promises, youth's buoyant hopes<br />We find in thoughts of thee<br />We find in thoughts of thee.<br /> <br />And strengthened by these mem’ries dear (mem'ries dear)<br />We forward go with songs of cheer (with songs of cheer.)<br />To thee our thanks we raise,<br />To thee our thanks we raise;<br />And to the guiding Hand above<br />Which over all our lives doth move,<br />A parting song of praise<br />A parting song of praise.<br /><br />Lyrics source:  <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3687" title="Commencement Program, 1910">Commencement Program, 1910</a><br />. <strong>St. John's Forever<br /><br /></strong>St. John’s forever, her fame shall never die<br />Fight for her colors, we’ll raise them to the sky<br />Each loyal son pledges her his heart and hand<br />For her united we as brothers stand<br />. <strong>“A Team Song”</strong><br /><strong>Tune: <em>Auld Lang Syne</em><br /></strong><br />Should all our victories be forgot<br />Of now and long ago,<br />You'd surely find we always keep<br />A team that's far from slow.<br />We play the game and win great fame<br />Wherever we may roam,<br />And then right back to Old St. John's<br />We take the victory home.<br />Come gather 'round the Orange and Black<br />And lift your voice in praise<br />For Alma Mater, loved St. John's,<br />And dear old college days.<br /><br />Lyrics source:  <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/2023" title="Rat=Tat 1910">Rat=Tat 1910</a> 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 Various St. John's College musical recordings Description An account of the resource Audio recording of three St. John's College songs, including: "Ode to Saint John's College", "Saint John's College March" (or "St. John's Forever"), and "A Team Song" sung to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne". 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 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Saint John's College Music Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [ca. 1949-1959] https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/26978450e46703d0d6317f1754f58a94.mp3 17552c932136fa76103c9be08ff24ea6 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 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 audio cassette tape Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:44:35 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 Reminiscences of Scott Buchanan Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a discussion entitled "Reminiscences of Scott Buchanan" circa 1973; with Nicholas Nabokov, Ford K. Brown, Simon Kaplan, John Kieffer, Jacob Klein, J. Winfree Smith, W. Kyle Smith, and Miriam Strange. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Nabokov, Nicolas, 1903-1978 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 1973 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Buchanan, Scott Milross, 1895-1968 Brown, Ford Keeler Kaplan, Simon, 1893-1979 Kieffer, John Spangler Klein, Jacob, 1899-1978 Smith, J. Winfree Stange, Miriam Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Nabokov et al 1973 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/784178cc77039a508133ea7e57166931.mp3 06cf5c5a3591976b112f57a3c388e0e6 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 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.) 01:45:53 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 Andrea Mitchell and Judy Woodruff Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a conversation between Andrea Mitchell and Judy Woodruff held on March 18, 2018. This is part of the Great Conversations series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mitchell, Andrea Woodruff, Judy 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 2018-03-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to post this online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Relation A related resource <a href="https://www.sjc.edu/annapolis/events/great-conversations" title="Event information" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Event information on SJC Website</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context GreatConversations3-18-18 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Wolf, Mary Great Conversations https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ee4c154f7577bbf90a6dc2093bc3b8d3.pdf be835979273a6b77ae24791327f5358e PDF Text Text KEPLER'S DISCOVERY OF THE ELLIPTICAL ORBIT OF MARS �ror e good many years I have had the ambition to be able to answer the question& How did Kepler errive at the so-called firat Keplerian law, the ellipticity of the planetary orbit? The discovery of the ellipse ought to be, one would think, a rather $traightforw®rd geom~trical aff~ir, a matter of calculating di~tsncee b~­ tf.il~an Suri ~rid plenat t:rigonQmatdcaUy, arid eeein9 that thees distances fit into M dlipse with the Sun at one focus. Now as all the commentat«:irs make clsar, eucli dietance-dateTminetions do indeed play a role in Kepler's journey of discovery. Sut this ~ole, as I believe I can now show, is e negative one; the trigon0atatry does not lf!'Jiad to th~ !dee of thi!ii ellipse l.n the fi:i:at place, 1 t is too imprecitH~ to gJ.vfJ the £?J.,mansiof!_! t:Jf' the ll!lll.ipae, and H does not provide ~hl!lt Kepl~n~ regeu:·dsd ~~ en adequ~te confirm~t ion of the elliptical shape. What has smerged for me fr om ~ study of Kepler's book, the Aetronomia Nave of 1609 ~ and I do not believe that thie underatanding appears in any of th;-;;condary literature -- is not msrely th~t ~epler gm~a hie journay theory-laden, btJt, that i t is £.Q!X thua that ha !iUai'U'lges to rnrive 2t hie first tuio laws~ the ellipse end the e.i·aa law. It is en initial hum::Jl ~ ~ physical hypothesis, which guides him throughout; every step ie made deliberat~ly , not only in confrontation with data, but in pursuance of that hunch. And the laws ~rrived et~ the ellipse and the area law, rest on the physical theory as on a pr~m­ :Les; they r 't!main hy pothetical; t hey cannot be confirmed independently of one ano ther~ but taken jointly yield better predictions than had avar been achieved before. What I shall try to show, then, is how this is so; to trace in achametic outline the logical m~p of Kepler's journey. let ma begin with two preliminary remar ks. The first has to do with the obthat Kepler used. With the benefit of hindsight , we can say that ell the planets known to Kepler have nearly circular orbits. The one with the most flattened orbit is mercury, but mercury, being close to the Sun, is difficult to observe. The next greatest departure from circularity occurs in the orbit of IYlars -- the orbit that Kepler studies -- and here the departure from circularity is such that the minor axis of the ellipse is about 1/200 or i'% less than the major axis. In a picture of this orbit drawn to scale, meet of us could noti by merely looking, detect the departure from circularity. ~ervationa Thus a planetary theory which uses circular paths can be surprisingl y good. It is not quite right to talk about errors arising from the assumption of circularity alone; in any planetary theory, an additional aesumption has to be made ea to the motion of the planet. But I can assert that, if one .2!2_ have a theory for mars which erred only in assuming a circular path, the discrepancies between prediction and observation would never rise above 10' of arc. Now my thumb, held out aa far as possible from my eye, subtends an angle of about two degrees, or 120'. So the discovery of the elliptical orbit is going to depend on rather refined observations. The observations which Kepler used were made by Tycho Brahe, in the years between 1575 and 1600. They were made by naked eye, but with large instruments, quadrants, sextants, on which the scales could be finely divided. Often Tycho had two observers observing the same object simultaneously; their results e0atetimes differed by ae much as 3' of arc, but the final result or average waa regarded a s accurate to within 2' of arc~ This is to be compared with the 10' discrepancy between observations which previous astronomers had allowed to be tolerable. Without Tycho's reduction of the expected error to about 2' of arc, Kepler's discoveries could not have been mede . �2 / FIGURE 1 STAGE 1 �3 The second preliminary remark concerns Kepler ' s hunch, the ph:1 sical hypothesis which guides him throughout his work. Whan Kepler went to Prague in 1600 , to work under Tycho Brahe, he was already an ardent Copernican. frJ saw that the preeminent role of the Sun in planetary theory, which had appeared as an unexplained assumption in Ptolemy's constructions, becomes a simple cansoquance of the postulates in Copernicus's system. However, Kepler felt that Copernicus had failed to realize the full meaning of his new system. For Copernicus , tho Sun sits like a lamp in the midst of the solar aystam, lignting and heating up the world; otherwise it is functionless . The centers of the planetary circles do not even lie in the sun. Now Kepler felt that the Sun was more then a mere lamp. He noted that ae you go o~t from the Sun, the actual linear speeds of the planets become lass: Venus movas mere slowly than mercury, the Earth moves more slowly than Venuag mare moves more alowly than the Earth, ~nd so on. To Kepler this correlation between distance and speed suggested a causal relation: he hypothesi.zad that the Sun was somehow causin_g the planets to move about, and that the motive force or virtue fell off in strength ae one got farther from the Sun. Thus, when he sta~ted his work on mars, l<aplar already had the germ of the idea of a celestial physics, that is, an account of the planetary movements in which the planets do not have within them the source of their motionsi but are moved from without by pushes and pulls. What I think we need to see is how Kepler, faced with a mass of confusing data end theory inharitad from his predecessors 9 is guided by this physical hypothesis throughout his journey. So much for preliminaries. I turn now to what Kepler, with his flnir for the dramatic, calla his ~on mars. I shall divide the war into seven phases. The first phase I shall baraly mention. It has to do with th3 latitudes of the planet. The observed position of a planet is specified by latitude and longitude (Figure 1). Hare is the celestial epheret with the celestial north pole on top, and the equator running around the middle. As far aa the making of observations is concerned, we can think of the (arth as being at or near the center of this sphere. Inclined to the equator is the circle of the sclipti~. This is the apparent path of the Sun during a year, projected against the background of tha stars. The Sun's position along the ecl ipt ic, measured i n degrees eastward from the vernel equinox, is called its longitude. Now the plenets are observed tc do something like what the Sun doe3: their general movement ie eastward, approximately along the ecliptic. However, they depart from the ecliptic by small amounts, going above it and below. Now the theories of Ptolemy and Copernicus with regard to the variati on in latitudes are frightfully complicated. Kapler accomplishes an ancrmous simplification. He hypothesizes that the plane of ffiar's orbit is inclined at a constant angle to the plane of the ecliptic, and passes through the Sun. He is able to verify this hypothesis by means of certain observations, which I shall not describe hers . Note the use of the Sun as a fixed reference point; the previous theories had always used an imaginary point called the mean Sun~ rather than the "real and apparent Sun", as a reference point in their planetary calculations, and this was one of the reasons for the complications in the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories of the latitudes . (In the case of Ptolemy, the additional complication due to the use of the mean Sun is clearly apparent in the theories of Venus and Mercury; in the Ptolemaic theories of the latitudes of the superior planets, the complication arises mainly from the geocentric mode of description .) Kepler's establishment �4 .... .&:,, , __ ---- M, / / / E1 z / \ I \ I I I \ I I I I I S I \ I \ I I \ \ ', t1.'C'/ ~y " " . . . . . . . . -- - _p_1:1~-~.,, . ~~/ ....... p FIGURE 2 STAGE 2 1 M Mars as Evening Star 2 M M rs a t Opposition a �5 of the constancy of the inclination, end the passage of the plane of the orbit through the real Sun, is a first victory for his hunch about the role of the Sun. In what follows, I shall ignore the problem of latitudes entirely. I shall deal only with the longitudes, i.e., the positions of Mare as projected onto the ecliptic. Second Phase. Kepler sate up a theory for the longitudes of ~ars which is successful in one way and fails in anothar . The first thing to understand is what one hes to go on in setting up a theory for the longitudes of a planet. The observations of the planet are of two kinds. Let us agree to take the Copernican standpoint, and to think of the Sun as a fixed point, and of the Earth and the other planets as moving in orbits about the Sun (Figure 2). Hare the outer circle is the assumed path of Mars, and the inner dotted circle is the assumed path of the Earth. Ordinarily, when an observation on lilare,is made, the Earth, Sun and Mars form a triangle, e.g., SEW. The observation gives only the direction of mars from the Earth, against t~e 1 background of the stars. At this point we are far from knowing everything about the triangle. Of course Kepler does have a theory of the Earth's motion, or rather of the Sun's motion, which he has inherited from Tycho, and we sh~ll find him trusting this theory to give the direction of the line E1 s 1 • for a reason which will appe ar shortly, Kepler will not completely trust t~is theory to give him the distance E1 s 1 , which varies around the circle since the Sun is off-center. And even if we accepted Tycho's theory, to solve the triangle we would still need to know the direction of s~ 1 • How can we determine the direction of sm,? Thie b~ings us to the second sort of observation. About every 780 days, mars, the Earth, and the Sun come into a line, with the Sun on the far side of the Earth from frlars. At about this time, mars can be observed approximately on the meridian overhead at midnight. At the exact time of opposition, an observer on Earth is seeing mars against the background of the stars in just the positi on in which he would see it if he were situated in the Sun. Kepler had twelve su~h observations to work with, taken between 1580 and 1604 . Actually, one seldom ggts an observation at the exeat time of the opposition; the position of the planet at opposition has to be calculated from a group of observations made about the time of the opposition . Kepler, for the first time, calculates the oppositions to the real Sun, rather than the f1lean Sun; this is in line with his hunch; ha hopes this change will lead him to a new and better theory. But how set up •a theory? At the time of the opposition one knows the heliocentric longitude of mars, its position on the ecliptic as seen from the Sun. But one does not know its distance from the Sun. The only thing to do is to make an assumption. Kepler proceeds to try to fit a theory of Ptolemaic type to the data. That ls, he assumes that r1lars is moving in a circular path with center at C, that the Sun is off-center at some point S, and that the motion of the planet is uniform not necessarily about C but about another point Q, called the equent point. All of these features are present in the Ptolemaic theory of the deferent of mars, except of course that the Sun ia replaced by the Earth. What one needs to find is the direction of the line SCQ, and the ratios of SC and CQ to the radius of the circle. The procedure for finding these things, both for Ptolemy and Kepler, is the horrendous one of trial and error: make a guess, than alter it if the theory fails to fit the facts. There is one difference between Ptolemy and Kepler that I should mention: Ptolemy hed assumed that the point C is midway between S and Q for reasons that �6 By vicarious theory : SQ ~SQ SC = 18 , 564 9 , 282 11 , 332 From tw o tri gonometric calculati ons : p SC between 8000 and 9943 (av . = 8971) SC between 8377 and 10106 (av . = 9242) FIGURE 3 STAGE 2 �7 are not entirely clear. Kepler did not want ta asaums this; rather, he wanted to place the point C between S and Q et just the right point, to yield the beet fit between observation and theory. Kepler uses four of the twelve observQtions at opposition to set up hie and afte~ 70 t rials, finds a theory which fits these observations. H~ than checirn the theory ~gain~t t he t'emaining eight observations , and finds the concordance very good : the average discrepancy between theory and observat ion ie 50'' 9 the maximum dhcrepency being 2 1 12 11 • Whet th:ie theory does than, is to give t he heliocentric longitudes of mars, ite positions es aeon from the Sun, with e pr~~ie!on equal to that of the obearvatione . theory~ Now ae we next discover, this theory is false. Kapler come~ to call ! t hia vi carious or substitute theory , bacauee though false it serves to give him the hel iocentric longi tudes of Mara, for all his later work. What it frtile to gioo correctly are t he dhtancee of filers from the Sun. How ca n Kepler learn ~y_thi n_g about the ~ence,!. of mars f'rom the Sun? Suppcas f or ~ moment that wa take Tycho 's eolar theory and t ransform it into a theory of the Earth's m otion -- this ie a vary simple geometrical trensformaUon mhich I shall descr ibe shortly -- end conaider. observations of' mars whtitr. it ie ~in opposition ( rigur a 3) . The Earth, Sun and mare in each of t he two ob0ervetions p.i.ctursd hers form a triangle . The position of Si'll is now known from the vicerioue thaory j tha position of Em is given by the observation in each c~ae, and the position of ES is determined by Tycho ~ s solar theory . Now Tycho'n eoler theory~ which differs from Ptol emy'e only in its numbers, is known to giua ths he liocentric l ongitudea or t he tarth with coneid~ rabla accuracy ~ juat as the vicarious theory gives the heliocentri c longitudes of Mars ~i th considersbla accu~acy, so all the angles in th~sa triangle$ are known to wit hin about 4 1 of arc. The ratioa of t he sides of the t:r.ienglae can thiin be ci.ilculat&1d t ri gonometri©ally,. If only one could huet Tyc:ho • e theory to give aJ.ao the ratio of SE1 to sr 2 - thase ar-e not equal becsuae the Sun is not in the center of the circl e -- on" could determine the ratio of sm1 to SM2 • The fact is, Ksplsr know:<.l that ha can trust Tycho~e thAory, in its predi ction of Ea:rth- Sun distances, within ca!'tain lim.its. Ona beaie for this truat is provided by observations of the apparent diameter of the Sunt e di sk~ which shaw. ~hough ~ little toughly, thet tha distBncs b0twoen the Earth and Sun does not change vary much, changes in far.t less than Tycho's th~ory p~sdicts . Th~ orbit ~mt be nsa:rly circul a!'. The possible er~ors are em3ll enough s o thet Kepler can uae Tycho ' s theory to learn somsthing about ma1·e-Sun distance~ . He ifi particularly interested in checking the plecramont of the point C, the cent~r or tha orbit. The vicarious t heory had put i t about 0 . 61 of tha way from S to Q, By computing mars-Sun distances near the line of apaidee Kepler now show6 t hat C mumt ba muc h clcear to helf way between S and Q. !f he now alters the vicarious theory eccordingl y, and puts C midway between s l!lnd Q, tha al tet~d theor y no lor.ger rn:edicts the heliocent ric longitudes of mars correctly, but gives errors as high as B', whereas Tycho's observations cannot~ in error by more than about 2 1 • The 8' error ha r a~ Kapler tell o us, is what forced him to go on to a total reformetion of aetronomy. Kepler's situation, at this point, can be summarized as follows. He has two theories, Tycho~s aolar theory for the Earth, and the vic8rioua theory for �8 4 F I GU RE STAGE 2 . Theory s ucceeds for Why the Vicarious. longitudes heliocent ri c �9 M ars. Both are Ptolemaic-styl e theories, involving a circula r pati1, and uniform angula= motion about a point within the circle. Each theory predicts tho heliocentric longitudes of its planet with errors not exceeding 1 1 or 2', as confirmed rather direc tly by obser vation. * But if Tycho'e theory for the Ea:th is taken as correct for Earth-Sun distancaa, then the uicarioua theory ie wrong with respect to mars-Sun dio tancee . In f eet, tha vicarious theory is definitely wrong, becauae the possible errors in the distances in Tycho 1 s theory are relativoly sm~ll, compared with those deduced for the vicarious theory . So of the two r ssurnptione on u ihich the vicarious theory r eErta , the ch'cular path and tns uniforr.1 m otion ebout an Equant point, one or the other m t be wrong. Ths vicar ious theory wil l remain us uasful, ana indeed indispeneabla 9 f or f inding the heliocentric longitudaa of mars, but it i6 a false th11o:r y. Which of the two Ptolamnic principles, circular path or equant point, should ba changed? Kepl e r M no doubts en thie acore. If one has in mind tha possias bi lity af a cclestiel physics, the equant principle appears artifi ci al: there i~ no body at th0 oquant point, no believable mechanism of which the equent principle would b~ th~ 8Xprrcoian . ruoreover, the work on the vicarious theory has provided Kepler mi h a cluA to a possible substi t ute for the equant principle. It is tha equant princiclG th~t Koole r wil l firs t abandon, but before doing so , he undert ekee an inquiry as to why Ptolemaic-style theories, using equent points, can be so successful, in tho prediction of heliocentric longitudes. fundnrnantall '.; , tho success m6'0.ns this (figurf;! 4). The • arying motion of any J .i.$ symrr.etri r:2l. about a certain Hne 1 the line of apsi df,1s (AP}. The fll!}E)\:. r apid motion of the planat occurs at Gne point (P) , and its alawast motion et a point 180° away (A). In between these points, on either side of the line of epsidss; the change in the planet's angular apeed about 5 ia gradual. Suppose we assume the planet to be mouing uniformly on a circle concentric with S. This theory is wrong , beceuse 1 sta rting at A5 tho po int of s lowest motion, the actuol anet falls behind tna planet of our th8ory; the discrepancy builds up graduall y to a maximum at about a quarter of tha planet 's period, and then decreasas again to zero as the planet comes to P. that after a period tha pl anet is aean f rom S ~ long SK instaed af SU; in other words, the discrepancy ot thi s t ime between observation and our first theory is the angle KSU. We can eliminate this discrapa~cy rather simply, by shifting the planetary circle up, so that its center is at Q. Thia new theory will rhyme with observation when ths planet ·s in ths lines SA, S!C, SP, SL; end the J(:r·g &-crde.< di;screp2mcv bstwsGn th$o:ry amJ obaervat.icri, angle ~CSU ( ,... a'f;,gl~ SKQ), amounting ta nearly 11° in the cBse of Mars, hae been elimin~tcd. Such diocrepanciea as remain will be in the octants, and will be much smaller; in the case of luara these remaining errors are at maximum about 8 1 , i.e. , 1 /80 of the former er ror. Kepler goes on to ehow how 9 keeping Q fixed ae the equant point or center of uniform motion, and taking a new orbit with center at some point C between S and a, the remaining disc=epancies can be reduced below the level of observational detection . In this fin al ad justment of the orbit ~ the point O~ previously deter*This statement is made from Kepl er's point of view. Actually, Tycho'a incorrect values for ref rac~ion and for solar parallax lead to an eccentricity that ie too high, nnd so the sol~r theory is more erroneous than the above statemsnt implies. �10 Twins 5°30' s c c E E/ E9~iva.lent Eal"th Theo~/ Tyc1o's Solar Theo1;y F I GURE 5 STAGE 3 B A Given : ( 1) ( 2) SC ~ CQ # Then : Q AB : RP : : AQ : QP c (approximately) s But : = SP , = SA . AQ QP Therefore : AB : RP : : SP : SA (approximately) RP FIGURE 6 STAGE 3 �11 mined , must remain the equant point; otherwise, s oma part of t he n~ iginal l a r georder di screpanc y will be r e-introduced. Thi s argument shows why , gi ven the general charactar of planotary motion, a theory of the equant type is doomed ta succeao, as far as canca~na prediction of heliocentr ic longit udes. There is one dther consequence I should like to mention for later use : it is that the placement of the equant point can be determined with greater precisi on then the placement of the center of the orbit, because the placement of the equant point depends on the determination of a larger angle. Third Staqe. Kepler devises a replacement for the equant principle. As I mentioned before, the worl< with filers has already provided a clue. Kepler has f ound t hat t he midpoi nt of the line of apsides, C, eannot be where the vicarious theory puts i t , but must be more nearly midway between S and Q, the Sun and the equant poi nt. Now it is a peculiar fact, on which Kepler had meditated, that Ptolemy in his theories of Venus, mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, had assumed what is called t h~ bisection of t he eccentricity . If we translate the Ptolemaic theor ies i nto hel i ocentr i c form, what thi s means is that the center of the orbit is assumed ta l i o mi·· ~y between th9 Sun and tho Equant point . And Keplor has now gotten a r ough veri f i r.ation o~ this assumption i n the case of Mars . Among the princ ipal plenete, the main e xcopi.ion, to which this assumption had not been applied, was the Sun, or if you are a Coparnicnn, tho Earth (rigure 5) . (Of tee other exception, mercury, Kepler ends by distrusting some of the observations on which Ptolemy's theo r y is1based.) Tycho 1 s solar theory, like Ptolemy's, was a simple eccentric theory : the Earth is off-center, but the Sun goes uniformly about the center of the circle, so that equant point and center of the circle coincide. When you transform thi s t heory into a theory of the Earth's motion, you again get a simple eccentric theory, with equant point and center of the orbit coinciding . Now what if the eccentricity were bisected in the case of all the planets? Take a planetary theory in which the eccentricity is bisected (fiqure 6) . The planet m oves at a uniform angular rate about Q. In a given time ~t would, say, go through e small angle AQB. In an equal time, later, it woul d go through the equal angel RQP. The equality of,the angles means that, for small arcs near the li:ie of apsides , very nearly, 'Ai3/RP = AQ/QP. But because of the bisection of the eccentr icity, because Q and S are symmetrically placed about C, i~ follows that AQ = SP and AS = QP. Substituti ng, AB/RP = SP/SA . In othar words, near the line of apsi des , the arcs traversed by the planet in equal times are inversely es the distances from the Sun. Or the velocity of the planet varies invoreely as i ts distance f rom the Sun. This is a new hypothe sis, which Kepler believes might be generally applicabl e , thr oughout t he or bit. I t is not precisel y equivalent to the equant pr inciple, e xcept in the li~e of apsides w hen the eccentr icity is bisected . But this h) pothes i s is in acc or d with Kepler's hunch , tho physical hypothesis he brought wi th him to Prague, the i dea that t he Sun , by means of some mysterious, immaterial virtue, is pushing the planets about , and tha t its m otive virtue f alls off in c..h ''" •·:.t-h 11: i t. ~ ornat.or rli Ph~ '1C 8 S f rom the Sun . Now Kepler feels that he will be justified in trying out this new hypothesis, if he can eateblish that tho eccentricity ie ~·~ so cted in the case of ths Earth, just as Ptoleffly had assumed it to be for the other planets beaidee marcury. �12 FI GURE 7 STAGE 3 Observat ion s a t E1 , E 2 , 687 day s apart . Dir ecti ons of lines determined : EJM ' E 2 M ~ E 3Mby observati o n . (2) SEJ , SE? ' SE 3 by Ty c h o ' s soiar t fieory . (3 ) SM by t he v ic a riou s t heory . (1) Leng th o f SM assume d the s am e for e ac h o b serv at i on . FIGURE A 8 STAGE 3 I \ I I I \ \ \ \ \ \ " Radius Rule " : Times fo r equal ar c s AB , BD, are as the distances of t hose arcs from the Sen , Sm 1 , Sm 2 • " Area Rule ": Ti mes for equal ar c s AB , BD are as the areas of the sectors ASB , BSD . s �13 The main procedure Kepler uses is as follows (Figure 7} . He takes three of Tycho's observations of mars, made 687 days apart, the ti m it takes ffiars to go e once around its orbit. At ell three times, then, frlars should be at the same place, m. Let the Earth at these timos be at the points E1 9 E2 , E3 • Then the directions of the lines E1 ra, E2m, E3 mare determined by Tycho's obse rvations; the directions of SE , SE , SE are determined by Tycho's solar theory; and finally the position 1 of S~ is ~etermined by the vicarious theory of mars. We get three triangles with all angles known 9 and one side, 5"11, in common. It is than possible to find the ratios of SE , SE 2 , SE 3 to Sfil, and hence to one another; so the positions E1 , E2 , E3 are found. Tnree points determine a circle, and so Kepler can determine the position of the canter of this circle, and hence the length SC in relation to the radius of the circle. Now I want to stress that these trigonometric calculations are much less satisfactory than the usual accounts of l<epler's work suppose; into each calculation of SC go seven pieces of data 9 each of which can be in error, and the trigonometric calculation can greatly magnify the initial e r rors, especially when emall angles are involved. Kapler goes throu gh procedures of this kind several times, and gets divergent results: the highest reault for SC is to the lowest as 5 to 3. All of them, however, show that the ecc entricity of the orbit is ~than the valug assigned by Tycho. Remem ber that the eccentricity determined by Tycho is essentially the eccentricity of the equant, which can always be determined with greater precision than the canter of the orbit. Kepler's results, tho ugh markedly divergent among themselves, show that the center of the orbit does not coincide with the equont point as had always been previously assumed; rather-:-i't lies somewhere in the middle between the equant point and the Sun. Kepler, then, assumes that the eccentricity is exactly bisected. Then he can proceed to try out his new hypothesis, that the velocities of the planet vary inversely as the distances from the Sun. The new hypothesis has one great disadvantage: it is dif ficult to calculate with. The speed of the planet is const antly var ying as a function of its distance from the Sun, and the hypothesis says how it is varying; but what we need to know is how far the planet goes in a given time along its path. To determine this, one would need the methods of the calculus, not yet invented. K3pler attempts an approximation: approximately, he says, the times for the planet to traverse equal arcs are proportional to the distances of these arcs from the Sun; the great er the distance, the greater the time (figure B}. In applying this idea, Kepler goes through very tedious calculations, dividing the ssmicircle into 180 area of one degree each, computing the distancesof each of thsse arcs from S, adding up successive sums of these distances and putting these sums proportional to the times. Let me montion only one result: in the case of the Earth, predictions based on this new principle differ from those based on Tycho's theory by et Most 9" of arcp which is below the level of observational detection. The new theory is satisfactory in predicting the heliocentric longitudes of the Earth, because it jibes with Tycho's solor theory. And Tycho's solar theory, a simple eccentric theory in which th8 equant point coincides with the center of the orbit, is satisfactory for heliocentric longitudes because the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit is small -- less than 1/5 of the eccentrici ty of mars' orbit -- and therefore what matters is only thA placemen t of the aquant point, which Tycho has determined fai rly precisely. l<e pler knows this and depends on it. �14 Fl GU RE S TAGE 3 "Radius Rule": Times for equal arcs AB, BD are as the distances of those arcs from the Sun, Sm 1 ~ Sm 2 . "Area Rule": Times for equal arcs AB, BD are as the areas of the sectors ASB, BSD. FIGURE STAGE )1...,,, ...... 9 ----.A ' 4 ""\ \ \ \ I \ I Ptolemy's solar theory adapted to account for eccentric orbit of Mars s I Radius of epicycle = eccent ricit y SC S replaces Earth; M replaces Sun For circular path, angle A must be equal at every moment to angle 1 I c I \ ' I \ I I \ '" '' ....... --- p / / / / I I �15 Then Kepler has another idea, to abbreviate the calculationE. The distances from the Sun to the points in one of these equal ores (o.g. AO, figure 8a) are all contained in the area of the sector, e.g. BSA. Tho aro::i of t ;iis sector suggests itself AS R ~~asure of all the dist~nces within the sector. Th8n just as previous! y ·the distances of these equal a::cs wPre proportional to the times, eo now the areas might be assumed to be proportional to the times, for thees equal arcs. This is the origin of what is called Kepler's ~cco~~ law, ~h8 law of areas: as it is usually stated today, the areas swept out by thF radius vector from the Sun to the planet are proportional to the times. Actue~ly, t~is hypothesis is a new principle , not equivalent to the for~~r one. Out again, in the case of the Earth, it rhymes satisfactorily ~1ith Tycho's theory: the m~~imum discrepancy is 34" of arc. In the case of mars, the differences t:JOU~d be r.;uch larger. f"ourth Staq_!!· Kepler renews his attack on r.lar:-:-., using his new principle, that the areas are proportional to the times. (I a~ !Raving out of account here the 'act that Kepler continued to calculate also with his firot hypoth3sis, that the times for equal arcs are as the distances of th ose arcn from the Sun. I shall deal only with his uce of the arP3 lru.) In this new attack, Kapler first assumes a circulnr orbi~ for rn3r s, with the Sun off-center. The Sun is presumably pushinq pln~ot eround, the strength of the push decreasing with increasing distcn~o fro~ ~~~ cun. But at this point Kapler has to ask himself a quLJqtion. Why should the distance of the planet from the Sun vary? w:1y dons it not si~~ly move in a circle concentric with the Sun? The only account Kepler can think of is an adaptation of Ptolemy's epicyclic theory for the Sun (figure 9). In this, the epicycle has a radius equal to the eccentricity, and movos count!"lrcJockwise oround a circle with the Earth at the center, while thn Sun moves clock~ise a~: the same rate on the epicycle. At every moment, anglo L = angle A. On these assumptions, it can be shown that the Sun simply moves in a circlo ecccn~ric tJ the Earth (dotted circle in the figure). Now this samo mechanism cen be adopted to make Mars move in a circle eccentric to the Sun. Besidoo being moved 3round by tho Sun, Mars then has a mover of its own, which moves it in this tiry epicyclic circle. Kepler worries about how the planetary movBr might accor.plish this. He knows,that, as Tycho's observations on the parallaxes of cornets ~3V8 indicated, the heavens are not solid; there are no crystalline sphere~; comets rno110 straight through the planetary regions. Tho planetary mover h3s no feet or wings . And there is another difficulty. The angle L docs not increase cniformly with time, but rather follows the dictates of the area low. But for [ars t o remain on a circle, angle A must at each instant be equal to angle L. So t~~ planet hos to move !!2!!-uniformly about the epicycle. Oor.s ths planetary mover have to study planetary tables, trying to find out whore it ought to be? J<ople= is sceptical about that, but he proceeds anyway to 2rply th3 area law of the eccentric circular orbit. I shall not describe the calculations. Uoing th8 aroa rule~ Kepler is finding out where the planet is in its circle at givP-n ~imos in the whole period of 687 days in which it completes its orbit. The rosu:ts ~re checked against the predictions of the vicarious theory. As it tu~n~ out, thore is agreemont of �16 A FIGURE 10 STAGE 4 Er rors in Circul a r Theo r y of Stage 4, as c ompare d with the Vi c ariou s Theory . p STAGE 5 I ~c Err ors i n t he Ov a l Th e ory o f Stage 5, a s c ompa re d wi th the Vicarious The o r y �17 t he t wo t heor i e s i n t he apsi~oe (A, A) and i n t he quadrants (q, Q) but a discrepanc y of about 8' i n t he octants ( f i gur e 10 ) . At a1 for instancej the new theory pu t s t h ~ plf~rm t 8'2"l 11 al'le a j of 111he r e i t shou l d be; and at o2 , it is 8 1 1" behind where i t s houl d be . The pattern of e r r or i s s ym etrical in the other semim ci r c l e . So t he pl ane t , on the assumpti on of a circular orbit end the area rule or l aw, ie be i ng made t o m oue too rap i dly about the aps i dee, and too slowly about t ha quadr ant s . The re for8 either t he ci r cular orbi t must be wrong, or the a r e a rul e, or both. I f i t is only the circl e which is wrong, t hen the orbit must bs br ought wi t hi n t he ci rcle in t he m iddle l ongitudes? around the quadrants, eo t ht'lt t he amount of a r e a i s reduced t hare, and hence the times for given a rcs ahortenad . The or bit woul d be oval. Kepl e r perf orms a num ber of c al c ul a tio ns wit h tri a ngles involving the Earth, Sun and M s , in otd e r t o determine the di s tance of Mar s from the Sun in these ar middl e l ongitudes. I have pre vi ou s ly mc n:ioned the error in t his type of calcul etiqn . Kepler i s now i n a better po sit i on t o make these distance cal culations t hen befor e, bec ause his ;~ odi f icati on of Tycho 1 s solar theory -- hie introduction of the bi section of t he occontricity -- makes the the or y a better predictor of Earth- Sun distanc e s . Eut 'the £'~ror is st i ll ~ trouble s ome . However , Kepler's r esul t a £!.£ s how th.:i t f.'.:c.~ s '.':'.J ,:os l'.' i :.;hi n the c i r c le i n the mi ddle longitudes. In othsr words, the or bi t is s ome kind of ova:, rather than circular. So the circle of the Stage Four t heo ry is wrong . O the other hand, the area law may still be n right; it pr edicts that tha orh it i s ov al, and the distance-determinations, though rough , confirm thi s prec;ic~ion. fifth Stage . At the begi nning of Chapter 45 of the Astrono~l!!~' Kapler tells us that, having di $covered that t he or bit is not circular, he felt he knew the cau s e of th8 departure from circularity. from Stage four you will recall that the planetary mover that was moving Mar s on its little epicycle was having a rather diff i cult time. No t only did it l eek f eet or wirgs, but it was having to move the planet .IJ£!!-~~ly on the epicycle in order to keep to the sccsr.tric circular path. It u j ob would be easier, though still i mpossible, if it had only to move the planet uniformly on the epicycle. But ii it were to do thi s , t he resulting path would be oval, as required. This is eas y to show, but I shall omit the demonstration . The actual orbit turns out to be 8gg-ehaped, wit h the sharper end at the peri-helion, or point of closest approech to the Sun. Kepler proceeds to calculate the consequences of this new hypothesis, assuming as before the area rule. The calculations are horrendous. To simplify matters, Kepler substitutes en ellipse for the egg-shaped oval; the difference in shape is very small. I shall call th is el lipse the auxiliary ellipse . Even then tha problem remain ~ difficult, and l<epler tries a number of different routes to its solution. The results in which he finally reposes trust (fi gure 11) again show agreement with t ho vicari ous theory in the apsioss and quadrants , and discrepancies in the oct ants. In onA calculation , for i nstance , he finds t hat the new oval theory puts the plc11st 8 1 behind where i t should be at the f ir s t octant , and ?t' ahead of where it should b8 at the thi rd octant. Note that t he e r rors in the oval hypothesis, on t~e ascu ~pt ion of the a r ea rule , are almost the exact opposite of those found in t he circular hypothesis : the pl a net i s going t oo slowly about the apsidea, and too rapidly in t he m ddle l ongi t udes . If t he area i law is right, then the orbit should bo ~ narrow: there needs to be more are a between the Sun and th~ or~it in th8 middle ! ong i tudes y i n or der to show the planet down t hore 9 areas being proportional to times . �18 A c T Q s +8' -8' Errors in Circular and Oval The ori e s Circular Circu lar Ov al -8' +8 ' 1st octant 3rd octant FIGURE -8' 12 p +8 ' STAGE 6 �19 !Hxth Sta.Q!. Keph:r now 0ee s that ~ on t he as eumption that the '111'&8 law ie right , h~ will get a theory t ha t jibes with t he vica~ious th eory, in its predictiorts of heliocantr ic: longitudes , if he choos es an orbit j ust midway b~ti..1een the cir cle of Stage four ~ nd the a~J x il .i.sr }4 d lipas of Stage f'ive ( f'igura 12). Rounding off th e B:n·or s i n the oc t emb, we get an anti-symmetri ca l rarrey ( afl shown oppo8 ite t he diegrelm) " Th e dotted !i!llipt icfi!l orbit, jumt 111ich.1m)' bE'Ntwaen th ~ ci rcl @ ~n d t he su ~ il isr y ellips e, will reduco t hese symmetrical errors to zer o. I n effe ct, t he arae l aw is controlling the s hape of the orbit . Tha f5 r3~s swept out ftbout the Sun ~re es0umsd to be proportional to the timws; varioua ly 6h~ ped orb i ts distr ibute tha total area of the orbit in di ff er ent weye; only one e hapa of orbi t will get t he planet t o the right plecG at t he right time. Dn the eaeumptio n of the ~rea l i:u1p the right or bit csn differ only negligibly from the dotted dlipee. moreover , Kepler ia now able to calculate the precise dimensions of the dotted ellipse. long before, he had calculated the width, CT, of th~ lunule which the auxiliary ellipse cute off from the ci rcle. He hae only to he lvu t his width to get QR , and hence RC , the semi-minor axis of the ellipse. Two remarks. As is well known , th e correct ellipse is that ellipaa which hes the Sun et ona focus. Tha term "forcus" -- first introduced into European mathematical literature by Kepler himself , in the Aatronomie ~Optics of 1604 -- is nowhere used i n the now described (Phase#:£,), realized that the Sun was involved in the discovery Astronomie Nave. At the stage of his journey we have Kepler gives no indication ae to whether or not he located at the focus. The focal properties were not of the correct ellipse. Second Remark. What about the possible role of mars-Sun diatancee, determined trigonometrically, in the discovery of the correct ellipse? From three cf Kepler's letters, written in December, 1604 and January, 1605, it is apparent that tha dietance-determinaticne are misleading him: they are giving the wrong value for the amount of ingression of the orbit within the circle. Let the mean distance from the Sun to the Eerth be 100,000. Than thG mean distance from the Sun to mare comes out to be 152,350, approximately . The correct, dotted ellipse comae within the circle by about 660 of these parts. Kepler was getting values o f 800 or 900 parts. In a passage of a letter written in May of 1605 , after th e war wea over -- it cema to an end about Easter time -- Kepler says thet the dis tance determinations generally left him in doubt by about 100 or 200 pe~ta. By contrast, the assumption of the area law, together with the dotted ellipse, laeds to predictions which, Kepler tells us, jibed mith the vicarious theory "to the nail". The distance-determinations play an essential role , but this r ole ie mainly negative and admonitory . They show that the vicarious theory is wrong in ita predictions of mere-Sun distances, end that Tycho'e soler theory ie wrong in its predictions of Earth -Sun dietancee; in both cases , they indicate that the eccentricity is more nearly bisected; and in the case of Mare, they show that the orbit ia not a circle but some kind of oval. After the discovery of the correct elliptical orbit of mars, and after Kepler hes, arguing from analogy, altered his theor y of the Eerth to make the shape of its orbit oval, the distencee in these two orbits can be used in predicting positions of mars es eesn from t he Earth; and these predictions can be checked against the obeer vetiona . But Kepler sees these confirmations es confirming hie mar s and Earth t heories 1oint ly, not th ~ martien theory by itself . And in any case, the disUlnce de t erminatior~ do not lead, in the first place, to the idae of t he ellipse, .2£. to its exact dimensions: they ere t oo ridden with error to do so. �21 Seventh .2DS. final Stage. Kepler has the ellipse and the area lew -- the first and the second plar1etary law!i that go under his name. He is in despair. He feels that his triumph over filers is empty . He cannot explain ·.uhy the planet should go in this particular orbit. One day he ie considering a diagram of the eccentric circle -- not the correct orbi t of ffiars, but the orbit of Staga Four (Fi gure 13). This circle, of course, circumscribes the correct elliptical orbit. If we assign 100,000 parts to the radi us of the circle, then the ellipse come s within the circle, in the middle longi tudes, by 429 parts; Kapler had calculated this number. Now he had been employing thie circle constantly, in his cal cul ations of areas in the el l ipse; and always in these calculations, a certain triangle pleyed a r ole: the triangle with the base SC, where S is t he Sun, and C is the cente r of the orbit, and the apex P is on t he circle, at such a point that PC ie perpendicular to CS. The angle CPS, Kepler knew, woe s0 1a•. Kepler t ells us t ha t qui t e acc identally he happened on the s ecant of CPS, t ha t i s PS/PC ; it was 100429/ 100000 . "It was aa though" -- he says -- "I had awakened from s leep, and seen a new l igh t." In the middle longi t ud es, betws8n the apsides, the lunula is broadest ,. and in fact its width, 429 is just t he exc ess of PS over PC. Keple r immediatel y a rrives at the notion t hat for othe r places on t~ e c i rcle, e.g. , P' , t he distanc e of mars from the Sun should be gi ven , not by SP ', but by the perpendicular project ion of SP' onto the correspooding di ameter of the circle, viz . P'T . lhe last part of the story I am barely touching on, because of its compli cation, but I do want to urge that Kepler's sudden sense of illumination is not totally unintelligible. There are, I think, two raaeons for it. One of them has to do with the relation between the area law, and that first hypothesis which l<apler had proposed to replace the ~quant, the hypothesis that the times for equal arcs are proportional to the distances of those arcs from the Sun. Kepler knew that these t wo hypotheses were not equivalent fo r most orbi~A; b\Jt I thick t hat et the moment of illumination, beca~ee of e certain geometrical rel a tion , he got the idea that the two hypotheses would be exactly equivalent for the r i ght e l liptical orbit . This is not quite right, and Kepler finds a clear and strictly corr ect formula t ion only much later, after the Astronomia ~was f i nished. The other reason has to do with the explanation of the e llipticity of t he orbit. Kepler now proceed!:! to replace the motion of t he planet on the epicycle, used in Stages Four and five, by a libration or oscillation of the di ameter of the epicycle that goes through t he Sun. The possibility of such Bn oscillation Kepler had thought of long before , when he was having all his di fficul t ies with the c onception of t he planetar y mover, and was t rying to imagine a wey in which mar e could be caused t o move in an orbit eccentr i c to t he Sun . K pler f i nal ly accounts for the osc il l at ion by a kind of m gnet i c a tt raction and e a r 'pulaion. But the point I w ~n t to make he re i s that, i n Kepler's e arlier study of this oscillation t ho tr i angl e P'TS i s i nvo lved . Thus t his moment of i llumin~tion is t riggered by an dCCidontal observation; but the reaso n that the acc idontal o~servation seems illuminating is that it s uggests a solut ion to two prohl€ms on whi ch Kepler had spent long hours, and with the geometry of llihic h he is thoroughly familiar. �A FIGURE 13 STAGE 7 Discove ry of the correct rule for Sun - Planet distances When the angle at the center of the circle is x , and the helio ce nt~ic longi t ude therefore u (approximately) , t hen -the Sun - Planet distance is n ot SP' (as in the circular theory), but P ' T (t h e p r ojection of SP ' onto the diameter) . �23 What Kepler now has is a proposed procedure or formula for calculating the distances of filers from the Sun. for a given angle at the center of the circle, say~ x in rigure 13, the proper distance is not SP' hut P'T. But: how is P'T to be laid off? One end of it has to go et S, but where does the other end go? Kepler first verifies hie not-quite-defined formula by laying P'T off along SP', the radius vector from Sun to planet in the old, discarded circular theory of Stage rour. This theory, we recall, gave errors in the heliocentric longitudes of B' in the octants. The resulting orbit, gotten foam the new distance formula, applied in this way, is not an ellipse. It does not matter; the angular positions of the new distances era not quite right, but they are never off by more than 8 1 • In an 8' shift, at the upper octant for instance, the radius vector in the ellipse changes by about 25 parts. The distances determined by observation and trigonometrical calculation are uncertain by 100 or 200 parts. In other words, the observationally determined distances fit orbits which differ slightly in shape from the ellipse. Kepler knows this. But he wants to fit the distances of the new formula into the ellipse. The orbit must be elliptical, as he has convinced himself on the basis of the area law.~ter a time-consuming mistake, Kepler discovers the right way. The new mistances, laid off from S, are to be shifted in position from the line SP' to a position such that the end-point of the distance lies on P'M, a line perpendicular to the line of apsides. Then the end-points lie on en ellipse. Kepler is here discovering a new piece of geometry, hitherto unknown. All right. The war is over. Whet I have bean trying to show may be summarized aa follo~E. The revolution which Kepler brings about in astronomy -- and the Keplerian rev~lution is the decisive revolution, it is here rather than with Copernicus that we cross the divide between ancient and modern astronomy -- this revolution does not consist in the discovery of what may be called, in a simplistic sense, e~pirical laws. If the first two Keplerian laws were empirical in that sense, thAn it 1110uld have had to be the case that the ellipticity of the orbit was verified independently of the area law, and then the area law verified within the ellipse thus found . The actual process was the other way round: what Kepler verified, with the degree of precision he wanted, was the proposition: .!.f. the area law is right, !!:!.!!:!. the orbit is elliptical. It is true that he has satisfied himself, independently of the area law, on the basis of distance-determinations, that the orbit is oval. But these determinations leave an unsatisfying range of indeterminacy. Newton will later write: "Kepler knew ye Orb to be not circular but oval, But the guess is no idle guess; it comes out of a hunch actively pursued, in confrontation with all the previous theories, end with Tycho's new data. & guest it to be Elliptical." Yes. If one is asked what is responsi ble for Kepler's discoveries, I think one has to admit the role of chance, lucl<, or as Kepler would say, Providence. It is into his care that Tycho's observations are eonfided the only obaerveti~ns that could have led him to his goal. The first task he is assigned is that of �24 constructing a theory for mare - - the only planet whose elliptical path could have been discoveredt in t he t hen state of the obse~vati gnal ert . The th@oriss of Stages four and rive, which he constructs, happen to err equally in apposite dir•ctione from the right result. H%ll .!1~.efL~!l! by accident on the !meant of s tlertain eingle 9 ~nd sfJ emeirgss f'.l:om his final p~rplexity. aut ruhat ii>l just as i.i:tpcrt.:ant, thro1,,.,igh all the ~ccid®nt end ®I'ror ~nd luck, is, first, Kepler's belief in the possibility of understanding, and his dovation t.t:i hi~ task~ th~t con i es him th:cough four yaera of !'aaeord.ng i:md c:~l"" oulaUon; ~nd t>J~cond y, the rightness of his initiB-1 hurv;h or insight., Md hh ability to disentangle the confused state of things before him in the light of .i t. ~~ procaecig ioo~ad e k i nd o f She&·i.m:k Holmei!3,'\,an l ngicp whi ch cl ~ima ir1 eliminating the impossible or false to arrive 8t the true ; and most of the physical hypoth.wsas ha constructs wiH ha1Je lat.er to be discet>ded ~~ inconai~tant ~ith Nriwtonian theory . But at ·the root of all his theorizing is that initial aenao of the significance of the inverse releti~ between velocity and sietancs '"""' I':! fir~t ~liW.!i11',!ll" of wht'it will one dray be the law of cane1ervation t:f angulfU' It is in the light of that hunch that he is guided through 900 paoss or ~:@1. cul etion to El bettsx plen!'ltar y thecriry than hsd even.' bean proposed befoira. No doubt K~pler ~ a di~cove~ies ~re a kind of mi~acle -- of chance and love, but aleo ot inventive hypothesizing and detective logic. mom~ntum. � 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 24 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Kepler's discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture given in May 1967 by Curtis Wilson at the University of California at San Diego. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Wilson, Curtis Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant San Diego, CA Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1967-05 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Wilson 1967-05 Deans Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d18608f1f7d2fbb158090895c9762b9e.pdf d63c824ed21947c06757e45f9e2a7c0a PDF Text Text Berlin Lecture on "The Year 1943 and the German Resistance to Hitler" ~tlfXMXZXIXIJ:XIEEJlXJ!XEXEIIEX.XX of the second world waro 1943 may have been the crucial year Churchill, in his history of that war, entitled the volume on it "The Hinge of Fate"o Beginning at El Alamein and ending in Tunisia the British and Americans cleared the Germans and Italians out of North Africa~ The Russians inflicted the greatest defeat so far on the Germans at Stalingrad. That defeat increased "'\ the readiness amo~g many~ermans to get rid of Hitler who had sacrificed the Sixth Army instead of allowing it to retreat while there was time. The sudden surge in the number of Germans, especially among the military, who were willing and eager to overthrow Hitler coincided, however, with the Allied demand for "Unconditional Surrender". Roosevelt had pronounced it at a press conference at the end of his meeting with Churchill at Casablance, and Churchill had supported it. Stalin shrouded himself in ambiguity, encouraging some Germans to think that they might get a better deal out of the Russians than out of the Western powers. The Anglo-Americans were adamant and Unconditional Surrender meant capitulation in the West and East -at a time when their invasion and liberation of Western Europ~ was still in the distant future. This was not a propitious circumstance for the opposition to the Nazis inside Germany. The lecture addressed itself to the question how harmful the demand for Unconditiontl Surrender was and came to the tentative conclusion: not very - apart from the touch of rhetorical vaingloriousness. It may have helped to hold the co;f{ion of the Big Three together and that was needed to keep 1\ Stalin sweet and fighting. The Russians were bearing the brunt of the 'W!lr in Europe, and his demand for a second front in Western Europe was not met until June 1944. The lecture dealt with the activities of the German resistance to the Nazis in 1943, which included several abortive attempts to assassinate Hitler and equally . abortive efforts to come to some 1li-f·kt~( agreement with the Allies. c~ ended with other forms of resistance: The activities of the Munich students known as "The White Rose" and of people who helped those persecuted and endangered by the regime activities undertaken at great risk and with considerable loes of life. 1 ~ • �DER DEUTSCHE WIDERSTAND JM WENDEJAHR 1943 s e~Je.-- R0 h WJ VOV) @ee~ Erlauben Sie mir eingangs eine autobiographische Ortsangabe. 1943 sass ich in London in einer Abteilung des Foreign Office, die sich vor allem mit der Analyse der deutschen Medienproduktion befasste: Zeitungen, Agenturmeldungen, Radio. Wir wussten natOrlich, dal3 Goebbels und sein Apparat nicht die Wahrheit sprachen. Trotzdem konnte man aus ihren Ausserungen ganz nOtzliche SchlOsse ziehen, wenn man das Zeug Tag fOr Tag las und auf Nuancen und Veranderungen achtete. Da kam plotzlich eines Tages etwas ganz Anderes, kein Goebbelsprodukt. Es war ein maschinegeschriebener anonymer Bericht ·Ober ein Ereignis in MOnchen, wo eine Gruppe Studenten Flugblatter gegen das Regime verbreitet hatte und dafOr vom Volksgerichtshof zum Tade verurteilt warden war. Es war das erste, was ich vom deutschen Widerstand las. Von Stund' an liess mich das Thema nicht mehr los. Von wem der Bericht stammte erfuhr ich erst sehr viel spater, nach dem Kriege. Es war Helmuth James von Moltke, von dem ich damals noch gar nichts wusste. Seine englischen Freunde hielten dicht. Im Laufe der Zeit sah ich mehr und mehr und immer wieder, wie oft die Religion oder der Glaube ein Bestandteil der Fahigkeit zum Widerstand war. Spater versuchte ich, etwas darOber zu schreiben - nicht so sehr Ober den Kirchenkampf und Ober das Verhalten der kirchlichen Organisationen und ihrer Haupter als Ober die Rolle des Glaubens im Leben derer, die dem Massenwahn \': �•2• nicht verfielen: Bei der Arbeit an diesem Thema stiess ich immer wieder ~uf Helmuth Moltke - nicht weil er sich so viel daruber geaussert hatte • das tat er nur ganz gelegentlich, dann aber Oberzeugend; vielmehr weil er danach handelte und weil so viel von dem Anderen was ich fand, vom Widerstand der Frommen, Verbindungen mit seiner Person hatte. Die Menschen, die den Ansturm der Holle als solchen erkannten und, umgeben vom Bosen nach dem Guten strebten, sich darum mOhten, bereit waren, etwas dafOr zu riskieren - erstaunlich viele von ihnen -t: schienen mit Moltke in BerOhrung gekommen zu sein. Vielleict)\kam das daher, dass er sich so rOhrig umgetan hatte. In diesen MOhen fanden diese Menschen - wie mir in vielen Fallen schien - so etwas wie Gnade, etwas, was sich ihnen q_ffenbarte und ihnen half. Diese Offenbarung - ich bin nicht ganz sicher, ob man es so nennen kann - aber wie sonst? - war etwas, was sie entdeckten oder wiederentdeckten, was ihnen wirklich oder wirklicher wurde. Es war nicht Todeszellenfrommigkeit, nicht nur Hinwendung zum alten Gott nach den ErschOtterungen des Krieges, dieses Krieges, der ja vor 1939 schon als unerklarter BOrgerkrieg in Deutschland begonnet" lta.,-tf {.,. Obrigens spielt auch das hinein, das BOrgerkriegsartige, in die Tragik des e ausseren Krieges und seiner Zwange. ~ Krieg war ja nach Nationen und Koalitit'onen von Nationen organisiert. Da schlug man sich nach Nationalitaten tot, weil nur so die Nation, die Adolf Hitler zum Fuhrer hatte und die ihm bis zu seinem Selbstmord folgte, bezwungen warden konnte. Dass er und sein System seine eigenen Feinde im lnneren auch totschlug wusste man. Aber das Kollektiv Deutschland, Nazideutschland musste niedergezwungen werden, um nicht nur die anderen Lander von dieser Bedrohung zu befreien, sondern auch die unterdrOckten und verfolgten Menschen in Deutschland. Das VerlassenheitsgefOhl mancher Gagner des Regimes, das GefOhl im Ausland missverstanden und nicht gewOrdigt zu sein, ist ein Teil der Tragik dieser �•3• Konstellation, der Tragik des Krieges. Mir scheint, es gab wirklich nur eine Moglichkeit, die zu beenden: den Krieg zu verlieren und .s.o. Hitler und seine Helfershelfer los zu werden - es sei denn, dass es gelang, ihn und sein System - mitten im Krieg - durch inneren Aufstand zu beseitigen. Der Versuch wurde, nach etlichen folgenlosen Anlaufen, gemacht und er misslang. Zu viel stand ihm entgegen, vor allem der Krieg und die patriotische Befangenheit des Volkes und der Wehrmacht. Es war den Nationalsozialisten gelungen, Deutschland und den Nationalsozialismus zu verketten. Und es war fOr Deutsche schwer, zu sehen dass diese Ketten nur auf dem Wege der nationalen Katastrophe gelost werden konnten. Manche - vielleicht sogar viele - sahen es, durften oder wollten es sich aber nicht eingestehen. Und so wurde weitergekampft bis Hitler tot war, von eigener Hand. Es gab Verschworer gegen ihn, die ihn toten wollten um die Wehrmacht von dem ihm personlich geleisteten Eid zu befreien. Ware diese Befreiung der Gefahr einer neuen Dolchstosslegende entgangen? Waren die Deutschen, genug Deutsche, so weit, sich wirklich hinter die Gegner dieses Fuhrers und seines Regimes zu stellen und die Folgen in Kauf zu nehmen? Ein "ehrenhafter" Friede war schon 1943 kaum mehr zu erwarten. So waren die Verschworer auf sich gestellt, auf sich und ihr Gewissen. -.. '<=:::::: ~:;> t:ai Weshalb nenne ich 1943 das "Wendejahr" ? Winston Churchill nannte den vierten Band seiner Geschichte des Zweiten Weltkriegs, der sich mit diesem Zeitabschnitt befaBt, " The Hinge of Fate ". In El Alamein, Stalingrad und Tunis ~ wendete sich der Krieg von standigen aliierten Niederlagen zu Siegen. Im Mai war " Afrika von den Achsenmachten befreit. Im Juli landeten die Aliierten in Sizilien und Mussolini wurde gestOrzt. Auch im Krieg zur See hatte sich das Blatt gewendet. Der Luftkrieg war massiv geworden und die Alliierten hatten da jetzt die Oberhand. �. 4• Aber auBenpolitisch war auch eine tiefere, langsamere Wende im Gange. Im Juni 1941 hatte Hitlers Angriff auf die Sowjetunion das schwere Jahr seit dem Fall Frankreichs beendet, in dem England .a1Jfiln - wenn auch gestOtzt auf sein Weltreich - dem Herren Europas Widerstand leistete. Ein halbes Jahr danach hatte der japanische Angriff auf Pearl Harbor Amerika in den Krieg gebracht. Hitlers Kriegserklarung machte es Roosevelt leichter, sein Volk in den Krieg gegen Deutschland zu fOhren, ja diesem europaischen Krieg sogar den Vorrang vor dem Krieg im Pazifik zu geben. Aber das ungeheure amerikanische Kriegspotential brauchte Zeit um zum Tragen zu kommen. Die von Stalin seit 1942 geforderte zweite Front liess bis Juni 1944 auf sich warten. Sie ging von England aus und hatte mit Eisenhower einen amerikanischen Oberbefehlshaber. Er hatte schon in Nordafrika den Oberbefehl gefOhrt, obwohl die Briten in Afrika noch die Hauptlast des Krieges trugen. Aber die Gewichte verschoben sich zugunsten Amerikas. Churchill hatt1'# keinen leichten Stand gegenOber dem Obermachtig werdenden Bundesgenossen im Westen, der dazu noch geneigt war, mit dem Bundesgenossen im Osten ein argloseres Verhaltnis zu pflegen als der britische Premierminister. Russland hatte seit 1941 die Hauptlast des Krieges in Europa getragen - jedenfalls zu Lande - und trug sie weiter. Churchill war ein langgedienter Kommunistengegner, hatte aber, als Hitler die Sowjetuninon angriff, so fort den neuen Bundesgenossen begrOsst, der nun einen patriotischen Krieg gegen Deutschland fOhrte. Stalin liess es sich 1943 angelegen sein, besonders dem Ausland gegenOber die ideologische, die kommunistische Komponente zurOcktreten zu !assen. Die Komintern wurde aufgelost. Im Juli 1943 wurde in Russland das "Nationalkomitee 'Freies Deutschland' " gegrOndet, im September der Sund Deutscher Offiziere. Eins seiner Veroffentlichungsblatter, das nach England gelangte, trug stolz die Farben schwarz - weiss - rot. Auch die Wortwahl der �•5 • Rhetorik war bemOht, das Ausland den Kommunismus vergessen zu lassen. Stalins Werben um die Deutschen machte dem Westen natOrlich etwa~ Sorge. Deutsche FOhler in ostlicher Richtung gab es sowohl seitens des Regimes als auch seiner Gagner. Letztere waren in unserem Zusammenhang besonders heikel. Es war nicht klar, ob sie den Zweck hatten, mit den anscheinend oder angeblich weniger auf "bedingunsloser Kapitulation" bestehenden Russsen handelseinig zu werden, oder den Zweck, diese Moglichkeit oder Drohung als Druckmittel auf den Westen zu benutzen. Aber wahrend Stalin bestrebt war, die Furcht var einer Ausbreitung des Kommunismus zu zerstreuen, stellte er doch ganz handfeste GebietsansprOche. Russland brauchte nach diesem Krieg Sicherheit. Bevor das Jahr 1943 um war, thatten die Westaliierten der Verschiebung Polens nach Westen zugestimmt. /\ ~ Ausserdem hatte Stalin schon im Mai die Reaktion der Exilpolen in London auf die Leichenfunde in Katyn zum Anlass genommen, die Beziehungen zu ihnen abzubrechen. In einer neuen Churchillbiographie von einem jungen englischen Historiker warden die Zugestandnisse an Stalin 1943, 1944 und 1945 als Appeasement bezeichnet. Der Autor hatte in einem frOheren Werk die Appeasement-Politik Chamberlains gegenOber Hitler ~erteidigt. Churchills Entschluss, den Kampf gegen Hitlerdeutschland nach dem Fall Frankreichs weiterzufOhren, k@isi!W er. Dieser Kampf konnte nur in einer erhofften spateren Bundesgenossenschaft, einer "Grand Alliance" mit Amerika und Russland zum Erfolg fOhren und musste die Abhangigkeit Englands von diesen Bundesgenossen bedeuten. Was an dem Buch auffallt, ist der kOhle Abstand von den Vorgangen in Hitlers Deutschland und Hitlers Europa. 2 �. 6• Diese aber waren es, die die GemOter erregten und den Krieg gegen Hitler, bis zum bitteren Ende, notig erscheinen liessen. Und das Ende .w.ar bitter. Englands materielle Stellung in der Welt ging dabei drauf. Die Bitterkeit zeigt sich bei manchen Englandern noch jetzt in Feindseligkeiten gegenUber Deutschland. Aber war diese Entwicklung, wenn man dem Hitlerismus nicht freien Laut lassen wollte, zu vermeiden ? Schwerlich. Nicht all.a Opfer und Einbussen waren vorauszusehen, aber doch mehr als "Slut, Schweiss und Tranen", die Churchill Ab 0~~J gleich bei der Obernahme seines Amtes erwahnte. Es war ein schwerer Kampf gegen das · .filn.e. Deutschland, mit dem sich immerhin die Masse des deutschen Volkes und seiner FOhrerschaft identifizierte. Dabei konnte man durchaus die Existenz eines "anderen" Deutschland ~nerkennen, und viele taten das auch, aber diese Anerkennung war vermischt mit Enttauschung und Misstrauen. Warum geschah nichts gegen diesen Tyrannen ? Warum waren die Reprasentanten seiner Gegner nicht bereit, die Gewinne seiner Politik fahren zu !assen ? Gut, sie waren Patrioten und litten, wie viele Deutsche, an dem Trauma von Versailles und wollten wieder die deutschen Grenzen von 1937 oder 1938 oder 1914; aber sahen sie nicht, dass diese nach allem, was geschehen war, nicht mehr in Frage kamen ? Sie wollten eine Zusage guter Bedingungen tor ein neues Deutschland nach der Beseitigung Hitlers. Aber sie klangen immer wieder so als ob eine solche Zusage eine Bedingung ihres Handelns war. Dagegen sah Helmuth Moltke schon 1939 den Verlust des Krieges voraus (und hielt ihn sogar tor notig).2. Er sagte schon 1940 zu George Kennan (damals an der amerikanischen Botschaft in Berlin), das wUrde wahrscheinlich den Verlust seiner Heimat, Schlesien, bedeuten.4 Im Herbst 1941 hatte er heftige Auseinandersetzungen mit einem Verwandten, der deutscher Botschafter in Warschau gewesen war, Uber die notigen Gebietsverzichte. Nie konne man verzichten, sagte der Diplomat und hielt es fUr unpatriotisch, auch nur daran zu denken.5' �-7- Natarlich waren die Gagner des Regimes in einer ZwickmOhle. Wann sie Zuwachs werben wollten, mussten sie diesem Hoffnungen machen und vielleicht war die Hoffnung auf die Befreiung vom Unrechtsstaat nicht genug. Die Generationen erfahrener Manner hielten. dachte~in Kategorien, die sie fOr realpolitisch Ab~J. , -- Die jungen Leute von der Weissen Rose hingegen wollten vor allem das Gewissen der Deutschen aufrOtteln. Und dator waren sie bereit, ihr Leben zu riskieren -manche mehr, manche weniger. Christoph Probst war verheiratet und hatte drei kleine Kinder. Aber sowohl von Hans als auch ~ von Sophie Scholl sind AussprOche Oberliefert, die ihre Bereitschaft zeigen. So sagte Hans nach ~iner bekannt gewordenen Hinrichtung von einer Anzahl von Sozialisten und 6 Kommunisten, es sei an der Zeit, dass auch Christen etwas taten; und Sophie sagte: "/is fallen so viele Menschen 1Qr dieses Regime, es wird Zeit, dass jemand 1 dagegen fallt." Dass sie mit diesem "Jemand" sich selbst meinte, sich jedenfalls nicht ausschloss, und dass auch sie an eine Wiederverchristlichung Deutschlands dachte, scheint mir ganz klar aus ihrem Traum in der Nacht vor der Hinrichtung hervorzugehen, den sie ihrer Zellengenossin erzahlte. In dem Traum trug sie ein Kind in einem langen weissen Kleid zur Taufe. Der Weg zur Kirche fOhrte einen steilen Berg hinauf. Aber sie trug das Kind fest und sicher. Da tat sich plotzlich vor ihr eine Gletscherspalte auf. Sophie konnte das Kind gerade noch an die gesicherte gegenOberliegende Seite legen, dann stOrzte sie in die Tiete.f? Fur so wichtig hatte Roland Freisler diesen Fall gehalten, dass er selbst nach MOnchen geeilt war um die jungen Leute abzuurteilen. Nur vier Tage vergingen z'fbschen der Festnahme der ersten drei und dem Fallbeil, das ihr Leben beendete. Alexander Schmorell suchte zu entkommen, wurde aber verraten und gefasst. Professor Hubers Verleger bat um Aufschub von dessen Hinrichtung, �•8• damit sein Autor noch sein Buch Ober Leibniz fertig schreiben konnte. Der Antrag wurde abgeschlagen. Willi Graf musste bis Oktober auf seine Hinrichtung warten, da die Gestapo - vergeblich - versuchte, noch weitere Namen von ihm zu erfahren. Die Guillotine, die ihrem Leben ein Ende setzte, war eine von den etwa 19 Guillotinen, die Moltke in einem langen Bericht Ober die Zustande in Deutschland erwahnte, den er zur gleichen Zeit wie seinen Bericht Ober die Weisse Rose bemOht war, aus Schweden zu seinem Freund Lionel Curtis in England gelangen zu !assen. Dieser Brief blieb in Schweden stecken und nur ein - etwas verzerrter Bruchteil, memoriert von dem amerikanischen Generalsekretar des Vereins Christlicher Junger Manner, gelangte zum Bischof von Chichester, der ihn an Curtis weiterleitete: Aber der Bericht Ober die Weisse Rose und ihr letztes Flugblatt nahmen einen anderen Weg und kamen durch. Nach einer eingehenden Schilderung des Falles, seines Hintergrundes, der Vorfalle, der drei Studenten, der Formalitaten vor ihrer Hinrichtung, den Nachwirkungen oder Nachwehen und der Verhaftung von Professor Huber, kam ein Abschnitt Ober die nahere Zukunft und ein letzter Ober mogliche Hilfe aus der Aussenwelt. Zur Frage des "Was Nun ?"stand in dem Bericht folgendes: In Deutschland mOsse die Sache verbreitet und weitergefOhrt werden. Das sei schwierig und gefahrlich. Die Aufforderung des Flugblatts, aus der Partei und ihren Organisationen auszutreten, sei allerdings unklug und solle herausediert werden: sie wOrde zu viele Menschenleben kosten und es den Machthabern zu leicht machen, ihre Gegner zu erkennen und auszuschalten; besser sei es, von innen heraus zu arbeiten und die Machthaber unsicher zu machen, auf wen sie sich nun verlassen konnen. �. 9• Varn Ausland konne Hilfe dadurch geleistet werden, dass man der Sache zur Publizitat verhelfe, die Namen der Beteiligten immer wieder nenne, var allem im Radio. Aber noch Wichtigeres sei moglich: "Dieser Fall" ( ich zitiere und Obersetze ) "ist frei van Spionage, Kommunismus, Defaitismus, usw. Es ist ein klarer Fall inneren Aufstands auf Grund sittlicher Prinzipien, die eines Tages die inner-europaischen Beziehungen leiten mOssen. Es ware ein enorme Hllfe, wenn diese Tatsache einen Widerhall van draussen fande, wenn auch nur eine Andeutung gegeben wOrde, dass es Krafte in Deutschland gibt, mit denen es nicht nur moglich sondern notig ist, nach dem Krieg zusammenzuarbeiten. Andererseits wOrde grosser Schaden angerichtet, wenn diese Vorgange nur als Symptom eines ~erfalls in Deutschland registriert wOrden, Anzeichen dafOr, dass die Lage van 1918 wieder herannaht. Das wOrde namlich das Urteil des Volksgerichtshofes rOckwirkend rechtfertigen .... Es ist somit ein Fall, dessen Behandlung im neutralen und feindlichen Ausland viel Gutes und viel Schadliches bewirken 10 kann." Soweit der anonyme Moltke. Die BBC verlas das beigelegte letzte Flugblatt und die Royal Air Force warf viele Exemplare, mit einer Rahmenerklarung, Ober Deutschland ab. Als ich viele Jahre spater in den inzwischen freigegebenen Akten des Foreign Office wieder auf diesen Bericht stiess, war er, wenn ich mich recht entsinne, in der Kategorie mit lauter Material Ober Zersetzungserscheinungen und deutsche Versuche, die Einheit der fiiierten Koalition zu sprengen und einen /\ milden Frieden zu erreichen. Dass dem anonymen Autor hochstens das Letzte angelastet werden konnte, ergibt sich daraus, dass er Uber Zusammenarbeit nacil dem Krieg sprach. NatOrlich warder Wunsch nach der Anerkennung des "Anderen Deutschland" schon wahrend des Krieges auch dabei. �• 10 • Jedoch bevor das Jahr um war, machte Moltke doch einen Versuch, einen verzweifelten Versuch - ob von Canaris, ob von den Kreisauern gedeckt, weiss man nicht - den Angloamerikanern tor den Fall einer Invasion in ausreichender Starke und mit mehr Durchschlagskraft als der des Feldzugs in ltalien, eine deutsche Offnung im Westen in Aussicht zu stellen, die zu einer schnellen Besetzung ganz Deutschlands fOhren wOrde und mit einem Schlage auch das Volk von dieser Losung Oberzeugen und die Gefahr einer neuen Dolchstosslegende vermeiden wOrde. Nicht von ihm selbst, sondern von zwei exildeutschen Kontaktmannern nach seiner Abreise aus Istanbul im Dezember, fOr den amerikanischen Geheimdienst (OSS) formuliert, fOhrte dieses Memorandum zu langen Auseinandersetzungen unter den Amerikanern, die man jetzt in den ~ ~ Vierteljahrsheften for Zeitgeschichte nachlesen kann. Moltke selbst wurde nach diesem Vorstoss, den er bei einer Dienstreise in die TOrkei machte, verhaftet und ausser Gefecht gesetzt. Es wurde nichts aus dem Plan, der, obwohl aus anderer Feder stammend, seine Ansichten zum grossen Teil richtig wiedergeben mag. Er hatte mit Hans Wilbrandt und Alexander ROstow, dem Hauptautor der Denkschrift, eingehende Gesprache gefOhrt. Er hatte selbst vor seiner Abreise an Alexander Kirk, den ihm wohlbekannten ehemaligen amerikanischen Geschaftstrager in Berlin und jetzt in Kairo, einen Brief geschrieben, als er ihn nicht, wie erhofft, in Istanbul antraf. In dem Brief erwahnt er auch das entmutigende Beispiel ltalien, das im September kapituliert hatte und zum Kriegsschauplatz wurde. Das war nicht gerade ein gutes Omen fOr innere Veranderungen in Deutschland. Es mOsse klar gemacht warden, wie sich eine Wiederholung vermeiden Hesse. Dazu brauche man eine gemeinsame politische Zielsetzung, ohne die es keine wirksame militarische Zusammenarbeit geben konne. Was diese angehe, konne sowohl vom militarischen wie auch vom politischen Standpunkt aus nur eine solche in Frage �• 11 • kommen, die die Lage mit einem Schlage verwandle. Und dafOr sei Geduld notig, man mOsse warten, warten und nochmals warten bis eine Streitkraft vorhanden 12. sei, die, mit deutscher Hilfe, unwiderstehlich sein wOrde. Die lBesorgnis Ober den ~amen Foldzug in ltalien und d~ Notwendigkeit abzuwarten bis genOgende 9~ t(trl.lft'f!?<J Kraft tor ein 6Adef'sa™g'-9s Vorgehen in Frankreich da sei, kommt Obrigens auch in ....... =efttJ.an'freye vor.t31n dem Memorandum steht dazu noch, dass eine solche schnelle Entscheidung und Besetzung Deutschlands durch die Westmachte taktvoll "die Aliiierten" genannt - von der dadurch freigesetzten "wahren Stimme" 1't Deutschlands als eine Art westliches Tauroggen begrOsst werden wOrde. Der Bericht stiess trotz seiner diplomatischen Formulierung auf Skepsis und ~blehnung. Trotzdem er eingangs die Annahme der zu Anfang des Jahres proklamierten Forderung der. bedingungslosen Kapitulation beteuerte, beinhaltete er eben doch Bedingungen. Die Grossen Drei hatten sich jedoch eben erst in Teheran Ober die gemeinsame FortfOhrung des Krieges und einige Gesichtspunkte der Nachkriegsregelung geeinigt. Die Westmachte konnten off/iziell auf einen solchen Vorschlag nicht eingehen und Prasident Roosevelt, zu dem das Dokument gar nicht durchdrang, Mitte das auch nicht gewollt. Sagar die Englander wollten lieber Deutschland mit russischer Beteiligung besetzen. Aber anscheinend erfuhren englische und russische diplomatische Vertreter erst im Mai 1944 von diesem oder einem ahnlichen Vorschlag. All das bedeutet, meine ich, nicht, dass man Peter Hoffmann in seinem Buch Ober die Bruder Stauffenberg voll zustimmen kann, wenn er den Schluss zieht, vor allem aus der Verzogerung der Mitteilung an die Englander und Russen, dass "die Missachtung der Moglichkeit, Hunderttausende von Menschenleben zu retten, nicht durch den Zwang der Kriegskoalition zu erklaren" ist-"(,..f?J+.;-=s:-se~~fDas Argument der Moglichkeit, Hunderttausende zu retten, war von einem sehr 16 engagierten aber nicht einflussreichen BefOrworter des Plans erwahnt warden. Die �• 12 • Auseinandersetzung daruber zog sich Ober Monate hin und war von sehr unterschiedlicher Qualitat. Moltkes alter Freund, der Journalist Wallace Deuel, der mittlerweile far das OSS arbeitete, war auch daran beteiligt. Er legte seine Hand fOr Moltke ins Feuer, hatte aber Zweifel an der DurchfOhrbarkeit des Plans, besonders was die Moglichkeit und Wirksamkeit der in Aussicht gestellten deutschen Mitwirkung anging~rNatOrlich war auch die Reaktion der Sowjetunion, selbst unter der Annahme der DurchfOhrbarkeit, ein wichtiger Punkt. Der Plan schlug vor, die Ostfront etwa an der Linie Tilsit-Lemberg zu halten. So ist vielleicht Peter Hoffmanns Wort von der "Mlssachtung" der vorgeschlagenen Moglichkeit etwas zu streng, und vielleicht unterschatzt er auch den Zwang der Kriegskoalition. Er bestand ja nicht nur in dem anglo-amerikanisch -russischen Versprechen der ~ofortigen gegenseitigen Benachrichtigung Ober deutsche Kontaktaufnahmen, dessen Bruch den stets argwohnischen Stalin zu wer weiss was fOr Sonderabmachungen mit den Deutschen veranlassen konnte solche Erwagungfen auf russischer - Anzeichen fOr .u.nd deutscher Seite waren schon da. Worin bestand der Zwang der Koalition? Doch auch in der Oberzeugung, dass Deutschland total besiegt warden musste, ohne Abmachungen und Konzessionen und solche Bedingungen wie sie in dem fraglichen Dokument trotz seiner verbalen Akzeptanz der "bedingungslosen Kapitulation" enthalten waren. Es kam, wenn nicht auf "bedingte Kapitulation" dann zumindest auf eine "gesteuerte Niederlage" hinaus. Der Hinweis des Memorandums auf eine Gefahr der Bolschewisierung Deutschlands wirkte, von deutscher Seite kommend, eher wie ein rotes Tuch, wie ein weiterer Versuch die Koalition zu spalten. Trotz gewisser Bedenken gegenOber der Sowjetunion und Stalins Absichten, musste Deutschland mit seiner Hilfe besiegt werden. In den Demokratieo war ein Abgehen von der Koalition zu dem Zeitpunkt undenkbar. Hitlers Pakt mit Stalin, der Auftakt zu diesem Krieg, war nur moglich weil weder Deutschland noch Russland Demokratien waren. Solche politischen Schaltungen konnen nur Diktatoren vornehmen. ' ,, ,, .\ -----.. *V ~ .la-. �- 13 - Das Wendejahr 1943 hatte mit der fast gleichzeitigen Bekanntgabe des Endes des Kampfes in Stalingrad und der Proklamation der Forderung bedingungsloser Kapitulation Deutschlands, ltaliens und Japans auf der Konferenz Matr~ von Casablanca begonnen. Im febraaf waren zwei Attentatsversuche auf Hitler misslungen. Im April gelang dem SD eine empfindliche Schwachung der Abwehr. Im Mai kapitulierten die deutschen und italienischen Truppen in Nordafrika. Im Juli landeten die Aliierten in Sizilien. Mussolini wurde vom Faschistischen Grossrat ~Ee~ ol0 Jalit'o~ · gestOrzt und ~erhaftet - sp~ffer aber Wieder von Deutschen befreit. Im September /' landeten die Angloamerikaner in SOditalien und die neue italienische Regierung unter Marschall Badoglio kapitulierte und bot den Aliierten ihre Hilfe an. Die geutschen intervenierten und kampften zah. An der diplomatischen Front endete dann das Jahr 1943 mit der interalliierten Aussenministerkonferenz in Moskau und dem Treffen von Stalin, Churchill und Roosevelt in Teheran. Auf diesen Konferenzen wurde das weitere gemeinsame Vorgehen gegen den gemeinsamen Feind beschlossen. Das etwa war der Rahmen, in dem sich der lnnerdeutsche Widerstand gegen das Hitlerregime 1943 abspielte. Bevor das Jahr begann, hatte Dietrich Bonhoeffer eine Bestandsaufnahme nach 10 Jahren 1942/43 nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft gemacht, die er zur Jahreswende Hans von Dohnanyi, Hans Oster und Eberhard Bethge Oberreichte. Darin ausserte sich Bonhoeffer zur Frage Attentat und Staatsstreich wie folgt: die Dummheit sei getahrlicher als die Bosheit, die man bekampfen kann. Menschen konnten dumm gemacht werden, konnten sich dumm machen !assen. �• 14 • Es sei Macbtentfaltung, die den Menschen die innere Selbstandigkeit raube, sie erlagen dann Schlagwortern und Parolen und wOrden zum willenlosen Instrument und zu allem Bosen tahig, und zugleich unfahig, es als Boses zu erkennen. Und nun kommt der springende Punkt: es war fOr Bonhoeffer ganz deutlich, dass nicht ein Akt der Belehruog sondero alleio ein Akt der Befreiung die Dummheit Oberwinden konne. " Dabei wird man sich", schrieb er, "damit abfinden mOssen, dass eine echte innere Befreiung in den allermeisten Fallen erst moglich wird, nachdem die aussere Befreiung vorausgegangen ist." Diese war es, die er mit seineo Freunden und Vertrauteo anstrebte. Was er dann Ober Klugheit schreibt, gehort vielleicht nicht so direkt zur Frage Widerstand, ist aber doch relevant und · fOr einen Lutheraoer - erstaunlich. Die Missachtung der g6ttlichen Gesetze sei nicht nur unrecht, schreibt er, sondern unklug, und er findet es, besonders nach den Erfahrungen der letzten zehn Jahre verstandlich, "warum die aristotelisch-thomistische Ethik die Klugheit zu einer der Kardinaltugenden erhob." "Klugheit und Dummheit", tahrt er fort," sind nicht ethisch indifferent, wie uns eine neuprotestantische Gesinnungsethik hat lehren wollen." Und dann: " Es i.S1 einfach in der Welt so eingerichtet, dass die grundsatzliche Achtung der letzten Gesetze und Rechte des Lebens zugleich der Selbsterhaltung am dienlichsten ist, und dass diese Gesetze sich nur eine ganz kurze, einmalige, im Einzelfall notwendige Oberschreitung gefallen !assen, wahrend sie den, der aus der Not ein Prinzip macht, und also neben ihnen ein eigenes Gesetz aufrichtet, fnJher oder spater - aber mit unwiderstehlicher Gewalt erschlagen. n �- 15 - Dass die verantwortliche Tat, die Befreiungstat, das irdische Leben kosten konnte, wusste er, wussten sie alle, die Widerstand leisteten. "Der Tod kann uns nicht mehr sehr Oberraschen", schreibt er. "Unseren Wunsch, er moge uns nicht zufallig, jah, abseits vom Wesentlichen, sondern in der FOlle des Lebens und in der Gesamtheit des Einsatzes treffen, wagen wir uns seit den Erfahrungen des Krieges kaum mehr einzugestehen. Nicht die ausseren Umstande, sondern wir selbst warden es sein, die unseren Tod zu dem machen, was er sein kann, zum Tod in freiwilliger Einwilligung." 1'6 Helmuth James von Moltke glaubte wohl weniger an eine solche Befreiungstat. Er meinte, dass nur ein klare militarische Niederlage zur Befreiung fOhren konne - Befreiung nicht nur von Hitler, sondern von dem, was Hitler moglich gemacht hatte, einschliesslich des Militarismus, der • seit dem "grossen Moltke", dem Feldmarschall Bismarcks • eine gesunde politische Entwicklung in Deutschland erschwert hatte. Ein Miltarputsch und Staatsstreich, wie ihn die Verschworer im Sinne hatten, konnte kaum die Grundlage eines gesunden Staatswesens abgeben. Wie Moltke von einer Dienstreise in Schweden an seinen englischen Freund Lionel Curtis schrieb, hielt er es fOr einen Fehler der deutschen Opposition, dass sie sich auf eine Aktion der Generale verliess. Diese Hoffnung war, wie er meinte, von vornherein aussichtslos. Der wichtigste Grund war ein soziologischer: "Wir brauchen eine Revolution," schrieb er, "nicht einen Staatsstreich; und eine solche Revolution wird den Generalen niemals denselben Spielraum und dieselbe Stellung geben, wie sie ihnen von den Nazis eingeraumt warden sind und noch eingeraumt werden." -11 �• 16 • Diese Ansicht spielte sicher eine Rolle in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen der Gruppe van Goerdeler und Beck (tar den Moltke grosse Hochachtung hatte) und dam Kreisauer Kreis. Spannungen gab es monatelang. Anfang Januar 1943 gab es eine Begegnung zwischen den "Alten" oder, wie Moltke sie nannte, "Exzellenzen", Goerdeler, Beck, Popitz, Hassell, Jessen und dem Vermittler, Fritz van der Schulenburg, einerseits, und den "Jungen" vom Kreisauer Kreis: Moltke, Yorck, Gerstenmaier und Trott. Goerdeler wollte die jungen Manner nicht recht ernst nehmen und versuchte, die Differenzen bezOglich der geplanten Wirtschaftsund Sozialpolitik zu verschleiern. Moltke hielt Goerdelers Programm tor eine "Kerenski -Losung", d.h., eine unhaltbare Zwischenlosung, die zum Kommunismus fOhren musste. Selbst Hassell fand Goerdeler "eine Art Reaktionar".w ·- Was immer die auseinandergehenden Ansichten innerhalb des Widerstandes gewesen sein mogen - im Marz kam es dann zu zwei Attentatsversuchen, die missglOckten. Kann man die Versuche als ein Zeichen nehmen, dass die Ende Januar in Casablanca van Roosevelt formulierte und von Churchill unterstOtzte Forderung der "bedingungslosen Kapitulation" sich nicht so lahmend auf den deutschen Widerstand auswirkte wie van manchen angenommen wird? Stalingrad war ein Signal zum Handeln. Wie stark war die Behinderung durch die neue Formel - die eigentlich nur das formulierte, was !angst stillschweigende Annahme gewesen war? Schon 1941 hatte Churchill angeordnet, dass jeglichen deutschen Annaherungen durch Schweigen zu begegnen war. Seitdem waren nur noch mehr GrOnde hinzugekommen, vor allem die Notwendigkeit, die Koalition mit Sowjetrussland und Amerika zusammenzuhalten. Sachlich hatte die Forderung ausserdem das tor sich, dass man damit eine Wiederholung des Trauerspiels von Wilson's 14 Punkten und Versailles vermied. Rhetorisch war sie vielleicht weniger glOcklich. Aber Goebbels hat wenig daraus gemacht - Historiker des deutschen Widerstands hingegen mehr. 2.1 �- 17 - Im Juni fand die dritte und letzte Konferenz der Kreisauer in Kreisau statt. Die Hauptgesprachsgegenstande waren Aussen - und Wirtschaftspolitik, sowie die Bestrafung van "Rechtsschandern". Diese Vokabel wurde benutzt, wail es sich bei den Naziverbrechen nicht nur um Kriegsverbrechen sondern um prazedenzlose Schandungen des gottlichen und Naturrechts handelte, denen schwer mit Paragraphen beizukommen war. Die Bestrafung dieser Rechtsschander sollte einerseits in deklaratorischer Achtung bestehen, andererseits van Deutschen oder van einem internationalen Gericht mir deutscher Beteiligung vorgenommen werden. In den folgenden Wochen wurden die besprochenen EntwOrfe waiter Z'L diskutiert und in dokumentarischer Form festgelegt. Ausserdem suchte man nach Qeeigneten Personen, die in der Obergangszeit als "Landesverweser" fungieren konnten. Parallel hiermit intensivierten sich im Sommer wieder die Planungen der auf einen Staatsstreich hinarbeitenden Verschworer. Bis im Herbst Claus Stauffenberg zu dieser Gruppe stiess - bei dem sich Axel van dem Bussche als Attentater meldete - war Henning von Tresckow der militarische Motor der Verschworung. Aber Attentat und Staatsstreich waren ja nicht die einzige Art des Widerstands. Planung fur die Zeit nach dem Umsturz oder der Niederlage gehorte auch dazu - ebenfalls der Kampf gegen die Grausamkeiten des Regimes. In seinem schon erwahnten Bericht Ober die deutschen Zustande, der seinen englischen Freund nie erreichte, schrieb Moltke auch etwas Ober die Opposition gegen das Regime, jene Manner, van denen man, wie er einer englischen Schlagzeile entnahm, "so viel hart und so wenig merkt." Er erwahnte die grossen Verluste der Regimegegner, ihre stillen Erfolge bei der Sabotage mancher nationalsozialistscher Massnahmen, ihre Rettungsaktionen tar einzelne Menschen. �• 18 • Zwei dauerhafte Erfolge der Opposition hebt er besonders hervor: die Mobilisierung der Kirchen und die Wegbereitung far ein dezentralisiertes 2..~ Deutschland. In der Tat geharten zu den Kreisauern nicht nur Kirchenmanner beider Konfessionen wie auch Sozialisten, die dem Christentum positiv gegenOberstanden, sondern Moltke war von Anfang an bemOht, die deutsche Glaubensspaltung politisch zu OberbrOcken und die Hierarchen politisch zu 2A: aktivieren. Mit dem katholischen Bischof von Berlin besprach er seit 1941 regelmaBig, wie man den Unrechtsmassnahmen der Regierung und Partei am besten entgegentreten konnte und 1943 gelang es, den Bischof Preysing mit dem evangelischen Bischof von WOrttembergJ~m weithin aner:kanAten Oberhaupt des'fticM glsiohgesehalteten Teils der protestantischen - Kirche,~ zusammenzubringen, und beide, Preysing und Wurm, protestierten gegen Verfolgung und Tatung . unschuldiger 2..t;;° Menschengruppen. Auch ein Hirtenbrief der Fuldaer Bischofskonferenz Ober die Zehn Gebote erregte das Missfallen des Sicherheitsdienstes wegen seiner politischen Relevanz. Da stand namlich zum 5. Gebot zu lesen: "Tatung ist an sich schlecht, auch wenn sie angeblich im lnteresse des Gemeinwohls verObt wurde: an schuld - und wehrlosen Geistesschwachen und Kranken, an unheilbar Siechen und tOdlich Verletzten, an erblich belasteten und lebensuntOchtigen Neugeborenen, an unschuldigen Geiseln und entwaffneten Kriegs - und Strafgefangenen, an Menschen fremder Rassen und Abstammung." Der SD beanstandete auch, dass sich der Kommentar zum 6. und 9. Gebot mit der Heiligkeit der Ehe befasste, auch der rassischen Mischehe.2.'T Moltke selbst war besonders rege in der VerhOtung von Geiselerschiessungen und verhandelte hierOber nicht nur mit Generalen sondern 2£ auch mit den zustandigen SS-Gewaltigen in Holland und Danemark. Ausserdem 2b �• 19 • mag er seine Unterredungen mit den Generalen Falkenhausen und StOlpnagel elie... . auch zu Sondierungen anderer Art, z.B. betreffend-6ef Moglichkeit einer Offnung nach Westen, benutzt haben~ Sowohl in Holland als auch in Skandinavien besprach er sich mit Reprasentanten des Widerstands, der in Norwegen stark von der Kirche getragen war. Es gelang ihm auch dem bereits unter Hausarrest stehenden norwegischen Bischof Berggrav gegen noch peinlichere Repressalien zu helfen. Moltke war auch in Kontakt mit schwedischen Oekumenikern und andere Kreisauer, besonders Trott und Gerstenmaier, mit dem Vorlaufigen Weltkirchenrat in Genf, besonders dessen Generalsekretar A.W. Visser 't Hooft, der eine grosse . Hllfe war. 30 ·- 1945, zwei Jahre nach dem Bericht Ober die Weisse Rose, begannen wir in London Akten aus den befreiten Gebieten und aus dem besetzten Deutschland zu n J)a>. ~efi.vv1 cJ.Q._s 'S'c'e., \1€..N~~/' l~q;t- ~c'~ ~~w'21 sehen, auch Papiere aus Konzentrationslagern. ~ie waren niederschmetterndl benre-{b-<J Die Lager waren van den Aliierten Oberrannt und befreit warden. Auch die ersten Bilder kamen nun nach England. Da bekam ich ein Bunde! Akten - Photokopien - aus der Reichskanzlei: Eingaben an Heinrich Lammers, Chef der Reichskanzlei. Besonders erinnerlich ist mir ein Konvolut, das sich mit der - talschlich - so genannten etVi€.fr1. "Euthanasia" befasste. Da war ein Pastor Braune, der dagegen tlEinspruch erhob. Und da war, auf komisch kariertem Papier, ein Protest von ~ ~ei~~htenberg. Es war wie eine Enklave des Himmels in der Holle. Von den Predigten des Bischofs Galen hatten wir schon wahrend des Krieges gehort. Sie wurden sogar in England veroffentlicht. Aber hier waren weniger prominente Manner, die offenbar ihr Leben auf's Spiel setzten um das Leben anderer zu retten. Viel spater erfuhr ich Naheres Ober sie. �- 20 - Am 5. November 1943 war der Domprobst Bernhard Lichtenberg nach VerbOssung seiner zweijahrigen Gefangnisstrafe auf dem Weg nach Dachau gestorben. Er hatte, unter anderem, offentlich in Abendandachten in der Hedwigskathedrale in Berlin zum Gebet fOr "die verfolgten nichtarischen Christen und tor die Juden" aufgerufen. Obwohl er das schon lange getan hatte - schon im November 1938 hatte er, wie er selbst in der Gerichtsverhandlung angab, damit begonnen - war er nie van einem Gemeindemitglied denunziert warden. Das taten dann zwei rheinische Studentinnen, die wahrend einer dieser Andachten in der 3l Kirche waren. Der Bericht Ober Lichtenbergs Gestapoverhor hatte Moltke bei einem seiner Besuche bei Bischof Preysing so beeindruckt, dass er ein StOck . . . .. 1· h B ne fe . d ~avon in einem seiner tag 1c en wurde freigegeben - 3 . S'et~ ·1·1e rt e.2-Lie ht en b ergs an~ z1 Le1c he . er war, schwer herzkrank, eines "natOrlichen" Tades gestorben. Sein Bischof, Konrad Preysing, sprach bei seiner Beerdigung, zu der Tausende kamen. Es war die letzte offentliche Kundgebung der Katholiken Berlins. 33 Man muss sich immer wieder vergegenwartigen - und jOngere Generationen konnen es sich kaum vorstellen - in was fOr einem Staat diese Menschen lebten. Das Gerichtsurteil gegen Lichtenberg mag das beleuchten. Die einschlagigen Paragraphen waren Kanzelmissbrauch und Vergehen gegen das HeimtOckegesetz. In der UrteilsbegrOndung steht dazu: " lndem der Angeklagte in seinem Gebet ausdrOcklich tor die Juden und die Gefangenen in den Konzentrationslagern eintrat, befasste er sich offentlich mit den gegen die genannten Personengruppen eingeleiteten staatlichen Massnahmen; denn der Grund dafOr, dass er sie in seine FOrbitte aufnahm, lag nach seiner eigenen Einlassung allein darin, dass er �• 21 • sie um ihrer Rassenzugehorigkeit oder ihrer Weltanschauung willen fOr von den staatlichen Behorden verfolgt ansah. Er hat also in AusObung seines Berufes in einer Kirche vor mehreren Personen Angelegenheiten des Staates zum Gegenstand seiner VerkOndigung gemacht. Dies geschah in einer den offentlichen Frieden getahrdenden Weise. Sowohl die Regelung der Judenfrage wie auch die Bekampfung staatsfeindlicher Elemente durch Anordnung der Vorbeugungshaft in Konzentrationslagern sind Massnahmen des nationalsozialistischen Staates, an denen die gesamte deutsche Bevolkerung Anteil nimmt ..... Dass sich gegen seine Abendandachten bisher niemand beschwert hatte, ..... zeigt nur, wie sehr seine Zuhorer durch ihn schon beeinflusst waren."31 Nun war er also tot. Und inzwischen hatten diese staatlichen Massnahmen sich auf das ganze besetzte Europa ausgedehnt mit dem Erfolg millionenfachen Mord es. In Deutschland war man an die Trennung der sogenannten Mischehen gegangen, deren jOdische oder, wie es damals hiess, "nichtarische" Partner bisher von der Deportation ausgenommen waren. Das tohrte im FrOhjahr 1943 zu der Demonstration Berliner Ehefrauen, denen es wirklich gelang, ihre schon verhafteten Manner noch mal freizukriegen. Der Anlass zur Verhaftung van Hans von Dohnanyi und Dietrich Bonhoeffer Anfang April 1943 war ein Versuch, der auch gelang, einige Juden, als Abwehragenten getarnt, ins neutrale Ausland zu retten. Hans Oster wurde bei dieser Gelegenheit auch kaltgestellt und war tartan in seiner verschworerischen 35" Aktionstahigkeit stark beeintrachtigt. Es war der erste Einbruch des SD in die Abwehr, in der sich ja, angefangen bei Admiral Wilhelm Canaris selbst, eine rege Tatigkeit gegen das Regime entfaltet hatte. ---J:: i'\.j·~-~ �~ Ii ~J 6 ~.::::; • 22 • "'d ..!:::,( =(, ti' -::.., ~,~;­ ':> ~..:;- Da haben wir ein Spektrum von Widerstand, von dem nur _ein Teil zu dem gehOrte, was dann am 20. Juli 1944 in dem Versuch des Attentats und Staatsstreichs gipfelte. Alie diese Manner - und Frauen, wie z.B. Margarete ~ -~ ~ .... ~ ~ un.el ~e-~ ic.id(q,e,{i <'k'.e- tW. ~~ h.s f..14' bc"Jf5~ <~,1z-p.&llc>~ ~~ t>er ~ /!}._ "t'l-l.~ ~ lh~ij l<e)lSommer vom Hilfswerk des Sischoflichen Ordinariats in Berlin/\ und junge Leute wie die Studenten und SchOler der Weissen Rose, all diese - wie man sagt Deutschen setzten ihr Leben ein - und viele verloren es. In Hava Sellers bewegendem Film Ober den deutschen Widerstand, "The Restless Conscience", "Das ruhelose Gewissen", wird ein Teil von Henning von Tresckow's Ausspruch vom 21. Juli 1944 zitiert. lch mochte den fehlenden Teil ~itieren: > " Wenn Gott einst Abraham verheissen hat, er werde Sodom nicht verderben, wenn auch nur zehn Gerechte darin seien, so hoffe ich, dass Gott auch Deutschland um unsertwillen nicht vernichten wird." 3G Ob Tresckow Deutschland 1945, 1949, 1989, oder heute, wohl als "vernichtet" ansehen wOrde? Es handelt sich aber -tor mich- nicht nur um Deutschland. Gewiss, der Widerstand war eine Manifestation des "Anderen Deutschland", und das war nach dem Krieg eine gute Sache, auch fOr diplomatische Werbung im Ausland. Aber nicht darum geht es und nicht nur um Deutschland. Es geht um das, was Helmuth Moltke einmal "das Bild des Menscheo" nannte~f Die Unmenschlichkeit, die die Menschheit in Hitlers Tausendjahrigem Reich erlebte, war vor allem, aber nicht nur, eine Angelegenheit der Deutschenjt>def-\lielleicht-=SO:llto iGt-r= Sagen "de1 61~eutseneA ", eenHie- �- 23 - ~ci+le-5-Se~t~BM~ffi--fi:Hff~~~~ Man sah, was Menschen moglich war. Nach den zwolf Jahren waren es die Beispiele der Menschlichkeit, der Mitmenschlichkeit, die einen wieder Vertrauen zu den Menschen, auch deutschen, fassen liessen. Staatswesen sind pervertierbar. Mehr Menschen sind schwach als base. Wohl denen, die in einem guten Staatswesen leben. Die Deutschen hatten es von 1933 bis 1945 schwer. Nur starke GemOter konnten den Versuchungen und Drohungen des Dritten Reiches widerstehen. DafDr, dass es sie gab, muss man sehr dankbar sein. �Anmerkungen 1. Beate Ruhm von Oppen, Religioh and Resistance to Nazism, Princeton 1971. 2. John Charmley, Churohills biography. 3. The end of glorys a political London 1993. Jtlrgen Heideking und Christof Mauch, Das Herman-Dossiers Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, die deutsche Emigration in Istanbul und der amerikanische ~eheimdienst Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Vierteljahrshefte ftlr Zeitgeschichte (40) 1992, So 574, Anmo 360 4. George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, Boston 1967, s. 121; Memoiren eines Diplomaten, Stuttgart 1968, s. 127. deutsch "' 5 0 Beate Ruhm von Oppen,\H~., Helmuth James von Moltke, Briefe an Freya 1939-1945, 6. Mttnchen 1988, Brief vom 13.11.41, Hermann Vinke, Das kurze Leben der Sophie Scholl. s. 317. Ravensburg 1980, So 125. Anm~ 6), s. 7o Vinke, Sophie Scholl (s. 146. 80 Vinke, Sophie Scholl (s. Anm. 6), S. 157. 9 0 Text der "Kurzfassung" mit Begleitbrief des Bischofs in Ger van Roon, German Resistance to Hitler: Count Moltke and the Kreisau Circle, translated by Peter Ludlow, London 1971, So 364-367; Originaltext in Henrik Lindgren, Adam von Trotts Reisen nach Schweden 1942-1944, Vierteljahrshefte ftlr Zeitgeschichte (18), 1970, So 274-291; wiederabgedruckt in Michael Balfour / Julian Frisby, Helmuth von Moltke: A leader against Hitler, London 1972, So 215-224; deutsch in Freya von Moltke / Michael Balfour/ Julian Frisby, Helmuth James von Moltke 1907-1945: Anwalt der Zukunft, Stuttgart 1975, S. 212-2200 10. Wilhelm Ernst Winterhager (Hg.), Der Kreisauer Kreis: Portr~t einer Widerstandsgruppe. Begleitband zu einer Ausstellung der Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 1985, 11. 12 0 IH-eieiekisg /Ma.Yob' Herman-Dossier (s. Anm. s. 234 f. 3), s. 567-623. ldleia9ki:a-g / Mau.eh,t Herman-Dossier ( s. Anmo 3), So 584 f o �s. 130 Moltke, Briefe (s. Anm. 5), 7.1.44, 14. Herman ... Dossier ... ~ ( s. Anmo 3), S. 590. 15. Peter Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brttder, Stuttgart 1992, s. 587. 360. 160 ~id.eking/ M.an-cnJ,Herman-Dossier (s. Anm. 3), s. 588. 170 Herman-Dossier (s. Anmo 3}, So 615-6190 180 Eberhard Bethge (Hgo), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebungo Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, Neuausgabe, Mttnchen 1970, 190 s. 16-200 Helmuth James von Moltke, Bericht aus Deutschland im Jabre 1943. Letzte Briefe aus dem Gef~ngnis Tegel 1945. Berlin 1971, S 0 1946. 200 Moltke, Briefe (so Anm. 3), Brief vom 9olo43, So 450 f; Eugen Gerstenmaier, Streit und Friede hat seine Zeito Ein Lebensbericht, Berlin 1981, s. 169 f; Die Hassell-Tagebtlcher 1938-1944. Ulrich von Hassell, Aufzeichnungen vom Anderen Deutschland. Nach der Handschrift revidierte und erweiterte Ausgabe unter Mitarbeit von Klaus Peter Reiss herausgegeben von Friedrich Freiherr von Gaertringen, Berlin 1988, So 3470 21. Ihr sch~rfster deutscher Kritiker ist Lothar Kettenacker in seinem Beitrag tiber "Die britische Haltung zum deutschen Widerstand wl!hrend des Zweiten Weltkriegs" in Lothar Kettenacker (Hgo), Das "Andere Deutschland" im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Emigration und Widerstand in internationaler Perspektive, Stuttgart 1977, So 49-740 22. Ger van Roon, Neuordefnung im Widerstando Der Kreisauer Kreis innerhalb der deutschen Widerstahdsbewegung, Mtlnchen 1967, S 0 550-571, und Roman Bleistein (P.g.), Dossier: Kreisauer Kreis. Dokumente aus dem Widerstand gegen den ~ationalsozialismus. Aus dem Nachlass von Lothar K~nig SoJ., Frankfurt am Main 1987, So 239-299 und 337-3530 23 0 Moltke, Bericbt (so Anm. 19), So 38 f. 24. Moltke, Briefe (s. Anm. 5), 25. Ludwig Volk (Hg.), Akten deutscher Bischtlfe Uber die Lage der Kirche 1933-1945. 938-943; Band 6~ s. 12-14. Band 5, Mainz 1983, s. 675-678, 817-819, Mainz 1985, So 19ff, 2lff, 25, 42, 62-65, �99 r, 128, 145, 192, 202, 207, 215-220, 267-270, 283, 285, 291 r., 293, 332, 4290 Fftr Wurms Engagement s. Heinrich Hermelink (Hg.), Kirche im Kampf, Tttbingen 1950, s. 654 ff, 659r., sovie Gerhard ScQ~fer (Hg.), Landesbischof Wurm und der nationalsozialistis9he Staat 1940-1945. Eine Dokumentation. Stuttgart 1968, s. 149 ff., 160 ff., 163 f., 165 fo 26. So "Protokoll der Plenarkonferenz des deutschen Episkopats, Fulda, 17o-19o August 1943 11 in Volk, Bischofsakten (s. Anm. 25), Band 6, 133-146, und "Hirtenwort des deutschen Episkopats vom 19.8.43 - am 29.8.43 verlesen", s. 178-184, sowie "Hirtenwort ttber die Zehn Gebote vom 19.s.43 - verlesen am 12.9.43 11 , s. 197205. Siehe auch zwei Entwtirfe von Eingaben des deutschen Episkopats vom ~2./23o August 1943 gegen die Aufl6sung der Mischehen und d~"Evakuierung der Nichtarier", f 0 216 ff.· und 22or. Ftir die"Handreichung an die Pfarrer und Altesten zum fttnften Gebot der letzten altpreussischen Bekenntnissynode vom ft 16.-17. Oktober 1943 So Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Theologe, Christ, Zsitgenosse. Mtinchen 1967, So 795-797. Heinz Boberach (Hg.), Berichte des SD und der Gestapo Uber Kirchen 'und Kirchenvolk in Deutschland 1934-1944. Main~l971, Nr. 264, s. 850-855, besonders 853 Fo 280 Moltke, Briefe (so Anm. 5), Brief vom 5.6.43, s. 484-486, vom 7.6.43, s. 488, vom 12.9.43, s. 537, vom 4.-5.10.43, s. 550-552. 29. Moltke, Briefe (s. Anm. 5), Brief vom 5.-8.6.43, So 488-491. 30. Fttr die umfassende Darstellung der Auslandskontakte des deutschen Widerstands siehe Klemens von Klemperer, German resistance against Hitler: the search for allies abroad 1938-1945. Oxford 1992. Das Buch ist dem Andenken der beiden 6kumenischen Haupthelfer, George Bell und W.A. Visser 1 t Hoof~gewidmet. 310 Alfons Erb, Bernhard Lichtenberg, Domprobst von St. Hedwig zu Berlin. 5o Aufl., Berlin 1968, 5), s. 80. 32. Moltke, Briefe (s. Anm. Brief vom 14.11.41, 33. Erb, Lichtenberg (s. Anm. 31), s. 136-138. 34. Erb, Lichtenberg (s. Anmo 31), s. 104-105. 350 Bethge, Bonhoeffer (s. Anmo 26), So 878-885. s. 319-323. �36. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Offiziera gegan Hitler. Neue, durchgesehene und erweiterte Ausgabe von Walter Bussmann. Nach der Edition von Gero von So Gaevernitz. 37. ~erlin 1984, So 129.- Bo Balfour/ Frisby, Moltke (Anm. 9), s. 184-186; deutsch in Moltke/ Balfour/ Frisby (Anmo 9), So 184-187 (unvollstlindig). � 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/. 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Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 28 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The year 1943 and the German resistance to Hitler / Der Deutsche Widerstand Im Wendejahr 1943 Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture by Beate Ruhm von Oppen given in Berlin on July 19, 1993, with summary of main points in English. Entitled "Der Deutsche Widerstand Im Wendejahr 1943". 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Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource German English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Ruhm von Oppen 1993-07-19 FaFi-Ruhm von OppenB026 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/45b4f0164ea4e18855870176c1547ad8.pdf 03ca2c6d079639c5f43239fb65a9e636 PDF Text Text This materiaf rn~\I h Copyright law (Titl . !=i protected by e 17 U.S. Code) REVISIONISM AND COUNTER-REVISIONISM IN KIRCHENKAMPt' HISTORIOGRAPHY by Beate Ruhm von Oppen Paper presented on March 18, 1970 a.t The International Scholars Conference on "The German Church Struggle 1933-1945: What Can America Learn?·" held at Wayne State University March 15-19, 1970. �Prefatory note Two passages in what follows are printed in brackets. They are portions of my original manuscript I left undelivered when I read my paper in the morning of 17 March. I have decided to reinstate them (a) because some listeners expressed a regret that the lecture was not lon~er and (b) because I myself regretted the omission when I heard Richard Rubenstein in the afternoon. B.R.v.o. �REVISIONISM AND COUNTER-REVISIONISM IN KIRCHENKAMPF HISTORIOGRAPHY Beate Ruhm von Oppen The title on our program is a terrible mouthful. explain how I intend to deal with it. Let me I shall not confine myself to the church struggle in the narrower, purely institutional sense. Nor would you want me to do so. What interests us all are the wider implications of that part of church history, that crisis of Christianity and Christendom. As for "revisionism and counter-revisionism" in the writing and thinking about that era of church history, tlie allusion to what is going on in the general field of contemporary history is deliberate. The last few years have witnessed some striking reinterpretations of the history of the age of Hitler. There was A.J.P. Tarlor with his Origins of the Second World 1 War. He rejected the version that had been more accepted since the Nuremberg trj_als. ~r less But what is cux-rently known as "revisionism" is the interpretation provided by the New Left. There was Alperovitz with his Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima 2 and Potsdam in 1965 and quite a lot in that vein since. The tenor of all this is the reasonableness of the Russians and the obduracy and uncooperativeness of the United States, amounting at times to collusion with the Germans. The historian Arno Mayer digs deeper and goes back further, at least to the Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles as an early exercise in containment 3 or counter-revolution. �2- But what concerns us more is his contention that in the context of the international civil war that began in 1917, the Second World War and the extermination camps wer0 r.tthe diabolic wages of revolution ."1.ud counter 4 revolution . . . . " Th~.:J :i.s mor·'~ rndi~n 1, PVcn, th'.""! P12tcr Waiss j in his Auschwitz oratorio The Investigation, which mentions the com- plici ty of Germ.an industry in the employment of slave labor. It goes a good deal further than Hochhuth who, after a tr€mendously long build-up, finally lets his Pope appear and shows him preoccupied with investments and capitalist calculations. " ... von brennen.der 6 Sorge um Unsere Fabriken erfilllt ... " and so on. You may remember that clever crack. For the benefit for those without German among us I should perhaps add that "Mit brennender Sorge," the famous first words of the anti-Nazi encyclical of Pius XI, are here put into the mouth of his heartless successor to express his "burning concern" for the coffers of the church. The rapacity of Rome is quite an old theme, dating back to Luther and beyond. ':I'he complicity of German firms in the slave labor system is a newer one and undeniable. But to say that that system and the camps that supplied some of the labor were the consequence of the Western capitalists' view of Hitler's Germany as a bulwarlt against Bolshavism is something else again. It would be too much of a digression to say more about revisionism in general contemporary history and its possible points of contact with our subject. another thing: But the above examples illustrate the difficulty of isolating "historiography." 7 Once political scientists and historians like Lewy and �38 Friedlaender take Hochhuth seriously enough to start their works with favorable references to his play and its historical appendices and message and then are in their turn accepted as scholarly and cogent, it is not only the public mind that has been invaded by melodrama 9 That invasion, its causes and but the academic mind too. consequences, form part of the story of revisionism and counterrevisionism. And one might be quite prepared to let the academic mind go to pot, if the universities were not the new churches where people look for salvatio~--provided, of course, they are "relevant." Ever since Hitler came to power I have been interested in the relevance of religion to Nazism and the resistance to it. made me go to Dahlem, as a schoolgirl, It to hear Martin Niemoller. But now when I say that I am working. on this subject, the usual question is for figures: what statistics are there? I do not think that relevance can be quantified, though one may be able to draw certain conclusions from church attendance, penalties inflicted on clergy and parishioners, the denominational breakdown of the membership of the SS, and the like. But was the church, for instance, "relevant" to the man who, among those who tried to kill Hitle~ caree closest to succeeding? On the eve of his attempt to kill Hitler and bring down the Nazi system, in the evening of the 19th of July, 1944, a very tense and busy day, Claus Stauffenberg went briefly inside a church. You will find no mention of this in Guenter Lewy's book The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, not even in the slender chapter �4- 10 on "The Problem of Resistance." Perhaps the incident does not affect his argument--which at most, though not at all, times he limits to the conduct and recorded utterances of bishops and other representatives of the institution. It does appear in a 11 book published long before Lewy wrote. And Peter Hoffmann in 12 his recent book on the resistance even goes into the question of what church it was. enquiries. He has made exhaustive a.nd inconclusive So we do not know if it was a Catholic or a Protestant one. uncertainty. I quite like the ecume~ical aspect of that Stauffenberg was a Catholic and the son of a 13 Protestant mother--who never conve~ted to her husband's faith. But Lewy al:so goes into questions of theology and motivation ~. Therefo:r.e it is even odder that he does not mention the fact that earlier StRuffenberg had tried to recruit a fellowCa tholic for the conspiracy by pointing to the Catholic view on Natural Law and tyrannicid'3 which, whatever the Protestant view might be, made it the duty of a faithful Catholic to act counter to 2n oath of loyalty that had been rendered void by mass murder and a ruinous military policy. the Both Major Leonrod, brother officer to whom Stauffenberg had talked in this v':i."@p, and his confessor whom Leonrod had subsequently consulted on the sinfulness of knowing about assassination plans, were later 14 hanged. Lewy mentions just enough of the Leonrod story to make one VlOnder about the priest and about Cardinal Faulhaber for later praising him 11 ?.s a fight er against Nazi tyranny . " Every- thing is possible, and I would not put it past the Faulhaber of 1946. But in fact, when one goes to Lewy's source, one finds �5- Mother Mary Alice Gallin reporting something slightly different: a Lenten Pastoral in which Faulhaber "praised the heroism of those who fought against the Hitler tyranny and used as illustration ... a letter ... in which a priest from Munich wrote to him: 'What a beautiful day--the exaltation of the Cross! I am condemned to death for being the confessor of a man who 15 participated in the attentat.''' Whatevar the possible intricacies of that communication, it strikes me as both mean and misleading to bring out mainly the negative points of that story. Mother Gallin used it quite properly in a discussion of the apparent or real inconsistencies in the attitudes of the church to rebellion. It is, indeed, close enough to the posthumous misappropriation of a martyr by the establishment to give one an inkling of the rage that anyone not totally uncritical of the establishment might come to feel if this line were followed consistently, with never a twinge of self-examination or whisper of regret. Then thera is, of course, not a word in Lewy about the hanging judge's comment on this Catholic priest for having (as a matter of course) considered a possible assassination of Hitler under the 16 heading of tyrannicide. Yet that was precisely what Stauffenberg meant when he spoke to Leonrod about the duty of a Catholic, and the greater freedom of conscience a Catholic might have compared with a Protestant. What keeps Lewy's resistance chapter so slim? indictment of the church for collaboration so fat? What makes his Sticking to �6- the recorded public utterances of the hierarchs and taking them at their face value. Where such statements deviate from t:'J.e diplomacy that was widely practiced under the dictatcrship; they may be used selectively, to exclude intim?.tions of opposition. And silence is taken as assent--though we know quite well that it was not 17 always so taken at the time. But it is not in order to reduce the file on collaboratiofr and increase that on resistance that !'urge a less selective view of the church struggle. It is in order to take accpvnt of the fact that the churches as institutions were fearful crisis. ~nd are in a Unless we regard them as dispensable or even in need of liquidation in the general interest, we must try to see what good they did--a.s well as what harm--when the challenge to Christianity and to hllmanity was at its most deadly. And if that is our purpose, it will not do to persist in simple compilations 18 of damning quotations. Even the juxtaposition of staunch lay men and women and the timid clergy, a.nd even that of the devoted pastoral and lower clergy and the diplomatic higher clergy can be overdone. (With this distinction I refer more to the Catholic constellation.) It is, after all, conceivable that if there had been no Concordat, yes, even with its secret annex on the clergy and the armed services, Goebbels would have had no cause to complain about the danger to the National Socialist cause represented by army chaplains at the front. These chaplains were clearly far more important than the Nazi propagandist army bishop Rarkowski whose significance is, I think, exaggerated by Gordon Zahn and Guenter 19 Lewy. I must confess that in all my work on captured German �7- records Rarkowski never impinged on me, whereas the troublesome 20 army chaplains, both Protestant and Catholic, constantly did. Goebbels considered them even more dangerous than he did Bishop Galen of Milnster whom, nevertheless, he wanted eliminated as soon as this was feasible, i.e., after the war. Quite clearly there were checks and balances of a kind, of a practical and psychological kind, even in the totalitarian system of the Third Reich. They did not balance enough, they did not check nearly enough--but they were real all the same. They even saved lives sometimes. It is one of the merits of Peterson's book on The Limits of Hitler's 21 Power that he almost stumbled on the religious factor among the limits and writes about it without, however, thinking much further about it. He simply takes it as one of the givens of a complex situation, like character traits or the differences between small and big towns. �8- [on Monday Eberhard Bethge gave a breathtaking description of the self-deceptions and errors of the Confessing Church. Twice, I think> he referred to the "room to breathe" that Confessors enjoyed at a time, for a time. The fallacy of the "revisionists" lies in ignoring the fact that in order to resist the murderers, people must be able to breathe. Theoretical constructs cannot resist. To postulate a population of perfect resisters does not restore to life a single man, woman, or child. To sneer ~t those who did resist because they do not conform to the current counsels of perfection(iamf insults not only them but also the casualties they were trying, by their lights, to save. dimmer than ours. I am not so sure their lights were Hindsight is not perspicacity. Neither is there merit in not having been led into certain temptations by the grace of geography or chronology; nor, of course, is there any merit or demerit or moral immunity in genealogy or the accidents of birth. That, surely, is one thing we must have learnt.] �9- Thus I would say: Neither the retrospective expectation of the impossible nor the narrow institutional approach gets us anywhere with our subject--though, of course, questions of the role of institutions are very important, including, naturally, the question of the self-defense of institutions and of its cost and benefits, both to their members and to non-members. I incline to the view that the self-defense of the church, the real church (and I know that that word "real" begs a question), both Protestant and Catholic, had benefits trat reached well beyond their own membership. Of course there were moments when the defense of the institution was in conflict with the defense of the faith and of humanity. But to make those moments into a comprehensive indictment of these institutions strikes me as wrong, irresponsible, and unh:lstorical. Penitence is one thing--and we have had quite a lot of that here, though we have had other things too, and sometimes one was not quite sure about who was b?.ating whose breast. But I think wholesale condcmnation--even self-condemnation--does not help. There are, I ad~it, moments when one can understand the "revisionist" wave that swept over all earlier accounts of the heroism and martyrdom of the church struggle. But when a History 22 Scholar in Oxford refers to the churches as "tools of fascism" revisionism has gone far enough. The pre-war historians of the church struggle may have suffered from the weaknesses John Conway described on Monday. Yet they were closer to the truth, I think, than the latter-day perfectionists. �10It strikes me as significant that George Shuster who, with Reinhold Niebuhr, seems to have been one of the first in this 23 country to recognize and denounce the evil of Nazism, was also the first to write a book about the church conflict. he gave it, Like a Mighty Army: The title Hitler Versus Established Religion, may have been over-optimistic, yet the boo~ published in 24 1935, gave an impressive picture of the clash. Then, in 1936, there was John Brown Mason's Hitler's First Foes: A Study in 25 When, thirty years later, I asked an Religion and Politics. assistant at the New Yorlt Public Library for it, he said somewhat sardonically, "I didn't know he had so many enemies." By then, of course, Hochhuth held the stage and revisionism was in full swing. Mason, incidentially, was a Protestant, writing about the conflict betweeri the Catholic church and the Nazi regime. was another. Micklem He published his book in 1939, under the auspices 26 of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Lewy uses it exactly ~' It is a classic. in his chapter on "The Church and Hitler's Foreign Policy," merely for the translation of an announcement read from the pulpits in the diocese of Berlin after the Munich Agreement. "God has heard the prayer of all Christendom for peace," and so on. He uses Micklem's translation in his own 27 argument of church support for Hitler, but does not quote Micklem's comment which follows immediately after: please the Nazis. "This did not It ascribed glory to God rather than to Adolf 28 Hitler." And so it goes, I am afraid, in much of Lewy's book. There is a lot one can do with selective quoting and taking things out of their context; and he has done it; and thus what John Conway �11- 29 has called a "brilliant polemic" is built up. Conway was more 30 severe with FriedlaendE:lr's booli: on Pius XII; and my guess is that one reason was that when he saw that he had seen more of the documents on relations between Berlin and the Vatican and he knew what Friedlaender must have seen and had suppressed, ignored, or distorted. docume~ts ! had had more experience with the domestic and developments and therefore found Friedlaender mild in comparison with Lewy. Also, a misinterpretation of this one dead po:rn worries me less than false siP'plifications of the complex doings and sufferings of a lot of people. Perhaps a personal note will help to explain why I feel this so strongly and also feel that--whatever the revival of German Protestantism and its theology in the Nazi era, in response to its almost deadly challenge--Catholics should not be forgotten in all this. During and after the war I was working on Germany for the British Foreign Office. We heard and saw more than most, certainly more than the news media; and received more reliable information than the press and r~dio (television hardly existed in those days). Doing that kind of work gave one a clearer view of the hell of Hitler's Europe than anyone else outside, and clearer, too, than most people insj_de had. It is, I suppose, an experience that leaves its marks. After the Normandy landings, captured documents began to arrive--including concentration camp records. They conveyed a picture of hell and the virtual inescapability of hell. Then the �12- records of the Reich Chancery arrived, the records of the administrative, governmental, center of it all (though, of course, there was the Party Chancery too, and the SS and concentration camp universe had more to do with that). Rut here was the correspondence of Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancery. alia, the euthanasia or It contained, inter killing'' material. '~ercy Here were the protests of Bishops von Galen and Wurm--one Catholic, one Protestant--of the Protestant pastor Braune and of the Catholic priest Bernhard Lichtenberg. in the middle of hell. died in captivity. prayed for the Jews. They were like an enclave of heaven And of thesa four it was Lichtenberg who But then he had also publicly pleaded and All these men were brave, Braune perhaps the bravest. But Lichtenberg was imprisoned, maltreated, humiliated, 31 and then died in transit to a codcentration camp. It is that kind of thijg "f.::hat stays with one: proof of courage and the p.it,lpable, visible fidelit~. These men had kept faith with imbeciles and epileptics and had tried to intervene at the heart, the unfeeling bureaucratic heart, of the political machinery, to get one kind of killing stopped. They even eventually succeeded, probably because the factor that had prompted their ~ion '--~~~-grief an~ horror of )h:_C<enext of kin, remained a factor. There ~ people all over w·~D ~rxir Germany whose institutionalized brothers, sons, aunts died sudden deaths by medical means, who night have seen their relatives quite recently, were then told that they had died of acute appendicitis, and knew there had been no appendix since it had been taken out �13- years ago. It was these lying death certificates, which one knew bore no relation to the actual cause of death, that may first have conveyed to ordinary, unpolitical people the fact that the country was, in part at least, being run by murderers. of course, always individual families that were hit: It was, it was just one person they loved or were somehow attached to who had been made to die; it might happen quite near where they lived, or in an institution farther away; the victims were usually taken somewhere else to be killed; some of the trPnsports became known in the institutions affected--even children heard about them; and here and there smoke from cremation would attract attention. But it was not these--usually avoidable--failures of stagecraft that caused unrest among the people. It was the fact that the families of the victims were leading normal lives among other families leading normal lives, in a state whose laws did not provide for the killing of the incurable--let alone light cases of epilepsy-and whose legal system, despite all political distortion, was still function;.ng. That the whole program of medical murder was based on a secret order by Hitler, some may have known or heard by way of rumor--most did not. The whole thing was surrounded by mystery, secrecy, brutality, administrative anonymity, and 33 misleading language, even organizations with phoney names. All this was happening all over the country and caused individual grief and collective unrest. The members of the clergy who were approached by the bereaved or those about to be bereaved or who, like Braune, were connected with institutions that housed and cared �14- for the patients the system was now exterminating, these men-Braune, Lichten'be:"."g, Wurm, Galen--could and did use the argument of inexpedi8ncy against this policy of extermination. Popular unrest is not a thing a government wants, least of all during a war that demands increasing sacrifices from the people. also used the argument of illegality. God and the dictates of humanity. They And they invoked the law of But it was almost certainly the consideration of the inexpediency of the operation that eventually got it stopped or almost sto~ped. Quite an arsenal of arguments--though God and humanity did not cut much ice with Nazis. Expediency did. But even here, what surprised me, coming on this correspondence when I did, was that anyone protested at all--not that there had not been more protest. And th:id protest w2.s "through channels," the channels that were left in what sm:vived of the old system, the ancien regime. Galen also preached in public, referred to the matter in sermons; and at once the radicals, or progressives, of the new regime took counsel on how he could be silenced. · T~ey or to kill him during the war. decided it was inadvisable to touch He was too popular in Westphalia-- indeed all over the Reich, wherever people pricked up their ears for a voice of dissent. Lichtenberg, on the other hand, was hardly known beyond Berlin and even there his name meant something only to the Catholic minority and a few lively minds outside. Incidentally, his arrest and eventual death were due not to police initiative or the denunciation of one of his parishioners, but to a couple of sharp-eared and vigilant women students from the 34 Rhineland who were sightseeing in his church during a service. �15- It is such human .facto1·s, social tac tors, atmospheric factors one has to be aware of in dealing with those years. It may have been partly as a result of this early conditioning by much of the documentation on the churches that I felt that even Bockenforde was not quite just to the German bishops in his very critical article on German catholicism in the crucial year of 1933. This article appeared in the Catholic monthly 35 Hochland in early 1961 and was, I suppose, the real beginning of the revision of the earlier favorabl~ picture. There was a reply 36 by Hans Buchheim 37 and then a rejoinder by Bockenforde. I felt tha:. even Bockenforde was isolating some episcopal statements from their contexts--or at any rate not giving enough context for 38 certainty about the significance of the quotation. Shortly before there was Morsey with his long chapter on the end of the 39 Center Party in the big book Das Ende der Parteien. So the nineteen-sixties were largely occupied by critical literature, some of it hyper-critical, but they also saw the beginning of the documentary series put out by the Vatican and the Catholic Academy in Bavaria and the steady progress of the publications of the corresponding commission on the Protestant side, the AGK or Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Kirchenkampfes. 40 In 1967 came Bethge's Bonhoeffer misleading: --but to call it that is it is to my mind the best single book on the develop- ment of events and the feel of the time and, of course, the figure and role of Bonhoeffer. published in translation. It is now, at long last, to be It is the most vivid, the most telling �16- picture of the era of the church struggle you ara likely to get anywhere. 41 John Conway's book on The Nazi Persecution of the Churches appeared soon after and its very title signalled a change. The book is not just about persecution, it is also about adaptation and resistance but it gets back, at last, to the point that, whether we call them totalitarian or not, the Nazis, once in power, had the initiative and had church policies of their own. They were not friendly. Readers of German had already been reminded of that in 1965 in Friedrich Zipfel's book, Kirchenkampf in Deutschland 1933-1945. Religionsverfolgung und Selbstbehauptung der Kirchen in der nationalsozialistischen Zeit. (That word "Selbstbehauptung" is, I think, a key term in our context.) The evidence about the relationship of the Nazis and the churches is so vast and manifold that the argument about resistance and collaboration can go on forever and lead nowhere, certainly to no understanding, unless certain values and priorities are made explicit. One may have to agree to disagree about values; but at least one then knows what the disagr€ement is about. By all this I do not mean to say that my own values and priorities are crystal clear to me. But very often in the polemics of the last decade I have had the distinct impression that the basic quarrel was not really so much about facts as about their interpretation. Though there are, admittedly, lots of facts, important facts that we need to know more about. One category of facts concerns the very �17- difficult questions who knew what when; also, what was knowable at any given stage. Here hindsight is a great hindrance, unless one is aware of its dangers. �18- [These questions are complicated by the hardest question and the most painful answer of all: much. the question who cared and how Caring and knowing are connected--and so are courage and knowledge. In the pressures of the time certain kinds of knowledge were dangerous. There were, undoubtedly, such things as cognitive courage and cognitive cowardice, factors of courage or the lack of it that affected cognition itself. Also much "knowing" was a 43 matter of interpretation. Louis de Jong has shown that the Jews in Holland simply would not or could not believe what was going on in the East. They must have been lilte the many Germans who knew of deportation but did not know of extermination. In the case of Jews who were themselves, as we now know, liable to extermination, one cannot say they did not know because they did not care. But since in the c~se of non-Jews there is always the suspicion that they did not care, or did not care enough, much more contemporary knowledge of the mass killing is ~ow assumed than is probably justified. The extreme example of wanting to know and taking steps to find out is Kurt Gerstein. It involved complicity. Any knowledge meant a kind of complicity, meant either tacit toleration of the intolerable or attempts to counteract it which invariably involved lies, deception, some harm to others, perhaps even murder. Gerstein himself became part of the system that supplied the gas with which millions of Jews were killed. If his own account is to be accepted --and I do, on the whole, apart from some minor details, accept it--he diverted some of the supplies. But his signature is on �19- the receipts for large quantities. He signed for them in order to divert them. A proportion he was unable to divert or destroy. 44 He had joined the SS in order to find out about its murders. This extreme example shows that the courage to see, the courage 45 to know, was a far from simple matter. The present phase of recrimination indicts knowledge as well as ignorance--knowledge, however, somewhat more than ignorance. There is a widespread desire to incriminate. Where so many suffered and died, the desire to find c·:llprits who caused their suffering and death is natural. But it is hard to satisfy with the truth. Part of the truth undoubtedly is that there was less knowledge of what we now know to have happenP-d at the time it was happening. But the other and more painful part of the truth is that most men (and most women, and most children) cared less than they should have cared. They did not love their neighbor like them- selves--particularly not the neighbor who had been classified as not-a-neighbor or the millions of Jews outside Germany, in occupied Europe, especially in Eastern Europe where they were so numerous and so segregated. The Jewish experience of forsakenness--the sin of Christendom-is now being visited on Christianity. was a deadly reality. "Christian" anti-semi tism But the mainspring and machinery of the twentieth-century mass murder of Jews was not Christian, it was post-Christian or neo-pagan. Christians did not prevent the murders but they did not instigate them. And it is surely significant that �20- the Nazi agencies whose task it was to watch opposition to the regime interpreted Christian, particularly Catholic, objections to Nazi neo-paganism as objections to Nazi racial policies. Nazis and anti-Nazis were agreed on the synonymity of neo-paganism and racism. And that, to me, is the chief lesson to be learnt from that epoch. It does not mean that one ignores the anti-semitism or cowardice or greed or cruelty of gentiles called Christians. But it means that there is a difference between Christianity and gentility, between Christianity and Judaism on the one hand and paganism on the other; and the difference may be one between life and death, earthly, physical life and death--as well as the other kind.] �21- This conference may help us on toward the dialectical synthesis mentioned by John Conway on Monday, which Victor 46 Conzemius prognosticated or hoped for when he wrote two years ago. He had also suggested, even earlier, some such conference as this but could do nothing to bring it about. be a good :i.dea t'J get Incidentally, it might 111s really outstanding sn:rvey of the literature on the Christian churches and Nazi totali- 47 tarianism translated. Meanwhile there is my own somewhat shorter and less systematic article, "N~-zis and Christians" in 48. World Politics, April, 1969. ---~----~- . - I mention it here because church ---------~- historians may not expect an article on our subject in that politiea1 quarterly. Our subject has all along suffered from inter- disciplinary as well as inter-denominational segregation. That is why this conference is such a wonderful opportunity to de-segregate, to integrate, to bring together what belongs together. Conzemius, I think, sees the essential as well as the existential connection between the two components of the subject of the ~~dress with which our Chairman opened this ccnferoncc. To sustain the tension between them without short circuits seems to me the only way to illumination or enlightenment on the darkest secret and the best publicized crime of Christendom. publicity has been retrospective and blinding. must come from elsewhere. The The il~umination �22- The church struggle was the struggle of the church to be true to its Lord. And I take that to be a vital concern not only to its members but to all mankind. I am not a member, but I am passionately convinced of its importance. What gave me that conviction was precisely the experience of Hitler's millennium and the Christian response to it. �23- Footnotes 1. (London: 2. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War Hamish Hamilton, 1961). Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam; the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (New York: 3. Simon and Schuster, 1965). Arno J. Mayer, Poli tics and DiplOI~_acr o~ Peacema}.~~!lg: Co~tain~_ nient and Counterrevolution at --·- Versailles, 1918-1919 (New York: Knopf, -- - - - ---- ----- - --·-· - ~'--· -~ ---· - ·- 196'1). 4. "Uses and Abuses of Historical Analogies," paper delivered at the Annual Mc8ting of the American Historical Association, 1967. 5. Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung; (Frankfurt am Main: play. Oratorium in 11 Gesangen Suhrkamp, 1965); and The Investigation; a English version by Jon Swan and Ulu Graubard (New York: Atheneum, 1966). 6. Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter. Schauspiel, mit einem Vorwort von Erwin Piscator (Reinbek bei Hamburg: 1963); The Deputy. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Preface by Albert Schweitzer (New York: 7. York: Rowohlt, Grove Press, 1964). Guenter Lewy, ThP. Catholic Church and Nazi GeI_"ma11y (New McGrav' '!T-•.L.l. Book Company, 1964). �24- 8. Saul Friedlaender, "Pius X:£I and the Third· Reich. Documentation. Translated froil! the Fullman (New York: 9. A French and German by ChRrles Knopf, 1966). For the invasion of the classroom by the Hochhuth industry see Dolores Barracano Schmidt and Earl Robert Schmidt, eds., The Dep~ty_ _!leader: Studies in Moral Responsibility (Chicago: Scott, Forsman and Company, 1965). 10. Lewy, pp. 309-321. 11. Eberhard Zeller, Geist der Freiheit: Juli (Milnchen: 12. der zwanzigste Hermann Rinn Verlag, 1954), p. 217. Peter Hoffmann, Widerstand, Staatsstreich, Attentat. Der Kampf der Opposition gegen Hitler (Milnchen, Piper, 1969), pp. 465 and 808. 13. She made a point of mentioning this to me when I saw her in 1953. 14. Spiegelbild einer Verschworung: Die Kaltenbrunner- Berichte an Bormann und Hitler Uber das Attentat vom 20. Juli 1944. Geheime Dokumente ans dem ehemaligen Reichs- sicherheitshauptamt. Herausgegeben vom Archiv Peter filr historische und zeitgeschichtliche Dokumentation (Stuttgart: Seewald Verlag, 1961), pp. 262 f, 321-4, 435, and Christian Milller, "19. Juli 1944" in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, ed., 20. Juli 1944. Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler im Urteil der auslandischen �25- Geschichtsschreibung. Eine Anthologie (Bonn: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, 1969), p. 225. 15. Mother Mary Alice Gallin, German Resistance to ... Hitler: Ethical and Religious Factors (The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1961), p. 288. 16. Volksgerichtshofs-Prozesse zum 20. Juli 1944. Transkripte von Tonbandfunden. Deutschen Rundfunks. 17. Herausgegeben vom Lautarchiv des Mimeographed, n.~., April 1961, p. 136. For a discussion of some of this see Beate Ruhm von Oppen, "Nazis and Christians," in World Politics, vol. XXI, No. 3 (April 1969), pp. 392-424. 18. Not even subtler p~esentations German Catholics and Hitler's Wars: (New York: such as Gordon c. Zahn's A Study in Social Control Sheed and Ward, 1962). 19. Zahn, pp. 143-172; Lewy, pp. 236-242 and 247. 20. For documentation refer to some of the earlier Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Va. (Washington, D.C.: The National Archives, 1960- records were filmed selectively, ). Later Field Commands omitting the chaplaincy sections. 21. Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler's Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969). �26- 22. Magdalen Goffin, "A Contradictory Hero," in The New York Review of Books, 21 August 1969, p. 34. (opening Lecture by Franklin Littell). 23. See above, p. 24. George N. Shuster, Like a Mighty Army: Established Religion (New York: Hitler versus D. Appleton-Century Company, 1935). 25. John Brown Mason, Hitler's First Foes: A Study of Religion and Politics (Minneapolis, 1936). 26. Nathaniel Micklem, Natior.al Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church, Being an Account of the Conflict Between the \ National Socialist Government of Germany and the Roman Catholic Church 1933-1938 (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). 27. Lewy, p. 219. 28. Micklem, p. 229. 29. John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-45 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968; and New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 409. 30. Ibid., pp. 494-450. 31. Anton Erb, Berhard Lichtenberg. 1946). (Berlin: Morus Verlag, �27- 32. argues It was not just, as Lewy (pp. 266-7; and Conway, p. 283) that there was a popular outcry against the euthanasia program because the next of kin felt sympathy for the victims as relatives, and no outcry againct the extermination of the Jews bccauso pro~aganda; there had been anti-semitic another important point of difference was the almost instant knowledge of the fate of the victins of the euthanasia program and the lack of it in the case of deported Jews. 33. Infamy: Cf. Fred Mielke and Alexander Mitscherlich, Doctors of The StoLy of Nazi Medical Crimes ... translated by Heinz Norden ... (New York: H. Schuman, 1949); Alexander Mitscherlich and Fred Mielke, eds., Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit (Franldurt am Main: 34. Fischer-Bilcherei, 1960) . Cf. Otto Ogiermann, S.J., Bis zum letzten Atemzug: Prozess gegen Bernhard Lichtenberg (Leipzig: der St. Benno- Verlag GMBH, 1968), pp. 120-5. 35. Ernst-Wolfgang B5ckenf5rde, '~er deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933; eine kri tische Betrachtung," Hoch land, vol. LI II (February 1961), pp. 215-39. 36. Hans Buchheim, '~er deutsche Katolizismus im Jahr 1933: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Ernst-Wolfgang B5ckenforde," ibid., (August 1961), pp. 497-515. 37. Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenf5rde, "Der deutsche Katholizismus im Jahre 1933: Stellungnahme zu einer Diskussion," ibid., vol. LIV (February 1962), pp. 217-45. �28- 38. Beate Ruhm von Oppen, ucatholics and Nazis in 1933," Wiener Library Bulletin, vol. XVI (January 1962), p. 8. 39. Erich Matthias and Rudolf Morsey, eds., Das Ende der Parteien (Dlisseldorf: 40. Droste Verlag, 1960), pp. 279-453. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Zeitgenosse (MUnchen: Theologe, Christ, Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1967). 41. 42. 1945. See note 30. Friedrich Zipfel, Kirchenkampf in Deutschland, 1933- Religionsverfolgung und Selbstbehauptung der Kirchen in der nationalsozialistischen Zeit (Berlin: 43. de Gruyter, 1965). Cf. Louis de Jong, "Die Niederlande und Auschwitz," in Vierteljahrshefte flir Zeitgeschichte, 17. Jg., 1. Heft, January 1969, pp. 1-16. 44. Cf. Saul Friedlaender, Kurt Gerstein ou l'nmbiguit6 du bien (Paris: Casterman, 1967); Kurt Gerstein oder die Zwiespaltigkeit des Guten, deutsch von Jutta und Theodor Knust (GUtersloh: Bertelsmann Sachbuchverlag, 1968); Kurt Gerstein, the Ambiguity of Good. Translated from the French and German by Charles Fullman (New York: 45. Knopf, 1969). Friedlaender brings this out. But he does not make it clear that the document known as the Gerstein Report was written in April 1945, long after the events presented by Hochhuth, who uses and stresses Gerstein's knowledge and his attempt to communicate it to the Vatican--but not the cost 0£ its acquisition. �29- 46. See above, p. 47. Victor Conzemius, [John Conway's paper.] '~glises chretiennes et totalitarisme national-socialiste," in Revue d'Histoire Ecclesiastique, vol. LXIII, nos. 2 and 3/4, 1968, pp. 437 and 868-948. been reissued as a monograph: Victor Conzemius, Eglises Chretiennes et Totalitarisme National-Socialiste. Historiographique (Louvain: See note 17. Un Bilan Bibliotheque de la Revue d'Histoire Ecclesiastique, Fasciule 48, 1969). 48. It has since � 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 31 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Revisionism and counter-revisionism in Kirchenkampf Historiography Description An account of the resource Typescript of a paper by Beate Ruhm von Oppen presented on March 18, 1970 at The International Scholars Conference on "The German Church Struggle 1933-1945: What Can America Learn?" held at Wayne State University March 15-19, 1970. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Detroit, MI Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1970-03-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Ruhm von Oppen 1970-03-18 FaFi-Ruhm von OppenB016 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d12f4df024705cf2cacdd07911e702a1.pdf 7709daa22daa5bfb63a55a73059b3202 PDF Text Text ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE LIBRARY 11111~11~1~1m~1~1m~1~11111 3 169~ ()()()~!) ~61;9 . .. .~ This r:>aterial may be ~ Copynght law rr P oiectoo by . ttle 17 U.S. Code) LAITY AND CHURCHES IN THE THIRD REICH Beate Ruhm von Oppen Paper read at a conference on "Christianity and Resistance" University of Birmingham, England 19-23 April, 1995 �BRvO, 1 While on an official trip to neutral Sweden in the spring of 1943, Helmuth James von Moltke wrote a long letter to his English friend Lionel Curtis. Moltke tried to give him a picture of the state of Germany and hoped to get it to him from Sweden.1 The letter never reached Curtis; only a rather deficient and severely abridged, memorized version was conveyed to the Bishop of Chichester, who passed it on. It is interesting that, though memorized and conveyed by a professional churchman, it omitted the bit on the churches. 2 On his way to Sweden Moltke had read some recent Reports of the House of Lords. In his job at the Abwehr, as legal advisor to the German High Command, he had regular access to Hansard. The Reports may well have included the pleas of Bishop Bell in the House of Lords on 11 February and 10 March for a differentiation between the Nazi regime and the German people, such as Stalin had made, but which the Casablanca formula of Unconditional Surrender called in question. Moltke told his wife that he read the debates with great interest and not without profit. 11 11 3 What concerns me here is what Moltke said about the churches, not in the garbled version that got through to Curtis, but in his own letter, which rested in a Swedish archive until resurrected a quarter of a century later. After a long, detailed, and graphic description of conditions in Germany, he addressed the question of the internal opposition to the regime, "the men 'of whom one hears so much and notices so little,"' as he says, quoting one of his ltteimuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya 1939-1945, edited and translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen, New York 1990, pp. 281-90. 2For the text of that version, see Ger van Roon, German Resistance to Hitler: Count von Moltke and the Kreisau Circle, tr. Peter Ludlow, London, etc., 1971, pp. 364-67. 3Letters (see note 1), p. 277. �BRvO, 2 English sources. He mentioned the immense difficulties any internal resistance had to cope with and the losses inflicted by "the quick-working guillotines. The opposition was, however, able to throw some sand into the 11 machine and surreptitiously save thousands of lives. Its chief mistake was relying on the generals to act. But it had done two things which, Moltke believed, would count in the long run: the mobilization of the churches and the clearing of the road to a 11 completely decentralized Germany." He thought the churches had done great work and he knew that some of the sermons of the more prominent bishops had become known abroad, especially Galen's sermons against "euthanasia" (so-called) and two sermons of the Bishop of Berlin, Count Preysing. The state was putting great pressure on the churches, but did not dare to go too far at present. And the churches were full, Sunday after Sunday. Moltke's phrase about the opposition mobilizing the churches is 11 11 startling and in stark contrast with the assumptions of his later judge, the President of the People's Court, Roland Freisler--assumptions shared, it sometimes seems, by some historians: bishops give orders or exercise "social control" and the faithful follow them.4 As Preisler knew, the Catholic church was by no means as supine or supportive of the government as its postwar critics allege. Unlike the Protestant churches, it had opposed the Nazis before their assumption of power; and its adaptation to the new conditions did not amount to capitulation. In April 1940 the papal nuncio in Berlin considered it his duty to report the following: 4see for instance Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler's Wars: A Study in Social Control. NewYork, 1962. �BRvO, 3 A part of the clergy have adopted an almost hostile attitude toward Germany at war, to the extent of wanting complete defeat. This attitude arouses not only the displeasure of the government, but gradually also that of the entire people, as they are almost all enthusiastic about their Leader; I therefore fear that a painful reaction will one day follow which will divide the clergy and even the church from the people. . . . As long as it was merely a matter of domestic policy, it was easy for anyone to distinguish between anti-Nazi and anti-state attitudes; the clergy adopted the former but not the latter. Now, when it is a matter of foreign policy ... there are only a few who can understand that one can be against Hitler without being against the state, i.e., without being a traitor.s One member of the clergy he undoubtedly had in mind was Konrad Preysing, the Catholic Bishop of Berlin. But there were others; and the attitude observed by the nuncio was widespread among the lower clergy and did not escape the Security Service or the Gestapo either. One has to wonder if it was only the (unrepresentative) Protestant Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was praying for the defeat of his country. The Austrian clergy had little sympathy for the refusal of an Austrian peasant, Franz Jagerstatter, to fight for Greater Germany. To Gordon Zahn is due the merit of having discovered and publicized the story of that extraordinary layman. Zahn had first delivered himself of a compilation on the shortcomings of his church, full of dubious judgments, shocking Srne Briefe Pius' des XII. an die deutschen Bischofe 1939-1944. ed. Burkhart Schneider and others, Mainz 1966, pp. 354-56. �BRv0,4 quotations and sociological jargon. 6 Then came the splendid book In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter.7 The best part of it is what the simple Austrian peasant Jagerstatter wrote himself. He was so uncompromising in his refusal to serve in Hitler's army that the Gestapo thought he might be a Jehovah's Witness, or at least under the influence of a cousin who belonged to the sect. But no, he was a Catholic. He was not even a pacifist--he had done some basic training earlier on. But he refused to fight for the regime that was fighting against his church. His church, however, was urging him to think of his wife and children and do what the law required. The army, in the person of a sympathetic officer, even offered him non-combatant service. But no--he would have nothing to do with that army, not even in Russia, where it was allegedly fighting the godless Bolsheviks. So, against the entreaties of his clergy, he went to the guillotine. (According to Moltke's information there were nineteen of them at work in Germany in 1943. Their installation had begun in the thirties. They were more efficient than the hand-axe and quicker than hanging: three minutes per execution; hanging took five.) Where Zahn editorializes, he can go wrong--as in a surmise that in talking about mass murder his hero may have been alluding to concentration camps, whereas he obviously meant abortion. He was not a liberal. The mass murder of the Jews may not even have impinged on the peasant of St. Radegund. What concerned Jagerstatter was not survival but salvation. He had observed the Nazi policies against the church in Germany before the 6see note 4. 7New York 1964. �BRvO, 5 Anschluss. When Hitler marched into his homeland, the Nazi system developed in Germany in five years was instituted in a matter of days and weeks. The church was not attacked at once. Cardinal Innitzer, the Archbishop of Vienna, was a Sudeten German and rejoiced in the incorporation of Austria into Greater Germany. He did not rejoice for long. But first he and his bishops issued a proclamation praising National Socialist achievements in national and social policy and economic revival. They were not alone in this. Austrian Protestants were just as full of hopes and illusions, and even some leading socialists shared them. Austrian church resistance to the Nazis took about six months to form and stiffen.8 Did Jagerstatter condemn his hierarchy and clergy? He obviously deplored their attitudes and utterances, but he understood them somewhat better than their latter-day critics. This is what Zahn quotes of Jagerstatter's notes: Let us not ... cast stones at our bishops and priests. They, too, are men like us, made of flesh and blood, and can weaken. They are probably much more sorely tempted by the evil enemy than the rest of us. Maybe they have been too poorly prepared to take up this struggle and to make a choice between life and death . . . . Perhaps, too, our bishops thought it would only be a short time before everything would come apart at the seams again and that, by their compliance, they would spare the faithful many agonies and martyrs. Unfortunately, things turned out to be quite different: years have passed and 8Erika Weinzierl, "Osterreichs Katholiken und der Nationalsozialismus," Wort und Wahrheit, Vienna, XVIII ( 1963), pp. 417-39 and 493-526, and XX (1965), pp. 777-804. �BRvO, 6 thousands of people must now die in the grip of error every year. It is not hard to imagine, then, what a heroic decision it would require for our people to repudiate all the mistakes that have been made in recent years. This is why we should not make it harder for our spiritual leaders than it already is by making accusations against them. Let us pray for them, instead, that God may lighten the great tasks which still stand before them.9 On another occasion he wrote: It may well be that hell holds great power over this world at the present time, but even this need not cause us Christians to fear. May the power of hell be ever so great, God's power is still greater. Naturally, though, anyone who does not arm himself with the weapons ... that Christ left behind for us in His supreme legacy when He instituted the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, will scarcely be able to hold out very long against these mighty enemies.10 The church had been instituted as the custodian and dispenser of the sacrament, the means of grace. Should we not take that aspect seriously? It is hardly ever discussed in the vast literature about the churches in the Third Reich. Yet the Kulturkampf of the Second Reich had deprived entire regions of their priests. The enmity of the regime against the churches, indeed against Christianity, was relentless, with only a few tactical adjustments during the 9solitary Witness (see note 7), p. 15. lOJbid., pp. 231-32. �BRv0,7 war. Towards the end of the 1960s John Conway had to remind the critics of the Pope and the churches of this. enmity in his book The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945.11 The Nazis were not just anti-clerical; they were anti-Christian. Let me add this: In public Hitler was careful about what he said. In the privacy of his Table Talk he was quite open and indulged in denunciations of Christianity along vulgarized Nietzschean lines: it made a people soft and useless for great enterprises; it was the begetter of Bolshevism; it had Jewish roots. Whatever one may think of the reliability of Hermann Rauschning as a source, his report on Hitler's dictum about conscience as a Jewish invention 12 rings true and agrees both with the indiscretions of the Table Talk and the actions of the regime.13 As early as 19 34 the bloody purge of Ernst Rohm and his associates in the S.A. included not only other enemies like the former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife, but also Erich Klausener, the Berlin head of the lay organization Catholic Action. And it is surely no accident that the much-quoted threat against the Jews in Hitler's long speech of 30 January 1939 was immediately followed by a threat against the churches if they stepped out of line and opposed the regime.14 The secret public opinion reports of the Security Service are full of detailed observations of church opposition to and activities against the 11 London 1968. 12Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: a Series of Political conversations on his Real Aims. London 1939, p. 220. 13Hitler's Secret conversations, New York 1953; and Werner Jochmann, ed., Monologe im Fiihrerhauptguartier 1941-1944, Hamburg 1980. 14Max Domarus, ed., Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945, vol. II, 1, 1939-1940, Wiesbaden 1973, pp. 1058-59. �'BRv0,8 programme and policies of the regime, with considerably more attention given to the Catholics or "political Catholicism" than to the Protestants, who were regarded as mere reactionaries and anyway always divided among themselves. Catholic denunciations of Nazi neo-paganism were--rightly-regarded as attacks on the religion of race, and incidents of opposition to round-ups and deportations of Jews were ascribed to church influence. Little escaped the Gestapo and Security Service and their network of informers and infiltrators. And Cardinal Bertram was, from his pusillanimous point of view, quite right to take fright when the last plenary meeting of the German Catholic bishops at Fulda in 1943 drew up a pastoral letter on the decalogue that had, in the section on "the human rights of the scond tablet," comments on the fifth, sixth, and ninth commandments, with clear condemnations of the wholesale killing of the innocent and the forcible break-up of "racially" mixed marriages. The Security Service noted them too and quoted them at length.15 They were obviously thought to have an effect on the faithful. The watchdogs of the regime were no doubt aware that the effects of such pronouncements--there was a comparable one by the Confessing Church in Prussia later that year--reached well beyond the flock of churchgoers. The churches were crowded during the war, and the crowds included people who had not been in the habit of going to church. Thus Moltke only went to a service held by Hanns Lilje after he had been bombed out of his lSLudwig Volk, ed., Akten deutscher Bischofe uber die Lage der Kirche 1933-1945, vol. 6, Mainz 1987, pp. 197-205; and Heinz Boberach, ed., Berichte des SD und der Gestapo uber Kirchen und Kirchenvolk in Deutschland 1934-1944, Mainz 1971, pp. 767-69; also Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich 1938-1945: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes und der SS, vol. 12, Herrsching 1984, No. 348 of 7 January 1943, pp. 4635 ff. �BRv0,9 flat and moved in with Peter Yorck and his wife; they went to hear a rousing sermon from the man later re-encountered in jail. Even before the war there was that tendency. I was certainly not a church-goer, and not even confirmed, when, as a teenager, I went with one of my schoolteachers to hear Martin Niemoller in Dahlem in the early phase of the Third Reich. In fact, the inhuman and godless nature of the regime created something I would call a wider congregation, which included even nonbelievers. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's brother Klaus was once twitted for kneeling down at a wedding service and replied that he would rather bend the knee there than to the dictator. The alternative may have urged choices on people who in more normal times could have avoided them. When his brother KarlFriedrich later visited him in prison, Klaus told him that he had the score of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in his cell. Karl-Friedrich commented that it was nice that Klaus could hear the music when he read the notes. "Yes," Klaus answered, "but the words also! The words!" 16 And then, in such a time, believers and many unbelievers looked to the churches and watched them. They may often have been disappointed in what they saw and heard. An activist like Moltke did indeed take part in the "mobilization of the churches" against the regime. And the benighted Anglican Bishop of Gloucester, Arthur Headlam, may have had a bit of a point when he said that Moltke's concern about the church struggle in Germany was primarily prompted by his antagonism to the Nazi regime, which that bishop did not share, at least not in the mid-thirties. But it was 16Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage, tr. Eric Mosbacher et al., ed. Edwin Robertson, New York 1970, p. 832. �BRv0,10 not the whole point.17 Fortunately George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, held different views. When Fabian von Schlabrendorff was arrested in August 1944, the police commissar told him that there were four grounds of suspicion against him which led to the assumption of his involvement in the July plot: that theological literature had been found in his luggage--a book on Catholic moral theology, a book on Protestant ethics, publications on the rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics, and a Bible. The second, third and fourth grounds were that he had been a lawyer in civilian life, an officer and a member of the nobility (one of Reich Labour Leader Robert Ley's "blue-blooded swine"). The order of these suspicious circumstances is surely noteworthy. The Nazis had never discovered the plot of 1943-because the intrepid Schlabrendorff had managed to retrieve and dispose of the bomb that had failed to go off in Hitler's plane. But finding religious books in the baggage of the reserve lieutenant on General von Tresckow's staff rightly aroused the suspicions of the investigators. Schlabrendorff, incidentally, held the view that before the Nazi challenge roused it German Protestantism was somnolent, possibly even moribund.18 He was a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant. He was not alone in his ecumenical interests and concerns, interests that went beyond Geneva and Scandinavia and England and reached Rome and Roman Catholicism. Not for 17Michael Balfour and Julian Frisby, Helmuth van Moltke: A Leader Against Hitler, London 1972, p. 71. 18fabian von Schlabrendorff, The Secret War Against Hitler, Boulder and Oxford 1994, pp. xix-xx. �BRv0,11 nothing did Hitler's ideologue-in-chief, Alfred Rosenberg, and his minions denounce "Protestant pilgrims to Rome" in 1937.19 Moltke, another Protestant and the son of stoutly anti-Catholic Christian Scientist parents, read papal encyclicals--probably the social policy encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Ouadragesimo Anno--on the Sunday war was declared. When he and Peter Yorck began to form what is now known as the Kreisau Circle, they took care to include not only men of different political experience and views, but members of both denominations-realizing the disastrous political consequences of the religious split in Germany. In the letter to his wife about the way his trial went, Moltke wrote that he was condemned for his friendship with Catholics, and, sardonically, that he was going to die as a martyr for St. Ignatius. Indeed, Roland Preisler had previously indulged in considerable vituperation against the Jesuit Alfred Delp, a member of the Kreisau Circle, who was tried and sentenced to death with Moltke.20 Augustin Rosch, the Provincial of the Society of Jesus and another member of the Kreisau Circle, was arrested while the trial was in progress.21 He survived. Lothar Konig, the least well- 19Nathaniel Micklem, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church: Being an Account of the Conflict Between the National Socialist Government and the Roman Catholic Church 1933-1938. London 1939, p. 180. Micklem also notes that in the context of the anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge of March 1937, Preysing declared in his pastorla letter of July 11th "that the Catholics had never felt themselves so firmly united with their separated brethren nor felt so closely bound to them as at the present time" (ibid.). 20Letters (see note 1), pp. 399 f,, 402, 404 f., 409 f.; also Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp. Geschichte eines Zeugen, Frankfurt am Main 1989. 21 Roman Bleistein, ed., Augustin Rosch: Kampf gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt am Main 1985. �BRvO, 12 known but probably most active of the Munich Jesuits, escaped arrest.22 He was also, like Preysing, a member of the Ausschug fur Ordensangelegenheiten, a committee of five bishops, four members of religious orders, and a layman, which was officially concerned with the affairs of religious orders, but was in fact a ginger group formed to overcome the paralyzing effect of Cardinal Bertram, the chairman of the Fulda conference of bishops. Preisler did indeed find Moltke's association with Jesuits most objectionable. "And you visit bishops," he yelled. "What is your business with a bishop, with any bishop? Where do you get your orders from? You get your orders from the Fuhrer and the NSDAP! That goes for you as well as for any other German, and whoever gets his orders from the guardians of the Beyond, gets them from the enemy and will be treated accordingly."23 Preisler had got it back to front. The Protestant layman Helmuth Moltke did not visit the Catholic Bishop of Berlin to get orders, but to exchange information and to discuss the best way to fight the regime. Moltke began his regular visits to Preysing, this most determinedly and consistently anti-Nazi member of the German hierarchy, in July 1941. Berlin, the young diocese of the Catholic diaspora, was lucky in its bishop, who had opposed the Nazis even before his translation from Eichstatt in Bavaria.2 4 22Roman Bleistein, ed., Dossier: Kreisauer Kreis. Dokumente aus dem Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Aus dem NachlaE. van Lothar Konig S.J., Frankfurt am Main 1987. 23Letters (see note 1), p. 403. 24see Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler's Power, Princeton 1969, pp. 295-311. �BRv0,13 Berlin was lucky to have Preysing's right-hand man, Bernhard Lichtenberg, the Provost of St. Hedwig's, the Catholic cathedral of Berlin, and head of the bishop's Hilfswerk, the office for helping Jews or "non-Aryans." After the pogrom of November 1938 he began regular public prayers "for the persecuted non-Aryan Christians, for the Jews, and for the poor prisoners in concentration camps." None of his parishioners ever reported him. That was left for two visiting Protestant women students from the Rhineland in October 1941. So he was arrested, as he had not been after writing to Dr. Leonardo Conti, the chief medical officer of the Ministry of the Interior and Reichsgesundheitsfi.ihrer, to protest against the killing of the incurable and allegedly incurable inmates of institutions. But the public prayer for the Jews led to his arrest and two years in jail for commenting on politics from the pulpit, after serving which he was to be taken to Dachau. He died on the way there.Zs Berlin was lucky again, because Lichtenberg's job at the office for helping Jews was taken on by a laywoman, Margarete Sommer, who on one occasion, acting on Preysing's instructions, even penetrated to Cardinal Bertram in Breslau and tried to get him to agree to a protest against the deportation and murder of the Jews. But he insisted on incontrovertible, undeniable proof of the latter--which she could not produce. So she failed. But she did what she could. Gertrud Luckner did similar work with the backing of the Archbishop of Freiburg. She was arrested and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Berlin had quite a network of people, 2Ssee Alfons Erb, Bernhard Lichtenberg, Domprobst von St. Hedwig zu Berlin, Berlin 1986. �BRv0,14 members of the Protestant Confessing Church, too, who helped Jews evade deportation. Pastor Harald Poelchau, the Protestant prison chaplain at Tegel, was one of them. He also helped innumerable political prisoners. By some quirk of providence he had been appointed to his post in 1933--though he was a socialist, a fact that could hardly have escaped the authorities. He was both forthright and cunning-and indefatigable in help for others. As for his sacramental ministrations, he once told Moltke--whose circle he joined in 1941--that he never offered communion, but that 50% of the people he looked after asked for it spontaneously.26 What difficulties such ministrations had to overcome and what interdenominational solidarity existed in prisons has been movingly described by Eberhard Bethge, who was himself involved as prisoner and ordained minister. He cooperated with Father Odilo Braun, a Dominican, in the prison at Lehrterstrasse 3. Thus they shared the wine Bethge had retrieved while tidying up the cell of Ernst von Harnack on the day of Hamack's execution. They shared wafers, Bethge slipped the consecrated host to Catholics when he distributed coffee in his capacity as prison trusty, and sometimes he managed to bring the Eucharist to fellow-Protestants. All these people were in solitary confinement after July 1944 and not all were allowed visits by chaplains.27 Alfred Delp was supplied with wine and wafers by two women who were allowed to bring laundry and other necessities. The sergeant on duty was tolerant.28 26Letters (note 1), p. 169. 27Eberhard Bethge, "Plotzensee - die kostbare Gabe: Predigt am 20. Juli 1994," Evangelische Theologie, vol. 54, pp. 485-90. �BRvO, 15 It was not just clergy that practised this solidarity. The case of the Lubeck priests, three Catholic, one Protestant, who were tried and executed together, was probably unique.29 The chief ecumenical push came from the laity. Stauffenberg, the Catholic son of a Protestant mother, made it his business to brief himself on the theology of tyrannicide. He may have felt he had to do it because of the piety among the brave. He told Axel von dem Bussche that tyrannicide was less problematic for Catholics, but that even i Luther permitted it in certain circumstances, and told him of a place in r r Luther's works where he could look it up. Unfortunately Bussche never passed that on and later even denied that it mattered to him: Notwehr. the emergency, the need for self-defence, was sufficient.30 I still feel that Luther, with his interpretation of Paul, especially Romans 13:1, was a great impediment; and I wish I could find a helpful argument in his vast output. f I ! ' Indeed, as Eberhard Bethge put it in his great biography of Dietrich I I Bonhoeffer, "Like Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer had always believed that 'Luther j would say now the opposite of what he said then. 111 31 It took a sovereign I ,_ spirit like Bonhoeffer to see that--or to claim to see it--and to act on it. The Nazi challenge produced efforts to overcome theological and sociological barriers. The situation in 1945 was very different from that described by Thomas Nipperdey for the period from 1866 to 1918--which he summed up by calling the denominational split, even among the secularized majority, the basic religious factor, where the definition of 28Bleistein, Delp (see note 20), p. 325. 29Else Pelke, Der Uibecker ChristenprozeF.. 1943, Mainz 1961. 30seate Ruhm von Oppen, Religion and Resistance to Nazism, Princeton 1971, pp. 70-71. 31Bethge, Bonhoeffer (see note 16), p. 373. ,_ �BRv0,16 Protestantism for many Germans was anti-Catholicism and little else.32 How tremendous the barriers were even up to 1934--and how Hitler was able to exploit them--is fairly clear, too, in Klaus Scholder's account.33 But something was happening to them--and it was not that secularization had simply made them irrelevant or uninteresting. One of the younger and earlier opponents and victims of the regime, the 21-year-old Sophie Scholl, had a dream in her prison cell the night before her execution. She and her brother and their friends in the White Rose group were imbued with a sense of the need to rechristianize Germany to overcome the Nazi regime and ideology. The tiny inner group actually happened to extend from the Protestant Scholls to the Catholic Willi Graf and even included one practising Russian Orthodox member, Alexander Schmorell.34 This is how Sophie told her dream to her cell-mate: It was a sunny day, and I was carrying a little child, dressed in a long white gown, to be baptised. The path to the church led up a steep hill. But I was holding the child firmly and securely in my arms. Suddenly I found myself at the brink of a crevasse. I had just enough time to put the child down safely on the other side before I plunged into the abyss.35 That day she went to the guillotine, as did her brother and a friend. 32Thomas Nipperdey, Arbeitswelt und Biirgergeist, vol. 1 of Deutsche Geschichte 18661918, Munich 1991, pp. 428-530. 33Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, vols. 1 and 2, Philadelphia 198788. 341 am grateful to Christiane Moll for this information on Schmorell. 351nge Scholl, Die WeiF..e Rose, Frankfurt am Main 1955, pp. 101-102. �BRvO, 17 Moltke considered the White Rose and its activities and motivations so important that he took great pains to get a report to England, together with a copy of their last leaflet. Unlike his letter to Lionel Curtis, this report did get through, and the RAF later dropped thousands of copies of the leaflet over Germany. Their effect may have been impaired by simultaneous bombing. And Moltke's plea to the British not to treat the event as just a sign of crumbling German morale, but as an indication that there were forces in Germany with whom the Allies could and should cooperate, was hardly heeded. The report ended up in the Foreign Office f1le on crumbling morale and peace feelers put out by German opponents of the Nazi regime. But perhaps even Moltke expected too much of the Allies after Alamein and Stalingrad, especially Stalingrad, and over a year before the Allied landings in Normandy. The war unleashed by Hitler and loyally supported by the bulk of the German people had entered its last, most massively brutal phase. And it was a coalition war, with very disparate partners. That circumstance put severe limitations on the flexibility of British and American policy regarding "the other Germany." Yet some regret lingers. It is that, I supppose, that brought many of us here. But let us give thanks for the lives and the deaths of these men and women. It is by their deaths, and the pain of their families, that they made possible a process of healing. � 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 18 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Laity and churches in the Third Reich Description An account of the resource Typescript of a paper read by Beate Ruhm von Oppen at a conference on "Christianity and Resistance" at the University of Birmingham, England. 19-23 April, 1995. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ruhm von Oppen, Beate Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1995-04-[19-23] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Ruhm von Oppen 1995-04-19 FaFi-Ruhm von OppenB007 Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a362f5bdca9b8fa2593da76316cca765.pdf 1e1c5a2a33b5c983a2591fb6478493de PDF Text Text ����������������� 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 17 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Biographical sketch of Hector Humphreys Description An account of the resource Photocopy of Biographical Notice of the Rev. Hector Humphreys, D.D. Late Principal of St. John's College; "True Freedom the Gift of God the Son," a Baccalaureate Sermon; and the Register of St. John's College, for the Year MDCCCLVIII. The Greenfield Library does not own an original copy of the publication. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Proud, J. G. (John Greene), -1883 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Thomas J. Wilson 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 1857 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Copyright undetermined. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context COM_Proud_John_Greene_1857 Subject The topic of the resource Humphreys, Hector, 1797-1857 Commencement https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2ede46252c232f487fd47325c03086e9.pdf 96697694cdd2eb82c4cc9ad22541b39a PDF Text Text Inauguration Lecture St. John’s College, Annapolis October 28, 2017 Panayiotis Kanelos St. John’s College is indeed a college. But it is very much more than that. It is both an idea and an ideal. It is a place designed from the inside out, according to principles that are both unique and universal. It is its own theorem and its own proof. It is the most vital institution in higher education. It is a place that inspires love not because it is perfect, but because it is perfectly itself. I am the luckiest person in higher education. How many people can claim that they have passionately admired an institution from afar for a very long time, and then have been invited to join that community? I’m simply pleased as punch to be here. This is a community, however, that exacts a price. From the moment one becomes a Johnnie, one finds oneself drawn into that most characteristic Johnnie behavior, talking endlessly about rather important things. I have been here just over four months. During that time, I have had the great pleasure of getting to know my colleagues through conversation. They have pressed me to think carefully about the project we are engaged in. I have participated in seminars, attended lectures, and read with a rollicking group through a Shakespearean play. And just this week, I had the honor of leading my first preceptorial on one of my favorite authors, Jorge Luis Borges. Most importantly, I have spent many hours in conversation with our students. My admiration for their courage, having �selected to follow the most rigorous path towards a college degree that anyone might pursue, is profound. They are much more courageous than I was at their age, or am even now. My short time as part of the St. John’s community, already rich in conversation, has led me to think quite a lot about this thing we call liberal education. What I would like to offer this afternoon is a series of reflections on what we do and why we do it. These reflections are much too short, too rough and too raw to be dignified with the title of essays. They also lack the virtues of concision and precision found in a well-wrought aphorism. They’re really just paragraphs, and not very finely crafted at that. But to make me feel better, let’s call them something elevated, like folia, leaves. Like the Sybil’s leaves, they are interchangeable and will fall where they may. Since their subject is the liberal arts, seven folia seems like an appropriate number. 1. The Liberal Arts are the Arts of Memory Contemporary culture appears to be averse to the pursuit of liberal education. This should not surprise us. To call the era we live in "modernity" is to fetishize the present. We live in a perpetual "now"—this “modern” age—and that “now” is held to be qualitatively superior to the “not-now,” otherwise known as the past. The newest, the flashiest, the most up-to-date is the thing most desirable. The state of modernity is thus the state of perpetual forgetting. To valorize the present is to slough off the past. Liberal education, however, is predicated upon memory. The heart of liberal education is conversation in shared space, but the soul of liberal education is conversation across time. To take seriously the thoughts of those who have come before us is to add dimensionality to the otherwise flattened experience of living in a perpetual now. This is radically unfashionable, but it is essential nonetheless. �2. Liberal Education and Liberty It is commonplace to claim that the purpose of liberal education is to free the individual, “liberal” coming from the Latin, liber, to be free. Of course, what is not commonly agreed upon is what the individual is meant to be freed from. In the ancient world, liberal education was the education of the free man -- that is, one who was not bound to labor and could therefore spend time cultivating one's mind. Leisure was the precondition of such an education. This was also the Oxford of Cardinal Newman or Evelyn Waugh, and still lingers in the notion of the undergraduate years at college as a sort of Arcadia (one populated at most colleges, I might add, by groups of libertines suspiciously calling themselves Greeks). Another claim made upon liberal education is that it frees one from prejudice. Human beings are encased within a cocoon of pre-spun ideas, opinions and preferences. Liberal education splices open that cocoon. We emerge into the world in an altered state, transformed, capable of flight. Others hold that to be liberally educated is to be freed from illusions. Our movement is from the cave of shadows into the searing day. This is the model that promises enlightenment. I would argue that the telos of liberal education is to free us from ourselves. Our work is primarily internal, an activity of the soul. We are bound tightly by our pride. It constrains us. It isolates us. It distorts our relationships with others, with the world, and with Truth. The first order of business in a liberal education is to chasten. 3. Virtue or Virtuosity Modern education has become increasingly oriented towards virtuosity. It promotes the honing of skills, generally towards useful ends. It is technical and narrow in focus. We have witnessed �over the past decades the ascendancy of the STEM disciplines, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, and the dominance of Business as the single largest major in the nation. Anyone pursuing a degree in the liberal arts has been cornered at one time or another by a fretting uncle or a dismissive neighbor: “What are you going to do with that?” Yet the goal of liberal education is not virtuosity, but virtue. The Greeks used the term, arête, for excellence. It refers to the single-minded pursuit of an admirable goal. We might seek to become an excellent X, where X might be a violinist, a computer programmer, or a pole vaulter. Liberal education, however, challenges the notion that we should be defined by what we do. It suggests, rather, that we should be concerned first and foremost with who we are. In a liberal education, the primary object of study is the human being. Turning inquiry back upon ourselves, we find that what defines us is that we are “thinking things.” We are above all else rational creatures. Our pursuit of arête ought therefore to be the pursuit of logos. This, then, defines the proper focus of a liberal arts college. Were we a conservatory we would seek excellence in the arts. Were we a seminary, we would seek excellence of the spirit. Yet we are something like a conservatory of the mind, dedicated to the proposition that the most characteristic trait of the human being is that we are thinking things, and that the virtue we strive for is the excellence of the intellect. This conviction does not deny nor diminish other forms of excellence in the world -- but it argues that self-reflective inquiry lays the foundation for the art of being human. 4. Liberal Education Leads to Civil Discourse A commitment to the arête of being human, leads to a capacity for civil discourse. If the pursuit of excellence of the mind is predicated upon conversation and discussion, that is, if the arena of the intellect is the exchange of ideas, one must treat other minds as infinitely valuable. This �involves a significant degree of humility, accepting that we each superimpose upon the world a kaleidoscopic set of opinions, which shift and change shape chaotically. It also involves a degree of confidence, allowing that while we may often be wrong, we are not always so. A seminar is civil discourse in action -- it is a conclave of those willing to revise and amend opinion; it is a polis, where the currency is persuasion and the treasury a reliquary of truth. 5. There is no such thing as a "liberal art" The term “liberal art” is in and of itself an absurdity. There is no singular art that liberates. Liberal education runs across a network of ways of knowing the world. It understands that as human beings, we can know the world only imperfectly. Let me offer an illustration. Each of our five senses communicates something distinct, yet vital, to us. We can smell the freshly baked apple pie, see the nicely browned apple pie, feel the toothsome pie crust in our mouth, taste the gelatinous sweetness of the pie on our tongue, hear praise of the pie. In isolation, each of our senses offers a fragmented perspective on phenomena. Taken together, we experience the whole. Similarly, the liberal arts have historically offered seven “senses,” seven organs for knowing the world. In the Middle Ages, these fields of knowledge were categorized as the trivium – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – and the quadrivium – mathematics, astronomy, geometry and music. Today, our notion of the liberal arts, as with most things, is more fluid. Yet what must not be lost is the commitment of liberal education to aspire towards a multivalent approach to knowledge. A true education must traverse a broad landscape of subjects, from literature and philosophy to mathematics, the sciences and the languages, and put those subjects in conversation with one another. Where truth is to be found, it is found only fleetingly, as one synapse fires to the next, leaping across the arts of knowing. �6. One Cannot Receive an Education Words matter. We commonly, and casually, say that we received our education at School X or College Y. This is a category error of the first order. To receive something is to accept it. It puts the receiver in a passive posture. To “receive” an education, one would have to be a receptacle of some sort, a container waiting to be filled. Yet the word itself, education, expresses the opposite. The term originates from the Latin, “ex ducere”, which means “to lead out.” What does this tell us about the process of education? It involves movement. It is active. It is participatory. It entails collaboration between one who is led and one who leads. These leaders we call “teachers”. A teacher may be another person, present to the learner, perhaps around a seminar table. A teacher may also be one who has lived long before the student, who has left traces of profound insight or resplendent beauty, that draw, like a lodestone, one out of oneself. Teachers do not push, they do not drag, they do not compel. They invite the student on a pilgrimage, one in which they are fellow travelers. Taking up the call, the student is led out of complacency, out of docility, out of ignorance. Some may think that to be led, to follow, is not in accord with the freedom inherent in a liberal education: Why these 120 books? Why this tradition? This skepticism assumes a rather desiccated notion of liberty, a rather modern notion, which takes autonomy, self-governance, as its starting point. Self-governance, however, is the end point of education. To be liberally educated is to have been led out of bondage. There are many forms of slavery, all pernicious, and overcoming the first, ignorance, is only the beginning of the journey. �7. We see through a glass, darkly… There are, broadly speaking, two ways of knowing the world, both of which are necessary, yet ultimately irreconcilable. What we know can be divided into two categories – that which we can measure, and that which we cannot. On the one hand, human life is finite, bounded, defined by ridges and borders. On the other, we touch the infinite. Because we are more than mechanical, because we each have a mysterious sort of agency, our lives are imbued with the qualities of better and worse. We make choices, and try to do so with the best information possible. This is reflected in the liberal arts, divided into the trivium and the quadrivium. The first set of disciplines encompasses the qualitative aspects of human experience: speech, expression, discernment. The latter, the aspects of the world that we can measure – time, distance, breadth, number. Our work as seekers of truth is to hold all these forms of knowing in our minds simultaneously and to craft a synthesis that reconciles the whole. None of us is capable such a project– we see through the glass, darkly – but were we able to achieve this synthesis, we would approach that ever-elusive quality called wisdom. I hope you will forgive me for these underdeveloped ideas, forgive me if I have been tedious, or if I have been simply wrong. That quality called wisdom certainly eludes me. Yet let me conclude be restating what I do know is true: St. John’s College is indeed a college. But it is very much more than that. It is both an idea and an ideal. It is a place designed from the inside out, according to principles that are both unique and universal. It is its own theorem and its own proof. It is the most vital institution in higher education. It is a place that inspires love not because it is perfect, but because it is perfectly �itself. It is an institution that I have come to love rather quickly, and will cherish always. Thank you for allowing me to join this community. � 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 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 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Presidential Inauguration Speech, 2017 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the inauguration speech given by Panayiotis Kanels on October 28, 2017 in Annapolis, MD. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kanelos, Panayiotis 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 2017-10-28 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3445">Audio Recording</a> <a title="Inauguration Program" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3444">Inauguration Program</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kanelos Inauguration Lecture 2017 Inauguration Presidents