Dreams and Visions: An Interdisciplinary Enquiry

Dreams and Visions Presenting the Past Central Issues in Medieval and Early Modern Studies Across the Disciplines Gen...

Author: Nancy van Deusen

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Dreams and Visions

Presenting the Past Central Issues in Medieval and Early Modern Studies Across the Disciplines General Editor

Nancy van Deusen

VOLUME 2

Dreams and Visions An Interdisciplinary Enquiry

Edited by

Nancy van Deusen

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: Angel-priest, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, chancel arch. © Photo by Virginia K. Henderson. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dreams and visions : an interdisciplinary enquiry / edited by Nancy Van Deusen. p. cm. — (Presenting the past : central issues in medieval and early modern studies across the disciplines, ISSN 1875-2799 ; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17971-4 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Intellectual life—History. 2. Middle Ages—Intellectual life. 3. Philosophy, Medieval. 4. Civilization, Medieval. 5. Dreams—Philosophy. 6. Visions—Philosophy. 7. Dreams— History. 8. Visions—History. 9. Dreams in literature. 10. Visions in literature. I. Van Deusen, Nancy (Nancy Elizabeth) II. Title. III. Series. CB353.D74 2010 001.1—dc22 2009044406

ISSN 1875-2799 ISBN 978 90 04 17971 4 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

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CONTENTS List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Illustration section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii ix

Introduction: Dreams and Visions Nancy van Deusen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Daniel the Dreamer, Daniel the Dream-Reader Meg Worley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9

Cassiodorus and Theoderic: A Vision of Reviving Falling Cities Birgitta Lindros Wohl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

The Lament and Augustine: Visions of Disintegration and Transformation Nancy van Deusen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

In the Beginning: Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe in the Twelfth Century Conrad Rudolph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

Visions of Verbum Incarnatum: Augustinian Homiletics and English Christmas Sermons, 900–1700 Wendy Furman-Adams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation of Divinity Ann R. Meyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 St. Bonaventure’s “Doctrine of Illumination”: An Artifact of Modernity Wendy Petersen Boring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

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Dreams, Visions, and Nightmares in Islam: From the Prophet Mu ammad to the Fundamentalist Mindset Tamara Albertini . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 The Vision of Heaven and Knowledge in Castilian Literature: From Alfonso X to Alfonso de la Torre Ana M. Montero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 The Vulgate Grail Michael Murrin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 A Vision of Poverty: Remembering the Passion and the Christian Ideal in the Imagery of the Observant Franciscans Virginia K. Henderson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Dream and Vision in Shakespeare’s Plays David Bevington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Dreams, Visions, and Delusions: Madness in Shakespeare J. Harold Ellens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 Vision in the Eye of the Beholder: Translation or Transformation Eolene M. Boyd-MacMillan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Beyond Three: Jung, Anthropology and Number John N. Crossley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 A Vision of Dwarfs Joanna Woods-Marsden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 The Dawes Act of 1887: A Dream of “Civilizing the Savages” that became a Nightmare for Native Americans Robert W. Hanning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Meg Worley Pomona College

Michael Murrin University of Chicago

Birgitta Lindros Wohl California State University, Northridge

Virginia K. Henderson Emory University

Nancy van Deusen Claremont Graduate University Conrad Rudolph University of California, Riverside Wendy Furman-Adams Whittier College Ann R. Meyer National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington D.C. Wendy Petersen Boring Willamette University Tamara Albertini University of Hawai’i, Manoa Ana M. Montero Saint Louis University

David Bevington University of Chicago J. Harold Ellens University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Eolene M. Boyd-MacMillan Cambridge University John N. Crossley Monash University, Victoria, Australia Joanna Woods-Marsden University of California, Los Angeles Robert W. Hanning Columbia University

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[Plate I – van Deusen]

illustrations

I

1 Ms Vaticanus Reginensis Latinus 288, f. 64v–65r, Planctus david super Saul et Ionathan, Rome, Vatican Library.

[Plate II – Rudolph]

II

illustrations

1 Saint Paul’s, Creation of the Cosmos. Rome, Bib. Vat. MS Barb. lat. 4406, f. 23.

[Plate III – Rudolph]

illustrations

2 Grandval Bible, Genesis frontispiece. London, Brit. Lib. MS Add. 10546, f. 5v.

III

[Plate IV – Rudolph]

IV

illustrations

4 3

5

6 3 Initial to Genesis. Salzburg, Stiftsbib. St. Peter MS A.XII.18, f. 6; 4 Parc Bible, initial to Genesis. London, Brit. Lib. MS Add. 14788, f. 6v; 5 Augustine, City of God, initial to book eleven. Heiligenkreuz, Stiftsbib. MS 24, f. 96; 6 Bible of Stephen Harding, initial to Genesis. Dijon, Bib. mun. MS 12, f. 3v.

[Plate V – Rudolph]

illustrations

7 Pontigny Bible, initial to Genesis. Paris, Bib. Nat. MS lat. 8823, f. 1.

V

[Plate VI – Rudolph]

VI

illustrations

8 Souvigny Bible, initial to Genesis. Moulins, Bib. mun. MS 1, f. 4v.

[Plate VII – Rudolph]

illustrations

VII

9 Bible moralisée, frontispiece, Creation of the Cosmos. Vienna, Ost. Nationalbib. MS 2554, f. Iv (photo: Bildarchiv der Ost. Nationalbib., Vienna).

11 Tiberius Psalter, Creation of the Cosmos. London, Brit. Lib. MS Cotton, Tiberius C. VI, f. 7v.

VIII

10 Eadui Codex, First canon table. Hannover, Kestner Museum MS WM XXIa 36, f. 9v.

[Plate VIII – Rudolph]

illustrations

[Plate IX – Rudolph]

illustrations

IX

12 Bible moralisée, dedication page. New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib. MS M.240, f. 8.

[Plate X – Rudolph]

X

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13 Bible of Saint-Hubert, Genesis monogram. Brussels, Bib. Roy. MS II.1639, f. 6v (copyright Bib. Roy. Albert Ier, Brussels).

[Plate XI – Rudolph]

illustrations

14 Gospels of Henry the Lion, creation page. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bib. MS Guelph 105 Noviss. 2 , f. 172.

15 Initial to Genesis. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 48, f. 7v (by permission Master and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Conway Library, Courtuald Institute of Art).

XI

17. Honorius Augustodunensis, Clavis Physicae, World-soul. Paris, Bib. Nat. MS lat. 6734, f. 1v.

XII

16. Honorius Augustodunensis, Clavis Physicae, Creation. Paris, Bib. Nat. MS lat. 6734, f. 3v.

[Plate XII – Rudolph]

illustrations

[Plate XIII – Rudolph]

illustrations

18 Boethius, De Musica, frontispiece. Cambridge, Univ. Lib. MS Ii.3.12, f. 61v (by permission Syndics of Cambridge University Library).

19 Saint Paul’s, Creation of Adam. Rome, Bib. Vat. MS Barb. lat. 4406, f. 24v.

XIII

[Plate XIV – Rudolph]

XIV

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20 Bible of Sainte-Geneviève, initial to Genesis. Paris, Bib. Nat. MS lat. 11535, f. 6v.

[Plate XV – Rudolph]

illustrations

XV

21 Bible of Robert de Bello, initial to Genesis. London, Brit. Lib. MS Burney 3, f. 5v.

[Plate XVI – Rudolph]

XVI

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22 Winchester Bible, initial to Genesis. Winchester, Cath. Lib., Winchester Bible f.5.

[Plate XVII – Henderson]

illustrations

XVII

1 Slipknot, detail of the grille of the chantry chapel of Henry VII, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey (photo by author).

XVIII

2 Chantry chapel of Henry VII, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey (photo by author).

[Plate XVIII – Henderson]

illustrations

[Plate XIX – Henderson]

illustrations

XIX

3 Angel frieze of the Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, south side (photo by author).

4 Angel-priest, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, chancel arch (photo by author).

[Plate XX – Henderson]

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5 St. Sebastian, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, northeast apsidal chapel (photo by author).

[Plate XXI – Henderson]

illustrations

6 Isaiah, Chapel of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey, north side (photo by author).

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[Plate XXII – Henderson]

XXII

illustrations

7 Angel, Cathedral of Albi, choir enclosure (photo by author).

[Plate XXIII – Henderson]

illustrations


XXIII

[Plate XXIV – Henderson]

XXIV

illustrations

9 Angel, Cathedral of Albi, choir screen (photo by author).

[Plate XXV – Henderson]

illustrations

XXV

10 Annunciation to the Virgin, Cathedral of Albi, choir screen (photo by author).

[Plate XXVI – Henderson]

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illustrations


[Plate XXVII – Henderson]

illustrations


XXVII

[Plate XXVIII – Henderson]

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13 Imago Pietatis, Cathedral of Albi, Chapel of St. Michael (photo by author).

[Plate XXIX – Henderson]

illustrations

XXIX

14 Antonello de Messina, Christ at the Column, c. 1480, Paris, Louvre (Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY).

[Plate XXX – Henderson]

XXX

illustrations

15 Andrea Mantegna, Ecce Homo, c. 1500, Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. (Scala / Art Resource, NY).

[Plate XXXI – Henderson]

illustrations

XXXI

16 Anne of Brittany and the Ordre de la Cordelière, Histoire de la Toison d’Or, Bibliothèque nationale, MS Fr 138, fol. 1v, c. 1492–98 (Bibliothèque nationale de France).

[Plate XXXII – Henderson]

XXXII

illustrations

17 Man of Pity, c. 1480–1500, Beaune, Hôtel Dieu (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY).

[Plate XXXIII – Henderson]

illustrations

XXXIII

18 Hans Burgkmair, Naked Christ on the Cross, woodcut, c. 1510, Basel, Kupferstichkabinett der öffentliche Kunstsammlung (Kunstmuseum Basel).

XXXIV

19 Lady Poverty, detail from the Allegory of Poverty, Assisi, San Francesco, Lower Church, crossing vault, early 14th c. (Scala / Art Resource, NY).

[Plate XXXIV – Henderson]

illustrations

[Plate XXXV – Woods-Marsden]

illustrations

XXXV

1 Giacomo Vighi called L’Argenta, Portrait of Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy, c. 1570–72, 146 × 88 cm, Pinacoteca Sabauda, Turin (photo: Mostra del barocco piedmontese, 1963, cat. 1).

[Plate XXXVI – Woods-Marsden]

XXXVI

illustrations

2 Alonso Sánchez Coelho, Portrait of Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia with Magdalena Ruiz, c. 1585–88, 207 × 129 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (photo: Alonso Sánchez Coelho y el ritratto en la corte de Felipe II, 1990, cat. 29).

illustrations

3 Agnolo Bronzino, Double-sided Portrait of the dwarf Morgante, c. 1550, 150 × 100 cm, Uffizi Depositi, Florence (photo: Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 1990, pls. 167–68).

[Plate XXXVII – Woods-Marsden]

XXXVII

XXXVIII

illustrations

4 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstorum Historia, 1642 (photo: Caprotti, Mostri, draghi e serpenti nelle silografie dell’opera di Ulisse Aldrovandi e dei suoi contemporanei, 1980, figs. 12, 15, and 20).

[Plate XXXVIII – Woods-Marsden]

[Plate XXXIX – Woods-Marsden]

illustrations

XXXIX

5 Titian, Portrait of Alfonso D’Avalos with a dwarf, c. 1533, 110 × 84 cm, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (photo: Museum).

[Plate XL – Woods-Marsden]

XL

illustrations

6 Tintoretto follower, Portrait of Scipione Clusone with a dwarf-page, dated 1561, 124 × 148 cm, Galleria Nazionale della Liguria, Genova (photo: Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti, 1994, cat. 24).

[Plate XLI – Woods-Marsden]

illustrations

XLI

7 Antonis Mor, Portrait of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle’s Dwarf and Hound, c. 1550, 127 × 93 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (photo: Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 1990, pl. 125).

[Plate XLII – Woods-Marsden]

XLII

illustrations

8 Titian, Portrait of Charles V with Hound, early 1530s, 192 × 111 cm, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (photo: Falomir, Tiziano, 2003, cat. 19).

[Plate XLIII – Woods-Marsden]

illustrations

XLIII

9 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, c. 1537–39, 93.7 × 76.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art (photo: Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici, 2004, cat. 38).

[Plate XLIV – Woods-Marsden]

XLIV

illustrations

introduction: dreams and visions

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INTRODUCTION: DREAMS AND VISIONS Nancy van Deusen

This volume, as for the others in this series, spans time and culture to bring historical perspective as well as contemporary insight and analogies to a particular theme of of importance, in this case, that of the mind and the eye. The topic of “Dreams and Visions” brings to the mind the past in terms of nostalgia, memory, the topic of “way-farer,” or life in viam, and concepts of prior, posterior, what has been previously the case transformed into the present. The past leaves vestiges, traces, to be assimilated and incorporated into a useful present. Accordingly, the concept of “pre-existent substance” or material, either invisible or visible, that is present and available when one starts out with a task or project, either mental or physical, is a topic of importance for medieval intellectual life. It is also a topic to be explored within several contexts, and with many facets in this volume that encompasses a chronological panorama from antiquity to present legislation—a governmental “vision”—in North America. Daniel the visionary and interpreter of dreams is our point of entry into the topic of Dreams and Visions; but the example of Daniel in the Old Testament is also of use in providing a categorization of what is at stake within this topic. Meg Worley recalls the two dreams of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and further, a distinction between two types of dreams within the Hebrew Bible, that is, dreams— message dreams, incubation dreams and symbolic dreams; and “waking visions.” There is an additional category of “dark speeches” that require interpretation and usually involve the participation, insight, and reactions of others. On the other hand, “mouth to mouth” communication, such as that between God and Moses is plain, transparent, without question, and usually demands a response, often in terms of obedience. Early on in the volume a distinction is made between a requirement of interpretation on the one hand, and “plain speech” on the other, a distinction that will be further clarified as several authors bring additional facets of this topic to the fore. Accordingly, we are presented with the foundations of the overarching system of the medi-

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eval interpretation, not only of the biblical scriptures, but of other texts as well, in terms of the literal (historical), allegorical, requiring interpretation and explanation, the tropological in terms of a direct mandate requiring response, and the eschatological, or apocalyptic “modes” or “senses.” A final, fifth mode of interpretation that can be seen to collapse all of the modes into one is the mode of “plain speech.” When God speaks, there is usually no doubt as to both the source and meaning of the statement. Further, some visions “speak” for themselves. Past and present, the memory of settled, peaceful times, of the beautiful buildings of a well-maintained, commodious city contrasted with loss, decay, turbulence, and the downfall of nations and empires, in one case Rome, in another case, the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, as recorded in the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah, unite the contributions of archeologist and classicist, Birgitta Lindros Wohl and musicologist, Nancy van Deusen. In the cases of Cassiodorus and Theoderic, the question of the historical “accuracy” of an account comes to the fore; is the connection between the inner “vision” of a place, and its outer physical reality intact? In one case, Fulgentius of Ruspe (ca. 500 ce) wrote (bringing to mind also a recurrent topic of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem): “How splendid can the heavenly Jerusalem be, if the earthly Rome thus shines?” In another mid-fifth century account of Rome, the city is depicted as having fallen, most certainly, on evil days. It is an account of decay, fragmentation, and disruption, and of decline. Where is the truth; can the truth be known? What accounts for this crucial difference of “vision” coming from two eye-witness reporters? How can one deal with the question of prior and posterior, and is this a question, not one of historical “accuracy,” but of the vision of the beholder, or even of the unseen, “pre-existent substance” of the reporter’s own memories, motivations, and nostalgia that has provided a building material, so to speak, for a writing project or is useful in giving boundaries and expectations to a recognizable genre, such as, in the case of van Deusen’s study, the lament? We are confronted in both of these cases with abstraction, imagination, and construction. A vision of time, as well as the concept of beginning, as well as of origin, receive thorough treatment in the study of “Theories and Images of Creation” by art historian Conrad Rudolph, who concentrates at the onset of his paper, on the self-conception of the teacher and dialectician, Peter Abelard. Self-conception, or how a culture


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regards, and reflects upon itself conditions results, as Rudolph argues, in other words to determine theology is to construct power. He writes; “Since politics may be said to be the formation and exercise of power, the determination of theology, therefore, is, or can be one form of politics…” In selecting, from various possible topics, that of creation, Rudolph brings his study from an articulation of origin and authority during the medieval period, to a topic of much concern within the present political life of North America—hence providing a link to the final paper of this volume by Robert Hanning, who, as a medievalist, also brings the question of vision, of understanding and of intention into contemporary North American legislation. Historical situation as a stage from which to present an important problem is thus connected with, and illuminates, present concern. A vision of the Verbum incarnatum, the “Word made flesh” is the topic of Wendy Furman-Adams’ contribution to a multifaceted discussion of a larger consideration, namely, visionary approaches to the inexpressible. As Augustine stated that in verbally dealing with the incarnation, the mystery of “God the speechless Word,” one is expressing the inexpressible, that for all the splendor of verbal presentation, “no human thought, no language can be equal to the task” of extolling the Word who made both speaker and hearers. What then? As Furman-Adams states, “ The only way even to approach such a mystery is through word-play, symbolism, and paradox piled upon paradox—arduous intellectual exercise aimed always at grasping the hem of Wisdom’s garment.” In this Augustine’s training as an orator, his sovereign grasp of the most far-reaching issues of Christian theology, as well as his life-long desire and vision to communicate these issues through preaching came to the fore, to be of use, within his sermons well into the eighteenth century—and beyond. As the possibility of revelation is a relevant one for Augustine, so throughout the Middle Ages, revelation—how to deal with it, recognize its authority, and encourage it—is, as Ann R. Meyer states, a distinctive feature of medieval Christianity, and one of profound importance. Further, the close relationship between vision, representation, coalescing in revelation brought the apocalyptic Book of Revelation into medieval intellectual life for many reasons. Drawing upon the writers, for example of Late Antiquity, such as Plotinus, Meyer states, “The medieval desire for revelation was nourished by a belief in the possibility that human beings could experience God’s intimate presence through their own efforts to represent the divinity.”

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These “efforts” at representing the inexpressible, giving schematic shape in order to articulate their own internal visions—perhaps even too intimate for verbal articulation—constitute the core of Meyer’s comprehensive study of this important topic. Ultimate fulfillment of the New Jerusalem, for example, is to be found in John’s vision: “And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and He will dwell with them. And they shall be his people; and God himself with them shall be their God (Revelation 21.1-3). A vision, and step-by-step progress toward that vision—of these two contrasting elements life itself, especially the Christian life, consisted. Represented, reflexive vision is also the theme that brings together the following two papers, one, by Wendy Boring that brings important topics of late-medieval theology together with their contemporary reception; the other, contributed by Tamara Albertini on the cross-cultural implications of dreams and visions. A vision of heaven is also the theme of Ana Montero’s study of the topic in Castilian literature, actually a delicate political issue at the Castilian court during the last decades of the thirteenth century. Montero’s contribution presents three visions of heaven as found in three medieval texts that she has labeled as “pseudo-philosophical”: one vision generated as political propaganda; the second as a vision of the natural sciences and the “science of astrology,” and finally, an apocalyptic vision that connects Montero’s contribution to the study it follows, that of Ann Meyer, namely, a vision of heaven as the culmination of all things, an amalgamation of all sources and agendas. Political agenda, a perception of science, and theological doctrine, are thus combined in a vision of heaven in medieval Castilian literature. This is indeed a “Pleasant Vision,” in which “Understanding” faces God. Wonder and explanation, united in vision are the consideration of Michael Murrin’s essay that focuses upon “visions” of The Holy Grail, pursued, for example, by Lancelot. Lost in a huge, trackless, forest, Lancelot finds it impossible to discover where he, in fact, is. He falls asleep, has a vision, with several attendant events, of the Grail, and awakens, wondering whether what he had seen was “real” or a “dream.” Still another facet of the topic comes in this instance to our attention, in terms of authentication, a perception of reality, “truth,” and the usefulness and even possible functionality of “dreams and visions.”


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Are dreams “reality” or is “reality” a dream? Does one experience truth in everyday life as it exists in the world, or is “truth” available only by visionary experience—are dreams and visions “experience?” Such are the questions that rise from this insightful treatment of some aspects of dream literature in the Middle Ages, to be continued in the papers that follow, namely concerning Shakespeare and his treatment of dreams (David Bevington), as well as the topic of “Dreams and Madness” (Harold Ellens). Image and vision within the particular example of observant Franciscans is the topic of Virginia Henderson—as well as a particular vision of “poverty” as practiced by medieval friars. In this vision, simple objects or activities such as tying a rope, securing a belt, or what might seem to be a self-evident detail such as the slip-knot, carries internal meaning. As Henderson states, “Indeed, the unassuming character and simplicity of the slipknot were essential to its purpose, even though ironically, those very qualities caused it to elude the scrutiny of later generations. Routine, everyday details, practical things, recognizable objects, simple subjects and figures, all may indicate a vision of transcendence, which, in their sheer practicality cover over, momentarily hiding from view, what may be a reality of great consequence. This, of course, was a powerful medieval topic, namely, that of the integumentum, the covering that hides, perhaps, a significant vision from the curious, the disinterested, as well as those who have no capacity to understand. David Bevington, in his contribution, “Dream and Vision in Shakespeare’s Plays,” explores, as he writes, “the coming together of immortal and mortal worlds,” that is, dreamlike transformations, and transformation as “translation,” a topic that is also addressed by Eolene M. Boyd-MacMillan. Dream is a key word for Shakespeare, and his use of dreams also provided structure to a progression of thought that can be seen in his life-long output. Shakespeare deals with dreams in two important ways—the delineation of which also gives clarity to this entire volume. Firstly, dreaming is a kind of madness (also explored by J. Harold Ellens), and there is also a connection between dreaming and the thereafter that continually engages the space between fantasy, the “unreal” and reality itself, however one might define it. Thus, “the frenzy of creation” as a gift, is akin to that of prophesy; the dreamer can be seen to take on a prophetic role. Further, the “poet” is the instrument “into whom the divine afflatus

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breathes superhuman knowledge and power—the power of imagination and insight.” As Shakespeare writes: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Dreams, then, in addition to presenting a kind of madness, challenge “belief” as well as what we hold to be “true,” that is observable “reality.” The second manner in which Shakespeare uses dreams within the structure of his plays also brings out a significance within the title of this volume, namely, “vision,” in which dreams give forth portent, warn, deliver messages that the dreamer would do well to heed. In both cases, a need for interpretation is evident, and this requirement also brings together the papers contained within this volume. As Bevington states, “The inadequacies of representation must be filled by the spectators themselves;” dreams beg to be interpreted; readers must interact with texts. The interpretation of both dreams and characters also constitutes the core of J. Harold Ellens’ contribution to this volume. As Ellens states at the onset of his study, “Among his great variety of carefully crafted modes and moods of the human spirit, his most masterful often seem to be his scenes and characters of utter madness.” The gifts, training, and experience of a psychologist and theologian are brought to bear on the topic of dreams, visions, and delusions within the nexus of Shakespeare’s varied and diverse characters. Dreams as transformative, and their relationship to inner life is explored by Eolene Boyd-Macmillian in her contribution, “Vision and the Eye of the Beholder: Translation or Transformation.” As she states, using a musical analogy, “The oftentimes-invisible dynamics of ‘translation transformation’ takes on the quality of an underlying bass-line played loudly in the symphony of spirituality. A scholar can ‘translate’ a particular spirituality in such a way that all spiritualities can seem to translate each other, to be the same spirituality in different cultural languages, or the same melody in different keys.” The vision, then, of both inner stance, as well as its transformation, brings an added, complementary, dimension to a multi-faceted exploration of the topic at hand, and unites an ongoing discussion to contemporary issues within religious studies. Again, pattern, inner logic, access to


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invisible, yet profoundly available reality, is also the subject of John N. Crossley, an historian of mathematics, who also approaches description of inner vision from the standpoint of the illustrative power of musical exemplification, namely, the early fourteenth-century writer on music, Johannes de Grocheio. Crossley explores number, differentiation and distinction, as well as the continuity of prior, posterior, in sequence, as inner visions that retain immediacy and persuasive power. Vision in the inner eye of the beholder; a perception of qualities as the basis and foundation for attitude, possible action, and, certainly, is the topic that unites the final two papers of this volume, that of art historian, Joanna Woods-Marsden and her perceptive analysis of an unexpected topic, the perception of dwarfs as delineated by, and given visual representation; and Robert W. Hanning’s treatment of a “vision of Indians” during the nineteenth century that resulted in legislative application. In both cases, inner perception resulted in outer realization. As Robert W. Hanning states in his title, this inner perception or vision “Became a Nightmare for Native Americans.” Hanning, a medievalist, takes up the topic of a vision of the “Civilization the Natives,” as an underlying cultural priority that accordingly provided an agenda for action. It is a vision that was responsible, as we will see, for great harm. Hanning quotes from George Armstrong Custer, “My Life on the Plains, or, Personal Experiences with Indians” (published, May l872) to show that just as characteristics of the Plains induced “faulty vision (or visions) on the part of those unfamiliar with them” just so “meditations on the ‘true nature’ of the ‘uncivilizable savages’ provided an eerie emblem for the distorted understanding of Native Americans shared not only by their avowed enemies, but also by their self-proclaimed ‘friends’ and ‘rescuers.’” Hanning’s forthright and succinct study brings a focus on “dream,” “vision,” “inner stance,” and spiritual outlook into an arena of contemporary experience, problematization, and legislative deliberation. Need one observe that the issues identified by Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Johannes de Grocheio, and William Shakespeare, among many others, seen through the lens of rhetorical training, or the shaping of dramatic continuity, are not only profound issues of the past, but continue to retain their pungency and urgency in the present; that the insights of the past, perhaps redefined and interpreted, can give direction for the many problems that beset and beleaguer today.

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nancy van deusen

Daniel the Dreamer, Daniel the Dream-Reader

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DANIEL THE DREAMER, DANIEL THE DREAMREADER Meg Worley

People who have never taken a college English class frequently misunderstand the focus of literary studies. Too often our families and acquaintances assume that English teachers write novels, and we are not always successful in explaining that literary scholars do not make literature, we study it. It is less well known, however, that there is precedent for this problem in the biblical book of Daniel. While Daniel is best known for the tale of the prophet in the lion’s den and the writing on the wall, it teaches another valuable lesson: you can have dreams, and you can interpret dreams, but you cannot do both simultaneously—you cannot have your dreams and interpret them too. Daniel opens with the capture of Jerusalem, when Nebuchadnezzar takes four bright little boys back to Babylon, to be educated and taught the Chaldean language: children in whom was no blemish, but well favoured, and skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king’s palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans. (Dan. 1.4)1

After a little trouble with the food, the boys settle down and become wise men at the court. Nebuchadnezzar has two dreams, both of which are interpreted by Daniel after all of the other astronomers and sages at court are stumped. Nebuchadnezzar, thus persuaded of the supremacy of the Hebrew God, dies and meets his reward. The episode of the writing on the wall occurs in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar’s son, when Belshazzar insists on drinking from the temple vessels taken from Jerusalem. Daniel, as we know, is called to decipher it; after all, if he can read dreams, he must be able to read writing. After he reads the writing on the wall to the king, Daniel is made the “third ruler in Babylon” and he gives up dream interpretation; from here on, he is the one dreaming. First he dreams of four supernatural beasts and their judgment by the Ancient of Days— 1

All biblical quotations are from the King James Version.

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interpreted by a nearby angel (“one of them that stood by”) as the rise and ultimate defeat of four devouring kings. Then he dreams of a goat defeating a ram and a conversation among saints about the restoration of the sanctuary that the goat has destroyed, which is interpreted by the angel Gabriel. Like Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel has two dreams about world history, and he too requires someone else to interpret them for him. I have not addressed Daniel’s vision of the apocalypse, which consumes the last two chapters of the book, due to the different types of dreams in the Hebrew Bible. The first main distinction to be made is between dreams (chalom/helem2) and waking visions (mareh/mara). Moreover, most commentaries divide dreams into three types: message dreams, incubation dreams, and symbolic dreams. Message dreams tend to be straightforward—telegraphs from God, telling Abimelech that Sarah is Abraham’s wife, not his sister (Gen. 20.3), and telling Joseph that a visit to Egypt would be a good idea (Mt. 2.13). Incubation dreams are invited—by fasting, or, more commonly, by sleeping in a temple, as in the case of Solomon at Gibeon in I Kings 3. Daniel’s apocalyptic vision, however, is not described as a dream at all, although it does seem to be invited by fasting; it does not occur at night, and Daniel marvels that none of his companions see the awesome creature with a face like lightning. In essence, dreams are by definition private, experienced during sleep, whereas visions present themselves in the public sphere, regardless of who actually experiences them. Symbolic dreams, not surprisingly, are the primary locus of the act of interpretation in the Hebrew Bible. This type of dream shows a clear division of labor between having dreams and interpreting dreams, which we should read as a biblical system of checks and balances. Important dreams are dreamt by important men, who, due to their inability to make heads or tails of the experience, must turn to the community for help in putting the divine dictum to use, thereby submitting the royal plan of action for public approval. God himself makes a distinction early on. Numbers 12 is usually remembered as Miriam and Aaron taking issue with Moses’ Ethiopian wife, after which God afflicts Miriam with leprosy. But their challenge is to Moses’ authority, not to his taste in women: “Hath the lord indeed 2

The book of Daniel is written in both languages—Aramaic from 2.4b to 7.28, and elsewhere in Hebrew.


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spoken only by Moses?” they demand in Numbers 12.2. “Hath he not spoken also by us?” In his angry response, God clearly differentiates ways of knowing the divine will. Prophets he speaks to through dreams and “dark speeches,” but Moses is unique; with him, the Lord speaks “mouth to mouth” —peh le peh (Num. 12.8). This is the answer to the question frequently asked by students: Why does Miriam get leperized but Aaron gets off scot-free? Aaron is a priest, but Miriam is a prophetess. The lesson is clear: Dark speeches require interpretation and imply the involvement of others—the priest of the temple, at the very least—while mouth-to-mouth communication is transparent, unquestionable, and demands immediate obedience. This distinction is further elaborated in Job 33, when Elihu observes that God sends dreams in order to change events while discouraging willfulness: In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction. That he may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man. (Job 33.16-17)

Both of these purposes are relevant here. The best-known symbolic dreams in the Hebrew Bible—Joseph’s bowing sheaves in Genesis 37; Pharaoh’s fourteen cattle in Genesis 41; Gideon’s all-vanquishing barley cake in Judges 7—all concern not merely personal fortune but world history. This is particularly the case with the dreams in the book of Daniel; both Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel are given glimpses of the political destiny of the Middle East. Daniel’s apocalyptic vision, on the other hand, is providential rather than political, and it is described in different terms—mar’a rather than chalom. When the author of Daniel writes in Daniel 10.7, “And I Daniel alone saw the vision: for the men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves,” he is underscoring the fact that this is not a dream but a shared event. It is not about world history but an eschatological experience. The third-person introduction to this first-person passage makes another point: Daniel “had understanding of the vision” (Daniel 10.1). No one needed to interpret the Apocalypse for him. It is an important point: Apocalyptic visions speak for themselves. It is not that they are easy to make sense of, as anyone who has taught the Book of Revelation to a classful of undergraduates can attest; it is that they brook no debate. Political outcomes, however, are a matter

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for community involvement, and these are precisely the dreams for which interpretation is required. Message dreams are often experienced by people who are not world rulers, like Abimelech and the New Testament Joseph, and their dreams guide their local behaviors, not the fates of nations. Symbolic dreams, however, are generally about the course of human events. Even Joseph’s dreams in Genesis 37—the only dreams he experiences, before he becomes the interpreter of Pharaoh’s dreams—appear to be about political domination. And it is important to note that even here, Joseph submitted his dreams to his brothers for interpretation. So it is with the other occasions of symbolic dreams. They are given to monarchs: Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel after he is put in charge of the city of Babylon. Joseph was not a monarch when he dreamed of the bowing sheaves and curtseying planets, but his brothers’ interpretation of those dreams makes it clear that they were afraid he would be. And Saul knows that his days as king are numbered when, in I Samuel 28.6, the Lord would not speak to him, not even in dreams. The second thing to note about symbolic dreams is that their interpretations are always public events. After Joseph’s first dream, he calls together his brothers to say, “Hey, listen to this dream I had last night.” After the second, he tells his father and brothers together, and Jacob rebukes him for the interpretation they give to the boy’s dream (Gen. 37.10). When the sandal is on the other foot and Joseph is interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, his performance is the finale of a communal attempt: “[Pharaoh] sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof; and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh” (Gen. 41.8). This mirrors Nebuchadnezzar’s behavior very closely; he too gathers all the wise men together for an unproductive committee meeting. Neither Pharaoh nor Nebuchadnezzar call for sages individually—the best bet, then the next-best bet, then the next, and so forth; the important thing is that they work together. The language used by the author of Daniel gives us some small hint of how these symbolic dreams, and particularly the interpretation thereof, were viewed. Twice in Daniel, interpretation is rephrased with the synonym “dissolving doubts.” In other words, the advisorial role of dream interpretation is openly acknowledged. “Doubts” we can read as what a good ruler entertains when forming a plan of action, and dissolving those doubts is clearly a job for the wise men at court. And if they cannot do it, the butler or captain of the guard will prob-


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ably know a Jewish hero who can advise you (Gen. 41.9; Dan. 2.25). It is worth noting also that Daniel is the only book in which either “dissolve” or “doubts,” shere and ketar, appears. I opened with a comparison to literature, and while the verb “interpret” applies equally to writing and to dreams in the Hebrew Bible, the connection is in fact tighter than that. Academics are often enough accused of grasping at interpretive straws, but here we are justified: Chapter 5, the scene of the writing on the wall, marks Daniel’s transition from a dream interpreter to a dream haver. The act of reading Mene mene tekel upharsin on the wall is not the fulcrum event, although Belshazzar’s assumption that writing is another form of dream is intriguing and worth further exploration. Instead, it is the consequences of that act of interpretation that alter Daniel’s epistemological status: I have heard of thee, that thou canst make interpretations, and dissolve doubts: now if thou canst read the writing, and make known to me the interpretation thereof, thou shalt be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about thy neck, and shalt be the third ruler in the kingdom. (Dan. 5.16)

Daniel’s response is an eloquent refusal of payment: “Let thy gifts be to thyself, and give thy rewards to another” (Dan. 5.17). This language is very reminiscent of the story of another prophet’s effort on the behalf of an enemy ruler: In I Kings 5, Elisha refused to accept payment for the cure, but his servant Gehazi runs after Naaman and pretends that the prophet has changed his mind and will take payment after all. For this, Gehazi gets smitten with leprosy, something that gets revived in 14th-century discussions of simony, where those selling spiritual favor are called Gehaziites (“simoniac” being generally reserved for those who purchase such favor). In Daniel, the prophet refuses payment for his grand act of reading—but then, after he has translated the writing on the wall from divine language to human. Belshazzar ignores his protestations, clothing him in scarlet, draping him with gold, and proclaiming him the third ruler in Babylon. And Daniel accepts it. There are other examples of biblical waffling, but it is striking that Daniel refuses payment and then accepts it. The scarlet and gold are not the point here; rather, the proclamation of Daniel as third ruler is the important part, made all the more so by Belshazzar’s death that

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very night. Darius the Mede soon takes over, and he puts Daniel in command: It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom a hundred and twenty princes, which should be over the whole kingdom; And over these, three presidents: of whom Daniel was first: that the princes might give accounts unto him. (Dan. 6.1-2)

At this point—and only at this point—Daniel begins experiencing dreams himself. In assuming the staff of power, he changes the nature of both his relationship to God and his relationship to the people. Henceforth God will communicate with him through dreams and dark speeches, to borrow the language of Numbers 12, and Daniel will require someone else to interpret them. Those someone elses are angels, not the counselors and wise men of the court, and we might even surmise that the episode of the lion’s den, which follows Darius’ empowerment of Daniel and which is precipitated by the people’s resentment, is a sincere critique of his style of governance. We can imagine their complaint: “He’s so high-handed, he doesn’t even come to us to interpret his dreams.” If dreams are a route of communication among God, ruler, and people, the same is true of writing. The first mention of the written word in the Pentateuch is not the stone tablets of Mosaic law but the story of the defeat of the Amalekites at Jehovahnissi, in Exodus 17. This is an underappreciated episode of the Exodus, and it underscores the importance of leaders and their people working together. This is the battle where Joshua and his forces are successful against the Amalekites only as long as Moses holds his staff on high. Things are going well, but Moses’ arms get tired. So Aaron and Hur sit him on a stone, and each one holds up an arm until the last Amalekite is defeated. And then the Lord commands, “Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua” (Ex. 17.14). We should particularly observe that as in the case of symbolic dreaming, we have a pathway of communication between God, leader, and people— patron, writer, and readers. And all in a situation of community involvement and consultation in an event of historical significance. We are used to thinking of writing as a means of bridging a divide, across space, time, or both. But writing and dreams, as they are used in the Hebrew Bible, both bridge divides and create them. Particularly in the Pentateuch, the written word is simultaneously a form of communication between the Lord and his chosen leader and a chasm of


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power between the leader and his people. Before Moses receives the tablets from God on the mount, as part of the purification ritual, [H]e took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient. And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient. (Ex. 24.7)3

Like writing, dreams emphasize the power gap between constituencies, and in both cases, reading bridges that gap. Moses reading the book of the covenant to the people is a way of connecting the Israelites to God, more directly than through the mouth of his chosen one. In the case of dreams, the bridge is built from the other direction: Gathering the people for the interpretation of the king’s dream is a means for the community to involve itself in the royal decision-making process. In both writing and dreams, this specialized form of communication creates a lacuna in order to fill it with sturdier material than had been there before. To gesture briefly to the New Testament, Acts 10 is a wonderful example of the power of the symbolic dream and its interpretation. This section describes the dreams of Cornelius and Peter, and it weaves together message dreams and symbolic dreams. Cornelius has a message dream in Acts 10.5: “Go get Simon Peter.” While Cornelius is obeying, Peter has a symbolic dream, which he cannot make sense of. Luke even writes that Peter “doubted in himself what this vision which he had seen should mean” (Acts 10.17). The knock on the door by Cornelius’s men resolved the meaning of Peter’s dream, but it also is a turning point in the history of the church: This marks the coalescence of the Christian community, with Jews and Romans joining together in a single congregation. As Peter says, “Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company or come unto one of another nation; but God hath showed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (Acts 10.28). In conclusion, one last comment about Daniel is worth making. The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, of course, arrange the individual books differently: The Hebrew Bible places the prophets in the middle, to continue the narrative trajectory of the Jews begun in the histories, while the Christian Bible places the prophets last, so as to hark forward to the coming of Christ. But the two treat the book of 3

Italics added for emphasis.

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Daniel specifically in different ways: To Christians, he is one of the prophets, while to Jews he belongs in the category of wisdom literature. I find this interesting, for it tells us that each tradition values a different aspect of the man. By stressing wisdom—the single trait explicitly required for dream interpretation—the Hebrew Bible upholds the balance of power between king and people, while the Christian tradition treasures the prophetic. I am unwilling to make claims about individual relationships with God (or to use the word “theophany”), but the difference in placement is surely a rich ground for ecclesiological scholars. In any case, as a distinctly non-visionary kind of person, I am very glad the Bible has reserved a place for those of us who can only offer, well, if not wisdom, then at least study, analysis, and interpretation. Those who can, dream; those who cannot, read.

Cassiodorus and Theoderic

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CASSIODORUS AND THEODERIC: A VISION OF REVIVING FALLING CITIES1 Birgitta Lindros Wohl

In ad 458 the following Novel was dispatched by the emperor Majorian from Ravenna: “While we rule the state, it is Our will to correct the practice whose commission we have long detested, whereby the appearance of the venerable city is marred. Indeed, it is manifest that the public buildings, in which the adornment of the entire city of Rome consists are being destroyed everywhere by the punishable recommendation of the office of the prefect of the city. While it is pretended that the stones are necessary for public works, the beautiful structures of the ancient buildings are being scattered, and in order that something small may be repaired, great things are being destroyed.”2 But Bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe wrote, visiting Rome ad 500, “How splendid can the heavenly Jerusalem be, if the earthly Rome thus shines?”3 What can be believed, since these images are contradictory? In any case, they mirror an unsettled time, a reality of the turbulence and decay, the insecurity and downfall of the fifth and sixth century Italy, which is the focus of this study, presenting a picture of a last, brief flourishing of the cities of central Italy, against the background of

1 I would like to dedicate this contribution to the memory of Professor Åke Fridh of Gothenburg University, whose work takes a fundamental place in Cassiodorus studies. We had preliminary plans for a joint study on the present subject matter, cut short by his death in 1997. In spite of his illness, he shared his time generously and knowledge, pointing out some of the relevant passages. 2 Majorian, Novel #4, Corpus Theodosianum, trans. C. Pharr, (Princeton, 1952), pp. 553-554. The immediate interest for us of this edict derives from its date. It is, however, well known that the essence of it is a repetition and echo of prior legislation in the same vein, based on the desire to restrict the mobility of urban building parts; see especially the excellent study of J. Alchermes, “Spolia in Roman Cities of the Late Empire: Legislative Rationales and Architectural Reuse,” DOP 41(1987), 167-178 for an analysis of Novel #4, pp. 176-178; see also further comments below, 7, n. 34. 3 PL 65, col. 131, as translated by M.J. Wilson, “Towards a History of Theoderic’s Building Program,” DOP 42 (1988), 73-96, esp. 74.

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destruction and decline. 4 In fact the Ostrogoth period I refer to— approximately forty years—was surrounded by deep shadows on both sides. Before came Theoderic’s war of accession against Odoacer (489493), and after followed the Gothic wars of the Byzantine reconquest of Italy (535-562), one reason why the Ostrogothic interlude has been regarded as a “Golden Age,” both by ancient writers and later historians.5 The personalities of the age had the fortune or misfortune of living in “interesting times” and thus are witnesses to the large and chaotic triangular drama between Rome (old power), Ravenna (new power), and Constantinople (real power). The Ostrogothic period owes its reputation (and fascination?) to several colorful personalities. First Theoderic, the rather tragic figure of the Arian vice roy/king.6 Raised as a hostage in the East, in Byzantium, he became a fervent supporter of Italy, a solicitous restorer of many Italian cities. Sent as governor of the West from the Byzantine court, his legal position always remained ambiguous vis-à-vis Constantinople—in fact, if not in the letter— something that colored his reign and policies, and eventually undid all his efforts. Though popular and sincerely admired in many quarters, his initial practice of justice and goodwill crumbled in his last years, under the pressure and threat from both east and west, and the ensuing wavering loyalty of the Romans. At present, however, we are primarily interested in his actions as urban restorer, not his military exploits. He could in principle not make laws, but merely edicts, implement the laws, interpret them, deal with petitions etc. However, 4 On the present scholarly objection to the notions of “decline” and “fall,” and the ensuing debate, see e.g. J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, “The Uses and Abuses of the Concept of ‘decline’ in Later Roman History, or was Gibbon Politically Incorrect?” in Recent Research in Late-Antique Urbanism, ed. Luke Lavan (Portsmouth, RI, 2001), pp. 233238, and the subsequent responses by A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins, M. Whittow and L. Lavan, pp. 238-245; see especially B. Ward-Perkins’ proposal that in urban archaeology the terminology of “decline” is still valid. 5 See esp. Procopius, Gothic Wars V, 1.27-28, ed. and trans. H.B. Dewing (repr. 1993), pp. 10-13; also the Panegyricus by Ennodius, Ennodii Opera Omnia, ed. F. Vogel (Berlin, 1885), pp. 203-214; and Anonymus, Valesianus 12.60, trans., J. Rolfe (London, 1972), pp. 544-545. For an extensive recent bibliography, see CAH, vol. 14, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors. ad 425-600 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 991-1101. 6 A thorough listing of the most important works on Theoderic (through 1988) is found in Wilson, “Towards a History,” p. 73, ns. 1-2, and some more recent in CAH, vol. 14 (n. 4 above); for older works and a thorough overview also of the archaeological aspects of Theoderic’s work, see G. della Valle, “Teoderico e Roma,” in Rendiconti della accedemia di archeologia, lettere e belle arti, N.S. 34 (1959), 119-176, esp. 119, n. 1.


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he certainly tried to stretch his powers, and demonstration of their trappings, as his sense of royal mission and self-importance grew.7 To the court in Ravenna were drawn many Roman supporters of the Goths, e.g. Cassiodorus, whose edited official letters Variae are at the center of our attention here. They provide an extraordinary window into the civic administration in its battle against urban decay and downfall of the early 6th century. The details of his official career are well known: born into a wealthy, land-owning family in Calabria, he started his cursus honorum young, in Rome, following in his father’s footsteps.8 Because close to the court and to Theoderic, who utilized his rhetorical talents, and admired his learning in general, Cassiodorus rose to several high ranking positions: quaestor, magister officiorum, and finally praefectus pretoriae of Italy, the last held after Theoderic’s death (526).9 In Variae he is Theoderic’s mouthpiece, but in fact probably considerably more than that, as he seems to have earnestly shared in the concerns for stemming the urban decline, fired by the same admiration for Rome and her past greatness. In spite of having served the Ostrogoth camp closely and enthusiastically, he managed to survive the east-west power struggle. Though he ended up frustrated in his worldly ambitions, he was able to safely withdraw to his estates in Squillace, Calabria, to live out a long life in religious contemplation and theological studies in his famous library, founding what has been regarded as one of the earliest monastic communities, Vivarium. But not all Romans attached to the court in Ravenna ended up so fortunate, as we know from the fates of the Roman aristocrats Boëthius and his father-in-law Symmachus. Both served the Ostrogoth government, are addressed in Variae, but were both executed on (probably) trumped up charges for treason,10 caught in the maelstrom of the 7

On Theoderic’s attitude to his own position, see Wilson, “Towards a History,” pp. 74-76. 8 The bibliography on Cassiodorus, his life and works, is voluminous, especially English: see J.J. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus (Berkeley, 1979), with ample bibliography of earlier periods. Since 1979, see S.J.B. Barnish, Cassiodorus: Variae (Liverpool, 1992), pp. 189-194. For older works, see della Valle, “Teoderico,” pp. 123-124, n. 3. 9 A good overview and analysis of Cassiodorus’ official posts and their power and relation to Variae, is found in A. Gillette, “The Purposes of Cassiodorus’ Variae,” in After Rome’s Fall, Essays Presented to W. Goffart, ed. A. Callander Murray (Toronto, 1998), pp. 37-50. See also Barnish, XXXIX-LIII. 10 For Boëthius, see e.g. OCD, 3rd edition (Oxford, 1996); also M.T. Gibson, Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence (Oxford, 1981); for Boethius and Symmachus’ circle, see A. Momigliano, “Cassiodorus and the Culture of his Time,” in Studies

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growing split between east and west, between the aristocracy of those devoted to Rome and its emperor in Constantinople, and those devoted to the Ostrogoths in Ravenna. The position of old Romans like Boëthius and Symmachus had probably always remained somewhat distant towards the Goths. Their philosophy and leanings were Greco-Roman, not embracing barbarians, such as the Goths.11 In this precarious balance between the increasingly suspicious Byzantine power in the East, and the various restless Germanic and Gallic powers in the West, Theoderic created a temporary hiatus in the deconstruction of ancient Rome and Italy’s past glory. The confluence of restorative initiatives depended on timing: on funds available and willingly given, and on the desire and vision of two men in crucial positions.12 These official letters are rare documents of regulatory attitudes at the time, mostly in the name of Theoderic, a few in the name of the Gothic successor rulers, touching on a number of issues of civic administration. Cassiodorus has by some writers been regarded as simply an objective, administrative functionary, carrying out orders, without much personal engagement.13 The letter publication would then be merely a typical act of a literary man, for the conventional reasons given in his own preface: the urging of friends, a desire to provide models for official documents. These topical explanations have probably some truth, but I propose there is much more to his motivation, more than literary vanity, or convention. in Historiography (New York, 1966), pp. 181-210; also J. Moorhead, “Boethius and Romans in Ostrogoth Service,” Historia 27 (1978), 604-612. Procopius reports on the two killings and Theodosius’ remorse: Gothic Wars V, 1.32-39, Loeb III, pp. 12-15. 11 I am not commenting specifically on the political aspects of Cassiodorus’ career, on his relationship to these men, and the fact that he never mentions their death, though he succeeded Boëthius and may have been related to him. 12 The fundamental modern editions are Theodor Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, MGH XII (Berlin, 1894), and A. Fridh, Cassiodorus: Variae, CCSL 96 (Lund, 1973); bibliography for Variae, XXI-XXIII. English translations are incomplete: Th. Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus (London, 1986) includes all letters but with frequent abbreviations and summaries; S.J.B. Barnish’s translation contains selected letters, but sparse material relevant to the present study. His Introduction is, however, rich and the bibliography useful (see above, n. 7). Commentaries and interpretations of the text from a literary, grammatical, or administrative point of view are many, foremost the various contributions by Å. Fridh. For other studies on Variae, particularly relevant to the present issue, see subsequent discussions and notes. References to other works by Cassiodorus are found in e.g. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, XI-XII. 13 E.g. Gillette, “The Purposes” (see above, n. 8).


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Naturally the letters are burdened by the taste for rhetorical superfluity of the time, of heavy use of metaphor and digression. But the obvious editorial process the letters underwent for primarily political reasons after the fall of the Ostrogoths, has probably had very little effect on the 25 letters dealing with the repair/restoration both of Rome, Ravenna and other cities, which are our immediate concern. The rhetorical digressions have at times been so irritating to commentators that the content has been almost disregarded. But for anyone interested in the style, it pays off to rummage for the real tidbits: e.g. an order to the city prefect (X.30)14 to repair the bronze elephants on Via Sacra, is interlarded with an extensive description of the life and habits of elephants. Or Symmachus is praised for restoring the Theatre of Pompey (IV.51),15 which ends up not only with a lengthy description of the beauty of the vaults, but also with a flowery excursus on the history of Tragedy, Comedy and Pantomime. However, the recurring tendencies to odysseys into a world of learning, gain credence and reality by the political shadows surrounding the enterprise—and we recall that Cassiodorus at the very end of the Ostrogoth rule (535), encouraged pope Agapithus to create a library and school of Christian higher learning in his house on the Caelian hill (foreshadowing Cassiodorus’ own library at Vivarium). 16 What were then the undeniable gains in that relatively brief moment between the prior neglect after the departure of Constantine I and the disastrous effects of the Gothic Wars after Theoderic? There were, of course, new structures, mostly limited to Ravenna and Verona (palaces, colonnaded streets, mausoleum, churches, baths, city walls). Though these are not generally part of restoration or shoring up of the old, one aspect is important for the conclusion that there is every reason to believe that Theoderic was looking to imperial models from Rome as well as from Constantinople, and both in building types and his own behavior.17 Secondly, new or revived relevant offices as aides for the King’s efforts. Most offices depended on the Praefectus Urbis as supervisor. 14 Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori, pp. 317-318; Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 396-397; Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, pp. 442-444; see also O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 101-102. 15 Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori, pp. 138-139; Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 177-179; Barnish, Cassiodorus: Variae, pp. 79-82; Hodgkin (brief summary), The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 263. 16 Institutiones, praef. 1, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 3-6; see O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 31, 178-185. 17 See Wilson, “Towards a History” (above n. 3).

22


Thus Theoderic tried to keep intensive control over Roman building affairs. These offices include – A Curator Statuarum, reinstituted in ad 500 during his visit to Rome, but originating with Constantine I. There are frequent references to statues in danger. – A Comes Romanus (if separate from the prior office?) was in charge of the special nightly surveillance against theft. – An Architectus publicorum with a staff of engineers supervised the conditions of old and new constructions. – A Comes Formarum Urbis saw to the aqueducts and the public supply of water. – A Comes Portus urbis Romae was the harbor master. – A Tribunus Voluptatum, a head of amusements supervised the public buildings for theatres and shows.18 Thirdly, Maintenance and restoration of old buildings. A triumphal visit by Theoderic to Rome in ad 500 was a pivotal moment in this pursuit, when he made explicit declarations and promises to the cheering populus, causing our source to pronounce him “amator fabricarum et restaurator civitatum.”19 The epithets were well deserved, in light of the impressive list of his conservationist efforts all over Italy. If this does not qualify for an Ostrogoth “renaissance,” we can settle for an honest renovatio. And not a minor one either, since we know that the term renovatio could also be applied to fairly insignificant efforts or repair.20 All repairs were done with fresh bricks. Theoderic’s stamps were found in great numbers all over the city, according to the ever-present archaeologist Lanciani. They came from a revived brick-yard (Portus Licini), which probably was the place both of production and depository/storage. Its exact location is debated.21 18 There is some ambiguity about the distribution of assignments between these titles at the time of Theoderic, see della Valle, “Teoderico” (above n. 6), pp. 131-134; also A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vols. 1-2 (Baltimore, 1964), 1: 313, 691, 695, 708, 711. The prime document is Notitia Dignitatum of ca. ad 395, of which an Introduction and listing is found in Jones, 2: 1417-1450; see also R. Lanciani, The Destruction of Ancient Rome (London, 1901), pp. 38, 78-79. 19 Anonymous, Valesianus 70 (above, n. 4), pp. 552-553. 20 P. Brown, “Art and Society in Late Antiquity,” in Age of Spirituality: A Symposium, ed. K. Weitzmann (Princeton, 1980), pp. 17-27, 19. Wilson’s work stresses the large scope of Theoderic’s efforts. 21 R. Lanciani, p. 78. Variae I.25 (Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori, p. 28, Fridh, Cassiodorus, p. 33, Barnish, p. 18) orders repair and resumed output from the brickyard; see also della Valle, “Teoderico” (above n. 6), pp. 135-143.


23

In the announcement of his provisions for urban care of Rome, the Palatine Palace was a priority, a facility maintained longer by the Byzantine administration than any other Roman structure, probably into the seventh century (after all, Otto III was able to stay there in ad 1000). 200 pounds from the wine tax was to be given according to Theoderic each year for the upkeep of the palace and the walls.22 Although no specifics are given for the care of the palace, a famous letter of Variae (VII.5) is so explicit as to be called the “formula curae palatii.”23 It advocates (to the palace architect) the necessity of palatial splendor, to give a proper outward expression of power. Interestingly enough, also the harmony of the parts is an explicitly required ingredient for success. It is uncertain which palace is aimed at—if any in particular of the ones we know of: Ravenna, Verona and Pavia especially. But one thing is certain: Theoderic was using architecture as a tool for imperial propaganda, in line with earlier emperors, and with contemporary Constantinople, which he knew well personally. This launches us into the notion of topoi of urban concerns—of which VENUSTAS (graceful elegance), and ORNAMENTA (embellishments) were de rigeur for a city at the time. It is a particularly repeated priority for Rome and its public structures. Various ordinances speak of the “marvels,” “wonders,” the “unsurpassed splendor of Rome,” “ so much that amazes in Rome;” “Rome has a world-wide reputation to defend,” etc., etc. I am not suggesting that the presence of topoi indicates an absence of genuine feeling, only that the genre has its demands of slogans. The main thrust of the topoi in Variae falls in line with and echoes similar occurrences in earlier legislation of the Corpus Theodosianum: the sense of urban aesthetics is a measure of civic pride, a subject matter firmly located in rhetoric.24

22

Anonymous, Valesianus 67 (above n. 4), pp. 550-551. Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori, pp. 204-205, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 264-265, Hodgkin (abbreviated), The Letters of Cassiodorus, pp. 323-324; see also B. WardPerkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1984), pp. 157-178 for all palace constructions by Theoderic; see della Valle, “Teoderico” (above n. 6), also for a discussion of the archaeology of the Palatine palace, pp. 157-162. 24 See e.g Alchermes, passim, for discussion of such administrative references in the Corpus Theodosianum. In the Byzantine east the relationship between the physical reality of the urban condition and its emphasis in rhetorical literature is well explored by H. Saradi, “The Kallos of the Byzantine City: The Development of a Rhetorical Topos and Historical Reality,” Gesta 34 (1995), 37-56, with the interesting conclusion that there seems to be an inverse relationship between urban reality and rhetorical 23

24


The unsurpassed wonders named include especially the Forum of Trajan, the Capitoline, the aqueducts, the underground rivers of the sewers, and the circus (quite predictable and vital targets). Cassiodorus takes us to thickets overgrowing the water-channels,25 and to spigots diverted from the public good to private gain.26 He makes us walk through “forests of statues,” even at night to guard against thieves of metal27—all of course to implant the idea of the ever vigilant care of the King. And it is of course true, the King is responsible for “restoring monuments to their ancient splendor,”28 for “buildings rising again to new life,”29 and that “nothing mediocre can be tolerated in Rome,” 30 etc. The repetitions of the phrases do not have to inspire any mistrust. Was perhaps the statement by Fulgentius of Ruspe 931 a result of Theoderic’s beneficial actions? And when it comes to repair of more ordinary buildings, what is the policy? Here the edicts about “alienation” come into play, i.e. the laws about the state divesting itself of buildings already in ruinous or semiruinous state.32 Can they be sold or given away? In III.29 we learn that alienation can carry the right both to ownership and to passing it on mentions. A similar conclusion is reached by J. Onians, dealing primarily with Latin sources, “Abstraction and Imagination in Late Antiquity,” Art History 3 (1980), 1-23. 25 Variae V.38 (Ravenna), Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 164, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 211-212, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, pp. 286-287, pp. 324326; VII.6, Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, pp. 205-206, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 265-267. 26 Variae III.31, Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, pp. 127-128, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 119-120, Barnish, Cassiodorus: Variae, pp. 61-63, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, pp. 213-214; also Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity (above n. 23), pp. 39, 145-146. 27 Variae VII.13, Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 210, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 272-273, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, pp. 329-330. The masses of statues in Rome are confirmed by many sources, see e.g. Lanciani, The Destruction, esp. pp. 36-46. 28 Variae III.44 (Arles), Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, pp. 100-101, Fridh, Cassiodorus: Variae, p. 127, Barnish, Cassiodorus: Variae, pp. 65-66, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 220. 29 Variae IV.24 (Spoleto), Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, pp. 124-125, Fridh, Cassiodorus, p. 158, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 247 (summary). 30 Variae III.29, Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 94, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 117-118, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 213 (abbrev.). Theoderic’s special care for Rome is documented esp. in Variae III.31 (above n. 26). 31 Above n. 3. 32 Variae VII,44 is regarded as a formula for the phenomenon, Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 224, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 292-293, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, pp. 343-344, also Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity, pp. 207-208.


25

in inheritance.33 Should they be torn down or repaired? In the latter case, the solutions are pragmatic and individual,34 but in general fallen blocks may be transferred and reused—if they go into the restoration of another public building, all in the interest of tidiness and public venustas. This principle of aesthetic harmony in repairs had certainly not always been practiced in prior instances: e.g., in the upper levels of the Colosseum;35 is the emphasis here a warning against such examples? Unfortunately we do not always know which building is intended, since the editing process removed specific names and dates to create an exemplum of official writing. Private citizens are praised for undertaking such matters at their own expense, following a long Roman tradition: e.g. Symmachus (later executed), had apparently worked on a number of houses in Rome before he was charged with the Theatre of Pompey. If, however, a building is too far gone, permission may be granted for removal of unseemly, useless blocks for reuse elsewhere—provided it is for public use.36 Alienation of private buildings is interestingly enough also firmly regulated: such stone may NOT go to another city.37 One wonders of course how much stone had been removed, before the habit was again stamped illegal. How about loop-holes? There must have been many, though we only get glimpses, i.e. in matters on how to interpret the law, bending it to one’s advantage. There is considerable evidence for that in the Codex Theodosianus, simply by virtue of the repetitions of an ordinance. The King himself seems to find occasions, as he does not have to play with the same cards. Thus it is not surprising that he—contrary 33

Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 127, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 117-

118. 34

Again Variae VII.44 (above n. 31), and IV.24 (above n. 29). A. Lanciani, The Destruction (above, n. 18), p. 28 and figs 9 and 10. The patchwork repair, one of many, is dated to the third century, the reigns of Alexander Severus and Decius. 36 Variae II.7, Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 50, Fridh, Cassiodorus, p. 61, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, pp. 174-175, also Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity, p. 212. Already Novel #4 by Majorian from ad 458, (above n. 2), allowed tearing down of buildings in ruinous state, provided the ornamenta were transferred to another public building. 37 Variae I.28, Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, pp. 29-30, Fridh, Cassiodorus, p. 35, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 160 (abbrev.). Variae is here, as in other instances, relying on earlier legal proclamations; alienation to another city was prohibited both in Corpus Theodosianum (e.g. 15.1.1 and 15.1.14), and in Majorian, Novel #4 (see Alchermes, above n. 2, passim). 35

26


to his policy—could request stones lying about to be shipped to him from one city to another.38 A brief summary of the overall careers of Theoderic and Cassiodorus in respect to civic restorations would first point with honest admiration to the scope of the ambition shown: no single ruler had for centuries exhibited such a vision, or could boast such a result. The scope of the action was the extraordinary, not the philosophy behind it. What then joined the two men in this effort? For I feel there was a special link of motivation, not generally emphasized. I suggest they saw eye to eye on the goal of urban policy, but of course for somewhat different reasons, from different historical altitudes, as it were. Theoderic was seeking respectability and bolstering the prestige of his office; the appropriate forms of propaganda were part of his imitation of imperial power. He has been credited with great subtlety and enlightenment in his policies. However, his not always so subtle tendency towards autonomy, his establishing himself as a prince ruler with an ambitious agenda, could not in the long run have gone down well with Constantinople. His delicately balanced position was ambiguous, and endangered by his own actions. In the case of Cassiodorus, I see two specific questions. First, why was he so pulled into the renovation policy of Theoderic? Then, why did he edit the Variae for publication? The answer to both stems from the same source: his genuine admiration for the Ostrogoth king.39 Cassiodorus’ attitude over many years of service was well known and placed him in a precarious political position at the fall of the Ostrogoths and the Byzantine reconquest of Italy. There was no longer much room for the prior tolerance of an Italian official’s admiration for what was now the enemy.

38

In all cases orders are given for delivery to Ravenna: Variae III.9 from Aestunae (Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 84, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 104-105, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 202 (abbrev.), also Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity, p. 212; III.10 from Rome (Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 84, Fridh, Cassiodorus, pp. 105, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 202 abbrev.), V.8 from Faventia (Mommsen, Cassiodorus Senatori Variae, p. 148, Fridh, Cassiodorus, p. 189, Hodgkin, The Letters of Cassiodorus, p. 270 abbrev.). 39 This even took the form of writing a History of the Goths in 12 volumes, now lost. It was started before 526, and may have been completed as early as 519, or in 533; some suggest a revision even continued until ca. 550-551, see Momigliano, “Cassiodorus and Italian Culture of His Time,” in Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), pp. 181-210, 191-195 for the latter view, and O’Donnell, Cassiodorus (above n. 7), pp. 43-54 for the former.


27

The real bond between the two (which in the end proved a liability to the Byzantine court) was, I propose, the fact that they were both, in their own way, outsiders to Rome, who tried to make Italy the centerpiece of the empire again. Theoderic, an aristocratic member of the Amal family of Gothic rulers, and Cassiodorus from a family of provincial Calabrian dignitaries, were both parvenus in the center of power, individuals who came to see, feel and attach themselves to the glorious past of empire with the fervor of converts. The real Roman aristocracy on the other hand, men like Boëthius and Symmachus, were not likely to buy into the Gothic encomium. The cultural and historical roots and education turned most Romans almost automatically away from the barbarian Goths as overlords, while more open to accepting the Greeks of Constantinople (if a choice be necessary).40 The triangle of Rome—Ravenna—Constantinople offered many ethnic ideologies to cope with, and for awhile the balance was managed among the ethnic, religious, geographic and political diversity seeking convivenzia. But the potential of conflict must have been obvious, especially to a man of such complex loyalties as Cassiodorus—a man of Greek learning, Roman affiliations and Gothic sympathies. One might ask at this point: to whom does the past belong? Did a sense of ownership come with performing the acts of preservation and recuperation? With the care of memory? There is not much nostalgia and lamentation in Variae, but an up-beat note of activism: the past is not so far gone it seems—it is recoverable! Or at least that is the impression expressed, though one suspects that moments of despair must have been experienced. Theoderic died in time, one might say, to avoid seeing the destruction of his ambitious plans. Cassiodorus on the other hand must have felt quite threatened at the Byzantine invasion of Italy in 535. He had for decades demonstrated his devotion to the Ostrogoths fallen from favor. So what course did he take? Upon retirement from public life in the late 530s, he is likely to have stayed in Ravenna collecting and editing the Variae.41 And not just for literary vanity, we can assume, but to save his own skin, and the reputation of Theoderic, on which it depended. In this crisis of loyalty it was important to make a diplomatic case for the Ostrogoths. Under the circumstances it was an act 40 41

See della Valle, “Teoderico” (above n. 6), p. 123. See O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 103-105.

28


of bravery, when he witnessed the unraveling of the work of his whole public life. But Cassiodorus survived, though removed to Constantinople for over 10 years, until 554, possibly as a hostage.42 During those years he starts his theological writings, initiating the final phase of his life, culminating in the monastic, literary establishment at Vivarium. Theoderic’s position may have been precarious, and his reign a tight-rope walk, but his rule proved a luminous hiatus in the unavoidable ruin of Rome and other Italian cities to come. The Ostrogoth period was the last strong stand for protection of past monuments. The absence of de facto civic offices of the old kind, including the fading of the senate after the Gothic wars, indicates that Rome was sinking to the position of a provincial city.43 While to some extent paying lip-service to a continuum of Roman traditions, both imperial and papal powers work—without much inhibition—for spoliation, not for conservation in the coming centuries.44 For example, Honorius I (625) removed (with imperial permission) all bronze tiles from the Venus-Roma temple for St. Peter’s.45 Constans II took, during his infamous visit in 664, a resolute, and mostly mercenary stand towards Rome’s famous glory: he wanted its attributes for himself, and ordered the removal of masses of bronzes to Constantinople, including the bronze tiles of Pantheon, even though it had become an operational church by then.46 Hadrian I gave Charlemagne the famous permission in the 780’s to transfer to Aachen “mosaics, marbles and other materials from both floors and walls” of the palace in Ravenna.47 By now the pope no longer needed imperial approval.

42 It is not known with certainty whether he went willingly or not to Constantinople, nor how he got there, or the precise length of his stay; for a discussion of the various theories and likely scenarios, see O’Donnell, Cassiodorus, pp. 105-107. 43 This in spite of the official Byzantine proclamation, the so-called Pragmatic Sanction of Rome in 554, assuring the city of funds for the preservation of its public structures; see Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity, p. 47; the deplorable condition of the city during the wars is recorded by Procopius, reporting on the citizens feeding on nettles growing abundantly amid the buildings (Gothic Wars, VII, 17.13, Loeb IV, pp. 298-299); see also Jones, The Later Roman Empire (above n. 18), 1: 711. 44 Restoration of the admired aqueducts must be considered a utilitarian rather than an aesthetic act, see Ward-Perkins, especially pp. 143-149. 45 Liber Pontificalis, 3 vols., ed. L. Duchesne (Paris, 1886-1957), 1: 323. 46 Ibid., 1: 343. 47 Codex Carolinus, p. 81, see MGH, Epistola III, p. 614.


29

In citing these well-known examples, we notice that all this exploitation and dismantling is told in an unsentimental, robustly factual manner, without any regrets. There is no real trace of an aesthetic policy after the Ostrogoths, but one assumes, a good deal of financial convenience. What follows after the Gothic Wars with regard to the image of physical Rome, can fall under the heading of archaeological cataclysm, or at least archaeology of relentless deconstruction. The mental image of Rome however, is another story, where memory has proven a most durable agent in creating a reality all of its own.

30


The Lament and Augustine

31

THE LAMENT AND AUGUSTINE: VISIONS OF DISINTEGRATION AND TRANSFORMATION Nancy van Deusen How doth the city lie solitary, that was full of people How is she become a widow She that was great amongst the nations and princess among the provinces How is she become a tributary!

So begins the Lamentations of Prophet Jeremiah. Further on in the book of Jeremiah itself: Oh that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears That I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.

Songs of loss, they are, certainly, recognizably so, and there are many of them, not only in these two books of the Old Testament, but elsewhere; open in the clarity and immediacy of their vision, the simplicity and universality of the message they convey, leading then to a corresponding clarity of genre. What was enjoyed is gone; the satisfaction and bounty of former years no longer there, only the memory remains from that which had brought so much comfort. How much better it would have been if one had not been so happy, if one had not past joys with which to reproach oneself. Better always sightless, ever poor, than to have lost what one had enjoyed, had even taken for granted. For the way it is today, may not always be so. The proud city lies in ruins, the people have been conquered, forcibly taken away—exiled—and only this sad, eloquent, prophet finds expression in the midst of grief to tell of it. Characteristic as a genre in the Old Testament, recognizable in the Middle Ages as the Lamentationes of the Prophet Jeremiah, sung not only during Holy Week, but taken up as a compositional project, for example, by Orlando di Lasso in the sixteenth century, or by Igor Stravinsky in the twentieth; the medieval Latin or vernacular planctus—in the provençal vernacu-

32

Nancy van Deusen

lar, planh—the lament can be traced throughout western music history. There are, as well, analogies in other world music civilizations that can be related to a cross-cultural identification and study of the Lament through centuries of its importance. Laments are, after all, universal, and certainly transcend time and place. Who has not, in fact, felt the acute pain, poignancy, and perplexity—the sheer desolation, in fact—of loss. But there is more to it than this. This contribution to a volume on the topic of “Dreams and Visions,” will explore the emotional content of music and why laments as the vision of an emotional state nearly always either bring up the subject of music or include it in a powerful partnership of tone and text in a dynamic coalition of music and words, specifically as sound substance, and the implications of this coalition for the expression of loss itself. If sound is a substance, than loss and a sense of loss is also an emotional substance, is it not? Medieval writers thought so. We follow this train of thought regarding sound as substance further. Although certainly not alone in this, throughout his long life, from his conversion in the 380s, ce, to his death in 430, Augustine continued to be amazed that music was so powerful, and expressed in his writing, particularly on the subject of music, De musica, ca. 387, what was the source of music’s own particular potency. He perceived, as well, that music was addictive. Although Augustine thought about what, in music, produced effect—and, to a certain extent was both in awe of, and mystified by, music’s obvious dynamism—it appears that the great theologian never completely settled the question to his own satisfaction. It was not for lack of effort. Augustine’s treatise on music was one of the first of his youthful, post-conversion writings, written together, or interspersed, with his works concerning the mind and soul. His work, however, on music, rather than indicating, as some have suggested, a residual link to his old pagan life, or a post-adolescent expedition into a subject he quickly found tiresome—as others have proposed—provided a basis from which the major preoccupations of a long and productive writing career emerged.1 From the very onset of Augustine’s treatise on music—and the beginning of the long journey his thought-life would follow— Augustine seems convinced that accent, pulsus, not tone, was the primary component, and a key to significant answers in a quest for 1

Cf. articles “Music, Rhythm,” “Musica, de,” in Augustine Through the Ages, An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A. (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999).


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music’s quintessential power. This has come as a disappointment to many. Peter Brown, for example, laments the fact that Augustine’s promised treatise on melody never appeared. (To be sure, Augustine expresses regret as well in his Retractiones.)2 We should, however, take Augustine’s priorities seriously, and, rather than longing for a treatise that he apparently never wrote, look more closely at the extensive treatise on music that he, in fact, did write, noting that Augustine’s De musica provided a compendium of concepts and terms for describing music, and offered, as well, a fascinating compendium of accentual patterns. Augustine’s treatise on music, so far as we know, was written in conjunction with, and at approximately the same time, as his treatises on the mind or the soul, that is, around 387, C.E. In considering the soul, Augustine, it would appear, is concerned with what Aristotle had named (in his treatise on the soul, De anima) “soulish substance,” that is, material, quantity, and products of the soul; in other words, how what is invisible can be quantified, described, and used—how one can chart its content and designate its effect. The relationship, then, between soul and accent is completely obvious, it would seem, to Augustine, in that accent within speech, and combined with musical tone, has a material reality. Shared invisible, yet completely substantial, material then provided content to the recognizably musical tone, as well as the sound used in pronouncing, for example, the vowel a, and this is also clear today in music notation, in that one designates a certain pitch as a.3 Both the a that designates the vowel in speech, and the a that designates a musical tone are figurae—the indicative outline that separates and presents a characteristic shape from the generality of sound substance. Accent also enlivened speech, providing characteristic format to the emotional substance of passion, that, as material content, could be discerned within what was said. An example of this is that one is able 2 Cf. P.R.L. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1967, repr. 1969), p. 1, as well as article “Retractationes” in Augustine Through the Ages. One is reminded of Aristotle’s treatise on Comedy, mentioned in the Poetics but either never written or no longer extant—what is not available is held in high esteem. 3 Augustine, De musica, PL, Lib. I, Cap. I: Sonorum certar dimensiones observare non ad grammaticam spectat, sed ad musicam. Both grammar and music use the material of sound, a dimension that is certain and clear, but more expanded in the case of music, and as, he continues, has to do, as well, with modus and tempus, since music employs sound within time. Within modus resides significance, rather, diverse significances: praeter id quod significatae diversa est, nihil tibi videtur sonus distari?

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to tell that the person with whom one is speaking is angry, not only by the fact that the face of one’s discussion partner has suddenly turned red; but also by the clear and abrupt accents he or she uses, thus disclosing by characteristic figurae and gestures the distinct passion, pathos, or mode—the Latin modus a translation of the Greek pathos— of anger. Accent is invisible, makes use of material and its presence or absence is actual, constituting a bridge between the unseen and the everyday; the clear and plain, and the profoundly mysterious, since one uses accent constantly in everyday speech, and can, of course, make quite trivial statements, using accent freely. Of course, greetingcard verse is a case in point, but ordinary verbal exchange is likewise full of accent, though its patterns are not so painfully obvious. From an utterly basic consideration of quantifiable “soulish substance”—whatever that might be—which is Augustine’s project at that time of his life, his concept of accent emerges; and it should be kept in mind, I believe, that Augustine is not simply more or less repeating what he has gleaned on the subject of accentual patterns from the Roman education in rhetorical commonplaces and delivery that he had received, but, rather, that he is considering the whole concept of accentual pattern within an intensely interesting development of his views concerning, specifically, the soul. Accent within patterns raised up for him characteristic formats that were both substantial and enlivened, and contained within themselves emotional content. His concern for format-generating factors, as he delineates them in De musica, then, belong to a much larger concern for accessing and assessing this emotional substance, not only because that could possibly explain music’s power upon the listener, but also because it could offer a way of thinking about music’s long-term effects. It is instructive to proceed as Augustine does, noting the increments of sound-soulish substance as he discusses them, one by one, culminating at the conclusion of his work on music, with what were for him ultimate, yet unseen, realities.4 A connection that is crucial to the entire work is established at its very beginning. Augustine writes that he did not want to remain where 4 That Augustine concludes with the implications of what he has written within the area of God’s nature and power, that is, theology, is an indication that he, in fact, considered his work on music to have reached completion, since theology is the point, eventually, of the study of music as Augustine explains in his treatise on the order that exists amongst the disciplines (De ordine, PL 32, CSEL 36, CCSL 29, with English translation, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, ed. J.E. Rotelle (New York, 1990–).


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language stayed, that is, with what he calls “certainties” of sound substance within vowel and consonant, but, rather, go on to the juncture of language or the single letter, figura, of grammar, with tone. Music, although it uses the same material as speech, that is, sound, is more directed and multi-dimensional, in that it uses not one but many tones, as Augustine notes.5 Further, music employs the combination of contained “pieces” of time, tempora, or measured increments of time and musical pitch that one recognizes as being utterly characteristic, therefore memorable, and which separate music from ordinary speech which also employs sound and occurs within time. These varied and diverse voices, literally, voci, are shaped (artificiosum); they are contained, therefore, are corporeal, that is, remain within the body of their containment, and, because they are distinctive and separate, also have names, so that they are differentiated one from the other. This is an interesting analogy of Augustine, that can also be imagined; that just as the body contains flesh within the limits of the body, and keeps that flesh, bones, and blood within the body, so sound is contained within the limits of, for example, the consonance in a word like cat. In the process of naming and containing, these varied and diverse voices receive their identity. Musica quid sit; modulatio quid sit, asks Augustine, in two questions, which open his second chapter—questions which would resonate through the entire body of writing concerning music as a discipline—what then is music; what is connection?6 What, indeed, is 5 Augustine’s De musica does not simply contain a reiteration of poetical patterns that were trendy at the time, nor was it a compendium of his own educational experience in the arts of grammar and rhetoric. There was, at the time of his writing, no other treatise specifically on music; hence the treatise provided a way of approaching music—turning music into a discipline based on substance and measurable quantity—as well as vocabulary that was held in common with the other arts, but at the same time channeled specifically and directly into musical use as exemplification for the other arts dealing with particularity, relationship and motion. The consequences of both of these, that is methodology for approaching music, and a systematic vocabulary that related it to the other arts, resulted in increasing clarification of the analogical, exemplary discipline of music and its place of “ministry” within, and related to, the other artes. 6 What is music, what is conjunction within musical syntax, were two questions which opened nearly every treatise on music from the late-ninth to the present day. The question formulates the parameters of a consideration of musical substance, or the material and measurement discipline of music which exemplifies the particulars (as ordinal numbers in arithmetic), conjunctive lines (the province of geometry) and motion (the motion of heavenly bodies in astronomy, motion generally within the thirteenth-century science of physics).

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the nature of relationship itself as a principle? Music actually combines force and reason, two opposites, or contrary, opposing directions or intentionalities, writes Augustine. This is all very well and good, but how is it accomplished, he implies, and goes on to answer his own question. There is force in the individual stroke or pulse, which, successfully carried out, and maintained, strokes the ear, is observed and commented upon by the intellectual capacity, and remains, then, within the memory. In other words, both intellect and feeling are simultaneously engaged by the individual pulse, thus combining energy, force, and reflection.7 Pulse, pulsus, then is the seat of music’s power—the stress of accent combined with varied and diverse tones. Stress within feet, of course, had been discussed often enough, and both were readily apparent in all of the works of Latin literature upon which Augustine’s education had been based, and especially in Virgil, which Augustine knew well enough to quote, one way or the other, either exactly or slightly changed, approximately 10,000 times.8 The source of music’s potency, for Augustine, is a particular combination of stress and tone, a combination that formed an enlivened material or substance that could be molded, shaped, and constructed. This was not spiritual substance, essentially unseen, rather actual material, made of time and sound, that pulsated with life. This soulish substance of the pulse both contained, and was infused with life. Surely musical substance is sweet to the taste; we desire it, wrote Augustine. This fact has two origins. First, we have a hunger for material, and accordingly, for the sonorous material itself, as one hungers for food; secondly, we are attracted to the connections that are established, the copulationes, that can be observed in music, that draw us to it, and keep us there, riveted to the ongoing motion that these connections establish. We are moved to travel along from one tone to the next, especially when that succession of tones makes sense, is recog7 “Whatever is delightful to the senses commends itself to the memory, and according to bodily movement, becomes attached to its own imitation (cf. PL 32, col. 1088).” 8 See Sabine Mac Cormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley, 1998), who writes in her preface, pp. xviif: “Vergil and Augustine are very different authorial personalities. Vergil wrote slowly, with much revising, and the volume of all his poems will fit into a small purse. Augustine, by contrast, usually wrote rather quickly and his works take up several feet on the shelves of a library. But the two share one characteristic: they both wrote for their contemporaries at large, not merely for the erudite few, and they wrote about topics that captured the imagination.”


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nizable, or tempts us by its perceived propulsive motion.9 Beginning with individual increments of material, syllable, and tone, Augustine goes on to pes, or combinations of syllable, tone, and pulse, repeated in varied and diverse patterns.10 Finally he goes on to contained bodies of pattern, or verses. Not only does Augustine designate each individual contained pulse as an enlivened body, but the contained verse, consisting of many pulses, is also a body, and in this way shows us what a body is like, that is, material within containment, capable of movement, growth, and the actualization of potential. Where did Augustine get these priorities? Part of the answer surely lies in his own reading of what would have been already Latin classics. But there is a feature that seems particularly to absorb Augustine, and that is the notion of material soulish substance, its properties, or qualities and the sizes and shapes into which this soulish substance could be constructed. We know that these three priorities, that is, the nature of the unseen substance of sound and its relationship to that of soul were on Augustine’s mind at approximately the same time because he, at just that time of his life, wrote about them. The subjects, understandably, also remained with him long after he had finished the three 9 See Book II, Cp. I...Quare illud nunc quaere, utrum sonus versuum alignando te aliqua per aures voluptate commoveret. Synonyms for deliciousness, delectability abound (especially in Chapter II, but also throughout the work, to return with force in Chapter IV): Scientia cur in musica definitione ponitur...nam et numerosus est et suavissimus ille cantus, et, nisi fallor, tempori congruit...qui sensu quodam ducti bene canunt, hoc est memorose id faciunt ac suaviter, quamvis interrogati de ipsis numeris, vel de intervallis acutarum graviumque vocem It is also interesting to observe that musical sound itself, and for itself, is delicious and attractive to the aural faculty in a way that is not duplicated by visual stimuli. Hence caricature, for example, of a composer such as Beethoven was generated during his own time—and continues to this day—in which outstanding features or gestures are accentuated with comic or absurd results, whereas, musical caricature is both much less frequent, more difficult to accomplish, and much more complex as an aural statement. One need only to compare the many caricatures of Liszt made during his own lifetime, with the sonorous phenomenon of his music to realize that sound itself is attractive, and on a profound level. This is also due to the material nature of sound, which explains why one has a hunger for it as one has an appetite for food, and, on the other hand, can be satiated with a superfluity of music. 10 This, of course, separates Augustine at this point from a twentieth-century reading audience, and is responsible for the fact that the treatise has, generally speaking, been ignored during this century, also by musicologists. It is also interesting that the only complete English translation of De musica available even today is that made by a Latin philologist, W.F. Jackson Knight, who also wrote a slim but important volume on Accentual Symmetry in Vergil (Oxford, 1939) in which he showed that the several hundred varied and diverse accentual patterns in Virgil’s Aeneid both contained and also expressed emotional substance. This point will be developed below.

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relatively small writing projects, De musica, De quantitate anime, and De qualitate anime. What, exactly, is the stuff of the soul, asked Augustine, and in this question, he was asking the same question as Aristotle had posed six centuries previously in his own treatise concerning the soul that would be translated into the Latin De anima in what we know as the great Aristotelian reception of the late twelfth, early thirteenth centuries. Soul is not easy to describe, it seems. But soulish substance can be shaped, molded, formed into small and large-sized pieces, all of which are delimited and contain properties. Although soulish substance, was, needless to say, difficult to trace, Augustine noted in several contexts that sound displayed the same characteristics as soulish substance, and, furthermore was, as he stated in The Order That Exists Amongst the Disciplines, a sure thing. Sound in terms of single sounds within the grammatical construction of language, as well as single tones, could be taught to children because, unlike soulish substance, they were certainties; that is, either they were present or they were not. Not only, then, was sound extremely useful in revealing the nature of soulish substance, in fact, it constituted soulish substance, but, furthermore, a single, delimited, sound such as a consonant, b, displayed the same characteristics as a single tone. Both delimited, self-contained sounds, to Augustine’s mind, were filled with the energizing force of soulish substance. Each separate tone contained substance which, in turn, because it is substantial, contained properties. Soulish substance, and seen, what we consider to be material, substance are indistinguishable, and, furthermore, soulish substance, as well as seen substance, can be delimited into autonomous pieces as chunks. The craft of the one who works consciously with this particular material was displayed in the appropriate juxtaposition of these pieces of soulish material, in the act of joining, of bringing together, of conjunction. So far, well and good. We still have, however, difficulty understanding the properties of unseen substance, such as the qualities of the soul, just as Augustine has it, not only in De musica, but in his treatises on the soul as well. Do not be discouraged by this conversation. Augustine himself states that all of this is of the highest abstraction, leading, eventually to the ultimate unseen substance, not only of the human soul, but of God himself. But everything that he carefully, patiently, explains in these four youthful treatises of his, that probe the ways in which one learns, the capacity for learning, the properties of the substance learned, and


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the substance that learns it, namely, his treatises on The Order That Exists Amongst the Disciplines, The Qualities of the Soul, Concerning Music, and the Quantities of the Soul, written as it seems, more or less at the same time, ca. 387, can be explicated in particular pieces, of contained, modular sound—pieces of sound that become more and more obvious, and seem to explain themselves with repetition. A pulse, pulsus, with its accompanying accent, then, can be said—as he does—to constitute a body that contains life itself. And so, after having made this observation, he goes on to describe what he means in terms of patterns of pulses, that is: short short short short/ short short short short long long long long/ long long long long

and more combinations of longs and short, often in contrast pairs of Long/short, long/short; long/short, long/short long short short/ long short short, and many more.

Each pulse, because it is substance itself, and, contains an energizing life-giving force, also contains both characteristic motions, as well as distinctive, recognizable, properties. This soulish substance contains emotional substance, as our own soulish substance also contains emotional substance. In other words, each one of these individual pulses, both singly and together both contain within themselves, and effect, emotion. Augustine’s long long long long, long long long long, contain and give forth emotional qualities, one at a time, each as an ensouled body of soulish substance, and altogether within the body of the verse, versus. If we consider again the Prophet Jeremiah, in the English translation of his first Lament: How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is she become as a widow she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces How is she become a tributary! or Jeremiah’s Oh that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people,

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we observe a long long long long long, and a cadence, almost a drip drip drip drip of the encapsulated body of each syllable, one after the other. And Augustine was right about placing his discussion of encapsulated emotional substance in his treatise on music, since the joining of syllable with tone makes each a long, encapsulated, pulse, resulting then in long, long, long, long. The pairing of syllable with tone effectively slows down the pace one would use in simply reading or saying these contained verses. Could there be a kind of substance that, in Augustine’s language, contains the emotional material of the very essence of lament, of loss; and that the characteristic property in this case of lament, is, on an extremely basic, fundamental, level, perceived at all times, by everyone, everywhere? We move on from Jeremiah the prophet, writing possibly in the seventh century before the birth of Christ, and from Augustine, thinking about his pulses and verses in the fourth century, Common Era, to Peter Abelard, teaching and making his way during the first half of the twelfth century as, concurrently, new, recent translations of Aristotle, especially the Physics—but his other works as well—coincided with the formation of the first Augustinian houses—a noteworthy coincidence to be sure. The case could be, and has been made, most recently by John Marenbon, in his book, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard,11 that Abelard was an exceptionally influential teacher, and that his teaching activity centered primarily on the new Aristotelian learning, namely, the logical tools or logica nova that became available through the early translations of Aristotle, from the twelfth century through the thirteenth. This is probably the case. But what we do know certainly, and which, I believe, has a direct connection to his teaching, is that Abelard, quite exceptionally, wrote six Planctus, or laments, Lamentationes—for what had been fine and enjoyed, but had disappeared. The medieval Planctus celebrates loss, and Abelard chose Jacob who lost his son, Samson, his hair and his mighty physical strength, Jeptha, who lost his daughter, David’s planctus on the dual deaths of Saul and Jonathan, as well as on the loss of his wayward son, Absalom. All six of the planctus are Old Testament figures—strong figures from a long-time past, who mourn their loss with a loud voice.

11

Cf. John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 1997).


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If one actually deals musically with, for example, the Planctus Davidis, or David’s Planctus dealing with the deaths of both King Saul and his son Jonathan, one notices a certain repetitive containment of each one of the pulses, as well as the emotional substance made more perceptible in repetition: Do-lo-rum so-la-ti-um la-bo-rum re-me-di-um Me-a mi-chi ci-th-ar-a Nunc quo ma-ior do-lor est Iu-sti-or-que me-ror est plus est ne-ces-sa-ri-a. Sta-ges mag-na po-pu-li, Re-gis mors et fi-li-i, Ho-sti-um vic-to-ri-a Du-cum de-so-la-ci-o, vul-gi de-spe-ra-ti-o luc-tu re-ple-at con-ni-a. My harp, my consolation in sorrow and cure for pain is now the more needful to me, as my sorrow is greater, and my grief more fitting The great slaughter of the nation, the king’s death, and his son’s, The triumph of the enemy, the desolation of the leaders, The commons in despair, these fill all things with mourning/. concluding with: I give rest to my harp-strings would that I could do so to my lamentations and my tears My hands are sore with striking, my voice is hoarse with lamenting, and my breath fails me.

Example I: MS Vaticanus Reginensis Latinus 288, f. 64v-65r Planctus david super Saul et Ionathan David’s own words, as they are transmitted are not by any means so extensive, nor are they so personal.12 The planctus or lament is, how12 As recounted in II Samuel 18-19, especially 19.1. David’s lament is short and succinct, namely, “Absalom, my son, my son Absalom, my son Absalom, would that God had willed that I die for you. O Absalom, my son, my son!” See ed. G. Vecchi, Pietro Abelardo. I “Planctus.” Introduzione, testo critico, trascrizioni musicali (Modena, 1951); and eds. C. Blume, G.M. Dreves, Analecta hymnica medii aevi, vol. 48 (Leipzig, 1905).

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ever, much longer; what comes to the fore is: long long long long, or pulse pulse pulse pulse, a substance in itself containing the emotional substance, specifically, of lamentation. Because of the clear divisions expressed by each self-contained throb, or pulsus, within unseen substance, the planctus exemplifies then a preoccupation of Abelard, namely, his emphasis on differentiae, differences, within soulish, unseen, material. Abelard’s differentiae, while building upon familiarity with the concept of differentia and divisio that he knew he could assume—because it had been a commonly-used term in medieval logic for several hundred years—nevertheless, emphasized the concept in order to go beyond previous discussions of differences in material properties within unseen material. And the differentiae, differences between what had been the case before, and what was now the case— the drastic difference made by loss, was poignantly obvious from the significance of the text. In other words, his planctus are crucial to what seems now to have been the main point of his teaching, to introduce what became known as the new logic, based upon new Aristotelian tools. Loss made difference plain. But the planctus, from the Latin plangere, or beat, as used by Virgil, to lament;13 also, because of its clear, regular repetitive, structure, seems to invite the realization of artistic goals—of extension, elaboration, according to the individual composer, be he Abelard, or a composer that might not be so well-known, such as Godefrey from the Abbey of St. Victor, one of the first of many Augustinian houses that became more and more important during Abelard’s lifetime,14 whose Planctus ante nescia has also been transmitted, associated with his name as possible author. These planctus invariably bring out the contrast between prior and posterior as a “vision” providing structure, as, for example in the Planctus ante nescia, Mary has lost her son: Once acquainted with lament, with lament I am now distressed and wearied.

Godefrey’s planctus, like Abelard’s is very long, and there are other similarities, such as common expressions, dolor, solatium, for example, and, most of all, the regular long, long, long, long, strokes or pulses of the lament. These planctus were also apparently well-known in their time, and made their way from one place to another, through, cer13

Cf. note 10 above. See van Deusen, “Communities of Learning: Augustine, the Bishop, and Early Augustinian Houses,” forthcoming in ed. Karl F. Morrison, Empathy. 14


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tainly, people who knew them, from St. Victor, at that time outside of Paris, to Benediktbeuern outside of Munich.15 It is not happenstance that all of these compositions, Abelard’s planctus, a planctus by Godefrey of St. Victor, that is also among the Carmina Burana, were composed during a very specific period of time, by people working during the active, highly volatile, convergence of a renewed interest in understanding and applying Augustine’s writing to newly available Aristotelian terms, models, and argumentation. It is an intellectual vision that was to be found in the first translations of the Physics from Greek directly into Latin. The Physics of Aristotle concentrates on the properties of material and motion and, understandably, in view of its subject matter, provoked earnest, immediate, interest and a flood of commentary beginning with those commentaries of Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, and continuing well into the seventeenth century. Later, towards the last generation of the thirteenth century, Aristotle’s treatise on the soul, and its discussion of soulish substance should also be taken into consideration, although, as John Murdoch has pointed out, the most commentedupon work of Aristotle’s was definitely the Physics—concerning material properties.16 These translations and their commentaries, at the time of greatest effect—that is the late twelfth, early thirteenth centuries—coincide exactly with sudden, renewed, equally impassioned, discussion of, Augustine’s writings, especially over matters where Augustine was clearly reacting to topics Aristotle also discusses in detail, We can also notice at this time the foundation of Augustinian houses at St. Victor near Paris, St. Martin at Nevers in Burgundy,17 and eventually all over 15 For an overview as well as highly-detailed treatment, of this twelfth-century milieu, see Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996). 16 Cf. John Murdoch, “Infinity and Continuity,” in Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg, Eleonore Stump (Cambridge, 1982), p. 565, as well as Bernard G. Dod, “Aristoteles latinus, “ in CHLMP, pp. 45-79. For an impression of how extensively the Physics was commented upon, see Albert Zimmermann, Verzeichnis ungedruckter Kommentare zur Metaphysik und Physik des Aristoteles aus der Zeit von etwa 1250-1350 (Leiden, 1971). See also van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University: The Case of Robert Grosseteste and Anonymous IV (Leiden, 1995), and “Roger Bacon on Music” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden, 1997), pp. 223-241. 17 See van Deusen, “Institutional Context and Musical Construct: a Paradigm in Medieval France,” Laborare fratres in unum. Festschrift László Dobszay zum 60. Geburtstag, eds. Janka Szendrei, David Hiley (Hildesheim, 1995), pp. 53-61. A more

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Europe. The two are certainly related, but the ways in which both took place are complex, and I believe, not to be simply discussed in terms of cause and effect, influence and imitation. Whether Augustine’s discussion of invisible material and soulish substance prompted motivation to obtain from the Greek original, translations of Aristotle’s work on material, the Physics, and eventually his treatise concerning the soul, or whether early translations, made during the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries, for example, by John the Scot and James of Venice, prompted a strong reply in terms of renewed scholarship into the interpretation of Augustine’s writings, has not by any means been settled, in fact, we are only now articulating the problem. What is clear, however, is that the bond between Augustine and Aristotle is exemplified in the planctus—by Abelard,18 as well as by Godefrey of St. Victor, included in the Carmina burana. And it would seem that, rather than a developmentary process, this connection as well as this interest in, and appreciation of, the emotional content— the very materiality itself—of sound, gave a conceptual basis, as well as the content to composition.19 In other words, I do not believe that Abelard composed his six planctus because he was sorry about the course his own life had taken, comparing past joy with present difficulty, but rather that the planctus by its very substance, note by note, and syllable by syllable served as an example for an entity as abstract as self-contained substance itself, as well as the fact that material by its very nature mutates, changes, is changed, and becomes something other than what it was before. Phenomenology is, of course, based on this fact, observable, as well in life. But even more clearly presented, for observational purposes, than life itself, is the exemplification of extensive treatment of the institutional construct, place of the Abbey of St. Martin, and manuscript sources of the cathedral milieu at Nevers can be found in van Deusen, Music at Nevers Cathedral. Principal Sources of Medieval Chant, 2 vols. (Binningen, Switzerland, 1980). 18 The question raised by John Marenbon of what Abelard was, whether logician, theologian, moral thinker, or philosopher (in The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, p. 99), is not, I believe, appropriate to Abelard’s time, or, in fact, to Abelard himself, since these divisions do exist, but rather reflect much later academic specialties, not Abelard’s intellectual environment. See also Marenbon, “Medieval Latin Commentaries and Glosses on Aristotelian Logical Texts before 1150 ad,” in Aristotelian Logic, Platonism, and the Context of Early Medieval Philosophy in the West (London, 2000), pp. 77-127; 128-140. 19 I have approached this in an article on “The Nature of ‘Stuff’” applied to sound substance, in ed. Nancy van Deusen, Issues in Medieval Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Richard C. Dales (Ottawa, 2002).


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unseen “soulish substance”—a translation of anima—and its transformation in music, all of which Abelard was certainly aware. This relationship, namely, Augustine’s description of soulish substance, exemplified in his treatise on music, reinforced within his treatises on the substance of the soul, and Aristotle’s discussions of substance, both seen and unseen—was at the forefront of what most interested those who could read, write, and think, in Abelard’s time, including, of course, Abelard himself. His Planctus is the result. But the progression of long long long long/long long long long: the self-contained pulses that, in turn, themselves, contained emotional substance, can be found elsewhere, even in surprising places. By way of conclusion, here is an example from life experience that occurred far away, but recently. Much of my travel to and from the university in Pest where I have engaged in seminars for students in interdisciplinary medieval studies, who are drawn from all of the former Soviet Union bloc countries; also, as I make my way to and from the Franz Liszt Academy where I have taught musicology students, conductors, and keyboard players; as I walk here and there, even within the course of a day, to the libraries and archives where I have studied Latin liturgical manuscripts, Latin commentaries on Aristotle’s writings, as well as the recordings and transcriptions of Hungarian folkmusic made by Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály—with three subsequent generations of folkmusic researchers—in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Folkmusic Research, has been in my own company, that is, I have traveled by myself, purposefully walking along toward some goal, together of course, with some of the few hundred thousand inhabitants of the city of Budapest. Alone in a crowd of others who are out and about, I have, each day, many opportunities to observe the various and diverse figures around me, as well as the city itself—of what this city consists, and how it has continued to survive materially, as newer buildings have been constructed from the old. And I have opportunity as well to think my own thoughts. I notice much more this way than when I am in company with one or the other of my ever-expanding group of Hungarian friends—expanding each year, since I have returned every year for over a decade. One day I got off my bus to walk to the archive to do what I had planned to do that day; namely, select and listen to, as well as transcribe, folkmusic, and compare some of my transcriptions with those that Bartók had made of the Székély laments in Transylvania, now part of Rumania. Suddenly, near the cathedral, on the most

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prominent piazza of Buda’s castle hill, the one spot in the city that all of the tourists visit, I spied a small, very old, gypsy man, playing a home-made zither-like stringed instrument. Folding himself over his instrument, he played what the researchers in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Folk Music Archive had classified as an “old-style, smallambitus, lament.” How did I know that this, in such an unlikely situation, played by a gypsy, in the middle of all the bustle and noise, the coming and going of swarms of tourists loaded in and loaded out of behemoth buses? On the other side of the cathedral, a high school band from Texas was loudly playing a jazzy version of “I wish I was in the land of the cotton, old times there are not forgotten.” Still another residue from the old communist days was an electronic gong that intoned a second-inversion major triad in the key of F major every time the door of the small castle bus closed, which was often enough, as the bus made its way up and down—up, down, and around—the castle mound. Here is how I knew that the gypsy man was playing a lament. It is because, as we have seen, laments have the same long long long long/ long long long long,

in contrast, radically to all of the other music going on at the same time on the Budapest cathedral square. The drip, drip, drip, drip of the gypsy man’s lament was accentuated by the pluck, pluck, pluck, pluck of his stringed instrument, as Abelard in his planctus relates: My harp, my consolation in sorrow and pain. What then are the ultimate constituents of the world, and how are they related to thought and language?20 The insight we have then from Augustine in the fourth century, exemplified, as a good teacher, by Abelard in the twelfth, to be instinctively appropriated by those who place together pieces of musical and textual substance within the tradition of Hungarian folksongs—the composers of folksong—is that loss is not imaginary, a fleeting feeling that one can simply dispose of, and dispense with, and get on, so to speak, with life. Loss, in fact, is substantial and material, and the lament is made up of nearly equal pieces of the material of sound and time. This, then, is a vision of past and present, of the substantial nature of loss itself, that human beings, everywhere, all over the world, and in all times, understand. 20

These are John Marenbon’s thoughtful and succinct basic questions in The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, p. 99.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 47

IN THE BEGINNING: THEORIES AND IMAGES OF CREATION IN NORTHERN EUROPE IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY* Conrad Rudolph

Logic has made me hated by the world!

So Peter Abelard thought and wrote to his former lover, the brilliant Heloise, in probably his last letter to her before his death in 1142, after having been virtually driven from Paris by Bernard of Clairvaux, the austere Cistercian mystic and perhaps the most powerful ecclesiastical politician of Western Europe.1 Characteristically for Abelard in matters of self-conception, he was exaggerating. Logic had made him hated not by the world but only a portion of it. While this was certainly an influential portion and one that had almost succeeded in destroying him, it could never do so entirely. In fact, logic had made Abelard “the Socrates of the Gauls, the great Plato of the West, our Aristotle,…the prince of scholars”2—and this, this great fame and the almost unprecedented influence that accompanied it, was as much the problem as logic was. * Reprinted with permission from the editor of Art History. To John Williams, on his seventieth birthday. My thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support of my larger project, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor and the Multiplication and Systematization of Imagery in the Early Gothic Portal, of which this is part, and to Kathleen Pyne for her close reading of this text. When dual systems of traditional numeration exist for primary sources, reference is made to the more precise of the two. All biblical references are to the Vulgate. 1 Peter Abelard, Epistola et Fidei Confessio, in ed. Victor Cousin, Petrus Abelardus: Opera, 2 vols. (Paris, 1849), 1: 680. On Abelard in general, see, among others, Jeffrey Garrett Sikes, Peter Abailard, (repr. New York, 1965); D.E. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard: The Influence of Abelard’s Thought in the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge, 1969); and most recently, M.T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997), and John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, 1997); Luscombe and Marenbon with full bibliographies. 2 Attributed to Peter the Venerable, Epitaphia Abaelardi 1, in ed. Victor Cousin, Petrus Abelardus, 1: 717.

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In a word, Abelard had been caught up in the politics of theology. The time was one of great theological inquiry, challenging, as it did, the very authority of divine revelation on the most fundamental level, and at a moment when both interest in secular learning and the number of students were dramatically increasing—all factors that can hardly be overemphasized. But for certain elements within the Church, more still was at stake. And this was nothing less than a perceived assault on one of the basic underpinnings of the complex relationship between religion, theology, society, and political power. This relationship is an almost inexhaustible subject in its own right. But for the purposes of this study, religion may briefly be said to be a practical philosophy of existence whose intellectual justification is its theology. To determine a significant component of the theological justification of a religion that has a virtual monopoly in a given culture— as Christianity did in the Middle Ages—is to condition within certain limits how the people of that culture, more or less as a whole, think about their existence. To condition how a people thinks is, to a large degree, to determine what it will think. To determine what a people will think is to condition results. Since power is the ability to condition results, to determine what a people thinks in such a central aspect of human experience is power. Or, put another way, to determine theology in such a culture is power, or at least one form of it. Since politics may be said to be the formation and exercise of power, the determination of theology, therefore, is or can be one form of politics; the determination of theology is or can be the formation and exercise of one form of power—and much of the religious art of the Middle Ages acted to project this power, whether real or claimed. For reasons that will be explained below, one of the most pressing theological issues of the day was that of creation, competing theories of creation being far more deeply a concern in the pre-modern religious society of the Middle Ages than in our modern secular society in the United States where, even still, it remains a political issue.3 Indeed, because of the absolute fundamentality of the concept of creation, any given culture’s view of creation is crucial to that culture’s intellectual self-identity—and, as such, can act as a microcosm of sorts of its essential character, whether creation is looked at in its orthodox aspect or, 3 Or in the post-Darwinian world of late nineteenth-century England and America; cf. Kathleen A. Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin, 1996); my thanks to Kathleen Pyne for this apt reference.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 49 even better, as a point of contention. And behind at least some of the contention that surrounded the controversy over creation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the delicate question of the role of the Church: according to traditional Christian belief, all of the history of humankind, from the beginning of time to its end, was directed toward a single goal, salvation, with the Church acting as the first and last authority on this. But new or newly popular theories of an independently working Nature, in challenging traditional understandings of the creation account of Genesis, indirectly and unintentionally also challenged this authority and, according to some, even the basis of Christian faith itself. How all this worked out for the logician/theologian Abelard and his contemporaries in the schools in terms of civil politics is too complex to go into here. It is enough to say that the Ile-de-France of the time was dominated by clan politics.4 And for the purposes of this study, the two most significant clans of early twelfth-century Paris were the clan de Garlande (whose most prominent member was the same Etienne de Garlande whose removal from power with the help of an alliance between Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis and Bernard of Clairvaux is so well known to art historians) and the clan that spearheaded ecclesiastical reform in Paris (led by Bishop Etienne de Senlis and the regular collegial house of Saint Victor, and strongly supported by Bernard). Without going into the details of the intense struggle that arose between the two—ultimately a tale of murder, intrigue, betrayal, and power both won and lost—it can be said that the clan de Garlande was extremely active in resisting reform. It would be a mistake to draw facile parallels between clan politics and intellectual, as opposed to reform, positions. We simply do not know enough about most of the leading scholars to say how they 4

On this see esp. Robert Henri Bautier, “Paris au temps d’Abélard,” in Abélard en son temps, Acts du Colloque international organisé à l’occasion du 9e centenaire de la naissance de Pierre Abélard (Paris, 1981), pp. 21-77; and Robert Henri Bautier, “Les origines et les premiers développements de l’abbaye Saint-Victor de Paris,” ed. Jean Longère, L’abbaye parisienne de Saint-Victor au moyen âge, Communications présentées au XIIIe Colloque d’Humanisme médiéval de Paris (Turnhout, 1991), pp. 23-52. See also Achille Luchaire, Louis VI le Gros: Annales de sa vie et de son règne, 1081-1137 (Paris, 1890), pp. XLII-LXIV. I use the French word clan, which is borrowed from Bautier and which refers to a political culture characterized by a particular form of patronal factions, in order to avoid any confusion with its common meaning in English. For a discussion of the fundamental structural distinctions between the two clans cited here, see my forthcoming book, The Mystic Ark.

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aligned themselves or even if they aligned themselves at all. But we do know how two of these scholars, Abelard and Hugh of Saint Victor, fit in. They were on the fringes of the civil confrontation, unquestionably. But that Abelard had come under the patronage of Etienne de Garlande, as described by Robert-Henri Bautier—though the exact nature of this relationship is unclear—is certain, as is Hugh’s allegiance to his own institution, Saint Victor, in which he held a high position for the time, master of the school. We cannot, however, expect the intellectual complex of the schools to correspond exactly with the political complex of northern France. While the approaches taken by the leading scholars to the philosophical issues in the controversies naturally divide them into traditional and non-traditional intellectual camps, ultimately the institutions or clans with which those scholars were associated cannot be described in the same terms. Though Etienne de Garlande might back the brilliant Abelard to enhance his own prestige and—more importantly—to savage William of Champeaux, the founder of Saint Victor and the person who in the first two decades of the twelfth century was one of his worst enemies, in the end Etienne and the clan de Garlande cared nothing for intellectual dominance within the schools. Given this connection between Abelard and the clan de Garlande, however, and given the unavoidable association of all leading scholars, such as Hugh, with institutions that were by definition both political and intellectual, it is clear that the two do intersect at points, and that these institutions could play leading roles in both worlds. The fundamentally political basis of these intellectual institutions leads us to the question of the relation of the art produced by them, generally speaking, to the process of the determination of theological thought. Were the issues that concerned them so greatly worked out in part through art? Or was it nothing more than accidental—in a time of general adherence to traditional iconographical forms—that the illuminator of one twelfth-century manuscript (plate 7, for example) might choose to depict creation in terms of a literal presentation of the six days, while another (plate 16, for example) might do so in the almost purely non-scriptural imagery of the proto-science of platonism? And was it simply a coincidence that the artist of a third (plate 8) might use the scriptural structure of the first, while expressing it in terms of the proto-science of the second? Was it an oversight that the artist of one of the famous Vienna Bibles moralisées (plate 9) should have depicted the sun, moon, and stars—creations of the fourth day—

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 51 among the primordial chaos of the first day, with which his Creator was still contending? Elsewhere, what does the addition of the Fall of Adam and Eve to the traditional depiction of the Six Days of Creation mean (plate 21)? Is it just a narrative continuation of the beginning of Genesis and, if so, is this also the case for the apparently random images from the rest of Genesis that accompany those of the Fall? Or, in an even more extreme example (plate 22), how are we to read an initial to Genesis whose Creation of Adam and Eve is accompanied by scenes from throughout the Bible, incidents that are not found in Genesis at all? These images have often been taken at face value by scholars as straightforward creation scenes or as the unique iconographical expressions of various patristic or contemporary writers on creation without reference to the larger, on-going dialectical struggles of which the writings and the artworks were a part.5 But it is no accident that extant creation imagery in the manuscript illumination of the twelfth century should show an increase of almost 900% over that of the eleventh, with this interest only continuing into the thirteenth century with almost four times the twelfth-century figure.6 In the twelfth century, the process of the determination of theological thought was one of public debate within elite culture and it was in part worked out through art: the primary images under discussion in this paper being not public art per se but an inward-looking institutional art whose realm is somewhere between the public and private spheres, an art that can be said to be exclusively by and/or for the elite themselves in all of the twelfth-century examples cited here, with the exception of perhaps only one.7 In the first part of this study, I will lay out the general intellectual/political context in which these images operated, as well as identify some of the more specific issues involved in the various theories of creation as they pertain to creation imagery. In the second— after very briefly taking up a few prominent Early Christian and Carolingian images of creation in order to make plain the change of emphasis in the visual argumentation apparent in the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century examples discussed here—I will analyze the 5 For example, Johannes Zahlten, Creatio Mundi: Darstellungen der sechs Schöpfungstage und naturwissenschaftliches Weltbild im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1979). 6 Ibid., pp. 25-26, 219. 7 For a further discussion on religious art that lies between the public and private spheres, see Conrad Rudolph, Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Cîteaux Moralia in Job (Princeton, 1997), p. 94.

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latter with an aim toward showing that these images should instead be seen as active factors in the process of forming elite opinion on the issue of creation as a prelude to conditioning opinion on a broader, lower level, and that they can act as indicators of the place on the intellectual/political spectrum of the monasteries and collegial houses in which they were made during this urgent controversy. Indeed, this was a time when the Church’s monopoly on learning, as it had been known for centuries, was not only threatening to slip away from its control, but was actually doing so. The “Old” and the “New” Theologies and the Threat of Logic Logic and its accompanying fame had indeed made Peter Abelard hated by the world. But exactly how they were able to do this—and how logic relates to creation—is not as clear as it might seem to be at first glance. The term logica can mean a number of things but, as employed by Abelard, it refers primarily to the application of Classical systems of reasoning to the sacred. Seen in the twelfth century as having been first taught by Plato and then developed by Aristotle,8 logic was understood to be the basis of pagan philosophy, which in turn was seen as a moral and highly advanced approach to the divine, but one that was not divinely revealed and consequently that placed human reason above faith. While Plato’s logic was known only indirectly at this time, Aristotle’s logical treatises De Interpretatione and Categories were widely studied, even considered a basic part of the liberal arts.9 And logic was further taken up through well-known related commentaries and studies by Porphyry, Cicero, and others.

8 Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 3:2, ed. Charles Buttimer, Catholic University of America: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Latin 10 (Washington, 1939), p. 52. 9 Both were ascribed to Aristotle in the Middle Ages and comprised what was known as the Old Logic. De Interpretatione is generally considered today to be by Aristotle, Categories is thought by many to be spurious. The remaining logical treatises of Aristotle translated by Boethius and known as the Organon were not current in the early twelfth century, gradually resurfacing only later. On these, see Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (New York, 1927), p. 345. The liberal arts as they eventually came to be conceived under the influence of Martianus Capella comprised grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 53 Many influential Christian thinkers such as Paul, Ambrose, Benedict of Nursia, Cassian, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux, to name only a few, were violently opposed to this “secular” logic which they saw as antithetical and even adversarial to Christian thought.10 At the same time, secular logic had been employed successfully within mainstream contemporary theology before Abelard, and had a long tradition of acceptance of varying degrees and qualifications by such moderate figures as Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus— who nevertheless complained bitterly that students were “swarming” to schools of secular learning—Anselm of Canterbury, and Hugh of Saint Victor.11 The problem was thus not the use of logic per se, but rather by whom that logic was used and how: whether it was used by a more radical element in a way that was seen as contrary to the faith or, more precisely, to faith itself. Inextricably linked with this use of logic was concern over the perceived degree of acceptance of Classical learning, especially Platonism, acquired through non-Christian or non-Christianized sources: Boethius, Macrobius, and Cicero, for example.12 The basis of this conflict in the early and mid-twelfth century was as much intellectual and philosophical—even demographic—as it was theological, and this is ultimately why Abelard and others like him were never fully repressed. Indeed, the time was the high point of a 10 These criticisms of logic are typically embedded in broader condemnations of secular learning. For example, Paul, I Cor. 8.1; Col. 2.8; I Tim. 6.20-21. Ambrose, Exameron 1:7, 1:9, 1:24, ed. Karl Schenkl et al., CSEL 32 (Vienna, 1897), vol. 32, pt. 1, pp. 6-7, 8, 22-23. Benedict of Nursia, as traditionally conceived in Gregory the Great, Dialogorum Gregorii Papae Libri Quatuor, 2: preface 1, ed. A. de Vogüé, Dialogues, 3 vols. (Paris, 1979), 2: 126; and implied in Benedict of Nursia, S. Benedicti Regula Monachorum, prologue, ed. Benno Linderbauer (Metten, 1922). Cassian, Conlationes 14.16, Sources chrétiennes 42, 54, 64, ed. and trans. E. Pichery (Paris, 1955-1959), 2: 203-206 (citing the passage from Timothy referred to above). Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob 27.1, CCSL 143-143B, ed. M. Adriaen (Turnhout, 1979-1985), p. 1331. Bernard of Clairvaux, In Die Pentecostes 3:5, 8 vols., eds. Jean Leclercq and Henri M. Rochais (Rome, 1957-1977), 5: 173-174; In Sollemnitate Apostolorum Petri et Pauli 1:3, 5: 189-190; Epistola 190, 8: 17-38; among very, very many others. 11 Among any number of other works by these authors, this practice is apparent in Boethius, Philosophiae Consolatio; Cassiodorus, Institutiones, 1: preface, Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1961), p. 3, for the passage cited here; Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo; Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon; it pervades the writings of Augustine. On this subject in general, see R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), pp. 170-184. 12 My use here of the term platonism encompasses all forms of platonism, including neoplatonism, which as a term dates only from the nineteenth century.

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period commonly known as the renaissance of the twelfth century (c. 1050-1250), a period of phenomenal economic growth, the often contentious formation of critical social institutions, an explosion of learning, and perhaps the most dynamic period of artistic experimentation in Northern European history: arguably the first, embryonic heartbeats of modern Western culture, and the basis of an impending social change that threatened the very core of the status quo.13 Economic growth had stimulated social change which, in turn, brought about a demand for education and provided a larger and more intellectually inquisitive audience than had been seen, or felt, at any time since the disintegration of the Roman Empire and probably earlier. Concurrently, just as the economic revival brought about a change of focus from the closed manorial system of the countryside to the open market of the city, so did it begin the transfer of the concentration of learning from the monastic schools of the countryside with their socially relatively closed and educationally narrowly restricted programs of study to the cathedral, collegial, and independent schools of the cities with their relatively open and increasingly wide-ranging approaches to thought. The friction generated in this transition resulted in one of the great conflicts of the renaissance of the twelfth century: the struggle between the “old” and the “new” theologies, a struggle in which logic played a leading role. The “old theology” was an experiential theology of faith. While the vast majority of its adherents accepted the Classical tradition of education in the liberal arts, they did so in a highly circumscribed way, insisting that learning was of value only to the degree that it was directly applicable to spiritual knowledge in the narrow sense of an individual’s understanding or spiritual experience of Scripture, typically through the often extremely loose exegetical method associated with Gregory the Great.14 Classical literature was something that was 13

The standard work on this is Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, (n. 9), to which must be added R.L. Benson and G. Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1982), with historiographical introduction (pp. xvii-xxx) and reference to further bibliography on the question of the renaissance of the twelfth century (p. xxi, n. 3). 14 On the two mentalities, see esp. Jean Leclercq, “S. Bernard et la théologie monastique du XIIe siècle,” Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis 9 (1953), 7-23; and G.R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford, 1980). My use of the terms “old” and “new theologies” comes from the twelfth-century expression, the “new theology.” Cf. Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola 190:1, 8:17; William of Saint-Thierry, Disputatio Adversus Petrum Abaelardum 3, PL

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 55 tolerated primarily for instruction in literary and rhetorical skills, as well as for general scientific knowledge. Despite its central role in advanced education, Classical learning remained viewed by proponents of the “old theology” as fundamentally corrupt as well as corrupting, something to be regarded with extreme suspicion, a seductive tool of the devil in a wide variety of ways. Although the lines of demarcation between the “old” and the “new” theologies broke down as the century progressed, in the early and mid-twelfth century the “old theology” is best represented by monasticism and such individuals as Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry: institutions and men of great education, accomplishment, and respect, but typically committed to the primacy of an experiential monastic spirituality as the “intellectual” goal of learning. The “new theology” was a theology of inquiry whose faith was based on logic, at least theoretically. Its adherents not only saw the liberal arts as individual disciplines that could be legitimately studied for their own sake, they increasingly saw the use of logic as an interdisciplinary means of attaining the truth rather than simply as a component of the liberal arts. In this, Aristotelian logic was of overwhelming importance. It provided a means of systematization to the increasing multiplication of knowledge, a systematization that has rightly been seen as the greatest intellectual accomplishment of the renaissance of the twelfth century.15 Adherents of the “new theology” accepted Classical literature not only for instructional purposes but also as a source of advanced knowledge that could at times be seen—whether positively or negatively, depending by whom—as achieving an understanding of the divine which, within its natural boundaries, rivaled that of Scripture. In the early and mid-twelfth century, this particularly meant the cosmological thought of Plato and his followers. This “new theology” was less a rejection of monastic learning than the creation of a new learning, eventually a secular learning, but one which at the time was largely clerically based. Nevertheless, because of the centuries-old monopoly on learning held by the monastic wing of the Church, it looked like such a rejection. The “new theology” is best rep180:255. For an example of the twelfth-century awareness that it was the experiential aspect of the “old theology” that in part distinguished it from the “new,” see Bernard of Clairvaux, De Conversione 4, 25, op. cit. (n. 10), 4: 74, 99. 15 Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, pp. 11, 181. The crucial texts of Aristotelian logic—all translated by Boethius—were Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione, and Porphyry’s Isagoge (an introduction to the Categories).

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resented by Abelard, Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches, and others who shared this general outlook, men who wanted to push the limits of learning and who were perceived by many as valuing learning for its own sake, not for personal spiritual advancement. The two main threats to the “old theology,” then, were the use of Aristotelian based logic in a way contrary to faith, and the acceptance of Classical thought—at this time primarily platonism—as a body of human learning based on human logic that on certain matters could be claimed to equal and at times even surpass divine revelation. This emphasis on logic of the “new theology” was perceived by the “old theology” as striking at the very heart of Christianity, although this was something that was never intended by the “new theologians.” The reaction to all this could be extreme. Sometimes it was veiled in aphorisms such as that of Tertullian, which was from time to time invoked: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”16 But at other times, it could take on tones of intimidation, accusation, and even condemnation, as when Anselm of Canterbury branded those who in his opinion placed reason before faith as dialectici haeretici: heretical dialecticians or, better, dialectical heretics.17 This threat was given even greater immediacy by the fact that the “new theology” was extremely popular, a phenomenon of the greatest significance. For the same mobs of students that had flocked to the secular schools in Cassiodorus’s time were now flocking to the more secularized teaching of “the great Plato of the West, our Aristotle” and of others who were forging ahead, something that the “new theology’s” opponents could not afford to ignore.18 Theories of Creation: The Timaeus, Scripture, and the Patristic Precedent This acceptance of the logic and substance of Classical learning is what not just the “old theology” but also its moderate sympathizers called “worldly knowledge.” And perhaps the most pressing issue raised by the growing acceptance of “worldly knowledge” was the theory of 16 Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum 7, ed. R.F. Refoulé, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis 1 (Turnhout, 1954), p. 193. 17 Anselm of Canterbury, Epistola de Incarnatione Verbi 1in, S. Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. F.S. Schmitt (Edinburgh, 1946-1961), 2: 9-10; cited by Evans, Old Arts and New Theology, p. 69. 18 The sources on Abelard’s phenomenal popularity are too numerous to cite here; many of these may be found in Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard, pp. 1-13.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 57 creation: is creation best explained according to a literal interpretation of Genesis, or is the presentation in Genesis more or less an allegory for the “scientific” principles described by Plato in his Timaeus, the leading authority on creation aside from Genesis at this time and widely available through the partial Latin translation and commentary by Chalcidius?19 There are a number of points in the creation account of the Timaeus that are of significance for the twelfth-century controversy over creation and its imagery. According to Plato, the cosmos was created by the Demiurge: the Craftsman, demiourgos in Greek, a word that was translated by Chalcidius as opifex and whose metaphoric sense was also often rendered as artifex in the Bible, the Fathers, and later writers.20 The Craftsman, however, is not the highest god, but a god created by the highest god to create that which is immortal: the cosmos, souls, and the lesser gods—who, in turn, create the remaining material and mortal things, including human bodies. Platonic creation theory sees creation proceeding from pre-existent, eternal matter which was not made by the Craftsman and which was chaotic in its primal form. Creation was effected on the basis of exemplars or models (platonic Forms or Ideas) which were also eternal and not created by the Craftsman. All material things are composed of varying amounts of the traditional four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. The cosmos itself is perpetual (as opposed to eternal, having a beginning but no 19 Chalcidius translated that part of the Timaeus which deals with creation; Plato (trans. Chalcidius), Timaeus 17a-53c, Timaeus: A Calcidio Translatus Commentarioque Instructus, ed. J.H. Waszink (London, 1962), pp. 7-52. Somewhat less of the Timaeus had also been translated by Cicero and was available but less widely used; Plato (trans. Cicero), Timaeus 27d-47b, ed. R. Giomini, De Divinatione, De Fato, Timaeus, M. Tulli Ciceronis Scripta Quae Manserunt Omnia 46 (Leipzig, 1975), pp. 179-227. On the importance of the Timaeus in the Middle Ages, see Raymond Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition during the Middle Ages, rev. edition (Munich, 1981), p. 28. 20 For Plato’s account of creation in the Timaeus, which is summarized in the following paragraphs, see esp. Plato, Timaeus 28a-53c, trans. R.G. Bury, Plato, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1952), 7: 48-126. For Chalcidius’s rendering of demiourgos as opifex, see Plato (trans. Chalcidius), Timaeus, 29a, 41a (n. 19), pp. 21, 35; he also uses fabricator once along with opifex (29a, p. 21). Cicero translates demiourgos as artifex and effector; Plato (trans. Cicero), Timaeus 29a, 41a, pp. 180, 214, also using such words as fabricator and aedificator to convey the general idea (28c-29a, p. 180). References to the use of opifex and artifex in the Fathers and later writers are far too numerous to cite here. While artifex generally has a higher status than opifex, the words are used interchangeably in the patristic literature. Various architectural metaphors are also quite common in the sources.

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end), being a living thing with soul and reason that order and animate creation, this rational soul being known as the world-soul. The Craftsman ordered the stars and planets of the cosmos, thus creating days, nights, months, and years. Although the cosmos is specifically stated as being good, the presence of that which is not good is accounted for through an emanationist theory of creation—the idea of a hierarchically descending progression of creationary acts from the highest to the lowest—rather than the free will of humankind per se. Before their integration with material bodies, human souls were instructed in the rules of moral behavior by the Craftsman—the choice between good and evil being theirs, as was the reward or punishment through the reincarnation that was to follow at the end of their potentially successive lives. The biblical counterpart to the Timaeus primarily consists of the two creation accounts in Genesis. The first is known to biblical scholars as the Priestly account (Gen. 1-2.4a). This is the account of the hexameron, the six days of creation. For the purposes of this study, it relates a number of significant points. There is one supreme, eternal (having no beginning and no end) God who transcends the world. There was no pre-existent matter, all matter was created from nothing (ex nihilo) by God himself. Everything immaterial and material was created directly by God. The act of creation was performed by God speaking, by the Word of God. The process of creation is described as taking place over six days. The initial matter of creation was chaotic. The spirit of God is said to have “moved over the waters” of this chaotic state. The stars and planets were created to divide night and day and to serve as signs, seasons, days, and years. God created humankind in his own image and likeness. And, finally, God’s creation was good. Evil is explained in the second account, the Yawist account (Gen. 2.4b-3.24), which ascribes the source of evil to the free will of humankind. Also central to this account is the explicitly personal creation of humankind by God, his personal relationship with Adam and Eve, and his personal instruction of them in the rules of moral behavior. In neither account is nature animate, there is no indwelling force that gives life or orders the cosmos. Nor is there any emanationist hierarchy of creation. While the Priestly account is the more cosmological and the Yawist the more anthropological, neither is primarily

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 59 concerned with cosmology or anthropology per se. The goal of neither is to explain creation itself. The purpose of both is ultimately a historical one in the Christian view, to lay the foundation at the beginning of Scripture for the history of salvation, to show that the God of creation is also the God of restoration, to show that humankind’s salvation is linked to its creation from the very beginning. In contrast, the Sapiential books and Psalms begin to exhibit the influence of Greek thought, especially platonic thought. God is now described on occasion as a craftsman (artifex in the Vulgate) in connection with creation, and the creation of the cosmos is spoken of from time to time in the metaphorical terms of the construction of a work of architecture. Indeed, the Creator is figuratively described as calculating the “foundations” of creation, weighing out some of the materials of creation in his three fingers or in a balance-scale, and ordering all things in “measure, number, and weight.”21 Elsewhere, the term logos is introduced in the Septuagint (verbum in the Vulgate), an ultimately pre-socratic term which in the thought of the great Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus was equated with the exemplar of God that served as the model of the cosmos.22 Nevertheless, even here the subordination of such thought to the history of salvation is fundamental. With the New Testament, Christ is almost from the very beginning said by Paul to serve as a mediator of creation: all things are from the Father, through Christ. Paul has taken Philo’s platonizing conception of the logos as the exemplar of creation and identified it with Christ.23 At the same time, this is integrated with the Old Testament history of salvation, with Christ’s role in creation being linked to his role in redemption. Thirty to forty years later—a generation or two—in the Gospel of John, this has been taken further in the overt use of the term logos for Christ, a term which in the Christian tradition came to refer

21

God or Wisdom (Christ) as an artifex: Wis. 7.15-21, 13.1-5. The cosmos as a work of architecture: Job 38.4-6. The foundation of the earth, and weighing and ordering: Prov. 8.22-31, Is. 40.12, Wis. 11.21. The Book of Psalms is technically not a part of the Wisdom books but is traditionally associated with them in the Catholic tradition. Part of this discussion of the Sapiential books is based on Leo Scheffczyk, Creation and Providence (New York, 1970), pp. 16-18, who also discusses the Priestly and Yawist accounts. 22 The term logos appears in Wis. 9:1, 18:15, among other places. Philo Judaeus, De specialibus legibus 1:81, ed. and trans. F.H. Colson, Philo (Cambridge, MA, 1950), 7: 146. 23 Scheffczyk, Creation, pp. 24-28. Cf. esp. I Cor. 8.6, Col. 1.15-19.

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to the role of the second person of the Trinity as the creative wisdom of God, as mediator between the Father and creation.24 From the point of view of the orthodox Early Christian thinkers, platonic creation theory was theologically quite untenable. The problem, however, was—given the fundamental tendency toward exegetical interpretation inherent in Christian thought and given the rudimentary state of critical biblical scholarship—that certain aspects of the Timaeus so closely paralleled the Genesis accounts that it could easily be seen, by those who wanted to see such a thing, as a deeper, more philosophical, more “scientific” account of the creation described in Genesis, albeit one whose pagan cultural basis required Christian interpretation on some points and simple rejection on others. For example, there were strong similarities between the platonic Craftsman and the Creator of the Old Testament, between the emanationist structure of the Timaeus and the structure of the six days of Genesis, between the instruction of souls by the Craftsman and the instruction of Adam and Eve, and between the creation of non-corporeal beings in both (lesser gods in platonic thought, angels in Christian), the ordering of chaos in both, the ordering of the stars and planets and the resultant creation of “days and nights, months and years” in both, the description of creation as good in both, and the hierarchic creation of living corporeal things in both. Indeed, Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria thought that Plato had been taught by Jewish scholars, and Augustine—who repeatedly states that platonism is the pagan philosophy closest to Christianity—suggested that Plato was familiar with Scripture and took seriously the possibility that Plato had had the opportunity to learn from Jeremiah on a trip to Egypt.25 To make matters even more difficult, platonism was enormously prestigious among the educated class, a prestige with which Christian thought very much wanted to associate itself. It was therefore not only desirable but virtually necessary to co-opt platonism. This was done not by Christianizing platonic thought but by platonizing Christian thought. From the very beginning, Chris24

Scheffczyk, Creation, pp. 29-30. Clement of Alexandria, Cohortatio ad Gentes 6, PG 8: 176. Augustine, De Civitate Dei 8:11-12, eds. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, Sancti Aurelii Augustini de Civitate Dei, CCSL 47-48 (Turnhout, 1955), pp. 227-229; De Doctrina Christiana 2:43, ed. J. Martin, Aurelii Augustini Opera 4:1, CCSL 32 (Turnhout, 1962), p. 63. Plato is known to have travelled to Italy and Sicily, though whether he visited Egypt is unknown. 25

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 61 tianity had been both receptive and defensive toward the various forms of platonic thought. And, over a period of many generations, both ante- and post-nicene Fathers—including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine—developed Christian creation theory along platonizing but orthodox lines.26 Although there was no shortage of disagreement or heterodox statements in the course of discussion, it can be said that from the point of view of an orthodox early twelfth-century scholar, the patristic heritage on creation was in general one that agreed on a number of points. The platonic Craftsman was neither the omnipotent Creator of the Old Testament nor the uncreated Logos of the New. Creation was not accomplished from pre-existent, eternal matter but was effected from nothing. There were no independent, eternal exemplars, uncreated by the deity. The emanationist basis of platonic creation was rejected, as was its corollary concerning the origin of evil. The perpetuity of the cosmos was denied, along with the idea of the world-soul. And, perhaps most important of all for this study, the Timaeus was seen as presenting its theory of creation in a manner divorced from the history of salvation. On the other hand, the concept of exemplars was accepted in a Christianizing context. The Creator was regularly spoken of as a craftsman (artifex, opifex). And it must be recognized that while there were platonic influences—however partial or diluted—in both the Bible and Christian culture that supported the idea of a parallel between the Timaeus and the biblical creation passages, these sometimes ran so deep as simply to be taken as scientific fact by contemporaries, not as the platonizing influences that they were. Such was the case for the identification of Plato’s discussion of the traditional four elements with the heaven and earth, primal waters, and primal light (of fiat lux fame) of Genesis 1.1-3, even though much of the authority for this line of thought resided outside of Plato. Far from being a parallel only in the narrow sense, it related Christian creation—and so material existence—to the complex of macrocosmic/microcosmic theory that was such a fundamental part of basic scientific and medical thought, making a perceived parallel all the more natural.

26 For a discussion of patristic commentaries on Genesis, see Y.-M.J. Congar, “Le thême de Dieu-Créateur et les explications de l’Hexameron dans la tradition chrétienne,” in L’Homme devant Dieu: Mélanges offerts au Père Henri de Lubac (1963), pp. 189-222.

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For the purposes of this study, there were only two issues on which the Early Christian Fathers did not come to a consensus: whether the period of the six days of creation ought to be understood literally or figuratively, and whether the “spirit of God” that moved over the waters of Genesis 1.2 was the Holy Spirit. The situation was not exactly the same with the scholars of the “old” and “new” theologies. Creation and the “New Theology” A platonizing Christianity accepted on the authority of the orthodox Fathers was not at all the same thing as a Christianized platonism put forth on the basis of a contemporary individual’s personal opinion. And, from the “old theology’s” point of view, nothing put this in greater relief than the “new theology’s” approach to creation in its use of logic, its ready acceptance of Classical authority, the relationship of scholarship to faith, and its ultimate neglect of the significance of the history of salvation within its discourse. The operative issues are many and complex, and can be both subtle and vague, but as far as the imagery of creation is concerned, they can be dealt with briefly. Perhaps the most characteristic difference between the platonizing but venerable Augustine and the platonizing but suspect “new theologians” may be found in their attitudes toward the creation account of the Timaeus as an authority. As put by Joseph Parent in his study of creation theory in the “school” of Chartres, Augustine took from platonism what was useful for Christianity—despoiling the Egyptians, as he would say—but was unconcerned with a Christian reading of the Timaeus. But the “new theologians,” as represented by William of Conches, for example, tried to extract a Christian sense from the platonic text itself.27 The significance of this from the standpoint of the “old theology” was that a Christian theology of creation properly speaking was being displaced by a pagan, though Christianized, 27 J. Parent, La doctrine de la création dans l’école de Chartres (Paris, 1938), pp. 49-50. Despoiling the Egyptians: Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 2: 60, pp. 73-74. On the chartrians in general, see also, among others, de J. de Ghellinck, Le mouvement théologique du XIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Bruges, 1948); R.W. Southern, “Humanism and the School of Chartres,” in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), pp. 61-85; Southern, “The Schools of Paris and the School of Chartres,” in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds. R.L. Benson and G. Constable, pp. 113-137; Evans, old Arts and New Theology; Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 63 science of cosmology.28 The focus of advanced thought on one of the major subjects in the education of society’s intellectual elite was seen as shifting from salvation to science. The “old theology” saw a similar threat in the “new theology’s” treatment of the role of the Trinity in creation, a threat it saw as credible enough to attack in the person of Abelard at the Council of Soissons in 1121. Exactly what Abelard said to bring about this attack is unknown. But it is known that one discussion of trinitarian attributes which appeared in the earliest recension of his book Theologia Summi Boni is not found in later ones, suggesting that this was in fact what was objected to, at least ostensibly and at least in part.29 In this passage Abelard identifies the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the work of creation with the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, respectively—a train of thought that was also attacked by the “old theology” through the persons of Bernard of Clairvaux and William of SaintThierry when it was later taken up by William of Conches. In his admittedly one-sided account of the affair, Abelard repeatedly notes how he was mixing theology and logic in a manner that explained the former by means of the latter. From the “old theology’s” point of view, the inquiries of Abelard and William of Conches threatened the mystery of the Trinity and were seen as limiting the omnipotence of its individual members.30 Also seen as limiting by the “old theology” was William of Conches’s denial of a primordial chaos, which, according to William, was inappropriate to an all-powerful God; as was his rejection of a literal interpretation of the six day period of creation, something which he

28

The phrasing is from Scheffczyk, Creation, pp. 115-116. Sikes, Peter Abailard, pp. 165-166. Abelard, Theologia Summi Boni 1: 2, ed. H. Ostlender, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 35:2/3 (1939), p. 3 (also known as Tractatus de Unitate et Trinitate Divina). Cf. Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, ed. J. Monfrin (Paris, 1959), pp. 81-89, esp. 87-88. Otto of Freising, Gesta Frederici seu Rectius Cronica 50, eds. G. Waitz, B. von Simson, and F.-J. Schmale (Berlin, 1965), pp. 224-226. 30 Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, pp. 81-89, esp. 81-84. Parent, La doctrine de la création, pp. 70-74. R.W. Hanning, “Ut enim Faber…sic creator: Divine Creation as Context for Human Creativity in the Twelfth Century,” in Word, Picture, and Spectacle, ed. C. Davidson (Kalamazoo, 1984), p. 113. And along similar lines on Thierry of Chartres, cf. N. Häring, “The Creation and Creator of the World According to Thierry of Chartres and Clarenbaldus of Arras,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 22 (1955), 155-156. 29

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thought, along with Abelard (following Augustine), should be taken figuratively.31 Perhaps the most problematic passage of the biblical creation account for medieval scholars was Genesis 1.2, which describes how the “spirit of God moved over the waters” of the primordial chaos. For the purposes of this study, there were two issues at play here for the “new theologians” of the twelfth century. The first was whether the spirit of God should be identified with the Holy Spirit. The second was, if so, should the Holy Spirit be identified with the platonic world-soul in a Christianizing sense. The “new theologians” had been left with an ambiguous precedent by the most authoritative Western Christian authority in this area, Augustine, who seems to have struggled with the passage throughout his life. In regard to the first issue, he says in typically augustinian fashion that the spirit that moved over the waters is or can be understood as the Holy Spirit.32 But as to the second, he sometimes seems to reject the idea of a world-soul and at other times to accept it with the qualification that it be understood as having no divine status in the platonic sense, but rather is something closer to the idea of Nature as the divinely ordained principle that orders and moves the cosmos.33 In probably his last statement on the subject, however, he states that the idea is one that comes from Plato and other pagan philosophers, that he has found no firm proof for it, and that Scripture provides no answer to this problem.34 And this was just the sticking point in the controversy between the “old” and the “new” theologies. It was not that Abelard had interpreted the spirit of God as the world-soul as Augustine and others had done before him (platonizing 31 Parent, La doctrine de la création, pp. 42. J. Taylor, “Introduction,” in The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts (New York, 1961), pp. 12-13. M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago, 1968), pp. 27, 171. Scheffczyk, Creation, p. 127. Hanning, “Ut enim Faber,” pp. 101, 109-110. Augustine, De Civitate Dei 11:6-7, pp. 326-327. 32 Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram Imperfectus Liber 16-18, PL 34: 226-227. 33 For example, Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim 1: 12, PL 34: 250-251; De Immortalitate Animae 24, PL 32: 1033; De Genesi ad Litteram Imperfectus Liber 16-17, PL 34:226-227. For Augustine’s thought on this throughout his life, see Vernon Bourke, Wisdom from St. Augustine (Houston, 1984), pp. 78-90. 34 Augustine, Retractionum Libri Duo 10:4, ed. P. Knöll, CSEL 36 (Vienna, 1902), pp. 54-56. Boethius was also of importance on the issue of the world-soul. The fact, however, that he wrote in verse and not prose seems to have given him a certain amount of latitude with his readers; Boethius, Philosophiae Consolatio 3: poem 9, ed. L. Bieler, Anicii Manlii Severini Boethii Philosophiae Consolatio, CCSL 94 (Turnhout, 1957), pp. 51-52.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 65 Christianity) that in part caused Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry to attack him, most notably at the Council of Sens in 1140. It was that he interpreted the world-soul as the Holy Spirit (Christianizing platonism). As Bernard said of Abelard’s position on the world-soul in his treatise De Erroribus Abaelardi, “While he struggles to make Plato into a Christian, he easily demonstrates himself a pagan.”35 It was a question of perceived attitude, not theology—which was why the Council refused to support Bernard in this particular charge. Nor was it that William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres had interpreted the same spirit of God as the world-soul—again, as Augustine had done before them—that caused them, too, to be systematically attacked, with William of Conches being so sharply criticized by William of Saint-Thierry that he left Chartres (and/or Paris) for Normandy. It was that they were perceived as reducing the process of creation to the natural operation of the four elements, thus desacralizing the cosmos.36 In the end, all three retracted their positions on the world-soul. Nevertheless, the stature of these figures within the “new theology” could not help but give prominence to the concept, a concept whose desacralization of the cosmos was seen by orthodox Christian thought as reducing the role of creation in the history of salvation.37 35 Abelard, Theologia Christiana 1:68-109, ed. E.M. Buytaert, Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologia, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis 11-12 (Turnhout, 1969), 2: 100-117. Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola 190 (De Erroribus Abaelardi) in general; and 190:10, VIII: 26, for the passage cited. William of Saint-Thierry, Disputatio Adversus Petrum Abaelardum 5, PL 180: 265-266. On this see further, Otto of Freising, Gesta Frederici 51-52, pp. 226-236. Parent, La doctrine de la création, pp. 73-75. Scheffczyk, Creation, p. 127. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard, pp. 123-127. 36 William of Conches, In Boetium 3:9, Troyes ms 1381, f. 63v (cited Parent, La doctrine de la création, pp. 74); and Philosophia Mundi 1:15, PL 172:46-47 (wrongly ascribed to Honorius Augustodunensis). On this, Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, p. 69. On William in general, see Parent, La doctrine de la création, pp. 73-75; Scheffczyk, Creation, pp. 117-118; and B. Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Princeton, 1972), pp. 249-262. Thierry of Chartres, Magistri Theoderici Carnotensis Tractatus 25-27, ed. N. Häring in, “The Creation and Creator of the World According to Thierry of Chartres and Clarenbaldus of Arras,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 22 (1955), 193. On Thierry of Chartres, see Parent, La doctrine de la création, pp. 76; Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” pp. 153-154; and Stock, Myth and Science, pp. 240-249. On the desacralization of nature, see Chenu, pp. 10-15. This is a subtle issue; cf. Scheffczyk, Creation, pp. 118-119, who is not, however, in disagreement with Chenu: it is a question of precisely what type of “rational” approach is taken to nature and how the world-soul/ Nature is defined. 37 Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, pp. 4-24. Scheffczyk, Creation, pp. 118-119.

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And this, the history of salvation, is the issue of most concern to the imagery of creation. In the use of the Timaeus and other examples of Classical scientific learning as authorities on creation, in denying the historicity of the literalness of the six day period of creation in the biblical account, and in the desacralization of the cosmos inherent in the theory of the world-soul with its essentially independent working of Nature and of the elements at creation, the “new theology” made science the focus of creation and not humankind, thus undercutting the significance of the history of salvation as one of the most fundamental components of orthodox Christian thought, undercutting the idea that humankind’s salvation is linked to its creation from the very beginning. But the most popular, and therefore influential, member of the “new theology”—the one to whom the students were flocking, according to both himself and his enemies—went even further. According to Abelard, logical consistency demanded that the requirements of salvation be understood as being the same before the Incarnation as after. Thus, seemingly denying inherent righteousness, he saw the people of the period of natural law (the time from the beginning up to the Mosaic law) and the period of the written law (from the Mosaic law up to the Incarnation) as lost without at least some confession of Christ—something largely possible only to those of the period of grace (from the Incarnation to the end of time).38 While this extreme statement was eventually more or less retracted by Abelard, the basic shift from the history of salvation to science by the “new theologians” as a group was not. And, because of the everincreasing interest in science, this turning from the history of salvation continued to be something with which the “old theology” and its allies struggled—including in contemporary imagery. Images of Creation The vast majority of medieval thought on creation never made it to parchment. What does survive represents only a very small fraction of the debate, although from the highest level. What is more difficult to 38 Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, pp. 172-173. Abelard, Introductio ad Theologiam (2:6), in Petrus Abelardus: Opera, 2 vols., ed. Victor Cousin (Paris, 1849), 2: 84; Theologia Christiana 4:76-78; 2: 300-302. See also Raymond W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 2. Hugh of St Victor and the Idea of Historical Development,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 5, vol. 21 (1971), 168.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 67 find evidence of is the controversy as it took place more broadly, at the middle level, in the thousands of discussions of the educated public of the monastic and collegial wings of the Church—the same people who constituted the public of the artworks with which this study is concerned.39 At the same time, while the loose division into the “old” and the “new theologies” is one that comes from the polemical literature of the twelfth century, the traditional grouping of so many of the leading “new theologians” into the so-called School of Chartres has been shown by R.W. Southern to be misleading. While there were Chartrians (a succession of scholars at the cathedral school of Chartres with similar interests), there does not seem to have been an actual School of Chartres (a continuing school of supra-regional importance with an intellectual tradition distinct from other schools of the same level).40 The Chartrian scholars important to this study who were previously identified with a School of Chartres also taught at Paris and elsewhere, as did Abelard. Their concern with creation did not stem from an interest in the Timaeus in the narrow sense, but from a broader intellectual demand that was widespread throughout Western Europe, as their movements and the origins of their students show. In this inquiry, the lines between the “old” and the “new theologies” were as often as not blurred, with the evidence suggesting that many of the less controversial figures—as well as the rank and file—were, on the polemical level, firmly in neither one camp nor the other, but saw all the authorities as a patrimony that had to be critically sifted through, at times with a great deal of creative interpretation. This broad interest in creation theory immediately found a vehicle of expression and projection in the art of the time: it is no accident that while there are only seven extant depictions of creation from the illuminated manuscripts of the eleventh century, there are no less than sixty-one from the twelfth and 233 from the thirteenth.41 Nor is it an 39

For an example of such discussions, see Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance:” Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia, 1990), p. 210. 40 Southern, “Humanism and the School of Chartres,” in general, but esp. pp. 74-77; and Southern, “The Schools of Paris and the School of Chartres,” which reviews criticism of his original thesis. 41 Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, pp. 25-26. Zahlten has added the figures for all media for the twelfth century incorrectly; cf. the table on p. 219. This trend began to decline in the fourteenth century and continued to do so for the rest of the Middle Ages. Zahlten’s categories are ultimately iconographical and unrelated to the conceptual categories and arguments presented here. On the iconography of creation, see also

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accident that they come from throughout France, Germany, England, and Italy—from precisely those places that had active schools and from which students flocked to the great masters of France, and especially of Paris. Like their public within elite culture, these images of creation could put forth the arguments of both extremes of the ideological spectrum as well as less polemical positions that were more concerned with the body of information on creation than with any specific school of thought per se. As the statistics just mentioned suggest, artistic interest in creation paralleled the progress of the controversy of the twelfth century, a controversy whose immediate foundations had been laid in the later eleventh. Before this, artistic depictions of creation were less frequent and could take any form. But on the whole, they were based on an internal logic different from the general scheme of things in the twelfth century. Let me cite a few examples. In the Early Christian period, the venerable fifth-century mural program of Saint Paul’s in Rome began with a depiction of creation (plate 1).42 It was, however, one in which the cosmological hexameron—the Priestly account—was presented in a single panel, while the anthropological Yawist account, the traditional story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, was elaborated in seven.43 Clearly, it was the question of the relation between the origin of humankind and the origin of original sin in the Fall—the area of the authority of the Church and, ultimately, its reason for being—that was seen as the more appropriate message to be derived from the opening of Genesis: more appropriate than the subject of cosmogony, the area of authority of the schools of philosophy that were still so flourishing and so prestigious. Not only did this visual argument respond to the current Pelagian controversy in which original sin was such a significant factor and which centered on Rome, but it did so in terms of the history of salvation.44 At the J. Van der Meulen, “Schöpfer, Schöpfung,” Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, ed. E. Kirschbaum, 8 vols. (Rome, 1968-1976), 4, with bibliography here; for bibliography see also Zahlten, Creatio Mundi. 42 Rome, Bib. Vat. ms Barb. lat. 4406, f. 23. 43 On the panels of Saint Paul’s, see J. Garber, Wirkungen der frühchristlichen Gemäldezyklen der alten Peters- und Pauls-basiliken in Rom (Berlin, 1918); J. Waetzoldt, Die Kopien des 17. Jahrhunderts nach Mosaiken und Wandmalereien in Rom (Munich, 1964); and more recently, H.L. Kessler, “Pictures as Scripture in Fifth-Century Churches,” Studia Artium Orientalis et Occidentalis 2 (1985), 23-27. 44 For an excellent discussion of this panel in light of the history of salvation, see Kessler, “Pictures as Scripture,” pp. 25-26.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 69 same time, the compression of the hexameron into a single panel—in this particular context—seems to be a denial of a literal interpretation of the six days, a rejection of what could be seen as its mythological character along the lines of Augustine (although not necessarily on his authority) as a needless embarrassment in the face of the widespread and sophisticated creation theories of contemporary secular culture. One must be careful, however, not to read too much into creation imagery. The context of the consecutive Priestly and Yawist accounts in the largely destroyed illuminations of the more or less contemporary Cotton Genesis of the late fifth century, for example, suggests that the goal of the person determining the selection of images in this program of an estimated 339 miniatures was primarily one of comprehensive narrative illustration.45 The Yawist story of the origin of original sin receives no more attention than any other part of Genesis. Whatever inherent content there is in this imagery, it remains passive, not active, and cannot be said to be operating on the same explicitly polemical or theological level as the creation imagery of Saint Paul’s. This is confirmed by the presentation of the Priestly account of the six days in ten illustrations: a straightforward visual narrative of the text, indifferent to its fundamentally sexpartite character. Perhaps the classic Early Medieval artistic presentation of creation is the frontispiece to Genesis in the Grandval Bible, made around 840 at Saint Martin at Tours—one of the great collegial centers of learning—a work that is iconographically related to both the Cotton Genesis and Saint Paul’s, although not directly dependent on them (plate 2).46 When compared to the creation imagery of Saint Paul’s—whose theological meaning was active, as opposed to the passive Cotton Genesis illustrations—we see that the Grandval program repeats each scene (in one case, combining the events of two of the Saint Paul’s panels into one scene), but goes further in including two scenes not found in the earlier arrangement. It seems to be no coincidence that the two scenes which the person responsible for determining the Grandval program chose to include beyond the particular Early Christian conception found at Saint Paul’s were scenes which elaborate upon the core argu45 On the Cotton Genesis, of which only a few fragments survive from the fire of 1731, see K. Weitzmann and H.L. Kessler, The Cotton Genesis: British Library Codex Cotton Otho B.VI (Princeton, 1986). 46 London, Brit. Lib. ms Add. 10546, f. 5v. H.L. Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours (Princeton, 1977), pp. 13-35. Weitzmann and Kessler, The Cotton Genesis, pp. 22, 55.

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ment of the origin of original sin—original sin having brought about the loss of sanctifying grace originally inherent in humankind, which in turn necessitated the sacrifice of Christ. The first of these is the Introduction of Eve to Adam (Gen. 2.22-24), an event that is interpreted by the authoritative and widely read Augustine as referring to the relation between the future Church and her spouse, Christ.47 The second is the Lord’s Admonition Concerning the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen. 2.16-17), which is seen by the equally authoritative Ambrose as a sign that salvation is available to all through free will and is used by him in his arguments against predestination.48 Indeed, that the concern here is something more than narrative is made plain by the fact that the person responsible for the Grandval program actually broke with the biblical narrative—the ultimate source—by including Eve in the Admonition and placing it after the Introduction of Eve: not a minor point, and something that happened neither before nor after in the great series of illustrated Touronian Bibles.49 Together, in this particular context, the two scenes 47 Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2:37, PL 34:215-216; and to a lesser extent 2:19, 39, PL 34:206, 217; possibly following Tertullian, De Anima 11, ed. J.H. Waszink, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis 1 (Turnhout, 1954), p. 797; both on the basis of Eph. 5.31-32. That this passage from Augustine is the basis of the additional scenes is supported by the fact that in the same passage he discusses Gen. 2.6, which states how a spring watered the entire face of the earth, something which Augustine interprets as referring to the relationship between the Holy Sprit and the Virgin. This accounts for the body of water in the background of the scenes of paradise. This has been interpreted as a vestige of late antique atmospheric perspective (F. Mütherich and J. Gaehde, Carolingian Painting [New York, 1976], p. 73), something that is the case for other elements of the banded background but not for this one: the two attendant angels and Christ of the top register appear from behind this paradisial spring but in front of the other bands, a spring which abruptly disappears upon the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. 48 Ambrose, De Paradiso 38-40, ed. K. Schenkl et al., CSEL 32, 62, 73, 78, 79, 82 (Vienna, 1897) f., XXXII/1: 294-297. 49 Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours, pp. 23, 28-29, has already dealt with this question, drawing attention to the Vita Adae et Evae and Josephus’s Antiquitates Judaicae where is Eve takes part in the Admonition. To this can be added that the sequence found in the Grandval Bible is the same found in Isidore’s Quaestiones in Vetus Testamentum, Genesis 3-4, PL 83:217-218; and that in the Old Latin Version and the Septuagint, the plural is used (thus implying the presence of Eve) in different phrases of the same sentence of Gen. 2.17; Vetus Latina, Gen. 2.17, ed. B. Fischer, Freiburg, Vetus Latina: Die Reste der altlateinischen Bibel, vol. 2 Genesis (1951), pp. 47-48. Cf. also Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2: 15, PL 34: 205-206; and Ambrose, De Paradiso 26-27, XXXII/1: 282-284. For illustrations of the Bamberg, Vivian, and San Paolo Bibles, see Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours, figures 2, 3, 4.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 71 demonstrate how the Yawist account of creation could be adapted to respond to the contemporary needs of the ninth century. This is not to say that these two scenes might not appear earlier, or that when they do appear either earlier or later they necessarily carry the identical meaning that they have in this specific context. It is to say that they were meant to bring to this creation program a dramatically increased emphasis on the role of the Church in the history of salvation—the Church, whose reason for being was predicated upon its monopoly on the sacraments, which were considered to be the leading source of sanctifying grace outside of the deity—especially in contradistinction to the contemporary polemics of the almost romantic Gottschalk, whose extreme predestination threatened the Church in denying that Christ died for all humankind, thus ultimately bringing into question the efficacy of the Church and its sanctifying sacraments.50 The issue is contemporary but its visual projection is traditional in that the exegetical logic of the contemporary argument is conveyed through the widely recognized traditional iconographical compositions of these two scenes: there was no need to formulate new iconography since the traditional forms were available and had the potential for far wider recognition than any new iconographical compositions might.51 Ultimately, the Genesis frontispiece of the Grandval Bible is a statement on original sin as the occasion of the loss of sanctifying grace, an assertion of the need for the restoration of that grace through the Church, a reaffirmation of the belief that salvation was available to all 50 On Gottschalk’s threatening the Church, see E. Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1951), 1: 542. W. Koehler, (Die Schule von Tours, Die karolingischen Miniaturen 1, 3 vols. [Berlin, 1930-1933], pp. 200-212 and passim) has suggested that this frontispiece was part of a larger, fifth-century anti-Manichaean prototype belonging to Leo I, copied by the monks of Tours. A.A. Schmid (Die Bibel von Moutier-Grandval: British Museum Add. Ms. 10546 [Bern, 1971], p. 149ff.) rejects this, arguing instead that the four frontispieces of the Grandval Bible are an assemblage of Pauline theology. For an analysis of these authors, see Kessler, The Illustrated Bibles from Tours, pp. 145-148. I myself have not studied these illustrations as a group, but only the component discussed here, though the basic elements of grace, creation, and salvation are part of all three arguments. Whatever the meaning of these images as a group, they should be seen in conjunction with the penetrating analysis of the intellectual/spiritual atmosphere in H.L. Kessler, “‘Facies Bibliothecae Revelata:’ Carolingian Art as Spiritual Seeing,” Testo e immagine nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 41 (Spoleto, 1994), pp. 533-594. 51 For an example of the limited recognition of newly formulated iconographical compositions, see the discussion of the west central portal of Saint-Denis in Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger’s Program and the Early TwelfthCentury Controversy over Art (Princeton, 1990), pp. 32-63.

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through free will, and thus a denial of the theory of extreme predestination. The great change that took place in the creation imagery of the renaissance of the twelfth century was not characterized by a decrease of interest in the anthropological Yawist account of creation, but rather a dramatic increase—an explosion, really—of interest in the cosmological Priestly account: an explosion of interest in the six days of creation. This interest was so broad and existed at so many points of the spectrum between the “old” and the “new” theologies that a decade by decade chronological analysis is impossible. Still, creation imagery might often be Yawist, as in the initial to Genesis from a Bible from Salzburg, made sometime shortly after 1150 and prefaced with the Fall of Lucifer (plate 3).52 Or it might take any form, as in the Parc Bible, where the imagery is very loose, where the first, fifth, and sixth days alone of creation are combined with the Fall and its immediate aftermath, and where the concern is with neither the Priestly account nor the Yawist one per se, but simply with a general narrative of Genesis from creation through Cain and Abel (plate 4).53 Or it might deny the literalness of the six days, depicting instead the theory of Augustine, and others, of the simultaneity of creation—as in the initial to Book Eleven of a copy of The City of God from the second half of the twelfth century, Book Eleven being the place where Augustine puts forth his theory (plate 5).54 Indeed, although Genesis begins with the hexameron, there was no compelling reason for the beginning of Genesis to be illuminated with it: the most popular visual field for creation imagery, the initial I of the opening lines of Genesis, In principio, might simply be treated ornamentally, without any connection to the text of Genesis whatsoever, as we see in the otherwise heavily illustrated Bible of Stephen Harding—despite the six-part division of its letter form—completed in 1109 at the great Cistercian monastery of Cîteaux itself (plate 6).55 But it was only now—approximately 700 years after the murals of Saint Paul’s and 900 after the less programmatic creation imagery of Dura-Europos, the catacombs, and the Early Christian sarcophagi—that the classic hexameral format of the histori-

52 Salzburg, Stiftsbib. St. Peter ms A.XII.18, f. 6. This study is in no way an iconographical analysis, for which see Zahlten, Creatio Mundi. 53 London, Brit. Lib. ms Add. 14788, f. 6v. 54 Heiligenkreuz, Stiftsbib. ms 24, f. 96. 55 Dijon, Bib. Mun. ms 12, f. 3v.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 73 ated initial I appeared.56 Even though this was a format of widespread use and great endurance, the fact that it became established only now, in the twelfth century, speaks of a very real contemporary immediacy. While the six days are in general depicted with an enormous amount of latitude—and it is often very difficult to say with integrity whether these variations have significance or not—a more or less straightforward example of the Priestly hexameral I is believed to have been produced for and possibly at the Cistercian monastery of Pontigny in the late twelfth century (plate 7).57 In this highly accomplished, luxurious initial, the six days have been conceived of in a rather literal way in six descending roundels. They convey all the basic information of the Priestly account and introduce nothing beyond that, with only minor exceptions. For example, the four elements appear in the portrayal of the first day, something that is virtually standard.58 And in the roundel of the sixth day, where humankind is created “male and female” according to the Priestly account, the Creation of Eve is shown from the side of Adam, following the common visual rendering of the Yawist account as interpreted by Augustine. This can be seen as a formulaic depiction striving for comprehensiveness in showing the creation of woman as well as man, something which is not always the case—the Yawist account providing a description of the creation of both, unlike the Priestly account, which simply states that they were created in God’s image. Or, as is more likely, it may have been meant 56

Zahlten, Creatio Mund, pp. 57-63 and passim. Van der Meulen, “Schöpfer, Schöpfung,” pp. 119-121. Although it was only in the early twelfth century that the historiated hexameral I began to become widespread, the earliest known example is from the Lobbes (Goderannus) Bible of 1084; Tournai, Bib. du Séminaire ms 1, f. 6 (Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, figure 74). Images of the six days also appear in contexts other than the Bible; for example, Ambrose’s Hexaemeron (Munich, Bay. Staatsbib. ms Clm. 14399, f. 10, 14v, 21v, 40, 52, 74; Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, figures 155-158); Peter Comestor’s Historia (Paris, Bib. Nat. ms lat. 16943, f. 2; Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, figure 86); and Josephus’s Antiquitates Judaicae (Chantilly, Musée Condé, ms 1632, f. 3; J.J. G. Alexander, The Decorated Letter [New York, 1978], pl. 25). 57 Paris, Bib. Nat. ms lat. 8823, f. 1. On this manuscript in general, see Walter Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination (Ithaca, 1982), no. 91; and more recently Patricia Stirnemann in Saint Bernard et le monde cistercien, eds. Léon Pressouyre and Terryl Kinder (Paris, 1990), no. 132, both with bibliography. 58 For the iconographical tradition of the four elements in creation imagery, see Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, pp. 133-144. For a benign literary example of this, see Abelard, In Hexaemeron, PL 178:733; and Expositio Symboli Apostolorum, PL 178:622. Often described as the Aristotelian elements, these are pre-socratic in the origin of their thought, which was not superseded until Robert Boyle’s definition of an element as a chemically irreducible substance in his The Sceptical Chymist of 1661.

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to serve as a conclusion to the six days by portraying them as a prelude to the history of salvation—this being Augustine’s famous interpretation of the creation of Eve from the person of Adam as a foreshadowing of the creation of the Church from the person of Christ, relating it to the flowing of blood and water from the side of the crucified Christ.59 If this was in fact made at a Cistercian monastery, as some believe, it is in strong contrast to the earlier Genesis initial from the Bible of Stephen Harding, something that points up not so much the absence of interest in creation in a Cistercian monastery of the early years of the twelfth century as it does the almost compulsory attention toward it in the later years of the same century, after the influence of the schools had spread. Coming at a time when, unlike the period of the making of the Bible of Stephen Harding, Cistercian statutes prohibited just such illuminations, the hexameral I of the Pontigny Bible is an intransigent reaffirmation of the “old theology” and fully in league with the Cistercian reaction to the “new.”60 What makes it plain just how “fundamentalist” the rather common iconography of the Pontigny Bible can be at this time of the renaissance of the twelfth century is the hexameral imagery of other contemporary, monastically produced luxury Bibles, such as the Souvigny Bible of the late twelfth century (plate 8).61 Although Souvigny was one of the great Cluniac priories, like so many other respectable monasteries its monastic school was decent but made no claim to supra-regional status according to the standards of twelfth-century France.62 And that is precisely what scared the “old theology” so badly. For despite the evidence that Souvigny was an average conservative monastic institution, the almost full-page block of eight paintings that opens Genesis and that depicts the hexameron (with an additional scene dedicated to the Fall) presents a view of creation that can only be described as deeply informed by the current creation theories that the “old theol59

Augustine, De Civitate Dei 22:17, 2: 835-836. On this artistic legislation, see Conrad Rudolph, “The ‘Principal Founders’ and the Early Artistic Legislation of Cîteaux,” Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, vol. 3, Cistercian Studies Series 89 (Kalamazoo, 1987), pp. 21-28. 61 Moulins, Bib. mun. ms 1, f. 4v. On this manuscript, see Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination, no. 76, with bibliography; special attention must be drawn to Walter Cahn’s exceptional unpublished doctoral dissertation on the visual sources of the Souvigny Bible, “The Souvigny Bible: A Study in Romanesque Manuscript Illumination” (Ph.D. Diss., New York University, 1967). 62 On Souvigny, see Léon Côte, Moines, sires et ducs à Souvigny: Le Saint-Denis Bourbonnais (Paris, 1966). 60

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 75 ogy” saw as so threatening. A selective comparison with the writings of Thierry of Chartres, the defender of Abelard at Soissons in 1121, will demonstrate this, although there is no need to insist that the Souvigny creation scenes are an illustration of the specific writings of Thierry himself—the broader cultural influence of the “new theology” and the strong attraction it held through its contemporaneity undoubtedly spread the teachings of such masters as Thierry far beyond their direct writings and lectures. In his discussion of the first day, Thierry notes among other things that at its creation, matter immediately began to move in a circular motion, with fire in particular rising to become the highest element and to illuminate the air. This is the immediate conceptual source of the fiery roundel from which the Creator presides at the top of the first panel. While a bust of the Creator does appear in creation imagery in an ornamental roundel in imago clipeata fashion on occasion—primarily in the Yawist variation known as the Roman type63—a fiery roundel was never shown, to the best of my knowledge, before the twelfth century and rarely, if ever, after illustrating the elemental logic of this particular scientific concept of the Priestly hexameron. Thierry further describes how in the interaction between the elements fire warmed the air, causing water vapor to rise above the air—although, as a rule, air “moved” (Gen. 1.2) over the water. Not an easy thing to depict visually, this is precisely what is shown in the “chaos” of the three remaining elements beneath the orange fire of the roundel (though all four elements are in a state of chaos), with black earth at the bottom, blue-black water above, and the orange-streaked air in the middle of the water: demonstrating how the water vapor rose but the air still “moved” over the water. (The general arrangement of the elements is, by the way, right out of Plato.64) At the same time, the use of these colours illustrates another point of Thierry’s, that fire and earth are active and passive, respectively, and that the two elements of air and water in between work in both directions: with the orange of the orange-streaked air relating it to the orange fire above, and the black of the blue-black water relating it to the black earth below. As to the form of the elements, he also states that in the beginning air had the density of water, and in fact that all unformed matter was similar to 63 On the Roman type, see Van der Meulen, “Schöpfer, Schöpfung,” pp. 106-108; and Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, pp. 47-49. 64 Plato, Timaeus 32b, pp. 58-60.

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water—an idea that is visually conveyed, within the natural limitations of the composition, through the wave-like depiction of all four elements. Finally, according to Thierry, the spirit of God mentioned in the opening of Genesis refers to the power of the artifex, the power of the Craftsman; he says that this is what David called the Word, what Christians call the Holy Spirit—and what Plato called the world-soul!65 It is only here that there is any ambiguity in the illustration. Certainly, the dove with the lightly indicated halo “moving” over the water does represent the spirit of God that was commonly identified with the Holy Spirit. But is it also meant to equate the Holy Spirit with the world-soul of Plato to the informed reader, one of the greatest fears of the “old theology”? Given the consistent, pronounced, and rather thorough visual projection of scientific theories sympathetic with this line of reasoning, the point is not that it cannot be shown that it does, but that it is impossible to show that it does not—with the inevitable (though not necessarily very satisfying) corollary that, in light of the specific context, it very well may. Continuing in his exegesis of the sacred through the discipline of physical science, Thierry tells how, during the second day, the water vapor that had risen above the air on the first now continued to rise above the level of the highest ether, i.e., above the level of what would later become the region of the heavenly spheres. This left the air (or firmament) suspended between the waters of the earth and the waters of the heavens—something that is indicated in many ways in hexameral imagery, but perhaps most commonly as a disk surrounded by the waters, as in the Pontigny Bible (plate 7).66 In the second panel of the Souvigny Bible, the two bodies of water are shown divided as they are in all hexamera, but now by a hemicycle of red, white, and green. This is a device used later by the same artist to indicate the orbits of the heavenly spheres, one such hemicycle being enough for now since none of these spheres have as yet been created. Together with the gold ground, the two here represent the ether and air, being inverted with a slight artistic license in order to accommodate the all-important device of the roundel. 65 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus: general discussion of the first day, 5-7, p. 186; air over water, 22, pp. 191-192; order of the elements, 17, pp. 189-190; density of air and all unformed matter, 23, 28, pp. 192, 193-194; the spirit of the Lord [sic], 25-28, pp. 193-194. On this, see also Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” pp. 147-154. 66 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus 8, pp. 186-187. On this, see also Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” pp. 148-149.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 77 In the third panel, the Souvigny Bible depicts the third day—in which the sea was brought together, dry land appeared, and vegetation began to grow—in a way that seems to be unique up until this time and fairly rare afterwards. It is Thierry’s contention that when dry land appeared through continued primal heating, the land mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa did not surface at once, but rather was preceded by a number of islands. He explains this through comparison with the process of evaporation of water on an uneven surface through heat, in which as the water evaporates, the highest areas of the surface emerge first.67 Perhaps not surprisingly by now, that is exactly how the person responsible for this hexameral program chose to represent the third day: as a number of islands surrounded by blue water and with the Creator above in a fiery roundel, the fiery roundel appearing elsewhere only in the discussion of the first day, where heat was also a major component of the argument. In his explanation of the fourth day, the creation of the planets and stars, Thierry discusses the belief that the heavenly bodies were made of the second day’s ethereal water vapor during this fourth rotation of the cosmos—mentioning in passing that the heavens are sometimes thought to look green.68 In illustration of the fourth day (the fourth panel), the person responsible for this program had the outer limits of the cosmos depicted as if surrounded by rotating green water vapor, the material source of the heavenly bodies, just as Thierry wrote. (The water in the other days is consistently blue or blue-black.) But to this, in order to indicate the heavenly bodies—something that was typically done by portraying the planets or stars themselves—he chose to depict the seven hemicycles or orbits of the seven planets in alternating colored and gold bands: not showing the seven planets (except for the sun and moon, which the Creator holds) but continuing the idea of rotation. Although the seven planets are not explicitly mentioned in Thierry’s discussion, they were taken for granted by all the formally educated people of the time (and probably many of the uneducated).69 The seven planets were also found in countless contemporary astro67 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus 9, p. 187. On this, see also Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” p. 149. Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, p. 169, has also noticed the connection between Thierry and the islands. 68 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus 10-13, pp. 187-188. On this, see also Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” pp. 149-150. 69 Although there is no need to attribute such a generality to Plato, his Timaeus 38c-d, p. 78, is the locus classicus. These are not four circuits with areas of air in between, but seven continuously adjacent circuits, just as they are consistently

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nomical schemata. But, to the best of my knowledge, they had never appeared in hexameral imagery until the twelfth century. And this seems to have been no accident. Just as much as the opinions of Thierry, this was an invasion of scientific thought—of human reasoning—into the word of God, and, as such, was exactly what the “new theologians” were so bitterly condemned for at the time. As to the fifth day, Thierry argues that the creation of the creatures of the air and water was brought about when the heat generated through the movement of the newly created heavenly bodies reached a level at which life could exist. Since this new heat warmed the elements that were above the earth first—the air and water—it was the creatures of the air and water that were created first.70 This idea is shown in the fifth panel of the Souvigny Bible through the appearance of the Creator blessing these creatures (as described in the Priestly account) from a wavy, blue roundel. According to Thierry, it was through the water vapor in the air that the life-giving heat was transferred to these animals. Thus, the roundel of the Creator is wavy and blue, suggesting water vapor—the earlier roundel of primal heat not being appropriate since the sun has been in place since the previous day and the operative factor of water vapor remains to be indicated. Thierry applied the same logic to the creation of the terrestrial animals of the sixth day, and so the same watery roundel is shown with the Creator blessing the terrestrial animals in the sixth panel. And while he also credited this process with the creation of humankind, he did state—briefly enough to be described as formulaically—that humankind was created in the image and likeness of God, following the language of the Priestly account.71 It is only now, with this idea, that the imagery of creation in the Souvigny Bible reverts to a truly traditional conception with a separate, seventh panel showing the Creation of Eve from the side of Adam and with the Fall of Humankind in the eighth and final panel. What immediately distinguishes the first six panels from the last two is the consistent presence of the roundels in which the Creator appeared. The purpose of this device—whether depicted in medieval astronomical schemata. The gold circuits carry a very faint ornamental pattern meant to indicate that they are not air but circuits. 70 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus 14, p. 189. On this, see also Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” p. 150. 71 Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus 14, p. 189. On this, see also Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” p. 150. The swirl of green across the body of Adam refers to his formation from the “slime of the earth” (Gen. 2.7), the rest of the earth also being colored green.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 79 indicating primal heat, ether, the orbits of the planets, or water vapor— is to make plain the idea that it is the force of Nature that is the actual medium of creation, though always with God as its source: no more or no less than what Thierry himself says. While Thierry’s ideas—and so the school of thought of which he was a leading member—are not all that different from many of the great Fathers such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Bede, what is different is his attitude.72 And in the Souvigny Bible, we find this attitude fully integrated into a luxury artwork of a mainstream Cluniac Benedictine monastery far from any major center of “new theology”—the character and location of the monastery undoubtedly making these manifestations of the new thought all the more disturbing to the “old theology.” Indeed, the threat of the Christianized neoplatonic conception of creation was generally presented in the lecture hall. But if the thought of the “new theology” could insinuate itself so thoroughly into the philosophical culture of such a mainstream, moderately conservative monastery as Souvigny that it brought about a virtual reconception of the traditional understanding of creation within that monastery’s artistic culture, more overtly platonic elements could find their places in other such institutions as well. And it was not limited to the creation account of Genesis. As mentioned earlier, the Sapiential books and Psalms have a platonic component to them, however minor, but one that could at times take on major proportions. The image of the Creator with a compass, whose ultimate manifestation is the magnificent frontispiece of the Bible moralisée of around 1220 to 1230 and now in Vienna (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek ms 2554), is a case in point (plate 9).73 According to John Friedman, previous scholars—including Erwin Panofsky—have wrongly seen this particular image as little or no different from the other forty or so extant images of the Creator holding a compass, viewing them all as having their biblical source is Wisdom 11.21, where it is said that God, whose hand created the world from formless matter, has ordered all things in “measure, number, and 72

As noted in Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” p. 155. Vienna, Ost. Nationalbib. ms 2554, f. Iv. See Gerald Guest, Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (London, 1995), for an overview of the literature and bibliography. More recently, see Katherine H. Tachau, “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas: Scientific Study in the Old French Bible Moralisée,” Art Bulletin 80 (1998), 7-33. I follow the date suggested by R. Haussherr, Bible moralisée: Faksimile-Ausgabe im Original-format des Codex Vindobonensis 2554 der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 2 vols. (Graz, 1973), 2: 7. 73

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weight.”74 The only noteworthy exception to this has been Otto von Simson, who attributes the source to Proverbs 8.27, the translation of which he gives as, God “set a compass [circle] upon the face of the depth.”75 It is, however, the opinion of Friedman that there are two distinct iconographical types of the Creator with compass, the first being based on Wisdom 11.21 and the second primarily on Proverbs 8.27. Of what he sees as the earlier type, the earliest extant example is found in the tympanum of a canon table in the Eadui Codex of around 1020, written by a monk at Christ Church, Canterbury (plate 10), and perhaps better known in the more complex composition of the Tiberius Psalter (plate 11).76 This illumination shows the Creator holding a compass and balance-scales in his left hand, while his right hand makes a gesture of blessing. The second type is exemplified in the Vienna Bible moralisée (plate 9), which shows the Creator holding only a compass, inscribing a circle on the cosmos. But as pointed out by Friedman, neither of these literary sources actually mention a compass—Panofsky and the others over interpreted Wisdom 11.21 as an exact source, and von Simson’s modern English translation of Proverbs 8.27 uses the word “compass” in the sense of a circle, not a geometrical instrument. Friedman himself is forced to follow impossibly tortuous paths in his desire to find a specific, written exegetical source for the word “compass,” finally having to go outside both the Latin and Christian cultures in which this image functioned.77 Toward this end 74 For this entire discussion, Jonathan Friedman, “The Architect’s Compass in Creation Miniatures of the Later Middle Ages,” Traditio 30 (1974), 419-429. 75 Otto Georg von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, expanded ed. (Princeton, 1987), p. 35, n. 37. 76 Hanover, Kestner Museum ms WM XXIa 36, f. 9v. On this manuscript, see Elzbieta Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 900-1066, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 2 (London, 1976), no. 67, with complete bibliography. This illumination should be seen in relation with the facing folio, folio 10, which shows the face of the Creator (Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, figure 225). Tiberius Psalter: London, Brit. Lib. ms Cotton, Tiberius C. VI, f. 7v. On this, Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, no. 98, with extensive bibliography; but special attention should be paid to Adelheid Heimann, “Three Illustrations from the Bury St. Edmunds Psalter and Their Prototypes,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966), 39-59. To this should be added the extensive study, Kathleen M.J. Openshaw, “Images, Texts and Contexts: The Iconography of the Tiberius Psalter, London, British Library, Cotton MS. Tiberius C.VI.” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Toronto, 1990), esp. pp. 31-33, 456-457, 490. 77 Friedman, “The Architect’s Compass,” gives full critical discussion, bibliography, and artistic sources. Erwin Panofsky, Dürers ‘Melencolia I:’ Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Berlin, 1923), pp. 67-68. R. Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 81 he cites three Jewish commentators who refer to the use of a compass by the Creator in relation to the Proverbs passage. Of these, however, two published only in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the third, the famous Rashi, probably only toward the late eleventh—and then in Hebrew—by which time the image of the Creator with the compass was already firmly established. There is, however, no need to go to such lengths. Medieval artistic culture, particularly in this period, was not entirely dependent on the written word, and its artists were quite willing and able to go beyond their texts in offering a sort of visual exegesis when required. Once established—in the age of the creation of the great Gothic cathedrals, when the role of the architect was becoming such an authoritative one—a different set of factors undoubtedly contributed to the appeal of this particular type of image. But Friedman is correct in his belief that there are two different iconographical types, though, in a different sense than that described by him. In the first type, the Wisdom type (plate 11), the head and hands of the Creator protrude from behind the earth, which is surrounded by the regions of air and ether (the heavens): the two constituting the “heaven and earth” of Genesis 1.1. His right hand makes the gesture of blessing while at the same time holding a compass and balance-scales. Friedman wants to see a literal interpretation of Wisdom 11.21 in this, with the compass referring to measure, the fingers to number, and the scales to weight.78 But while Wisdom 11.21 may be the specific source of some of this imagery, such as the scales, the gesture of blessing is simply an indicator of the Creator’s approval of creation, similar to his seeing that creation was “good” (Gen. 1.4), and is commonly seen Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London, 1964), pp. 339-340. Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, p. 35 n. 37. 78 Friedman, “The Architect’s Compass,” p. 423. Heimann (“Three Illustrations from the Bury St. Edmunds Psalter,” pp. 52-53) differs from this in seeing the pipes that extend from the Creator’s mouth as referring to number and also to the Son, giving a trinitarian interpretation of this image which she herself does not seem to be completely convinced by, despite her broad learning. The two pipes that extend from the mouth of the Creator are in all likelihood meant to show his vivifying powers, as Heimann herself shows in another creation image in an earlier article; New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib. ms 394, f. 5v (Adelheid Heimann, “Trinitas Creator Mundi,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 [1938], figure 8b). Perhaps more directly related is the testimony of Ps. 32.6, which states how God established the heavens and their power by the word and spiritus (spirit/breath) of his mouth, the pipes coming from his mouth giving visual emphasis to this concept which is otherwise rather difficult to depict.

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throughout creation imagery (cf. plates 7, 8, 15, 19, 20, and 21); it is not the deity counting on his fingers and does not refer to his ordering things in “number.” It is enough to say that the artist of the Eadui Codex (plate 10) saw the compass and scales as sufficient indicators in themselves: the scales as referring to weight is obvious enough, while the compass can easily be seen as referring to both measure and number in that measure (mensura) is described in perhaps the most authoritative commentary on this passage as being concerned with imposing limitations, and number with form—both of which are inherent in the use of the compass.79 Of more interest to this study is the context in which this imagery is actually used in the Tiberius Psalter—i.e., in a depiction of the first day, the creation of “heaven and earth” with the spirit of God “moving” over the waters, and not of the Book of Wisdom itself. In fact, none of the other examples of this type are found in copies of the Book of Wisdom either. They appear in various places, the Tiberius Psalter image being found in some computus material in the beginning of the Psalter. Thus, though biblically based, the image has conceptually migrated away from the text, and is in fact not a textual illustration at all. It is instead something quite different. It is the manifestation of the desire to have an independent image of the Creator, an image in which the conception of the Creator was fundamentally influenced from outside Genesis—in this case from the slightly platonically influenced Book of Wisdom—though the inspiration remains biblical. In the frontispiece of the Vienna Bible moralisée, this is taken a step further—a significant step. Typically described as a depiction of God as the architect of creation,80 as if it were an iconic image, this miniature seems to be something else again (plate 9). Its basic biblical source is not particularly in question, as has been explained. In the great reminiscence of creation in Proverbs, the author, believed in the Middle Ages to have been no less than Solomon, writes how God “encompassed the waters with true law and circuit (Pr. 8.27),” meaning—in this English translation of the Latin translation of the already poetic and enigmatic Hebrew passage—that when God gave a spherical form to the earth, which is surrounded by the

79 Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim 4: 7, PL 34: 299. Alan of Lille, Liber in Distinctionibus Dictionum Theologicalium, PL 210: 856, confirms this understanding of mensura, referring to this very passage. 80 On this, see Tachau, “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas,” cited above.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 83 Ocean Stream, he did so according to his own unchanging laws of Nature.81 But if this explains the general form of the frontispiece, what accounts for its rationale within the conceptual structure of the manuscript? The sequence of paired texts and images in the Bible moralisée begins, as one might expect in a picture Bible, with the traditional six days of creation.82 And, being a moralized picture Bible, each biblical text and image is given a corresponding figural interpretation in text and image; the interpretations of the six days here being fundamentally ecclesiological, with a strong Augustinian component.83 But, for the frontispiece which precedes this entire sequence of texts and images, there is no moralized counterpart. Although the creation of the world in six days as described in Genesis was accepted as a literal reality by most in the Middle Ages, Augustine provided a powerful authority for a different understanding of this biblical passage, whose illustration the person or persons responsible for the illumination of the Bible moralisée had to come to terms with here. According to Augustine, the process of the six days is best understood figurally, though he remains purposefully vague about this despite the fact that he gives at least two different exegetical interpretations of its meaning (the best known of which is not even integrated into his discussions of creation, properly speaking). He repeatedly states that creation was simultaneous, that the creation of the original formless mass of elemental matter took place before the first day, whatever that first day constituted, that it was precisely now—with the creation of matter, with change, and with motion—that time began, and that this is or may be what is understood by the creation of “heaven and earth.”84 81

Pr. 8.27: “…certa lege et gyro vallabat abyssos.” Vienna, Öst. Nationalbib. ms 2554, f. 1-1v. 83 For example, on the creation of the angels of the first day, as referred to in Vienna, Öst. Nationalbib. ms 2554, f. 1, see Augustine, De Civitate Dei 11: 9, 11: 32-33, pp. 328-330, 351-354. On the foreshadowing of the Church of the sixth day as described in Vienna ms 2554, f. 1v, Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos 2: 37, PL 34: 215-216. On the non-literalness of the hexameron in general, Augustine, De Civitate Dei 11: 6-9, pp. 326-330; De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim 2: 28, 4: 1, 4: 37-5: 1-6, PL 34: 274-275, 295-296, 310-323; De Genesi ad Litteram Imperfectus Liber 28, 31, PL 34: 231, 233. 84 Augustine’s thought varies somewhat on this; but in general see De Civitate Dei 11: 6-9, 11: 32, 11: 33, 22: 30, pp. 326-330, 352, 353-354, 865-866; Confessiones 12: 9, 12: 15-16, 12: 24-25, ed. L. Verheijen, CCSL 27 (Turnhout, 1981), pp. 221, 223-224, 228-229; De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim 1: 8, 1: 12, PL 34: 249, 250-251; De Genesi ad Litteram Imperfectus Liber 6-12, PL 34: 222-224. 82

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Given that the bulk of the formless mass which the Creator is circumscribing consists of the four primal elements (with the water of the Ocean Stream forming the circumference, in accordance with Pr. 8.27),85 given that the first and last parts of the inscription of the miniature state, “Here God creates heaven and earth…and all the elements,” given that there is no figural interpretation offered for this image, and given that the images of the six days which it faces are interpreted only figurally, it seems that the frontispiece should be thought of on an overt level—in regard to its immediate relation to the succeeding hexameral imagery—as the depiction of the beginning of time at the moment of simultaneous creation, before the first day, according to augustinian thought, with God creating formless matter and bending over it to set it into cosmic motion with his own hand. But there is more at play here. Creation was a very closely studied subject in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the use of details in creation imagery is typically very exact. In the frontispiece of the Vienna Bible moralisée, some of the details are uncommon and the rest unique, serving the purpose in their very unusualness of taking this image another step deeper into creation theory, another step further in specifying and projecting a particular position on creation. The presence of the four elements in one form or another is common enough, although not necessarily with the same purpose as here. But the appearance of the compass with which the Creator gives spherical form to the whole is rather uncommon,86 and the depiction of the ten astronomical spheres found among the four elements is unique, as far as I have been able to determine. In Genesis, it is explicitly said that the sun, moon, and stars were created only on the fourth day, after the chaotic state of the universe had been made orderly, and after the earth had been fully formed and provided with vegetation. Yet in the Vienna Bible moralisée, while the state of the cosmos is still one of primal elemental chaos, the sun, moon, and stars are depicted as already created. This was not the oversight of an inattentive artist. Indeed, the complete title to the frontispiece openly declares, “Here God creates

85 The sea-green color of this element is consistent with that in the second, third, fifth, and seventh days; Vienna ms 2554, f. 1-1v. The next elemental ring toward the center is the air, the next fire (in the sense of ether), and the form in the center earth (cf. the depiction of the earth in the roundel of the second, third, and seventh days). 86 On this, see Zahlten, Creatio Mundi, pp. 153-156.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 85 heaven and earth, the sun and moon, and all the elements.”87 Both in what they specify and what they exclude, these details preclude any reference to the Roman type of creation mentioned earlier in which the imagery of the entire six days is collapsed into a single scene. Thus, despite the presence of the Creator, the course of creation in this image is decidedly and consciously non-biblical in its details—as distinct from its generally biblical form and augustinian rationale within the conceptual structure of the manuscript—something that was not the case in either the Souvigny Bible or the Tiberius Psalter. Ultimately, the same might be said for the presence of the compass, that it is decidedly non-biblical, regardless of its possible indirect justification through Pr. 8.27. For unlike the compass in the Tiberius Psalter— which is unemployed, one of several more or less incidental symbols that individually contribute certain discrete characterizations to the larger iconic depiction of the Creator—the actively used compass here serves as the focal point of the entire image and the primary device of narration. And what is being narrated through these details of astronomical spheres and compass is nothing less than the Christianized creation of the world according to Plato. In the Timaeus, in the crucial passage on the beginning of time—the same subject that is shown here—Plato describes how as part of the general process of creation the sun, moon, and five other planets were created (the canonical seven planets, the sun and moon being considered planets in pre-modern astronomy).88 In the Vienna Bible Moralisée, these are shown as the sun, moon, and eight other spheres: the ten representing the seven planets (of which only the sun and moon are specified in Genesis), the sphere of the fixed stars, the sphere of the primum mobile, and the sphere of the empyrean.89 And while the spherical shape of the cosmos was more or less standard and certainly non-controversial, one of the functions of the compass is to draw attention to its perfect, geometric form: concern with the geometric perfection of the cosmic sphere at the time of creation being entirely absent from Genesis but being an important 87 Vienna, Öst. Nationalbib. ms 2554, f. Iv: “Ici crie Dex ciel et terre, soleil et lune, et toz elemenz.” 88 Plato, Timaeus 38c, p. 78. 89 This arrangement would have been obvious to anyone familiar with astronomical schemata in the Middle Ages. Definitions and arrangement of these components vary, but as used here the primum mobile represents the crystalline sphere; the empyrean is the heavenly sphere of ether or fire; cf. Karl Künstle, Ikonographie der Christlichen Kunst, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1926-1928), 1: 174.

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matter in Plato’s account, which emphasizes that at every point the circumference was perfectly equidistant from the center point.90 There is only one way to convey this idea visually, and that is through the use of a compass—the visual reading of whose active use here is, therefore, not at all the same as that of the passive compass in the Tiberius Psalter. This leads us to the other function of the compass. In the Middle Ages, there were only two types of people who were thought of as using a compass: the geometer and the artifex or craftsman.91 The image of the Creator in the Vienna Bible moralisée is clearly not that of a geometer. This leaves only an artifex, or, more precisely, the artifex—the word artifex being so commonly understood to mean God that it was defined as such in a dictionary of biblical terms contemporary with the Vienna Bible moralisée.92 Thus, this is not exactly an iconic image of God as the architect of creation, as described by some authors. It is rather a narrative image of the Christianized Demiurge—the Craftsman, the artifex, in all his platonic seduction—at the beginning of time, in the process of simultaneous creation before the first day.93 But would anyone, aside from the “old theology,” have actually thought of this as platonic? To the “old theology,” the issue was not Platonism, it was Christianized platonism. When such an image was placed at the beginning of Genesis, certainly all educated viewers—and this image was made under French

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Plato, Timaeus 33b, pp. 60-62. For example, the compass is shown as the attribute of the geometer in folio 32 of the nineteenth-century copy of the famous illumination of the Liberal Arts from the lost, late twelfth-century Hortus Deliciarum; Rosalie Green et al., Hortus Deliciarum, 2 vols. (London, 1979), 2: 57. The compass is presented as the tool of the artifex in Is. 44.13: “artifex lignarius…in circino tornavit illud;” and a compass is depicted in the stained glass window of the sculptors at Chartres (for an illustration, see Jean Favier, The World of Chartres [New York, 1990], p. 155), and at the feet of Hugues Libergier in his tomb relief in Reims Cathedral (for an illustration, see Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation [Ithaca, NY, 1996], p. 90), both contemporary with the Vienna Bible moralisée. On the artifex in general, see von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, pp. 33-37 and passim; Friedman, “The Architect’s Compass;” Jean Leclercq, “Otium Monasticum as a Context for Artistic Creativity,” Monasticism and the Arts, ed. T. Verdon (Syracuse, 1984), pp. 69-71; Hanning, “Ut enim Faber.” 92 Alan of Lille, Distinctiones, PL 210: 711. 93 For a different view, which sees this image as “emblematic” and the following hexameron as narrative (rather than in the figural, Augustinian sense I describe here), see James Michael Heinlen, “The Ideology of Reform in the French Moralized Bible” (Ph.D. Diss., Northwestern University, 1991), pp. 14-15. 91

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 87 royal patronage94—would have been fully aware of the image’s ostensible scriptural basis in Proverbs. But the platonic factor would have been operative as well, even overriding, and can only be described as overt, given the extremely high recognition level and prestige of the Timaeus at this time. Yet this would have been the case not necessarily in the sense of an independent reference to the artifex of the Timaeus, but more insidiously—in the opinion of the “old theology”—in the sense of a concordance between the Bible and platonic thought. And in this regard, it seems to have been no coincidence that the famous body of Bibles of which the Vienna manuscript is a part was made under the instruction of clerical scholars. While these were clerical scholars who explicitly rejected the “dialecticians” and “secular” scholars within their profession and who were more moderate than Abelard or Thierry of Chartres, their very middle-ground position is an indicator of how far Christianized Platonism could penetrate—here, in the vernacular, reaching to the heights of the very throne itself (plate 12).95 94 On the likelihood of royal patronage, see Heinlen, “The Ideology of Reform in the French Moralized Bible,” pp. 238-242. 95 New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib. ms M.240, f. 8. My interpretation is in complete accordance with Heinlen’s theory that the frontispieces of the Bibles moralisées must be thought of in relation to the imagery that follows; Heinlen, “The Ideology of Reform in the French Moralized Bible,” pp. 12-30. Recently, Tachau, “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas,” has shown how the Bibles moralisées carry strong messages against “secular” scholars (those with excessive interests in astrology and dialectics) and against Catharists, suggesting that the Bibles were in part the work of the circle of Peter the Chanter (following Heinlen, “The Ideology of Reform in the French Moralized Bible”)—a general argument that is convincingly shown. But more specifically, she has also suggested that the frontispiece of Vienna ms 2554 is directed against both secular scholars (on the grounds that the compass conveys the idea that only God “encompasses the entire created order”) and Catharists (because God himself is shown creating the material world). As to the first part of her interpretation, the word-play between “compass” and “encompasses” is one that does not work in Latin. But more to the point, the visual vocabulary of the artifex in conjunction with creation imagery overwhelmingly relates it to Platonist thought. The term artifex (or opifex) for the Christian Creator is something that appears hundreds of times in the sources on creation, many of which were among the most important texts read by the educated. For example, the term is found repeatedly in the authoritative Augustine, De Civitate Dei 11: 22, 11: 23, 12: 26, 22: 11, 22: 19, 22: 30, pp. 341, 342, 382, 829, 838, 862 (these are only the most important, see also passim); Confessiones 11: 15, p. 201; and throughout his other writings; the unquestionably orthodox Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob 14: 70, p. 742, and cf. 9: 86, 34: 11, pp. 518, 1741; the middle-ground contemporary, Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon 1: 6, p. 13; De Sacramentis 1:1:1, 1:6:17, PL 176:187, 274; De Arca Noe Morali 2: 16, PL 176: 645; In Hierarchiam 1: 1, 1: 2, 2, 7, 9: 13, PL 175: 926, 928, 949,

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But it gets worse, from the point of view of the “old theology.” If the Vienna Bible moralisée could show at the beginning of Genesis a process of creation different from that recounted in Genesis, the Bible of Saint-Hubert shows not even this, depicting instead a platonic conception—not even the process—of creation, through Boethian and Macrobian interpretations, in its Genesis monogram (plate 13).96 Made in the late eleventh century at the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Hubert, formerly an Augustinian house, this almost crypto-platonic monogram shows the Creator surrounded by images of the four elements with inscriptions declaring their function as a variation of the platonic solids: evidence that a greater than comfortable degree of platonic influence was penetrating monasticism long before the great platonizing masters of Paris and Chartres had brought about a con-

1064, 1118; the conservative William of Saint-Thierry, De Natura Corporis et Animae 77, ed. and trans. M. Lemoine, De la nature du corps et de l’âme (Paris, 1988), p. 163; and cf. Epistola Domni Willemi ad Fratres de Monte Dei 265, ed. and trans. J. Déchanet, Lettre aux frères du Mont-Dieu, Sources chrétiennes 223 (Paris, 1975), p. 356; and, of course, the source of it all, Plato (trans. Cicero), Timaeus 29a, p. 180; Cicero also uses such words as fabricator and aedificator to convey the general idea (28c-29a, p. 180); Chalcidius renders demiourgos as opifex, see Plato (trans. Chalcidius), Timaeus, 29a, pp. 21, 35; he also uses fabricator once along with opifex (29a, p. 21); among many, many others from the Bible to Ambrose to Basil to Boethius to Rupert of Deutz. It is also important to note in regard to the first part of Tachau’s interpretation that neither Peter the Chanter nor the person responsible for Vienna ms 2554 rejected Plato or Classical thought out of hand, by any means. On Peter’s middle ground views on Plato, see J.W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1970), 1; pp. 103-104. On Vienna ms 2554’s acceptance of Classical thought through the vehicle of Augustine and Jerome, see Vienna ms 2554, f. 65 (Tachau, “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas,” figure 18), where the latter are shown bemoaning the theft of “the philosophy of the pagans” by “heretics and the unfaithful” (les populicans et les mescreanz); and cf. Tachau, “God’s Compass and Vana Curiositas,” 19-22 on this. As to the second part of her interpretation, the depiction of the creation of the material world by the Creator is true of virtually all creation imagery. The idea that creation is good, as repeatedly stated in Genesis, is integral to this. What distinguishes this image here is not its general theme but its specific details, details that, again, unequivocally relate it to Platonist thought as I describe above. Given its strong rejection of secular scholarship on the one hand and its moderate acceptance of platonist thought on the other, the manuscript must be seen as one form of middle-ground argumentation. 96 Brussels, Bib. Roy. ms II.1639, f. 6v. On the Bible of Saint-Hubert, see Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination, pp. 124-126, no. 39, with full bibliography. Of special interest is H. Bober, “In Principio: Creation Before Time,” De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. M. Meiss, 2 vols. (New York, 1961), pp. 13-28, who has analyzed the platonic theme of this initial.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 89 certed reaction against themselves from such monastic leaders as Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry.97 Similar examples could be multiplied endlessly. Boethius himself appears alongside Moses, David, and Solomon in the hexameral creation page of the Gospels of Henry the Lion, made at the traditional Benedictine monastery of Helmarshausen by the monk Herman around 1175, where the Early Christian master of Christianized platonism is ranked with the authors of Genesis and of the Sapiential books and Psalms as a sacred authority on creation (plate 14).98 The word hile is featured prominently in the depiction of the second day of creation in the initial to Genesis of a Bible from Saint Albans Abbey from the end of the twelfth century (plate 15).99 The latinization of the Greek word for the primordial chaotic material, hile (or more properly, hyle) is a word referred to by Ambrose and Augustine in the late fourth century but which in the twelfth century was part of the platonic vocabulary of such new theologians as Thierry of Chartres on the basis of Chalcidius’s commentary on the Timaeus—here, being gratuitously thrust into the imagery of the second day to indicate the still unformed nature of much of the cosmos at this time.100 The inclusion here of overtly platonic elements into otherwise traditional representations is illustrative of the “marginal” character of much of the public: these educated members of society, not the “new theologians” per se, were the public for whom the “old theology” was fighting so tenaciously. But certainly beyond hope, in the opinion of the “old theology,” must have been whoever was responsible for the two full-page illustrations in a copy of Honorius Augustodunensis’s Clavis Physicae, both of which go beyond Honorius’s abridgement of Erigena’s De Divisione 97 The appearance of the platonizing Bible of Saint-Hubert before the twelfthcentury platonizing scholars has been commented on by Hanning, “Ut enim Faber,” p. 121. 98 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bib. ms Guelph 105 Noviss. 2°, f. 172. On the Gospels, see Horst Fuhrmann and Florentine Mütherich, Das Evangeliar Heinrichs des Löwen und das mittelalterliche Herrscherbild (Munich, 1986); and Frank N. Steigerwald, Das Evangeliar Heinrichs des Löwen (Offenbach, 1985); both with full bibliographies. 99 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College ms 48, f. 7v. C.M. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066-1190, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 3 (London, 1975), no. 91, with full bibliography. 100 On the use of the word hile by Ambrose, Augustine, and in Chalcidius’s commentary on the Timaeus, see Häring, “The Creation and Creator,” p. 153. Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus 24, p. 192.

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Naturae in their timaean and chalcidian themes—possibly a monk at the venerable Benedictine monastery of Michelsberg, near Bamberg. The first depicts creation not in the biblical six days but in the platonic four types of living creatures (plate 16).101 The second illustrates William of Conches more than it does Honorius or Erigena, boldly proclaiming ANIMA MUNDI across the top of the page, over the head of a personification of this same world-soul presiding over the interaction of the four elements, showing better than the writings of the “new theology” to what degree twelfth-century monastic culture had become infiltrated by platonism, according to Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny (plate 17).102 Lost also, according to this view, must surely have been the monk of Christ Church in Canterbury who was responsible for the frontispiece to Boethius’s De Musica of around 1130, however innocent his intention may have been, which shows Plato sitting on the cosmos, book in hand, right arm raised in a gesture of authority, in general form looking for all the world like the Creator himself in the Yawist cycle of Saint Paul’s in Rome (plates 18 and 19).103 While many of the conceptual and iconographic components of these neoplatonic theories and their images had long traditions in Western medieval literary and artistic culture, their central role in the “new theology” made them newly suspect—and newly attractive. Indeed, from the point of view of the moderate educated monk or canon, much of this imagery could have been seen as little more than a contemporary integration of learning and biblical study. But from the point of view of the “old theology,” this shift of interest from salvation to science was perceived as reducing the process of creation to the natural operation of the four elements—something that desacralized the cosmos, something that could very easily be seen as an undermining of the basis of the theory of the history of salvation. Furthermore, in many cases, this could be seen as coming from precisely that quarter from which the “old theology” most needed support: the more highly educated component of the monastic and collegial wings of the Church. Thus, when the “old theology” responded, its arguments were 101 Paris, Bib. Nat. ms lat. 6734, f. 3v. Plato, Timaeus 39e-40a, pp. 82-84. For an analysis of these images, as well as of Michelsberg as the possible place of their origin, see M.-T. d’Alverny, “Le cosmos symbolique de XIIe siècle,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen âge 20 (1953), 36-37. 102 Paris, Bib. Nat. ms lat. 6734, f. 1v. D’Alverny, “Le cosmos symbolique,” pp. 31-81. 103 Cambridge, Univ. Lib. ms Ii.3.12, f. 61v. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, no. 41, with bibliography. Rome, Bib. Vat. ms Barb. lat. 4406, f. 24v.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 91 actually directed not so much at the leading thinkers of the “new theology” themselves, the danger without, but at those monks and canons on the margins, the danger within—a marginal public not unsympathetic to both sides which today is sometimes called the “swing voters,” a group that was all the more sought after precisely because of its marginal character and all that that implied. How did the “old theology” respond artistically? Remembering always that the breadth of interest in creation in the twelfth century and the nature of the extant artistic evidence make it both unnecessary and impossible to do a closely chronological analysis, the basic tendency was for the “old theology” to respond traditionally—and so respectably but ineffectually according to the standards of the new urban centers of thought. The Bible of Sainte-Geneviève, believed to have been made for the collegial foundation of Saint-Etienne in Troyes around 1185 to 1195, contains an interesting example of what seems to be a deliberate, though weak, response to the scientific challenges of the “new theology” in the twelfth-century controversy over creation (plate 20).104 In the initial to Genesis in this Bible, which is universally seen as connected to a group of luxury Bibles of the late twelfth century including the Pontigny Bible discussed earlier (plate 7), the artist presents a conception of the six days of creation that is clearly related to the Pontigny Bible, although not directly dependent upon it, in the general composition of the six central roundels and the overall design.105 But there are a number of significant differences in the 104 Paris, Bib. Nat. ms lat. 11535, f. 6v; sometimes called the Bible of Sainte-Geneviève, sometimes called the Bible of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For the possible place of origin and date, I follow M. Harrison Caviness, Sumptuous Arts at the Royal Abbeys in Reims and Braine: Ornatus Elegantiae, Varietate Stupendes (Princeton, 1990), p. 71; P. Danz Stirnemann, “Quelques bibliothèques princières et la production hors scriptorium au XIIe siècle,” Bulletin archèologique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, n. s., 17-18 (1981-1982), 31-32; and Stirnemann, “Nouvelles pratiques en matière d’enluminure au temps de Philippe Auguste,” in La France de Philippe Auguste: Le temps des mutations, Actes du Colloque international organisé par le C.N.R.S., ed. R.-H. Bautier (Paris, 1982), pp. 963-967, 970 (the latter uses the name, the Bible of Saint-Germain-des-Prés). On the house of Saint-Etienne, see T. Boutiot, Histoire de la ville de Troyes, 4 vols. (repr. Marseille, 1977), 2: 210-212 and passim. 105 On the Bible of Sainte-Geneviève, see Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination, no. 93, with bibliography; on the related manuscripts, see Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination, pp. 175-180, 221-222, no. 91 and 99, with bibliographies. The Manerius Bible (Cahn, Romanesque Bible Illumination, no. 99) has a virtually identical composition for the Genesis initial; I use the Bible of Sainte-Geneviève here because of its more obvious similarities with the Pontigny Bible (Amédée Boinet, Les manuscrits à peintures de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève de Paris [Paris, 1921], pl. IV).

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otherwise strikingly similar Sainte-Geneviève initial: the image of the Creator appears centrally in each of the hexameral roundels; the Four Cardinal Winds are depicted in the four corners of the inner rectangle; and the Priestly account of creation in the central roundels is fully integrated with the Yawist account of the creation and Fall in the flanking roundels—all missing from the purely Priestly account of the Pontigny Bible. In general, these elements taken individually do not necessarily have any special significance. But in this particular instance they are directly related to the creation controversy. In this particular case, the repeated and centralized images of the Creator are meant to emphasize the direct role of God in creation, as opposed to the more scientific theories of elemental creation of the “new theology.” The Four Cardinal Winds act to make plain the cosmic significance of the events they define as the center of the universe, as opposed to the desacralized universe of the “new theology.” And—because these first two elements have suggested a specific polemical direction on the part of the person responsible for determining this scene, a direction beyond the literal illustration of the text—it seems that the integration of the Yawist account of the Fall, in this specific case, is meant to go beyond a simple narrative of creation in connecting the need for salvation with creation, in connecting creation with the need for restoration. (The two cherubim guarding the gate of Paradise, the Four Rivers of Paradise, and the groups of animals at the bottom add nothing to this cosmic intent, but only serve to indicate locality and contribute to the ornamentation of the initial.) Thus, when seen in comparison to the initial to Genesis in the Pontigny Bible, this might be said to be a standard hexameral I reaction to the new scientific theories, an attempt to “resacralize” the cosmos desacralized by the “new theology” and to reintroduce, in however minor a way—and it is rather minor—the history of salvation into the history of humankind. A stronger, more confident move in the same direction is seen in the hexameral initial to Genesis in the Bible of Robert de Bello, abbot of Saint Augustine’s, made around 1230 to 1240, possibly at Canterbury (plate 21).106 In this lavish initial, the Nine Choirs of Angels are shown above the descending Six Days of Creation, the choirs integrated along with the Fall of the Bad Angels into the first day. The Creator is prom106 London, Brit. Lib. ms Burney 3, f. 5v. On the Bible of Robert de Bello, see Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts 1: 1190-1250, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 4 (Oxford, 1982), no. 63, with full bibliography.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 93 inently portrayed in each day, and the Trinity is depicted as resting on the seventh at the bottom. Though made with deliberate near-ambiguity, the figure of the Creator is that of the Father alternating from day to day with the Son—arranged in such a way that, appropriately, the Father administers over the creation of the first day, and the Son over the creation of Adam and Eve—and with the spiritus (breath) of the Spiritus Sanctus (Holy Spirit) coming equally from the mouth of each on the seventh day: this arrangement constituting a denial to those who wanted to delineate too finely the various roles of the members of the Trinity in creation, such as Thierry of Chartres, Abelard, and William of Conches, whose views were denied by William of SaintThierry and others.107 Extending away from this in a way that breaks dramatically with the letter form of the I, drawing attention to itself through its almost antithetical horizontal relationship with the vertical presentation of the creation series, are two rows of three roundels each. The top three depict (in five scenes) an abbreviated Yawist account of the Fall from the Admonition to the Labor of Adam and Eve. The bottom three show Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, and the Sacrifice of Isaac. As a group, these are not exactly the main events of Genesis, as has been said by others, though no further explanation has been given. To begin with, there are a number of stories from Genesis that are of much more importance both narratively and exegetically than the Tower of Babel, such as the stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob, and Joseph. Furthermore, although the general importance of Noah’s Ark and the Sacrifice of Isaac is obvious, their specific meaning is unclear in this particular context—both of them having a number of important, even famous, interpretations, something that is not the case with the Tower of Babel. Thus, it must be the Tower of Babel that provides the key to the specific meaning of Noah’s Ark and the Sacrifice of Isaac in this creation initial. The predominant significance of the Tower of Babel is—as Augustine says in The City of God—that it represents Babylon, the Great Whore, the ultimate Old Testament symbol of the City of Man. Given this basic direction, the great ecclesiological and Christological interpretations of Noah’s Ark and the Sacrifice of Isaac should be seen as having only passive roles in this instance. Instead, at play here is the active exegetical sense of the Ark 107 On this aspect of the creation controversy, see Parent, La doctrine de la création, pp. 69-81; Scheffczyk, Creation, pp. 95-104, 115-130; and Hanning, “Ut enim Faber,” pp. 112-114.

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and Abraham as representing the two ages of the six ages of the history of salvation that occur in Genesis, both of these events being specifically described by Augustine as symbols of the City of God on earth.108 When these scenes at the bottom of the initial—that is, at the end of the visual narrative—are seen in connection with the nine choirs of angels at the top, or beginning, the whole presents a forceful statement of the history of salvation. History began with the creation of the ten choirs of angels and the fall of one, and will conclude only when that tenth choir is replaced by humankind: the goal of the history of salvation.109 Toward this end, the goal of neither the Priestly nor the Yawist account here is to explain creation itself. The purpose of both is ultimately a historical one, to lay the foundation for the history of salvation, to show that the God of creation is also the God of restoration, to show that humankind’s salvation is linked to its creation from the very beginning. Still, the presentation, though not the concept, is one that is limited to the narrative of Genesis and the addition of the apocryphal fall of the angels. This is not the case with the great Winchester Bible, made around 1150 to 1180 at the Cathedral Priory of Saint Swithun, in Winchester. In its initial to Genesis, the degree to which the history of salvation could be seen as conceptually imbedded in the beginning of Genesis is nowhere more fully manifested (plate 22).110 Unlike the Bible of Robert de Bello, the initial here is taken to its logical conclusion, looking beyond the immediate text to its greater significance, replacing the six or sometimes seven days of creation of the traditional hexameral I with the six ages of the history of salvation, and with the Last Judgment initiating the period of the perpetual sabbath that forms the seventh and last age, as articulated by Augustine in the conclusion to his City of God.111 What was put timidly and without profound thought in the 108 Augustine, De Civitate Dei 15: 26, 16: 4, 16: 10, 16: 12, 16: 17, pp. 493-494, 504505, 511-513, 515-516, 521-522. The six ages as given in De Civitate Dei 22: 30, pp. 865-866 (cf. also 16: 24, p. 527) are: 1) Adam to the Flood, 2) the Flood to Abraham, 3) Abraham to David, 4) David to the Babylonian Exile, 5) the Exile to Christ, 6) Christ to the end of time (and, finally, the seventh age, the Sabbath of humankind awaiting the Last Judgment; and the eight age, eternity). 109 Augustine, De Civitate Dei 22: 1, p. 807. 110 Winchester, Cath. Lib., Winchester Bible f.5. Kauffmann, Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066-1190, no. 83, with full bibliography. 111 Augustine, De Civitate Dei 22: 30, pp. 865-866. Developed by Bede, De Temporum Ratione 66, PL 90: 520-521; De Temporibus Liber 16, PL 90: 288; and Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 5: 38-39, ed. W.M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), n. p.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 95 Sainte-Geneviève Bible, and ingeniously but in a limited fashion in the Bible of Robert de Bello, here reaches what might be described as the natural limits of the initial to Genesis as a visual vehicle for those seeking to expound polemically in this direction. We thus see that these are something more than simple sets of “pretty pictures,” as they are sometimes described as being. We see that thought on the burning issue of creation—both literarily and artistically—was dominated by two seemingly contradictory mentalities: one that saw creation primarily in light of the history of salvation, as incidental to the restoration of humankind after the fall, and one that saw it through the prism of Classical learning about the cosmos and the elements. But we also see that between pronounced manifestations of these positions other opinions existed at every point of the spectrum—the opinions of educated monks and canons who were not committed to either extreme, but the weight of whose opinions mattered to the proponents of the “old” and “new” theologies. This was by definition a marginal public, not at all necessarily the great minds, although they were a significant factor. In order to win them over, clearly both traditional and more current demands had to be met. They had to be seduced, seduced with equal amounts of both sides of the argument. From the point of view of the mainstream Church—that part of the educated Church which accepted change but only at a cautious pace, theologically, and with a deferential though not slavish attitude toward the Fathers—this was not something that the “old theology” could address effectively, for with the “old theology” there could be no compromise. Nor, ultimately, could the “new theology” effectively win over the vast majority of this group at this time, since mainstream thought still saw the primary purpose of learning as leading one to an intellectual/spiritual illumination which in turn could lead to personal salvation. No, in order to retain this marginal group within the mainstream, which itself was slowly but irrevocably turning in the direction of the “new theology,” the only effective response could be a dialectical one—one with a traditional basis that dialectically co-opted certain of the trappings of Classical learning—and this was possible only from a position that was itself the result of a certain amount of dialectical thought: the middle-ground. Theologically, this was accomplished through the work of such middle-ground scholars as Peter Lombard and Hugh of Saint Victor, scholars who were well-versed in both the methods and thought of

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Classical learning but who could dialectically synthesize them into the traditional orthodox framework in order to create contemporarily attractive but doctrinally acceptable systems of thought. An excellent example of this is Lombard’s Liber Sententiarum, which adopts the method but not the attitude of Abelard’s Sic et Non. No less, in its own way, is Hugh’s De Sacramentis, the first treatise ever to be called a summa by its author and ultimately the product of aristotelian logic in its systematization of knowledge.112 Artistically, this middle-ground position was publicly argued in the imagery of the time just as it was with the more pronounced positions of the “old” and “new” theologies in the language of creation, restoration, knowledge, the use of knowledge in the ascent of the soul—which is the proper pursuit of knowledge for the scholar, according to the middle-ground position—the relation of the individual to the cosmos, the history of salvation, and so on. These issues were most effectively and comprehensively put forth in perhaps the most complex single work of art from the entire Middle Ages, The Mystic Ark, a painting conceived by Hugh around 1130 in response to this controversy. The subject of a brilliant series of lectures, it is summarized in a fifty-six page “treatise” that is unique in the study of medieval art: The Mystic Ark. The treatise records the form and meaning of a highly complex cosmic schema containing hundreds of figures, the central object of which is Noah’s Ark preceded by the Six Days of Creation. Based on a combination of literal description from Genesis, previous exegetical tradition, and a certain amount of neoplatonic thought, The Mystic Ark is a presentation of the Christian history of salvation within the framework of a neoplatonic cosmic schema. That is, The Mystic Ark was an attempt to leave the rejection of secular learning and logic of the “old theology” behind while at the same time co-opting the intellectual basis of the theory of creation of the “new theology,” thus attempting to prevent the “new theology” from claiming this prestigious intellectual position as its own—a middle-ground position that corresponded to the middle-ground character of the canons regular, 112 On the comparison between Abelard and Peter Lombard, see Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, pp. 357-358. Hugh of Saint Victor, De Sacramentis, prologue to the prologue, PL 176: 183-184: “Hanc enim quasi brevem quamdam summam omnium in unam seriem compegi…” On De Sacramentis as the first treatise to be called a summa by its author, Margot Fassler, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris (Cambridge, 1993), p. 227; but on this, see also the qualification by Evans, Old Arts and New Theology, p. 40.

Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe 97 of which Hugh was one, somewhere between monasticism and the clerics of the new Schools. But this is another story.113 So much of the popular modern conception of public discourse in the Middle Ages has been formed either by the Romantic view of the nineteenth century of that period as a time of now-lost social harmony and unquestioned religiosity, or by the anti-Catholic Protestant view of the medieval Church as unhesitatingly imposing, preferably by force, a system of belief on a docile mass of people kept purposefully ignorant, the few of whom who dissented being eagerly burned at the stake. This simply was not the case. Not only was the entire Middle Ages a period of theological inquiry actively commensurate with the contemporary economic base that normally supports such inquiry, but there were many, at all levels of society, who did not agree with mainstream theological opinion. Indeed, on many important matters, no Church view existed which could actually claim the unquestioned force of dogma—something that typically only resulted from current debates, rather than preceded them. Certain aspects of the issue of creation were among these disputed points, and the debate was in part worked out through images, images for the intellectual elite, the conditioners of thought, the shapers of power—the public who would eventually decide the outcome through the force of its opinion. The position of the “old theology,” as expressed by Bernard, was straightforward: “Is not our hope unjustified, if [the elements of] faith are in doubt?”—against which attitude the “new theology,” in the person of William of Conches, railed, “Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their ignorance, they do not want people to look into anything. They want us to believe like peasants and to not ask the reason behind things.”114 What were people to think? Were they to think that, despite the benevolent overview of a Christian deity, human existence was predicated upon an essentially independently working Nature, and that God’s role in creation was indirect, with all that that distance implied for the Church both theologically and as a temporal institution of great power and wealth? Or were they to think that every aspect of the existence of humankind began with and was directed toward one goal: the fulfillment of the 113 The painting, treatise, and their context will be studied in my forthcoming book, The Mystic Ark. 114 Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola 190: 9, 8: 25: “Nonne si fluctuat fides, inanis est et spes nostra?” William of Conches, Philosophia Mundi 1: 22, PL 172: 56; cited by Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, p. 11.

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history of salvation which had been preordained from the beginning of time, the guide and interpreter for which was the Church? These were questions for which the stakes were high and the answers varied, both verbally and visually, and for which the imagery of creation can serve as evidence of the intellectual/political state of the monasteries and collegial houses in which they were conceived.

Visions of Verbum incarnatum

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VISIONS OF VERBUM INCARNATUM: AUGUSTINIAN HOMILETICS AND ENGLISH CHRISTMAS SERMONS, 9001700 Wendy Furman-Adams

When the Maker of time, the Word of the Father, was made flesh, He gave us His birthday in time; and He without whose divine bidding no day runs its course, in His Incarnation reserved one day for Himself. He Himself with the Father precedes all spans of time; but on this day, issuing from His mother, He stepped into the tide of the years. Man’s maker was made man, that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breasts; that the Bread might be hungry, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired from the journey; that the Truth might be accused by false witnesses, the Judge of the living and the dead be judged by a mortal judge, Justice be sentenced by the unjust, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Vine be crowned with thorns, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might be made weak, that He who makes well might be wounded, that Life might die.1 So begins one of the earliest Christmas sermons still known today. These words preached by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, on a Christmas day between 396 and 430, reveal a fundamentally paradoxical understanding of the Incarnation they celebrate—an understanding that was to permeate English Nativity poetry from its beginnings in the ninth century until shortly before its virtual disappearance around 1720. By the early 800s, a probable date for the first extant Nativity poem in English, the three liturgical seasons of Christ’s Incarnation— Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany—would be long and thoroughly established in the Western Church, and the homiletic traditions associated with them would be highly sophisticated. Not surprisingly moreover, since most poets were clerics, these homiletic traditions were to develop along parallel lines, both doctrinally and rhetorically, 1 St. Augustine, Sermons for Christmas Day and Epiphany, trans. Thomas Comerford Lawler (London, 1963), Sermon 9, p. 107. Quotations from the sermons are from this edition unless otherwise indicated.

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with devotional poetry (as with hymnody and art) at least until the sixteenth century. After that time, the parallels were to remain equally striking, as both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations encouraged increasing lay devotion and as, by the later seventeenth century, sermons came to circulate widely as literature. Indeed, beginning with Augustine’s sermons, an unbroken line of Augustinian homiletics can be traced through the earlier and later Middle Ages (in the writings of AElfric and Bernard of Clairvaux, among others); into the earlier seventeenth century (notably in the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne); and finally into the later seventeenth century (in the work of such popular Anglican preachers as John Tillotson and Robert South). But along with their considerable continuity, these later homilists also introduce a new rhetoric and a new, albeit orthodox, Christology. And in so doing they inspire a new kind of Nativity poetry, the Messianic lyric, while undermining the Incarnation’s power as a poetic subject—finally lulling to sleep a 1300-year-old tradition that, in several senses, can best be called Augustinian. Writing at least a full century after the introduction of the feast, Augustine was still something of a pioneer in the development of Christmas—solidifying in his sermons a liturgical tradition he had not found fully formed. Christmas itself was first of the three seasons of the Incarnation to be established in Rome, and the first to travel from Rome to Augustine’s North Africa. In the East, however, the feast of the Epiphany could be traced as far back as the second century.2 From its earliest known existence, it was celebrated on January 6 and commemorated chiefly the “manifestation” of the Infant Christ to the Magi. But its larger theme was the manifestation of Christ’s divine nature; thus other epiphanies came to be connected to that of the Wise Men—especially Christ’s baptism (which was thought also to have occurred on January 6, and which revealed both Christ’s Sonship and the Trinity) and his first miracle, at the wedding at Cana. Gradually Christmas was added to the Eastern calendar, although Epiphany remained the more important feast; and gradually, too, Epiphany came to be celebrated in the West. By Augustine’s day the feasts were separate—hymns and sermons were composed especially for one or the other—but they had not long been clearly divided. 2

See Lawler’s Introduction and Clement A. Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition (London, 1912), p. 20.


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Clement Miles, writing early in the last century, suggested a gradual ascent in the importance of Christmas, as opposed to the Eastern Epiphany, with the increasing doctrinal sophistication of the Church: In some circles of early Christianity the Baptism appears to have been looked upon as the true Birth of Christ, the moment when, filled by the Spirit, He became the Son of God; and the carnal birth was regarded as of comparatively little significance…As however the orthodox belief became more sharply defined, increasing stress was laid on the Incarnation of Christ in the Virgin’s womb. (p. 22)

The incipient Arianism in this early Adoptionist view was the greatest single Christological concern of the fourth-century Fathers; and it certainly is no accident that the earliest recorded ecclesiastical Christmas falls within eleven years of the Council of Nicea (325), at which Christ’s perfect Godhead was decisively affirmed. Indeed, echoes of the Nicene Creed are everywhere to be found in the sermons, hymns, and poems of Christmas, proclaiming a Christ who is …the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

Almost as soon as the twin feasts of Christmas and Epiphany were established at Rome, they found their earliest lyrical expression in the hymns of Augustine’s “spiritual father,” Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan (d. 397).3 Nearly every theme of later Nativity poetry can be found in these hymns as in Augustine’s sermons: Mary’s virginal conception, Christ’s virgin birth, the meeting of time and eternity. Much of the imagery used by later poets can also be found—Mary as a temple, her womb as a bridal chamber, the Eucharist revealed in the cradle—as well as the habit of associative connection between one event in the kerygma and another. From the outset, the aesthetic expression of Christmas was rooted in doctrine, in mystery, in paradox—to use

3 Garry Wills has recently questioned the extent of Augustine’s spiritual debt to the Archbishop, at least in the earlier period following his conversion. See Saint Augustine: A Life (New York, 1999), pp. 42-44. Nonetheless, Augustine received his official baptismal instruction from Ambrose and was baptized by him on Easter Eve 387, and the two remained in regular contact during Augustine’s bishopric.

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Rosamund Tuve’s distinction, in the Incarnation rather than the Nativity.4 The reason for this heavily metaphysical emphasis in Christmas literature—whether hymn, sermon, or poem—is of course complex. But its roots lie in the theology of the New Testament (especially Pauline and Johannine) and in the development of that theology by the early Latin Fathers. For reasons that at first were more didactic than aesthetic, Augustine emphasized not the “orderly accounts”5 of the Nativity to be found in Matthew and Luke, but the reflections upon the mystery of the Incarnation to be found in the Gospel of John and the letters of Paul. Concerned with refuting various forms of Arianism, Augustine constantly stressed the dual nature of Christ, bringing about a natural emphasis on mystery, paradox, and wonder. In his sermons he sometimes begins in the manner of what will become an Ignatian meditation, by “seeing the spot:”6 “He who was God was made man. His was a poor little hut; He was wrapped in swaddling clothes, placed in a manger—you heard it when the Gospel was being read. Who would not be amazed?” But he moves on at once to his real concern, the mysteries implicit in the scene: “Placed in a manger, He became our food” (Sermon 7, 99-100); the Babe in the manger is “God the speechless Word” (Sermon 18, 157); and, Augustine’s apparent favorite, the mystery of his double begetting: Christ was born of a father and a mother, both without a father and without a mother; of a father as God, of a mother as man; without a mother as God, without a father as man. Who, then, shall declare His generation? The one is without time, the other without seed; the one without beginning, the other without parallel; the one which has always been, the other which has never been before or since; the one which does not end, the other which begins where it ends. (Sermon 2, p. 74)

4 Rosemund Tuve, “A Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” in Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 37-52. For brevity and convenience I often use the word “Christmas” to designate the season in general, including Advent and the feast of the Epiphany. 5 Luke 1.1-4: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theolphilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.” 6 St. Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. John Morris, S.J. (Westminster, MD, 1943), p. 20ff.


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Augustine constantly reminds his audience that he is expressing the inexpressible, that for all the splendor of his words, “no human thought, no language can be equal to the task” of extolling the Word who made both speaker and hearers (Sermon 6, p. 91). The only way even to approach such a mystery is through word-play, symbolism, and paradox piled upon paradox—arduous intellectual exercise aimed always at grasping the hem of Wisdom’s garment. Thus Augustine became the great early master of what Renaissance rhetoricians would celebrate as an aesthetics of wonder; and he follows his own aesthetic theories in “putting emphasis on wondrous events because they appeal to, and remain in, the minds of the people” (Lawler, p. 15). His wordplay and symbolic connections may be ingenious but they are rarely sterile. For to Augustine, such thinking is nothing less than a way of seeing, a habit of mind so fully a part of him that the effect of all his verbal pyrotechnics is paradoxically natural, almost spontaneous; the emotions as well as the mind are fully engaged. Indeed Augustine’s motive is never merely to dazzle; he was vocal in his scorn for the empty tropes of the secular rhetoric in which he had been so thoroughly trained.7 Rather, he seeks through stimulating the mind to kindle the emotions of his auditors: And now, with what words shall we praise the love of God? What thanks shall we give? He so loved us that for our sakes He, through whom time was made, was made in time; and He older by eternity than the world itself, was younger in age than many of His servants in the world; He, who made man, was made man; He was given existence by a mother whom He brought into existence; He was carried in the hands which 7 In Confessions 6.6, for instance, he tells the story of the happy beggar, who put him to shame for his misery as a mere, though effective, rhetorician and professor of rhetoric: “I was preparing a speech in praise of the Emperor, intending that it should include a great many lies which would certainly be applauded by an audience who knew well enough how far from the truth they were. I was greatly preoccupied with this task… As I walked along one of the streets in Milan I noticed a poor beggar who must, I suppose, have had his fill of food and drink, since he was laughing and joking… My ambitions had placed a load of misery on my shoulders and the further I carried it the heavier it became, but the only purpose of all the efforts…was to reach the goal of peaceful happiness. This beggar had already reached it ahead of [me], and perhaps [I] should never reach it at all… I ought not to have preferred myself to the beggar simply because I was the more learned, since my learning was no source of happiness to me. I only made use of it to try to please others, and I only tried to please them, not to teach them. This was why you broke my bones with the rod of your discipline” (Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin [Harmondsworth, 1961], pp. 118-119). Augustine claims that it was the wisdom, not the rhetorical skill, of his classical master Cicero that appealed to him so strongly (3.4, pp. 58-59).

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Wendy Furman-Adams He had formed; He nursed at the breasts which He filled; He cried like a babe in the manger in speechless infancy—this Word without which human eloquence is speechless! …Let us in His presence try to realize the abasement that He in all His majesty accepted for our sakes. And let us be kindled with love, that we may come to His eternity. (Sermons 6 and 8, pp. 93 and 106).

Augustine’s purpose, then, is ultimately moral and spiritual: through the mind, he seeks the heart; and through the heart, he hopes to inspire the will to continuous moral conversion—that his hearers, like the Magi, having seen Christ’s glory, might return by another way (Sermon 21, p. 173). Augustine’s peculiar blend of intellect and passion, of wit and wonder, is instantly familiar to readers of Renaissance devotional poetry: just such a sensibility infuses the work of poets as diverse as Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, and Milton. His influence is likewise ubiquitous in English Nativity poetry of the Middle Ages, from the ninth-century Advent Lyrics through Friar William Herebert. Again and again, though in varying proportions, all these poets express Augustine’s themes of the double birthday of Christ; of the speaker’s spoken praise of the silent Word; of Mary’s virginal conception and perpetual virginity; of Christ the Cornerstone, uniting all humankind, and Christ the Reality, fulfilling all shadows and types. Augustine’s influence on medieval and early modern aesthetics flowed not only from his sermons (which were widely known throughout late antiquity and the later Middle Ages, though probably not so widely between the fifth and eleventh centuries), but also from his De doctrina christiana. On Christian Doctrine, in fact, became the fundamental medieval manual of aesthetic theory, outlining the proper use of scripture and, by extension, of all literature. That proper use of the Bible, as we have already seen in Augustine’s sermons, was typological; for scripture, says Augustine, “teaches nothing but charity, nor condemns anything except cupidity.”8 Thus, “whatever appears in the divine Word that does not pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative,” and “what is read should be subjected to diligent scrutiny until an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity is produced” (Doctrine, pp. 88, 93). Bernard Huppé has summarized Augustine’s typological method: 8

St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis, 1958), p. 88.


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When [one] read the Bible he had to avoid reading ‘according to the letter,’ the ‘fleshly robes’ in which Scripture is ‘wrapped up and concealed.’ These robes of the literal existed only ‘to be unwrapped and made open for the sake of underlying meaning.’ Only by the unraveling of an allegory could readers be stirred by biblical truths.9

The effect of this search for the “kernel” of meaning within the “husk” of Hebrew narrative and prophecy was that “allegory became an indigenous part of the world view of Western Christendom,” and Augustine’s exegetical work endlessly increased “the range of biblical symbol” (Huppé, pp. 43 and 84). Probably at least a century before the first English Nativity poem was written, Bede, drawing on Augustine, had identified four levels of allegory: historical, allegorical or typical, tropological or moral, and anagogical. And Bede’s exegetical method is only typical when he writes, of Psalm 147.1, “Jerusalem may be understood to concern on the historical level, the cities of the earth, on the allegorical level, the Church of Christ; on the tropological level, the blessed soul wheresoever it is; on the anagogical level, the native land of heaven.”10 The kind of symbol produced by such allegorical use of scripture (and of classical literature as well) “has much to do,” says D.W. Robertson, “with the general character of early Western art and literature”—its abstract, objective quality.11 “I contemplate the saints more pleasantly,” writes Augustine, referring to the Song of Songs, “when I envision them as the teeth of the Church cutting off men from their errors and transferring them to her body after their hardness has been softened as if by being bitten and chewed” (Doctrine, p. 37). Robertson does not exaggerate when he remarks that “there is no spontaneous emotional appeal” to such an image. But the comparison is not without its cerebral appeal, which “lies in an intellectual recognition of an abstraction beneath the surface of the language.” If the emotions of the hearer are to be engaged, they will be engaged in response not to the visual image of saints as teeth (or, later, of the 9 Bernard F. Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry (New York, 1959), pp. 8-9. 10 Bede, De schematibus et tropis, quoted by Huppé, p. 45. Indeed the trope of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt into the promised land of Canaan—and the establishment there of their holy city of Jerusalem—becomes the central metaphor for the soul’s journey to God: as Northrop Frye puts it, the “monomyth” at the heart of the “great code” which is the Bible. Thus, not surprisingly, Dante uses this same trope in his letter to Can Grande to explain his allegorical method in the Paradiso. 11 D.W. Robertson, Jr., Of Christian Doctrine, introduction: p. xiv.

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Virgin as a golden gate with strong locks), but to the “philosophical significance beneath the symbolic configuration” (Robertson, p. xv). Augustine’s exegetical theory contributed not only to the study of scripture, but also to the invention of symbols in art and literature. For to Augustine the Bible was both the source of greatest wisdom and the model of the greatest eloquence: thus “a man speaks more or less wisely to the extent that he has become more or less proficient in the Holy Scriptures” (Doctrine, p. 122). Such a belief produced several results. First, to know the Bible for Augustine was “to keep the various parts of Scripture in mind so that [one] could with ease refer from one part to another” and be able to make connections between them (Huppé, p. 20). It required the ability to think not only typologically, but associatively, synthetically. Thus, not surprisingly, Nativity poetry became highly allusive; one image was expected to suggest another in the hearer’s mind—and, as the scriptures were often obscure, such allusive connections can often seem vague, ambiguous. But, second, such obscurity was highly valued in the scriptures. Augustine enjoyed “the eloquence of the Prophets, where many things seem to be obscured by tropes.” For, he says, “the more these things seem to be obscured by figurative words, the sweeter they become when they are explained” (Doctrine 128-29). What is more, “the obscurity itself of the divine and wholesome writings was a part of a kind of eloquence through which our understandings should be benefited not only by the discovery of what lies hidden but also by exercise” (Doctrine, p. 123). Preachers, expositors of this biblical eloquence, “should first of all seek to speak so that they may be understood” (Doctrine, p. 133), but poets were under no such injunction. They could imitate the divine eloquence of the scriptures themselves. Thus, not surprisingly, Nativity poetry became difficult and enigmatic, since, as Huppé writes (of medieval poetry in general), “structural and figurative difficulties…were felt to have direct relation to aesthetic pleasure, which derives from the discovery of truth in the underlying meaning” (p. 55). Not only was the reader to think of the Bible associatively, finding meaning in every possible connection between one passage and another; and not only was one to delight in the obscurity of its tropes and figures; one was also to find in its pages the ultimate models of style—“subdued,” “moderate,” and “grand.” The grand style, for the most part, is the style of Augustine’s sermons; and in the De doctrina Augustine accurately describes his own rhetorical practice:


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The grand style differs from the moderate style not so much in that it is adorned with verbal ornaments but in that it is forceful with emotions of the spirit. It is carried along by its own impetus, and if the beauties of eloquence occur they are caught up by the force of things discussed and not deliberately assumed for decoration,…determined by the ardor of the heart rather than by careful choice. (Doctrine, p. 150)

Ardor of the heart, and thus the grand style, is practically requisite when speaking of “the unity of the Trinity” or of the goodness of God. For “when God is praised…what an appearance of beautiful and splendid diction arises in him who praises Him as he is able, whom no one praises adequately and whom no one in one way or another fails to praise” (Doctrine, p. 146). Such was Augustine’s powerful double legacy to culture in general and to poetry in particular. In his sermons a poet could find the mysteries of the Incarnation expressed with the eloquence of the grand style, the intellectual rigor of typology and paradox, and the emotional fervor of a deeply feeling mind. In De doctrina, as in countless medieval rhetorical manuals based upon it,12 a poet could find, at least in outline, a clearly articulated aesthetic mandate: “Serious poetry,” as Huppé summarizes it, “should be allusive, enigmatic, periphrastic” (p. 30). And from the first Arian crisis of the fourth century until the second in the late seventeenth, no subject was deemed more serious than the Incarnation. The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book, collectively making up the first Nativity poem in English, perfectly reflect this Augustinian mandate—both directly and through Old English preachers like AElfric. The poem, like AElfric’s preaching, displays the paradox, subtlety, grandeur, theological sophistication and typological allusion of Augustine’s Christmas sermons, and follows the exegetical methods laid out in the De doctrina. Within Augustine’s controlling paradox of liturgical time—of Christ’s double and triple Advent, experienced simultaneously as historical fact, teleological hope, eternal reality, and sacramental experience—the Advent poet weaves a subtle and allusive fabric of other paradoxes of the Incarnation, every one of which finds earlier expression in the Father’s sermons: the paradox of the fortunate fall; the paradox of humankind’s temporal state; the paradox of Mary’s virginal conception and of the Christ-child’s virgin birth; the 12

Huppé has shown Augustinian ideas in works by such widely read medieval rhetoricians as Bede, Alcuin, Rabanus, and Isidore of Seville.

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paradox of Christ’s eternal generation, dual nature, and double begetting; the paradox of the frightened young girl who is mundi Domina and, as the poet puts it, pæt bearn foran breostum [bairn/baby at her breast] who is Savior of the World. In the later Middle Ages the Augustinian tradition was revived by mystical theologians like Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153). In Bernard’s Advent and Christmas sermons, in fact, one sees again the wonder, paradox, and typology recommended in the De doctrina and practiced in Augustine’s own preaching. Without attenuating Augustine’s emphasis on allegory, however, Bernard places a new emphasis on the literal level of scripture, a trend commonly if somewhat misleadingly known as “affective piety.” As a result of Bernard’s double legacy, Middle English Nativity poetry remains as subtle and allusive as its Old English model; as theologically sophisticated; as deeply rooted in traditional typology—in word-play, in wit, in paradox. But many poets, like Bernard in his sermons, also display a new interest in the literal scene; a new interest in character—especially at the moment of choice; a new interest in “how things happened;” and an intensified tenderness for mother and Child. Above all—following Bernard and others—Middle English poetry brings into special prominence three paradoxes central to Augustine’s preaching, but little exploited in earlier art and literature: the paradox of humbled majesty (in the kenosis of both Christ and the humble virgin); the conflation, in liturgical time, of the cross and the cradle (so that the lullaby and pietà become one); and, most strikingly of all, the trope of the eucharistic Babe, in which the biography of the Christ child becomes literally identical with that of the Host. In the early seventeenth century, the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne drew as powerfully, and if anything more consciously than Bernard’s, on Augustine’s rhetorical theory and praxis. And the poems of Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Milton—as much as they differ in other ways—all demonstrate their debt to Augustine, both directly and through his seventeenthcentury disciples. Donne and Andrewes, most notably, continually celebrate the traditional Augustinian and Bernardine mysteries from within the controlling Augustinian paradox of liturgical time. As Andrewes writes, There is a word in this text [Luke 2.11], and it is hodie, by virtue whereof this day may seem to challenge a special property in this text, and this text in this day. Christ was born, is true any day; but this day Christ


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was born, never but to-day only. For of no day in the year can it be said hodie natus est but of this.13

In keeping with Augustinian tradition, they also stress the more theological scriptures over the synoptic gospels, and “mystery” over narrative: The manifestation of God in the flesh the Evangelists set down by way of an history; the Apostle goeth farther, and findeth a deep mystery in it, and for a mystery it commends it unto us… [For] a man may hear a story, and never wash his hands, but a mystery requireth both the hands and the heart to be clean that shall deal with it. (Andrews, Sermon 3 [1607], p. 32)

There is pleasure, certainly, in the “exercise” afforded by the mysteries; but for Andrewes and Donne as for Augustine, the end is always to produce clean hands and a clean heart, the response of a rectified will. If Christians are to “retaile,” as Donne puts it, the “treasure” of Christ in their own lives, they must continually remember, like Augustine and Bernard, the mysteries of the faith. They must remember Christ’s eternal generation and his double begetting. “Wee are met here to celebrate the generation of Christ Jesus,” says Donne. But who shall declare his generation, his age? For, for his essential generation, by which he is the Son of God, the Angels...are no nearer to that generation of his, then if they had been made but yesterday: Eternity hath no such distinctions, no limits, no periods, no seasons, no moneths, no yeares, no dayes; Methusalem, who was so long lived, was no elder in respect of eternity, then Davids son by Berseba, that dyed the first week…But we come not now to consider that eternall generation, not Christ meerly as the Son of God, but the Son of Mary too.14

As believers must remember this double nativity, they also must remember Christ’s double nature, the mystery that the divine Son is always present, though hidden, in the human Child: “All along His life you shall see these two,” says Andrewes, At His birth; a cratch for the Child, a star for the Son; a company of shepherds viewing the Child, a choir of Angels celebrating the Son. In His Life; hungry Himself, to shew the nature of the Child; yet ‘feeding 13 Lancelot Andrewes, “Sermon 5 (1610),” in Ninety-Six Sermons, 1, eds. J.P. Wilson and James Bliss (Oxford, 1841; repr. New York, 1967), p. 64. All citations are from this volume, which includes all the Christmas sermons. 14 John Donne, “Sermon for Christmas Day, 1625 (Sermon 17),” in Sermons, 6, eds. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953-1962), p. 279. All citations are from this edition.

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Wendy Furman-Adams five thousand,’ to shew the power of the Son. At His death; dying on the cross, as the ‘Son of Adam;’ at the same time disposing of Paradise, as the ‘Son of God’. (Sermon 2, [1606], p. 22)

And they must remember that at his second Coming “He shall not come empty,” but with “an everlasting weight of glory.” Thus human life, for Andrewes as for Augustine, is a continual Advent of “expectancy” (Andrewes, Sermon 2, p. 31). Donne and Andrewes constantly explore the Augustinian types and patristic mysteries that have held such a place in medieval poetry. Christ, as for Augustine, becomes “‘the Head-stone of the corner,’ and join[s] both Jews and Gentiles in one coin or angle” (Andrewes, Sermon 14 [1620], p. 241). He “hath as this day bestowed upon us a dignity which upon the Angels He bestowed not.” And, writes Andrewes borrowing from Anselm, in Christ’s conception and birth, “No more than the light of Heaven passing through breaketh the glass…did the God of Heaven by His passage violate any whit the virginity of His mother; if we allow God the Maker of the light to do as much as the light He hath made” (Sermon 9 [1614], p. 139). Like Augustine and Bernard, Donne and Andrewes delight not only in theological mystery but also in metaphysical word-play. Speaking of Christ’s double Advent Andrewes says, “He that cometh here in clouts…will come in the clouds one day” (Sermon 12 [1618], p. 200). And, “‘Without Him in this world,’ saith the Apostle; and if without Him in this, without Him in the next; and if without Him there—if it be not Immanu-el, it will be Immanu-hell… What with Him? Why, if we have Him…we need no more; Immanu-el and Immanu-all” (Sermon 9, p. 145). And sometimes—as in their exploration of the fullness of time (Gal. 4.4) and the fullness of God in Christ (Cols. 1.1920)—their wit, like Augustine’s, becomes an allusive epistemological act; they discover a kernel of meaning deep within the husk of the word. Well might the time of Christ’s Coming be called “the fulness of time,” says Andrewes, “For when He was sent into the world, ‘in whom the fulness of the Godhead dwelt bodily,’ in Whom ‘the Spirit was not by measure;’ in Whom was ‘the fulness of grace and truth’; ‘of Whose fulness we all receive’;—when He was sent That was thus full, then was time at the full” (Sermon 4 [1609], p. 49). But, says Donne, “This was a strange fulnesse, for it was a fulnesse of emptinesse; It was all Humiliation, all exinanition, all evacuation of himselfe, by his obedience to the death of the Crosse.” Yet “this very…‘emptying Himself’


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for our sake,” Andrewes concludes, “is a pressing down the measure; and so even by that still the measure is more full” (Sermon 4, p. 52). Such is the paradox of Dei dignatio, humbled Majesty. Indeed the mysteries of humbled Majesty and suffering God call forth Donne’s and Andrewes’ greatest eloquence. Like Augustine and Bernard, Andrewes continually reminds us that in Christ’s Nativity “we have to consider two orders of things:” the “poor and mean sign” of the Child in the manger; and the angels’ song, exceeding high and heavenly,” sung as a “balance or counterpoise” (Sermon 12, p. 198). In Christ’s birth, he says, we find “the Word ‘by Whom all things were made,’ to come to be made Itself” (Sermon 6 [1611], p. 91). Further we see Augustine’s Verbum infans, and Bernard’s “contracted” Word, “‘so little as a child’ and so low as a manger” (Andrewes, Sermon 2, p. 29). But above all we see a babe born to die, whose “cratch is a sign of the Cross:” ‘…the Word was made flesh.’ I add yet farther; what flesh? The flesh of an infant. What, Verbum infans, the Word an infant? The Word, and not able to speak a word? How evil agreeth this! This He put up. How born, how entertained? In a stately palace, cradle of ivory, robes of estate? No; but a stable for His palace, a manger for His cradle, poor clouts for His array. This was His beginning… Is His end any better? that maketh up all: what flesh then? Cujus livore sanati, black and blue, bloody and swollen, rent and torn, the thorns and nails sticking in His flesh… So to be made, and so unmade; to take it on, and lay it off, with so great indignity: weigh it and wonder at it that ever He would endure to be made flesh, and to be made it on this manner. (Andrewes, Sermon 6, p. 92)

Yet, for Andrewes and Donne, this pain and this indignity—so inimical to worldly values and so offensive to human complacency—are the very point of the Incarnation: “His poor clouts manifested by a star; His shameful death published by a great eclipse; yea that it might be manifest indeed… He would have it preached all over the world.” Indeed “in the very same flesh He is ‘received up into glory,’ and in the same shall appear again at His second manifestation” (Andrewes, Sermon 3, pp. 40 and 39). The sermons of Andrewes and Donne, like those of AElfric and Bernard of Clairvaux, make a veritable catalogue of Augustinian motifs: liturgical time; Christ’s dual nature, eternal generation, double Advent, and double birth; his humbled Majesty, the signs at the cradle of his suffering and death, and even his Eucharistic identity. The

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Restoration, however, came on the heels of “twenty years of civil strife, ecclesiastical revolution, political interregnum and constitutional chaos.”15 Anglican divines returned in 1660 to bare and dilapidated churches, where a people long forbidden to celebrate the ancient catholic feasts had largely forgotten how—and churches in which the sacraments were rarely administered. In his journal for Easter of 1665, one Ralph Josselin wrote, “[T]welve of us received the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper publicly for which I bless God; I believe its 22 or 23 years since received on that day and occasion.” And Norman Sykes cites evidence that “in the diocese of Salisbury…the Holy Communion was seldom celebrated more than three times a year, in many places not so often. The church courts do not appear to have tried to enforce more than a general reception at Easter” (Sykes, pp. 26-27). Over the next thirty years the English Church failed not once, but repeatedly (most notably in 1661 and 1689) to achieve “Comprehension”—and due to that failure was tragically weakened both by a mass exodus of dissenting clergy and by the doctrinal and liturgical divisiveness caused by those who conformed just enough to stay within the established church. In the face of endless controversy—now widening beyond the issues of the previous age to an attack even on PaulineAugustinian Christology—preachers struggled to define and then to defend a concept Augustine would have understood only too well: the “fundamentals” of the faith. Yet their approach to this crisis—one in many ways mirroring the crisis faced by Augustine in the late fourth century—represented, after 1300 years, a departure from, if not a reversal of, both the aesthetic mandate of the De doctrina christiana and the confident assertion of Augustinian paradox. In place of the highly associative Augustinian eloquence—in which the “kernel” of meaning was to be sought within the “husk” of narrative, in which every passage was connected allusively to every other, and in which obscurity was valued for the “sweetness” of intellectual “exercise”—a new homiletic emerged. Not only the vocabulary and syntax were to be simplified; theology, too, should be made as accessible as possible. Robert South (1634-1716) is typical of Restoration and eighteenth-century preachers when he apologizes for the irreducible difficulties in a passage out of Romans. And, indeed, not all preachers were as willing as South to pursue the “full sense” of 15

Norman Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 16931768 (Cambridge, 1959), p. 1.


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Pauline and Patristic faith; for others it was enough to proclaim the synoptic message of the Fatherhood of God and the Messiahship of the One who was (in some sense, at least) his Son. Within the orthodox pale—both Anglican and dissenting—was a considerable range of opinion about how best to defend historic Christianity against intellectual assault from several quarters; and that range can be discerned in the most popular preachers of the age. From the High Church orthodoxy of Robert South to the still orthodox “latitude” of the yet more popular Archbishop Tillotson,16 a new way of seeing the Nativity appears—and along with other forces gives rise to a new kind of poetry: the Messianic lyric. South is by far the most Augustinian of Restoration preachers. Reading his affirmations of Christ’s deity out of context, in fact, one can be swept up in what feels momentarily like an Augustinian or Bernardine rapture. But the context of South’s great declarations is new, relevant to the total effect of his sermons, and not without irony. We remember that Augustine’s sermons were originally framed not only to inspire awe but also to combat the Gnostic and, more urgently, the Arian heresy. Written within a century of the Council of Nicea, they were intended to reinforce fundamental Christological doctrines that, for Augustine at least, could be expressed only in terms of paradox: Christ’s eternal generation; his dual nature; his double begetting and virgin birth (“Who shall declare His generation? The one is without time; the one without seed; the one without beginning, the other 16 Ever since the publication, in 1662, of Simon Patrick’s A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men, ed. T.A. Birrell (Los Angeles, 1963), the term has been used to describe a broad range of ecclesiastical views. To Donald Greene, “The term ‘latitudinarian’ is best taken…to mean those Anglican divines who, before 1662, tried to mediate between the Puritan and High Church wings of the Church of England and, after 1662, to bring about [as Tillotson tried to do] the reunion of the Protestant Nonconformists with the Church by the (unsuccessful) attempts at comprehension in the late 1670’s and 1689.” “Doctrinal differences,” in Greene’s view, “were very little involved” between Latitudinarians and their High Church brethren. (See “Latitudinarianism and Sensibility: The Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’ Reconsidered,” Modern Philology 75 [Nov. 1977], 159-83.) Other writers—notably historians like Gerald R. Cragg (The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 [New York, 1970]) and Norman Sykes—stress the “liberal” theology of preachers like Tillotson, especially as seen in his much quoted sermon on the text “His commandments are not grievous.” The whole body of Tillotson’s work does suggest a willingness to bend on many “nonessentials” of Christian faith; but it would be a mistake, as Greene notes, to turn him into a Pelagian heretic or a “mere moralist.” He repeatedly insists upon the mediation of Christ as the only means of salvation; and if there are some doctrines he soft-pedals, he certainly denies none.

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without parallel”); the absolute mystery of the Verbum infans, of the speaking Creator-God turned speechless, helpless creature; and that of the Provider of all things turned not only into a hungry Babe, but also into “the Food of the faithful beasts of burden” who “know their Master’s crib.” To AElfric and the Advent lyricist these doctrines were Christmas—the very essence of the feast. They could be celebrated with extravagance and abandon—the more wonder, the more amazement, the better. Likewise for Bernard and for the poets of the high Middle Ages. And as embattled as the generation was of Donne and Andrewes; of Crashaw, Milton, and Vaughan, the issue was not the ultimately central one of Christology. For all the divisions over the nature of the true church, over the true understanding of the sacraments, over the relative importance of faith and works, early modern preachers and poets found in their shared Augustinian reading of the Incarnation their profoundest common ground. But South ironically, along with his peers, is in a position medieval and early modern preachers were not. He is, in fact, 1300 years later, in Augustine’s own position: defending Christian orthodoxy against the second major incursion of Arian (and now Socinian) heresy. Augustine’s approach was to celebrate the Nicene paradoxes with a peculiar blend of wit and wonder designed to shock both heart and mind into awed belief. His approach became the normative one, long outlasting the doctrinal disputes that gave it birth. South to some extent followed Augustine’s program. But he faced some new difficulties as well. The Protestant Reformation in England had not itself greatly weakened the authority of the Fathers. With the Puritan ascendancy, however—and even more among the more radical dissenting groups—the cry of sola scriptura became ever louder; and apologists scrambled to find biblical, as opposed to Patristic and credal, warrant for the beliefs which they had held to be central to the faith. The effort proved disconcerting, for many found with Bishop Richard Watson that the Trinity was in fact not “literally contained in any passage of Holy Writ”;17 that an inductive, empirical approach to the scriptures might reveal a quite different—and perhaps, some hoped, a less taxing, more palatable—faith. Thus whole groups of Presbyterians, freed of allegiance to the Fathers and creeds, became unitarians (denying in some 17

Richard Watson, Anecdotes in the Life of Richard Watson, quoted in Sykes, Sheldon to Secker, p. 169.


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cases not only Christ’s eternal generation and equality with the Father, as the Arians did, but also, with Faustus Socinius, his pre-existence as spirit) while remaining, on their own terms, devout and biblical Christians.18 The Church, moreover, at this juncture in its history needed all the devout adherents it could get: other challenges from without—at first of Deism and later radical skepticism—tore at its doctrinal confidence and unity. To some, like South, it seemed best to attack issues head-on; to others, like Isaac Watts, accommodation—even with Arians and Socinians—seemed possible; and to many, like John Tillotson, it seemed best simply to proclaim most forcefully what the widest community of Christians could still share.19 In many of South’s sermons—and invariably in the most Augustinian—we thus find the mysteries affirmed in the context of a sharp attack on heresy. “Christ was the root of David,” he says, “but how (second italics mine)?” It is no longer enough to celebrate the mystery; it must be defended against very definite adversaries: Arius taught that Christ had a spiritual subsistence before the world began: Socinius held that he was a mere man, and had no subsistence or being at all, till such a time as he was conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary… Socinius asserts a thing, considered barely in itself, more agreeable to reason,…but then, on the other side, the opinion of Arius is, of the two, much more difficult to be confused by scripture.20

South takes on both parties by the use of both scripture and “reason” (but rarely by the use of the no longer entirely admissible data of the creeds and Fathers), and finally concludes:

18 If Milton adopts some Arian beliefs in The Christian Doctrine, the reason is largely the same as in the next century. To arrive at such a doctrine is natural (if not precisely inevitable) if doctrine is to be “compiled,” as Milton puts it, “from the holy Scriptures alone.” 19 Indeed consensus was itself becoming an important value in a way it had never been before. This was the era of the democratization, the “laicization” of the Church (see Sykes, Church and State, p. 379ff.). Even Parliament’s rejection of the Feathers’ Tavern petition—requesting that ideas of the Trinity and godhead be referred only to the Scriptures and not the Thirty-Nine Articles—was based not on any a priori theological grounds, but on “the vital principle that such reforms should be enacted not in response to the demand of a minority but in reply to the clear and unequivocal desire of a majority of churchmen, clerical and lay” (p. 328; italics mine). 20 Robert South, “Sermon XXI,” in Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions, 2 (New York, 1867), p. 140. All citations from South are to this edition.

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Wendy Furman-Adams In short, if the adversaries of Christ’s divinity can prove Christ not to be God, they must of consequence prove that the scriptures…are not the word of God;… Nevertheless, if, according to the unreasonable demands of this sect, this and all other mysteries of our religion should be put to answer for themselves at the bar of human reason, I would fain know, wherein consists the paradox of asserting Christ to be God? (XXXI, Sermons 2, p. 140; italics mine)

South’s scriptural defense of orthodox Christology can often be sophisticated and learned. But while all previous preachers in the Augustinian tradition had gloried in the very impossibilities of the faith—and drew from them the intellectual “exercise” they found so “sweet”—South is forced to step out onto the more dangerous ground of his intellectually reductive opponents. Thus, although he takes the hard Augustinian line in the Christological debate, South’s sermons nonetheless represent a serious attenuation of some of Augustine’s favorite mysteries—most notably that of the Eucharist and its attendant mystery, so central to Nativity poetry, of sacramental time. Unlike Donne and Andrewes, who sought a compromise with Catholic tradition, South makes no connection between the child in the manger and the elements of holy Communion. Indeed, he attacks any but a purely symbolic interpretation of the sacrament, stressing that the Savior is bodily absent from the Church’s celebration. The faithful remember both his birth and his crucifixion, but hodie he is neither in the manger nor on the “altartable” (a term which itself suggests the discomfort of the Anglican compromise). Rather, he is “set down,” his work complete, “at the right hand of the Most High, receiving the homage of praises and hallelujahs from saints and angels…forever and ever” (IV, Sermons 5, p. 343). Between his remembered first coming and his expected second coming lies a sacramental vacuum: the Eucharist no longer has any special connection with Christmas, as both have become mere memorial. South does defend the doctrine of the virgin birth—and in fact goes on, like Donne, to suggest Mary’s perpetual virginity. But while for Donne the idea still had some affective significance, for South its importance lies in a far more contemporary issue: Jesus, he argues, could not be the King of the Jews “had Joseph had any children, either by Mary or another wife.” With this passage it seems to me we are in the presence of something new: not by any means what Linda Ching


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Sledge has called a loss of biblical faith,21 but on the contrary the rise of what might be called a merely biblical faith. South, the conservative, has it both ways, affirming much of past tradition while testing the waters of the new: a shift from an emphasis on Word as synecdoche to a new emphasis on the word as narrative. Biblical literacy will henceforth take on a new meaning. For Augustine, to read the scriptures was to keep every part simultaneously in mind—all equally present through the mystery of liturgical time—and to move from one theme to another by association of sacramental and typological images. For Isaac Watts, as for most of his contemporaries, to be biblically literate was to know and be able to follow the history of salvation from Genesis to Revelation.22 Evangelicals would come to call that narrative “the scarlet thread of redemption,” but most eighteenth-century Christians from far left to right would agree: the Bible was the all-sufficient thread of a literally true epic, filled with heroes and villains—and the greatest hero, of course, was Jesus Christ.23 What we find in most religious writing of the century is precisely this new Christology—or at least this new emphasis. While most Christians no doubt continued to believe much or even most of what Augustine had taught, they emphasized the beliefs upon which all could agree: that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised true Messiah and Savior of the world. No paradoxes were necessary to express or support that claim; what was needed instead was evidence of two essential kinds: prophecies from the Old Testament pointing to his future coming (now seen not so much typologically as literally) and miracles from the New Testament that proved the veracity of his claim. The new Christology is of a piece with the new view of scripture: if one is 21 Linda Ching Sledge, “The Nativity in English Poetry (Ph.D. Diss., City University of New York, 1976), p. 246 ff. 22 To that end, in fact, Watts wrote a sort of Readers’ Digest condensation called “A Short View of Scripture History,” through which “persons of younger years, and the common rank of mankind” could learn the basic events in the Bible. Since salvation could depend upon a true knowledge of the story, Watts “studied generally to use such words and forms of speech as are most plain and easy to be understood.” See Isaac Watts, The Works of the Late Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts, D.D., vol. 3, ed. D. Jennings, D.D. (London, 1753), pp. 319 and 322. 23 This view of the Bible was accepted by all Protestants—but was most insisted upon by non-conformists, who most mistrusted and most completely discarded Patristic traditions of exegesis. Thus it is probably not coincidental that Milton writes the great biblical epic (for the most part abandoning the Patristic influences still to be seen in his youthful Nativity Ode) and that Defoe is generally credited with “inventing” the English novel.

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telling a literal history, the former “husk” of the truth becomes its kernel. Following Augustine, virtually all preachers and poets have connected the Hebrew scriptures typologically to Christ and the Virgin (for example, in Aaron’s rod, which “grew, and blew, and bare nuts, betoken[ing] the blessed Mary;” or in Ezekiel’s gate, which even to Donne is the emblem of her perpetual virginity). But in Tillotson and South we find something new: a serious attempt to understand prophecy literally, and as it was meant in its original historical context. For South, the Wise Men have changed from types of the Gentile world to Gentile witnesses of Christ’s birth; for Tillotson the Hebrew prophets have turned from a compendium of emblematic images of Christ, into conscious, literal, and crucial witnesses to his authentic calling and mission. Thus it is important to demonstrate that Jesus matches the literal expectation of Old Testament Jews and others in the ancient world. Tillotson goes far beyond the scriptures, in fact, to “prove” the breadth of contemporary expectation: For about the time of his coming, the Jews were in a general expectation of him, as appears not only from that ancient and general Tradition of theirs, from the school of Elias, that at the end of the second two thousand years of the World, the Messias should come;(and our Blessed Saviour’s coming did accordingly happen at that time;) but likewise from that particular Computation of the Jewish Doctors, not long before our Savior’s coming, who, upon a solemn debate on the matter, did determine that the Messias would come within fifty years. And this was farther confirmed, from the great Jealousie which Herod had concerning a King of the Jews that was expected to be born about that time; and from that remarkable Testimony in Josephus…24

The Gentiles’ expectation Tillotson likewise supports, with reference to Tacitus and Suetonius. Besides, Tillotson argues, the time was an appropriate one—the period of Augustus’ pax romana. But while Andrewes and Milton invoked that secular peace only to contrast it to the far surpassing and more costly peace to be bought by the Dread Lamb who is finally more heroic than pastoral, Tillotson—whose wont it is to ignore the unpleasant when possible and sometimes almost when not—goes on cheer24 John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, Sermons, 2, ed. Ralph Barker, D.D., Chaplain to his Grace (London, 1701), pp. 8-9. All citations from Tillotson are to this edition.


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fully to celebrate the “advantages” of the time. That the “spreading of Christianity” had ever occasioned difficulty—that the peace it brought was that of a two-edged sword—one would never gather from Tillotson’s Messianic vision. He is even able to proclaim Christ’s relation to the Temple at Jerusalem without mentioning either its violent cleansing (Matt. 21; Mark 11; Luke 19; John 2) or its association with sacrifice, including the sacrifice of Christ’s own death: “And accordingly Jesus our blessed Savior came during the second Temple; he was presented there by his Parents, and owned by Simeon for the Messias; he disputed there, taught frequently there, and by his Presence filled that house with glory” (p. 21). The impression left is of a career as brilliant and successful as Tillotson’s own. But if Tillotson’s vision lacks some important shadows (perhaps he felt, and perhaps rightly, that his congregation had griefs enough in a kingdom too easily and too frequently moved), it does not lack scope or grandeur. His vision sweeps—like Handel’s Messiah a half-century later—from the birth of the awaited Baby to the permanent establishment of his Kingdom, and assures the listeners of their place within it: It was usual with the Jews to describe the times of the Gospel, by the Kingdom of the Messias;…a kingdom which cannot be moved… And indeed there is no need of any farther Revelation after this; nor any Change of that Religion which was brought from Heaven by the Son of God; because of the perfection of it, and its fitness to reform the World, to recover Mankind out of their lapsed and degenerate Condition, and to bring them to happiness. (pp. 25-26)

Of course Tillotson is a preacher and a moralist; thus his sermons end with exhortations to his audience to appropriate what they have heard in their lives. At the most basic level, he attacks the “irregular and extravagant” merrymaking so often undertaken at Christmas: “Good God! that ever it should pass for a piece of Religion among Christians, to run into all manner of excess for twelve days together, in honour of our Saviour!” (p. 32). One may perhaps detect here, as well, a last faint, desacralized glimpse of Augustine’s Eucharistic beasts, who know their maker and their master’s crib: how terrible, Tillotson says, that such eating and drinking should be “done under the pretense of doing Honour to the Memory of Christ’s Birth; as if, because the Son of God was at this time made Man, it were fit for Men to make themselves Beasts” (pp. 31-32). I think it is not coincidental, however, that Christmas, like the Eucharist, has here become not re-enactment, but memory.

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Finally Tillotson reflects the longing of his age, when he exclaims, “How happy a thing it is to escape and overcome the Prejudices which men have against Religion.” How unreasonable it is to reject Christ, he says—in a sermon significantly titled “Proving Christ Messias”—for The change which Christianity designed was the least liable to Exception that could be, being nothing else in the main of it, but the reducing of Natural Religion, the bringing men back to such Apprehension of God…as was most suitable to the Divine Nature and to the Natural Motions of Men’s Minds… And then for matters of Practice, to bring men to the Obedience of those precepts of Temperance, and Justice, and Charity… God hath sent his Son in our Nature, to declare his Will to us, and to be a Pattern and an Example of Holiness and Virtue. For our assistance, he hath promised the Aids of the Holy Spirit; and for our Encouragement, he offers us Pardon of Sin… and Eternal Life and Happiness in another World. This is the short sum and Abridgement of the Christian Religion, and there is nothing in all this that can reasonably be excepted against. (Sermons 5, pp. 53-54)

Indeed most people found very little against which to take exception; and this user-friendly orthodoxy won handily, by the middle of the eighteenth century, against the proponents of merely “Natural” religion. Toleration was established and the Church knew its first peace in 150 years. But the cost was an “abridgement” of Augustinian faith that would in the long run take its own toll—not the least upon devotional poetry, and particularly upon the poetry of the Incarnation.

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PLOTINIAN IMAGE AND THE MEDIEVAL REPRESENTATION OF DIVINITY1 Ann R. Meyer

A distinctive feature of medieval Christianity was its profound awareness of the possibility for divine revelation. The great churches of the period were designed as apocalyptic landscapes. The dream vision achieved a popularity and sophistication as a literary genre equal to and often surpassing that of heroic narrative. The development of sacred liturgies and sacramental theology grew out of a desire for more intimate communion with the divine realm. And never in the history of Christianity was the Book of Revelation taken so seriously and given such attention in all forms of religious expression.2 The medieval desire for revelation was nourished by a belief in the possibility that human beings could experience God’s intimate presence through their own efforts to represent the divinity. What these efforts had in common was the cultivation of a concept of complex symbolism, whereby images (language, liturgy, a church building, art objects, etc.) become gateways to knowledge and experience beyond human expression. Terms such as symbolon, figura, signum, and imago were typically used interchangeably to designate a medium that serves as a vehicle for spiritual transformation and an occasion for revelation.3 It was this unusual combination of inspiration, religious belief and desire, and the cultivation of a symbolic imagination that gave expression to many of the high cultural achievements of the period. There are traditions within medieval Christianity, of course, that were not only less optimistic about efforts to manifest God’s presence, but which sought to censor—even crush—those efforts as sins of idol-

1 This essay draws upon my larger study, Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem (Cambridge, 2003). 2 An excellent introduction to this subject is The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, eds. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca, 1992). 3 Other terms that designated identical or closely related meanings include allegoria, integumentum, hyponoia, eikon, aenigma, typos, similitude, umbra, sacramentum, and mysterium. See Meyer, Medieval Allegory, pp. 2-4.

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atry and prideful presumption about the nature of divinity. Both the Old and New Testaments provide justification for such censorship:4 Thus saith the Lord: Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool: what is this house that you build me? (Is. 66.1) God, who made the world, and all things therein; he being Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands (Acts 17.24). For we know, if our earthly house of habitation be dissolved, that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven (II Cor. 5.1).

Yet, those who follow their desires to represent divinity have also found biblical passages that offer encouragement: And they shall make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell in the midst of them (Ex.25.8). For the Lord has chosen Sion. He hath chosen it for his dwelling. This is my rest for ever and ever. (Ps. 131.13-14)5

For Christians, the manifestation of Yahweh’s presence through the construction of the desert Tabernacle (Ex. 25-40) and Solomon’s Temple (I Kings 5-8; cf. Ez. 40-42) finds ultimate fulfillment in the vision of the New Jerusalem in The Book of Revelation: And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people; and God himself with them shall be their God (21.1-3).

The apocalyptic vision is, however, reserved for the future, and the Christian life—as one of pilgrimage toward the Eschaton—requires 4 Translations of biblical passages are taken from the Douay (Rheims-Douay) version (Baltimore, 1899). 5 Traditions of censorship on the one hand and optimistic—even lavish— representation on the other co-existed throughout the medieval period, both finding biblical justification for their respective spiritual expressions. If we look to church architecture, for example, the Cistercian tradition exemplified representation through austere simplicity. The high Gothic styles were highly ornamental proclamations of visual and material splendor. These alternative approaches to medieval sacred spaces were highlighted in Bernard’s of Clairvaux’s vehement reproach of Abbot Suger for his extravagance in the rebuilding of the Abbey Church of St.-Denis. See Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1979), especially pp. 10-16.

Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation 123 guidance on how to prepare for that vision. Part of this preparation, beginning with the earliest Christians, has been to learn how to (re) interpret all of temporal reality in terms of the Incarnation and Redemption of Jesus Christ. The letters of Paul offer guidance on how the sacred history of the Hebrews is to be understood as a prefiguration of Christian revelation. In the letter to Galatians (4.24), for example, the participle allêgoroumena is used to designate the figurative relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Other Pauline terms used to convey this allegoresis include typos (Lat. figura in I Cor. 10.6) and typiκôs (Lat. figura in I Cor. 10.11). Yahweh’s dwelling place is interpreted as a figure of the new temple—the human being—and, by extension, the community of the faithful. Christians are the architects of their own sacred selves, and Christ is their foundation: According to the grace of God, which is given unto me, as a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid; which is Christ Jesus… But if any man violate the temple of God: him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which you are. (I Cor. 3.10-17)

Medieval exegetes found clear biblical precedent, therefore, in the development of their symbolic imagination and methods of interpretation. Their elaboration upon this precedent resulted in interpretive techniques for understanding not only the sacred history and language of the Bible, but all of God’s creation as a potential sanctuary, where the presence of God, through proper interpretation, may be experienced.6 The biblical precedent for allegorical techniques of interpretation gave authority to the medieval quest to shape the desire for revelation 6 The following sources are especially useful for an introduction to this subject: Félix Buffière, Les Mythes d’Homère et la pensée grecque (Paris, 1956); Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture, 4 vols. (Paris, 1959-64); M.D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans. Jerome Taylor and L.K. Little (Chicago, 1968); Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1969); Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972); Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes (Paris, 1976); Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh, 1981); Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, 1997); Peter T. Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (Princeton, 2004).

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into a language or programs of complex symbolism. Yet, medieval concepts of the symbol also depended greatly on Hellenistic traditions. My purpose in this essay is to introduce the teachings of Plotinus (204/5-270) as an important source for our understanding of medieval religious symbolism, especially its anagogical treatment.7 The influence of Plotinus’ religious philosophy upon medieval Christian traditions, particularly in the west, developed primarily through Augustine of Hippo (354-430), also the chief figure in the transmission of Platonism to the Christian west.8 Plotinus’ teachings were fundamental to Augustine’s theological formulations; yet, scholars have often judged Plotinus’ teachings as too early to be relevant for our understanding of later medieval developments in philosophy, theology, or the arts. Another hindrance has been that Porphyry’s compilation of Plotinus’ teachings is presented in a complex literary style that some have thought ill-suited for philosophical discourse. Nor is there strong evidence in these writings that Plotinus was familiar with Christianity. For these reasons, scholars have hesitated to emphasize his influence upon Christian-Platonism, especially in its western expressions. It becomes difficult, however, to dismiss Plotinus’ influence as too remote or stylistically inappropriate to be relevant for our understanding of medieval traditions when we recognize Augustine’s enormous debt to him. David Knowles acknowledged this debt in 1962: “if a reader of Augustine is in doubt as to the origin of a particular idea, he will usually find the answer in Plotinus.”9 Among the Platonists that Augustine mentions in his writings (especially Plato, Porphyry, and

7 P. Henry and H.-R. Schwyzer’s edition of the Enneads in Plotini opera (Oxford, 1964-82) is printed with facing page English translation, in seven volumes (The Loeb Classical Library), by A. Hillary Armstrong, Plotinus (Cambridge, 1966-88). My citations from the Enneads (hereafter cited Enn.) are taken from this translation. 8 Augustine’s familiarity with Platonism included Latin translations by Marius Victorinus, of writings by Porphyry (234?-301?), Plotinus, and probably Cicero’s Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus. The names of Plato, Porphyry, and Plotinus all figure prominently in Augustine’s De civitatae Dei (hereafter cited as civ. Dei). For an introduction to this subject, see A.H. Armstrong, Plotinian and Christian Studies (London, 1979); F. Van Fleteren, “The Ascent of the Soul in the Augustinian Tradition,” in Paradigms in Medieval Thought: Applications in Medieval Disciplines: A Symposium, ed. N. Van Deusen, Medieval Studies 3 (Lewiston, 1991), pp. 93-110; P.F. Beatrice, “Quosdam Platonicorum Libros: the Platonic Readings of Augustine in Milan,” Vigiliae Christianae 43 (1998), 248-81; Stephen Menn, “Augustinian Wisdom,” Part One of Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge, 1998). 9 David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, eds. D.E. Luscombe and C.N. L. Brooke, 2nd ed. (London, 1988), p. 32.

Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation 125 Plotinus), he views Plotinus as the superior thinker.10 More recently, a growing number of scholars concur that Plotinus was the chief influence upon Augustine’s Platonism.11 Stephen Menn has identified accurately, I believe, Augustine’s intellectual struggle (as he describes it in the Confessions) as “primarily a struggle to conceive of God as something real yet incorporeal.”12 Plotinus’ sophisticated metaphysics, with its detailed system of spiritual progression, appealed deeply both to Augustine’s rigorous intellect and his intense spiritual yearnings. Plotinus’ analysis of the soul’s ascent through progressive stages of perception and sanctification taught Augustine how the sensory world may be understood as an opportunity for revelation. This insight became central to his development of a sacramental world view, by which the soul, through proper perception of the sensory world, may recognize divinity and return to its spiritual source in God. Augustine’s efforts to reconcile features of Platonism with Christian belief were shared, of course, with other major thinkers of late antiquity and the medieval period. Yet, scholars recognize Augustine as the primary figure for the transmission of Platonism to the Christian west.13 It was also through Augustine that the medieval Latin church accepted Christian-Platonism. Since Plotinus is a chief source for understanding Augustine’s Platonism, the former’s teachings are vital to an understanding of how Platonism was appropriated by medieval Christians in the conception and symbolic expression of the relation between the divine world and human experience. An important result of Augustine’s appropriation and adaptation of Plotinus’ teachings was its contribution to the formation of a Christian symbolic imagination, a formulation that was influenced as well, of course, from other directions.14 But Plotinus’ teachings, 10

See, for example, civ. Dei I.22; VIII-XII; De consensus Evangelistarum 1.22.35. See, for example, Robert J. O’Connell, The Origin of the Soul in St. Augustine’s Later Works (New York, 1987); John Rist, “Plotinus and Christian Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 386413; Menn, “Augustinian Wisdom.” Menn discusses the major scholarship on the subject. 12 Conf. VII, ix: 13; xx: 26; Menn, “Augustinian, pp. 75-77. 13 Early representatives of this tradition include Clement of Alexandria (c. 150c. 215), Origen (c. 185-254), Gregory of Nyssa (c. 332-95), Ambrose (c. 339-97), Maximus Confessor (580-662), Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500), and John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810-77). 14 From Proclus (410?-485) through Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500), for example. See Struck, Birth of the Symbol. 11

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through Augustine, mark a distinct source in this subject that needs appropriate recognition and exploration. It is not possible in an essay of this length to trace Augustine’s treatment of Plotinus’ thought in his formulations of Christian theology and hermeneutics. Nor is it possible to examine in detail how Plotinus’ aesthetics were carried out in any particular medieval expression. These subjects I have treated in a larger study.15 Instead, I wish to emphasize here aspects of Plotinus’ thought that contributed to the development of the medieval symbolic imagination, especially in the effort to represent divinity. These features of Plotinus’ thought include his aesthetic of spiritual transformation through images, together with his unique conception of a spiritually dynamic cosmos. These formulations are themselves dependent upon his metaphysics of light, a theory of emanation by which he attempted to reconcile a Platonic conception of a hierarchy of being with an Aristotelian concept of an organic universe. Plotinus’ light metaphysics defines how the levels of perception interact and, therefore, how human beings may experience, ascend, and return to the “light above light” (V.3.12, 15). Plotinus assimilated opposing elements of his inherited traditions and created an original philosophy inspired by intense religious devotion. His teachings are an account of the vital relation between the intelligible and sensible realms and how communication and spiritual transformation between these realms is possible. He describes how each ascending level of perception is a further sanctification of the soul from the visible world to contemplation of the invisible One. Plato is Plotinus’ main source for understanding the spiritual life and the conception of reality as hierarchical, progressing from the sensible to the intelligible realms.16 From the larger Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, Plotinus adopted his three hypostases (the One or the Good, Intellect or Nous, and Soul), but he modifies these according to his own cosmology. One way Plotinus departs from his inherited traditions is his concept of the One as both infinite and beyond being, beyond the intelli-

15

Meyer, Medieval Allegory. Plotinus refers frequently to Plato’s dialogues, especially the Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, and Timaeus. When he draws upon the Republic, Plotinus ignores Plato’s politics and selects passages mainly from Books IV, V and VII that provide authority, or frequently to serve as points of departure for his own views. 16

Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation 127 gible world of finite forms.17 In Ennead VI, Plotinus describes the One as something outside of, or extra to, the nature of Intellect. Yet, the One radiates as a “bloom” upon Intellect (VI.7.22; VI.7.21 and 31). Plotinus’ concept of the One has its historical roots in Plato’s “Idea of the Good” and Aristotle’s transcendent, self-thinking God.18 Plotinus’ One, however, while more elevated metaphysically, is also more accessible spiritually than previous historical conceptions. Plotinus’ One is not only the radiating source of the cosmos; it is also a primary principle different in kind (not just in degree) from the cosmos.19 Plotinus also believes that no human expression can adequately represent the reality of the One. The important qualifying word here is “adequately.” Despite his conviction of the fundamental inadequacy of human significations for divine reality, Plotinus chooses terms and phrases that emphasize the One’s positive quality. A.H. Armstrong has described this paradoxical aspect of Plotinus’ thought as religious mystery, as a “negative theology of positive transcendence.”20 Plotinus’ positive terms for the One include “pure will” (VI.8.13, 21) and “love” (V.6.6), but the “Good” is an especially effective designation: since the One (or the Good) is the radiating source of the cosmos, Plotinus places special emphasis on the cosmos’ fundamental goodness. This Plotinian formulation became, for Augustine, highly compatible (through appropriate Christian adaptation) with his sacramental theology.21 While Plotinus identifies himself as a follower of Plato in his choice of terms for the One, we recognize an important distinction in their thinking when we recall the famous allegory in Republic VII (514a-518b). Plato describes the visible world as a cave and its inhabitants as prisoners; the visible world is a shadow or illusion of intelligible truth. Plato’s cave metaphor emphasizes, in other words, the 17

Enn. I.6; III.8.1; V.1.6, 7; V. 4.1; VI.8. This departure from tradition is the subject of John Kenny’s chapter, “The Mystical Monotheism of Plotinus,” in Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology (Hanover, 1991), pp. 91-149. 18 Plato, Republic, VI.508d; VII.517b; Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII.1072b; and De Anima III. 4. 429a, III. 5. 430a; See also, A.H. Armstrong, The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 6, 12; Armstrong, “Plotinus’ Doctrine of the Infinite and its Significance for Christian Thought,” Downside Review 73 (1954-1955), 47; Kenny, “The Mystical,” p. 99. 19 On this unique distinction, see Armstrong, Architecture, pp. 5, 56, 115 and Kenny, especially p. 132. 20 Architecture, pp. 14, 29-30, 56. 21 See Meyer, “Foundations II: Augustine’s City of God,” in Medieval Allegory, pp. 47-65.

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distance, difference, and rupture between the visible world and the transcendent world of forms. Plotinus’ divergence from Plato on this point was fundamental to medieval concepts of complex symbolism. While Plato’s visible world is mere shadow or illusion of intelligible truth, what is illusory for Plotinus is the idea of a drastic rupture or rigid boundaries separating the sensible realm from the intelligible. In Plotinus’ system, a distinction between these realms does exist, but more importantly, the boundaries are blurred, “[f]or nothing is a long way off or far from anything else” (IV.3.11). Plotinus’ religious philosophy is, therefore, an optimistic demonstration of how the visible realm receives and reflects the light and goodness of the One, and how it too must be understood as good.22 Humans do not perceive the Good in itself, but they can participate in its goodness through its “bloom” upon Intellect (VI.7.22; VI.7.21, 31). Plotinus’ theory of emanation emphasizes the goodness and dynamism of the cosmos. This theory also suggests that communication between the realms of perception and sanctification makes possible the continued existence of the cosmos. The cosmos is good because goodness radiates from the One, without the One being changed or depleted. Plotinus describes this emanation as a process—a procession—that sets the cosmos in motion and is met with a reciprocal movement of the soul’s return or “conversion” to the One. Plotinus’ combined concepts of blurred distinctions between the visible and invisible realms and the dynamic relationship between the One and the soul were expressed, through Christian adaptation, in the symbolic programs of medieval religious art. The great churches, for example, through architectural innovations, iconography, and liturgy were showcases for a Plotinian cosmic dynamism, with their great emphasis on communication between the temporal and eternal realms. The Gothic designs in particular allowed the interior spaces to be flooded with cascades of reflected light. Much of the imagery served to stimulate in minds of the living the memories of the dead, and to 22 Scholars have viewed Plotinus’ account of cosmic goodness as a response to the Gnostic identification of the physical world with evil. See, for example, Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago, 1993), pp. 24, 25, 31; Denis O’Brien, “Plotinus and the Gnostics in the Generation of Matter,” in Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought; Essays in Honor of A.H. Armstrong, eds. H.J. Blumenthal and R.A. Markus (London, 1981), pp. 108-123; E. Bréhier, La Philosophie de Plotin, Librarie Philosophique (Paris, 1961), p. 193ff.

Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation 129 look ahead in preparation for the events of the Eschaton. Liturgy was especially important in manifesting the dynamic communication between the visible and invisible realms. The processions, the reenactments of Christian salvation history, the chanting, and the liturgical gestures reinforced and encouraged belief in a reciprocal communication between human beings and God.23 One fundamental difference, of course, between Plotinian and Christian teachings is the ontological nature of God (or the One). Traditional Christianity in western medieval Europe recognized a God who entered history through the Incarnation of Christ, an event that redefined history in terms of Redemption and final Judgment. While scholars have described Plotinus’ visible realm as “sacramental” (without being pantheistic), Plotinus never introduces such a profoundly intimate presence of the One in the sensible world. Nor do we find in Plotinus’ teachings a concept of a community of faithful on pilgrimage toward an apocalyptic vision. But the Plotinian One is the source of a relational procession, so all that proceeds from the One radiates in its goodness. Even the level of perception farthest from its primary source, the level of the senses, is a vital stage within Plotinus’ system; it is rich with spiritual opportunity if perceived as a reflection of divinity. Indeed, Plotinus’ articulation of the soul’s participation in divine radiance begins with his validation of images. “Natural things are imitations” (V.8.1), he argues, and “as long as that higher reality gives its light, the rest of things can never fail: they are there as long as it [the One] is there; but it always was and will be” (V.8.12). The concept of visible things that are “imitations” that can “never fail” as long as there is the radiance of the One is a concept that Christians were able to adapt and qualify according to Incarnational theology and apocalyptic spirituality. Plotinus’ affirmation of the sensible world’s spiritual potential may be understood as a natural counterpart to the goodness of the One and, therefore, as central to the overall optimism of his religious philosophy. This is also an optimism we recognize in much of the great religious art of the medieval period. In both traditions, we find a profound affirmation in sense perception and in the material shaping of ideas, when these are to serve as occasions for higher vision. For 23

See Meyer, “Liturgy at St.-Denis and the Apocalyptic Eschatology of High Gothic,” in Meyer, Medieval Allegory, pp. 69-97.

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Plotinus, the universe is “a sort of great sacrament in the wide sense, a sign and collection of signs that makes the spiritual world effectively present as far as it can be here below.”24 The radiation of the One allows humans to see images and yearn to see more than image. The soul requires this radiance in order to recognize divinity in the sensible realm and to serve, in turn, as a reflection of divinity. The image is not worthy to be contemplated in itself; instead, it is an instrumental, dynamic stimulus, often engaging the observer’s emotions in the spiritual ascent and return to the One. In the Plotinian system of perception, the opportunity for images to serve as vehicles of spiritual transformation depends upon the observer’s capacity and willingness to receive radiance from the divine realm. Plotinus’ observer perceives divinity through forms, or presentations of ideas. Form emanates from the “the first immaterial one” and is “beauty everywhere” (V.8.2): all the Forms we speak about are beautiful images in that world, of the kind which someone imagined to exist in the soul of the wise man, images not painted but real. (V.8.5)

The observer “sees the form in bodies binding and mastering the nature opposed to it, which is shapeless, and shape riding gloriously upon other shapes” (I.6.3). This shaping, or submission of body to the influence of the forms, is a submission to freedom, a coming into being (I.6.2), since to yield to this influence is to be released into a vision of primary beauty. Sense perception gathers the multiple and dispersed parts of the visible object and presents them as form to the soul: we do not yet see a thing while it is outside us, but when it comes within, it influences us. But it comes in through the eyes as form alone. (V.8.2)

Exterior vision (what we see “outside us”) proceeds to internal vision. We note how Plotinus takes care to emphasize the role of the senses as the path of entry for formative beauty. With the progression of perception, the soul receives the form’s influence and begins its ascent. Plotinus describes this ascent metaphorically as one of divestiture (I.6.7): as a soul rises it will “strip off” the “clothes” that it acquired in descent. Plotinus chooses emotionally charged expressions to describe the spiritual transformation. 24

137.

Armstrong, “Salvation, Plotinian and Christian,” Downside Review 75 (1975),

Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation 131 Recognizing form as “something in tune with it and fitting it and dear to it,” the soul is moved, (I.6.3), “delighted and thrilled,” so that it “returns to itself and remembers itself and its own possessions” (I.6.2). The soul’s remembrance of itself through the image is a recognition of form. The thing outside the soul (the object in nature, for example), participates in the higher reality through form just as the soul does. Therefore, the soul recognizes as its own possession the higher reality that the image reflects. This recognition is a movement of remembrance, a re-identification of the soul with Intellect and a recollection of its own participation in primary beauty. The soul’s recognition of form is simultaneously an ascent to Intellect: [T]he soul will come in its ascent to intellect and there will know the Forms, all beautiful, and will affirm that these, the Ideas, are beauty; for all things are beautiful by these, by the products of intellect and essence. (I.6.9)

The soul’s activity is, therefore, twofold, with a continued and simultaneous division of attention between two relational stages of perception (II.1.5; VI.7.5). 25 The “lower” soul, in its perception of the visible world, shapes or governs it. Through its governing, the soul may be said to create the material world in its recognition of form and contemplation of intellect. The soul, therefore, does not act upon the sensible world “from the outside,” as if it were painting a picture (V.8.5). Instead, the soul’s governing action proceeds from its contemplation of Intellect, just as the action of Intellect upon the soul proceeds from its contemplation of the One. The “higher” soul, then, receives light from Intellect and sheds this light upon its lower self. This concept of spontaneous and simultaneous cascades of contemplation at all relational levels of perception results in a crucial feature of Plotinus’ religious philosophy: the communicative movement or procession between relational stages of perception makes possible the continued existence of the cosmos. The Plotinian One, as the source of the Intelligible world of the forms, is without form itself, since it is beyond limitation. The form that blooms upon the image through the One’s radiation and the soul’s twofold action is presented to the soul through the senses not as a natural representation, but as an idea. This presentation triggers a rec25

Hadot describes Plotinus’ account of the soul’s divided attention in terms of human psychology (p. 29).

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ognition of Intelligible beauty, resulting in a cyclical transference of perception from one realm to the other and extraordinary in its possibilities for higher vision. The spiritual experience of the soul is a bridge between the visible world and eternity. The artist plays a special role in Plotinus’ sacramental view of the cosmos. He argues that beauty of form present in the natural world is not as great as beauty of form in the mind of the artist. For this reason, Plotinus perceives the image wrought by the artist as a higher beauty than that of the natural object. For Plotinus, the artist improves upon nature. One recognizes here, of course, a significant departure from Plato’s teachings in Republic X, where the artist is a maker of copies twice removed from truth. Plotinus’ modification and refinement of the Platonic model is not, however, a distinction isolated from other innovations of his philosophy. There is coherence to Plotinus’ system that makes his validation of images inevitable, especially those wrought by the artist. This departure from Plato arises naturally, for example, from his conception of the One as supreme positiveness, which leads to the generation of Goodness and the reciprocal communication of created reality with that Goodness. Plotinus distinguishes beauty of form in the mind from beauty of form in nature through his concept of the “rational forming principle.” In nature, he argues, the rational principle is present as the “archetype” of beauty; in the “nobly good” soul, however, it is a more intensively active beauty, “already advanced” and “more beautiful than that in nature” (V.8.3). The rational principle is the qualifying feature of Intellect; it acts as an intermediary between the soul and the One. The One, although beyond the realm of finite ideas, holds beauty before it as the rational principle, or “screen” that “adorns” the soul, “giving it light from a greater light” (V.8.3). The light of the One passes through the screen of Intellect and graces the soul, allowing the soul to see a likeness of primary beauty. The screen of Intellect “makes us deduce by its very presence in the soul what that before it [the Good] is like, which is no longer in anything else but in itself” (V.8.3). The identification of Intellect as a qualifying principle that adorns the soul like a “screen” of beauty is a foundational concept for the medieval treatment of religious symbolism. Christian theology serves as a plotinian “rational principle,” qualifying the image (e.g., the edifice, the painting, the poem) so that it may be understood as an anagogical symbol. Scholars of the medieval Christian west who have sought a greater understanding of the language and visual programs

Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation 133 of medieval symbolism have always recognized Augustine and other early Christian Platonists as key sources, but through Augustine, we are lead back to Plotinus’ reworking of the philosophical traditions that he inherited. His validation of images follows naturally from his unique conception of the radiating One: the colliding reflections upon the soul result in an anagogical ascent and, therefore, make possible not only communication between the material and immaterial realms, but also the continued existence of the cosmos itself. What is especially remarkable is Plotinus’ emphasis on how this communication or transformation takes place at the level of the image: something like an imprint and image of that other [immaterial world] suddenly appears [to the soul], either by its direct action [of the rational principle] or through the assistance of the soul…. (V.8.7)

When the observer succeeds in transporting “what one sees into oneself” the colliding reflections upon the soul become one, so that the soul dismisses the image and sees “the whole:” there is no longer one thing outside [primary beauty] and another outside [the archetype of beauty in nature] which is looking at it [the soul], but the keen sighted has what is seen within…. (V.8.10)

The colliding reflections unify the cosmos and keep the stages of perception in constant movement and communication. Plotinus’ detailed analysis of the soul’s ascent demonstrates an extraordinary effort to assimilate a complex Platonic-Aristotelian tradition; but it is also a demonstration of his profoundly religious desire to express what he believes is ultimately inexpressible. The apophatic, or negative, aspect of the One is never canceled by its positive radiance, since the One “exists before research and before reasoning” (V.8.6). While Plotinus places the One beyond being, he is compelled, nonetheless, to “signify our meaning.” The fundamental motivation behind this desire to signify that which is beyond signification is religious devotion.26 Plotinus articulates the movement toward spiritual vision in emotionally charged language intended both to stimulate the observer’s desire and to mimic the soul’s ascent. He seeks to inspire in his listeners a “piercing longing” (I.6.7) to become one of the “exceed26 Armstrong views this devotion as “the most clearly un-Hellenic thing” about Plotinus, and he attributes it, in part, to the influence of the religious passion of the Stoics: “the exaltation of the remoteness and transcendence of the Supreme with the passionate devotion to the ruling principle of the universe seems to be an original achievement of Plotinus” (Architecture, p. 33).

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ingly blessed spectators” (V.8.5), to share in a vision of “true light, not measured by dimensions, or bounded by shape into littleness” (I.6.9). According to Plotinus, it is also this longing of the devoted soul that compels the artist to represent the ineffable, however futile that project ultimately is. He recognizes, too, that the artist must always wrestle with the paradox: “what image could the primary principle of beauty take?” How does one “manifest the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world” (V.8.6)? Even in his validation of images, Plotinus never dismisses their inadequacy to represent the divine: “every image,” he says, “will be drawn from something worse,” worse, that is, than primary beauty (V.8.3). Yet he insists that images are necessary: “[i]t is utterly unlawful,” that there should be no beautiful image of [intelligible] beauty and reality…for it [the image] has life and…it has [as] its being beauty since it comes from that higher beauty; (V.8.12)

Plotinus’ philosophical position provides a powerful justification for the effort to represent divinity. The artist, he believes, improves upon nature by transferring the beauty of intellect to the object, thereby bringing the object one step nearer to primary beauty: “the arts do not simply imitate what they see, but they run back up to the forming principles from which nature derives.” The artist transfers the form or idea from his mind to the shapeless object, mastering it, refining it, and bringing it “to beauty of form by art” (V.8.1). Plotinus offers an interestingly specific response to the artist’s dilemma: if one signifies wisely, like the Egyptians, “every image” will be “a kind of knowledge and wisdom…a subject of statements, all together in one” (V.8.6).27 The artist will make icons, and these icons will be taken from Intellect, “so that one is not really apprehending it [primary beauty] through an image.” Plotinus explains that the action is, instead, like taking a piece of gold as a sample of all gold, and, if the piece taken is not pure, purifying it in act or word by showing that not all this sample is gold, but only this particular portion of the whole mass; (V.8.3)

We may understand this passage as an expression of three related tenets of Plotinus’ religious philosophy: first, in order to recognize primary beauty, humans must become “godlike” by purifying their 27

Hadot has observed that Plotinus may be recalling Egyptian hieroglyphics (p. 40).

Plotinian Image and the Medieval Representation 135 souls, a purification that begins with the individual’s perception of self. If one looks within and does not see a good soul, then the “statue” of ourselves must be brought to “self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.” This self-mastery is possible through virtuous words and actions, so one is able to “cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright…till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you” (I.6.9). Plotinus’ religious philosophy is, therefore, inseparable from his ethics.28 In addition, to purify the soul is to purify what one sees in the visible world, so the formative power of Intellect can shine its incorporeal light upon (or through) the object. Finally, this purification is a “coming into being,” a movement toward divinity through contemplation and participation. Intellect acts as a qualifier of the Plotinian image. Words and actions must be extensions of Intellect so that the piece of gold can be purified and can function as a reflection of primary beauty. “[H]ere it is,” Plotinus continues, from the intellect in ourselves when it has been purified, or, if you like, from the gods, that we apprehend what the intellect in them is like. For the gods are majestic and beautiful and their beauty is overwhelming: but what is it which makes them like this? It is Intellect, and it is because Intellect is more intensely active in them, so as to be visible. (V.8.3)

Plotinus is suggesting, perhaps, that the Intellect of the gods, because of its intense activity, is itself visible—visible to the mind’s eye. But human intellect, since it is not as active, is less available to the mind’s eye. Humans, therefore, must take something that is materially visible, like the piece of gold, and qualify it through Intellect (and, by extension, words and actions) so that it can become an occasion or invitation for higher vision. To the medieval symbolic imagination, the visible world was removed but not separate from the divine realm. It was a world radiant with possibilities for revelation. The medieval anagogical image is a Plotinian icon qualified through Christian theology. When Augustine read in Plotinus that the “exceedingly blessed spectators” (V.8.5) become radiant with the light that penetrates “through the whole of the soul” and shines “bright upon all” (V.8.10), he recognized a religious yearning and a mysticism to which he aspired. Yet, he believed 28 As Armstrong has observed, “the critical purification of the mind is inseparably linked with the moral and religious purification; you cannot have one without the other” “Plotinus,” Cambridge History, p. 239.

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that it could only be fulfilled through the Christian revelation. Nonetheless, his reading of the Platonists provided an essential intellectual environment for his conversion.29 In Plotinus’ religious philosophy, he found the most sophisticated intellectual formulation, and one that was inseparable from intense religious devotion. It was this influence that allowed Augustine to “return” to his “own self:” In I entered, and with the eye of my soul, such as it was, I saw the Light that never changes casting its rays over the same eye of my soul, over my mind… It was above me because it was itself the Light that made me… All who know the truth know this Light, and all who know this Light know eternity.30

While Augustine’s adaptation of Plotinus’ religious philosophy served his own spiritual yearning and conversion, this adaptation also provided an intellectual basis for the medieval development of the anagogic symbol. The great churches of the period are only the most conspicuous examples, built and designed as images of the New Jerusalem through the material shaping of ideas and the yearning to know God’s presence. It was this kind of medieval effort to represent and experience divinity that recalls Plotinus’ bloom as a passage to revelation.

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Conf. V.14; VII.9-16, 20. See also civ. Dei, X.1-2 Conf. VII.10, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin, Saint Augustine: Confessions (New York, 1961), pp. 146-147. 30

St. Bonaventure’s “doctrine of illumination”

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ST. BONAVENTURE’S “DOCTRINE OF ILLUMINATION”: AN ARTIFACT OF MODERNITY Wendy Petersen Boring

There is a certain irony in the use of archaeological metaphors when approaching such an epistemologically-laden topic as “Augustinian illumination,” particularly given that the post-modern penchant for digging—as opposed to gazing—arose at least in part in protest to the ocularcentrism of the Western philosophical tradition. Thus an essay aimed at getting us to see “illumination” more clearly by treating it as artifact, which is precisely my intention here, is perhaps in danger of mixing more than metaphors. However, here the larger theme of this volume is most suggestive: just as dreams can be seen as artifacts of memories, so the “doctrine of illumination” can be seen as an artifact of the ways in which the modern era has chosen to remember the philosophical development of the Middle Ages. The essay, then, is an invitation to see our notion of “Augustinian illumination” as both dream and artifact, containing traces of our philosophical past, a vision more of ourselves than of that which it purports to represent. As artifact, “Augustinian illumination” is readily identifiable. “Augustinian illumination,” it is almost universally assumed, is that account of knowledge that begins with Plato, continues in its Christianized form in Augustine, reaches its apex in thirteenth century Franciscans like Bonaventure, and finally fades from view under attacks by Scotus in the fourteenth century. It sees the changeable material world as incapable of yielding true, or paradigmatic knowledge, and thus locates certitude in the unchanging eternal forms in the mind of God. There is almost universal agreement, too, regarding its thirteenth century incarnations. In continuing a Platonic schema, Bonaventure’s “doctrine of illumination” rejects Aristotelian epistemology, and represents a decisively different epistemological path than that of his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas. This identification of the artifact has hardly been value neutral, as anyone acquainted with the evolution of the discipline of medieval philosophy is aware. Despite persistent efforts at its defense from Franciscan quarters, comparisons

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of “Augustinian illumination” with Aquinas’s Aristotelian epistemology have the ring of comparisons between crude, early Stone-Age axes and the sophisticated, state-of-the-art weaponry of the late Neolithic period: the pervasive picture in the secondary literature is of “illumination” as intellectually regressive, a kind of quaint relic from the backwaters of early medieval life.1 My argument is that this picture of “illumination”—as a continuation of Augustinian/Platonic epistemology, a rejection of Aristotelian abstraction, and as that which marks Bonaventure’s thought as intellectually regressive in contrast to the conceptual rigor of Thomas—is best regarded not as a description of the ideas and texts of the thirteenth century, but as an artifact of modernity. It is, I would like to suggest, the creation of a series of interpretative practices and agendas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when scholars began the process of canon reformation, retrieving medieval philosophy from the strangleholds of enlightened criticism based on specific, evolving notions of what counted as properly philosophical. Part I of the essay traces the creation of artifact through the era of retrieval. It argues that “illumination” made its debut in the Germany of the 1840s-60s as the essentially mystical, religious, murky foil character in narratives designed to demonstrate the philosophical relevance of Thomas’s epistemology, based on the emerging ideal of philosophy as an “objective science.” This original role assignment for “illumination”—as anti-Aristotelian, not properly philosophical, and as everything Thomas’s epistemology was not—persisted throughout the era, even as what counted as philosophical evolved from objective science, to empiricism, metaphysics, and finally, logic. With the work of Gilson “illumination” migrated to a neo-Kantian philosophical milieu where its mystical, essentially religious character could be construed as philosophically tenable – the pre-thematic awareness of the divine eternal reasons. Regardless of whether “illumination” is read in or out of the philosophical canon, however, the narratives that created “illumination” have functioned as something like blinders. While they may tell us a great deal about the evolution of the modern philosophy, they obscure the real nature of Bonaventure and Aquinas’s mid-thirteenth century texts. Part II, then, concludes the essay with a series of observations regarding what happens when the modern artifact is placed 1

See for instance David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago, 1992), p. 227.


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alongside the mid-thirteenth century texts considered central to Aquinas’s rejection and Bonaventure’s continuation of “illumination.” What is eclipsed by the modern artifact is the textually specific nature of their arguments and their consistent and creative attempts to demonstrate precisely what the modern era has deemed to be impossible, or at least philosophically suspect, namely that Augustinian and Aristotelian texts, far from incompatible, can be seen as part of the same epistemological design. The story of the creation of “Augustinian illumination” is enmeshed in the long, complex story of what is often referred to as “the era of retrieval of the medievals” that began in the mid- to late 1800s in France and Germany and continued well into the twentieth century. It is a story far beyond the scope of this essay. 2 My intention here is to simply isolate a few of points salient to the creation of “illumination” and to indicate how our contemporary notions of “illumination” came to be. To begin, “illumination” was constructed against a backdrop of historical and philosophical narratives infused with Enlightenment-era hostility to all things religious. Enlightenment historians, busy dismantling tired institutions and discrediting old authority, had churned out narratives in which Christian doctrine was portrayed as a superstition that stifled freedom of thought and repressed the use of reason.3 Philosophers, intent on constructing the story of the evolution of philosophy into a discipline which inquires into natural things and 2 In fact, only a smattering of studies treating a few of the possible themes exist to date. John Inglis’s recent revisionist account, which I engage substantially below, is perhaps the most complete version, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 81 (Leiden, 1998). Mark Jordan gestures towards a series of secular, institutional, and ecclesiastical motives in “Medieval Philosophy of the Future!,” in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies, ed. John Van Engen, (Notre Dame, 1994), pp. 148-161. Bernard McGinn traces the debates regarding what counts as mysticism in the introduction to his history of mysticism, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York, 1991). A classic version can be found in Armand Maurer’s, “Medieval Philosophy and its Historians,” in Essays on the Reconstruction of Medieval History, eds. V. Murdoch and G.S. Couse (Montreal, 1974), pp. 69-84. See also Joseph Ratzinger’s account of the history of the modern controversy concerning Bonaventure’s “anti-Aristotelianism” in The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Z. Hayes (Chicago, 1971, 1989), pp. 120-134. 3 The phrases are in Hayden White’s, “The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment,” in Topics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), p. 135.

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proceeds by principles self-evident to all,4 deemed the Middle Ages a massive blank, a philosophical eclipse.5 Jacob Brucker’s Historica Critica Philosophiae (1742-1767), the first in the modern genre of a general “history of philosophy,” is the classic example.6 Brucker, a Lutheran minister and contributor to the Encyclopédie,7 devotes over nine hundred pages to scholastic philosophy, only to conclude that in the Middle Ages philosophy was reduced to a marketing tool for religious dogma, done for the sake of procuring ecclesiastical offices. In contrast to “true” philosophy, which consists in the inquiry of reason alone into natural things, the medievals imprisoned philosophy within theology, confounded rationality with religion, and subordinated reason to revelation, producing what can only be called “pseudophilosophy”—a discourse with only the appearance of philosophy, best described as “quarrelsome,” “sophistic,” “contentious,” “vague,” and “obscure.”8 The nature of what medieval philosophy had to be retrieved from in turn shaped the type of history of philosophy done during the era of retrieval, a fact that turns out to be highly significant for the creation of “illumination.” The type of history of philosophy that marks the era of retrieval, the type that has at its primary aim establishing that certain medieval thinkers belong among the canon of “great dead philosophers” instead of, as the Enlightenment tradition had it, among the unenlightened clerical dead, is unabashedly—if not always consciously—engaged in canon reformation. It proceeds as all good canon re-formations do, not so much by careful reconstructions of textually 4 For example, Sigismund Storchenaue, Institutiones logicae et metaphysicae (Paris, 1769-1771), whose work devotes little more than two pages to the philosophy of the Middle Ages, arguing that if philosophy means reflection on the natural world, there was no philosophy during the Middle Ages, and instead presents Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, and Wolff as restoring philosophy as a true science. 5 For example, Octave Hamelin, in a statement written as late as 1905, expressed the widely-held view that the Middle Ages were philosophically “sterile”—that having begun with the Greeks, philosophy suffered an “eclipse” during the night of the Middle Ages only to revive again with Descartes. See his Le système de Descartes (Paris, 1921), p. 15. 6 Jacob Brucker, Historica Critica Philosophiae, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (Leipzig, 17671776). 7 Jordan makes this point explicit in his “Medieval Philosophy of the Future!” p. 151. 8 Brucker, Historica Critica Philosophiae, 3: 714, 871- 874. The sole exception in Brucker’s narrative is Ockham, the hero for breaking the pontifical chain of power (3: 847-849), and developing an account of universals that anticipates philosophy’s break from theology’s empty abstractions (3: 910-922; 4: 3-5, 106-107).


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specific arguments, but instead by assembling a cast of historical characters and a dramatic narrative that places the philosopher in a certain way, indicating how and in what ways the chosen medieval thinker’s ideas are not only properly philosophical, but also promisingly relevant. Like the type of history of philosophy Richard Rorty has dubbed Geistesgeschichte, the history of philosophy from the era of retrieval is history with a moral, and “the moral to be drawn is that we have, or have not, been on the right track in raising the philosophical questions we have recently been raising.”9 The early nineteenth century retrievals largely continue in the tradition of enlightened criticism, limiting their work to identifying isolated blips where rationality broke free from bondage to religion.10 Hauntingly similar to the more recent retrievals of the 1950’s and ‘60’s, the early nineteenth-century retrievals operate with something like what Marcia Colish has felicitously termed the “conduit thesis” in regards to things medieval—implicitly analogizing medieval thought to a water main, the job of which is to deliver prized pre-medieval goods to the modern era, picking up as little debris along the way as possible. What is of merit in the medieval past is what is anticipatory of modernity, the spots where modern-like thought bursts through, despite the debris surrounding it. In the tradition of enlightened criticism, bottlenecks occur when something religious impedes the flow of pure reason. The heroes function as “cultural roto-rooters,” wielding the tool of reason alone to engineer mini-breakthroughs anticipatory of the main breakthroughs of modern philosophy.11 The retrievals written in the first half of the nineteenth century, for instance, do not significantly revise the basic Enlightenment narrative structure as much as they merely add to the list of roto-rooters. Victor Cousin’s work in the 1830’s, for instance, finds its hero in Abelard as 9

Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Philosophy in History: Essays on the historiography of philosophy, eds. R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1984) p. 57. 10 For discussion of larger themes in the historiography in this period see Ernst Breisbach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago, 1994), chapters 13-15. 11 Marcia Colish, “Intellectual History,” in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, ed. John Van Engen (Notre Dame, 1994), pp. 190-203. In the essay, Colish intends the metaphor to characterize a strain in the modern field of medieval intellectual history that emphasized the presence of classical, pre-Renaissance material in the middle ages, but it works just as well for the Enlightenment and early nineteenth century histories. I have tweaked the metaphor a bit to fit this earlier genre of Enlightenment histories.

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the necessarily French precursor to the necessarily French Descartes,12 at the same time that it finds no “true” philosophy or “liberty of thought” in the Middle Ages, but rather rational thought trying to emerge from the “bondage” of religion; the Middle Ages are treated not as a distinct period of history, but instead as the slow, bloody formation of modern civilization, and modern philosophy is seen as emerging from medieval thought as Greek thought emerged from the shadows of mythology.13 Hegel, too, follows Brucker’s basic lines, inserting his own philosophical agenda in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, published after his death in 1833-1836. Echoing Brucker, Hegel describes the philosophy of the Middle Ages as “barbarous,” prone to “hairsplitting” and “excessive subtlety,” and agrees, though on different grounds, that there is no “true” philosophy. In Hegel’s case, it is not the lack of the free use of reason alone, but instead a neglect of the human spirit that marks the Middle Ages as philosophically sterile. As the nineteenth century wears on, better scholarship, the demands of more explicit nationalism, and an increasing interest in things medieval yield two important inventions, though not whole-scale revisions, of the basic Enlightenment narrative.14 In terms of the creation of “illumination,” the most significant is Barthelémy Haureau’s move of suggesting that philosophically what the Middle Ages were about was the discovery, interpretation, and correction of Aristotle. Under this rubric, Haureau’s thesis, De la philosophie scholastique,15 composed in response to a competition sponsored by the Parisian Academy for Moral and Political Science that called for a “critical” examination16 of scholastic philosophy in order to mine ideas from the national past that would be useful to modern secular philosophy, claimed to have found philosophy “worthy of the name” in the Middle Ages—a liberty of mind and spirit, an attempt to break free from 12

The phrase is Jordan’s, “Medieval Philosophy of the Future!” p. 151. Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie moderne, 3 vols. (Paris). See also summaries in Maurer, “Medieval Philosophy,” p. 70; Jordan, “Medieval Philosophy of the Future!” p. 151. 14 The basic lines of Brucker’s narrative dominates the general histories of philosophy at this point, even in Germany, where the romantic interest in pantheism, nature philosophy, and mysticism had produced works on John Scotus Erigena, the Victorines, and Meister Eckhart. See Inglis, Spheres, pp. 47-48. 15 Haureau, De la philosophie scholastique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1850). 16 A reference to Brucker’s Historica Critica Philosophiae, as Jordan points out in his “Medieval Philosophy of the Future!,” pp. 150-151. 13


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enslavement to dogma, the precursor to the curiosity and boldness of the spirit of the French in preparation for Revolution.17 Although the idea that what justified medieval thought as properly philosophical was its reception of Arisotelian thought (particularly Aristotelian natural science) was groundbreaking, Haureau’s thesis continues in the tradition of French enlightened criticism. As Mark Jordan aptly remarks, “the judges of the competition seem to see historical inquiry as a way of ‘despoiling the Egyptians’—durable goods—logical principles, procedures, results—are transferred from their unjust predecessors among the clerical dead to the liberated and living children of modernity.”18 It is Heinrich Ritter, who introduces the second invention key for the creation of “Augustinian illumination” in his Geschichte der Philosophie (1829-1853).19 Ritter’s contribution was to argue that what the Middle Ages were about philosophically was not the overcoming of religion by the free use of reason, but instead the reconciliation of theology and philosophy,20 although he concludes that the medievals for the most part failed in this reconciliation, and instead put philosophy to theological uses.21 While the French historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were content to see anticipatory blips of the modern revolutionary spirit, the Germans of the 1840’s faced a different task, and in the scholarship produced amidst the distinctly German experience of French Revolutionary politics one can see a significant shift. In these new retrievals, the implicit analogy for the medieval past switches from a clogged water main to a hidden treasure chest. Instead of containing anticipatory bursts of things modern, the Middle Ages are seized on as containing long-hidden, but now valuable answers to current philosophical dilemmas, which in turn are seen as providing the foundations necessary for the resolution of vexing political and social 17 Haureau, 1: 31; Jordan, “Medieval Philosophy of the Future!,” pp. 150-151; Maurer, pp. 71-72. 18 Jordan, “Medieval Philosophy of the Future!,” p. 152. 19 Heinrich Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophie, 12 vols. (Hamburg, 1829-1853). 20 Ockham is portrayed as the hero for understanding that philosophy has to do with human experience and things tangible and clearly separating this from theology, which concerns itself with what is not tangible, but instead supernatural. While philosophy rests on experience, the supernatural knowledge of theology rests only on authority, Ritter 8: 598-600. 21 Aquinas, for instance, is read as praising the supernatural order at the expense of the natural, and using philosophy to explain the fact that it needs God’s supernatural help in order to arrive at true peace, Ritter 8: 327-328.

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problems. Like its predecessors, this is history with a moral, but now the moral is that what has gone amiss in modernity can be fixed by returning to the insights of medieval philosophers and theologians. As a recent study by John Inglis suggests,22 although the roots of this new approach to medieval philosophy lie in the wider German political and cultural reactions to French Revolutionary politics, particularly the Revolution of 1848, it is principally orchestrated by a relatively small group of Catholic academics eager to find a “scientific” foundation for the beliefs and authority structures of a conservative ecclesiastical and political order centered in Rome.23 Inglis zeroes in on two Catholic, German professors Joseph Kleutgen (1811-1883) and Albert Stockl (1823-1895)24 as responsible for the restoration of medieval 22 My own argument was strengthened by the painstaking research found throughout Inglis’s work, and I agree with his general argument that what are usually seen as competing positions, between for instance, de Wulf and Gilson, are in fact united by a common set of assumptions and basic model in their approach to medieval texts. However, Inglis does not treat illumination, and as is evident below, my argument identifies a different set of assumptions as being important to the construction of the modern understanding of “illumination.” In addition, Inglis’s axe to grind is quite different from my own. His argument is that the standard model dominating history of medieval philosophy is flawed because it attempts to read the medievals without reference to the theological and moral context of their writings (p. 12). Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, he says, are not interested in clarifying the nature of human knowledge—i.e., they have nothing resembling what we think of as the modern discipline of epistemology—but instead in discussing knowledge as part of the moral and theological pilgrimage to God. While I am sympathetic to arguments that warn against reading medieval authors as engaging in the discipline of philosophy as we know it today, this is not my principle argument here, nor the main purpose in describing the interpretative practices that have shaped this era of scholarship. Unlike Inglis, I believe the medieval texts ostensibly on “illumination” do indeed have knowledge and something resembling our contemporary discipline of epistemology as their central topic. In my view, attending to the moral or theological context of these particular texts does not yield greater insight into what the texts were trying to say regarding knowledge. 23 See Inglis, Spheres, p. 41. Inglis’s larger argument is that the Kleutgen and Stockl’s recovery of medieval theology and philosophy is part of the widespread attempt throughout early nineteenth-century Germany to restore the traditional institutions of church and state in the face of Napolean’s domination of Europe. Inglis particularly highlights the role of Joseph Gorres in this wider cultural movement in his early anti-Enlightenment, anti-Revolution newspaper, Der rheinische Merker (1813), his campaign to restore the Cathedral of Cologne as a monument to the German past, and his later book, articles, and newspapers that glorify the medieval social, political, and ecclesiastical order over against the modern world. See Inglis, Spheres, pp. 41-47. See also his chapter two, “The Restoration of Medieval Philosophy in the Early Nineteenth Century.” 24 Inglis’s argument more precisely is that Kleutgen was the first to construct a model of the history of medieval philosophy according to the standard spheres of


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philosophy at this time, and argues that their work set the agenda not only for the programmatic piece for that restoration, Pope Leo’s encyclical, Aeterni Patris,25 but also for the revival of Catholic scholarship following it. Kleutgen and Stockl’s scholarship, Inglis argues, was based on the belief that the best chance to restore harmony to the chaos of contemporary society was to find a philosophy capable of reconciling reason and revelation, and they claimed to have found it in the Middle Ages. 26 In addition, Kleutgen and Stockl’s most significant invention was to read medieval thinkers not as addressing archaic, essentially religious topics, but instead as contributing to what had recently become the standard spheres of philosophical inquiry (logic, epistemology, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and political philosophy),27 and as thus offering valid answers to contemporary philosophical dilemmas. As Inglis points out, their investigation into medieval thought is shaped by a desire to find a philosophy able to avoid what they saw as the “subjectivism” of Descartes, Kant, and the German Idealists on the one hand, and the “materialism” of empiricism and ancient Greece on the other.28 Although Inglis does not suggest it (his study does not treat “illumination”), what is most significant in terms of the creation of “Augustinian illumination” is the philosophical context of the German universities in the 1850s-60s. Kleutgen and Stockl construct their narratives in the midst of the newly emerging ideal of philosophy as an “objective science,” distinct from psychology and history of philosophy, a foundational discipline which grounds the knowledge claims of other disciplines and proceeds by method which are rigorous and scientific. This context, together with the premise first articulated by Haureau, that it was the assimilation of Aristotelian thought that made medieval thought properly philosophical in the first place, drives their narrative structure. But whereas Haureau had his eyes on the absorpphilosophical inquiry and the reconciliation of faith and reason with Aquinas as the high-point, and Stockl was the first to implement this model in a general history of medieval philosophy (see Introduction, p. 11, and chapters three and four). See Inglis’s bibliography for complete listing of the Kleutgen and Stockl’s works. 25 Inglis, Spheres, p. 155. 26 Inglis, Spheres, pp. 136, 156. 27 Inglis does not emphasize the fact that these spheres of inquiry are new. For that argument see John Passmore’s “Historiography of Philosophy,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York, 1967). See also Richard Rorty’s version in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), chapter 3. 28 Spheres, p. 276.

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tion of Aristotelian natural science, Kleutgen and Stockl, reflecting the newly-placed priority on epistemology, zero in on Aristotelian abstraction. 29 The hero of their narrative is Thomas, praised for his choice to follow Aristotelian abstraction instead of Augustinian “illumination.”30 Aquinas’s version of Aristotelian abstraction provides all the desiderata of the Kleutgen/Stockl agenda: it provides a philosophy that proceeds by empirical observation of real individual objects, thus providing an account of the foundations of universal knowledge that respects the different domains of philosophy and theology and escapes the shortcomings of idealism and empiricism, which, in turn can lead to right moral action and uphold the authority of church and state. It was in this historical and philosophical context that neo-Platonism and Augustinianism, and Bonaventure along with them, first received their role assignments as the mystical, shadowy murk from which the clarity of Aristotelian epistemology and Aquinas’s synthesis emerged. Augustinianism came to stand for a primitive, essentially religious approach to knowledge that relied on the supernatural to explain cognition rather than the natural capacity of the intellect to cognize real individual objects.31 “Illumination,” as the idea that reason needed divine help, was an anathema not only to the still-present Enlightenment ideal of rational inquiry as free from religion, but also to the ideal of philosophy as “objective science.” In addition, Augustinianism veered far too close to what was termed the dangerous “subjectivity” of idealism (which corresponding neatly with what were perceived to be equally dangerous anti-institutional ecclesiastical and political leanings). In other words, Augustinianism was found lacking not only because it represented an inherently religious idea that threatened the autonomy of rational inquiry, but also because it failed to provide foundations for universal knowledge, thus for the new selfunderstanding of philosophy, as well as for the truth claims of the church. Virtually all of the characteristics of the modern artifact of “Augustinian illumination” are already in place in Kleutgen and Stockl’s the29 See Richard Rorty’s summary in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 134. See also Maurice Mandelbaum, “On the Historiography of Philosophy,” Philosophy Research Archives, 2 (1976). 30 See Inglis, p. 177 and chapter 3. 31 The analogies even suggest “illumination” as dangerously close to magic or superstition. Aquinas, it is argued, does not “wave his hand” over the problem of the origin of ideas by positing divine illumination or spiritual phantasms as the Augustinians will do. See Inglis, Spheres, chapter 3.


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sis: the identification of “illumination” as an essentially religious as opposed to philosophical approach to knowledge, the idea that “illumination” is something Augustine and Bonaventure follow while Aquinas does not, the assumption of a fundamental difference between Bonaventure/Augustinian theories of knowledge on the one hand and Aquinas/Aristotle’s on the other, and the identification of Aristotelian and Thomistic thought as properly philosophical. Widespread acceptance of these ideas simply awaited dissemination and further development in the scholarship following Aeterni Patris.32 The period directly following Aeterni Patris, usually hailed as the bright, shining moment of the recognition of the philosophical merit of the medievals, looks rather dim from the perspective of “illumination.” It was not that Bonaventure and “illumination” did not have their defenders. They did, complete with papal sanction. Leo XIII, in an effort to counterbalance the endorsement of Thomas in Aeterni Patris, had sent a letter to the Franciscan order in 1885 to indicate his support of the publication of the critical edition of Bonaventure’s works in which he indicates that Bonaventure’s works have their own role to play in combating errors of the modern world.33 The Quarrachi editors, responding to this, strongly emphasized similarities with Thomas in their critical edition (1882-1902). However, despite these efforts, the scholarship produced in the first half of the twentieth century continued to be driven by strong contrasts between Bonaventure/ Augustine on the one hand and Aquinas/Aristotle on the other, and the defenses themselves appeared less than glittering. Ehrle’s thesis (1889, 1925), for instance, on the conflict between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century,34 provides a defense of Bonaventure, but does so by emphasizing the distinctively Augustinian nature of Bonaventure’s thought, describing it as the culmination of the Franciscan School at Paris, and arguing that the Augustinianism of Bonaventure’s work rests on an ignorance of Aristotle and thus 32 As Inglis points out, the Kleutgen-Stockl “model” is not generally accepted outside of Catholic circles before the first decades of the twentieth century, pp. 135139. 33 The letter is printed on the first page of the third volume. See Lampen, P. Willibrord, “Quarrachi, Leo XIII und die Franziskanerschule,” Franziskanische Studien 17 (1930), 241-252. 34 Beitrage zur Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Scholastik II: Der Augustinismus und der Aristotelismus in der Scholastik gegen Ende des 13. Jachrhunderts. (1889), pp. 603-635. See Ratzinger’s summary, In The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes (Chicago, 1971, 1989), p. 121.

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cannot be construed as specifically anti-Aristotelianism. It was explained that Bonaventure’s election to the office of Minister General in 1257 meant he was drawn away from “scientific” work and, unlike Thomas who remained in academia his entire life, unable to read or adequately absorb the new Aristotelianism. The result was an impression of Bonaventure’s work, if not openly hostile to philosophical progress, then intellectually inferior and dated on the scene of thirteenth century intellectual life, especially in contrast to Thomas. If the defenses from the Franciscan quarters were not exactly glimmering, “illumination” appears even dimmer in the scholarship dedicated to defending the legitimacy of medieval thought by establishing the philosophical acumen of Thomas Aquinas. Maurice de Wulf’s work (1900), for instance, which came as part of the first wave of scholarship following Leo’s encyclical, continues the basic narrative line established by Kleutgen and Stockl, but adds drama by placing “illumination” as one of the central issues in a conflict between competing philosophical schools in the thirteenth century, one Aristotelian and the other Augustinian. De Wulf’s thesis, which described a clearly defined, unified scholastic philosophy, Aristotelian in content and form, beginning as a weak loosely knit structure in the ninth century, gradually emerging from earlier neo-Platonic, Augustinian forms, reaching its high point in thirteenth century in Thomas, then declining in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,35 required as its counterpart an identification of Augustinian, and Neoplatonic thought as pre-scholastic, the infancy of true scholasticism. Bonaventure (and Hales) are described as developing early, eclectic forms of the synthesis which compromise pure Aristotelianism with alien views.36 Key to the plot is de Wulf’s description of Thomistic epistemology as superior because of the role it grants to natural human powers. Continuing the line of argument first established by Kleutgen/Stockl, de Wulf argues that Thomas demonstrated that humans know universals through their natural human powers, a position that is described as more “philosophical” than relying on divine illumination.37 Augustine and 35 Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, first published in 1900, enlarged to three volumes by 1947. English translation by Peter Coffey, History of Medieval Philosophy (London, 1909). See also Maurer, “Medieval Philosophy and its Historians,” pp. 73-77; Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry, p. 175. 36 De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, pp. 155-156; Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry, p. 176. 37 De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, pp. 251, 282-283.


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Augustinian theologians are read as confusing religion and philosophy, in contrast to Thomas who was praised for treating them as separate sciences, each with its own principle, method and formal object.38 Van Steenberghen’s thesis (1931),39 although it addresses the weaknesses in de Wulf’s made apparent by new critical editions and significantly revises the idea of two competing schools of thought,40 assigns “illumination” essentially the same role as de Wulf’s had, although the issue of the philosophical legitimacy of “illumination” is conducted in terms of notions of a fundamental incompatibility between “empiricism” and “idealism.” Bonaventure’s thought is described as the continuation of Platonism, or “ancient idealism,” summed up as view that knowledge is acquired “by direct intuition of Ideas that exist in an absolutely transcendent reality,” as opposed to Aristotelianism, which stands for “scientific empiricism,” the view that knowledge is acquired “by observation of corporeal reality alone.”41 Philosophy is defined as an objective science, which, Van Steenberghen informs us, in the “strictest sense” starts from principles recognized as evident and has as its goal the construction of a “systematic interpretation of the universal order.”42 In this scheme, Augustine, and Bonaventure as his thirteenth century successor, are viewed as achieving only a theological synthesis, not a philosophical one. “Augustinianism” is seen as a suppression of reason that “retarded” and “delayed” the development of philosophy as “science” in the Middle Ages, and as antithetical to a modern Christian humanism.43 Philosophy is defined, once again, in such a way as to read Augustine and Bonaventure out of the canon. The original role assignment given “Augustinian illumination” in the Kleutgen/Stockl/de Wulf/Van Steenberghen interpretative line— as not properly philosophical, essentially Platonic, and everything Thomas’s epistemology is not—has persisted across an astonishing array of philosophical persuasions and historical contexts right up to the present day. Joseph Owens’s essay in The Cambridge History of 38

De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, pp. 262-264. Van Steenberghen, Siger de Brabant d’après ses oeuvres inédites, 2 vols. (Louvain, 1931-1942). A shortened English translation of this work was printed as Aristotle in the West: The Origins of Latin Aristotelianism (Louvain, 1970). See also The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century, trans. J.J. Gaine (London, 1955). 40 Aristotle in the West, p. 162. 41 Ibid., p. 10. 42 Ibid., p. 26. 43 Ibid., p. 32. 39

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Later Medieval Philosophy,44 for instance, long a standard in the field, is a classic example of how this basic rubric is updated with new criteria for what counts as properly philosophical. The relationship of Owens’s essay to the others in the volume reveals the central bias: in contrast to the heavy emphasis on logic—reflecting the editor’s judgment that logic is historically more distinctive and philosophically more valuable than anything else in medieval thought45—“illumination” is treated in one brief essay titled, “Faith, ideas, illumination, and experience,” which lumps together what was considered to be the entire neo-Platonic, Augustinian strand in later medieval thought on knowledge under the rubrics of faith, Platonic ideas, metaphors, and experience. The message is that whatever “illumination” is, it is not philosophy. And in fact, that is precisely what Owens argues. Owens describes Augustine’s theory of knowledge as entirely dominated by the Christian faith and as following in the neo-Platonic tradition of a separation between intellection and sense perception. His “doctrine of illumination,” Owens explains, is the expression of the idea that intellection is the interior vision of things in their true reality, vitally and luminously present within the mind as intelligible objects. In this Platonic scheme, the senses merely admonished the mind.46 With this kind of conception of knowledge, metaphors of vision and birth are sufficient for Augustine. Bonaventure is described as continuing the Augustinian doctrine of illumination “in its full range and power.”47 Thomas, by contrast, though he used the traditionally terminology of light, is praised for developing his explanation of cognition in “thoroughgoing terms of being.”48 Yet another version of the same set of interpretative rubrics can be seen in Stephen Marrone’s recent history of “illumination,” The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century.49 Marrone up-dates the essential contrast between Augustinian and Aristotelian thought as one between truth as “psychological experience,” a matter of private and interior revelation dependent 44 “Faith, Ideas, Illumination and Experience,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. Kretzmann, Kenny, and Pinborg, (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 440-459. 45 Kretzmann, Introduction, p. 4. 46 Owens, Cambridge History, pp. 441-443. 47 Ibid., p. 451 48 Ibid., p. 453. He cites ST I, I, 84, a. 5, resp. 49 Stephen Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2001).


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upon intangible divine intervention (Augustinian), versus truth by demonstration from rules of logic available to all (Aristotelian). Marrone’s characterization of “illumination” fits in with his larger argument—essentially a rehearsal of the Kluetgen/Stokl/deWulf/ Van Steenberghen narrative—that the twelfth and early thirteenth century began with an Augustinian model, but gradually, with the discovery of Aristotelian science philosophers cut themselves free from this old pattern of thought and embraced the clarity and formal precision of Aristotelian logic. He argues that Augustine’s discussion of knowledge is subservient to moral ends, formally imprecise, and uses definitions of truth to make what is in fact a point about God’s relation to man. Here again philosophy is defined in such a way as to read “illumination” out of the canon, although this time what counts as properly philosophical is logic, versus Augustinian psychological truth, or interior divine intervention.50 The idea that attempts to combine Aristotelian and Augustinian epistemology are rationally incoherent, or untenable on the prima facie assumption that Augustinian/Platonic and Aristotelian epistemologies are contradictory—an idea first voiced by Kluetgen and Stockl and given new philosophical urgency by each successive definition of what counts as properly philosophical—has persisted in epidemic proportions in the secondary literature. Ronald Nash’s article in the new Encyclopedia on Augustine, for instance, although it acknowledges Aquinas follows a kind of “illumination” in ST I, I, 84.5, 6, dismisses it as an unsuccessful melding of Aristotle’s agent intellect model, untenable for the simple reason that Augustine’s “philosophical heritage was Platonism, not Aristotelianism,” and “Augustine’s thought has no room for abstraction.”51 Perhaps the most pervasive idea haunting the contemporary artifact of “illumination” springs directly from post-Enlightenment unease regarding accounts of knowledge that appear to rely on divine intervention. Garnering almost universal consensus is the idea that while Bonaventure’s Augustinian schema relies on “supernatural” intervention, Thomas rejects “illumination” in favor of an epistemological scheme in which human reason functions by its “own capaci50 This is the argument continued from Marrone’s earlier work, William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth in the Early Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 1983). 51 Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI, 1999), pp. 438-440.

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ties,” without divine assistance. R.H. Popkin, in his new Columbia History of Western Philosophy, for instance, argues that Aquinas’s development of the agent intellect model is a rejection of Bonaventure’s doctrine of illumination because it sees the agent intellect as an essentially “created nature,” endowed with the natural light of reason, requiring no additional illumination distinct from the created light.52 Ignatius Brady, in his section on the immediate reactions to Bonaventure’s De scientia Christi, argues that Aquinas’s position in De Veritatae and in the Summa Theologiae represent “an explicit, though not overly polemical, rejection of Bonaventure’s ‘doctrine of illumination’ that rests an insistence that the light of human reason which God endows us with is capable of knowing first principles by itself and thus that knowledge in the eternal reasons is not necessary for the attainment of certain knowledge.53 Pasnau, in his recent entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, offers a slight twist, concluding that Aquinas actually does defend a version of “illumination” but what separates Aquinas from his Franciscan contemporaries is that he thinks illumination is an innate gift, “bottled up within the agent intellect,” as opposed to an ongoing process. Also widespread is the related idea that what “illumination” is really about is the necessity of a “supernatural” intervention, something extra, or super-added to the free functioning of human thought. Pasnau, in fact, defines “illumination” as reliance on “some kind of special supernatural assistance” to cognitive activities.54 Finally, the idea that Aquinas’s epistemology differs significantly from Augustinian illumination persists even amidst philosophers otherwise opposed to grand, sweeping narratives regarding the movement of thought in the thirteenth century. Scott Macdonald’s two entries in the recent, A Companion to Epistemology, for instance, indicate that the difference between the two is the difference between an account of the justification of paradigmatic knowledge based on the principles of demonstrative syllogisms on the one hand versus one based on awareness on the other.55 Although Macdonald includes 52 Richard H. Popkin, Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1998), p. 246. Popkin cites the Summa I, q. 12, art. 11 and De Veritatae Q. 10, art. 6. 53 Brady, “Bonaventure’s ‘doctrine of illumination:’ Reactions medieval and modern.” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5/2 (1974), 134, 135. 54 “Divine Illumination,” Fall 2006 ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2006/entries/illumination/ 55 “Augustine,” and “Aquinas, Thomas,” in A Companion to Epistemology, eds. J. Dancy and E. Sosa (London, 1992).


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brief references to the fact that Aquinas’s account of scientia rests on his theory of abstraction and metaphysical commitments, he includes no references to its Augustinian or illuminationist strands.56 The entry on Augustine, by contrast, describes paradigmatic knowledge as justified by direct awareness, developed in terms of metaphors of vision and light. Aquinas’s appropriation of Aristotelian logic is what is deemed properly philosophical in his account of knowledge. The original role assignment given “Augustinian illumination” in the Kleutgen/Stockl/de Wulf/Van Steenberghen line—as not properly philosophical, essentially Platonic, and everything Thomas’s epistemology was not—has proven remarkably persistent, even as what counts as philosophy has been continuously redefined, from reason free from religion, to natural science, objective science, epistemology, empiricism, metaphysics, or most recently, logic. In fact, the list of the ways in which the opposition between Aristotelian and Augustinian epistemology has been parsed provides a kind of virtual tour of the terms on which medieval philosophy has been redeemed in the modern era. If Aristotelian epistemology is redeemed as the use of reason “free from divine intervention,” then Augustinian illumination stands for reason in need of “special divine help;” if Aristotelian philosophy is rendered as “empiricism” then Augustinian epistemology is parsed as “idealism,” and so on down the line: philosophy versus theology; a properly metaphysical account of truth versus an account given “merely” in terms of light or vision; truth by demonstrations evident to all versus a psychological or interior account of truth; an account of paradigmatic knowledge given in terms of the properties of demonstrative syllogism versus an account given in terms of awareness. While the philosophical terms used to parse the opposition have varied through the years, what has not varied is the idea that “Augustinian illumination” and Aristotelian epistemology represent, if not mutually exclusive, then at least incompatible epistemological schemas, and that attempts to combine the two are philosophically suspect at best. In addition, as Aquinas’s thought has been identified with what is properly philosophical in the dominant narratives, Augustinianism 56 Macdonald’s entry is a shortened version of his longer essay, “Theory of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, eds. Norman Kretzmann and Eleanore Stump, pp. 160-195. While this longer article contains more detail regarding Aquinas’s metaphysical commitments, it does not discuss his faculty psychology, instead remaining focused on what Macdonald identifies as properly epistemological, logic.

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has been left to occupy the polarity’s “darker” side. In fact, the list of what “illumination” really is, according to these narratives—supernatural, inherently religious, mystical, psychological, interior, using merely metaphors of vision and light—reads like a list of what one would never want to be accused of philosophically in the modern era. The first true revision of “illumination” as not from the “dark side” came with the work of Étienne Gilson on Bonaventure.57 However, what is new in Gilson’s work is not that he redefines “illumination” (nor is it that he wrote a different type of history of philosophy; Gilson is engaged in canon reformation just like his predecessors), but instead that he places “illumination” in a different philosophical milieu.58 By this point Hume and Kant had burst the bubble of empiricism, the ideal of philosophy as an “objective science” had waned, and European intellectuals in Gilson’s circles were gripped instead by “the problem of knowledge.” With Gilson’s work, for the first time, “illumination” is approached not via narratives regarding the evolution of philosophy as objective science, but instead via the problematics of neo-Kantian philosophy. In other words, “illumination” continues to be defined as inherently religious and mystical; the difference is that in the neoKantian milieu this can be construed as a Good, as opposed to a Bad Thing. Philosophy is defined, for the first time, in such a way as to include “illumination” in the canon. Gilson’s work on Bonaventure belongs among the genre of early nineteenth century theological responses to Kant, and like others in this genre, it possesses a deep ambivalence towards its Kantian heritage. On the one hand, it is gripped by Kant’s critique of the limits of reason in the First Critique, but on the other, it is less than enamored with Kant’s way out of the finite prison in the moral imperative, or with the idea that the noumenal realm is closed off forever to thought, and thus that metaphysics is dead. One can see this ambivalence in Gilson’s chapter on Kant in his, A History of Philosophy,59 where he 57 Gilson’s, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure was originally published in 1924; the English translation (based on the second French printing in 1943), which first appeared in 1938, was reprinted by St. Anthony Guild Press in 1965. 58 The fact that Gilson treats Bonaventure at all may come as a bit of surprise for those acquainted only with his famous rendering of Thomas as the great reconciler of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. After his work on Thomas, Gilson turned to Bonaventure, studying him during the three years he spent in German prisoner of war camps. See Laurence Shook, Étienne Gilson, Étienne Gilson Series 6 (Toronto, 1984), pp. 6-11. 59 Étienne Gilson, A History of Philosophy (New York, 1963).


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argues that Kant’s “lucid insight” is the realization that universality and necessity cannot be derived from the data of sensation, but continues on to say that by locating universality and necessity in the subject, in a priori structures of understanding, Kant is guilty of “slaughtering,”60 or “beheading” metaphysics and propelling modern philosophy into subjectivism and skepticism.61 What is needed, Gilson argues, is a way out of Kantian strictures on knowledge that simultaneously allows room for universal truth to be established via metaphysics. Gilson’s way out, like Schleiermacher’s before him, is through the mystical element in thought, the affirmation of the immediacy of the divine realm to the intellect—which he argues is precisely the purpose of Bonaventure’s “doctrine of illumination.” “Illumination” is thus handed a new role assignment: the pre-thematic awareness of the divine eternal reasons that provides the foundation for a metaphysics and “the only complete reply that philosophy can give to the problem of the basis of certitude.”62 Gilson’s argument rests on reading the eternal reasons/divine light as essentially identical with Kant’s noumenal realm, and on reading an essentially Augustinian spiritual dilemma (“man cannot know any truth without God but he cannot see God”)63 as a translation of “the problem of knowledge” (the problem that the conditions for the possibility of thought cannot be grasped by thought itself).64 Bonaventure is the hero of Gilson’s narrative because he recognized that necessity and universality cannot come from the created realm alone; in this he saw the limits of reason. However, unlike Kant, he located the source of universality not in us, but in the divine realm and thus avoided subjectivism and skepticism. In addition, he recognized that philosophy was incomplete without revelation. Thus, Bonaventure’s “doctrine of illumination” provides a firm foundation for morality, a vision of the relation between philosophy and theology, and a place for the church.65 Gilson’s basic interpretative moves—locating Augustinianism amidst neo-Kantian problematics and defending its philosophical 60

A History of Philosophy, p. 425. A History of Philosophy, p. xi. 62 Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, p. 364. 63 Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, p. 349. 64 Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, pp. 356, 358, 363. 65 Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, p. 438. It is in this context that the oftquoted of assessment of Gilson’s—that Bonaventure has nothing that can properly be called philosophy, if by “philosophy” one means the discoveries of reason alone, independent of the data of revelation—ought to be understood. 61

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merits based on its ability to provide a metaphysical basis for certitude—have persisted up through the present day, particularly among Franciscan scholars. His argument that Bonaventure’s “doctrine of illumination” is a solution to the “problem of knowledge” prompted an entire body of literature which interpreted “illumination” not only as addressing “the problem of certitude,” but also as an example of a preoccupation which permeated the whole of Bonaventure’s thought.66 Gilson’s idea that “illumination” provides a metaphysical answer to the problem of knowledge has also prompted numerous studies. The most recent examples can be found in Andreas Speer’s articles in Medieval Philosophy and Theology,67 in which he explicitly takes up the issue of the Van Steenberghen/Gilson debates by reopening question of whether one can speak coherently of a philosophy in Bonaventure, and argues that Bonaventure’s thought as a whole and his “theory of illumination” in particular is philosophical in both its roots and orientation because it is rooted in a larger metaphysical project.68 Like Gilson, Speer locates the philosophical question addressed by the “doctrine of illumination” in terms of a (neo-Kantian) problem of the

66 Gendreau, for instance, in his often-cited work, “The Quest for Certainty in Bonaventure,” begins his thesis by stating what he assumes is common knowledge, that “the whole intellectual life of Saint Bonaventure resolved itself in a perpetual quest for certainty,” in Franciscan Studies 21 (1961), 104. See also Speer, “Certainty and the Scope of Knowledge” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 3 (1993), 35-61, and J.M. Bissen, L’Exemplarisme divin selon saint Bonaventure (Paris, 1929), p. 176, where he describes the doctrine of illumination as a theme which permeates the whole of Bonaventure’s thought. In addition, Gilson’s rendering of “illumination” initiated long debate over whether Bonaventure (and Augustine before him) intended that the eternal reasons were to ground certain knowledge, or to provide its content. Gendreau rehearses the entire history of the debate in terms of whether or not Bonaventure thinks we grasp the eternal reasons as a known object, “quod,” or simply as a medium that certifies our certainty, “medium quo” (p. 185). For those under the sway of Kantian epistemology, the idea that we grasp the eternal reasons directly is obviously deeply problematic—akin to asserting we grasp the noumenal realm directly, thus most have opted for the idea that the eternal reasons are only a medium of our knowledge; but the debate continues to this day. See R. Nash’s article, “Illumination, Divine,” in Augustine through the Ages, pp. 438-440. 67 Speer, “The Certainty and Scope of Knowledge,” begins by situating the Questions within the general context of a disagreement over the status of scientific rationality and revealed truths at the University of Paris in the early part of the thirteenth century (p. 36). 68 Oddly enough, Speer appears to be one of those who reads Gilson’s statement that “there is nothing resembling philosophy” in Bonaventure as meaning that Gilson himself found nothing resembling philosophy in Bonaventure, a position that is simply untrue.


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limits and scope of knowledge,69 however he revises the central question “illumination” addresses slightly: it is not the problem that the conditions for the possibility for thought cannot be grasped by thought itself, but instead the problem of the metaphysical identities of knowing subject and object known.70 He also picks up on the Gilsonian theme that Bonaventure’s “doctrine of illumination” is indicative of his insight into finitude of rational structures, but he gives this an eschatological spin: the finitude of pure reason is read as an eschatological critique of philosophy that reminds it of its provisional nature.71 Finally, Speer also enters the old debate of whether the eternal reasons are grasped by thought or not, arguing that the eternal standard “itself is never attained,” but through its “influence” we attain certainty.72 The ideas can only be grasped “reflexively;” they are “formal principles of knowledge” designed to guarantee certainty.73 Another key aspect of Gilson’s treatment of Bonaventure’s doctrine of illumination influential in subsequent studies is his argument that “illumination” is unifying element of Bonaventure’s entire corpus— the expression of its theocentrism, or Christocentrism.74 Gilson’s thesis, developed specifically to refute Van Steenberghen’s assessment that Bonaventure’s thought lacks rational cohesion, also ties “illumination” to the essentially Augustinian (as opposed to Aristotelian) spirit of Bonaventure’s work, which he sums up as a rejection of the autonomous use of reason and a “resolutely theocentric” approach to knowledge.75 Franciscan scholars in the years after Gilson’s study such as DaVinca and Veuthy, took up this rallying cry and defended their former Master General by arguing that the spirit of Bonaventure’s entire work is Augustinian, and as a consequence, anti-Aristotelian. By “Augustinian” they meant, as Gilson had, a rejection of the autono69 For instance, in “The Certainty and Scope,” Speer begins by suggesting that Bonaventure’s Disputed Questions are relevant to questions posed by any theory of knowledge, namely the question of whether there is certain knowledge and if so, what it is; how far knowledge extends and what are its limits (p. 35). 70 His version of the central question is, “how can one know with certainty what something is?” And his version of Bonaventure’s answer is, “by knowing it completely—under the conditions that cover both object and subject,” “Certainty and Scope,” p. 42; “Bonaventure and the Question” (p. 35). 71 Speer, “Certainty and Scope,” p. 60. 72 Speer, “Bonaventure and the Question,” p. 36. 73 Ibid., p. 36. 74 See for instance, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, p. 430. 75 Bonaventure’s “terminology may be Aristotelian,” but his “spirit is Augustinian,” Philosophy of St. Bonaoventure, p. 333.

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mous use of reason. Others argued that the essence of “Augustinianism” was to be found in a doctrine of exemplarism.76 Zachary Hayes work can be seen along this trajectory, though he avoids reading Bonaventure amidst thin characterizations of “Augustinianism” and “Aristotelianism,” and considerably develops Gilson’s notion of theocentrism by arguing more specifically for the radical Christocentrism of Bonaventure’s work.77 His treatment of “illumination” reflects this larger thesis and his lifetime research interests. In The Hidden Center and in his introduction to the Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, for instance, “illumination” is treated primarily as an expression of Christological issues (for instance, the metaphysics of exemplarism, Christ’s role as Word, hypostatic union), thus as confirmation of the pervasiveness of the Christocentric motif.78 When Hayes treats the epistemological component of “illumination” he defends it via an appeal to metaphysics. In an assertion that is repeated frequently, Hayes says in his introduction to the Disputed Questions that, “stripped to its essence, the theory of illumination is an analysis of the metaphysical conditions for the fact of human certitude.”79 As he says, Hayes hopes to make clear that illumination is not a description of “some psychological experience” but rather a “metaphysical” account of the fact that human beings do indeed possess certitude.80 His remarks here hearken back to Gilson’s agenda of establishing the philosophical legitimacy of “illumination” by arguing that it establishing a metaphysical foundation to certitude. In the scholarship following in Gilson’s line the term “metaphysical” in reference to “illumination” often is used in its honorific sense in order to defend against the suspicion that “illumination” is merely about some religious or psychological experience and thus not properly “philosophical.” As we have seen, “illumination” made its debut in a quite specific, historical context, in the Germany of the 1840s-60s, amidst the turn to 76 See L. Veuthey, Bonaventurae philosophia Christiana (Rome, 1943); Z. Alszeghy, “Studia Bonaventuriana,” Gregorianum 29 (1948), 142-151. 77 See, for instance Zachary Hayes, O.F.M., The Hidden Center: Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St. Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure, NY, 1992). 78 Consistent with this, Hayes treats the other Questions in the series the same way—as a development of Christological or metaphysical issues treated in the Sentence Commentary or in other works. See Introduction to the Disputed Questions, pp. 49, 51-54, 56, 59, 60, 65. 79 Hayes, Intro. to the Disputed Questions, p. 56. 80 Hayes, Intro. to the Disputed Questions, p. 57.


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the medieval past to fix what had gone amiss in modernity and the emergence of the ideal of philosophy as an “objective science.” It was in this context that the small group of German, Catholic scholars redeemed medieval thought as properly philosophical by creating the narrative regarding the thirteenth century which featured the assimilation of an Aristotelian epistemological scheme philosophically superior to and at odds with the old Augustinian one, and handed Aquinas the role of the hero for his articulation of Aristotelian abstraction and “illumination” the role of the essentially religious/superstitious foil character from which Aquinas’s “scientific” synthesis could emerge. In so doing, they created a whole-scale revision of the Enlightenment narrative schemes in which selected medieval thinkers were valued for freeing reason from the bondage to religion and anticipating bursts of the modern revolutionary spirit, and instead began viewing the medieval past as a treasure chest to be raided for relevant answers to vexing modern philosophical, social, and political dilemmas. However, even as this new narrative revised the relationship to the medieval past and introduced new criteria for how medieval thought could be redeemed as properly philosophical, it bore the marks of its Enlightenment heritage: “illumination” as the idea that reason needs divine help was an anathema not only to the task of philosophy as establishing the foundations of a universal, scientific knowledge, but also to the ideals of rational inquiry free from religion, and the commitment to philosophy as a distinct science from theology. The original role assignment given “illumination”—as not properly philosophical and as everything Thomas’s epistemology was not—persisted in the period following Aeterni Patris, even as the narratives regarding two schools of thought in the thirteenth century were made more complex, and even as what was properly philosophical was continuously redefined—from the ideal of reason free from religion, to natural science, objective science, empirical observation of real, individual objects, the exercise of natural human powers, metaphysics, or finally, logic. The scholarship that follows in this line reveals its indebtedness to a series of modern polarities—among them, the oppositions between philosophy and theology, reason and revelation, empiricism and idealism. The interpretative moves basic to this first line have been responsible for some of the most enduring conceptions of Augustinian “illumination,” Aristotelianism, and thirteenth century intellectual life one finds in the secondary literature today. Chief among them is the ideas

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that Thomas rejects “illumination” in favor of an epistemological scheme in which human reason functions alone, by its own capacities, and that “illumination” is really an endorsement of the necessity of a “supernatural” or “super-added” power to natural human cognition. Equally epidemic is idea that Augustinian and Aristotelian accounts of cognition are fundamentally different, inherently incompatible, and that any attempts to combine them must therefore be intellectually inferior, or even rationally incoherent. Gilson’s work on Bonaventure opened up a new chapter in the creation of “illumination,” not by offering an essentially new definition, but by placing the old one in a new philosophical milieu, amidst neoKantian formulations of the problem of knowledge. With Gilson’s thesis, the equation of Aristotelian epistemology with philosophical progress was questioned for the first time and “illumination” was handed a new role assignment: the immediate presence of the divine to thought, the mystical element in thought that provides a way out of Kant’s finite prison and avoids subjectivism by locating the foundations of knowledge in the divine eternal reasons, thus paving the way for a traditional metaphysics able to ground the church’s universal truth claims. Gilson’s interpretative moves launched a second interpretative line with its own agendas. The secondary literature which follows in Gilson’s line today continues to defend “illumination” as a metaphysical and therefore properly philosophical account of knowledge, read “illumination” as addressing the questions of the problem of certitude or the conditions of the possibility of thought, discuss whether the eternal reasons provide the content or the ground to certain knowledge, and treats “illumination” as an extension of essentially Christological or metaphysical commitments. However, regardless of whether “illumination” has been derided or praised, read in or out of the philosophical canon, considered intellectually regressive or the vanguard of medieval wisdom, what has persisted is the core of the artifact with which we began—“Augustinian illumination,” it is assumed by parties on all sides, is an essentially Platonic account of knowledge that rejects the senses as a source of certain knowledge, differs substantially from Aristotelian epistemology, and is something Bonaventure continues, while Aquinas rejects. Difficulties emerge when this artifact is placed alongside the mid-thirteenth century texts considered central to Aquinas’s rejection and Bonaventure’s continuation of “illumination,” Bonaventure’s


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Question IV of the Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi81 and Aquinas’s Summa theologiae Ia.84, 1-8.82 Both texts have a long history of interpretative strain. Detailed commentaries on Aquinas’s Summa often skip over Ia. 84, 1-8 entirely, or simply reiterate stock interpretations.83 Alternatively, it is grudgingly admitted that the Question evidences an “illuminationist strand,” but this is explained away as a political move against the rising tide of anti-Aristotelianism, described as mere “lip service” to the authority of Augustine,84 or dismissed as an unfortunate blip in an otherwise thoroughly Aristotelian epistemological scheme, untenable on the prima facie fact that Augustinian and Aristotelian epistemologies are incompatible.85 Even the few ungrudging admissions of an Augustinian/Platonic presence ascribe a “Janus-like” or “enigmatic” quality to the article,86 and following an interpretative tradition which has equated “illumination” with supernatural help, move quickly to reassure readers that Aquinas’s epistemology stresses the natural capacities in human cognition and

81 Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi: Opera Omnia 4 (Quarrachi, 18821889), trans. Zachary Hayes, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ (New York, 1992). The other text considered central to Bonaventure’s development of “illumination” is the thematically-related sermon, Christus onus magister: Opera Ominis V (Quarrachi, 1882-1889), trans. Zachary Hayes as “Christ, Our One Teacher,” in What Manner of Man? Sermons on Christ by St. Bonaventure (Chicago, 1974, 1989). 82 Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. ed. 5 vols. (Westminster, 1981). 83 For instance, Anthony Kenny, in his detailed commentary on Questions 75-89 of part I of the Summa, in Aquinas on Mind (London, 1993), essentially skips over article 5, summarizing it—incorrectly—in half a sentence: “having rejected the Platonic view of the origin of ideas, whether in their pagan form that they derived from self-subsistent forms (84.4), or in the Christian form they derived from knowledge in the mind of God (85.5), Aquinas presents as his own the Aristotelian via media between empiricism and Platonism (85.6).” 84 See for instance, Robert Pasnau, “Henry of Ghent and the Twilight of Divine Illumination,” Review of Metaphysics 49 (1995), 49-75. Pasnau amends this earlier assessment in his recent, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa theologiae Ia 75-89 (Cambridge, 2002), and now states that there is “nothing insincere or backhanded in Aquinas’s approach” in 84.5 (p. 449, n.5). 85 Nash, “Illumination, Divine,” pp. 438-440; Speer, “Certainty and Scope,” p. 40. 86 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas, (p. 304). Pasnau is one of the few to argue, as I do, that Aquinas’s use of Augustine is integral to his overall agenda in 84. However his interpretation of this fact, and his larger argument regarding Q. 84—that it demonstrates Aquinas embrace of Augustinian illumination “at the very heart” of Aquinas’s account of intellective cognition, thus placing him at the end of a long tradition in Western philosophy that “had no way to explain the working of mind without appealing to the supernatural” (pp. 302-310)—are very different from my own.

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denies the need for any special or continuous divine illumination.87 Similar interpretative strain can be found in commentaries on Bonaventure’s Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ. Either Bonaventure’s defenses of Aristotelian epistemology are ignored, or where they are noted, they are treated as a non-binding aberration in a thoroughly Augustinian/Platonic picture. My suggestion is that this interpretative strain is a direct result of the logic of canon reformation entirely missing the textual specificity of mid-thirteenth century disputations bent on demonstrating the compatibility of Aristotelian and Augustinian epistemological accounts. Generations of scholars, armed with the philosophical polarities that structure the narratives of retrieval—all of which assume an inherent incompatibility between Aristotelian and Augustinian epistemology—have approached the texts of their favorite thirteenthcentury hero (or villain) and have either skimmed them in search of nuggets to support an Aristotelian versus Augustinian plot line, or, if they have read them more carefully, have emerged baffled by the fact that they appear to reconcile what the logic of retrieval dictates must be separated. Ironically, the cumbersome labels created early on by de Wulf and Van Steenberghen to characterize Bonaventure’s thought—“eclectic Aristotelianism with Neo-Platonist tendencies”— in some ways capture the inadequacy of the modern interpretative rubrics at the same time that they point to Bonaventure and Aquinas’s central agenda of showing how Augustinian and Aristotelian schemes can be seen as part of the same design. What is needed is a new approach. 87 John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock are some of the few not to make this move. See their Truth in Aquinas (London, 2001). Richard Popkin, The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, citing the Summa I, q. 12, art. 11 and De Veritatae Q. 10, art. 6, says that Aquinas rejects Bonaventure’s doctrine of illumination because it sees the agent intellect as an essentially created nature, endowed with the natural light of reason, requiring no additional illumination distinct from the created light; Pasnau, in Thomas Aquinas, citing ST Ia2ae 109.Ic, describes the difference between Aquinas and his Augustinian critics as the fact that Aquinas wants that insight to be given all at once, from the start—bottled up within the agent intellect,” while his opponents, in contrast, think of illumination as an ongoing process, “as necessary as the air we breathe” (pp. 305-306); Brady, “St. Bonaventure’s doctrine of ‘illumination’” repeating the most common description one finds in the secondary literature, argues that the thrust of Aquinas’s rejection of illumination in De Veritatae and in the Summa Theologiae is an insistence that the light of human reason which God endows us with is capable of knowing first principles from whence arises certitude; knowledge in the eternal reasons is not necessary for the attainment of certain knowledge (p. 31).


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When these texts are approached free from the blinders created by an assumption of Aristotelian/Augustinian epistemological incompatibility, and free from the need to place an Aristotelian Thomas and a Augustinian Bonaventure in grand narratives regarding the march of philosophical progress in the thirteenth century, and are read instead with an eye to how they conduct the business of disputatae— how, as Mark Jordan has put it, they reconcile pieces of authoritative sententiae and weave together textually-specific answers to quite particularly phrased questions88—what quickly becomes clear is that the artifact bears little resemblance to the texts. One of the points revelatory of the divergence between modern artifact and mid-thirteenth century text is found in the kinds of questions they pose. The narratives from the era of retrieval are driven on the one hand by broad, general epistemological questions (“Do humans need God to know anything with certainty, or to know scientific truth, or anything at all? How can we show that these texts address “the problem of knowledge?”), and on the other hand, by specific questions driven by relevancy and retrieval (“Are there any French philosophers from the medieval period who we can construe as sounding like philosophes? How can we demonstrate that Aquinas can hold his own amongst the back-to-Kantians?). Bonaventure’s Question IV of the Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi and Aquinas’s Summa theologiae Ia.84, 1-8 are, by contrast, shaped by a series of textuallyspecific questions arising out of a desire to assimilate passages on the Augustinian eternal reasons on the one hand, and a series of Aristotelian epistemological principles on the other: Given that in the Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics Aristotle has shown that “the principle of knowledge is in the senses,” how should we read the passages in Augustine’s Confessions that say we must “see all things in the eternal reasons?” Given that Aristotle holds that the intellect is immaterial, yet knows material objects, how should we read Augustine’s texts from the Soliloquies that seem to suggest the intellect “only knows immaterial objects?” In other words, the kinds of questions that drive canon reformation eclipse both the textual specificity of Bonaventure and Aquinas’s inquiries as well as their primary purpose in disputation. 88 As Mark Jordan has argued is the central task of the quaestio in his work on Aquinas, Ordering Wisdom: the Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas (Notre Dame, 1996), p. 63.

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The difficulties go beyond the observation that the aims of canon reformation are not equal to the aims of the medieval disputation. When the modern narratives regarding “illumination” are placed alongside the thirteenth century texts, it becomes apparent that they are not simply the product of a different kind of intellectual enterprise, but more significantly, that they distort what Bonaventure and Aquinas set out to say in these mid-century texts. I have argued this point elsewhere in considerable detail.89 Here, let me simply make a series of observations regarding the key differences between artifact and texts. To begin, the central assumption that has marked the secondary scholarship on “illumination” from its inception—the idea that Augustinian and Aristotelian epistemologies are fundamentally incompatible—is not one that either Bonaventure or Aquinas share. In fact, Bonaventure and Aquinas not only assume compatibility between Augustinian and Aristotelian epistemological principles, one of their primary aims is demonstrating this compatibility. They do so in a variety of ways: Augustinian arguments and images are used to elucidate Aristotelian epistemological principles and vice versa; Aristotelian and Augustinian terminology are used interchangeably; Augustinian and Aristotelian texts that seem to contradict are glossed and reconciled with ease. Second, these mid-thirteenth century texts argue creatively and persistently for an interpretation of Augustine’s texts quite close to the opposite of the modern artifact of “Augustinian illumination.” Both explicitly ally Augustine with Aristotle over against what they perceive to be a thoroughly discredited Platonic position, untenable precisely because it fails to account for the fact that knowledge proceeds from the senses. Augustine is read not as following Plato in rejecting the senses as a source of certain knowledge or holding that certainty is only had via awareness of the divine eternal reasons, but instead as explicitly supportive of a whole series of Aristotelian epistemological principles. Augustinian references to the mutability and changeability of the senses are not read as precluding the senses from delivering knowledge, but instead as affirming the necessity of an immaterial cause of knowledge over against a materialist account (Aquinas), or as affirming the necessity of the cooperation of created and uncreated 89 “On why Bonaventure does not continue, nor does Aquinas reject, ‘Augustinian illumination:’ a re-reading of Bonaventure’s Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi and Aquinas’s Summa theologiae Ia.84, 1-8,” submitted to Franciscan Studies.


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principles of knowledge (Bonaventure). Both Aquinas and Bonaventure take considerable care, and use considerable hermeneutical agility, to demonstrate that Augustine was in fact aware of the dangers of the Platonic position and both marshal little known Augustinian texts to demonstrate that Augustine’s account of knowledge can be read as compatible with and supportive of the fact that in this life knowledge must begin with corporeal things. They are united in seeing Aristotelian epistemology as convincingly revising the Platonic map by establishing that the truths of scientia and united in arguing that Augustine clearly belongs on the Aristotelian side of the polemic against Plato. In other words, contra the modern artifact, for Bonaventure and Aquinas, Augustine does not follow a Platonic epistemological schema that refers all certain knowledge to the eternal reasons and rejects the senses as a source of certain knowledge. Third, both Bonaventure and Aquinas bend over backwards to defend the integrity of precisely what the modern polarities have deemed impossible or philosophically suspect: an account of knowledge which holds that Aristotle’s arguments regarding the necessity of input from the sensible species in the production of scientia are compatible with Augustine’s assertions regarding the necessity of the involvement of the eternal reasons, or divine light in the formation of certain knowledge. In this regard these texts represent a particular stage in the assimilation of the Aristotelian corpus, one in which Aristotelian scientia as necessary and eternal knowledge that proceeds from the senses and grounds the enterprise of natural science, is seen as ripe for assimilation with Augustinian accounts of certain knowledge. Whether they are justified in interpreting Augustine and Aristotle in this way is another question. What is clear, however, is that neither would recognize the artifact of “Augustinian illumination” as accurately representing their reading of Augustine, or their own positions. Seen from the perspective of the mid-thirteenth century texts, the modern artifact of “Augustinian illumination” appears a bit like a strange dream: unnecessarily nervous about the inclusion of the divine light in cognition, bent on opposing precisely what the thirteenth century texts are intent on combining, absolutely mistaken in affiliating Augustine with a discredited Platonic position and in assuming Bonaventure and Aquinas represent substantially different epistemological positions, and driven by grand, sweeping questions that skate

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right over the fine-grained, nitty-gritty business of textual reconciliation. Paradoxically, “illumination” sheds light on the dreams and visions of the modern era, at the same time that it eclipses the textual artifacts from the thirteenth century.

Dreams, Visions, and Nightmares in Islam

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DREAMS, VISIONS, AND NIGHTMARES IN ISLAM: FROM THE PROPHET MU~AMMAD TO THE FUNDAMENTALIST MINDSET Tamara Albertini

I. The Foretelling of the September 11th Attacks through Dreams In December of 2001 a website offered a transcript in English translation of a videotaped conversation among individuals from (or close to) the al-Qaeda scene, while they were paying a courtesy visit to an allied Shaykh. The meeting took place presumably in a private home in Qandahar, Afghanistan some time in November of 2001. The person leading the conversation in that tape—identified by the U.S. Department of Defense as Usama bin Laden—expresses much satisfaction with the “success” of the attacks carried out in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.1 While the identification seems to be credible, the following will content itself with calling the person 1 www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2001/d20011213ubl.pdf (Cf. also the transcript included in bratislava.usembassy.gov/cis/cisen020.html). The transcript is preceded by the following information

(Transcript and annotations independently prepared by George Michael, translator, Diplomatic Language Services; and Dr. Kassem M. Wahba, Arabic language program coordinator, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. They collaborated on their translation and compared it with translations done by the U.S. government for consistency. There were no inconsistencies in the translations.) In mid-November, Usama Bin Laden spoke to a room of supporters, possibly in Qandahar, Afghanistan. These comments were video taped with the knowledge of Bin Laden and all present. Note: The tape is approximately one hour long and contains three different segments: an original taping of a visit by some people to the site of the downed U.S. helicopter in Ghazni province (approximately 12 minutes long); and two segments documenting a courtesy visit by Bin [sic!] Laden and his lieutenants to an unidentified Shaykh, who appears crippled from the waist down. The visit apparently takes place at a guesthouse in Qandahar. The sequence of the events is reversed on the tape—the end of his visit is in the beginning of the tape with the helicopter site visit in the middle and the start of the Usama bin Laden visit beginning approximately 39 minutes into the tape. The tape is transcribed below according to the proper sequence of events.

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in question “Usama.” For the analysis offered in this paper it is not important that the leading discussant was, indeed, Usama bin Laden. The author of the present paper is mainly interested in the type of language applied by participants who are in or close to the Islamic fundamentalist scene.2 By the same token, it is also not essential that the videotaped conversation had actually occurred in the city of Qandahar. Whenever the location of the meeting is mentioned in the following narrative, the name of this city will, therefore, be placed within quotation marks. The Western reader of the transcript may be intrigued by the many dreams mentioned during the “Qandahar” gathering. Apparently, various individuals ranging from fighters to scholars and housewives reported having had dreams announcing the attacks as early as a year before the actual events. The dream accounts take up nearly two pages of the transcript, from a total of six, which is an indication of the great importance given to these dreams by the hosting Shaykh and his guests. Upon reading these accounts one wonders, if the videotape was released to impress Muslims worldwide with the “true” dreams recorded in the al-Qaeda milieu and thus convince them of the legitimacy of attacks carried out by Islamic Jihadists on Western targets. The transcript features altogether seven dreams. For the sake of easy referencing they shall be called the “Qandahar dreams” (although there is no evidence that they were received in the city of Qandahar) and numbered in the order they appear in the transcript. Two dreams are mentioned by “Usama,” three by the hosting Shaykh, and another two by unidentified participants. Dream  UBL [Usama bin Laden]: ...He [Abu-Al-Hasan Al-(Masri)] told me a year ago: “I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!... So I wondered if that was a soccer game or a pilot game? Our players were pilots.” He (Abu-Al-Hasan) didn’t know anything about the oper-

Due to the quality of the original tape, it is NOT a verbatim transcript of every word spoken during the meeting, but does convey the messages and information flow. EDITOR’S NOTE: 39 minutes into tape, first segment of the bin Laden meeting, begins after footage of helicopter site visit. 2 For a similar analysis of fundamentalist language see Tamara Albertini, “The Seductiveness of Certainty: The Destruction of Islam’s Intellectual Legacy by the Fundamentalists,” Philosophy East and West 53,4 (2003), 455-470.


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ation until he heard it on the radio. He said the game went on and we defeated them. That was a good omen for us (www.defenselink.mil/news/ Dec2001/d20011213ubl.pdf, p. 5; my emphasis). Dream  Unidentified Man Off Camera: Abd Al Rahman Al-(Ghamri) said he saw a vision, before the operation, a plane crashed into a tall building. He knew nothing about it (ibid.). Dream  Shaykh: ...One of the good religious people has left everything and come here. He told me, “I saw a vision, I was in a huge plane, long and wide. I was carrying it on my shoulders and I walked from the road to the desert for half a kilometer. I was dragging the plane.” I listened to him and I prayed to Allah to help him (ibid.). Dream  Shaykh (continuation from the previous statement): Another person told me that last year..., but I didn’t understand and I told him I don’t understand. He said, “I saw people who left for jihad...and they found themselves in New York...in Washington and New York.” I said, “What is this?” He told me the plane hit the building. That was last year. We haven’t thought much about it. But, when the incidents happened he came to me and said, “Did you see...this is strange” (ibid., p. 5-6). Dream  Shaykh (continuation from the previous statement): I have another man... he said and swore by Allah that his wife had seen the incident a week earlier. She saw the plane crashing into a building...that was unbelievable, my god (ibid., p. 6). Dream  UBL: We were at a camp of one of the brother’s guards in Qandahar. This brother belonged to the majority of the group. He came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America, and in the same dream he saw Mukhtar teaching them how to play karate. At that point, I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream. So I closed the subject. I told him if he sees another dream, not to tell anybody, because people will be upset with him (ibid.). Dream  (Another person’s voice can be heard recounting his dream about two planes hitting a big building).

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One cannot help but notice the almost matter-of-fact fashion with which the dreams are narrated and received by the participants of the “Qandahar” conversation. Despite the occasional expression of amazement it does not appear that any of the interlocutors doubted the possibility of events being announced through dreams.3 The leader of the conversation is so convinced of the matter that he feared the secrecy of his operations threatened by the many dreams featuring planes crashing into high buildings. To conclude at this point that dreams must be important to Muslims would lead to an understatement. Dreams and visions are determining factors that have left their marks on Islamic religion, culture, and law. They even helped shape dynastic lines.4 They presented valuable epistemological clues upon which both, Muslim philosophers and theologians, developed sophisticated theories to explain the event of prophetic revelation—rationally. Moreover, dreams and visions in Islam are in themselves the conduit of revelation. Dismiss Mu ammad’s visions, and Islam becomes a religion without a Book. But does this necessarily entail—theologically speaking—that God communicates with pious Muslims through dreams to this day? II. Dream Narration and Dream Interpretation in Islam Islam has a long tradition of dream narration and dream interpretation. Both scriptural texts, the Qurʾān and the ~adīth (the collection of the sayings of the Prophet Mu ammad), record and discuss dreams. The most common and a neutral term for dream in Arabic language is “manām.” “Ruʾyā” (from the semitic root “r-ʾ-y”=to see) is a more specific term that is used for the dream that entails a vision, while ulm is

3 As G.E. von Grunebaum put it: “The reality of the objective significance of the dream is guaranteed by the Holy Book itself” (“Introduction: The Cultural Function of the Dream as Illustrated by Classical Islam,” in The Dream and Human Societies, eds. G.E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois [Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1996], p. 7), which is why religious authorities in Islam (unlike the philosophers) had no need to inquire further into the cognitive significance of dreams. The following will show that they could simply rely on the Prophet’s promise that divine revelation will continue in the form of dreamed images. 4 For political dreams see Toufy Fahd, “The Dream in Medieval Islamic Society,” in The Dream and Human Societies, pp. 351-363, and Annemarie Schimmel, Die Träume des Kalifen. Träume und ihre Bedeutung in der islamischen Kultur (München, 1998).


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reserved for confused or bad dreams, also referred to as aghāth alām or simply aghāth. All these terms appear in Islamic scripture.5 Among the ninety-seven books comprised in al-Bukhārī’s famous compilation of the ~adīth, Book 91 is entirely dedicated to oneiromancy, i.e. the interpretation of dreams. The Arabic term for oneiromancy is taʿbīr, from the root ʿabara, meaning to pass over something from one side to another as when one crosses a river and carries something to the other shore. The term suggests that the interpreter is expected to trace the “meaning” captured in dream images back to an original—presumably verbal—content.6 Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209), a follower of the grand al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), relates taʿbīr to ʿabra (=tear), a term that “denotes a ‘crossing/traversing,’ because the tear moves from the eye to the cheek.” Thus taʿbīr can be understood as “the science of interpreting dreams, since the interpreter has to cross from the imaginary to the rational.”7 The original content of dreams is believed to be inscribed in a celestial book usually referred to as the “Preserved Tablet” (al-Law al-Mafū) or the “Mother of all Books” (Umm al-Kutub), which is also taken to be the source of Qurʾānic revelation. In some dream manuals it is said that the Angel of Dreams called idūq or idīqūn (vocalization not recorded) brings down to the dreamer information regarding the future. Other manuals assume that either the human spirit (rū) or soul (nafs) journeys to heaven and receives in the presence of the Throne of God knowledge from the “Tablet” through the assistance of the Angel of Dreams.8 Before drawing on more materials from Islam’s very rich oneirocritic literature, one should first establish the scriptural basis of dream interpretation. If one is to counter in any way the manner in which the 5 For a detailed referencing of these notions in Islamic sources see “Ruʾyā,” in Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden, new edition, 1960-), vol. VIII, pp. 645-649; here onwards referred to as EI. “Manām” is probably the term used in Dreams 1 and 6, while “ruʾyā” can be expected to be the term applied in Dreams 2 and 3. 6 John C. Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation (Albany, NY, 2002), p. 86. 7 Quoted after Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazali & the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill, 2005), p. 60. 8 Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, p. 28, pp. 58-59; p. 82. Von Grunebaum who found the name of the Angel in a work by ʿAbdalghanī al-Nābulusī (1641-1731) transliterates “iddīqūn” (“Introduction: The Cultural Function of the Dream as Illustrated by Classical Islam,” p. 8). A. Abdel Daïm discovered in a mss. of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris yet another variation in ‘Moṣaddīqun’ (L’oniromancie arabe d’après Ibn Sirin (Damascus, 1959), p. 63).

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seven dreams have been assessed during the “Qandahar” meeting, only Qurʾānic and ~adīth-sources should be taken into consideration, since individuals raised in Wahhābī Islam (of which many are known to be active in the al-Qaeda movement) rarely accept later developments in the field of religious studies. Does Islamic oneiromancy have a scriptural basis? In a adīth recorded by al-Bukhārī one learns that Allah’s messenger often asked his companions after fajr (early morning prayer): “Did anyone of you see a dream (ruʾyā)?” (B, 91:48, 7047).9 The understanding here is that the most reliable dreams are the ones received before dawn. On one side the dreamer has a better recollection of the night images received, on the other the interpreter’s mind is at its best performance in the early hours. The Prophet himself was known to be an interpreter of dreams—of his own and those of his companions. Not unlike Yūsuf, the biblical Joseph who was sold into Egyptian slavery by his own brothers (and whose story is recorded in the Qurʾān),10 he was able “to make the dream pass” from symbolic imagery to actual meaning. This act is also called taʾwīl (=taking back to a first), a term ordinarily reserved for scriptural exegesis, the meaning being that the scholar endeavors to find the “first” content of metaphors and generally figurative language.11 Coincidentally, the term taʾwīl appears precisely in the Qurʾānic story of Yūsuf where he relates to his father a dream in which he saw eleven stars, the sun, and the moon prostrate themselves to him (Q, XII: 4). After warning against sharing the content of the dream with his brothers, Yūsuf’s father then states to him: “Thus thy Lord will prefer thee [to your brothers] and will teach thee the interpretation [taʾwīl] of events” (Q, XII: 6).12 The epistemic parallel between scriptural and oneirocritic exegesis is best explained by the Ismāʿīlī scholar Abū ~ātim al-Rāzī (d. 934-5). The interpreter of a sacred text is to be compared to the dream interpreter, he says, whereas the expert of tafsīr (Qurʾānic philology) is like

9 Unless otherwise stated, adīth quotations are from The Translation of the Meanings of Sahih Al-Bukhāri, Arabic-English, trans. Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 9 vols. (Ryadh, Saudi Arabia, 1997); here onwards referred to as B. 10 The Qurʾān devotes to Yūsuf all of Sura XII. The verses relating to Yūsuf’s oneirocritic talents appear also in the adīth (B, 91:6). 11 “Taʾwīl,”in: EI, vol. X, p. 390b. 12 Unless otherwise stated, Qurʾānic passages are quoted after The Glorious Qurʾān, bilingual edition, with English translation by Marmaduke Pickthall (Albany, 1976); here onwards referred to as Q.


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the translator who mediates between a non-Arab dreamer and an Arab oneirocritic.13 Many contributors to the ~adīth report that “a good dream [that comes true] of a righteous man is one of forty-six parts of An-Nubuwwa (Prophethood)” (B, 91:2, 6983; see also 91:3, 6987, 6988, 6989; 91:10, 6994; and 91:26, 7017). A tradition recorded by Umm Kurz, the wife of a Companion, sheds some light on the connection between prophethood and dreams: “While prophecy has ceased, bearers of glad tidings remain” (my emphasis).14 The bearers of glad tidings invoked in the saying are dreamers. The understanding thus is that, since there can be no Prophet after Mu ammad (Muslims believe that their religious founder seals off the chain of biblical prophethood), the only conduit for prophecy left are dreams.15 How central the notion of “glad tidings” are to dreams in Islam, may be seen from another tradition that is recorded in a great number of ~adīth-compilations. Narrated Abū Hurayra: Allah’s Messenger said, ‘When the Day of Resurrection approaches, the dreams of a believer will hardly fail to come true, and a dream of a believer is one of the forty-six parts of AnNubuwwa (Prophethood) and whatever belongs to An-Nubuwwa can never be false.’ Mu ammad bin Sirīn said...: ‘There are three types of dreams: (1) The reflection of one’s thoughts and experiences one has during wakefulness, (2) what is suggested by Satan to frighten the dreamer, (3) or glad tidings from Allāh.’ (B, 91:26, 7017, my emphasis)

Clearly, the dreams worth pursuing further—hermeneutically— belong to the third group identified in the above adīth. “A glad tiding from God” translates the Qurʾānic notion of bushra (Q, 10:64), a key notion in the Islamic discipline of dream interpretation. According to an early source it simply is the name for a believer’s true dream.16A type of dream to include in this group are dreams sent to warn good Muslims of upcoming dangers and fatalities. They too descend from the celestial Book and call for interpretation.17 13

EI, vol. X, p. 391a. Quoted after Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, p. 112. 15 For sources substantiating that in fact a promise has been issued to pious Muslims that dreams shall be sent to make up for the lack of revelation after the Prophet’s death cf. Leah Kinberg, “Literal Dreams and Prophetic adīts in classical Islam—a comparison of two ways of legitimation,” Der Islam 70 (1993), 283. 16 Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, p.110. 17 For the inclusion of adverse tidings among the true dreams see von Grunebaum, “Introduction: The Cultural Function of the Dream as Illustrated by Classical Islam,” p. 8. 14

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Tamara Albertini III. An Assessment of the “Qandahar Dreams” in the Light of Scripturally Based Oneiromancy

Bushra is most likely the term used by “Usama,” where the transcript speaks of “good omen” (Dream 1). Is it a coincidence that it is precisely he who introduces the first dream to the participants of the “Qandahar” conversation? Not likely. It certainly presented him with the opportunity to surround all of the seven dreams recounted in that conversation with a divine aura. Thus the images of planes, whether they were “seen” crashing or not, become a matter of “glad tidings.” Since they appear to announce a divinely-ordained event, they have no need of justification. “Usama’s” reference to a Qurʾānic formula is a shrewd and effective means of legitimation, since the use of scriptural language allows him to reach a large pious Islamic audience.18 Whereas he cannot expect every Muslim to be familiar with the place of dreams in Islamic theology, he can realistically speculate that individuals brought up in Islam know at least some of the ~adīth-traditions mentioned above. That is all that is needed to generate a contemporary sub-text or even a series of contemporary sub-texts to these traditions in the minds of a Muslim audience today. Among the possible sub-texts to be considered, one can easily think of the following: Sub-text  The Prophet himself used to ask his Companions about their dreams. Narrating one’s dreams to fellow-Muslims is thus one of the many ways in which believers may emulate a common practice of the first Islamic community. This transforms the “Qandahar” meeting into a pious gathering. Sub-text  Since the content of these dreams has been “validated” on the day of the September 11th attacks and since dreams that come true are “one of forty-six parts of An-Nubuwwa,” the dreamers mentioned in the videotaped conversation are to be seen as recipients of divine revelation. 18

For an analysis of statements clearly attributable to Usama bin Laden see W. El-Ansary, “The Economics of Terrorism: How bin Laden is Changing the Rules of the Game,” in Joseph E.B. Lumbard (ed.). Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition: Essays by Western Muslim Scholars (Bloomington, Indiana, 2004), pp. 191235, and T. Albertini, “The Seductiveness of Certainty: The Destruction of Islam’s Intellectual Legacy by the Fundamentalists.”


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This makes the dreams themselves become a matter of “glad tidings from God,” while the attackers emerge as agents who carried out a divine mission. Sub-text  Further, if “true” dreams are connected with the approaching of “the Day of Resurrection,” as Abū Hurayra’s adīth seems to suggest, the attackers of September 11th are not only divine agents but may be, moreover, considered apocalyptic agents.

It takes but one of these sub-texts to confer a simile of legitimacy to the attacks of September 11th. Needless to say what one person’s good dream may be another person’s nightmare. Pseudo-legitimacy, however, is not only uncovered in the means identified above. It appears at a more fundamental level: Ironically precisely there where the participants of the “Qandahar” conversation mean to attach themselves to oldest—sound—Islamic tradition. A closer examination reveals how they are in fact betraying said tradition. “Usama” and his followers assume that when God speaks to believers through dreams, the dream images are necessarily the exact equivalents of the objects hinted at: a ‘plane’ means a plane, a ‘crash’ is a crash and so forth. In other words, none of the participants thinks of how “to make the dream pass.” The “Qandahar dreams” are interpreted literally to mean that a plane or planes could be expected to hit one or more buildings. In other words, the dreamed images are understood to reflect divine will in a straightforward manner. After the facts, this appears to be, indeed, the “obvious” meaning. One cannot stress enough how much this simplistic oneiromancy stands in stark contrast with the actual Islamic understanding of dream interpretation, especially with scripturally based oneiromancy. For instance, Yūsuf whom Muslims take to be the founder of Islamic dream interpretation, did not see in his dream his father, mother, and brothers bow before him. What he saw were sun, moon, and stars showing reverence to him. The interpretation did not involve a complex procedure. Nevertheless, someone—his father—was needed to identify the images of heavenly bodies with the members of Yūsuf’s immediate family. Or, to mention another famous biblical story that is also recorded in Islamic scripture, when Ibrāhīm (Abraham)—coincidentally Yūsuf’s great-grandfather—was summoned to sacrifice his

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son Ismāʿīl19 (in the Qurʾān God issues this command in a dream; cf. Q, XXXVII: 102), the correct interpretation—after the fact—is that the order is not to be executed. God himself prevents the killing of Ismāʿīl and speaks to Ibrāhīm: “Thou hast already fulfilled the vision (ruʾyā)” (Q, XXXVII: 105). The dream was sent to test the patriarch’s piety, not to foreshadow an event that was eventually to materialize. In my estimation Ibrāhīm’s vision belongs, therefore, to the genre of symbolic— and not literal—dreams. Both Yūsuf’s and Ibrāhīm’s night visions confirm that Islamic scripture promotes the notion of dreams as a means of communication between God and his community. Both their dreams are introduced in the Qurʾān as events that require proper interpretation. Ibrāhīm’s dream is particularly revealing, since it sheds an intriguing light upon the “true” dreams in “Usama’s” entourage. If nothing else, it brings up a question. What if these dreams meant the opposite of what they convey prima facie. Thus, what if—rather than validating— the images of crashing planes were intended to be a warning against executing the operations that led to the September 11th events? What if they were not to be taken as “mubashshirāt,” (glad tidings) but adverse tidings? It seems appropriate to include some more materials referring to the place of dreams in Islamic theology, before attempting an answer to these questions. IV. Islamic Manuals of Dream Interpretation An examination of John C. Lamoreaux’s recently published study The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation offers a rare opportunity to acquaint oneself with the complexities to be found and the high degree of sophistication reached in Islamic oneiromancy. Suffice it to say that by the end of the 10th c/beginning of the 11th c. Khallal’s biographic dictionary called abaqāt al-Muʿabbirīn (=The Classes of the

19 The name of the son to be killed is not recorded in the Qurʾān. But since the birth of Isḥāq (Isaac) is mentioned after the story of the sacrifice, the context suggests that it could only have been Ismāʿīl (Ishmael). Unlike the Book of Genesis, Islamic scripture thus takes Ishmael (the ancestor of the Arabs) to be the protagonist of this story. The Qurʾānic verses referring to Abraham’s dream are reproduced verbatim in al-Bukhārī’s ~adīth (B, 91:7).


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Dream Interpreters) lists no less than 7,500 oneirocritics.20 In Die Träume des Kalifen (=The Dreams of the Caliph) Annemarie Schimmel mentions a somewhat later source that discusses 11750 dream interpreters.21 This alone should make one aware of the importance given to this field. The following will consider only literature from the first period of Islamic oneiromancy where authors of dream books were highly respected transmitters of prophetic tradition. As noted above, considering Wahhābism’s strict reliance on the practice and the custom of the Prophet Mu ammad, it would make little sense to include materials from a later period when manuals of oneiromancy started to reflect hermeneutical devices derived from non-Islamic sources as well (Greek, Jewish, Christian, Indian, and/or Persian). In what follows the challenge consists in identifying an argumentative basis that is (or should be) meaningful to highly conservative Muslims. It is obvious that Jihadists or otherwise ideologized Muslims cannot be reached by such a strategy, since they know all too well that this would undermine their “theology.” However, tradition-oriented scholars with no political agenda could be interested in such a discourse. Among the first Muslim interpreters of dreams one finds the muaddith (=contributor to the ~adīth) Mu ammad ibn Sirīn (654728). His above-quoted threefold categorization of dreams appears in all major ~adīth compilations. Although many dream books have been attributed to him, it does not appear that he has authored one. The early documents that mention him in the context of oneiromancy connect him to Yūsuf, the biblical patriarch Joseph, who is said to have appeared to him in a dream. According to the later dream book author Dīnawarī (wr. 1008), ibn Sirīn claimed upon waking up from such a dream: “When morning came, whenever anyone told me about a dream it was as if I could see it in the palm of my hand.” One source has him be the student of dream interpreter Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib (d. 712) who allegedly transmitted to him 600 chapters from Yūsuf’s legendary dream book. Another source asserts that Ibn al-Musayyib was 20 Khallal’s dictionary has not survived. A summary, however, can be found in Dīnawarī’s al-Qādirī fī ʿIlm al-Taʿbīr (Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, p. 61). It lists 100 dream interpreters: 6 prophets, 13 companions, 12 Muslims from the second generation, 10 lawyers, 9 ascetics, 8 authors of dream books, 6 philosophers (among these 3 Greeks), 5 physicians (among these 3 non-Arabs), 3 Jews, 3 Christians, 6 Zoroastrians, 7 pre-Islamic Arabs, 5 demonic spirits, 3 magicians, and 4 physiognomists (Schimmel, Die Träume des Kalifen, p. 22). 21 Schimmel, Die Träume des Kalifen, p. 22.

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introduced to oneiromancy through Asmā’, a daughter of Abū Bakr, who in turn has been taught by her father who was a close companion of the Prophet and his first successor.22 Not surprisingly Mu ammad ibn Sirīn is mentioned in every Islamic manual of dream interpretation.This may suffice to ascertain the theological legitimaticy of the field. Oneiromancy was not the privilege of prophets such as Yūsuf, Ibrāhīm, and Mu ammad but was also practiced among Mu ammad’s companions and passed on by them to the next generation. The first writer of a dream book whose work has survived is Ibn Qutayba (828-889), a fine religious scholar and highly respected authority. His ‘Ibārat al-Ru’yā (also known as Ta‘bīr al-Ru’yā) reveals the author’s fascination with the epistemic value of dreams:23 Among the types of knowledge and the varieties of wisdom with which humans occupy themselves, there is none more obscure, none more refined, exalted, and noble, none more difficult... than the dream, for it is one of the parts of revelation (way) and one of the modes of prophecy (nubūwa) (my emphasis).24

Since dreams are a form of knowledge, the list of qualities required of the dream interpreter is impressive: the true oneirocritic is a “recoverer” of knowledge. Besides being extraordinarily pious and moral the interpreter must be thoroughly acquainted with scripture, an expert of Arab tradition and the intricacies of Arab language, a fine grammarian, and a “knower” of men. Moreover, he is expected to have an agile mind, to be quick in drawing analogies, and to possess a powerful memory.25 To recognize the right analogies and correct symbolic links between night images and their respective meanings is the key to the 22 Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, p. 23. Since ibn Sirīn’s mother was a slave owned by Abū Bakr, it seems obvious that Islamic oneiromantic tradition was interested in connecting him further with Abū Bakr’s household. 23 For extensive excerpts see M.J. Kister, “The Interpretation of Dreams. An Unknown Manuscript of Ibn Qutayba’s ‘Ibārat al-Ruʾyā’,” Israel Oriental Studies 4 (1974), 67-103. 24 Quoted after Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, p. 28. 25 “It is incumbent on him to be learned in the Book of God and in the traditions of the prophet... in the proverbs of the Bedouins and in well-known verses of poetry, and in etymological and dialectical studies. He must moreover be refined in his character, a quick study, equipped with a thorough practical understanding of men and their characters, knowledgeable in the use of analogy and able to memorize lots of material” (quoted after Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, p. 29).


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right understanding of dreams. Ibn Qutayba’s ‘Ibārat al-Ruʾyā shows nevertheless that the oneirocritic’s mission does not solely consist in identifying links to be extracted from his dream book. The materials Ibn Qutayba organizes in forty-six chapters (dreams of God, prophets, planets, animals...) are only useful, if the interpreter is provided with a solid methodological basis. The author thus proposes no less than nine methods of taʾwīl: 1. The name-based interpretation where either the etymology of the dreamer’s name or the dreamed object’s name is an essential oneiromantic clue. The same dream content may, therefore, have a different meaning according to the receiver’s given name. 2. The meaning-based interpretation where a specific quality of the dreamed object becomes the central hermeneutic device. 3. The Qurʾānic-based interpretation where the meaning of a dream content is linked to the assessment of either the same or a similar content in a scriptural verse. 4. The adīth-based interpretation where the meaning of a dream content is linked to the assessment of either the same or a similar content in a saying of Prophet Mu ammad (or of previous prophets). 5. The proverb-based interpretation where the meaning of a dream content is linked to the assessment of either the same or a similar content in an Arabic proverb. 6. Interpretation through opposition and inversion where a joyful dream means the opposite and vice-versa. Euphemisms and metaphorical renderings are included in this category. 7. Interpretation through increase and decrease where an opposite meaning is to be assumed depending on quantitative factors. It thus may make a hermeneutic difference if a person dreams of one or more fish. 8. Interpretation depending on the time where the meaning of a dream content is linked to either the season or the time (day, night, dawn). The same dream content may, therefore, have a different meaning according to when it was received. 9. Interpretation depending on the dreamer’s occupation or religion. Without elaborating on this method, Ibn Qutayba seems to be suggesting that one also has to take into account the profession and the faith of the dream recipient. For instance, a Christian’s or a Jew’s dream may have to be assessed differently.26

The nine methods devised by Ibn Qutayba are aimed at preventing a mechanical approach in which a dream-image ‘x’ is always correlated to one and the same meaning ‘a.’ Whereas his ʿIbārat al-Ruʾyā does 26

Cf. ibid., pp. 29-31.

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offer a great number of sets of equivalents (the sun stands for the king, the moon for his wazīr, etc.), the author makes it clear that these are to be applied in accordance with the specific circumstances and conditions surrounding dreamers and their dreams. There is no one universally applicable interpretation for one given dream, just a set of principles to guide the oneirocritic’s creative efforts. The message sent out is that true oneiromancy rests on a notion of dynamic hermeneutics. Nothing is further away from the assessment of the seven dreams that took place during the “Qandahar” conversation introduced in the beginning of our paper. To think of these as symbolic dreams was clearly never considered an option by any of the participants of that conversation. For a fundamentalist mind trained to accept only literal interpretations of scripture, there can be only one correct “reading” of dreams—the literal one. Conclusion: The Place of Literal Dreams in Islam This paper has insisted on the existence of a strong, complex, and rich tradition of oneiromancy in Islam and contrasted it with the literal dream interpretation reflected in the “Qandahar” meeting. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge that Islamic theology is known to have made use of ideologized literal oneiromancy before. In the same way as adīth-reports have been conveniently “remembered” to help push through specific agenda, dreams too are known to have been invoked to help either legitimate the status quo or introduce new practices. It is not the author’s intention to establish which historic dreams may or may not have been genuine. However, as Leah Kinberg, a leading expert of Muslim oneiromancy, is able to show: “The legitimation of the usage of dreams created in Islam a situation in which various groups could easily record dreams in order to justify their own ways of behavior.”27 For instance, various religious authorities helped establish seven canonical readings of the Qurʾān by invoking dreams in which the Prophet himself appeared to them to introduce the correct recitation of certain verses. This type of claim is particularly powerful, 27 Kinberg, “Literal Dreams and Prophetic adīts in Classical Islam,” p. 292. See also Leah Kinberg, “The Standardization of Qurʾān Readings: The Testimonial Value of Dreams,” in Proceedings of the Colloquium of Arabic Grammar, eds. Kinga Dévényi and Tamás Iványi (Budapest, 1991).


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since several adīths insist that visions featuring the founder of Islam can be trusted on the grounds that the devil is unable to assume Mu ammad’s shape (B, 91:10, 6993, 6994, 6996, 6997). Literal dreams have also been utilized by Islam’s leading Sunni schools of Law (madhāhib, from sing. madhhab) to legitimate their respective jurisprudential methodologies. Interestingly enough, the most conservative ~anbalī school is also the one that made the most extensive use of justificatory literal dreams. Although symbolic visions have been recorded by adherents and/or founders of these schools as well, preference was usually given to literal dreams for what should be quite an obvious reason. If dreams are evoked in support of one school’s position, that support would be unnecessarily hindered by an onerous and possibly inconclusive interpretive process. The rich materials gathered by Kinberg in her article “The Legitimization of the Madhāhib Through Dreams”28 allow for several observations. First, the recording of dreams made to assist with the justification of any of the madhāhib seems to stop by the end of the 13th c., which is about the period when the four leading (and to this day lasting) Sunni schools of Law emerge as equally legitimate institutions. One may, therefore, safely assume that the many dreams invoked in particular by the more conservative Mālikites, Shāfiʿites, and ~anbalites reflect the rivalries and tensions among their respective schools and, more importantly, their common endeavor to discredit the more progressive ~anafites who were accused of making an excessive use of reasoning. This is the debate in which ahl al-adīth (=adherents of the adīth) and ahl al-raʾy (=adherents of personal opinion) faced each other for many centuries. Second, the massive recording of dreams by the ~anbalī madhhab shows that it is the ahl al-adīth who made most of this justificatory means. They were clearly the ones to “adapt” this instrument to the legal arena. By comparison only one dream has been recorded in favor of the position defended by Abū ~anīfa (d. 767), the founder of the ~anafī school (a symbolic dream that was interpreted by no lesser oneirocritic than the much celebrated ibn Sirīn.)29 One could, of course, always think of God or His messenger as intervening in the

28 Leah Kinberg, “The Legitimization of the Madhāhib Through Dreams,” Arabica XXXII (1985), 47-79. 29 Ibid., p. 52.

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debate. But then one would have to wonder why hardly any dreams were sent against the ~anafites after the 1300s. Considering that Wahhābism developed out of the ~anbalī school of thought, it becomes quite understandable that some modern Wahhābīs still think of dreams as viable justificatory means. To them it may suffice to answer with the following adīth: “The worst lie is that a person claims to have seen a dream which he has not seen” (B, 91:45, 7043; see also 7042). If they could accept hermeneutics as a legitimate theological method of religious inquiry, one could further argue that true taʿbīr is anyway not about utilizing the knowledge of dreams for earthly purposes. The high art of oneiromancy is not to be wasted on vulgar divination. The dream is like a ladder sent by the Angel of Dreams to help with the journey home. To make the dream pass, one has to transport oneself to the other shore and be transformed by the experience. In response to dreamers who claim to have seen the Prophet appear to them in a vision, al-Ghazālī, one of Islam’s finest philosopher-theologians, states: It only means that what the dreamer sees is an image, acting as a link between the Prophet and himself, instructing him as to the truth. ... similarly, the essence of God is free from shape and form, but knowledge from Him reaches the creature by means of a sensuous image of light or some other beautiful form... That image then is truthful and real and a link in passing on knowledge.”30

The same may be said of any dream-vision, it is but a link in passing on knowledge.

30

Quoted after Duncan Black MacDonald, The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam (Beyrouth, 1965), p. 81.

the Vision of Heaven in Castilian Literature

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THE VISION OF HEAVEN AND KNOWLEDGE IN CASTILIAN LITERATURE: FROM ALFONSO X TO ALFONSO DE LA TORRE Ana M. Montero

Introduction The depiction of heaven was a delicate political issue at the Castilian court in the last decades of the thirteenth century. More precisely, different conceptions of heaven—always placed as the culmination of a distinct scholarly training—give us an insight into philosophical and religious debates, as well as into the nature of relationships between minorities and Christians at that time. This paper will deal with three visions of heaven found in three medieval pseudo-philosophical Castilian texts. The first vision was generated as political propaganda by Alfonso X’s court as his political star declined, and can be seen as a pinnacle in the effort to create a universal learning that existed during the Alfonsine cultural renaissance. As a counter reaction, Alfonso’s rebellious son, king Sancho IV, produced a slightly different depiction of heaven that attempted to strengthen his image as champion of Christian orthodoxy. Almost 150 years later, an obscure scholar named Alfonso de la Torre wrote a philosophical textbook in Castillian—the Pleasant Vision of Sciences—which can be seen as another attempt to blend and redefine similar diverse cultural trends inherited from the past. His text also culminates with an equally polemical vision of heaven. All in all, these visions are important for our understanding of the different nuances in the systematization of the cultural heritages, during the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. 1.1. Alfonso’s Cultural Enterprise At his sudden death in 1284, king Alfonso X could have been regarded as the epitome of political failure. After all, many of the Castilian king’s political enterprises—his legal reforms, his manipulation of fiscal policy and continuous taxing, his expensive maneuvers to be elected Holy

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Roman Emperor over Christian Europe, his relationship to the Church, his preparation for an invasion of North Africa, and so on— had achieved little or no success and had provoked alienation among the different strata of society. Moreover, at the time of his death, caused by a cancer that was facially disfiguring, Alfonso was in the middle of a civil war waged by his second son, Sancho IV, who would then take over the throne. Ironically, in the middle of a succession crisis, Alfonso had to establish an alliance with the king of Morocco, who traditionally was his enemy. To sum up, when Alfonso X died, he was politically isolated, and social unrest dominated.1 However, Alfonso—surnamed the Learned, not so much the Wise —had also been a giant of culture, a man of universal education. Today he is recognized as one of the most renowned patrons for the arts in Spain and his role as a mecenas went beyond that of ordering books and compilations.2 The manuscripts that came out of the royal scriptorium in the 30 year period from 1252 to 1284 comprised texts of 1 For a balanced assessment of Alfonso’s figure, see Robert I. Burns, “Stupor Mundi: Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Robert I. Burns, S.J. (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 1-13, at pp. 3-5. Also Richard P. Kinkade, “Alfonso X, Cantiga 235, and the events of 1269-1278,” Speculum 67 (1992), 284-323, at 284. 2 Though scholars continue to argue the precise involvement of Alfonso in his cultural renaissance, it seems safe to say that Alfonso’s contribution was rather that of an editor or an architect, which suggests that he must have sympathized with most of the ideas put forward in his texts. The following excerpt, often quoted by scholars, shows that Alfonso’s role went beyond just ordering translations and supporting book projects:

Thus we have said many times: a king makes [writes] a book, not because he wrote it with his own hands, but because he composes its own arguments, and emends them, and makes them uniform, and rectifies them, and shows the way they should be done, and thus he whom he [the king] orders writes them, but we say for this reason that the king writes the book. Assi como dixiemos nos muchas uezes: el rey faze un libro, non por quell el escriua con sus manos, mas porque compone las rezones del, e las emienda et yegua et enderesça, e muestra la manera de como se deuen fazer, e desi escriue las qui el manda, pero dezimos por esta razon que el rey faze el libro. (We follow Anthony J. Cárdenas’s translation in “Alfonso’s Scriptorium and Chancery,” in Emperor of Culture, ed. Robert I. Burns [Philadelphia, 1990], p. 92.)

Nevertheless, it is important to stress that the actual authors were a group of scholars—mostly Jews and Christians—working in the shadow of the king. In particular, the figure of Yehudá ben Mošé intervened in most of the scientific treatises, (see Norman Roth, “Jewish Collaborators in Alfonso’s Scientific Work,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, pp. 59-71; and Carmen Ordóñez, “Los judíos españoles y la transmisión del conocimiento astro-


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history, law, religion, science and, even, entertainment. The Alfonsine collection ranged from the Calila e Dimna, an Oriental collection of animal fables probably used for political education, to the Book of the Science of Astrology, to a collection of songs in honor of the Virgin Mary (the Cantigas de Santa María), to handbooks on world history or the Siete Partidas, the Seven Divisions, a landmark in European law codification, just to cite a few examples.3 Part of Alfonso’s greatness is due to the fact that he was concerned with all aspects of life, from how to build a chessboard to the names and influence of the stars. His curiosity was so unrestrained that—if we are to believe the following statement by Alfonso’s nephew, don Juan Manuel—he even ordered the translation of the Kabbalah, Koran, Talmud, and Mohammed’s Ladder into Castilian. Furthermore he [Alfonso X] ordered translated the whole law of the Jews, and even their Talmud, and other knowledge which is called qabbalah and which the Jews keep closely secret. And he did this so it might be manifest through their own Law that it is all a [mere] representation of that Law which we Christians have; and that they, like the Moors, are in grave error and in peril of losing their souls. [We follow Norman Roth’s translation in “Jewish Collaborators,” pp. 59-71, at p. 60 and n. 7.]

Unfortunately, but maybe not so surprisingly, since the treatment of minorities would gradually deteriorate after Alfonso, none of these translations of Islamic and Jewish texts are extant today. The exception, however, may be Mohammed’s Ladder, which has survived in French and Latin, but not in its Castilian translation; this work may have influenced Dante Alighieri when he wrote his Commedia. In regard to Alfonso’s cultural enterprise, three noteworthy features deserve some attention. First, much of this renaissance did not happen in Latin—the European language of culture and Christian liturgy—, but in Castilian, a feature that was basically new in the middle of the thirteenth century. This linguistic maneuver was probably part of the wider policy for national unification.4 It is important to remember that lógico: Judah Ben Mosé Ha-Kohen,” in II Jornadas Astrológicas [Sevilla, 1999], pp. 93-102). 3 For a general survey of the Alfonsine works, see Carlos Alvar et al., “Alfonso X,” in Diccionario filológico de literatura medieval española (Madrid, 2002), pp. 1-86. As a way of recognizing Alfonso’s outstanding role as a lawmaker, his image is emblazoned on a medallion in the U.S. House of Representatives. 4 Spanish became the norm in Alfonsine documents. However, Fernando III, Alfonso’s father, had already used the Castilian language in documents as early as

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in 1252, Alfonso inherited a kingdom that had suddenly become geographically enormous due to the recent conquest of most of what is today Andalucia. In this kingdom, Castilian was to function as the common language for Arabs, Christians, and Jews. Unfortunately, the use of Castilian—instead of Latin—also prevented the diffusion of Alfonso’s works throughout Europe.5 O’Callaghan states, for instance, that if Alfonso X had ordered the Partidas written in Latin, “it would have probably been accepted as the basic code of law for all of Western Europe.”6 The second feature in Alfonso’s cultural enterprise is its pragmatic and secular approach. Little or no attention seems to have been paid to the disquisitions of high-profile Christian theology or scholasticism, which, at the time, was all the craze in the University of Paris. In fact, theology was left out of the curriculum for the new studium of Salamanca. What mattered were those things that could improve man’s everyday life in a direct way. It will not be until the middle of the fourteenth century that a scholastic theologian actually taught in a Castilian university. This leads me to the third feature in the Alfonsine cultural enterprise, which is the high incidence of texts in natural philosophy—more precisely, in astrology and astronomy. In the Alfonsine productions, 1214 (see Anthony J. Cárdenas: “Alfonso’s Scriptorium and Chancery,” p. 95). Anthony Pym’s hypothesis is that Castilian as a written target language should be “seen as part of a nation-building policy, regulating the frontier with Islamic knowledge at the same time as it unified Castilian diversity. It could even be part of the wider policy of national unification that included the introduction of a unified system of weights and measures in 1261, the writing of standard laws (the Fuero Real and the Siete Partidas) and the production of a similarly standardized view of history (the General Estoria).” (“The Price of Alfonso’s Wisdom: Nationalist Translation Policy in Thirteenth-century Castile,” in The Medieval Translator 5, eds. Roger Ellis and René Tixier [Brepols, 1996], pp. 448-467, at p. 455). It can also be argued that natural philosophy was part of this process of cultural homogenization. On the other hand, Alfonso X’s father-in- law, Jaime I of Aragón, “chided Alfonso X for indulging in bookish activities instead of pursuing a vigorous conversion policy” (Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain [Oxford, 1993], p. 417). 5 However, “at the time of his imperial ambition, Alfonso also had a specific group of at least four or five Italian clerks to carry out Latin and French translations, working from completed Castilian versions” (Anthony Pym, “The Price of Alfonso’s Wisdom,” p. 460). Nevertheless, not many of the Alfonsine works in Castilian reached Europe—a later reworked version of the Alfonsine Tables would be an exception. This set of astronomical tables spread through Europe and two centuries later would be bought by a misunderstood Polish student—called Nicholas Copernicus—, who would claim that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. 6 Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “Image and Reality: The King Creates his Kingdom,” in Emperor of Culture, ed. Robert I. Burns (Philadelphia, 1990), p. 30.


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the study of the heavens was paramount, which is evident in such texts as: the Libro de las Cruces (Book of the Judgements of Astrology), a reworking of an earlier Arabic text which showed how to interpret the constellations; the Lapidario (Lapidary), a brilliantly illustrated treatise on medical and other properties of stones, caused by the influence of the stars; and Libro del saber de astrología (Book of the Science of Astrology),7 a compilation of sixteen treatises with a catalogue on the stars of the eighth heaven and instructions on how to design astrolabes, clocks, and other instruments in order to observe the heavens, to name just a few. And, to complete these works, a collection of texts on astral magic and talismans, including the Spanish translation of the Picatrix,8 was also compiled. However, most of this last collection and the Spanish translation of the Picatrix have been lost. Undoubtedly, Alfonso’s works adhered to those trends developed in twelfth-century Toledo which pushed men of wisdom towards Arabic astronomy (and eventually metaphysics), to the point that natural philosophy may have become a matter of national pride in Castile by the thirteenthcentury. Together with statements that reveal a Christian sense of inferiority in science when compared to Arabs, there was the rampant belief that Aristotle and Avicenna must have been of Hispanic origin and that the Spanish philosophers were experts in magic and astrology.9 7 In the most modern edition—prepared by Sánchez Mariana, Samsó et al. (Barcelona, 1999) —the following title is preferred: Libros del saber de astronomía del rey Alfonso X (Books of the Knowledge of Astronomy of the king Alfonso X), which is the one used by the first editor, Manuel Rico y Sinobas. According to Anthony J. Cárdenas, there is “no philological or historical support for this title” (A Study and Edition of the Royal Scriptorium Manuscript of El libro del saber de astrología by Alfonso X, el Sabio” [Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974], xciv). 8 According to David Pingree, editor of a Latin version of the Picatrix:

The Ghāyat al-Hakīm falsely ascribed to al-Makrītī was translated into Latin from a Spanish intermediary translation and renamed Picatrix in 1256 at the court of Alfonso el Sabio. Ever since then it has been the most comprehensive treatise on astral magic available in Western Europe. Its influence on philosophers, scientists and charlatans in England, France, Germany, Italy and Poland continued until the early eighteenth-century, and it was translated into both Italian and French as well as partially into English during the Renaissance.

Other Alfonsine productions dealing with talismanic magic have also been lost. See Alejandro García Avilés, “Alfonso X y el Liber Razielis: imágenes de la magia astral judía en el scriptorium alfonsí,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 74 (1997), 21-39. 9 The Franciscan Juan Gil de Zamora is responsible for this last statement (quoted in Charles Burnett, “Filosofía natural, secretos y magia,” in Historia de la ciencia y de la técnica en la Corona de Castilla, vol. 1, ed. Luis García Ballester [Junta de Castilla y León, 2002], pp. 95-144, at p. 128). See also Richard Lemay, Abu Ma’shar and

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Besides this strong emphasis on astrology and magic—which departs from other more scholastic-oriented productions in Europe— it has also been noted that some of the ingredients present in the Corpus Hermeticum can be found scattered throughout the Alfonsine works.10 It will not be until 1463 that the Corpus Hermeticum would become widely available in the West thanks to the Latin translation of its first fourteen texts by Marsilio Ficino. Up to that date the only Latin theoretical Hermetic treatise translated directly from a Greek source was the Asclepius. Nonetheless, Spain more than likely had privileged access to sources on the mystical Gnostic religion of Hermes Trismegistus earlier than the rest of Europe, due to its proximity to Arab culture.11 Besides references to Hermes, certain features in the Alfonsine works—such as the emphasis that knowledge leads to salvation, the notion that the heavens are a perceptible god which administers all bodies, the awareness that man can create gods by making statues and implanting life in them by calling up the souls of demons and angels, and the use of talismans—suggest the presence of Hermetic traditions and of attitudes that may have been suspiciously contemplated by some members of the Christian hierarchy.12

Latin Aristotelianism in the Twelfth Century: The Recovery of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy through Arabic Astrology (Beirut, 1962), especially pp. xxviii and xxxi. According to Salvador Martínez, Alfonso’s education in Arab sciences took place in Murcia, at Ibn Abu Bakr al-Riquti’s school, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews were accepted. See Alfonso X, el Sabio: Una biografía (Madrid, 2003), p. 84. 10 As far as I know, there are few studies that deal with the Hermetic tradition in the Alfonsine production. In that sense, I am indebted to Kahane’s and Pietrangeli’s study. Both scholars believe that the Hermetic tradition was still alive in three representative Alfonsine works, more precisely in: Bocados de oro [Golden bites], a collection of sayings by philosophers and wise men of antiquity; Picatrix or Goal of the Sage and, the “Libro de las estrellas fixas” or [“Book of the Fixed Stars”], which is the opening treatise in the Book of the Science of Astrology. See also Charles F. Fraker, “A Hermetic Theme in the General Estoria,” in Homenaje a Hans Flasche (Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 257-268. 11 For a history of the development of hermeticism, see Charles Burnett, “The Establishment of Medieval Hermeticism,” in The Medieval World, eds. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London & New York, 2001), pp.111-130, at p. 111 and n. 4. Burnett, however, does not mention Alfonso X. See also Idel Moshe, “Hermeticism and Judaism,” in Hermeticism and the Renaissance, eds. Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus (Washington, 1998), pp. 59-76. 12 According to Burnett, these features are some of the salient points of the mystery religion associated with the Asclepius. We notice its presence in some of the statements of the first book of the Libro del saber de astrología, in which astrology is established as the path to ascertain the notion of God:


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In summary, in this multicultural and complex renaissance at the court of Alfonso X, where all voices of wisdom and knowledge seemed to be heard, where astrology resonated with echoes of Greek science and Egyptian religion, where Christians and Jews worked together in translations and compilations, and syncretistic attitudes were stimulated, it is not surprising that a peculiar ideology thrived. The art scholar Ana Domínguez Rodríguez has brought attention to the complexity of the Alfonsine scientific synthesis—a world view that blended astrology, religion, philosophy, magic, and even hermetic thought. All of the pieces of this ideology are difficult to recover since some of the Alfonsine texts dealing with magic and non-Christian mystic trends are no longer extant. Domínguez Rodríguez goes on to suggest that a movement of ideological repression must have ensued or provoked the ending of the Alfonsine cultural activities (see “Arte en el Lapidario,” in Primer Lapidario del rey Alfonso X el Sabio [Madrid, 1982], pp. 199293, at 201-2). Interestingly enough, if we focus on how heaven was depicted at the Alfonsine court, a particularly controversial image echoes the Alfonsine attempt to amalgamate different sources. 1.2. The Alfonsine Vision of Heaven The Alfonsine work called Setenario—a legal, religious, and scientific treatise probably written in the middle of the civil war against Sancho IV in order to boast intellectual superiority13—is key to understanding the Alfonsine vision of the transcendent. Et qui esto [las obras de Dios en los cielos] bien quisiere saber non se enoíe de leer los libros de los sábios. et de entender bien las sus palabras et alcançara aquellas cosas que el ome puede alcançar por saber. et por aquello llegara á conocer á Dios. (p. 16) Onde conuiene al quid este saber se quisiere ayudar que escodrinne bien los libros de los sábios et los sus dichos según en otros logares deximos. Et que pare mientes á los mouimientos de los cielos. Et en las uertudes de las estrellas. Et en las poridades destas figuras. Et según esto faga sus fechos et sus obras. et non podrá errar. Antes llegará á auer lo que demandare. Et cumplir se le a su voluntad. et alcançará et aurá las maravillosas cosas que por otra manera non podrie auer ni alcanzar. (p. 18; emphasis is mine)

For the reproduction of legends concerning the animation of statues, see General Estoria, book XIII, chapters: XXXIII-XXXIV. Burnett also mentions the relationship between Arabic Hermetica and the star-worshippers of Harran (n. 4), as well as the condemnation of certain talismanic practices (pp. 124-125). 13 Traditionally, it has been assumed that the Setenario belongs to the prolegomena of Alfonso’s reign, since it opens up with the statement that Fernando III, Alfon-

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In the Setenario Alfonso chooses to portray himself as the instructor of future kings, as a privileged mind who equates himself with God, and thus he begins by quoting the name of God, according to Latin, Jewish, and Arabic sources (pp. 3-7). Next he summarizes knowledge—following the seven liberal arts—and, faithful to his naturalistic approach, he subordinates theology to astrology. Consequently, astrology becomes the discipline that leads to the understanding of God’s plan for the cosmos and, therefore, to the intellectual and mystic ascent to the divine realm:14 Astrology means knowledge reached by watching and by sight, and this is the fifth of these seven arts and it refers to the heavens… And it is broken down in seven manners: By sight By understanding… And these seven manners show how God is known according to these seven reasons… Astrologia, que quier dezir saber que sse alcança por catamiento e por vista, et es la quinta arte destas ssiete e ffabla de los çielos… E ésta es partida en ssiete maneras: so’s father, ordered its composition. However, there is a number of scholars—Peter Linehan, Jerry Craddock, and Georges Martin—who believe it was finished at the beginning of the 1280s. The praise which his Setenario contains of the merits of loyal Seville in a world full of treachery and treason provides further reason for dating that work to the end of his reign rather than, as is customary, to its beginning. (cf. Peter Linehan, History and the Historians, p. 421)

On the other hand, as I will show, the ideological conflict between Sancho’s Lucidario (ca. 1293), and Alfonso’s Setenario is also a strong argument in favor of chronological proximity. 14 Nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars have coined different terms to explain this approach. According to Amador de los Ríos, we are dealing with a “theologized astronomy (3: 561)”; in Solalinde’s words, this is “astrología a lo divino” (see Márquez Villanueva, El concepto cultural alfonsí [Madrid, 1994], p. 200). Consequently, in the Alfonsine hierarchy of wisdom, the astronomers and sages of the Antiquity often are equal to Christian saints. Tolomeo ffué vno de los grandes philosofos que nunca ouo en la arte de astrología; ca éste ffabló más alto en fecho de los çielos et de las estrellas que otro que ffué… ca ffué omne que entendió e punnó en saber más las poridades de los çielos. Et aquella carrera misma touo Sant Iohán euangelista entre los apóstolos e los otros ssantos; ca así commo Tolomeo ssiguió la manera de las crençias antiguas que creyen las gentes, assí Sant Iohán ssiguió otrosí las maneras de las crençias nueuas de Ihesu Cristo. Et sopo tanto de las poridades que ouo de ffazer libro, que llaman Apocalipsi…. (Setenario, p. 113; emphasis is mine)


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por vista por entendimiento… E por ende estas ssiete maneras desta arte muestran cómmo Dios es connosçido ssegunt estas ssiete rrazones…. (Alfonso X, Setenario, ed. Kenneth H. Vanderford (Barcelona, 1984), pp. 35-36; hereafter cited as Setenario; translations are ours unless marked otherwise)

Then he provides excerpts of a fascinating history of religions, where men have gradually acquired the knowledge of God through natural contemplation—in other words, natural philosophy, not the Christian Bible, is presented as the road map to reach God.15 And consequently, Alfonso states that his goal in the Setenario is to prove that our holy and saintly faith is truthful and correct “not just by using the old law and the works from wise men or prophets, but by using the nature of the heavens and other spiritual things” (italics are mine).16 The scope of this statement becomes more obvious when he adds that: The faith and law of our Lord Jesus Christ, wasn’t taken from the elements…, neither from the seventh heaven…, neither from the eighth heaven…, but it was taken from the ninth heaven, which is on top of all the others, as philosophers and wise men from the antiquity established. And they showed, thanks to their knowledge, that this was the place and dwelling of God. la fee e la ley derecha de Nuestro Sennor Ihesu Cristo, que non fué tomada de los elementos…, nin los siete çielos…, nin del otauo çielo…, mas fué tomada del nono, que es sobre todos los otros, segunt dixeron

15 There is a considerable effort in the Alfonsine texts to justify and authorize the wisdom of Antiquity. Thus, in the Setenario, religions from older times are said to foreshadow the Christian law. A few examples of chapter headings will clarify the meaning and scope of this open attitude: “On how those men worshiping the earth wanted to worship the Virgin Mary, if they had known better” (“De cómmo los que aoraban la tierra, a Santa María querían aorar ssi bien lo entendiesen,” p. 73). Or “When they were worshiping water, it resembled baptism” (“De cómmo los que aorauan el helemento del agua, erâ ssemeiança del baptism,” p. 76). Or “On how the loyalty devoted to Jupiter by men from the early times should have been devoted to Christ, if they had known better” (“De cómmo la onestad que dauan los antigos a Jupiter, a Ihesu Cristo la deuyeran dar ssi bien lo entendiesen,” p. 87). We find in the General Estoria a more explicit version of this narrative, in which men gradually access the notion of a Christian god through the worship of natural entities (see General Estoria [parte primera], ed. Antonio García Solalinde [Madrid, 1930], pp. 62-68). 16 “Non tan ssolamientre por la ley vieia nin por los dichos de los ssabios e de las prophetas, mas aun ssegunt natura de los çielos e de las otras cosas spirituales queremos prouar que La nuestra ssanta Ffe es ley derecha e crençia verdadera” (Setenario, p. 65).

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Ana m. Montero los filósofos e los sabios antiguos. E mostraron por su saber que aquél era lugar e morança de Dios (Setenario, p. 66).

So the Alfonsine God was conceived as the first motor or cause, with a physical dwelling in the ninth heaven, a notion that had been spread by Arabic astronomers.17 Finally, when we approach the description of heaven—interestingly placed at the end of this story of religion and science and before a section on Christian sacraments—we get a picture that resonates with the vision of St. John in Revelations but also attempts to amalgamate the four different cultures of the time—that is, Christian, Jewish, Pagan or Aristotelian, and Arabic. More precisely, we are confronted with a God that sits on a throne of light as a king would do. The image is articulated in seven parts: the chair corresponds to the Father, [“which is light and motionless”], the seated figure is the Son, the red color of the face and the light of the clothes evoke the Holy Spirit.18 The four animals protecting the chair are understood to be the four parts of the world and as symbols representing the four Christian evangelists. At this point—when the question about the number of Christian evangelists is addressed—the other cultures come into play insofar as they too have the same four animals in their mystical accounts. And therefore these four animals…they said that one had the features of a man, and the other of an eagle, and the other of a lion, and the other of a bull, according to what some of the Jews showed in a book called Martala [Merkabah?] in Hebrew concerning the same reason. And 17

Thus, the idea of God as a prime motor placed in the ninth heaven had already been put forward by al-Biţrūŷī, ibn Tufail’s disciple and the best Aristotelian astronomer in twelfth-century Spain. It seems that Alfonso and his collaborators did not resort to the scholastic distinction of the crystalline and the empyrean heavens. 18 In fact, the way God is depicted also vaguely echoes the Book of Daniel: Por ende mostraron quel vieron en el çielo commo rey muy noble sseyendo sobre cáthedra de luz, vestido de pannos rresplandientes commo el ssol et teniendo en la cabeça corona de essa misma guisa. Et dixieron que el rrostro dél era commo de llama de ffuego muy clara e los sus cabellos más [blancos] que nieue. (Setenario, p. 117) As I looked, thrones were placed and one that was ancient of days took his seat; his raiment was white as snow and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him…. (Daniel 7.9-10)

Mark Verman quotes this depiction of God as one of those playing a prominent role in Kabbalah (The Books of Contemplation [Albany, 1992], p. 7).


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it shows what the celestial court is like and what it looks like, and God Himself, and it mentions these four animals that are with God and carry His chair. There are some who say that King Salomon wrote this book according to the understanding of the Holy Spirit. It is also proved by the New Law of Jesus Christ, in a book done by St. John called Apocalypsis. It shows it more fully than others. It is also proved by Mohammed, who was God’s prophet according to the Moors. He did a book called Amochrch in Arabic, which means the ascent. And this is because he wanted to make others believe that he ascended into heaven and saw God and was familiar with His secrets. And he [Mohammed] said how he saw four animals and he figured them out as you have heard. Therefore the law of the Jews, and our [Christian] law and that of the Moors and even that of the Gentiles [= Pagans] agree on these four animals. Et por ende estas quatro animalias dieron ssemeiança a cada vna dellas ssegunt las obras que él ffaze. Ca la vna dixieron que auya fación de omne, e la otra de águila, ela otra de león, et la otra de thoro, ssegunt algunos de los judios mostraron en vn libro que dizen en ebraico Martala, que ffabla desta rrazón misma. Et muestra la corte del çielo cómmo está e que paresce y Dios en ssí, et ffabla destas quatro animalias que están con él et lievan la ssu cátedra. Pero algunos y ha que dizen que ffizo aquel libro el rrey Ssalomón por entendimiento de Spíritu Santo. Otrossi sse proeua en la ley nueua de Ihesu Cristo, en vn libro que ffizo Sant Iohán a que llaman Apocalipssi en que fabla desta rrazón misma, pero muéstralo más conplidamientre que los otros. Et proéuasse otrossí por Mahómat, que dizen los moros que ffué propheta de Dios; que él fizo un libro a que llaman en aráuigo Amochrch, que quier dezir del ssubimiento. Et esto es porque quiso ffazer creyente por aquel libro que él ssubiera al çielo e que él viera a Dios e que ssopiera mucho de las ssus poridades. Et dixo cómmo viera estas quatro animalias e ffigurólas así commo auedes oydo...Onde la ley de los judíos e la nuestra e la de los moros e aun la de los gentiles sse acuerdan en estas quatro animalias. (Setenario, pp. 118-119)

The conclusion is remarkable. First, it seems to reveal one of those few fleeting moments of convivencia; in other words, a point of cultural encounter between the three religions.19 Second, the manner in which the text Setenario blends science with mysticism is an aspect that—as far as my research informs me—has not been directly addressed yet within the Alfonsine studies. Moreover, this type of comment is far from being accidental. The same effort to highlight this particular religious point is 19 This fusion of the different religious traditions concerning the afterlife seems to be practically unprecedented. One example would be the Treatise on the Journey of the Soul mentioned by Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World [Cambridge, 1990], p. 231) and analyzed by M.-T. D’Alverny.

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found with similar words in the Book of the Science of Astrology when the constellation of the eagle is described; this apparently demonstrates that astrologers were doing the writing on the divine during this time. And men highly honored the eagle, since prophets and saints wrote about it [and said] that it was one of the four animals that supported the throne of God. And our Lord honored the eagle when He wanted its figure [or constellation] to be close to Him in heaven and [when he wanted] the saints, God’s friends and the ones who know His secrets, to see the eagle up there and to understand how God used the eagle. And men from many laws [or religions] agreed on the meaning of this and its presence there. And first of all the Jews…the Gentiles, those who were star watchers… and St. John the Evangelist who was Christian and a friend of God…and Mohammed. And therefore, because peoples of all laws agreed on this, men can understand how much virtue and meaning the figure of the eagle has. Et aun mayor ondra la fizieron los omes [al águila, hablando de su figura en una constelación de estrellas]. ca la escribieron en sus libros los prophetas et los sanctos. que era una de las cuatro animalias que sofrian la cadira de nuestro Sennor. Et nuestro Sennor Dios la ondró otrossí quando quiso que la su figura fuesse açerca del en el cielo. et que los omes sanctos et amiguos dell. et que sabian de las sos poridades. la uiessen allá. et entendiessen cuemo se seruia Dios della. Et otrossí la significança desto por qué era. et en esta acordança que estaba allí. según que dicho auemos. esta figura. fueron omes de muchas leyes. Et primeriamentre los íudíos. que los patriarcas et prophetas dellos fueron. Et los gentiles otrossí los que fueron estrelleros. uieron esta figura en el cielo. et possiéronla en sos libros. Et San Joan evangelista que fue Xpiano. et muy amigo de Dios. la escreuió en el su libro de la Apocalipsis. assi que los sus dichos se acordaron sennaladamientre en lo que dixeron los prophetas sobre esta razon de la aguila. Et Mahomet en el su libro que llaman almeherehc. que quier dezir tanto cuemo el libro del sobimiento. do él quiso fazer entender que sobiria al cielo. et que sabria las poridades de Dios. porque entendiesen que era su amiguo. en aquel libro fabla él desta aue que uiere allá. Et por ende pues que todas las gentes de las leyes se acordaron en esto. puede ome entender que gran uertud et gran significança a en la figura dell águila. (p. 19)

In conclusion, in some of the Alfonsine circles there was an interest for accounts on the ascent to heaven that would most likely be related to astral magic and probably to an intellectual Hermetic framework of ideas.


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1.3. The Reaction at Sancho’s Court: A Different Vision This atmosphere of apparent intercultural dialogue would be short lived. A few years later, around 1293, Sancho’s collaborators would feel that it was their duty to launch their own version of the Setenario, another pseudo-catechism appropriately called the Lucidario, which means “the giver of light” in Spanish. The Lucidario of Sancho IV was very loosely based on the medieval bestseller catechism from late eleventh-century England, the Elucidarius.20 Nevertheless, its aim was not to reintroduce late eleventh-century theology but rather to correct the complex Alfonsine intellectual inheritance. Thus, the text embarks on a dialogue between a disciple, lured by the charms of natural philosophy, and his former master in theology who stands as the final voice of authority. In prelude to this fictional dialogue, King Sancho IV pens a prologue full of eclectic accusations. And thus he mentions: the excessive attention to the heavens; the question of the eternity of the world—which is central to the book—; the existence of an anthropomorphic conception of God that can be associated to Kabbalistic thinkers;21 and finally, Sancho vaguely alludes to disagreements in the interpretation of Christ’s stories related to the clashes between theologians and natural philosophers. None of the men indicted with these charges are ever identified. The goal now is to prove that the Castilian court endorses strict Christian theology.

20

There is the general, though mistaken, view that the Lucidario of Sancho IV was an adaptation and partial translation of the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis, written c. 1095. However, once one compares both texts, it becomes evident that what Sancho’s collaborators borrowed was just the title, the plot—that is the idea of a dialogue between a master and a disciple—and probably the mystique of Christian orthodoxy that surrounded that work in Europe (see Ana M. Montero, “El Lucidario de Sancho IV: redefinición de su relación textual con el Elucidarius Honorius de Augustodunensis y el Setenario de Alfonso X,” in The Medieval Translator 8 [Brepols, 2004], pp. 49-59). 21 Sancho denounces: “…e quien quiere obrar de otras mas altas que estas asi faze(n) en ello gran atreuimiento, asi como muchos que quieren sauer que cosa es Dios e que figura ha en si, e quan grand es de luengo e de ancho, e si esta en pie o asentado,…” (Los Lucidarios españoles, ed. Richard Kinkade [Madrid, 1968], pp. 77-78; hereafter cited as Lucidario). He seems to allude to those who measure the body of God, who would be Cabalist thinkers. Also, the attention given to angels as well as to the image of an enthroned God within the Lucidario seems to suggest that the book may have been partly conceived as a reaction against kabbalah. Mark Verman calls attention to the Cabalist activity in Castile which had become unusually widespread during the thirteenth century when “numerous texts were being circulated, studied, and responded to” (The Books of Contemplation [Albany, 1992], p. 27).

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A radical change in the political landscape explains this dramatic condemnation of these vaguely identified cultural practices. With Sancho’s enthronement, ecclesiastics—who had been alienated during Alfonso’s reign, partly due to his dictatorial management of Church resources and partly because of the social competence of natural philosophers—regained their traditional power as royal counselors.22 Ecclesiastics not only eagerly supported Sancho’s claims to the throne, but they also created all of the ideological propaganda that justified Sancho’s royal power. And therefore, they aimed at boosting Christian orthodoxy and they succeeded in presenting Sancho as a God-send, providential king. In other words, Sancho would not be the new Salomon, the next Alexander or the last Aristotle—as his father had been regarded—if anything, he was the new Messiah. Moreover, Sancho’s group also accused some men, of whom we have to surmise were some of Alfonso’s collaborators, of unorthodox views concerning the divine. Accordingly, they composed the Lucidario as an effort to channel the Alfonsine inheritance in a different direction, which was less focused on astrology and was more orthodox according to radical Christian optics. In the Lucidario, the author(s) created the fiction of a disciple, a former student of natural philosophy, who resorts to his old master, a theologian, when he notices that his learning may be erroneous. In the first stages of the dialogue, the master is careful to ascertain that nature is subordinated to God, that God is not in the ninth heaven but everywhere, and that He is omnipotent. 23 The master then focuses on Christian dogmas, especially those that would be more difficult for minorities to believe, i.e. the trinity, the virginity of Mary, or the Eucharist. Consequently, we hear questions such as: why God chose to become bread and wine, instead of meat, fruits, herbs, or stones; or how, when Mary was pregnant with God, the trinity was inside her and about who was taking care of the world. Fear of God now becomes the real spur for the acquisition of knowledge.

22 For an analysis of this social conflict check Peter Linehan, History and the Historians, pp. 435-436, and his article: “The Spanish Church Revisited: the Episcopal gravamina of 1279,” in Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government Presented to Walter Ullmann on his Seventieth Birthday, eds. Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 127-147. Also see: Fernando Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa medieval castellana (Madrid, 1998), p. 181. 23 The conflict echoes the clashes among philosophers and theologians at Paris in 1277. However, this is much more local and I dare to say its nature is almost unrelated.


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Furthermore, unlike in Alfonsine times, knowledge by itself is distrusted, and is seen as an intrusion into God’s secrets. Moreover, the doctrinal part of this work—the Lucidario being a mélange of scientific and theological questions—culminates in a description of heaven that echoes and counteracts Alfonso’s contribution. Thus, Sancho’s collaborators reenact the Setenario’s question on the number of apostles, but they take pains to change its whole outlook.24 Accordingly, when the disciple asks his teacher why there are four Christian apostles and no more or less, the latter hesitates and grunts. Far from displaying the Alfonsine confidence and assurance, the theologian affirms it is a difficult question and concludes that: Holy doctors of our law and finders (?) and organizers of the scriptures, we do not find in any of the scriptures a reason why the evangelists are four and no more or less. Except what Ezequiel said…and equally Saint John in his visions of the Apocalipsis. los nuestros santos dotores de la nuestra ley, e trauadores, e ordenadores de las escripturas, non fallamos en quantas escripturas fezieron e conpusieron, que en ninguna dellas fallase deste cuento de las euangelistas por que eran quatro o por que non era[n] mas o menos, saluo ende en lo que dixo Esechias... e otrosi, dize sant Johan, apostol euangelista, en los sus visiones del apocalipsi. (Lucidario, pp. 218-219; translations are ours unless marked otherwise)

Now God is not portrayed as an old man on a throne but as a powerful Light, and the heaven depicted corresponds to that of St. John’s Revelations 4:1-8. God has no figure, He is not corporeal, but He is clarity and a voice (p. 102). And the theologian explains that we do not know why there are four Gospel writers, but only the accounts of Ezequiel and St. John suggest that the four figures portrayed in heaven—the man, the eagle, the bull or ox, and the lion—may foreshadow the four evangelists. We have to conclude that, as the dialogue with the minorities is precluded, heaven and the Christian God gradually became less visible, more abstract, and more unattainable.

24 In the Setenario the title of that chapter is: “On how prophets showed that there must be four evangelists and no more” (“De cómmo los prophetas mostraron que quatro euangelistas deuen sser e non más” [p. 117]). In the Lucidario, the title is: “Why the evangelists are four and no more or less” (“Por que rrazon las abangelistas [son] quatro e non son mas nin menos” [p. 218]).

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1.4. Conclusion To conclude, it could be anticipated that a king dedicated to the welfare and cultural enrichment of his subjects in the thirteenth century would turn his eyes to astrology, especially if that king happened to work under the sphere of Arabic science. It could also be expected that a man that highly valued knowledge—no matter what its provenance—would attempt to reconcile different ideologies in a multicultural environment. However, at the later stages of his reign, Alfonso X’s fondness for astrology, hermeticism, and synthesis was looked at with suspicious, frowning eyes, and was politically used against him. As a result, after his death, his cultural inheritance was rephrased in the Lucidario, which can be considered an attempt to rescue some of the Alfonsine scientific lore but also an exercise in denouncing certain Alfonsine cultural practices. During Sancho’s brief reign, the Alfonsine nation-building policy would be replaced by a stronger conversion policy. Hence, much of the Alfonsine notions on astral magic, hermeticism, or kabbalah were driven underground by officialdom. Many manuscripts disappeared or were left unfinished. Briefly, Castile would wait about one hundred and fifty years before the adumbration of another text would evoke the concerns of the Alfonsine world and once again provide an exposition of philosophy and religion in Castilian. 2. Alfonso de la Torre’s Pleasant Vision of the Sciences An answer to what happened to the Alfonsine production can be partially found in another philosophical treatise written by a more obscure man. I am referring to Alfonso de la Torre about whose life we ignore mostly everything. A bachiller in theology born in Burgos and a student of a Dominican school in Salamanca in 1437, most likely a converso—though we do not have conclusive evidence supporting this assumption—Alfonso de la Torre is best known as the author of an allegorical philosophical treatise on the acquisition of knowledge, called Visión deleytable de las ciencias (or Pleasant vision of the sciences; hereafter cited as Pleasant Vision). Pleasant Vision was composed around 1450 at the request of don Juan de Beamonte, chancellor and


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main “camarero” of the prince of Navarra, don Carlos.25 Maybe not so surprisingly—given the blending of Christian and non Christian sources in the Pleasant vision—at the end of his treatise, Alfonso begged his patron not to share the book with a third party.26 Such an unusual petition may provide some insight into the climate of the times, which was politically violent and particularly suspicious of learning, especially in regards to some of the disciplines mentioned in his text, such as magic and the kabbalah.27 More precisely, it might 25

According to Salinas Espinosa: Pocas cosas seguras hay que podamos decir sobre la peripecia vital de Alfonso de la Torre, si no es que, posiblemente de origen burgalés, entró como bachiller en teología en el Colegio de San Bartolomé de Salamanca en 1437 para continuar los estudios que, de haber llevado a término, le hubieran permitido obtener el grado de doctor o maestro, y que, tras un período de tiempo indeterminado, se trasladó a la corte Navarra, donde pasaría a ocupar alguno de los puestos reservados a los bachilleres en el Hostal del príncipe de Viana (Poesía y prosa didáctica en el siglo XV: La obra del bachiller Alfonso de la Torre [Zaragoza, 1997], pp. 26-27).

Salinas Espinosa also argues that Pleasant Vision must have been composed around 1450 (Poesía y prosa didáctica, p. 31). For arguments for and against De la Torre’s converso background, see Girón-Negrón’s summary of scholarly views (Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión Deleytable [Leiden, 2001], pp. 19-23). Following a manuscript account of the establishment of the Inquisition at Toledo, Crawford comments that Alfonso de la Torre could have been the same “Bachiller de la Torre” that was hanged in 1485 for plotting a revolt during the Corpus Christi procession in Toledo. However he is careful to add: “the name is so common in Spain that the document presented is of slight value” (“The Vision Delectable of Alfonso de la Torre and Maimonide’s Guide of the Perplexed,” PMLA 28 [1913], 188-212, at 211-212). 26 In the words by Alfonso de la Torre: “Por tanto, Señor, yo vos suplico quanto puedo e demando, de merçed singular, que este libro no pase en terçera persona, porque por ventura algúnd voluntario que no entendiese mi fyn yncreparme ỷa e sería yo sostenedor de pena syn meresçimiento…” (Alfonso de la Torre, Visión deleytable, ed. Jorge García López [Salamanca, 1991], 1: 349. The term “voluntario” alludes to the medieval theological dispute between those believing in the relevance of will (such as Duns Scotus or St Augustine)—that is, “voluntaries” —and those stressing the primacy of intellectual values (followers of Aristotle, Maimónides, Aquinas and therefore, Alfonso de la Torre himself). 27 Alfonso de la Torre himself mentions in his prologue the common habit of his time to “menospreçiar e yncrepar el ynvestigar de las çiençias, mas abominarlas e esparcirlas” and regrets the “ynorançia e abominaçión de las çiençias que es fallada en los modernos tienpos” (Visión deleytable, 1: 101-2). In his prologue, De la Torre also refers to “los mordedores enbidiosos” as a cause which made him postpone writing (p. 103). Moreover, within the text, when the character called Understanding first meets Truth, the latter one is afraid that, if Understanding has not overcome the opinions of the world, “nos difamaría por el mundo por mintrosas e nos perseguiría por palabra diziéndonos malvadas ereges” (p. 138). Nicholas Round’s comments help to qualify Alfonso de la Torre’s final request not to transmit or popularize his work. According to Round, patrons and scholars of fifteenth-century Castile “must have

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have had to do with the book’s sharp denunciation of religious and justice institutions or with the fact that Alfonso de la Torre adapted parts of Maimonides’s masterwork The Guide of the Perplexed. It may be that the fear factor sprang from the fact that Alfonso, instead of paying lip-service to the trite topic of fortune, took a different path that diverted not only from Maimonides but also from Christian beliefs, in which he asserted that the divine providence did not work individually but rather it had an effect on the whole species.28 Whatever his reasons, he created a powerful synthesis of knowledge that looked both backwards and forwards—in other words, his work had a strong medieval flavor while letting in some of the ingredients of the Renaissance.29 A quick look to Alfonso’s sources attests to its medieval nature as well as to its disparate, somewhat eccentric character. Thus, Alfonso de la Torre borrowed from the Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille, the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, Al-Ghazzālī’s treatise on logic, and mainly, as I mentioned, from Guide of the Perplexed by Maimonides, as well as from Aristotle and Aquinas. In his splendid book on Pleasant Vision, Girón-Negrón insists that De la Torre’s work should be placed in the fifteenth century Maimonidean tradition, that

been conscious of themselves as an isolated and untypical minority,” due to widespread social anti-cultural prejudices (“Renaissance Culture and its Opponents in Fifteenth-century Castile,” Modern Language Review 57 [1962], 204-215, at 214). 28 Nicholas G. Round wonders whether the “enormous bulk of sound doctrine on the problem of fortune” generated during the fifteenth century was written to dispel popular suspicions against the learned at a time of general hostility or apathy towards the cultivation of knowledge (“Five Magicians, or the Uses of Literacy,” Modern Language Review 64 [1969], 793-805, at 805). 29 For Crawford, the Pleasant Vision is a testimony of the decadence of learning in Spain before the time of Nebrija and thus, he regrets the unintelligent fashion in which Alfonso de la Torre uses the material furnished by the medieval encyclopedic works (“The Seven Liberal Arts in the Vision delectable of Alfonso de la Torre,” Romanic Review IV [1913], 58-75, at 60, 75). On the other hand, Charles Heusch praises Alfonso’s vulgarization of the ethic synthesis, which moves from a university context to the nobility environment for the first time (Heusch does not mention a precedent: Brunetto Latini’s version of Aristotle’s ethics in Li Livres dou tresor which was translated into Castilian around Sancho IV’s times or maybe by Alfonso X’s request). Heusch points out that the first university legislation in which the Aristotle’s ethics was mentioned at Salamanca University was passed in 1422 (“El Renacimiento del aristotelismo dentro del humanismo español,” Atalaya 7 [1996], 11-40, at 14, 15, 29). Moreover, the Kabbalistic and Hermetic perspective of the Pleasant Vision is seen as another sign of the modernity of this work (see Concepción Salinas Espinosa, especially p. 64).


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is, inside the Hispano-Jewish tradition.30 Other scholars, however, interpret the Pleasant Vision as a product of Christian scholasticism, its three key sources being Aristotle, Aquinas, and Maimonides.31 It is still possible to think that Alfonso’s knowledge of Maimonides could have been filtered through the Dominicans, since scholasticism and the Guide of the Perplexed appear to be fully integrated in the Pleasant Vision.32 In any case, what interests me is that the thirteenth-century Alfonsine worldview also seems to provide an important theoretical framework for some of the notions we find in the Visión deleytable, especially for the vindication of judiciary astrology, the kabbalah, the astral and talismanic magic, the Hermetic overtones, and for details such as the story of Abraham as an astronomer and natural philosopher—which can be found in Alfonso X’s General Estoria—and Moses’ knowledge of talismans.33 A characteristic example of the Bachiller’s penchant for occult sciences can be found in the following excerpts:

30

For the sources used in the Pleasant Vision, see Crawford’s articles as well as Girón-Negrón’s introduction to his book; cited below. Girón-Negrón finds fourteenth and fifteenth-century Hispano-Jewish precedents for De la Torre’s profession of astrological and deterministic beliefs in a Maimonidean context (pp. 133, 135). 31 According to Simina Farcasiu, “the Visión derives its structure from the Summa theologiae…[though] the Bachiller does not follow the content of the Summa to any extent comparable to his great fidelity to its form” (“Social Purpose and Scholastic Method: The Visión Delectable of Alfonso de la Torre,” in Circa 1492: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Colloquium: Litterare Judaeorum in Terra Hispanica, ed. Isaac Benabu [Jerusalem, 1992], pp. 79-97, at pp. 81, 84). Then Aristotle affords a new definition of the spiritual purpose of man, whereas Maimonides affords a theology whose model of self-fulfilment is precisely sacralized ethics (p. 85). Charles F. Fraker and Eugenio Asensio also regard De la Torre’s work as a synthesis of Maimonidean and Christian scholasticism. 32 Alfonso de la Torre does not seem to copy fragments from the Guide of the Perplexed but to adapt and integrate its content in his book with a high degree of freedom. The imbrication of Maimonidean notions and Christian scholasticism is so obvious that at least one example used to explain the old scholastic controversy between intellectualists and voluntarists is taken from Maimonides’ Guide. This familiarity seems to suggest that De la Torre may have been working with previous Scholastic synthesis of Maimonides’ masterwork. 33 Though Girón-Negrón focuses on studying the Pleasant Vision within the Hispano- Jewish intellectual context, he also gives some hints that support our hypothesis that there is continuity between the Alfonsine cultural world and Alfonso de la Torre’s ideological framework in Pleasant Vision (see Luis Girón-Negrón, Alfonso de la Torre’s “Visión deleytable:” Philosophical Rationalism and the Religious Imagination in FifteenthCentury Spain (Leiden, 2001), especially pages 131, 136, 148-150, and n. 407). Interestingly enough, Maimonides rejected magic, astrology, and hermeticism.

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Ana m. Montero Enpero a los sabios fincó el saber de las cosas que non tocan en ydolatría o superstitiçión, e aquéstas son las artes que usan sangre o safumerios. E todas son maldichas, mas el ayuntar de lo activo e pasyvo, e el esculpir de las piedras en tal o en tal signo, e el devinar en las estrellas líçito es, si es a buen fyn, e otrosý el pronusçiar de nonbres líçitos, que llaman cávalla, e costreñir los espíritus con aquella virtud, líçito es. Mientra el fyn sea bueno, bien puede el estrólago fazer una ymagen e escorpio en el signo de Escorpio para que sane los omnes de toda mordedura de syerpe…. (Visión deleytable, 1: 206) Aritmética: “en el pecho mío yacen admirables e muy maravillosos secretos, ca por mí se alcanzó el cuento de las letras…e en mí son las profundidades del la cábala, en las cuales es gran parte de la profecía… e en los libros de los profetas ser fallados los senblantes cuentos pozo fondo es e fuente sellada. ¿A quién bastará bever agua tan dificultosa de alcanzar? ¿Qué diré de tanta multitud de secretos…. (Visión deleytable, 1: 130)

Moreover, Pleasant Vision not only represents the first example of Christian Kabbalah in the vernacular in fifteenth-century Spain but also lies under the influence of Hermeticism of the astrological type.34 In conclusion, De la Torre reproduces a cultural atmosphere similar to that of Alfonso X’s learned court with its blending of philosophy, science, and mystical trends. Let me briefly summarize the content of Pleasant Vision before proceeding to its apprehension and understanding of the divine, as put forward by Alfonso de la Torre. Not very much unlike most of the aforementioned texts, Alfonso de la Torre’s work springs from a courtly dialogue between him and a noble, don Juan de Beamonte. The main question that seems to be in the air is the “bienaventuranza,” that is the final end of men. While pondering this issue, the bachiller falls asleep. In his dream, he has a vision of the decay of knowledge—the eagles, acknowledged long ago for their uncommonly powerful vision, have lost their perspicacious eyes, and truth has been uprooted by opinion (Visión deleytable, 1: 104). At the base of a huge mountain he is invited by a voice to escape from all that decay and ascend towards 34 See Salinas Espinosa’s Poesía y prosa didáctica en el siglo XV: La obra del bachiller Alfonso de la Torre (Zaragoza, 1997), pp. 49-66, especially pp. 55, 58, 60 and 63. According to Salinas Espinosa, preceding figures that combined Christianity and Kabbalah would be Pedro Alfonso and Ramón Llull; Arnau de Vilanova would be another figure to mention. Also, as we have suggested, the author(s) of the Lucidario lead(s) us to believe that Kabbalist practices had some influence at the Christian court of Alfonso X.


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eternal life. However, noticing the difficulty of the path, he realizes that no corporeal man could ascend, so he begs Understanding—a child whose face is illuminated by the light of “natural wit” (Yngenio Natural)—to set out on this arduous journey. One by one, Understanding meets and enters into dialogue with the seven liberal arts, represented by seven maids in seven mansions. The last one, Astrology, the most beautiful one, rests in the company of Wisdom, Nature, and Reason, as well as the “school of heroic and intellectual and moral virtues” (Visión deleytable, 1: 137). Unfortunately, Astrology cannot open her door for Understanding until Truth allows it. By now, knowledge has already become shrouded in a halo of secretiveness. Accordingly, many notions in this book will not be fully disclosed; they are to be visualized and fully understood by means of the images that Understanding contemplates within a mirror—however, the reader is denied access to this mirror. Returning to Dame Astrology, hardly anything is said about astronomical theories. What ensues is a dialogue, somewhat comic, among Truth, Wisdom, Nature, and Reason. All of them are afraid that Understanding–still enmeshed in fantastic opinions—will trash and hate them, so one by one they push the next one to confront Understanding. Reason, finally, is the one which agrees to face him. Understanding will fare well in his brief dialogue with Reason since he will conclude by affirming that “it pleases me to be diverted from any fantastical opinion, and the truth coming out from the mouth of a Christian will not persuade more than that of a Jew or a Moor or a Gentile, if they all be truths, nor will I negate the falsehood of one more than the other” (“bien me plaze ser desviado de toda fantástica opinion, e non me moverá más la verdad dicha por boca de cristiano, que de judío o moro o gentil, sy verdades sean todas…,” Visión deleytable, 1: 146; we partially borrow GirónNegrón’s translation [Alfonso de la Torre’s “Visión deleytable,” pp. xiiixiv]). Immediately the doors are fully opened. When asked for the reasons of his trip, Understanding unfolds his existential drama: the world has gone so awry that he casts doubts about God’s existence, and consequently he believes that there is no ruler of the universe except blind chance. Man is not different from other animals and that all that is in life “is to be born in order to die” (“e el omne non se fizo synon para morirse, e después de la muerte non ay cosa alguna,” Visión deleytable, 1: 154). Following this declaration, the child Understanding will receive lessons in metaphysics at the dwelling of Wisdom, and in natural

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philosophy at the House of Nature. These speculative notions in metaphysics and natural philosophy will make Understanding ready for the second stage of his training—that is, those teachings on Aristotelian moral philosophy to be delivered at the House of Reason. When speaking about the divine—at the very beginning of this cognitive trail—one has the feeling that Understanding behaves like the disciple in Lucidario, full of natural notions that make him a skeptic. Just as the old theologian proved to him that God controls natural forces in the Lucidario, Wisdom will prove to Understanding that God is the final cause or first mover, that He is single and incorporeal. God’s omnipotence is also proved, even if He can only act according to His ordained will, and therefore, the inherent evil character of matter cannot be avoided (Visión deleytable, 1: 165).35 However, what finally interests us is that the pleasant vision promised in the title, that is the culmination of this allegorical journey through knowledge, the ultimate end of humanity according to reason, is the vision of god. After confronting and absorbing notions on providence, evil, cosmology, the soul’s immortality, angels, virtues, and so on, Understanding is ready to face God.36 This final vision is preceded by a summary of the dogmas in the Catholic faith—such as the trinity, the virginity of Mary, and the resurrection of Christ—that is given somewhat perfunctorily by Truth. Christian doctrine is shown on the mirror, however, Understanding is unable to see it. The light coming out of the mirror is so powerful that Understanding is blinded and still cannot see.37

35 In other words: “De la Torre’s main point…is that the accidental evils accompanying natural phenomena such as fire, rain or astral influences—evils inherent to the nature of matter—do not compromise their greater good in the overall design of Creation and the preservation of the species” (Girón-Negrón, Alfonso de la Torre’s “Visión deleytable,” p. 122). 36 For Maimónides, men can reach three levels of perfection ranked in relative proportion to their knowledge of God—that is, they can become prophets, philosophers and saints (Girón-Negrón, Alfonso de la Torre’s “Visión deleytable,” pp. 196, 200). In a way, Alfonso de la Torre is rehabilitating the figure of the intellectual by portraying him as a prophet, somebody who is illuminated and able to enjoy a vision thanks to his epistemological training. Nevertheless, according to Maimonides, since there are no more prophets, the goal of the man is to become a philosopher—that is, like in the Alfonsine times, to achieve knowledge of God through his intellect. 37 Alfonso de la Torre was inspired by a similar passage in Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, where an allegorical character, Prudence, also embarks on a journey to heaven in search of the perfect man:


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Then Truth showed the mirror to them and it was so clear and brilliant that the flame was taken from the eyes of Reason and Understanding, and they were blind and Truth told them to pay attention to the mirror. And She showed them how God the Father eternally produced and generated from Himself God the Son; that from this two God the Holy Spirit was inspired; that there were three persons in one truthful God. Understanding and Reason, because of the blindness caused by the great light coming from the mirror, saw nothing. Estonçes la Verdad mostróles el espejo e tanto fue de claro e resplandeçiente que quitó la lunbre de los ojos a la Razón e al Entendimiento, e fueron asý como çiegos, e dixo la Verdat que toviese mientes en el espejo. E mostróles allí cómo Dios padre produzía e engendraba eternal mente de sý mesmo a Dios Fijo, e de aquéstos dos era inspirado Dios Espíritu Santo, que eran tres presonas en un solo Dios verdadero, e el Entendimiento e la Razón, con la ceguedad que tenían con la grand lunbre que estaba en el espejo, no vieron nada. (p. 329)

Then, the mirror turns dark and images from hell are described. Terror invades Reason and Understanding and they will not yet understand. They will just have to accept the testimony of Truth. In summary, the final goal of man—the vision of God—cannot be reached anymore, in the middle of the fifteenth century.

When the maiden [Phronesis], entering God’s realm and the abodes of the magnificent, wished to enjoy a view and foretaste of the strange new things, the brightness dazzled her eyes and the impact of the strange objects benumbed her mind. Faced with them her vision failed and her mind within was darkened. Thus drowsiness overcame the alert mind of Phronesis and false sleep weighed it down. (p. 156)

Once Phronesis is restored to consciousness by Faith—since Reason is not able to help—she is given a mirror that “acts as an intermediary to prevent a flood of fiery light from beaming on her eyes and robbing them of sight” (p. 160). Phronesis learns that Faith must guide the reins of Reason (p. 162) and is able to contemplate from the mirror “the eternal, the heavenly, the permanent, the immovable, the fixed” (p. 163). When she approaches God, “she can scarce endure His immortal radiance, can scarce abide the light that floods the court of His majesty. However, the surface on the mirror which she places before her eyes protects her from its flash, dulling the light by means of reflection” (Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus [Toronto, 1973], pp. 156-166). Unlike Understanding in the Bachiller’s account, Phronesis manages to control her mind and fears.

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These three texts—Setenario, Lucidario, and Pleasant Vision—are modalities of the homo-viator topos. All of them present men who chase the vision of God through the acquisition of knowledge. Furthermore, these texts also define religion and natural philosophy in slightly different ways, which forces us to see them as a result of the interaction of Christian, Jewish, and Arab cultures in different degrees and combinations. Finally, by evoking the image of God, they also implicitly establish power relationships and construct certain types of social order on earth. During the reign of Alfonso X, the main counselors in court were not ecclesiastics—as was traditional—but natural philosophers. As a consequence, the Greco-Arab science—especially astrology—was boosted. Though it is difficult to assess all of their achievements, since they have been obscured by time and deliberate oblivion, it seems these natural philosophers nurtured a curiosity about different religious perspectives such as kabbalah and hermeticism (and maybe even Sufism), which were all tainted by a rationalistic, Aristotelian approach. This cultural openness well suited a king who was always negotiating the limits of power against the Arabs and the Christian nobility, a king who was helped by Jews in the administration of his realm and was trying to build up a common nation from disparate peoples. It comes as no surprise that, in this complex kingdom where treason was always suspected and social unrest was dominant, Alfonso envisioned God as a king on a throne, an image that exudes power.38 Moreover, as part of his policy for national unification, Alfonso also enhanced the development of a common science—that is, natural philosophy. Or so did Sancho, Alfonso’s son, avow a few years later, when he stated that “this knowledge of nature is the most common knowledge to all peoples in the world and is used by Christians, Jews, and Arabs, and all the other types of men who live in the world and want to learn something.”39 This emphasis on natural science, together with the familiarity with other world views such as hermeticism or the kab38 Moreover, among Alfonso’s most consuming passions was his quest for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire (see Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “Image and Reality,” pp. 14-32, at p. 24) 39 “Este saber de naturas es mas cumun a todas las gentes del mundo e vsan por el christianos, e judios, e moros, e todas las otras maneras de omnes que biuen en el mundo que algo quieren aprender” (Lucidario, p. 79).


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balah, make one suspect that the Alfonsine heaven—a Christian heaven, after all—could be reached not so much by upholding definite beliefs or dogmas, but by knowledge, the mind, and intuition. All in all, it was an attitude that promoted dialogue among the three cultures. A few years later, we have a different court. Sancho’s advisors are mainly ecclesiastics. They will accuse Alfonso’s collaborators of heresy, especially concerning the eternity of the world, and they will modify the Alfonsine cosmogony and cosmology. Their approach is that of Christian orthodox theologians, arguably under the influence of the climate created by the condemnations of natural philosophy in Paris in 1277. Thus, for Sancho’s collaborators, the observation of the stars or the study of natural philosophy is not paramount. In fact, in the prologue to the Lucidario, Sancho even complains that men have gone too far by defying God in their observation of heavens.40 These theologians will refer solely to the texts from the Christian tradition, boost Christian orthodoxy (especially the notion of purgatory which helps to strengthen the church’s power), and stick to the representation of heaven as it is given in Revelations. This choice is certainly tainted by politics too. Sancho desperately needs the support of the Pope and must create a sense of normality and stability at home after a civil war. However, the definition of heaven has been slightly altered; now, heaven is less a personal search of the mind, and more of a belief. In other words, heaven becomes less penetrable and more Christian.41 Things become equally complex with our second Alfonso. Alfonso de la Torre attempts to reconstruct the notion of God by reconciling different traditions. His allegorical alter-ego, Understanding, departs on his intellectual journey believing that God does not exist. Through his journey, he becomes acquainted with a rationalistic God and 40

For instance, one of the first questions at the beginning of the dialogue in the Lucidario clarifies that God is everywhere, not just in the ninth heaven (“Sepas que Dios esta en todo logar e en cada vno de los çielos nuebe esta” [p. 101] and we also read: “quando el nuestro sennor esta en el mastalto [sic] çielo que es el nobeno, para mientes [sy] por todo eso en los çielos e en la tierra, [si] mengua(r) ninguna cosa de lo quel ordeno que se non faga todo asi como el mando” [p. 112]). 41 In all fairness, it must be said that the Lucidario of Sancho IV attempts to make a compromise with the Alfonsine heritage. The text highlights Christian doctrine and includes natural studies as long as it is clear the latter do not undermine God’s omnipotence. Therefore, Lucidario is another effort to reconcile philosophy and Christian religion in a way that could convince non-Christians as well as Christians. Its author may have been a Franciscan, Juan Gil de Zamora, though there is no conclusive evidence to prove this hypothesis.

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discovers that the final goal for humankind is the vision of God. In many ways, the second Alfonso demonstrates an awareness of the preceding traditions and achieves a synthesis of both Alfonso X’s and Sancho’s cultural traditions—or in other words, a synthesis of the Hispano-Jewish and Arabic science, and Scholasticism. Thus, De la Torre, like Sancho, pays service to Christianity—though in a perfunctory way—by respecting Christian doctrine. And like Alfonso X, he reveres secret sciences and a rationalistic God, whose order in nature can be studied and assessed. Reaching God is again an exercise of the mind. However, unlike during Alfonso’s and Sancho’s times, his heaven is not seen by human eyes. The light coming from the divine throne is blinding now. Heaven is still that mirror that evokes social order, because it encompasses all human aspirations. However, we can wonder, whether by denying access to heaven, a writer—converso in all likelihood—is requesting that we pay more attention to earthly matters and make the choice of heaven personal. Most likely, our second Alfonso’s penchant for magic, secret notions, kabbalah, and hermeticism may have grown out of an impulse to reform Christianity. Furthermore, by creating an intellectual, rationalistic approach, and avoiding the image of heaven as a throne, Alfonso de la Torre is putting the focus not on the king or the theologian, but on the philosopher, as the figure that can construct a new social order.

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THE VULGATE GRAIL1 Michael Murrin

This essay concerns the Christian Platonism of the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal. I begin with the Christian and will end with the Platonic. Albert Pauphilet and others have extensively researched the Christian background to the romance, and this part of the discussion will of necessity take up the greater portion of my essay.2 Few, if any, have looked at the Platonic side of this Grail story, unfortunately, which concerns not so much a set of specifics as a mode of thought. That part of the essay will then have to be more tentative and suggestive. I will look at both sides of the romance through the marvelous, in particular the Grail itself. The marvelous has always been important for heroic narrative, classical or medieval. Hero and heroine make choices and act in a world raised beyond our everyday life, in which divine powers like Juno can change the weather or instigate madness. In medieval poetry Beowulf must fight monsters. Or in La Chanson de Roland the hero has a sword which can cut marble; Gabriel comes to receive his soul; and Charlemagne has sunset delayed so he can finish the struggle with his Saracen enemies. The medieval marvelous, however, especially concerns Arthurian romance: the miraculous sword in the stone which 1 This paper was presented several years ago at a symposium sponsored by Claremont Graduate University. 2 Albert Pauphilet, Étienne Gilson, and more recently Pauline Matarasso set up the basis for this discussion. For subsequent remarks on Cistercian influence there are Emmanuèle Baumgartner, L’Arbre et le pain: Essai sur “La Queste del Saint Graal” (Paris, 1981), pp. 42-45 and Michel Zink, “Traduire Saint Bernard: Quand la parable devient roman,” in The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam, 1996), p. 30. On the other hand, scholars now argue that the author was not himself a monk, although he wrote under Cistercian influence. Jean Frappier originally made this point in his article, “Le Graal et la chevalerie,” in Autour du Graal (Geneva, 1977), pp. 89-128, and Matarasso and Baumgartner accept it (L’Arbre et le pain, p. 45). Stephen Knight would substitute Templars for Cistercians. See “From Jerusalem to Camelot: King Arthur and the Crusades,” in Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature, and Translation: Studies for Keith Val Sinclair, eds. Peter Rolfe Monks and D.D.R. Owen (Leiden, 1994), p. 232.

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makes Arthur king; the wonders invented by Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, and Morgan.3 The ultimate wonder is the Grail and, at the same time, the ultimate problem. Aristotle long before had provided wonder with a kind of explanation. He had shown why it works better in narrative than in drama (Poetics 24.8-10.1460a-b). Homer can have Achilles chase Hector three times around Troy, distracting us with the wonderful simile of the pursuer and the pursued in a nightmare, but on stage the sequence would be implausible. Yet, what is irrational on stage makes a kind of sense in discourse. In the Metaphysics (1.2.982b) the philosopher related wonder to understanding. Wonder is the beginning of philosophy: διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαυμάζειν οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ νῦν καὶ τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν, ἐξ ἀρχῆς μὲν τὰ πρόχειρα τῶν ἀτόπων θαυμάσαντες, εἶτα κατὰ μικρὸν οὕτω προϊόντες καὶ περὶ τῶν μειζόνων διαπορήσαντες, οἷον περί τε τῶν τῆς σελήνης παθημάτων καὶ τῶν περὶ τὸν ἥλιον καὶ ⟨τὰ⟩ ἄστρα καὶ περὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς γενέσεως. ὁ δ’ ἀπορῶν καὶ θαυμάζων οἴεται ἀγνοεῖν (διὸ καὶ ὁ φιλόμυθος φιλόσοφός πώς ἐστιν· ὁ γὰρ μῦθος σύγκειται ἐκ θαυμασίων)· ὥστ’ εἴπερ διὰ τὸ φεύγειν τὴν ἄγνοιαν ἐφιλοσόφησαν, φανερὸν ὅτι διὰ τὸ εἰδέναι τὸ ἐπίστασθαι ἐδίωκον καὶ οὐ χρήσεώς τινος ἕνεκεν. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e. g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from

3 There has been much recent study of the marvelous in medieval French literature generally and in Arthurian romance more particularly. General studies include Daniel Poiron, Merveilleux dans la littérature française du moyen âge (Paris, 1982) and Francis Dubost, L’Autre, l’ailleurs et l’autrefois: Aspects fantastiques de la littérature narrative médiévale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1991). For Arthurian romance Alexandre Micha contrasts the magical marvels in the Vulgate Lancelot with those in the Queste but at the same time stresses continuity in the marvels specifically associated with the Grail. See his Essais sur le cycle du “Lancelot-Graal” (Geneva, 1987), pp. 212-215. Jean-René Valette’s whole essay, “La merveille et son interprétation: l’exemple du Lancelot propre,” Revue des langues romanes 100/2 (1996), 163-208 is concerned with the issue, and he draws instructive parallels and contrasts between the Vulgate Lancelot and the Queste.

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ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.4

Wonder in heroic narrative, therefore, has a double function. First, it enhances the story. Tasso would later make it the specific difference in his definition of epic, what separates the genre from other forms of narrative. Now for wonder the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal is supreme in Arthurian romance. Already at the beginning the Grail announces its coming through a crescendo of marvels: marble that floats on water, miraculous food, and a self-moving chalice. Such wonders encourage interpretation. We ask of a wonder: what does it mean or how can we explain it?5 In the Vulgate Queste wonders generate a symbolic (medieval readers would have said an allegorical) interpretation of scenes, even of the whole story. The Vulgate author encourages this intellectual search further by the many lectures on wondrous events given mostly by monks and hermits. One monk, in fact, defines a Grail adventure as one with a significatio, a marvelous event which has meaning (Queste, p. 44).6 Roughly half the Queste is exegesis, attempts by monks to explain events which happen to others. In Todorov’s terms the Queste is “a double narrative, with two types of episodes, of a distinct nature but referring to the same event and alternating regularly.” The Queste “juxtaposes the two types of episodes; the interpretation is included within the texture of the narrative. One half of the text deals with adventures, the other with the text which 4

In this passage Aristotle speaks condescendingly about myth, as befits Plato’s former student, yet neither his condescension nor the attacks of his teacher stopped later writers from appropriating their ideas to different ends. This approach to wonder continues to influence modern scholars. Micheline de Combarieu begins an excellent article on the Queste stating that one questions a wonder. Once it is explained, wonder disappears. See “Les quêteurs de merveilles. Étude sur la Queste del Saint Graal,” Revue des langues romanes 100/2 (1996), 65. Lancelot, once he has confessed to and talked with a hermit, no longer wonders about his forest vision of the Grail (p. 76). Valette cites Armand Strubel, La Rose, Renart et le Graal: la littérature allégorique en France au XIIIe siècle (Geneva/Paris, 1989), pp. 19, 281: to wonder is already to call for an interpreter (“La merveille et son interprétation,” pp. 163-164). Interpretation, however, allows one to assimilate the marvel (p. 178). 5 Todorov says that the reader’s interest in the Queste is not what will happen, since we are told that. The reader asks instead: what is the Grail? See The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, 1977), p. 135. Baumgartner points out that this question originated in the Grail Continuations. In Chrétien the question had been “Whom does the Grail serve?” See her article “From Lancelot to Galahad: The Stakes of Filiation,” trans. Arthur F. Crispin, in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Texts and Transformations, ed. William W. Kibler (Austin, 1994), p. 20. 6 I cite from La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris, 1967).

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describes them. Text and meta-text are brought into continuity” (Poetics of Prose, p. 123). This procedure encourages us as readers to construct our own interpretations of events and then compare them to those of the monks which follow the event. They, of course, never correspond point-by-point, and the clerical explanations instead provoke more reflection by the reader, more analysis.7 To illustrate these two functions of wonder, the way it enhances narrative imaginatively and the way it stimulates reflection, I will look briefly at two appearances of the Grail. Consider Lancelot’s first Grail vision. He loses himself in a huge forest, having pursued in vain a strange knight who had unhorsed him.8 He comes upon an old chapel, abandoned and ruinous, standing on a heath. In front are a cross and a marble block, where two ways part. It is dark night, so dark that Lancelot cannot read the letters on the block, which is a medieval road sign. In the previous pursuit he did not know where he was riding, and now he cannot find out where he is. He walks over to the chapel, where an iron grill bars him from entry, but he can see within an altar hung with silk and a six-branched candelabrum, burning in front of it. Frustrated, the knight lies down by the cross and tries to sleep. He falls into a kind of trance and observes what follows but neither speaks nor moves. Two palfreys bring on a litter a sick knight, who cries and prays for a long time. Then suddenly the silver candelabrum moves by itself out of the chapel, followed by a silver table with the Grail. The sick knight begs to be healed, crawls to the table, kisses it, and is cured. He then falls asleep. The Grail remains in their presence sometime and then returns with the candelabrum to the chapel. The cured knight wakes. A squire brings his armor and adds Lancelot’s horse and sword. They set off on the Grail quest. It is now past midnight, and the moon shines bright in the sky. Lancelot now gets up, wondering whether what he saw was

7 Valette argues that, when there is an excess of significations, whether they concur with those made by clerics or fragment into separate understandings, an inclusive form is postulated, a superior form introduces itself, that of the final ends pursued by the work or that of the reader’s synthesis (“La merveille et son interprétation,” p. 202). He then discusses episodes in the Vulgate Lancelot that do not produce an explicit interpretation, matter that exalts the signifier for itself and not its transitive power. These episodes call for a different hermeneutic, not of the author’s intention but of the reader’s construction (pp. 204-205, 207). 8 It is the “Forest Gaste,” (Queste, p. 56) which Chrétien had made famous in his Perceval.

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real or a dream.9 He goes to the chapel, sees the candelabrum but not the Grail. Then he hears a voice, telling him to leave. The voice says that his stench fouls the place and dismisses him with a triple comparison. Lancelot is harder than stone, more bitter than wood, and more barren than a fig tree. Humiliated, Lancelot sets off next morning through the woods on foot (Queste, pp. 57-62).10 The sequence is mysterious and wonderful. There is the stone with letters Lancelot cannot read because of the darkness, and we are never told what the inscription is. There is the strange fact of a ruined chapel, lost in a wilderness, yet splendidly decorated inside and ready for a high Mass, as the six burning lights indicate. Then the Grail comes and cures the unidentified wounded knight. Finally, there is the sudden humiliation of one who had previously been the best knight in Arthur’s realm. The total lack of explanation increases the wonder because it makes everything mysterious both for Lancelot and for us. Wonder provokes questions. Several explanations are given for Lancelot’s failure to react when the Grail appeared. The narrator suggests two. The first is physical. A trance caused by exhaustion prevented Lancelot from doing anything. He had ridden a long time and had had nothing to eat. The second is moral. Some sin explains his inaction. The wounded knight, on the other hand, simply thinks that Lancelot did not see the vision. The 9

Jean-Charles Huchet in fact argues that Lancelot did see the Grail in a dream. See “Les déserts du roman médiéval: le personnage de l’ermite dans les romans des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Littérature 60 (1985), 95. Following a different line of thought, Christiane Marchello-Nizia suggests that the voice that Lancelot hears is an interior voice. See “Les ‘voix’ dans la Queste del Saint Graal: grammaire du surnaturel, ou grammaire de l’intériorité?” in Histoire et société: Mélanges offerts à Georges Duby, vol. 4: La mémoire, l’écriture et l’histoire (Aix-en-Provence, 1992), p. 83. Marchello-Nizia may be correct, but I do not agree with Huchet but can understand why he should make his claim. E. Jane Burns remarks: “The Queste works toward blurring the distinction between romance adventure and dream by allowing both of them to serve as a base text for interpretation.” See Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus, OH, 1985), p. 74. This blurring applies especially to some of the adventures of Sir Bors. Usually, however, one can distinguish between adventure and dream at least in retrospect, as Lancelot does here. Next morning he finds that he has been robbed by the knight he saw cured by the Grail and later defeats him in a joust (Queste, p. 132). Micha points out that Lancelot’s inaction recalls that of Gawain, when he saw the Grail at Camelot in the Vulgate Lancelot. Gawain was impressed by the richness of the Grail but was distracted by the beautiful woman who carried it (Micha, Essais, pp. 156, 183-184). 10 Baumgartner argues that the Grail requires a new kind of quest, not of action but of vision (L’Arbre et le pain, p. 52). Hence, some of the best knights—Lancelot, Perceval, Gawain—are dismounted and humiliated (p. 57).

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squire develops the narrator’s second explanation. Our knight committed a grave sin and had never gone to confession. Lancelot agrees with the squire, thinking of his liaison with Guinevere. Later a hermit will reinforce this reading and lecture Lancelot on his failure, explaining the mysterious words morally: harder than stone, more bitter than wood, more barren than a fig tree. His ethical explanation takes up half as much space as the vision itself and provides a subtle analysis of human capability, plausibly defending what would otherwise seem like wild exaggeration in the three comparisons. After the hermit completes his lecture, Lancelot knows in detail just why he failed (Queste, pp. 67-70). Yet here is the first peculiarity. The hermit’s long sermon tells us nothing about the vision itself, neither, of course, do the other brief explanations given earlier. The constant presence of explicators in the Queste makes one think that everything has been explained, but this is only an illusion. In a work that dramatizes its own interpretation, it is easy to miss the fact that very little is said about the central wonder itself, the Holy Grail.11 We do get eventually an elaborate history of the Grail, but such a history is not the same as an explanation. In this respect Todorov, drawing on biblical typology, claims that “the narrative of an adventure signifies another narrative; the spatio-temporal coordinates of the episode change but its very nature does not” (Poetics of Prose, p. 123). This is not meaning at all, as we understand it. Todorov goes on to say: “The signified is a signifier, the intelligible is sensible. An adventure is at the same time a real adventure and the symbol of another adventure” (p. 127). And, of course, none of this history helps us understand Lancelot’s vision. For that we must rely on our own exegetical skills. The author drew his inspiration for the scene from a passage in Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians. Here is the passage in Jerome’s Vulgate version: Nescitis quia templum Dei estis et Spiritus Dei habitat in vobis? Si quis autem templum Dei violaverit, disperdet illum Deus. Templum enim Dei sanctum est, quod estis vos. (I Cor. 3.16-17)

11 Lancelot wonders, however, only at the self-moving candelabrum. He had seen the Grail before at Corbenic and has been cured by it, as was this knight, both of them at night. It is the author who finds the words of denunciation wonderful (Combarieu, “Les quêteurs de merveilles,” pp. 74-75).

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Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

Paul has been talking of the Corinthian community as a building, in which the fire of the end time will reveal the quality of each person’s work, be it of precious materials or of wood, hay, and stubble, which will perish. The author of the Queste adapts the metaphor to the individual, and the church becomes a chapel. Lancelot, lost in mortal sin, then has a terrifying vision. He looks into his own soul, now ruined and abandoned. The six candles for a high Mass, nevertheless, still burn within, but he cannot enter.12 Nor can he see the Grail, though it comes out of the chapel later for him, as much as at the prayer of the sick knight.13 Outside he cannot see much of anything at all. He has come to a crossroads in his life but cannot read the direction sign. The hermit explicator alludes to the darkness and Lancelot’s exhaustion, when he begins his discourse with words which anticipate the opening of Dante’s Inferno: to wander from the path while asleep (Queste, p. 65). Yet the Grail did come to Lancelot, and he will afterwards repent and begin the long journey of purgation. At the end, however, while he will witness part of a Grail Mass, he will remain excluded from the chapel in Corbenic, the castle where the Grail normally resides, and later he will return to the Queen. This explanation reveals the psychological result of Lancelot’s ethical wandering, but it does not account for everything in the scene. I have not explained why the Grail appears as well to the wounded knight, who begins his quest as a thief, nor have I explained the Grail itself. The hermit’s reading and mine are partial and do not reveal anything about the Grail, the most important wonder in the episode.14

12 Nascien reads the burning candle which appears in a parallel vision experienced by Gawain and Hector as the light of gospel truth (Queste, p. 160). Lancelot is probably barred from the chapel because Lateran IV (1215) declared that a person who did not receive confession once a year did not really belong to the Christian community. 13 If it had come solely for the wounded knight, it would have left after the cure. Instead it remains a long time, presumably waiting for some reaction from Lancelot. 14 Miléna Mikhaïlova remarks that, while hermits seem to know everything in the Queste, including the past and part of the future of a knight, this hermit is astonished at the words Lancelot heard and is not omniscient. See “Le clerc: personnage de la fiction/personnage-fiction. Le clerc écrivant dans la littérature arthurienne,” in Le clerc au moyen âge (Aix-en-Provence, 1995), pp. 422-423.

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Lancelot is part of a spectrum, the best of the earthly knights, of those who do have some kind of vision but do not fulfill their quests. In this respect Lancelot’s experience contrasts strikingly with that of the inner three who do achieve the Grail. The last Grail vision is humanly quite splendid. The Grail resides in its own shrine in a Syrian palace. It stands upon its silver table over which Galahad has had constructed an ark of gold and gems. Joseph, a bishop, presides, wearing his episcopal robes. On the other hand, the scene is most unimaginative. Joseph says a private Mass for the three, what any Christian could observe daily anywhere in Latin Christendom. The author even specifies the liturgy, that of the Glorious Mother of God. This Mass closes a series of partial ones, partial either because the viewer, like Lancelot at Corbenic, sees only part of the service.15 Or, for the inner three, Galahad, Perceval, and Bohort (Bors), they attend a series of services qualified by “as if,”16 and the Mass-supper at Corbenic which they witness begins at the consecration and may end at the Communion. The holier a person becomes, the closer to the Grail, the more his vision resembles the Mass ritual, the less and less imaginative it becomes. One might call this development both Christian and Platonic. The wonderful and the imaginative visions serve those who exist presently at a lower ethical and intellectual level. In the Gospels Jesus complains that an unbelieving generation asks for signs.17 Those who believe and live according to their beliefs have no need of wonder. Yet this ritual really is more mysterious than the cure of the wounded knight which Lancelot witnessed during his trance. First of all, because this Grail story reflects Christian ritual, it automatically participates in a long and deep tradition of exegesis.18 It also indicates a special kind of time, which contrasts with our existence in the present, caught between before and after, what we experience with the questers as they go about their adventures. Todorov, drawing on Nietzsche and Eliade, says of ritual time: “Here no event happens for 15 The chapel door opens for him only at the Consecration, and he passes out before the elevation of the host is completed (Queste, pp. 255-256). 16 The same caution, though phrased differently, qualifies as well the Corbenic Mass Lancelot glimpses (Queste, p. 255). See Pauphilet, Études sur “La Queste del Saint Graal” (Paris, 1921), p. 22. 17 Matt.12.38-42; Mark 8.11-12; Luke 11.29-32. 18 In particular, the Vulgate Queste reflects the ritual of Pentecost, the feast which begins the story. See Frederick Locke, The Quest for the Holy Grail: A Literary Study of a Thirteenth-Century French Romance (Stanford, 1960), pp. 40-64.

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the first or last time. Everything has already been foretold... The Knights of the Round Table live in a world made up of recalls” (Poetics of Prose, pp. 132-33, 134). And ritual time finally triumphs, since our normal time, the time of adventures, turns out to symbolize ritual time, and contiguity gives way to an eternal return. The travels of the Grail in this world provide a geographic diagram of this eternal return, for they make a great circle. The Grail begins in Syria-Palestine, goes to Britain, and then returns to the lands where it first appeared before it vanishes from this world altogether. The other sense in which the Mass ritual has mystery concerns what a philosopher then would call accidentals, yet these set up the quest itself. In the Latin rite of the period the chalice which held the wine or Christ’s blood had a mysteriousness for the laity which the host did not. Lay people could receive the host and saw it at the elevation after the consecration, but they could not drink from the chalice and rarely saw it. Made of precious material, it was most often concealed by a veil. The Grail similarly comes to Camelot covered in white samite, so Gawain vows the quest, saying he wants to see it more openly, and all the other knights repeat his vow.19 Even when the chalice was uncovered during a Mass, the priest, who said the service with his back to the people, mostly blocked their view of it. Now in this last scene Galahad, a lay person, looks into the Grail. At Communion the Bishop takes the paten or plate off the Grail and invites Galahad to gaze within. He looks, trembles, and asks that he might die in his joy, but of his vision or experience he merely quotes Paul: “now I see openly what tongue could not describe nor heart conceive” (Queste, p. 278). Paul had used the phrase to describe the heav19 Already the Manessier Continuation drops the questions seekers were to ask in the Grail castle and substitutes vision. In Chrétien the Grail was clearly exposed to Perceval’s sight, but now it is covered and progressively uncovered to arrive at transparent vision (Baumgartner, “From Lancelot to Galahad,” p. 21). In the Vulgate Lancelot accordingly the motif is to see the Grail openly, not to ask questions (pp. 23-24). Perceval vows that he will see the Grail openly (Combarieu, “Les quêteurs de merveilles,” p. 80, n. 12, citing the Lancelot: roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha [Geneva, 1978-1983], 6: 206). In the same romance Bors tells King Pelles that the truth of the Grail will be uncovered only in its quest, the last of all the quests (XCVIII. 50). This is Valette’s point (“La merveille et son interprétation,” p. 184). And the Grail is never uncovered in the Agravain section of the Vulgate Lancelot, though it appears more and more frequently (Baumgartner, L’Arbre et le pain, p. 91, n. 13). It comes as no surprise that in the Queste the object is to see, not possess, the Grail (p. 123), or that, as E. Jane Burns has shown, the veil pattern she traces dominates the Queste (Arthurian Fictions, p. 137).

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enly rewards prepared for believers (I Cor. 2.9), and it had appeared twice before in this story. Lancelot used the phrase when he woke from a catatonic trance of twenty-four days which followed his own last Grail vision, and then Galahad said the same thing to Perceval, describing his experience at the Grail supper in Corbenic (Queste, pp. 258, 274). He was explaining to Perceval his request to die when he chose, a request he now immediately makes. After kissing his two companions, he kneels and falls dead before the altar. A hand then comes down and takes the Grail to heaven.20 This closure of the visions has consequences both in terms of meaning and in terms of wonder. Instead of the explanation we have been expecting so long, we get a denial of explanation.21 Readers, of course, have provided their own interpretations, just as I had to do for Lancelot’s first Grail vision. Étienne Gilson, for example, equated the Grail with grace. At the Corbenic supper Jesus himself makes this identification. It is called graal (grail) because it is gré (agreeable, grace).22 That is, the Grail relates to the Holy Spirit, an identification made by the most authoritative of the hermits in the story, Nascien (Queste, pp. 154, 159). It came to Camelot on Pentecost, the feast which celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit in wind and fire. The same phenomena occur at Corbenic. A fiery wind stuns Lancelot at his Grail Mass (p. 256), and 20 The hand also takes the Lance to heaven, but the author of this romance makes very little of the Lance. 21 Todorov, Poetics of Prose, pp. 129, 141. In his article, “Politicizing the Ineffable: The Queste del Saint Graal and Malory’s ‘Tale of the Sankgreal,’” in Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend, eds. Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley (Albany, 1994), p. 172. Martin Shichtman cites Robert S. Sturges: “Perhaps the most important element of the Queste that is not fully interpreted within the text is the Holy Grail itself. The lack of an authoritative reading for the central goal is not due to any lack of meaning for the Grail but to the fact that its meaning is ineffable. That its meaning cannot be expressed is no sign of multiplicity or indeterminacy, either” He takes this passage from Medieval Interpretation (Carbondale, IL, 1991), p. 70. Mikhaïlova continues in the same vein. Exegesis cannot explain the Grail. No hermit gives a definitive signification for the Grail. Only God can do so (“Le clerc,” pp. 426, 431, citing the Queste, p. 19). Combarieu makes the same point, drawing on statements by the questers. Lancelot cannot report what he saw in his trance at Corbenic (“Les quêteurs de merveilles,” p. 77), and Galahad calls the Grail the wonder of all other wonders. The superlative form recalls Lancelots’s inability to express what cannot be thought or spoken (p. 88). 22 Queste, p. 270; Étienne Gilson, “La mystique de la grâce dans la Queste del Saint Graal,” Romania 51 (1925), 321-347. In this mode Rosemund Tuve argued that Perceval is unthinking but trustful grace in her Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Prosperity (Princeton, 1966), pp. 432-433. Micha prefers this equation (Essais, pp. 196-197).

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the same wind chases out all but the elect from the Grail supper (p. 267). In this sense one could draw on the passage in Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians that was discussed earlier. Paul compares the community in Corinth to a building. He has laid the foundation in Jesus Christ; another has since built on that foundation; but each member contributes material of various quality to the structure: gold, silver, gems, wood, hay, stubble. Fire in the end will reveal the quality of such work (I Cor. 3.9-15). Precious materials survive fire, which in fact refines gold, but it will burn up wood, hay, and stubble. Fire reveals the worth of materials, discriminates between them. In the Queste similarly only a few can bear the burning presence of the Spirit.23 This explanation has two drawbacks. It does not account for the fact that the Grail changes shape.24 When Jesus made the identification with grace, it had the shape probably of a platter, which is what graal means in Old French, a shallow dish for serving meat. More often, however, it appears as a drinking cup, as in its last appearance. Secondly, the association with wind creates its own kind of mystery. In the Fourth Gospel Jesus tells a puzzled Nicodemus that that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth (John 3.8).” The equation depends on the Greek πνεῦμα, which can mean either wind or spirit and admirably explains why the Grail comes and goes of its own power and appears where it wishes. Yet how do you pursue the wind? Gawain vows to pursue it and then all the other knights of the Round Table. At one point Lancelot tells a woman: I do not know where I am going because I do not know where I can find what I am looking for (Queste, p. 129),25 23 Thinking along parallel lines Dante has “Primo Amore” among the powers that made hell (Inferno 3.2.6). In his own analogy, however, Paul has the builders who supplied weak material losing any reward but nevertheless saved, passing through the fire (διὰ πυρός). Consult the note to this passage in La bible de Jérusalem (Paris, 1973), p. 1650. 24 Micha argues that by its shape-changing the Grail loses its materiality. It can appear anywhere and suddenly disappears, as it did in Camelot or in the forest for Lancelot (Essais, pp. 162, 219). 25 Valette points to the hero in a sequence of the Vulgate Lancelot, who, unable to find what he is looking for, sits on the pavement because it is futile to seek that which he cannot find (Lancelot, ed. Micha, XCVIII. 47). He then cites Francis Dubost who says this is a rare image of a defeated and discouraged knight who conquers all he can conquer but is conquered because the sense of the things is denied him (“La merveille et son interprétation,” p. 200, citing Aspects fantastiques de la littérature narrative médiévale, XIIe-XIIIe siècles, 2 vols. [Paris, 1991], p. 760).

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and initially the questers split up and go to the densest parts of the forest, where there is no road or path (p. 26). They wander, just as did Abraham whom God told to go to a land He would show him but gave no directions (Gen. 12.1). Such equations or analogies do not illuminate but remain quite as mysterious as the Grail itself. A competing explanation identifies the Grail with the Eucharist, recently made central to the self-definition of the Latin church at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.26 Lancelot at Corbenic and the three inner questers in their first Grail Mass (Queste, pp. 234-35, 255)27 all witness the consecration of the host, and at the Corbenic supper Jesus Himself comes out of the Grail and distributes Communion (p. 270). And, as we have seen, Galahad dies after receiving Communion. The identification with the Eucharist provides a good gloss on the Grail’s ability to appear in different places. Peter Damian provides the explanation: So great is the unity of the Church in Christ, that the bread of the Body of Christ is one throughout the whole world, and one is the chalice of His Blood. For just as the Divinity of the Word is one, which fills the universe, so, even though the Body is consecrated in different places and on many days, there is but one Body of Christ. (Dominus vobiscum)28

This same argument would likewise work for the Grail’s ability to change shapes. Chalices come in different shapes and sizes, as do the ciboria which hold the hosts for Communion. At Masses throughout the Latin world then, and really throughout the Christian world, the vessels for the hosts and wine would take different forms, some of them simultaneously.29 26 Innocent III had himself composed a treatise, The Mystery of the Altar, and the Council drew its sacramentalism from the Parisians: Peter Lombard, Petrus Comestor, and Stephen Langton. See Raymonde Foreville, Latran I, II, III et Latran IV (Paris, 1965), p. 282. Pauphilet also allows for this reading. See Études, p. 22. 27 Appropriately for Gilson’s theory, however, the priest is celebrating the Mass of the Holy Spirit. 28 See Gerald Ellard, Christian Life and Worship (Milwaukee, 1956), pp. 149-150. The ultimate source for this analogy is part of the Thanksgiving Prayer for the bread in the Didache 9.4. Grain seeds, which are scattered on the hillsides, become a single loaf of bread, which in turn is broken. The questers themselves imitate this kind of unity in separation, as they gather together on a ship, scatter for five years of wandering, and finally reunite at Corbenic. 29 The equation with the Eucharist, carefully qualified, remains the dominant one among scholars. Baumgartner says that the Eucharist and the Grail are connected but

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Yet this explanation, while more comprehensive perhaps than Gilson’s, suffers from the same defect, for it explains the unknown by the unknowable. The Eucharist may have been familiar to all, even partaking in quotidian reality for those of the Latin rite, who could go to Mass daily, yet at the same time theologians agreed that it was ultimately a mystery. What they would have considered a correct interpretation, the new theory of transubstantiation, did not really explain the Eucharist. Rather it ruled out a set of incorrect interpretations. And here our discussion begins to sound Platonic, but first it helps to look at Dante, that other great allegorist of the medieval West, for an informative contrast. The Purgatorio resembles the Queste by its basic plot assumption: the ethical development of human beings by purgation. Dante has his hero view wonders like the carvings on the outer wall and floor of the first circle, that of the proud. Those on the wall illustrate humility and require no interpretation: the Annunciation, David dancing before the Ark, and Trajan and the widow who wants justice for her dead son (10.34-93).30 At the end, however, the pilgrim witnesses an apocalyptic series of tableaus (Canto 32), which are opaque and do require explanation. At the beginning of the following canto Beatrice offers one which does not explain, imitating those in the Book of Revelation: know that the vessel which the snake breaks was and is not... (33.3436). Yet commentators had very little difficulty with the series because it allegorized the history of the church as an institution. In the Purgatorio the explanation of a mysterious event is not another mystery. The technique in the Queste does, in fact, follow a Platonic mode, one which explains why the Grail can mean more than one thing, why intelligent readers could legitimately provide different, even seemingly contradictory, readings of the same object,31 or why for other scholars distinct, only later to ask a devastating question: If the Grail is the symbol of the Eucharist or grace, why does it disappear from the world? (L’Arbre et le pain, pp. 126129, 143). Stephen Knight traces the development of this equation, already made in the Conte du Graal (the scene of Perceval’s confession) to Robert de Boron. The Grail now becomes the cup which held Christ’s blood shed on the Cross. He further argues that Robert is reacting to the loss of Jerusalem and much of Palestine in 1187. Though the holy places may be lost, the Eucharist is present everywhere (“From Jerusalem to Camelot,” p. 226). 30 A modern reader would, of course, require help. 31 Baumgartner traces this claim of polysemeity back to Pauphilet, who equated the Grail successively with the Eucharist and the grace of the Holy Spirit, and then

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the Grail resists interpretation.32 I use the Myth or Analogy of the Cave in Plato’s Republic to illustrate the methods, since it is the root expression of this tradition and many know it (Rep. 7.514a-16a). The author of the Queste, of course, would have learned the method through intermediaries. In the Myth of the Cave the student begins in an imaginative cinema, down in a cave deep below the earth, guessing at shadow figures projected on a wall which seem to talk.33 The student is then dragged up from the darkness to the surface of our planet and looks at things we see daily: shadows, mirror images in water, then people and objects, next the moon and stars, and finally the sun. The student experiences our quotidian reality naively, seeing everything for the first time. Plato thus makes our everyday sights mysterious, just as the author of the Queste makes a visionary experience out of daily Mass. In this comparison the Grail serves roughly the same function as the sun in Plato’s analogy. The sun is the last thing the cave dweller tries to see, and, of course, one cannot really look at the sun.34 The student infers, however, that the sun is responsible for things seen, that it enables vision. What enables our knowing cannot be known. Similarly, the Grail makes possible intellectual as well as moral growth, but, as the enabler, cannot be known. One could argue further that the fact the Grail cannot be known, or, if experienced, cannot be expressed makes the allegory or play of multiple meanings possible.35 The genius of the author was to make the went on to say that the attributes of the Grail are those of God, that the Grail is the romance manifestation of God. Gilson, thinking theologically, objected that God, the uncreated, could not be grace (L’Arbre et le pain, p. 111). 32 Mikhaïlova makes this claim. In the Queste exegesis cannot explain the Grail (“Le clerc,” p. 426). 33 Susan Sontag begins her essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” with a glancing comparison between Plato’s underground cave and the cinema but then turns to photography, her real topic See On Photography (New York, 1973), p. 3. The cinema, however, provides a closer parallel, since in Plato’s story the images move and talk. Diderot developed this dynamic side of the parallel, drawing on the technology of his day, the camera obscura, when he critiqued a heroic painting by Fragonard in his Salon de 1765, in the Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 10 (Paris, 1876), pp. 397-407. 34 In the Vulgate Lancelot Bors was blinded by a vision of the Grail (Baumgartner, “From Lancelot to Galahad,” p. 26). 35 It is now commonplace to say that the Grail is polysemous. Baumgartner cites Pauline Matarasso in her Redemption of Chivalry (Geneva, 1979), pp. 205-241 to this effect (L’Arbre et le pain, pp. 44-45) and later argues that an adventure likewise can be polysemous (pp. 81-82 & n. 23). She lists a range of interpretations made by earlier scholars: the Eucharist, the grace of the Holy Spirit, God or God’s manifestation, the

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Grail absolutely central to the story, where in the older fragmentary version of Chrétien de Troyes the quester sees it only once.36 Selfmoving and appearing in different places, the Grail stimulates growth in understanding both by the questers and by us. We readers are educated as well. We begin, knowing no more than the characters during an adventure.37 In the end we have the eery sense that the characters know more than we do.38 During the Grail supper at Corbenic, we see four angels carry Joseph in a chair down to begin the service, but Galahad later tells Perceval that he saw so great a host of angels and heavenly beings that he was transported to heaven (Queste, pp. 268, 274). He saw much more than we did. Even Lancelot finally might see more than we do. While we see what he does at his Corbenic Grail Mass, his remark after he awakes from a twenty-four day trance is unsettling because it is the same as Galahad’s: I have seen such great marvels and happiness that my tongue could not discover them to you, nor can my heart conceive them (p. 258). Is he referring to what we know or to further visions? This Platonic sequence creates a problem for those who value the imagination. The author moves us from the unfamiliar and imaginative, midnight visions and ruined chapels, to the familiar: a Mass performed at its normal time, in the morning. Mass ritual, of course, can Trinity, but then agrees with Frederick Locke, who suggested that the Grail means more than one thing (pp. 112-113). She cites his article, “A New Approach to the Study of the Queste del Saint Graal,” Romanic Review 45/4 (1954), 241-250. Baumgartner adds her own reading to those of previous scholars. At Sarras Galahad looks into the Grail and sees the mystery of the origins of life and the beginning of time (L’Arbre et le pain, pp. 130, 141). She bases this claim partially on her analysis of the Tree of Life/Knowledge sequence, which takes the story back to Paradise and the Fall (pp. 131141). Baumgartner thus returns us to the passage cited earlier from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The end result of wonder is speculation about the genesis of the universe (Meta. 1.2.982b). 36 Perceval, of course, would probably have got another chance to see the Grail, only Chrétien never finished the work. 37 See Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, pp. 428-429. She shows how we learn to read episodes and at times near the beginning know more than the character or characters. 38 Combarieu expresses this point succinctly (“Les quêteurs de merveilles,” p. 90). At the end the author leaves to his heroes revelations of which he is not the author. This effacement is a mark of his art. He leaves the reader esbahiz (amazed, shocked). In the cycle the end then contrasts nicely with the early sections of the Vulgate Lancelot. After conquering Dolorous Gard Lancelot lifts a tombstone and learns his surname and parentage, something the reader already knew. See Elspeth Kennedy, “Who Is to Be Believed? Conflicting Presentations of Events in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle,” in The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 172-173.

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be visually exciting and highly imaginative in performance, especially on great ceremonial occasions: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, or special occasions like the dedication of a church, for which we have a description by Abbot Suger. Here the setting is indeed splendid, but the Mass is private, performed only for three people, and the author deliberately keeps his description bare of all but essential details. Now of all the 150 questers only six had adventures of any sort, and these were somehow connected to the Grail. Gawain, talking with Hector, remarks that neither they nor anyone whom they have met has had any adventure. All wonder is now concentrated on the Grail, but its elite, the inner three plus Lancelot, have vanished according to Hector (Queste, pp. 147-148). And then the reader remembers that Galahad, the special knight of the Grail came to remove adventures from Britain. He goes about ending or destroying the remaining wonders in Arthur’s island.39 After he dies and the Grail goes to heaven, we are left in an empty world, shorn of wonder, and the Round Table fellowship falls apart soon afterwards. Yet all this seems strange. In Arthurian romance, which delights in marvels, the ultimate marvel is the Grail, what most people mean when they talk about Arthurian wonder. This ultimate marvel, however, requires the destruction of all other marvels and then itself vanishes.40 In contrast the wonderful sculptures Dante sees in Purgatory will still be there when he returns to the mountain after death.41 Why the difference between the two great allegories? The Platonic tradition again suggests an answer. At the beginning of The Place of the Lion Charles Williams assumes that the Platonic idea of a lion manifests itself here in our world. As a consequence, all particular corporeal lions will have to disappear. If the process continued and if more ideas manifested themselves, our

39 Arthur, the Queen, and Gawain know Galahad will free Great Britain from adventures (Queste, pp. 10-11). He, therefore, holds a tournament so as to leave a remembrance of the Round Table behind (p. 13), knowing that Galahad will never return to court. 40 One might make a counter-reading that the Grail itself enables marvels, which flourish while it remains in Britain. Once the other wonders are destroyed, the Grail itself leaves Britain. Such an argument cannot explain, however, why the Grail’s own agent Galahad destroys the other wonders, even some occasioned by the Grail itself like the punishments of Mordrain and the Maimed King. 41 Purgatorio, 10.31-99; 12.13-72.

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world would itself eventually vanish.42 Hence the drama of the story: to save the world from its own ideas. Similarly, the Grail attracts all marvels to itself and then disappears. The Myth of the Cave suggests the logic. The student leaves the underground movie theater for our own familiar world, seen as qualitatively much better than the cave. On his return, however, the student cannot explain what he saw, anymore than Galahad can. An unbelieving generation asks for a sign, looks for a marvel, but reality is beyond marvels. We, however, who value imagination in literary works, or at least have done so since the eighteenth century, find this denial of the imaginative difficult to accept. The answer itself reads like a riddle: the most imaginative work is the one which finally denies imagination. This leaves us with the unsettling possibility that the two positions cannot be separated, that imagination at its highest cancels itself out.

42 A tame lioness that escaped from a wild beast show in fact vanishes. See The Place of the Lion (London, 1952), pp. 11, 14-15. In Chapter Three the idea of a butterfly appears, and all the local butterflies fly to meet it and disappear. Then the idea vanishes (pp. 40-42). Williams has Mr. Foster speculate what would happen if an animal were brought within the influence of an idea: “The matter of the beast might be changed into the image of the idea, and this world, following that one, might all be drawn into that other world (p. 54).” Williams draws an analogy with Aaron’s rod, which became a snake and swallowed the snakes of the Egyptian magicians (p. 51).

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A VISION OF POVERTY: REMEMBERING THE PASSION AND THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL IN THE IMAGERY OF THE OBSERVANT FRANCISCANS Virginia K. Henderson

When Peter de Celle (d. 1183) sought an example to clarify an abstract concept in his twelfth-century treatise On Conscience, he said, in addressing his patron, that he wanted something that would “prick your pious mind to devotion and raise your soul from visible form to invisible contemplation.”1 In effect, he defined a mnemonic image as it functioned in medieval devotional practice, that is, a visual or literary image that was striking enough to set off a chain of thoughts or associations to stimulate meditation. His conception of a striking image in this case was an elaborately laden table overseen by a king wearing a crown. By contrast, an ordinary rope tied in a slipknot would seem an unlikely candidate for such a purpose, which perhaps is why the motif—now seemingly so inconsequential but once so resonant in certain circles—has passed almost unnoticed and certainly unidentified in the late medieval art of northern Europe. Because the slipknot was a very practical method of tying a rope and also a means of securing a belt or sash in the Middle Ages, the failure to recognize its potential in images as anything more than a decorative or descriptive detail is understandable. The motif is so pronounced, however, and sometimes so contrived, on the sculpted images in the Chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey and the Cathedral of Albi in southern France that clearly its depiction at these sites was intentional and obviously therefore, meaningful in some way at one time. Indeed, the unassuming character and simplicity of the slipknot were essential to its purpose, even though ironically, those very qualities caused it to elude the scrutiny of later generations. For someone unfamiliar with the motif, it is easy enough to miss the slipknots that appear on the bronze grille which encloses the tomb of Henry VII and forms his chantry chapel in the Lady Chapel he built at 1

Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 206. Italics added.

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Westminster, now known as the Chapel of Henry VII (figs. 1 and 2).2 Once one is attuned to the motif, however, as its patron and designers would have been, it assumes its place as a subtle but singularly powerful and memorable image. Displayed at eye level on a grille that measures some fourteen by twenty-two feet and stands at about twelve feet in height, the slipknot recurred on its tracery originally as many as a hundred times. Although a tiny detail in the scheme of things, clearly it was important to Henry VII (1457-1509), for there are no other motifs or devices on his chantry chapel but the knotted cord, the royal badges, and the royal supporters.3 In fact, it is the incessant repetition of the slipknot represented as an isolated but naturalistically rendered, recognizable form, completely free of any figural or narrative context that causes it to stand out, at least once one is familiar with it. What 2

The only reference ever made to the motif occurs in the volume on Westminster Abbey published by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, where, in the description of the grille, some of the tracery is described as “bound by knots;” nothing more is said about the image there or anywhere else. Royal Commission for Historical Monuments in Great Britain, Westminster Abbey, vol. 1, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London (London, 1924), p. 66. Unnoticed too, or perhaps considered unimportant, the slipknots were omitted altogether from the otherwise reasonably accurate engraving of the grille published in Francis Sandford, A Genealogical History of the Kings of England and the Great Monarchs of Great Britain, etc. from the Conquest, Anno 1066, to the Year 1677 (London, 1677), p. 446. Earlier versions of aspects of this essay were addressed in my dissertation “In the Image of the King: The Chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey (Ph.D. Diss., Emory University, 1998), and in my papers for the symposium on poverty sponsored by the Claremont Consortium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity at the Claremont Graduate University in 2000, and the Thirty-eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University in 2003. 3 Small bronze statues of saints occupied niches on the grille framing the doors and the corner turrets, but no images other than the five mentioned were incorporated within the grillwork itself. The slipknot measures less than two inches in height. Several slipknots now are broken off, and they were omitted altogether from one panel on the east end, possibly cast from an earlier and superseded mold. The bronze grille was gilded, and it is likely that the heraldic devices, as well as perhaps the cord, were meant to have been painted, so that they would have stood out against the gold of the grille. The estimate for the cost of the king’s tomb drawn up in 1506 indicates that the clothing of the bronze effigies was to be painted, thus making the painting of the devices and the slipknots all the more probable. The design of the tomb was revised later, but the grille may have been under construction by 1504 when it was described in the indentures for the Lady Chapel, signed 16 July of that year, as “a closure of metall in maner of a Chapell.” Thomas Ducheman Smyth was recorded as working on it in the fall of 1505 and again in April 1506. British Library (hereafter BL) Harley MS 570, fol. 35v; BL Harley MS 297, fol. 29; London, Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), E36/214, pp. 15, 52.

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then was its purpose, and why would it have been depicted so often and so carefully on as important an object as the grille of a royal tomb? Slipknots occur repeatedly on the sculpted figures in the Lady Chapel as well, although until now they have passed unnoticed there, too. The most discreet knots are tied of rope, just as they are on the king’s tomb, while numerous others are tied of fabric. Slipknots secure the sashes of the numerous feathered angels in the friezes of the chapel (fig. 3), while a more modest slipknot of rope replaces the traditional morse on the cope of an angel-priest on the chancel arch (fig. 4). Other knots of rope appear on the statues of Isaiah and the martyr saints Sebastian and James the Great.4 On the two statues of St. Sebastian in the chapel, both of which depict the saint bound to a pillar as Christ was in the Flagellation, his undergarment is held by a rope tied in a slipknot (fig. 5).5 Similar knots adorn the scrips of James and Isaiah (fig. 6). The artifice, however, with which the large slipknot was configured on St. Agatha confirms, perhaps even more than the incessant repetition of the motif, the concerted effort and purposefulness with which it was represented throughout the Lady Chapel (fig. 7). There, the knot was created by combining the saint’s sash with the carefully manipulated fabric of her gown, so that its loop surrounds her bared breast, the symbol of St. Agatha’s martyrdom. Similar examples of the slipknot are found in the choir of the Cathedral of Albi, the remodeling of which was completed by its bishop Louis d’Amboise in 1483, twenty years before the Lady Chapel was begun in London.6 Both the knotted cord and the knotted sash are 4 Slipknots generally appear on martyrs and angels. All but one of the feathered angels at Westminster bears a slipknot; most likely the omission is attributable to a sculptor’s error. According to Christian exegesis, Isaiah foretold the suffering of Christ and salvation, which would justify marking him with the knot, also. He wrote that Christ “shall wear the belt of justice” around his waist (Isaiah 11.5), which possibly was understood as a reference to the ropes associated with the Passion and thus the Franciscan cord. Further, he advocated repentance and humble living, which would have allowed him to be seen as a precursor to the interpretation of the Rule of St. Francis espoused by the Observants. See, for instance, Isaiah 1.18-20, 3.13-25, 40.22. 5 St. Sebastian is represented in the triforium and again in the northeast apsidal chapel. In both instances, uniquely among the sculpted figures in the chapel, he is depicted flanked by his persecutors, who occupy the adjacent niches. All other niches contain saints. 6 Jean-Louis Biget, Y. Carbonell-Lamouthe, and M. Pradalier-Schlumberger, “Le choeur de la cathèdrale d’Albi,” Congrès archéologique de France 140 (1985), 75-76. The authors concluded that because of their number the slipknots must have been a symbol, but they were unable to identify it other than to suggest that it might have

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found on a number of the angels of the choir enclosure, on an angel of the choir screen, and on the Annunciation to the Virgin, whose hand very pointedly directs attention to the knot (figs. 8-12).7 As in the Lady Chapel, the disposition of the knots on several of the angels is clearly contrived and therefore suggests that there too the motif is more than mere decoration (figs. 13 and 14). The sash belt of the first martyr John the Baptist is secured by a slipknot; but more importantly, his mantle is held by a rope tied in a slipknot that is displayed like a badge on his shoulder, significantly, directly above the Eucharistic lamb that he carries.8 The mock cope, or mantle, with which Christ is clothed in the Imago Pietatis on the altar of the Chapel of St. Michael off the south choir aisle is fastened with a slipknot of rope also, just as the cope of the angel-priest at Westminster. His loincloth is secured by a slipknot as well, to which, like the Virgin, his hand points (fig. 15). Moreover, the wrists of Christ are bound by rope that is tied in a slipknot, although the upper portion of its loop has been broken off. The deliberate use of the slipknot is found in fifteenth-century images from the Loire valley also, and especially in Brittany. In fact, the slipknot recurs consistently in images that can be associated with a foundation or patron that was dedicated to the Observant Franciscans, who sought a literal interpretation of the Rule of St. Francis in reaction to the lax practices of their Conventual brethren. Indeed, the ideals and especially the stricter concept of poverty that the reformed friars embraced, together with the devotional interests of all the Franciscans, provide a logical context and ultimately an explanation for the motif.9 referred to a cult of the Holy Cord. They came to their conclusion after eliminating other possible explanations, such as the slipknot being a stylistic trait. In Biget’s more recent work on the sculpture at Albi, he noted the knots but made no attempt to explain them; Jean-Louis Biget, Sainte-Cécile d’Albi: Sculptures (Graulhet, 1997), p. 302. 7 The angel of the choir screen faces the nave, while the image of the Virgin, also on the choir screen, faces the south choir aisle. 8 Illustrated in Biget, Sainte-Cécile d’Albi, p. 214. The image of John the Baptist stands to the right of the Virgin and Child at the eastern end of the choir. A statue of Zachariah, father of John the Baptist and a priest, who foretold that his son would become a prophet and forerunner of Christ (Luke 1.76), stands in the ambulatory directly behind his son. Sometimes regarded as a martyr, he too wears a sash tied in a large slipknot. Ibid., p. 205. 9 Despite their advocacy of the literal Rule, Duncan Nimmo categorized the approach of the Observant movement, especially the branch that developed out of the convent at Mirabeau (Tourraine), as moderate, in contrast, to the approach of the Spirituals of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. The former, he argued, was based on papal interpretation, as advocated by Bonaventure and John Peckham, while

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Both Henry VII and Louis d’Amboise were ardent supporters of the reformed friars, as were many of the aristocracy of western France and especially the Breton dukes, who had displayed the Franciscan cord on their coat of arms since the 1440s. Although the Observants flourished throughout France during the fifteenth century, their foundations proliferated most rapidly in Brittany,10 where Henry VII spent fourteen very formative years of his youth in exile under the protection of the duke. It was there no doubt that he developed his devotion to the friars, whom he patronized and favored throughout his reign.11 By analyzing the visual evidence within the context of Franciscan devotional practice, the works of Bonaventure, and historical circumstances, this paper will argue that, for the transalpine friars and their supporters, the slipknot functioned metonymically as a poignant visual reminder of the Passion and suffering of Christ. Further, as a mnemonic image, it was capable of evoking a complex of associated concepts involving salvation, repentance, self-renunciation, charity, humility, and especially poverty. In the early years of his exile the future Henry VII and his uncle and guardian Jasper Tudor were kept at Suscinio, an isolated castle by the the latter opposed the papal declarations altogether. Documents from the reign of Henry VII, however, suggest that, irrespective of the basis of their interpretation, the Observants in England adhered rather rigorously to the concept of poverty. Certainly, their life-style was considerably more extreme than that implied by Nimmo, whose analysis was based on continental examples. This issue was addressed in my paper “Royal Imagery and Patronage at the Friary of Greenwich: A Conflict in the Theory and Reality of the Observant Life of Poverty?,” Fortieth International Congress on Medieval Studies, (Kalamazoo, MI, 2004). Duncan Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Medieval Franciscan Order, from Saint Francis to the Foundation of the Capuchins (Rome, 1987), pp. 479, 485, 487. 10 The first house of Observants in France was established at Mirabeau near Poitiers in the late fourteenth century and was quickly followed by others in the Franciscan province of Touraine; the Observants were established at Vannes, where Henry VII spent the greater part of his exile, circa 1437. Hervé Martin, Les Ordres mendiants en Bretagne, vers 1230-vers 1530: Pauvreté volontaire et prédication à la fin du MoyenAge (Rennes, 1975), pp. 61, 65-67, 71-74, 87-88, 97; André Vauchez, “Influences franciscaines et réseaux aristocratiques dans le Vale de Loire,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 70 (1984), 95-105; Joseph Marie Le Mené, “Le Cordeliers de Vannes,” Bulletin de la Société Polymatique du Morbihan (1894), 110; Nimmo, Reform and Division, pp. 441-442. 11 For Henry VII’s patronage of the Observants and their influence on him, see Virginia K. Henderson, “Rethinking Henry VII: The Man and His Piety in the Context of the Observant Franciscans,” in Reputations and Representations: Essays in Late Medieval History, eds. Douglas Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove, and A. Compton Reeves (Leiden, 2004), pp. 317-347.

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sea at Sarzeau, not far from Vannes. It may have been there that Henry VII first encountered the Observant Franciscans, for Francis I of Brittany (1442-1450) had founded a convent for them nearby at Bernon, circa 1449.12 The Franciscan friars were known as the Cordeliers in France, an epithet that was derived from the knotted cord that distinguished their habit. It was that cord, in turn, which the Breton dukes adopted in the mid-fifteenth century to distinguish their royal insignia, thereby visually aligning themselves with the Franciscans. Francis I was the first of the dukes to place the motif of the Franciscan cord around his coat of arms, undoubtedly to signify his devotion to his patron saint Francis of Assisi.13 Accordingly, the duke and his second wife Isabella Stuart were depicted in their prayer books with St. Francis as they knelt in prayer, and more significantly, the duchess was portrayed wearing the cord of the Franciscans around her waist in a full-page illumination in a 1464 copy of the Somme le Roi.14 The appropriation of the Franciscan emblem was even more pronounced in the court of Francis II (1458-1488), who not only continued to display the Franciscan cord around his arms, but also depicted it conspicuously on both sides of his coins.15 It was used as well, in other ducal ornaments, according to contemporary inventories, including a collar made in the form of the cord presented to the duke in 1468, ironically by his mistress.16 Moreover, with the consent of the 12

Martin, Les ordres mendiants, p. 79. Bernon is approximately four kilometers from Suscinio. 13 Jean-Yves Cozan and Jean-Christophe Cassard, La Bretagne au temps des Ducs, exhibition catalogue, Abbaye de Daoulas June 15, 1991-October 6, 1991 and Musee Dobrée, Nantes, November 9, 1991-February 9, 1992 (Daoulas, 1991), pp. 56-57, 164; Marie-Hélène Santrot, Entre France et Angleterre: le Duché de Bretagne, essai d’iconographie des ducs de Bretagne (Nantes, 1988), p. 252. The dukes of Savoy used the cord in their coats of arms also, although they configured it differently. 14 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS lat. 1369; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS Fr 958, fol. Fv., illustrated in Cozan and Cassard, La Bretagne au temps des Ducs, p. 61, fig. 58, and p. 65, fig. 67. 15 Illustrated in Cozan and Cassard, La Bretagne au temps des Ducs, pp. 56-57; Santrot, Entre France et Angleterre, p. 252. Francis II was a cousin of Francis I and the son of Marguerite d’Orléans, a supporter of the Franciscans and sister to Charles d’Orléans who, as the count of Blois, assumed patronage of the friars too, following the cenetury-old practice of those counts. André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Notre Dame, 1993), p. 212; idem., “Influences franciscaines,” p. 102. 16 Cozan and Cassard, La Bretagne au temps des Ducs, p. 210; Santrot, Entre France et Angleterre, pp. 252-53. An entry in the account books of Henry VII’s queen Elizabeth of York indicates that she had a necklace or collar in which the connotation of its imagery may have been similar: “a cheyne of golde with vij knottes.” Nicholas

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three orders of the Franciscans, the duke, the duchess, and their elder daughter Anne of Brittany were granted confraternity at the convent of Clisson by the vicar general of the Observants Guillaume Bertho, himself a Breton.17 Such then was the ambiance of the Breton court with which Henry Tudor had been associated for fourteen very impressionable years as a youth and young man. It was there that he would have become familiar with the ducal emblem of the Franciscan cord, and still more importantly, as we shall see, with the slightly different but related motif of the slipknot that appears in the Lady Chapel he built years later at Westminster. Although the design of the cord used on the gold demi-écu of Francis II is a decorative rendition of the slipknot, most of the surviving examples of the cord from the Breton court depict the whole cord with its several knots, a slipknot, and usually tassels.18 The image of the cord that appears on the grille of the tomb of Henry VII, on the other hand, consists of the slipknot alone, while those found elsewhere in the Lady Chapel are either single knots or ones that secure a cord or sash. The slipknots at Albi are configured similarly. As the actual cord that was worn by the Franciscan friars was depicted in medieval images, it had a slipknot at one of its ends, through which the other end was threaded, so that the rope formed, in effect, a noose or larger slipknot around a friar’s waist.19 It is in this way then, that the symbols of the cord and the slipknot are related. In its basic material form, the slipknot, which is itself also a noose, refers to the ropes with which Christ was bound, tied to the pillar during the Flagellation, and led through the streets to his crucifixion. The gospels describe Jesus as “bound” when he was led before Caiaphas and Pilate and indicate that he was flogged but are silent on the nature Harris Nicolas, Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth (London, 1830), p. 61. 17 Bertho had served previously as the vicar provincial of Tourraine. Max Courtecuisse, “Actes du châptitre des frères mineurs de l’observance cismontaine tenu à Châteauroux en 1478,” Revue d’histoire franciscaine 1 (1924), 486. 18 See, for example, figure 20 below. 19 See, for example, the painted panel of St. Francis from the second half of the thirteenth century at San Francesco, Orte, and the fifteenth-century paintings of St. Bernardino of Siena by Sano di Pietro and Pietro di Giovanni d’Ambrogio. Illustrated in Eve Borsook and Fiorelli Gioffredi Superbi, eds., Italian Altarpieces, 1250-1550: Function and Design (Oxford, 1994), figs. 18, 61, 62, and 71. See also, the early fourteenth-century image of St. Francis with Death, Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi, illustrated in Joachim Poeschke, Die Kirche San Francesco in Assisi und Ihre Wandmalerei (Munich, 1985), fig. 240.

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of the binding and the details of the Flagellation, thus leaving them to exegetical interpretation and the imagination of the faithful. With the shift in emphasis to the humanity and suffering of Christ that developed in the thirteenth century and the increasing pathos with which the Passion was represented in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially in northern Europe, the ropes figured ever more prominently as an instrument of torment (fig. 16).20 Their abusive role and capacity as a mnemonic device to stimulate inner vision were suggested much earlier, however, in the writing of Bonaventure, especially in The Mystical Vine: A Treatise on the Passion (Vitis mystica): Oh, the cruelty of the ropes with which those most cruel men tied the Lamb most mild! O Lord Jesus, I see You with the eyes of my mind— the only way now possible to me—tied with rough rope, dragged like a bandit to the high priest’s tribunal and then to Pilate. I see, and am filled with horror and bewilderment.21

A late fourteenth-century German treatise stresses even more graphically the torturous role of the rope that is conveyed in some fifteenthcentury northern images: They cast a rope around His neck, and bound His hands one above another with a rope. One dragged Him along with the rope and flung Him so that He might well have choked, another pulled him back up with the rope around His hands as if to pull His arms off His body…. And thus they dragged Him down the hill, one pulling Him by the clothing, and another by the rope.22

The slipknot appears occasionally too among the Instruments of the Passion that were depicted in medieval devotional images, and espe20 See also Derick Baegert, The Bearing of the Cross, c. 1500 (Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte), the Master of the Karlsruhe Passion, Arrest of Christ, c. 1440 (Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum) and Jaquerio, The Road to Calvary, 1440 (Ranverso, San Antonio). Illustrated together with other examples in James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation oof Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk, Belgium, 1979), plates I and XIII, figs. 65, 71, 75, 82, 88. The visual depiction of Christ led by a rope or noose around his neck dates to at least the eleventh century, when it appeared in the painting of the Road to Calvary at Göreme, Turkey, illustrated in Gertrud Schiller, Iconography in Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman, 2 vols. (London, 1972), 2: fig. 283. The early image does not include the tortuous aspects, however, which are a much later development. 21 Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure, Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint, trans. José de Vinck, 4 vols. (Patterson, NJ, 1960), 1: 157-158. 22 Christi Leiden in einer Vision geschaut…, as cited in Marrow, Passion Iconography, p. 97.

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cially in the woodcuts included in devotional literature, but almost always it was represented as part of a rope that is tied around a pillar or column to signify the Flagellation.23 The relationship of the slipknot to the bonds and physical suffering of Christ, however, is conveyed more explicitly in a French illumination of the Arma Christi from the fourteenth-century Psalter and Prayerbook of Bonne of Luxemberg. There, a cross encircled with a crown of thorns and a column wrapped with a cord secured by a slipknot flank a huge image of the wound of Christ.24 The same idea is conveyed less abstractly in a thirteenth-century German illumination from the Rothschild Canticles in which a wounded Christ links the cross and the pillar of the Flagellation to 23 In some instances the cord is wound around a column one or more times and terminates with its ends crossed, if not tied, to resemble a slipknot. See, for example, drawings used to illustrate “The Symbols of the Passion” in BL Royal MS 17 A, fols. 75b; the image of the Man of Pity printed by William Caxton as part of an indulgence ca. 1488; a similar image for an indulgence ca. 1490-1495 (Bodleian Library, Ms. Rawlinson D.403, fol. 2v); and the frontispieces of translations of the Imitatio Christi published by Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Illustrated in Legends of the Holy Rood: Symbols of the Passion and CrossPoems in Old English of the Eleventh, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Richard Morris, E. E. T. S., o.s., 46 (London, 1871), pp. 180-181; Henry Bradshaw, “On the Earliest English Engravings of the Indulgence Known as the ‘Image of Pity,’” Cambridge Antiquarian Communications 3 (1864-1876), plate facing p. 11; Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480-1535 (London, 1973), figs. 27, 28, 35; Lee Cullen Khanna, ed., Early Tudor Translators: Margaret Beaufort, Margaret More Roper and Mary Basset, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, series I, Printed Writings, 1500-1640, part 2, vol. 4 (Aldershot, 2001). The slipknot appears rarely, if at all, by itself among the Instruments of the Passion. A slipknot tied of cloth is represented among the Arma Christi depicted on a painted ivory panel of a small devotional booklet from Westphalia or the Upper Rhine, circa 1330-50 (London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Inv. Nr. 11-72), which has been interpreted, probably correctly, as the blindfold from the mocking of Christ. Had the artist intended to depict the rope, surely he would have indicated its texture as he did in the whip of the Flagellation. It seems to be at least a century later before the slipknot was represented in rope as an independent motif. Illustrated in H.W. Van Os, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300-1500 (Princeton, 1994), pp. 114-115. The only example of the rope included among the Arma Christi I have encountered so far is that of Partridge Green, St. Hugh’s, Parkminster MS dd.9 (D. 173), fol. 45v. Although configured there as a slipknot, the rope is depicted as twisted or overlapping to suggest the form rather than actually tied in the appropriate knot. 24 New York, The Metropolitan Museum, The Cloister Collection, MS 69.86, fol. 331r. Illustrated in Nell Gifford Martin, “Vision and Violence in Some Gothic Meditative Imagery,” Studies in Iconography 17 (1996), 339, fig. 22; Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger, eds., Die Passion Christi in Literature und Kunst des Spätmittelalters (Tübingen, 1993), p. 273, fig. 8; Lucy Freeman Sandler, “Jean Pucelle and the Lost Miniatures of the Belleville Breviary,” The Art Bulletin 66/1 (1984), 86, fig. 17.

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which he is bound by a rope tied in a slipknot (fig. 17). The significance that these images held for their late medieval audiences is explained in the devotional verses that accompanied some of them: the rope that bound and tortured Christ signaled the delivery of man from the bonds of sin.25 Bonaventure addressed that same paradox in The Mystical Vine, invoking imagery that is echoed in the visual images: O God of gods, what an offense against Your freedom and your power! You to be bound with so many ropes who alone are free! You to be bound who alone have the power to bind and to release!26

More specifically, in describing the bonds of Christ, Bonaventure identified the rope of the Flagellation as a bond and Christ as the vine, thus associating the ropes with the Eucharist, an idea that is expressed explicitly in Albi’s statue of John the Baptist: The fifth bond was the rope by which Jesus was tied to the scourging post . . . What truer stake could there be than that to which the Lord was tied? For as the vine is bound to a stake, so was Christ bound to a post.27

The correspondence between Bonaventure’s imagery of the ropes and the increased appearance of the slipknot as a mnemonic device in the later fifteenth century surely is no coincidence but reflects, at least in part, the heightened enthusiasm for Bonaventure that arose in the 1470s and culminated in his canonization in 1482. Furthermore, in 1464, the Franciscan Order expressly encouraged its preachers and confessors to promote devotion to the Passion among the people, thus 25

See, for example, the devotional verse “The Symbols of the Passion,” here rendered in modern English: To the pillar, Lord, also With a rope they bound thee to, The senews from thy bones burst, So hard it was drawn and strained fast; That bond delivers me of bonds, Of unkind deed and unkindness.

From BL Royal MS 17 A, fols. 75b, printed in its original form in Legends of the Holy Rood, p. 181. Another version of the poem and its illustrations (BL Add. Ms. 22029) are reproduced also, together with notations on the alterations made in a third version (BL Add. Ms. 11748); ibid., p. 180. For similar verses about the bound Christ used in late medieval hymns, see Richard Leighton Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford, 1935), pp. 125-128, nos. 166, 167, 171. 26 Bonaventure, Works of Bonaventure, trans. de Vinck (see above, n. 21), 1: 157. 27 Ibid., 1: 158.

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providing a fertile context for the motif of the slipknot, as well.28 The Franciscan devotion to the Passion and suffering of Christ, for which Bonaventure wrote the Office, and emphasis on the ropes also correlates with the friars’ oversight of the sanctuaries and relics of the Holy Land since at least 1260. Significantly, the custody of the relics passed to the Observants in 1437.29 In particular, the pillar, or column, upon which Christ was thought to have been scourged, was housed in the Franciscan Chapel of St. Mary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.30 Reputedly, the relic of the column was found in the early fourth century, not long after the cross was discovered by St. Helena, but little is known of it before the eleventh century. 31 From that time on, however, it was described in the journals of pilgrims to the Holy Land. In his Description of the Holy Places, for instance, circa 1172, Theoderich related that behind the choir to the right “there is a fair altar, wherein stands a part of the column round which our Lord was tied and scourged.”32 In 1345 Nicolas de Poggibonsi recorded that he had seen a piece of the column of the Flagellation that had been placed in a window or niche to the right of the altar of the Chapel of Saint Mary.33 A half century earlier, circa 1290, Philippus Brosserius reported that there was a piece of the column in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that was stained with the blood of Christ,34 a fact that Peter Comestor noted also in his twelfth-century Historia scholastica.35 The Franciscan author of the popular late thirteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ reassured his readers that a piece of the column was in fact 28

Raphael M. Huber, A Documented History of the Franciscan Order (1182-1517) (Milwaukee, 1944), p. 909. The increased interest in imagery, both textual and visual, that evoked affective piety, may have contributed as well to the greater enthusiasm for Bonaventure and his works. 29 Ibid., pp. 756, 909. 30 Louis Reau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 vols. (Paris, 1955-59), 2, pt. 2, p. 453. 31 Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (see above, n. 20), 2: 189; E. Power, “Colonnes de la flagellation,” in Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplement, ed. Louis Pirot (Paris, 1934), 2, pp. 64-65, 67. 32 “Theoderich’s Description of the Holy Places,” trans. Aubrey Stewart, in The Library of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society 5 (London, 1896; reprt., New York, 1971), p. 17. 33 Power, “Colonnes de la flagellation,” p. 66. 34 “Est et alius locus in sinistra parte Ecclesiae, in quo est colomna parva et subtilis, ad quam Jhesus dicitur ligatus et flagellatus fuisse” and “adhuc vestigio sanguinis Christi cruentata.” Power, “Colonnes de la flagellation,” 66. In The Mystical Vine Bonaventure referred to the blood-stained post as well; Bonaventure,Works of Bonaventure, trans. de Vinck (see above, n. 21), 1: 158. 35 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica in PL 197:1628B-C.

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“preserved to this day [in Jerusalem], as I know from a brother of ours, who saw it,” when he exhorted them to envision Christ bound to a stone column. He then cited Comestor’s description of the bloodstained piece of the column to encourage his readers to feel compassion for their Savior. 36 Bonaventure referred to the column as well, in his Mystical Vine where he stated that “according to legend, the post bespattered with it [the blood of X] retains to this day some red marks.”37 The column in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was described also in the journal of Richard Guildford, a counselor and close confident of Henry VII who journeyed to the Holy Land in 1506 and died there. Significantly, despite the lapse of more than a century and a half, his description is essentially the same as the report of Nicolas de Poggibonsi: “Also in the same chapell, on the right hande of ye sayde hyghe aulter, within a vought in maner of a wyndowe, is a grete pece of the pyllour yt our Sauyour was bounden vnto in the hous of Pylate.”38 The relationship of the slipknot itself to the suffering of Christ is conveyed in literal terms in the late fifteenth-century Italian painting of Christ at the Column by Antonello de Messina, where, forming the traditional attribute of a criminal, it appears as a noose around the neck of Christ (fig. 18). In the Ecce Homo by Andrea Mantegna, moreover, the rope, which again is configured as a noose, is depicted exactly as it is in contemporary representations of the cord worn by the Franciscans (fig. 19). In many late medieval depictions of the Passion, and especially in the Carrying of the Cross, a favorite image of the friars, Christ wears just such a cord, which was used increasingly in northern images as an instrument of subjugation and humiliation (fig. 16). It was this aspect of the Passion that St. Francis himself imitated as an act of penance, as recorded by both Thomas Celano and 36

Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green, eds. and trans., Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), pp. 326, 328-329. 37 Bonaventure, Works of Bonaventure, trans. de Vinck (see above, n. 21), p. 158. 38 Richard Guildford, The Pylgrimage of Syr R. Guylforde to the Holy Land, ad 1506, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1851), p. 25. Another relic of the column, known as the “short column” because of its size, although it was a full column with capital and base, was kept at S. Prassede in Rome; see Barbara Wisch, “The Passion of Christ in the Art, Theater, and Penitential Rituals of the Roman Confraternity of the Gonfalone,” in Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Kalamazoo, 1991), pp. 237-262.

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Bonaventure, when he demanded that he be led naked through the streets of Assisi with a rope tied around his neck.39 As Anne Derbes pointed out in her study of narrative paintings of the Passion in late medieval Italy, early Franciscan images depicted the ritual use of ropes around the necks of friars, a practice that continues today in the Good Friday ritual of the Corda Pia.40 Furthermore, the Franciscan cord was linked directly to the ropes of the Passion in the Expositio super Regulam Fratrum Minorum, which, although now arguably the work of John Peckham, was attributed to Bonaventure in the fifteenth century, at least since the time of the Observant friar John Capistran.41 While acknowledging the suitability of the rope as a belt for the sackcloth, based on Isaiah, Bonaventure wrote that he believed St. Francis had chosen it precisely because of the ropes that bound Christ when he was led before Pilate. Moreover, he identified the cord as the “girdle of armor, the rough rope of many truths,” the modest belt that “appears to drive the simonists and other vicious people from the Church.”42 The depiction, therefore, of the rope of Christ as a Franciscan cord in images of the Carrying of the Cross would have carried special meaning for the friars, for with each image of Christ bearing his cross and wearing a cord like their own, their founder’s challenge to imitate Christ and “take up the cross” would have been set before them in pictorially graphic terms.43 Thus, the rope of the bound Christ from 39

Marion A. Habig, ed., St. Francis of Assisi, Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis (Chicago, 1973), pp. 272-273, 672. 40 Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge, 1996), p. 134. For an early representation of the penitential practice, see the Penitents at the Tomb from the Saint Francis Dossal, Bardi Chapel of St. Francis, Santa Croce, Florence, ca. 1240, illustrated in Rona Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel (University Park, 1988), fig. 42. 41 Conrad Hawkins, “Authorship of the Commentary of Franciscan Rule Published Among the Works of Bonaventure,” Franciscan Studies 29 (1969), 202. 42 “Et cingulum, funem utique, quia dicitur Isaiae tertio: Erit pro zona funiculus, et Isaiae vigesimo secundo: Vocavit Dominus in die illa ad fletum et ad planctum et ad cingulum sacci. Hoc cingulum funiculus est, quia sacci funibus cingi solent. Credo autem, sanctum Franciscum istud sibi cingulum elegisse, quia legitur Matthaei vigesimo septimo: Vinctum adduxerunt eum et tradiderunt Pontio Pilato. Vel certe ad litteram, ut cingului vilitas concordet habitus vilitati, ut hoc cintorio armati, veritatis linea multis aspera ab Ecclesia nitantur disturbare simoniacos et alios scelerosos.” Expositio super Regulam FF. Minorum in Bonaventure, Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae, S.R. E. Episcopi Cardinalis, Opera Omnia, 10 vols. (Quaracchi, 1898), 8: 400. 43 See the Rule of 1221, chapter 1, derived from Matt. 16.24 (“If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”); Habig, St. Francis of Assisi, p. 31. Derbes relates the depiction of the cord around Christ’s

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the Passion, the Franciscan cord, and penance can all be associated with, as well as brought to mind by, the motif of the slipknot. The slipknot and the Franciscan cord, in turn, are associated with the Observants in a late fifteenth-century illumination that celebrates the founding of the Ordre de la Cordelière by the Observant patroness Anne of Brittany, then the queen of Charles VIII of France (fig. 20). While the knotted cord of the friars adopted by the Breton court frames the image, the duchess is portrayed wearing a sash tied in a slipknot—just as the angels at Westminster and several figures at Albi—as she stands before a group of courtly ladies, who are in fact symbol-laden personifications of the virtues.44 The slipknot appears on her coins also, both as a separate motif and as part of the Franciscan cord that surrounds her coat of arms. Furthermore, the duchess, who assumed her title three years after Henry VII returned to England to become king, wore around her waist “a chain of gold as thick as a man’s little finger and made in the shape of a cord of Saint Francis” when she received an English embassy in 1490. According to the attending English herald, she displayed the cord as a principal motif on her cloth of estate, as well.45 Interestingly, in discussing Anne of Brittany and the Ordre de la Cordelière in his early seventeenth-century book on royal women, Hilarion de Coste identified the cord depicted on her shield and coat of arms as the ropes and bonds of Christ, which he reported she always kept in her memory.46 While unfortunately he offers no source for his information, most likely his explanation, certainly not a conventional one, reflects a lingering awareness of the original significance and purpose of the imagery. Thus, it correlates with my interpretation of the slipknot both with respect to its referent and to its use as a mnemonic image. The wider implications of the slipknot are suggested in several sculpted images of the mocked and scorned Christ at the Stone Pavement, a relic visited by medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land also, and described in Richard Guildford’s journal: “an aulter vnder the neck in Passion images to the Franciscans’ identity of their founder as Alter Christus; Derbes, Imaging the Passion, p. 132. 44 The figure of prudence also wears a sash tied in a slipknot. 45 “Journal of Roger Macado” in Memorials of King Henry the Seventh, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages 10 (London, 1858), pp. 386-387. 46 Hilarion de Coste, Les éloges et vies des reynes, princesses, dames et damoiselles illvstres en pieté, courae & doctrine, qui ont fleury de nostre temps, & du temps de nos pères (Paris, 1630), p. 12.

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whiche is a pece of a stone moche lyke of a pece of a pyllour, vpon ye whiche our Sauyour sat in ye “courte of Pylate wha[n] he was crowned wt thornes, scorned and buffeted, &c.”47 Both formally and iconographically the sculpted images are related to the Imago Pietatis of Albi. An emaciated figure of Christ, wearing the Crown of Thorns, is seated on a stone with shackled ankles and hands in the late fifteenthcentury Man of Pity at the Hôtel Dieu in Beaune (fig. 21). The rope that binds his hands is tied in a prominently placed slipknot, while the other end of the rope wraps his ankles in a noose. If the figure did not originate at the Franciscan convent adjacent to the hospital, certainly it was influenced by the presence of the friars, for it was they who sold a portion of their convent garden so that the hospital could be built.48 A similar image of Christ in Pity, carved some twenty years later, belongs, at least now, to the abbey at Marche-les-Dames near Namur, a center of Cistercian reform in the fifteenth century with interests similar to those of the Observant Franciscans.49 Again, an emaciated and suffering Christ sits on a wall or pillar of ashlar with his ankles shackled with rope and his wrists tied in a large slipknot. He is accompanied in this example by a skull, a foreboding of his death at Golgotha, 47 Richard Guildford, Pylgrimage of Syr R. Guylforde (see above, n. 38), ed. Henry Ellis, p. 26. The Stone Pavement is mentioned in John 19.13. Guildford made another entry that seems to refer to the Stone Pavement, also: “as we passyd by ye strete, there sta[n]deth an arche ouer ye way, vpon ye whiche sto[n]de .ij large whyte stones; vpon the one of them por Sauyor stode whan he was juged to deth, and vpon ye other stode Pylate whan he yave sentence yt he shuld be crucyfyed.” Ibid., 29. Some three hundred years earlier, Theoderich described what presumably was the same site. In front of the Church of St. Mary on Mt. Sion near the Holy Sepulchre, he reported, “on a stone cut in the likeness of a cross, these words are inscribed: ‘This place is called the “Pavement,” and here is where the Lord was judged.” Further, within the church there was “a holy chapel dedicated to our Lord Jesus Christ, wherein stands a great part of the column round which the Lord was bound by Pilate and ordered to be scourged, after He had been condemned by him to be crucified; and there pilgrims in imitation of Him are wont to be scourged.” Possibly Theoderich and others mistook the stone of the Pavement, described by Guildford as looking like a piece of a column, as the pillar of the Flagellation, or there was another piece of the pillar at Mt. Sion, also. “Theoderich’s Description of the Holy Places” (see above, n. 32), p. 41. 48 Francesca Picou, “Église et couvents de Frères Mineurs en France: receuil de plans,” Bulletin archeeologique du comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, fascule A, Antiquités nationales, n.s. 17-18 (1984), 132. 49 Illustrated in Les Cisterciens en Namurois XIIIe-XXe Siècle, ed. Jacques Toussaint, exhib. cat., Musée des Arts Anciens du Namurois, 20 June-27 September 1998 (Namur, 1998), p. 226. Like the Observants, the reformed Cistercians advocated poverty. For the spikeblock, see Marrow, Passion Iconography (see above, n. 22), pp. 171189.

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rather than the spikeblock, a symbol of his suffering, that rests at the feet of the Christ of the Hôtel Dieu. The ropes and slipknot are displayed slightly differently but prominently on a third figure of the Man of Pity from Brittany in which Christ is portrayed wounded and bleeding more profusely than in the other examples.50 All four sculpted works use the ropes and especially the slipknot to present a devotional image of the suffering Christ and parallel so effectively once again the evocative imagery of Bonaventure. In The Tree of Life, he asked: who could hear without sorrow of the fierce executioners laying their murderous hands upon the King of Glory at that hour, tying with bonds the innocent hands of the gentle Christ, and shamefully dragging to the sacrifice the Lamb most meek and silent, as if he were a criminal?51

In The Mystical Vine Bonaventure’s words relate even more graphically to these images of the Man of Pity as well as to contemporary images of the Carrying of the Cross, all of which obviously were intended to stir affective piety: Beloved soul, behold how He was bound, how He was reckoned among the wicked…Pour out a torrent of tears for Him who is dying in such bonds…52 …we see Him seized, bound, dragged away, shoved around, beaten, spit upon, hit in the body and slapped in the face; we see Him crowned with thorns, clothed in a scarlet cloak, derided by mock adoration…, struck with a reed…torn with a sharp scourge, burdened with His own cross… stripped of His clothes.53

Clearly, by the third quarter of the thirteenth century, if not before, the ropes had become an important part of Franciscan thinking and signified a complex of ideas. But while they signified the suffering and abuses of the Passion, as well as the hope of salvation, they also signaled the submission of Christ to God’s will that is epitomized by his prayers on Gethsemane which foretold the Crucifixion: “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt;” and 50 Illustrated in Victor Henry Debidour, La Sculpture Bretonne: Étude d’iconographie religieuse populaire (Rennes, 1953), plate XXIX, figure from Langonnet. See also, a related late fifteenth-century carved figure of the Ecce Homo from the Lower Rhine in which a prominent slipknot secures the rope that binds Christ’s wrists. Illustrated in Schiller, Iconography in Christian Art (see above, n. 20), 2: fig. 272. 51 Bonaventure, Works of Bonaventure, trans. de Vinck (see above, n. 21), 1: 118. 52 Ibid., 1: 161. 53 Ibid., 1: 164.

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again, “if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”54 By willingly accepting the bonds, as Bonaventure described, Christ exhibited both humility and absolute renunciation of self, ideals that St. Francis in turn sought to imitate. In essence, therefore, the ropes, which at least in some instances were represented in the fifteenth century by the slipknot, encompassed the very ideas that lay at the core of the Franciscan concept of poverty. In depicting a man deprived of all his possessions, that is, the naked Christ patiently enduring abuse, the sculpted images of the Man of Pity convey the ideals of humility and self-renunciation, even though ultimately they too are images of hope. Echoing Bonaventure once again, the ropes, and specifically the slipknot, signal the suffering of Christ, but also the transcendence of suffering and the promise of salvation: “Let us be bound with the bonds of the passion of the good and most loving Jesus, so that we may also share with Him the bonds of love.” In speaking of the bonds that “so powerfully break our own,” that is, the ropes he saw in his mind’s eye, 55 Bonaventure suggested not only the mnemonic role of the ropes, but also their capacity as a metonymic image. The slipknot that appeared in the imagery of later fifteenth-century southern and western France and then England served as an abbreviated form of the ropes. Once deprived of its narrative context, however, the slipknot could function effectively mnemonically only for those who were familiar with the motif and chose to imbue it with meaning. The themes of the Flagellation and the Carrying of the Cross lent themselves particularly well to conveying the reality and intensity of the suffering of Christ in very human terms, a potential that was exploited increasingly in the art and literature of the late Middle Ages. There were other aspects of the tortures of the Passion, however, that were emphasized too, in order to intensify the sense of pathos and the depth of Christ’s sacrifice. Crucifixion was the lowliest and most grueling of punishments meted out by the ancient Romans and was reserved generally for slaves, foreigners, and the lowest levels of society. In fact, it was extremely rare for Roman citizens to be subjected to

54

Matt. 26.39; Matt. 26.42. Bonaventure, Works of Bonaventure, trans. de Vinck (see above, n. 21), 1: 15758. For Bonaventure’s reference to the mind’s eye, see p. [9]. 55

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it, and then only in the most serious of crimes against the state.56 As a standard part of the punishment, the condemned were flogged and made to carry a crossbeam to their place of execution. Indeed, for the Romans a “cross-bearer” was a decidedly derogatory term and the cross a shameful image.57 As the ultimate humiliation and mark of shame, the condemned were stripped of their clothing and displayed naked in a public place while they died and their bodies decayed.58 In a nearly parallel manner, criminals in late medieval Italy were stripped of their clothing, chained with an iron collar to a post in a public square, and subjected to public ridicule.59 The stripping of Christ itself, therefore, had the capacity to serve as a powerful image of the abuses of the Passion and the indignities borne by him for the sake of mankind, as well as to epitomize the concept of poverty exemplified by his life. That concept, in conjunction with the bonds and suffering of the Passion, seems to have been signified by the rope, as well. In fact, the physical, spiritual, and metaphorical connotations of poverty, which played so important a role in Franciscan theology from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, explain perhaps more than anything else the appeal that the motif of the slipknot had for the friars and patrons of the Observant reform. The Crucifixion was not depicted in the first centuries of Christian art, undoubtedly in large part because of the negative connotations that the punishment itself carried in the ancient world. Although there is some evidence that Christ was portrayed naked in images of the Crucifixion prior to the fifth century, after that time he was shown almost always either clothed in an ankle-length tunic, the colobium, or wrapped in a loincloth.60 The representation of Christ in a loincloth 56 Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia, 1977), pp. 24, 37, 39, 50-51, 87. 57 Ibid., pp. 25, 29, 31, 66. 58 Ibid., p. 87. The bodies were not buried but left as carion. 59 Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Persecution During the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, 1985), p. 65; Derbes, Picturing the Passion (see above, n. 40), p. 133. 60 Dictionary of Art, s. v. “Crucifix,” p. 210; Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art (see above, n. 20), 2, pp. 89-90, fig. 321. For Early Christian examples, see the Crucifixion from doors of Santa Sabina, Rome, in which Christ wears a narrow band for a loincloth, and the Crucifixion of an ivory plaque from a casket, circa 420, at the British Museum, London, also with the skimpiest of loincloths. The “naked crucifix” to which Gregory of Tours (d. 594) referred in his writing may have been a truly, or at least effectively, naked figure as well, because he had it covered with a veil; Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, 2, p. 91; Harald Keller, “Zur Entstehung der sakralen Vollskulp-

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has been interpreted in very literal terms, certainly in modern times, as either a clothed figure or as a “nearly nude” one.61 On another level, however, the wearing of the loincloth can represent physical nakedness and, more importantly, the theological concept of the nakedness of Christ. While the loincloth is considered a garment, certainly in some parts of the world, it was not regarded as such in medieval Europe where strict dress codes dictated socially appropriate clothing. The practice of the flagellants of mid-thirteenth-century Italy, for example, who for the sake of penance wore only a loincloth or similar low-slung garment below a bare torso in imitation of Christ, flagrantly transgressed contemporary standards of dress: effectively the participants were naked.62 The loincloth can also signify nakedness, and more specifically the naked Christ, in the sense that it was used to cover a man who had been stripped of his own clothing. That is, all that was his had been taken from him so that he was left naked, or totally without possessions, the very idea that underlay the concept of poverty so fundamental to the thinking of St. Francis and thus to the Observant reform. The latter interpretation, which resonates in the writings of the Franciscans, is reinforced by the account of St. John in particular, which states that, in addition to dividing up the garments of Christ, the soldiers cast lots for his “seamless undergarment.”63 Nothing is said in John or the other gospels, however, about whether Christ was hung totally naked on the cross or given some other form of covering. Only the apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus in the fourthcentury Acts of Pilate states that Christ was girded in linen, but long before that time Church fathers had described Christ as naked on the

tur in der ottonischen Zeit,” in Festschrift für Hans Jantzen (Berlin, 1951); Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300 (New Haven, 1990), p. 267, n. 35. 61 A. Kazhdan and A. Maguire, “Byzantine Hagiographic Texts as Sources on Art,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991), 11; Derbes, Picturing the Passion (see above, n. 40), pp. 30, 31, passim. 62 Gary Dickson, “The Flagellants of 1260 and the Crusades,” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 239. For a thirteenth-century image of the practice, see n. 41. 63 John 19.23. Presumably Jesus was stripped for the flogging that was ordered by Pilate, which would have been the customary procedure. Only the gospel of Matthew states specifically that he was stripped for his mocking (Matt. 27.28), but all imply that he was stripped in some fashion at his crucifixion by stating that the soldiers divided his garments. None, however, provides specific details about the nature of the clothing, sparse or otherwise, worn by Christ at the Crucifixion.

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cross.64 Still, even though a naked figure might have been historically more accurate, given the practice of the Romans and the implications of the words of St. John, decorum prevailed: after the earliest days, only rarely was Christ represented completely naked, and then only in late medieval images from northern Europe. Yet, unlike many modern viewers, at least some medieval and early Renaissance audiences appear to have correlated the loincloth with nakedness. The persistence of the idea of the reality—and indignity—of the nakedness of Christ is implied, for instance, in the late medieval legends that recount how the compassionate Virgin covered the exposed body of her son with her veil or mantle.65 The virtual nakedness of Christ is suggested too, in the late fourteenth-century Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden, where, according to the Virgin, Christ was given a small piece of cloth to tie around himself after she had seen him stripped of his garments.66 Furthermore, in spite of the physical decorum that was accorded visual images of the crucified Christ during the Early Christian and medieval periods, clergy and theologians from those same eras conceived of Christ as naked on the cross, and persisted in describing him as such in their writings. They must have understood the loincloth to represent nakedness too, therefore, in the images that surrounded them, and that often they themselves commissioned. In the late second century, for instance, the bishop Melito of Sardis described Christ as naked in his Homily on the Passion, and appears to have meant it very literally: O Strange murder, strange crime! The Master has been treated in unseemly fashion, his body naked, and not even deemed worthy of a 64 The gospel of Nicodemus states that Christ was “girt… with a linen cloth” during the mocking, thus providing textual justification for the depiction of the loincloth in the Passion scenes. “The Gospel of Nicodemus, or Acts of Pilate,” in The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. Montague Rhodes James (Oxford, 1924; repr., 1945), p. 104. 65 See, for example, the early fourteenth-century translation of a portion of the Meditationes Vita Christi by Robert Manning of Bourne, in which Mary wrapped Christ’s hips with her kerchief after seeing him naked on the cross. Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord, and the Hours of the Passion, ed. J. Meadows Cowper, E. E. T. S., o.s. 60 (London, 1875; repr., Millwood, NY, 1987), p. 20, lines 620, 623-624. Also, Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien (see above, n. 30), 2, pt. 2, p. 472; Marie Brisson, “An Unpublished Detail of the Iconography of the Passion in Le Chastel perilleux,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967), 398-401; and PseudoAnselm, Dialogus Beatae Mariae et Anselmi de passione Domini, 10, PL 159.282c, cited in Brisson, p. 399. 66 St. Bridget of Sweden, Revelations of St. Bridget, on the Life and Passion of Our Lord and the Life of His Blessed Mother (Fresno, 1957), pp. 59-60, 65.

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covering, that [his nakedness] might not be seen. Therefore the lights [of heaven] turned away, and the day darkened, that it might hide him who was stripped upon the cross, shrouding not the body of the Lord, but the eyes of men.67

The eleventh-century Byzantine philosopher and historian Michael Psellos urged his audience to see “Christ himself hanging naked upon the Tree” in his “Sermon on the Crucifixion,” which has been related to the early eleventh-century mosaic of the Crucifixion at Hosios Lukas in which Christ is portrayed in a loincloth.68 Bernard of Clairvaux referred to Christ as “disrobed” upon the cross, while St. Bridget described him more graphically as bound as naked “as he was born” to the pillar of the Flagellation and “standinge naked as he was born” at his crucifixion before he was given a cloth to cover “his priuai partis.”69 In the fourteenth-century Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ too, Christ is described as hanging “nakud vp-on the tre.”70 Perhaps more pertinent still for the motif of the slipknot found at Westminster and Albi and in Brittany are the descriptions of the naked Christ at the Flagellation and the Crucifixion that were used in the sermon “Histoire de la Passion de Jésus-Christ” by the famous Observant preacher Olivier Maillard: Christ was “tout nud, sans drap, ni linges (“completely nude, without cloth or linen”).”71 These are certainly the thoughts, if not the very words, that Henry VII, the Bretons, and the Albigeois heard from the popular friar, who visited Henry VII 67 Campbell Bonner, ed., The Homily on the Passion by Melito Bishop of Sardis with Some Fragments of the Apocryphal Ezekiel, Studies and Documents, vol. 12 (London, 1940), p. 179. Italics added. 68 Elizabeth A. Fisher, “Image and Ekphrasis in Michael Psellos’ Sermon on the Crucifixion,” Byzantinoslavica 55 (1994), 47, 51; P. Gautier, “Un discours inédit de Michel Psellos sur la crucifixion,” Revue des études byzantines 49 (1991), 5-66, cited in Derbes, Imaging the Passion (see above, n. 40), p. 30. Psellos described Christ simply as naked without further explanation or qualification. 69 Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux: Selections from His Letters, Meditations, Sermons, Hymns, and Other Writings, trans. Horatio Grimley (Cambridge, 1910), p. 264; Anthony Butkovich, Revelations: Saint Birgitta of Sweden (Los Angeles, 1972), pp. 36, 43, 48. St. Bridget described Christ as totally naked at the Flagellation elsewhere, also. See, for instance, St. Bridget of Sweden, The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden, ed. Roger Ellis, 1 (London, 1987), p. 20; Johannes Jørgeson, Saint Bridget of Sweden, trans. Ingeborg Lund (London, 1954), p. 262; St. Bridget of Sweden, The Revelations of Saint Birgetta, Edited from the Garrett Manuscript, Princeton University Library Deposit 1397, ed. William Patterson Cumming, E. E. T. S., o.s., 178 (London, 1929), p. 98. 70 Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, ed. Charlotte d’Evelyn, E. E. T. S., o.s., 158 (London, 1921), line 1517. See also lines 1380 and 1387. 71 Olivier Maillard, “Histoire de la Passion de Jésus-Christ,” Anciens monuments de l’historie et de la langue françaises 1 (Geneva, 1976), 46, 53.

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in England on several occasions between 1498 and 1501 and preached repeatedly in Albi and in his native Brittany.72 The concept of the naked Christ was reiterated and reinforced too, for Henry VII by the writings and sermons of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and confessor to the king’s mother Lady Margaret Beaufort. Fisher, who was highly esteemed by Henry VII, often preached before him, and appears to have played an influential role in the conception of the imagery of the king’s Lady Chapel at Westminster,73 was explicit in his description of the naked Christ, and the purpose of his nakedness: …for then the death of the Crosse was the most shamefull maner of death, that was put to any villaine… And he was hanged ther naked & betwéen two théeues as though he were a prince and captaine of misdoers. …O thou Christian soule, Christ Iesus the sonne of God tooke vpon him al this shame, for thy loue, to [th]e entent that if thou wilt amend thy life, and forsake thy sin and do true penance, thou shalt by his shame be deliuered fro[m] al shame. His shame shall hide thy sins. Hée was there naked and spoyled of all his cloathes, to the intent [tha]t thou shouldest be couered under his mantle fro[m] thy shame.74

Similarly, according to the Imitatio Christi, attributed at the time to Jean Gerson but now to Thomas à Kempis and translated into English 72 Maillard visited England in the winter of 1500-1501, and the court of Henry VII during the week of Christmas, when the king sent to the Observant convent at Greenwich for him. The “ecclesiastic, a great preacher, and a visitor of the Order of St. Francis” who, according to a Spanish envoy, consulted with Henry VII in the summer of 1498 “respecting the affairs of Brittany” most likely was Maillard, too. PRO E101/415/3, ff. 39v, 42; Calendar of Letters, Dispatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere, vol. 1, Henry VII, 1485-1509, ed. G.A. Bergenroth (London, 1862; repr. Nendeln, 1969), p. 169, no. 210. Keith Brown suggested Maillard was in England in the summer of 1498 and again in 1501, based on two entries in the king’s account books that do not mention him specifically or otherwise identify him and are not sufficient in themselves to do so. Keith Brown, “The Franciscan Observants in England 1482-1559” (Ph.D. Diss., Oxford University, 1986), p. 49; PRO E101/414/16, fol. 24v and PRO E101/415/3, fol. 55v. Maillard preached at Albi at least twice, once in September 1494 when he participated together with Louis d’Amboise in the translation of the relics to the cathedral, and again in 1498; Archives Départementales du Tarn, Albi, AA 4, fol. 22v; AA 4, f. 24-28; H. 828, fols. 89-89r. Maillard served as Vicar Provincial of Aquitaine from 1484 to 1487 and 1496 to 1499 and as Vicar-General of the Transalpine Chapter in 1487-90, 1493-96, and 1499-1502. 73 Virginia K. Henderson, “In the King’s Image: The Chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey” (Ph.D. Diss., Emory University, 1998), pp. 269-279. 74 John Fisher, A Sermon verie fruitfull, godly, and learned, vpon thys sentence of the Prophet Ezechiell, Lamentationes, Carmen, et vae, pp. 388-424, in John Fisher, The English Works of John Fisher, ed. John E.B. Mayor, E. E. T. S., e.s., 27 (London, 1876; repr. Bungay, UK, 1935), pp. 416-417. Italics added.

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for the first time by Lady Margaret, Christ offered his “naked body for thy synnes.”75 St. Jerome (340?-420) spoke of the nakedness of Christ too, and equated it directly with evangelical poverty, ideas that were expressed in four of his letters. His concepts, like those of St. Francis, were based on Matt. 19.21: “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” To defend the Franciscan vow of poverty, Bonaventure, in turn, cited the dictums of Jerome in his Apologia pauperum: “naked I will follow the naked cross:” (nudam crucem nudus sequar) and “naked to follow the naked Christ” (nudum Christum nudus sequere).76 Whether early churchmen were visualizing a truly naked figure or one wrapped in a loincloth as they wrote their words is impossible to say, but they continued to describe Christ as naked over the centuries, however literal or metaphorical their intentions were, while artists depicted him in a loincloth. The loincloth, therefore, must have represented the concept of nakedness to at least some of its audiences. Certainly the scantiness of the opaque loincloths that gird the figure of Christ on the tenth-century reliquary of the Sancta Sanctorum from Constantinople, for example, and on several thirteenth-century cruci75

Lady Margaret translated the fourth book of the Imitatio Christi herself, which contains the phrase cited, and underwrote the translation of the first three books by William Atkynson, which were published together in 1504 by Richard Pynson. Thomas à Kempis, A full deuoute & gosteley treatyse of ye Imytacion & folowynge ye blessyd lyfe of our most merciful sauiour cryst: compyled in Laten by the right worshypfull doctor, master Iohn Gerson, & translate into englissh the yere of oure lorde .M.d.ii. by mayster wyllyam atkynson, doctor of diuynyte, at ye speciall request & commaundement of ye full excellent pryncesse, Margarete, moder to our souerayne lorde Kynge Henry the .vii, and Countesse of Rychemount & Derby; Here beginneth the forthe boke of the folowynge Iesu cryst & of the most excellent prynces, Margaret, moder vnto our souereine lorde, kinge Henry the .vii., Countes of Rychemont and Derby, And by the same Prynces it was translated out of Frenche into Englysshe, in fourme & maner ensuynge, The yere of our lorde god M.D.iiii. In The Earliest English Translation of the First Three Books of the De Imitatione Christi,…Also The Earliest Printed Translation of the Whole Work from a Copy in the British Museum, ed. John K. Ingram, E.E.T.S., e. s., 63 (London, 1893), p. 270. The E.E.T.S. edition is reproduced from a later copy of Pynson’s original edition that was printed by Wynkyn de Worde. Pynson reprinted the treatise in 1517, while Wynkyn de Worde published editions in circa 1511, 1519/21, and 1528. 76 Habig, St. Francis of Assisi (see above, n. 39), p. 31; Jean Châtillon, “Nudum Christum nudus sequere: Note sur les origines et la signification du thème de la nudité spirituelle dans les écrits de saint Bonaventure,” in Bonaventure 1274-1974 (Rome, 1974), pp. 719-724; M.D. Lambert, Franciscan Poverty: The Doctrine of the Absolute Poverty of Christ and the Apostles in the Franciscan Order 1210-1323 (London, 1961), p. 62.

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fixes is equally suggestive of nakedness.77 Read less literally, however, other opaque loincloths, even though more generously depicted, can be seen to represent the idea of nakedness, as well, both socially and theoretically in the sense of a man deprived of his possessions.78 More significantly, at the very time that Bonaventure described the Lord as naked on the cross in his treatises, which date from the 1260s until his death in 1274, Christ was depicted in a loincloth, sometimes opaque and other times transparent, in works of art that were made specifically for the Franciscans. Additionally, characteristically the loincloth itself was tied at its center by a slipknot, a practice that Italian masters appear to have adopted from Byzantine prototypes.79 In his treatise The Holiness of Life, for instance, Bonaventure urged the friars who had taken the vow of poverty “to consider for a moment how poor the Lord of All was made for your sakes” and to look at the nakedness and poverty of Christ as he hung dying: “His executioners stripped and robbed Him of everything…Think of His poverty as He hangs on the cross.”80 In the Tree of Life he described Christ as “dispoiled” repeatedly and “stripped of his clothes.”81 Bonaventure addressed the idea of the nakedness of Christ more explicitly though in his Apologia pauperum, where, drawing upon the words of St. Jerome, he expressly related nakedness to poverty. Christ “had not

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Wooden reliquary box from the Sancta Sanctorum, Museo Cristiano, The Vatican, illustrated in A. Kazhdan and H. Maquire, “Byzantine Hagiographical Texts as Sources on Art,” fig. 36. 78 Derbes associated the translucent loincloth with a nude Christ and argued that it would have been understood in that way in Byzantium and later in Tuscany, especially among the Franciscans. At the same time, however, she also referred to a figure clad in a transparent loincloth as “nearly nude,” thus clouding her thesis. Her argument is couched primarily in physical and visual terms associated with the humanity of Christ, rather than metaphorically with the concept of a man stripped of his own possessions, that is, a naked Christ, whether depicted partially clothed or not in a more or less transparent loincloth. Luciano Belliosi, I think incorrectly, rejected Derbes’s theory altogether. Derbes, Picturing the Passion (see above, n. 40), p. 30; Luciano Belliosi, Cimabue, trans. Alexandra Bonfante-Warren, Frank Dabell, and Jay Hyams (New York, 1998), p. 99. 79 Ibid., p. 49. The motif appeared in northern Europe as early as the ninth century in Carolingian work and may have carried the same connotations of nakedness. See, for example, the upper cover of the Lindau Gospels, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 1, c. 870, and the Te Igitur of the Coronation Sacramentary of Charles the Bald, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 1141, fol. 6v. 80 Bonaventure, The Holiness of Life, being St. Bonaventure’s Treatise De perfectione vite ad sorores, ed. Fr. Wilfrid, trans. Laurence Costello (St. Louis, 1928), p. 26. 81 Bonaventure, Works of Bonaventure, trans. de Vinck (see above, n. 21), 1: 123.

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wherewith to cover His nakedness,”82 and because “He desired to end His life in the nakedness of absolute poverty, He chose to hang unclothed upon the cross.”83 At about the same time that these words were written and similar thoughts were entertained by many Franciscans, Christ was portrayed in an opaque loincloth that was secured by a prominent slipknot on the cross painted by Enrico di Tedice for the Clares at San Martino in Pisa, circa 1245-55. Similarly, the opaque loincloth and slipknot were used in the crucifix panel of a diptych of Santa Chiara at Lucca, circa 1255-65, on the cross painted by Coppo di Marcovaldo for Santa Chiara at San Gimignano, circa 1261, and on the anonymous crucifix of Santa Chiari at Assisi, circa 1260-70.84 It was at least a decade later, however, before Christ was depicted in a transparent loincloth—again held in place by a prominent slipknot—as he was, for example, in the now damaged crucifix painted by Cimabue for the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce in Florence, circa 1280-85, and in the crucifix painted by the Badia a Isola Master for San Francesco in Grossetto, circa 128085.85 Surely, given the great influence of Bonaventure and his treatises, 82

Ibid., 4: 131. Ibid., 4: 133. 84 Illustrated in La Pittura in Italia: Il Duecento et il Trecento (Milan, 1986), 1, p. 239, plate 363; Derbes, Picturing the Passion (see above, n. 40), figs. 1, 6, and 8. A large slipknot secures the loincloth that barely covers Christ in another thirteenthcentury Crucifix from Lucca, now in the Yale University Gallery, New Haven, Jarves Collection, no. 1. See also the crucifix painted by the Master of Saint Francis for San Francesco al Prato, Perugia, 1272 (Galleria nazionale dell’Umbria), and the painted cross in the Uffizi, Florence (no. 434), c. 1240-45, which Derbes and Goffen identify as a Franciscan work. Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict (see above, n. 40), figs. 21 and 45, and p. 30; Derbes, Picturing the Passion, fig. 7 and pp. 30, 93, 170-171. Use of the central slipknot to secure the loincloth seems to appear consistently in Franciscan crucifixes, but certainly was not unique to their images. The difficulty lies in determining at what point or in which cases it became simply an aesthetically preferred motif transmitted by artists, which seems more the case in Italy than in the North. See, for example, the painted cross of San Domenico, Arezzo, c. 1270-1275, which is attributed to Cimabue, and other crosses by the Master of St. Francis, all of which employ the motif. A low-slung loincloth with a central slipknot was depicted on a crucifixion in a Franciscan missal as well, in the second half of the thirteenth century. See La Pittura in Italia, 2: fig. 733. For variations in the configuration of the loincloth and methods of securing it in medieval Italian paintings, see Evelyn Sandberg-Vanalà, La croce dipintà Italiana e l’iconographia della passione (Rome, 1985), pp. 110-111, figs. 75 and 76. 85 Illustrated in Derbes, Picturing the Passion, fig. 11; Bellosi, Cimabue (see above, n. 19), p. 119; James H. Stubblebine, Duccio di Buoninsegna and His School (Princeton, 1979), fig. 161. While on one level a function of when a crucifix was painted, to judge by this sampling, the decision to use an opaque or transparent loincloth might have been influenced by the projected audience as well, more than by nuances of 83

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these images must have represented the naked Christ to informed audiences at that time. In all of them though, no matter how precariously low the loincloth was draped or how transparent or skimpy it was, significantly it is the slipknot that ultimately provides the decorous cover for Christ’s body. The nakedness of Christ and the sufferings of the Passion that are symbolized by the slipknot are described and explained by Bonaventure perhaps most vividly in his treatise The Mystical Vine, using the drama and evocative detail that increasingly characterized late medieval devotional works and images, especially in northern Europe. After describing Christ as seized, bound with rough rope, dragged, shoved, beaten, spit upon, ridiculed, mocked, and burdened with his cross, as cited above, he continued: “Our most loving Lord Jesus Christ is stripped of His clothes. Why? So that you may be able to see the ravages done to His most pure body.”86 This seems to be the point of many northern images of the naked Christ. In their effort to empathetically portray the humanity of Christ in scenes of the Passion, late medieval northern artists were far less inclined than their counterparts to the south to screen his naked body. Their images, on the other hand, which usually emphasized the suffering of Christ and functioned as devotional images intended to stir affective piety—sometimes so much so that the naked Christ was effectively “clothed” in blood—were less anatomically detailed than those of the Italians.87 The image of the truly naked body of Christ afflicted all over by wounds, for example, that is depicted, however discreetly, in the illuminations of the Flagellation, Christ Nailed to the Cross, and the Crucifixion of the Holkham Bible Picture Book, circa 1320-30, provides an uncanny parallel to Bonaventure’s words from The Mystical Vine.88 In the meaning. Crucifixes with transparent loincloths seem to have belonged only to the convents of friars while the loincloths of those belonging to the Clares are consistently opaque. 86 Bonaventure, Works of Bonaventure, trans. de Vinck, 1: 164. 87 Images of the naked Christ, which generally appear in devotional images intended to stir an empathetic response in accord with affective piety, are not as uncommon as some scholars have suggested, certainly with respect to northern art. Hamburger, Rothschild Chronicles (see above, n. 60), p. 73; Richard C. Trexler, “Gendering Christ Crucified,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), p. 110. 88 BL Additional MS 47682, fols. 29v, 30v, 31v, and 32, illustrated in W.O. Hassall, The Holkham Bible Picture Book, 2nd ed. (London, 1954), fols. 29v, 30v, 31v, and 32. On folio 32v, also a scene of the Crucifixion, the Virgin drapes a cloth around the loins of the wounded Christ. In Christ Nailed to the Cross, folio 31v, the executioners twist

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Flagellation of Christ by Wolfgang Katzheimer the Elder, circa 1485, not only is every inch of the naked body of Christ covered by wounds also, but the rope that secures his legs to the column is tied in a slipknot and a noose encircles his neck.89 The arm of one of his torturers, however, is placed conveniently to shield his genitalia, for he too wears no loincloth. Christ appears naked and wounded too, though less severely so, in the Crucifixion and Lamentation of the early fifteenthcentury Rohan Hours.90 A century earlier Christ was depicted naked as well, in the illumination from the Rothschild Canticles discussed above that sought to display his wounds and assert his victory over death. There, a totally naked Christ, who points to the wound in his side, links the living cross and the column of the Flagellation, to which his leg is tied once again in a slipknot; and perhaps even more significantly, in the woodcut Naked Christ on the Cross by Hans Burgkmaier, circa 1510, a physically more naturalistic, though not wounded, naked Christ is depicted clothed only in ropes that were secured to the cross by a slipknot (fig. 22).91 In the Sacrum Commercium, a treatise on Holy Poverty written a year after the death of St. Francis, the author described how the saint “gave himself to seeking . . . holy poverty…doubting nothing…fearing nothing…refusing no affliction to the body, so that at the last his desire should be granted him to attain unto her,” that is, to Poverty, “to whom the Lord had given the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.”92 “Unless though art naked,” that is without possessions, “thou shalt not be able to ascend unto her.”93 Poverty was an integral part of St. Francis’s understanding of the life of Christ, the very idea that is reprerope to stretch the body for nailing, another example of its use as an instrument of torture. In St. Bridget’s description also, the rope was used to stretch and affix the body; St. Bridget of Sweden, Revelations of St. Bridget (see above, n. 66), p. 60. 89 Illustrated in Ruth Mellinkoff, The Devil at Isenheim: Reflections of Popular Belief in Grünewald’s Altarpiece (Berkeley, 1988), fig. 41. 90 See The Rohan Master: A Book of Hours, introductions by Millard Meiss and Marcel Thomas, commentaries by Marcel Thomas (New York, 1973), fols. 10, 27, 41, 135, 214, 215, 216, 233v, plates 13, 33, 41, 57, 87, 89, 91, 120. In two other depictions of the Crucifixion, Christ wears a very transparent loincloth; fols. 223 and 237, plates 105 and 127. 91 For a discussion of this image, see Craig Harbison, “The Sexuality of Christ in the Early Sixteenth Century in Germany,” in A Tribute to Robert A. Koch: Studies in the Northern Renaissance (Princeton, 1994), pp. 69-81. 92 Sacrum Commercium: The Converse of Francis and His Sons with Holy Poverty, trans. [Rev. Canon] Rawnsley, text collated with Codex Casanatensis 3560 by Paul Sabatier (London, 1904), p. 39. 93 Ibid., p. 41.

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sented in the fourteenth-century allegorical painting of Saint Francis and Lady Poverty in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi (fig. 23). Usually interpreted as the marriage of St. Francis to Lady Poverty94 or the marriage of Christ to Poverty that St. Francis strove to imitate, it is particularly striking that the figures of Christ and Lady Poverty are essentially identical. The stature, the pose, and the tilt of the heads are the same: Christ is Poverty and Poverty is Christ. Significantly, Lady Poverty wears a ragged and much-patched tunic that is girded by a cord tied in a slipknot. Not only is the knot prominent and carefully detailed, but it is intentionally framed and conspicuously displayed on a large patch that mends her tattered garment. Clearly then, the slipknot signifies Poverty and the suffering of Christ, as well as the redemption that his bonds brought for mankind. Configured as the slipknot is at Assisi, it is the very motif that appears at Westminster and Albi. In the medieval conception of the social structure, what would appear to have been two incompatible worlds, those of the rich and the poor, worked in a paradoxically complementary and reciprocal way to serve the needs of both.95 The poor, or at least the worthy poor, were deemed the chosen people of God, for Christ had chosen to dwell among them. Their intercessory prayers, therefore, were regarded as the most efficacious. The rich, on the other hand, could offer charity in the form of alms to ease the suffering of the poor. The relationship, in theory at least, was symbiotic: the rich served the poor and the poor served the rich. This reciprocity was noted, for instance, by the early fourteenth-century Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa who preached that the poor were necessary to help those who helped them.96 Similarly, in the words of John Fisher, whose sermons were heard at the court of Henry VII two centuries later, “the ryche man oweth of 94 Poeschke, San Francesco in Assisi (Munich, 1985), pp. 106-107. For an interpretation of the painting as the marriage of Christ to the Church, see Renate Schumacher-Wolfgarten, “Dextrarum iunctio bei Giotto,” in Pietas: Festschrift für Bernhard Kötting, eds. Ernst Dassmann and K. Suso Frank, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 8 (Munich, 1980), pp. 584-593. 95 For discussions of the relationship of charity and poverty, see especially Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty, a History (Oxford, 1994), pp. 20-27, 35-44, 48; Carter Lindberg, Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor (Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 27-30. 96 William R. Lavin, “The Iconography of Charity Redux: The Origins of Two Little-Known Symbols for Amor proximi in Fifteenth-Century Italian Art,” FifteenthCentury Studies 20 (1993), 126.

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dutye to doo his mercy vpon the poore creature…for the poorer that a man be the more nede he hath to the ryche man.”97 The task was not so simple, however, for both sides of the equation required a sincere willingness to serve, in effect, a renunciation of self for the benefit of the other. The highly respected and popular Observant preacher St. Bernardino of Siena, who was critical of false charity and last-minute, death-bed giving, was quick to caution: “When you see a poor man, help him; succor him yourself, do not wait for somebody else to do it so that you need do nothing.”98 Maillard was at least as hard, if not harder, on the rich, whom he saw as fleecing the poor. It was not their greed and usurious practices that would condemn them though, but their failure to give alms. Like voluntary poverty, charity, willingly given, was nothing less than an expression of godly love. The Observant friars, who had chosen voluntarily to forego the more comfortable and often extravagant lifestyle of their conventual brethren, were counted among the most worthy of the poor. The wealthy, therefore, whose fundamental Christian duty was to provide aid to the poor, would have deemed them particularly deserving recipients of their charity, and received in return, so they would have thought, truly meaningful prayers for the remittance of their sins. The admiration that Henry VII appears to have held for the Observant friars throughout his twenty-four year reign and his devotion to their cause, even to the point of challenging the pope on their behalf,99 explains the presence of the slipknot on his tomb and in the Lady Chapel he built. His devotion to St. Francis and to the Observants is even more understandable though, given the fact that when he lived in exile in Brittany he was a landless and penniless young noble totally and precariously dependent upon the whims of the duke. Thus, Henry himself would have been counted among the poor, as they were defined in the Middle Ages, for he lived without those things that were appropriate to his estate.100

97 John Fisher, “Treatyse Concernynge…the Seuen Penytencyall Psalmes…Compyled…at the Exortacion and Sterynge of the Most Excellent Princesse Margarete Countesse of Rychemount and Derby,” in John Fisher, English Works, ed. John E.B. Mayor, p. 14. 98 Ada Harrison, ed., Examples of San Bernardino (London, 1926), p. 54. 99 Nicolas Glassberger, Chronica Fratis Nicolai Glassberger, ordini minorum observantium (Quaracchi, 1887), pp. 541-542. 100 For the medieval conception of poverty, see Geremek, Poverty (see above, n. 95), pp. 53, 60; Lindberg, Beyond Charity, pp. 19-22.

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Henry VII provided detailed indentures for his chantry chapel in the Lady Chapel and other charitable provisions that he established at Westminster, including an almshouse of thirteen poor men who were to pray for his soul. Significantly, the almsmen were to begin their day in the almshouse chapel by “calling to their myndes & remembraunce the passion of our Lord Jh[es]u.”101 From there, they were to proceed in a designated procession to the king’s chantry chapel for mass, where they would have been reminded of the Passion again by the slipknots they would have seen unavoidably as they processed by the chantry grille and entered the enclosure. When they knelt around the tomb within, as prescribed by the indentures, the slipknots would have appeared at their eye level once more, if visible only from the back, for the pavement of the tomb enclosure is raised above that of the Lady Chapel. At the end of the day in their own chapel at the almshouse, where surely there were slipknots also to serve as visual reminders, they were instructed specifically once again to call to mind the Passion, the focus of Henry VII’s personal devotion.102 The slipknot could stand alone as an independent visual motif precisely because it had the capacity to prick the mind of someone familiar with the image, causing him to recall the Passion and a host of thoughts related to it. A material fragment and mere trace of the Passion, it could function inclusively to sum up all its episodes. It was a metonym for both the Arma Christi and the whole of the Passion that could function mnemonically to evoke an empathetic response to Christ’s suffering and inspire meditation. It could suggest both the presence and absence of Christ, that is, his suffering, self-renunciation, and poverty, but also his delivery from the bonds and thus the salvation of mankind. Ultimately then, the slipknot alluded to God’s love and charitable gift of redemption. Appropriately, it was the form St. Francis adopted to serve as his “knotty corde,” which, according to the Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, signaled the steadfast love that in return “knetteth” the saint “to God above.”103 The qualities of simplicity and ordinariness that have obscured its recognition for later viewers conform most suitably to what the slipknot signified in 101

PRO C54/365, m. 15. PRO C54/365, m. 17. As it is represented on the grille of the king’s chantry chapel, the rope that is tied into the slipknots wraps around the tracery of the grillwork three-dimensionally so that it can be seen from within the chapel. 103 Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, ed. Charlotte d’Evelyn, p. 52, lines 1989-1992. 102

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the late Middle Ages, especially in the context of the Franciscans. While it was a singular and striking image, however, capable of focusing thoughts, inspiring inner vision, and evoking empathetic response, it could not sustain its effectiveness on its own in so abstract a form without the social group that constructed it. Indeed, the slipknot depended on the active participation of the beholder and therefore was effective only in so long as the group that imbued it with meaning continued to do so.104 With the onset of the Reformation, the absorption of the Observant movement into the mainstream of the Franciscan Order, and the suppression of the Observants in England in the 1530s, its significance as a memory tool and instrument of devotional practice passed into oblivion.105 With the loss of its context, and indeed its text, the once so resonant slipknot appears now as nothing more than an ordinary knot.

104 For the argument that meaning is imposed on an object rather than inherent to it, see in particular Carruthers, Craft of Thought (see above, n. 1), pp. 45-46. 105 For the papal resolution to the divisions within the Franciscan Order in 1517 and again in 1528, see Nimmo, Reform and Division (see above, n. 9), pp. 640-645.

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Dream and Vision in Shakespeare’s Plays

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DREAM AND VISION IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS David Bevington

Shakespeare seems to use dreams and visions in two ways, broadly speaking: one as a motif for reflecting meta-theatrically on the nature of drama itself as dreamlike, magical, and more than slightly mad, and the other as prognostication and unheeded warning. These two uses are strikingly unlike each other. I will explore the idea that the differences are largely generic, and that Shakespeare is drawn more to the meta-theatrical use of dreams in his comedies and in romantic tragedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra, whereas the more somber signification of dreams as otherworldly warning is more appropriate to English history plays and to a historically based tragedy like Julius Caesar. Then, I will suggest, we see Shakespeare returning with renewed fascination to the meta-theatrical interpretation of dreams and visions in his late romances. Much of the dreaming in A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes the form of nightmare for the young lovers who flee from Athens into the woods and are stranded there in the dark of night. We see that Shakespeare likes to write comedy in which the complications are unusually fraught with danger. Hermia repeatedly speaks of seeking out death; see, for example, 2.2.162. The young men would indeed come to fatal blows if Puck were not on hand to mislead them with his mimicking voices in the dark, keeping them safely apart. Puck talks of the forest as a place of ghosts and “Damnèd spirits” who, as suicides, have been buried at “crossways and floods,” presumably with stakes driven through their hearts (3.2.381-5). Shakespeare likes the frisson of impending disaster, perhaps because it makes the resolution of danger all the sweeter. Moreover, Shakespeare psychologizes the nightmares of the four lovers in a way that adds personal depth and meaning to their unsettling experience. Hermia’s being deserted by Lysander (when the love juice mistakenly causes him to fall in love with Helena) prompts a nightmare in which she supposes that a crawling serpent has eaten her heart away while Lysander “sat smiling at his cruel prey”

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(2.2.151-6).1 This dream seems not very difficult to interpret: it is not a prognostication, but a fantasied projection of her feelings of vulnerability. Helena too suffers from self-injuring fantasies: when the two young men grovel at her feet in competition for her love, she can only suppose that they are mocking her. Perhaps her undergoing this painful misery brings self-awareness at last, for when she and the other three awaken in the morning, all appears to be well. Their tribulations seem to them only a scary dream from which they awaken into better self-understanding. “Are you sure / That we are awake?” Demetrius asks the others. “It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream” (4.1.1913). What has happened to them seems so unreal that they have difficulty distinguishing dream from daytime, as we all do when we awaken from a dream. At the same time, the dreamwork appears to be healing. The young lovers are matured emotionally by having been exposed to a frightening picture of their own perverse instincts for self-destruction. Helena especially seems aware of how fragile and precious is the happiness she has found upon awakening: “I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own” (190-1). The story of Queen Titania’s dreamlike (and perhaps nightmarish) encounter with Bottom the weaver follows a similar parabolic curve of exposition, complication, and resolution, but here the story is one in which the battle of the sexes is settled in favor of the male. Titania has had the best of reasons for holding out against Oberon’s insistent demand that he have the changeling boy. This boy was the child of a mortal woman who served as a votaress in Titania’s order; the two were very close. Titania beautifully describes their loving relationship as one that was based on sharing the secrets of pregnancy and childbirth (2.1.121-37). These bonds are so sacred that Titania will not give up the boy, now that the mother has died. Does Oberon insist on having the boy because he feels jealous? As a male, he is excluded from the mysterious rites of womanhood that Titania and the boy’s mother have shared. Is he motivated too by a characteristically male impulse to control female unruliness, to put down a rebellion where he claims to be master? The parallels here to the conquest of Queen Hippolyta by Duke Theseus are suggestive. Men get to rule the roost.

1 See Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York, 1966). Quotations throughout are from David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed. (New York, 2009).


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Oberon’s triumph is evident most of all at the moment of Titania’s awakening from the spell that Oberon has cast upon her by means of the love juice. Under the influence of that dreamlike spell, she has been transformed into a creature quite unlike her usual self. No longer haughty and regal, she showers the ass-like Bottom with attentions, bidding her fairy attendants to bring him delicacies, to scratch where he itches, and to sing the two of them asleep. She winds Bottom in her arms as “doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle,” or as the “female ivy . . . Enrings the barky fingers of the elm” (4.1.1-43). As she freely confesses, she dotes on Bottom. This liaison is an exaggerated emblem of the epiphanic experience with which the play is so concerned: the coming together of the immortal and mortal worlds. It exposes to laughter what is so ineffably gross about our mortal nature. And indeed, when the spell is taken from Titania’s eyes, she sees at once how grotesquely and ludicrously opposite is Bottom’s nature from her own. “Oh, how mine eyes do loath his visage now!” she exclaims. She does not, however, venture to reproach her husband for having subjected her to this sexual humiliation. Perhaps she glances at Puck when she asks, “How came these things to pass?,” for she has long known Puck and his mischievous ways, but she offers no remonstrance. Oberon has taught her a lesson of wifely obedience, and has won from her the concession of turning over to him the changeling boy. “When I had at my pleasure taunted her,” Oberon reports to Puck, “And she in mild terms begged my patience, / I then did ask of her her changeling child, / Which straight she gave me” (4.1.56-78). The surrender is complete; Titania’s dream is one in which she learns to be an obedient wife. Bottom’s own dreamlike transformation is more pleasantly comic. Although he has been changed into an ass and then back again, and in the process has lost the company of his bewildered friends, he himself seems not to feel the slightest pain of humiliation. His friends worry that they have lost him for ever when he is “translated” (3.1.113-14), and that their opportunity to perform before the Duke and Duchess is also a casualty of their jarring forest experience, but Bottom knows only that he has had “a most rare vision,” a dream that is “past the wit of man to say what dream it was” (4.1.203-5). Although he does not say it in so many words, he has had an affair with the Queen of Fairies. He will get Peter Quince to immortalize the story in a ballad. A paradox appears to be at work: the young lovers, who suffered pangs of humiliation in the forest, awaken to a better understanding of their

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own human weaknesses and need for charitable forbearance; Bottom, for whom the forest was a romp, seems to have learned nothing about himself. He appears to be entirely content with who he is, and we see no reason to deny him that happiness. ‘Dream’ is of course a key word in the play and its title.2 What use do other characters make of dreaming? To Theseus, when he hears of the lovers’ strange adventures, dreaming is a kind of madness. Their stories are “more strange than true.” He is the play’s chief skeptic, unwilling to credit these “antique fables” and “fairy toys.” At the same time, he is most able to see the connection between dreaming and theatre. “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact,” he declares to Hippolyta, meaning that all three deal with the fantastic and “unreal.” The lunatic “sees more devils than vast hell can hold,” madly filling his brain with images of terror that ordinary mortals never even conceive. The lover “Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt,” infatuatedly supposing the dark-complected and gypsy-like wench whom he adores to be the nonpareil of feminine beauty. The poet is no less in the grip of a kind of madness that transforms reality into dream: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (5.1.1-18)

This frenzy is the “furor poeticus” of artistic inspiration, a frenzy of creation that writers from ancient times have claimed as the divinely sent gift bestowed mysteriously upon the the prophet or seer. The poet is the instrument into whom the divine afflatus breathes superhuman knowledge and power—the power of imagination and insight. The poet’s realm thus uniquely connects heaven and earth; his gift is to create images or shapes that do not exist in the mundane world. Through the poet, “airy nothing” and “forms of things unknown” achieve a kind of substance in art. Why does Shakespeare choose to celebrate the genius of his own dramatic art in the utterances of one who is so openly skeptical of the 2 See David Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream (New Haven, 1966), and René Girard, “Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, 1979).


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whole business and who nonetheless describes it so well? In part, perhaps, because Theseus is uniquely able to be an objective witness. As the central figure of the play’s framing plot, appearing at its beginning and end, he never experiences the magic of the forest. His only venture into the forest’s bounds is at dawn, as the lovers awaken from their dream; Theseus goes to the forest with his entourage to hunt. His conversation with Hippolyta is all about his splendid hounds, in full cry as they pursue the game. The image is perfect: Theseus is one who owns the forest, invading and colonizing it for his own patrician purposes. Historically, in England, the word “forest” connoted a tract of partly wooded land owned by the sovereign and used by him for the hunting of game; the Forest of Arden, near to Shakespeare’s birthplace, was just such a royal preserve. The location of most of the action in A Midsummer is both a “wood” and a “forest” (as at 2.2.72, for example), and, when Theseus goes hunting, he calls upon the assistance of his “forester” (4.1.102). The forest’s strange secrets are never revealed to Theseus. He does not experience what Northrop Frye aptly describes as the imaginative journey to the “green world” of Shakespearean comedy, where the realities of everyday living are transformed into an artistic vision. Queen Hippolyta, even though she stays with Theseus and thus does not undergo the imaginative and sometimes harrowing journey of the young lovers, believes in the “truth” of their transformative experience; she is attuned to the magic of their story in a way that Theseus is not. Seeing how their minds are so “transfigured” by what they have undergone, she accepts that their story “More witnesseth than fancy’s images,” that is, testifies to something essentially true. Their story, she insists, “grows to something of great constancy,” all the more wondrous because it is both strange and “admirable”—i.e., a source of wonder (5.1.23-7). Even in the courtly figures of the framing plot, then, the “truth” of the story told in Shakespeare’s play is a subject of debate. Are the fairies “real?” Shakespeare seems to delight in teasing us with this question, for it is a question about the kind of dramatic art he writes. In one sense, the fairies are fictional. They are parts to be played by actors. Yet since all the characters in A Midsummer are similarly fictional, we have yet to sort out the question of whether the fairies are fictional in a special sense. Theseus evidently thinks they are. Shakespeare is certainly drawing on legends about Pucks or leprechauns who play mischievous pranks, about briers and thorns that

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snatch at passers-by as though animated by a desire to hinder, about ghosts that wander in churchyards, and all the rest. Are we to “believe” in such legends? In Shakespeare’s day, belief in fairies was widespread, but was also the subject of fervent controversy, especially among some theologians and learned writers (including, a short time later, King James I) who were anxious to combat what they regarded as the dangerous superstition of demonology. In varied forms, the controversy lives on in our modern world. Shakespeare seems to be interested less in the issue of demonology than in what the question of fairydom has to say about dramatic representation. By choosing a story that deals in the improbable and the fantastic, he challenges us to examine what we mean by “belief” when we respond to his play. In one crucial sense, the fairies of A Midsummer are unquestionably “real”: they exist in our imaginations as shaped by Shakespeare’s poetic art, and thus are immortal. They will be remembered when all of us are long forgotten. They are immortal in the very sense that Plato describes when he talks about ideal forms: just as each individual being embodies an idea that will be eternally recreated through the process of generation, even so the invented characters of Shakespeare’s play will live on forever when the actors, the individual performance or reading, and Shakespeare himself are no longer among the living. The artisans’ performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” engages delightfully with this idea. It is unquestionably a bad play, but it is a play nonetheless. To Theseus, the raissonneur of A Midsummer, plays are all alike in one crucial respect. When Hippolyta complains of “Pyramus and Thisbe” that “This is the silliest stuff that e’er I heard,” Theseus offers a defense that sounds rather like Shakespeare’s defense of his own art: “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them” (5.1.209-11). All plays are only shadows, that is, unsubstantial representations and approximations that will vanish once the play is over. Perhaps we can hear in this speech a modesty that is characteristic of Shakespeare, apologizing for the inadequacy of dramatic representation even as he simultaneously asks us as audience to supply what is missing with our imaginations. Plato mistrusts poetry because it tells untruths; Shakespeare embraces illusion. Theseus is resolved to hear and see “Pyramus and Thisbe” in a generous spirit of finding and amplifying what is potentially good in it. “Never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it,” he admonishes his courtiers. “Our sport shall be to take what they


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mistake,” that is, our pleasure as spectators will be to receive in the proper spirit what the actors intend, not what they actually perform (82-90). “Pyramus and Thisbe” means well. However lamentable in its inappropriately comic touches, it tells a tragic tale that mirrors the plot of A Midsummer. It explores in a tragic vein the very tribulations that in A Midsummer are cheerfully resolved: parental opposition to romantic love, unlucky timing, a dangerous forest inhabited by wild creatures, misunderstood communication leading to disaster. Presumably the young lovers onstage, watching “Pyramus and Thisbe,” can see that, were it not for the grace of some forgiving comic spirit that has saved them from their worst selves, their plight might well have been that of the doomed lovers. Comedy and tragedy are separated by a hair-thin line of difference. “Pyramus and Thisbe” celebrates, no less than the larger play of which it is a part, the exquisite sense of young love doing battle with a hostile and uncaring world. Shakespeare gives to Oberon and Puck the last words of A Midsummer. They come onstage as the happily married couples end their watching the performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” and betake themselves to bed. The play is over, so far as the mortals are concerned. They have never seen the fairies, of course; when Puck and Oberon wander freely among the lovers in the earlier acts, the two of them are “invisible,” meaning simply that they tell us they are so. “I am invisible,” declares Oberon, “And I will overhear their conference” (2.1.1867). One cannot imagine a more perfect demonstration of what Theseus means when he says that our imaginations must “mend” dramatic mimesis. Oberon’s simply saying that he is invisible makes it so; we accept in the theatre that he cannot be seen by the mortals, even though we perceive the fairies as clearly as we do the others, and understand that all are played by actors. This stage trick confers on us a kind of omniscience; we are godlike, knowing more than do the mortals, knowing even at times more than the fairies themselves.3 This is particularly true when we see Oberon and Puck mistaken into thinking that Lysander is Demetrius and thus needing the love juice on his eyes to restore his love for Helena. We are the gods of the play.

3 See Roger Warren, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Text and Performance (London, 1983), and Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the Theatre (Iowa City, 1997).

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Appropriately, then, we share with Oberon, Titania, and Puck a moment after the play itself is over. If Theseus and Hippolyta preside over the framing or “over-plot” of A Midsummer, then the fairies now officiate at a still higher level of abstraction in the theatre. They know all about, and indeed have controlled, the events of the human story in such a way that those human participants have been entirely unaware of the fairies’ existence. Even this last process of framing proceeds by degrees. First, Oberon and Titania, with their trains, sing and dance to bless the palace of Theseus, expressing through music and dance movement the new harmony that the King and Queen of Fairies have achieved, and, through that harmony, a promise of happiness for the mortals under their “invisible” sway. Oberon offers assurance that the marrying couples will be fortunate in their progeny, with no danger of mole, harelip, or any such “mark prodigious” that the fairies can certainly inflict on any mortals who are so rash as to displease the fairies. Are we, as audience, so rash as not to believe in these fairies? If so, better watch out! Oberon thus playfully warns us to accede to the magical spirit of Shakespeare’s play or else stand in immediate danger of the fairies’ wrath. The tone is playful because of the insistent reminders that we are watching a dramatic representation, an imitation of an action. As the last stage of this progressive framing, Puck remains alone onstage to deliver the play’s epilogue. Though it is not named as such, it is an epilogue (like Prospero’s in The Tempest or Rosalind’s in As You Like It) by virtue of his dropping his stage persona and stepping outside the play’s fictional world. He speaks to us directly as “Gentles,” brazenly asking for our applause (“Give me your hands”) and apologizing for any inadequacies in what we have just seen: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear (5.1.418-21).

“We shadows” is gracefully ambivalent. It points to the fairies themselves, for whom the word is apt: Puck calls Oberon “King of Shadows” at 3.2.347. It embraces all the characters in the play, who are shadows in the sense of being theatrical representations with no existence outside the bounds of the dramatic fiction. It embraces the actors, since it is on their behalf that Puck offers his apology. And why not include the dramatist as well, as a member of the acting company? No less


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importantly, this epilogue brings everything to a close by emphasizing that the inadequacies of dramatic representation must be “mended” by the spectators themselves, by their imaginations. Puck insistently reiterates this idea thrice in his short speech: “all is mended,” “we will mend,” “We will make amends.” A Midsummer, as Puck insists, is a “weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream.” But then so is life itself. The spectators, by attending this play, have “slumbered here / While these visions did appear.” Playgoing is like sleeping; the play itself is a dream; our experience of it is like having a dream. With Shakespeare’s script at our disposal, the dream becomes our dream as we watch and read. Like any dream, it seems evanescent; when it is over, it is no longer there, and we grasp at it for interpretation as it fades into day-to-day reality. As Keats says, at the end of his “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?” Sleep, dream, poetry, drama, life itself— no wonder that Shakespeare is able, like Keats’s Grecian urn, to “tease us out of thought / As doth eternity.” The idea of the play as a dream is vividly illustrated in The Taming of the Shrew.4 Rightly understood, the entire action involving Kate and Petruchio, Bianca, Lucentio, Baptista Minola, and the rest is little more than the dream of a pathetic tinker named Christopher Sly. The practical joke played on this destitute alcoholic is to put him in a lord’s bed, surround him with attentive servants, and thereby persuade him that he is a recovered amnesiac subject to imaginings, “Even as a flatt’ring dream or worthless fancy” (Induction 1, 43). The servants are instructed by their master to “Persuade him that he hath been lunatic, / And when he says he is, say that he dreams, / For he is nothing but a mighty lord” (62-4). Once again, Shakespeare associates dreams with madness and with playacting. The device works, leaving Sly in understandable uncertainty as to what is reality and what is not. “Do I dream?” he wonders. “Or have I dreamed till now?” (Induction 2, 69). Being “loath to fall into [his] dreams again,” Sly agrees to sit over the stage and watch a play. He falls asleep, and in Shakespeare’s version at least has nothing to say as the play ends, but he is still, in his uneducated way, a stand-in for us as audience. As in A Midsummer, to see a play is to dream, and to write a play is to indulge in a kind of mad fantasy. Taming is often performed without the Induction, but at the 4

See Sears Jayne, “The Dreaming in The Shrew,” Shakespeare Quarterly 17 (1966), 41-56.

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considerable cost of losing a quintessentially Shakespearean perspective on dreaming and poetry. In Romeo and Juliet, almost exactly contemporaneous with A Midsummer (i.e., 1594-6 or thereabouts), we hear yet another disquisition on dreams that bears a resemblance to what Theseus says about lovers, madmen, and poets.5 Mercutio is, like Theseus, worldly wise, sardonic, and skeptical. His “Queen Mab” speech is a tour de force of inventiveness, as he imagines a diminutive fairy queen purveying dreams to all sorts of people. Being no bigger than a semi-precious stone in an alderman’s ring, Queen Mab rides in a chariot made out of an empty hazelnut and driven by a grey-coated gnat, with wagon spokes made of spiders’ legs, a whip of cricket’s bone, and other details similarly reduced in proportion. Her dreams are teasing, even mischievous: courtiers dream of ceremonious bows and hoped-for preferment, lawyers of fees, ladies of kisses (which Mab plagues with blisters because the ladies are so addicted to candy), parsons of comfortable church livings, soldiers of military heroism, wenches of sexual adventure, and the like. These images are, Mercutio freely confesses, “the children of an idle brain, / Begot of nothing but vain fantasy” (1.4.53-98). He views love in much the same terms, as a wryly amusing mad obsession. This wonderful speech by Mercutio serves much the same purpose in Romeo and Juliet, then, as does Theseus’s disquisition in A Midsummer: it proposes a deep connection between dreams, magic, poetry, and frenzy in a play that treats fantasy, poetic idealism, and falling in love with high and tragic seriousness. Mercutio serves as a counterweight, a skeptical voice, setting up a debate as to whether dreams are to be believed. Even at his untimely death he remains the inveterate scoffer, jesting to his companions, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man” (3.1.96-7). Yet without his questioning voice the love story might seem overburdened with sentiment. Shakespeare loves a multiplicity of voices. When we turn to Shakespeare’s early history plays, we see that dreaming and vision are apt to be more ominously prognosticatory. Through dreams and visions, political and moral values are pursued with a polemical urgency that displaces any meta-theatrical ideas 5 See Coppélia Kahn, “Coming of Age in Verona,” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana, 1980), pp. 171-93, esp. 177, and Robert O. Evans, The Osier Cage: Rhetorical Devices in “Romeo and Juliet” (Lexington, 1966), p. 76. Both argue that Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech “deals in the real subject of the play” and that “the real people do dream of real things.”


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about dreaming as theatre and as poetry. Richard III is a good example. The Duke of Clarence’s dream in Act 1, scene 3 is ominously rich with meanings that he cannot interpret. Having dreamt that he was on board ship crossing the English Channel with his brother Gloucester (the future Richard III) and discussing with him the troubled course of England’s civil war, Clarence imagines Gloucester to have stumbled and to have pushed Clarence overboard when Clarence reached out to steady Gloucester in his stumbling (1.4.18-20). The dream goes on in vivid Gothic splendor to imagine first the sheer terror of drowning and then the fearful wonders of the deep: shipwrecks, treasure-heaps of gold, dead men’s skulls with gems glistening in their hollow sockets, and still more. Like all dreams, this one begs to be interpreted. We as audience know that Richard has plotted the assassination of his imprisoned brother, so that to us the stumbling and pushing seem deliberate, albeit cunningly concealed in the way that Gloucester habitually practices to deceive Clarence. The moment is also proleptic: Richard will indeed stumble, and he will push many enemies over the side. The dream is truer than Clarence knows. It also contains echoes of his own uneasy conscience, for he knows in his heart that he has incurred divine wrath by his many perjuries. Insofar as Richard is the scourge sent to even accounts for Clarence, the dream can be interpreted as symbolic of a cosmic reckoning. With a wonderfully appropriate irony, this conscience-troubled man turns on the murderers hired to kill him with an appeal to their own consciences. Clarence cannot save himself, but he can serve as a warning to others. Other characters as well misinterpret dreams or fail to heed their warnings.6 Lord Hastings, given notice by a messenger that Lord Stanley “did dream the boar did raze his helm,” disdains “the mockery of unquiet slumbers;” only when he has been arrested and sentenced extra-judicially to immediate execution does he come to realize that the menacing boar was a sign of Gloucester’s treachery and violence (3.2.26-7, 3.4.82-3). Hastings has chosen to ignore other signs as well, such as the stumbling of his horse as he rode toward his grim destiny in the Tower of London. Dreams are thus of a piece with other prognostications, especially the dire curses of Queen Margaret. Buckingham realizes too late that Margaret was right to warn him of “yonder dog” who, “when he fawns, he bites” (1.3.289-90). The Lady Anne sees all 6

See David Bevington, “‘Why Should Calamity Be Full of Words?’ The Efficacy of Cursing in Richard III,” Iowa State Journal of Research 56.1 (1981), 9-21.

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too well at last that her heart has “proved the subject of [her] own soul’s curse” by agreeing to become Gloucester’s wife after having pronounced a curse on any woman so madly foolish as to do so (4.1.74-6). Self-prophecy and the fulfillment of dreams are important structures for the play. Richard of Gloucester, once he has become Richard III, is alone among the major characters of the play in being fatally undone by bad dreams and the working of a bad conscience. All the other characters come to a sad and penitent realization that they have sinned and deserve their self-inflicted fates; Richard alone holds out against the very idea of conscience, and then at last is quite unmanned by it. Queen Margaret has predicted that his falling under the spell of a curse is to take the form of bad dreams: No sleep close up that deadly eye of thine, Unless it be while some tormenting dream Affrights thee with a hell of ugly devils! (1.3.225-7)

Richard scoffs at such predictions, but he is careful nonetheless to avoid the threats that they pose for him. The cursing, when it comes, is of the most dire sort imaginable: the curse of a mother on her son.7 As Richard prepares for the battle with the Earl of Richmond that will determine his fate, his mother catches up with him: Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse, Which in the day of battle tire thee more Than all the complete armor that thou wear’st! My prayers on the adverse party fight, And there the little souls of Edward’s children Whisper the spirits of thine enemies And promise them success and victory! (4.4.188-94)

And so it proves, for, on the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard and his nemesis Richmond are visited in their dreams by the ghosts of Richard’s many victims and former allies, all of whom turn first to Richard, promising to “sit heavy on [his] soul” in next day’s fight and then to Richmond, praying that good angels may guard his army. This is a dream sequence, one of the most elaborate in Shakespeare; Richard and Richmond are both asleep, on opposite 7 See Madonne M. Miner, “‘Neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen: The Roles of Women in Richard III,” in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana, 1980), pp. 35-55.


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sides of the stage. It is a nightmare for Richard and a promise of victory for Richmond. Richard starts up out of his nightmare in a cold sweat: Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds! Have mercy, Jesu!—Soft, I did but dream. O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! (5.3.177-9)

It is a remarkable moment. Richard has been dreaming of battle in a frenzy of anticipation that is so characteristic of an anxiety dream before such a big event. At the same time, he calls out on Jesus for the only time in the play. The dream has awakened his conscience, the very conscience that he has attempted to deny and that he now accuses of cowardice, much as the two murderers of Clarence in 1.3 spoke of conscience as cowardice. Shakespeare presents this denial as the skeptic’s way of refuting morality as mere superstition, as Edmund does in King Lear. In this instance, however, the clear implication is that Richard is desperately in the wrong. The visions he sees in his dream are ones he would like to wish away as phantoms, and we can certainly understand how visions of this sort would come to a man like Richard with so much blood on his hands; the dream has this psychological dimension. At the same time, the ghosts have appeared to Richmond as well, and their predictions about the battle are decisive. Their curses, and those of Richard’s mother, do appear to weigh Richard down in the fighting and ensure that Richmond will prevail. Under the political pressures of a drama celebrating the accession to power of Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather, the prophetic and efficacious power of dreaming takes on the quality of objective truth. Some other history plays and some tragedies present dreaming in a similarly prophetic way. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, is troubled by a dream in 2 Henry VI in which his staff of office is broken in twain by Cardinal Beaufort and on its two pieces are impaled the heads of the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Suffolk (1.2.25-31). Although his wife tries to persuade him that the dream could be interpreted to Humphrey’s advantage, he and the others all die in the course of the play.8 Calpurnia’s dream in Julius Caesar ought to be a plain warning to her husband Caesar to stay at home on the fateful Ides of March rather than venturing forth into the Capitol, but he will not listen to her, wilfully choosing instead to interpret the dream about Caesar’s blood flowing like a fountain in 8

See Wolfgang H. Clemen, “Anticipation and Foreboding in Shakespeare’s Early Histories,” Shakespeare Survey 6 (1953), 25-35.

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which many Romans smilingly bathe their hands as meaning (as Decius flatteringly proposes) that Rome is to suck reviving blood from great Caesar’s munificence (2.2.76-90).9 At Philippi, Brutus is visited by a “monstrous apparition” in the shape of the Ghost of Caesar, warning Brutus that he will see Caesar at Philippi (4.3.277-87). Brabantio, in Othello, disconsolately observes that the report he has just received from Iago and Roderigo of Desdemona’s elopement with Black Othello “is not unlike my dream” (1.1.146). Whether this dream is to be understood as prognosticatory or symptomatic of Brabantio’s ambivalent feelings about his daughter’s marriage is unclear. In Henry VIII, six white-robed personages in golden vizards appear in a solemn and beatific vision to the dying Katharine of Arragon, whereupon, “as it were by inspiration, she makes in her sleep signs of rejoicing, and holdeth up her hands to heaven” (4.2.82ff.). In Romeo and Juliet, which we have already considered in a meta-theatrical light, prophetic dreams also occur: Romeo reports in soliloquy, just before he receives the terrible news in Mantua of Juliet’s seeming death, that “I dreamt my lady came and found me dead— / Strange dreams, that gives a dead man leave to think!— / And breathed such life with kisses in my lips / That I revived and was an emperor’ (5.1.6-9). The dream anticipates the scene of their sad ending, with of course a crucial difference, that can be attributed to wish-fulfillment, or to a metaphorical reading in which the lovers are indeed to be immortalized in their deaths. Macbeth is subject to visions that promise him quibbling hopes of future greatness even as they vanish as though into thin air. Antony and Cleopatra makes use of dreams and visions in a way that is perhaps consistent with the phenomenon we need to look at last: Shakespeare’s return to a meta-theatrical reading of dreams in his late romances. Nowhere does Antony and Cleopatra stand more apart from Shakespeare’s other great tragedies than when Cleopatra reports to Dolabella that she has “dreamt there was an emperor Antony. / Oh, such another sleep, that I might see / But such another man!” (5.2.757). She speaks as though the whole story of the two aging lovers, in which so many things have gone disastrously wrong, is now refined and reinterpreted by her dreamwork. Antony is transmogrified into a deity: “His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck / A sun and moon.” His legs “bestrid the ocean,” like some huge colossus; his voice 9

See Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967).


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was as the music of the spheres to his friends and rattling thunder to his enemies. His bounty was autumn-like, having no winter in it, and “His delights / Were dolphinlike; they showed his back above / The elements they lived in” (78-89).10 Cleopatra’s vision of Antony is both erotic and majestical; he is both god and man. At the same time, the vision is unstable, evanescent, like the “cloud that’s dragonish” and vapor in the likeness of “a bear or lion” that, as Antony has said, “mock our eyes with air” (4.14.27). Moreover, the splendid fifth act of Antony and Cleopatra is suffused with images of theater that conjure up the experience of drama in meta-theatrical terms. Cleopatra imagines how, in a future dramatization of her story, “Some squeaking Cleopatra” will “boy my greatness / In the posture of a whore” (220-1) thereby calling the Jacobean audience’s attention to the fact that they are watching a boy actor perform the role. Cleopatra stages her suicide as a grand event: “Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have / Immortal longings in me” (280-1). She puts herself on display, as she had done earlier on her famous barge when she and Antony first met on the river of Cydnus. As she and Antony go down into political defeat before the relentless onslaught of Octavius Caesar, they triumph in a way that is possible only through the poetry of drama. The fifth act of Antony and Cleopatra is, above all, about what the magical and transcendent art of the dramatist can achieve in the face of worldly misfortune. Shakespeare casts this imaginary triumph in the form of a vision, a dream of greatness that lives on through poetry when the humans themselves who acted out the drama are consumed with dust. All four of the so-called late romances stage scenes of dreamlike vision—an emphasis in Shakespeare’s late art that is surely not coincidental. In Pericles, where most critics agree that the concluding scenes are the most plausibly Shakespearean, two such visions appear. In the first, the whole story of Marina strikes her father, whom she has restored to happiness, as a fantasy of dreamland. “Oh, stop there a little!” he exclaims. “This is the rarest dream that e’er dull sleep / Did mock sad fools withal” (5.1.165-7). His incredulity is understandable: whereas he thought Marina dead and buried, she narrates a marvelous account of a wicked Queen seeking to murder her and of her rescue by pirates. Pericles does not know if he is in fact awake or still dreaming. 10

See Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven, 1973).

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As in The Taming of the Shrew, the play itself becomes, in retrospect, a kind of dream.11 The second dream vision in Pericles follows immediately afterwards. Comforted by being reunited with his only daughter and by the strains of “heavenly music” he now hears as though they were the “music of the spheres,” Pericles falls into a sleep. It is a sleep both of emotional exhaustion and of divine purpose, for in his sleep Pericles sees a vision of the goddess Diana instructing him to travel swiftly from Mytilene to her temple at Ephesus (5.1.243-52). There, as bidden in his dream, he recites the story of the play and especially the seeming death of his wife, Thaisa, in giving birth to Marina on board ship. Yet Thaisa is not dead; she is there at Ephesus, as priestess of the temple, having been placed in that position by Cerimon, the magician who had coaxed her back to life when she washed ashore in her jewel-lined coffin. A dream vision thus provides a resolution and a structure for Pericles. Diana has been its presiding spirit; the entire dramatic action is seen finally as the working out of a narrative over which she has ultimate control and which Shakespeare has now narrated through the choric voice of Gower. Cymbeline’s dream vision is meta-theatrical in a similar way.12 Posthumus Leonatus, the guilt-ridden husband of Imogen, tries to throw his life away by changing sides in the fighting between the Britons and the invading Roman army, doffing the Italian clothes in which he has returned to Britain in order that may fight bravely on the British side, but then changing back into his Italian outfit so that he may be apprehended as an enemy by the successful British. Wishing only to die an expiatory death for having lost faith in his wife and having (he thinks) ordered her death, Posthumus is the quintessential tragicomic figure for whom a happy resolution seems impossible. Yet the god Jupiter will not have it so. As Posthumus sleeps in his prison cell, awaiting execution, “Solemn music” introduces into the theater “an apparition” of Posthumus’s father, mother, and two younger brothers, all of them pleading to Jupiter that Posthumus’s noble acts be allowed to atone for his sins. The god is appeased. Descending “in 11 See C.L. Barber, “‘Thou That Beget’st Him That Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969), 5967. 12 See Arthur Kirsch, “Cymbeline and Coterie Dramaturgy,” ELH 34 (1967), 285306.


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thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle,” Jupiter makes clear at last his mysterious plan for erring humanity: “Whom best I love, I cross.” He inflicts suffering most of all on those who are his chosen favorites. And why does he do so? “To make my gift, / The more delayed, the more delighted” (5.4.101-2). His purpose is to increase pleasure and happiness by delaying its fulfillment to the end of the story. Jupiter’s utterance embraces a familiar theological explanation of human suffering, as in the Book of Job, or the story of Jacob and Esau: the righteous are tested and then rewarded for their faith and perseverance. At the same time, Jupiter speaks in terms that describe the essential premise of tragicomedy. The joy of reunion is immeasurably enhanced in the theater by its having been delayed until the recipients have been made aware, through suffering, of how precious it is to receive a grace that is, in part at least, undeserved. Jupiter is the genius of a tragicomic providence in Cymbeline ensuring that all will ultimately be well. Modern productions of the play, in which the descent of Jupiter is often seen to be both spectacular and improbable, calling attention to itself as theater magic by its very flamboyance and artifice, underscores what is so meta-theatrical about this moment. The riddling tablet left on Posthumus’s chest as he lies asleep, with its talk of a lion’s whelp that will be embraced by a piece of tender air, seems deliberately hokey, made up as it is of teeth-gnashing puns on “Leonatus” (a lion’s whelp) and on “mollis aer,” “tender air,” as equivalent to “mulier” or “woman,” i.e., “wife.” Shakespeare seems to be reveling in the kind of theatrical improbability for which his successor at the King’s Men, John Fletcher, was becoming famous. We see here the kind of self-aware delight in the very artifice of theater that Arthur Kirsch describes so well in his Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives. “Dreams are toys,” opines Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale, as he stands nervously on the much-maligned seacoast of Bohemia with the babe Perdita in his arms. “Yet for this once, yea, superstitiously, / I will be squared by this” (3.3.38-40). Antigonus is talking about a vision or dream that he has had in which, as he describes it to us, the spirit of the dead Queen Hermione has appeared to him, bidding that he leave her poor babe Perdita in remote Bohemia. Antigonus is skeptical of the popular notion that “the spirits o’th’ dead / May walk again” (1516), and yet this particular dream is so convincing that he feels he must believe it. “Ne’er was dream / So like a waking,” he insists. “With shrieks” the spirit of Hermione “melted into air.” Moreover, events of

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the play confirm the prophetic truth of Hermione’s utterances. She has told Antigonus that for his part in this unhappy business he “ne’er shalt see / Thy wife Paulina more,” and, sure enough, Antigonus is promptly devoured by a bear. Later events also prove that Hermione’s instructions about where Antigonus is to leave the child are essential to the fulfillment of the play’s romantic plot. This remarkable scene is thus at once a seeming testimonial to the objective reality of Hermione’s death and a cunningly self-aware tissue of theatrical fabrications. Never elsewhere does Shakespeare deliberately deceive his spectators into believing that a character is dead when the character is in fact not dead. Never elsewhere does he find occasion to use a stage direction like “Exit pursued by a bear.”13 This dreamlike ambivalence anticipates the climactic moment in which the “statue” of Hermione comes back to life. Prior to that moment, dreams are nightmares in The Winter’s Tale, as when the deeply disturbed Leontes in Act 1 soliloquizes about the supposed infidelity of his wife: Affection, thy intention stabs the center. Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams—how can this be?— With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing. (1.2.138-42)

Leontes imagines a passion so strong that it partakes of the nature of dreams, making possible things only dreamt of, collaborating with unreality and imagined fantasies. At Hermione’s trial for adultery he reiterates the charge: to her protestation that her life “stands in the level of your dreams,” i.e., stands directly in danger from your imagined accusations, he fires back, “You actions are my dreams” (3.2.812). In the tragicomedy of A Winter’s Tale, all this is prologue to the finale. Paulina is the stand-in for the dramatist, using her “statue” of Hermione to stage a theatrical illusion that is deliberately ambiguous. Is this a statue that we see in the theater, or a living actress? The player undertaking the part needs to be skillful at being motionless for as long as possible. Does Hermione come to life? The meta-theatrical trick is possible and indeed necessary because it reflects an ambivalence in the narrative itself. Having been told that Hermione died, we and the observers onstage credit the statue’s coming to life with miraculous “wonder” (5.3.22). As Paulina instructs her awed listeners, “It is 13

See Charles Frey, Shakespeare’s Vast Romance: A Study of “The Winter’s Tale” (Columbia, MO, 1980).


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required / you do awake your faith” (94-5). Paulina insists that her powers are not “wicked,” but they do seem magical. At the same time, we understand that they are contrived, in much the way that theater manages its contrivances. Paulina has sequestered away Hermione, who did not really die any more than Thaisa died in Pericles; and now, after the passing of a whole generation, the time has come for her to reveal herself to her guilt-ridden husband. Theater is once again like a dream, leaving us in uncertainty as to whether what we have seen was some phantasm. Paradoxically, our awareness of theatrical illusion enhances the “reality” of the experience. “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep,” affirms Prospero in his memorable speech beginning “Our revels now are ended” (4.1.156-8). By drawing together dream, sleep, life itself, falling in love, theater, and the writing of plays, as Theseus did in A Midsummer, The Tempest brings to a close the full circle of Shakespeare’s artistic career. Not surprisingly, then, many of the characters in The Tempest think they must be dreaming. The Boatswain, in Act 5, reports wonderingly of the strange noises he and his fellow sailors heard in the night, whereupon, when they awaked, they beheld their storm-battered ship now fully rigged, and were then transported, “Even in a dream,” to Prospero’s cell (5.1.241). Miranda dimly remembers her infancy in Italy “rather like a dream than an assurance” (1.2.45). Ferdinand, when he first encounters Miranda and her father, and is prevented from using his sword by Prospero’s magic, observes wonderingly that “My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up” (1.2.490).14 The island is a place of dreams. Caliban, the inhabitant most attuned to the island’s strangeness, attests to this dreamlike quality when he and Stephano and Trinculo hear the “invisible” Ariel playing a tune on a tabor and pipe. The drunken butler and jester are terrified into feelings of anxiety, but Caliban has heard such melodies many times before: Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, 14 See Frank Kermode, William Shakespeare: The Final Plays (London, 1963), and Alvin B. Kernan, The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven, 1979).

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As Hamlet says, “To sleep, perchance to dream” (Hamlet, 3.1.66). Sleep and dreams awaken in many characters on the island of the Tempest the sensations of guilty conscience, of being watched and judged. This idea is presented farcically in the stage routines of the clowns, as when the “invisible” Ariel mimics the voice of Trinculo in such a way that Stephano thinks that it is Trinculo who keeps saying “Thou liest!” (3.2.61-81), but the motif of a dreamlike invisible conscience is also more seriously treated in the attempt of Antonio and Sebastian to murder King Alonso and the rest. Alonso and his entourage are suddenly afflicted by an overpowering need for sleep, and we know why, even though they do not: Ariel has induced sleepiness as a test of the villains. Sure enough, Antonio and Sebastian are about to assassinate their companions when Ariel intervenes. He acts as a kind of conscience or an overseeing deity that the Machiavellian villains scoff at but which is nonetheless vital to Prospero’s scheme of subjecting the Italians to a series of nightmarish visions. Alonso experiences his tribulations on the isle as a consciencepiercing dream, prompting him to reflect that his only son Ferdinand has drowned as a divine retaliation for Alonso’s own crimes against Prospero. When he and the other Italians are subjected to a lecture by the Harpy, Ariel, promising that the heavenly powers have not forgotten their sins, and when the Harpy then vanishes, along with the foodladen table that had been set before them, Alonso knows why the Harpy has spoken to him the name of Prospero: It did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i’th’ ooze is bedded; and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded, And with him there lie mudded. (3.3.99-102)

Alonso is “desperate.” Yet Prospero, as the stage magician of this play, aided by Ariel, has created these nightmarish illusions to drive Alonso not to despair and suicide but to penitent meditation on what he has done. Prompted by Ariel, Prospero eschews vengeance in favor of a curative process. Prospero is thus the genius of helpful and enabling dreams, just as he is the theatrical deviser of shows and pageants aimed at celebrating young love and marriage.


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Prospero’s masque in Act 4 is, as Ferdinand says, “a most majestic vision” (4.1.118). It is a vision not just in the ordinary sense of something splendid to behold, but also in the sense that it is visionary, evanescent, partaking of the divine. Like the theater, like life itself, this vision and its actors will vanish into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.151-6)

As he sums up his achievement as artist, Prospero uses the topos of theater as dream that has been a staple of Shakespeare’s own art throughout his career. It is, of course, a commonplace to see life as a dream, and also to see art as a dream, but perhaps no other theater artist has given the commonplace such coherence in shaping an artistic career.

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Dreams, Visions, and Delusions

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DREAMS, VISIONS, AND DELUSIONS: MADNESS IN SHAKESPEARE J. Harold Ellens

William Shakespeare was a master at plumbing the depths of the human psyche, all the while keeping his prose vibrant and entertaining, even humorful. Among his great variety of carefully crafted modes and moods of the human spirit, his most masterful often seem to be his scenes and characters of utter madness. There are many of them in his dramatic landscapes of the soul, and every one rings true. He knew whereof he spoke. He understood the contours and confections of insanity from inside out. I wish herein to set them forth in critical review, empathic to the characters and scenes, but most of all discerning of the inner world of the dramatis personae; and of the theatrical persona of the author that those characters reflect. Of course, it required no rocket scientist and no bard of Shakespearean stature to discover in every human life an exciting and unsolvable puzzle, bound up in an enigma, wrapped in a mystery. Were Shakespeare’s people mostly sad or mad, glad or scared? Lots of all of those moods and emotions populate his poetry, and frequently in the same person at the same time. Everyone knows of Hamlet and his progressive slide into paranoia and depression. Almost all of us feel ambivalent about his insanity; its causes seem obvious, its inevitability predictable, but is he not merely the victim of circumstance? Or does he simply feign such dysfunction? How else could he cope? What then of Othello and his consorts, Iago, Roderigo, Cassio and company. Who is the mad one there? Or Romeo and Juliet, are they unhinged by fate or infatuation in their slide down the slippery slope of doom? Macbeth, of course, and Lady Macbeth, in company of Banquo and Macduff: heroic in dimension, as the gods of the Niebelungen; or just plain crazy? One can go on to Lear, Polonius, Poor Yorick, and the others. What is of interest here is not merely to name or numerate them but to look into the manner in which Shakespeare so cleverly crafts the humanness of three of their number, as it slides subtly into the strange-

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ness so common among humans, yet so dreadful. What is the artful nature of his storied descriptions; what his diagnoses; does the characterization carry through authentically; how does he have them well and ill, crazy and profound, all at the same time, offering at once near divine revelations and the sputterings or obsessive logorrhea of the damned insane? Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, in her analysis of imagery in five of Shakespeare’s plays, declares that in general Shakespeare was naturally a man of his own moment as he viewed humanity, but on the issue of madness he showed “a comprehension far beyond his time.”1 His sensitive understanding of the influence of mind on body…put him nearest to modern expert opinion, and this is as marked in his early as his later work. Thus the whole story of the cause and development of madness in a brain over-strained with exasperation and anguish is sketched in the Comedy of Errors, fifteen years before the full portrait of it is drawn in King Lear… But apart from the great pictures of mind acting on body in such plays as King Lear and Macbeth, the detailed knowledge of how this interaction works peeps out in unexpected touches in the images, as when Lucrece laments, “To see the salve doth make the wound ache more (Romeo and Juliet 1.1.201),” or when Romeo points out the ill effects upon a sick man of urging him to make his will.2

In interest of time and space, let us look specifically at three cases only: Iago, King Lear, and Hamlet, as paradigmatic of Shakespeare’s incredible discernment of the nature and causes of insanity, as displayed in his magnificently crafted characters. There will be other occasions to deal with the rest of the panoply of sick and disturbed characters in Shakespeare. Othello was Shakespeare’s twenty ninth or thirtieth play, written when he was 40 years of age. It was first played at the Court Theatre in London on 1 November 1604. Parrott thinks that it “is in many ways Shakespeare’s masterpiece of construction in the realm of tragedy;” its characters and scenes the most authentic and believable of all the

1 Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (Cambridge, 1935). Subsequently published in paper back in Boston by Beacon Press in 1958. The New Statesman and Nation said of this volume at the time of its publication, “This is a monumental work without a single dull page.” The book assesses the imagery of Romeo and Juliet, A Winter’s Tale, Richard III, As You Like it, and Macbeth. See Chart I, pp. 410-411 for a summary of conclusions. 2 Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery, pp. 136-137.


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authors work.3 As tragic masterpieces of theater, we do well to rank Othello with Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth; and the tragic aspect in each is mainly in the travail of the human spirit that in every case comes near to madness, or in fact falls tumultuously over the precipice. All wrestle with the power of evil and the problem of suffering and pain in times of human extremity. None of Shakespeare’s plays sets the dramatic scene so quickly, upon the first appearance of actors on the stage, as does Othello. In Scene I, Iago already has three extended monologues in which he sets forth his full character as an unapologetic narcissist. He proclaims bombastically that he hates the Moor, deserves better promotions, and will manipulate and serve Othello only for his own private gains. To Roderigo’s protest that this is dishonest, he declares, I follow him to serve my turn upon him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters Cannot be truly follow’d… It is as sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago; In following him, I follow but myself; Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so, for my peculiar end;… I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at; I am not what I am. (1.1.41-44, 55-60, 64-65)

The playwright seems well acquainted with the pathologies of the mind in those who seem able to operate moderately well in life, serving highly focused private ends, but who are afflicted, nonetheless, with the inherent potential for self-defeat that leads in the end to disaster. Iago is narcissistic in his claims for himself, paranoid about not having been selected for preferment, impulsive in bragging to Roderigo of his evil designs upon the Moor’s affairs, situation-inappropriate in stalking Desdemona despite her father’s order that he stay away from her, and sure of the utter honesty of his consummate deceit. Iago is neither able to project himself into another person’s feeling world, nor stand outside himself and critique himself objectively, nor can he see that his “truth” is not in any sense calibrated with reality. Moreover, he seems all the while to be playing around the edges of a

3 Thomas Marc Parrott, Shakespeare, Twenty Three Plays and the Sonnets, With General Introduction, Special Introduction for Each Play, and Notes (New York, 1938), p. 62.

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chronic combination of depression and anxiety. All this in the first scene of less than three pages! It would be difficult to craft a character more quickly than Shakespeare did, who fits all the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder, a form of psychosis defined in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV), of the American Psychiatric Association. Iago’s pathology plays out progressively from there and sweeps with it into various degrees of insanity almost all the players moving on and off the stage. Scene II has Iago swiftly and sturdily marching further down the unmarked trail into his personal perfidy. This time he courts the Moor, Othello, to set him against Roderigo, by lies, deceitful stratagems, and innuendo, claiming that Roderigo speaks constantly against the officer. Iago. Though in the trade of war I have slain men, Yet do I hold it very stuff o’ th’ conscience To do no contriv’d murder: I lack iniquity Sometimes to do me service. Nine or ten times I had thought to have yerk’d him here under the ribs. Othello. ‘T is better as it is. Iago. Nay, but he prated, And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms Against your honour That, with the little godliness I have, I did full hard forbear him. (1.2.1-10)

This pattern of intrigue deepens and expands as the play unfolds, until Iago has Othello sure that Roderigo has seduced his fiancée, now wife, Desdemona, and intends lethal harm to his person. In the meantime, Iago persuaded Roderigo that the Moor intends to undo and even kill him. Moreover, Iago set into the mind of Desdemona’s father the poisonous notion that Othello kidnapped his daughter. The real story behind this sordid drama is Iago’s intent to create so large a constellation of paranoia and enmity as to afford an opening for himself to kidnap and rape Desdemona. His nefarious motives and moves are captured in his own voice in the final lines of Act I: The Moor is of a free and open nature, That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, And will as tenderly be led by th’nose As asses are. I have‘t. It is engender’d. Hell and night Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light. (1.3.405-410)


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Thence the play is inevitable, if not wholly predictable, in the way it is crafted. It is the playing out of the mutual paranoia, until it rots the souls of the whole company, driven into murderous mayhem and the deadly defeat of every good possibility. In the end the Moor is dead, Roderigo is dead, Desdemona is dead, Emilia is dead. Of course, the source of all this insanity, Iago, lives. Cassio, a companion that Iago draws into his evil web, comments upon the degradation and insanity, “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts” (2.3.291-295). Iago responds predictably by making it clear that everyone else is such a beast or villain, but not he. He only meant good, for himself and Desdemona, and for the Moor as well, had the latter only the good sense to see it the right way around. Typical of the borderline psychotic who episodically crosses the line into overt psychosis, Iago cannot see reality as it is, nor discern how his model of the way things are does not calibrate with the real world. Thus he is always sure that his strategies will certainly work out well, while he is, nonetheless, constantly heading rapidly down a series of dead-end streets. Placidly he thinks his vision is sublime, but never can he figure out why nothing ever really works for him. Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘t is something, nothing; ‘T was mine, ‘t is his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.154-161)

As he sees his world go down, Othello, the Moor, cannot discern what the infectious force that is eating away its foundations could possibly be. He now believes Desdemona has betrayed him and his faithful Lieutenant, Roderigo, has put him in jeopardy. He leans for strength and steadying toward Iago, who is, of course, the very source of all this real insanity. Othello declares pathetically, “The pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago” (4.1.206)! In the end, when Emilia arrives to tell the truth about everything, Othello dismisses her allegations against her husband, Iago. “He, woman; I say thy husband; dost understand the word?… My friend, thy husband, honest, honest Iago” (5.2.154-156)! The Moor has lost track of reality and has moved into an alternative world of psychotic ideation.

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Desdemona grasps for reality in vain, as she, hoping against hope to ground her husband’s orientation once again in truth, asks a final desperate favor of her maid, Iago’s wife. “Prithee, tonight lay on my bed my wedding sheets…and call my husband hither. …’t is meet I should be us’d so, very meet? How have I been behav’d, that he might stick the small’st opinion on my least misuse” (4.2.104-108)? Othello eventually arrives on his own, intent upon revenge for her supposed unfaithfulness, and smothers his wife, Desdemona. in her bed (5.2.85). Trying to make sense of it all, Iago’s wife, Emilia, gives Othello another dose of the reality, declaring, “I will not charm my tongue, I am bound to speak. My mistress here lies murdered in her bed” (155156, 183-185). “Thou art rash as fire, to say that she was false: O, she was heavenly true!… My husband says that she was false?… If he say so, may his pernicious soul rot half a grain a day! He lies to th’ heart… (133ff).” But Othello flees again into delusion: “Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse of sun and moon, and that th’ affrighted globe did yawn at alteration… It is the very error of the moon; she comes more nearer earth than she was wont, and makes men mad” (5.2.99-101, 108-110)! In his unhinged state he finally discerns that the whole scenario is unhinged. Lodivico, arriving late, expostulates, “O, Othello, that wert once so good, fallen in the practice of a cursed slave. What shall be said to thee” (291-293)? The Moor replies, surfacing slightly from the disillusion, I loved not wisely but too well. I was not jealous, but insanely confused, I threw away the pearl of great price, Desdemona (344-348). The Tragedy of King Lear is equally a narrative of derangement. The story goes back to the dim shadows of the pre-history of what has come to be known as the British Isles. It was carried forward in oral tradition and folklore and makes its first appearance in literature in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae in about 1135. The Shakespearean play was first published in 1608, having been composed between 1603 and 26 December 1606 when it was first staged. It is the story of the filial ingratitude of two favored daughters which so exploits a father’s indulgent love as to destroy him. While Iago’s insanity is clearly a form of latent psychosis that incites in those around him false notions of reality, paranoia, and death; the madness in King Lear is of a more neurotic sort. He loves too well but not too wisely. His overweening and neurotic need for the abject devotion of his daughters leads him to disown the honest one and prompts the other two to feign love while conjuring the king’s destruction.


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Already in the opening scene Lear is busy dividing his kingdom between his three daughters. He announces his wish to shed himself of royal rule and responsibility. Retaining only his name and title, he wishes to be free of the ardor of kingliness. He attempts to control, even manipulate, the attachment of his daughters to him by suggesting that the one who loves him most will inherit the larger portion of the kingdom. The first two lavish him with romantic exaggerations of pledged affection to the point of affectation. Cordelia, however, speaks plainly and honestly. The king is incensed at her simple and plainspoken pledges of normal fealty and so deprives her of her inheritance. Instead of three partitions of his kingdom Cordelia’s right is simply split and added to that of Goneril and Regan; two halves for two conniving progeny. Herein is evil set afoot along two paths. First, the king has made himself vulnerable to the exploitation of his older daughters whose affections are false and intentions perfidious. Secondly, he has cut himself off from the one true source of authentic filial love. Both fatal flaws hatch treason. Quickly hell breaks loose. Goneril and Regan, together with their spouses and henchmen undertake the nasty business of isolating and exploiting their father and each other viciously. Nothing short of civil war and the progressive embondagement of the king becomes the clear ambition of the two. Each speaks such evil of the other that King Lear is thoroughly confused in his delusional need for their respect and abject and sentimental love for him. Edmund and the Earl of Kent declare that astrology fates all humanity to tragic ends. Far too slowly Lear sees the political and emotional noose tightening around his neck and cries out, “I am a man more sinn’d against than sinning!” (3.3.5859) The storm that breaks upon them all in the end seems to make us witnesses to a cosmic conflict between the God of good and that of evil, a symbolic plague that convulses the physical and moral worlds. Swinburne thought this play was the most elemental and primeval of Shakespeare’s works; perchance his best play, his most tremendous work, the greatest single achievement of Teutonic or Northern genius.4 In Lear, the daughter, grown strong, turns upon an old father who had stripped himself to strengthen her. She forgets the ties of blood, tramples upon the deep maternal instinct which leads the woman to protect the weak, and strikes the old man down with blow on blow to shame, to 4

Idem., p. 773.

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J. Harold Ellens suffering, and at last to madness. We recoil before the spectacle as before some breach in the laws of nature. When such things happen, Shakespeare seems to say, Chaos is come again. It is this impression which gives to Lear its peculiar, its universal, one might say, its symbolic significance.5

The fatal flaw in Lear lies in his neurotic need for love and for the power of loving. This sick hunger in him is turned mainly toward his children, daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. These characters and his herald, the Earl of Kent, are real persons in the story, as is King Lear himself. Out of their persons and characters the drama and its tragedy are drawn. Goneril has a chilling insensitivity about her which drives her to her ends ruthlessly; while Regan is fierier in her savage cruelty. Cordelia has her father’s need for love, his defensive pride, and his unwavering determination. Edgar and Edmund, the sons of Glouster; though they hate no one, pursue their treachery and murder without a heavy step. Parrott saw in Lear a kind of self-absorbed narcissism that shaped him into an autocrat and led to his blindness regarding the perfidy of Goneril and Regan, as well as regarding the constructive passion of Cordelia. Parrott is wrong. Lear is betrayed by his neurosis, not psychosis. Glouster is quite correctly sure, in any case, that the king is mad (4.5.286). In this sense, King Lear is a somewhat more believable play than is Othello. Lear is a lot like all of us. A little neurosis is a good feature of human personality, which alerts us to special needs in others and ourselves, makes us sensitive to the call of hurting humanity, and motivates us to go beyond self-serving to really care about ideal causes. A quality that should enhance one’s character, however, when it is overgrown to exaggerated size and power leads only to disastrous consequence. Pathologically neurotic love destroys—always! Lear seems unable to learn to love his children, servants, compatriots, or colleagues in a way that blesses relationships and embellishes their characters. He is sure, to the point of despair, that it is their lack of love for him that is the source and spring of all the trouble. In his neurotic extremity, his cry in genuinely pathetic, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child (1.4.310)!” From that point in the play a steady dialogue about the inconstancy of women and the bitter bite of the viper-female fills every scene. This perceived insanity in all the daughters prompts the male characters in 5

Idem., p. 775.


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their company to achieve the upper hand and ultimately do them in. Lear just cannot learn, even when Cordelia is in some way reunited with him. When he stands there denuded of his kingly robes and royal deference, he can finally acknowledge something of his neurotic dependency and the way in which it cursed the possibilities of true love and real relationship, driving all to narcissism, paranoia, greed, and insane, self-defeating pursuits. Parrott concludes poignantly, Here in the mind of the sentimentalists the play should end. But Shakespeare’s tragedy is made of sterner stuff. Lear has learned his lesson, but too late for this life. The powers of evil which his … folly had unloosed exhaust themselves in a final effort, and Cordelia lies dead in his arms. There is an outburst of agony and Lear passes away.6

Goneril and Regan, by poison and suicide, lie dead on the stage. Cordelia, the true and loving daughter, ends the ordeal beyond any capacity to return from the hurt and righteous rage of her father’s rejection and the cynical world view it has fashioned in her. She cannot, in the end, express herself to her father except by undercutting him, though the king finally came to fawn on her. Too late! The assigned assassins cut her down. Lear cannot endure; he faints and dies with his real daughter in his arms. The Duke of Albany closes the tragedy with some sympathy and esteem for the old sick king. “Our present business is general woe… The weight of this sad time we must obey; speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most: we that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5.3.315-325). Now, to carry our assessment further along, Hamlet requires looking into. The play is about a specific character who towers over the drama in his pursuit of a resolution to his profound emotional and intellectual enigma. His problem is very straightforward. He has reason to generate a very large load of very specific rage, for which there is no clear object upon which to vent it; and no obvious method for doing so productively. Such irrepressible rage, which must, nonetheless, be swallowed down inside, always produces profound depression. It is the main, and perhaps the only, form of human depression which is not caused by biochemical dysfunction. Furthermore, it is understandably maddening for Hamlet to be caught in a situation in which he has much circumstantial evidence for 6

Ibid., p. 776.

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believing a great betrayal has been perpetrated upon him from a most unexpected source, but he has no way to confirm his suspicions. This inevitably generated a heavy overlay of paranoia, grief, fear, and selfdoubt; deepening and widening the pathological nature of his depression. Such suffering always produces a sense of utter isolation in the sufferer, making it easy for him to see the entire world as against him. This is the pathology in which Jean Paul Sartre saw the entire human race entrapped in his play, No Exit.7 Frederick D. Losey observed wryly that Shakespeare found deep mystery in Hamlet, but no more than in every other character he fashioned. The widespread notion that there is something mysterious about Hamlet has led to much speculation that has befogged a play which by every right should make a particular appeal to youth, not only through the character of its hero, but also because of its general clarity. The tragedy of Hamlet furnishes, of course, texts for endless philosophical speculation, as do the daily experiences for that matter in the life of a newsboy; but such speculation adds nothing to our understanding of the play. To understand Hamlet, it is enough to read the play observingly.8

So let us read it carefully. The clue to the meaning of Hamlet and of his progressive insanity is given us in the opening act. The castle guards are sure they have seen the recently deceased king of Denmark appearing as an apparition upon the battlements. The king was Hamlet’s father and both Hamlet’s suspicion regarding how he died, and the haunting words of the apparition lead to the fear that his mother and uncle have conspired in killing the king. Hamlet’s fear and sense of betrayal produce his grief, paranoia, and rage-induced depression. He cries out, “Break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue (1.2.159)!” When his mother urges him to put off his grieving and his funereal clothes, with the claim that he is not the only one who has lost a father and he should not make it seems so unique a tragedy, he offers his character revealing response. Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems. ‘T is not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, 7

Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit, and Three Other Plays (New York, 1949). Frederick D. Losey, Shakespeare: The Complete Dramatic and Poetic Works of William Shakespeare (Philadelphia, 1952), p. 998. 8


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Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passeth show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)

Hamlet is a consummate existentialist. He has no time for idealistic custom or romantic mythology. He deals with reality as he sees it immediately before him. His reality is a moral realism and a moral idealism combined. He wants to find a way to “stick it right into the face” of his mother and her paramour, whom he thinks have killed his father to acquire his kingdom. When this admirably sensitive young man progressively uncovers what seem to him to be the facts of the case, he can see it only as encounter with monstrous evil. His problem with this evil is moral: the immorality of the murder and the immorality of his mother’s betrayal of him and his father. As Shakespeare unfolds the drama he gives Hamlet numerous intellectual reasons for rationalizing his delay in effecting the revenge. Hamlet wants to be sure of his case, avoiding immoral judgment or betrayal on his part. He is clearly caught between a rock and a hard place. So he and his friends devise a mechanism for laying the evil bare. A “play’s the thing, wherin I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2.637-8). They stage a play for the queen and her new husband, Hamlet’s uncle. In it Hamlet and company depict a series of scenes leading up to exactly the type of betrayal and murder of which they suspect the culprits: a little poison poured into the ear of the napping king—in the play within the play, hence in the play, hence in what Hamlet is sure is real life. The ruse works. The play enthralls both king and queen and when it takes the unexpected turn to the murder scene, both realize they are caught in their perfidy. An elaborate battle of swords ensues in which Hamlet and Horatio have laid about them valiantly until all characters, good and bad, are dead upon the stage, with Hamlet piled atop, and only Horatio left, of course, to tell the tale. There is much side-play of great humor and complex mayhem woven into this drama; indeed Polonius makes his bumbling and opportunistic way through the play until, taken for another, he is accidentally done-in by a dagger thrust through the drapes in which he is hiding. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are mistakenly executed by the English, Ophelia is constantly offered up to Hamlet who never quite seems to notice that she is female, and the apparition repeatedly

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appears and speaks with such divine subtlety and mysterious symbolism that it is unclear what Hamlet should do about it. The wrong persons drink the poison, then all the important people drink the poison like a regular Eucharistic sacrament: a black mass. Nonetheless, through thick and thin, by humor and horror, the inevitability of feckless fate forces all to tragic endings. Insanity hangs heavily over everything everywhere. Quite a lot was rotten in the state of Denmark, as it turned out! When we raise the question regarding evident causes for the various kinds of madness in Shakespearean characters, many types of appropriate or relevant things can and ought to be said. It is amazing that Shakespeare could achieve such a well developed character of severe Borderline Syndrome as we see in Iago, since these characters are so bright, seductive, manipulative, and persuasive that they are usually not seen for what they are and those around them tends to think they, the observers themselves, are the dysfunctional ones, a thing Borderlines work overtime to confirm. One can as well observe that Shakespeare must have been a profoundly intuitive psychologist, vastly ahead of his time, to see all the turns and twists of a sensitive neurotic personality like King Lear as it spirals down into dysfunction, insanity, and self-defeat. Similarly, how did Shakespeare discern already in his day the subtle way in which repressed anger produces depression, which, when added to constantly stimulated paranoia, drives its victim literally out of his mind? Neither Aristotle, Galen, nor the physicians of the Renaissance, who were largely dependent upon Galen, ever developed a theoretical model for the diagnosis of Borderlines, nor did they understand the relationship between unexpressed anger and depression. The insights of Greek and Roman medicine were mediated to the Renaissance physicians, upon whom Shakespeare would have been dependent, largely through the Arab and Persian philosophers, physicians, and medical scientists. Shakespeare would have had to develop his entire understanding of such phenomenally destructive characters as borderline psychotics, on the basis of everyday observation, rather than theoretical models. He apparently noticed that in the communities in which he lived, as in all human communities throughout history, it was clear that 45 percent of the population was borderline: mild, moderate, or severe. I refer to them as the Mississippi River Boat Gamblers of the world. On stage for a brief period of time they seem like the brightest, most


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clever, most seductive and entertaining persons one has ever met. Apparently the reason they always seem so bright, clever, and seductive is because they are using 90 percent of their gray matter while the rest of us use about 10 percent. They use so much of their brain power all the time because they learn early in life that for some reason their internal models of reality do not work in the real world. Thus they notice that nothing they try seems to work out well. Because they are always inherently somewhat paranoid, they conclude that others are causing their discomfort and dysfunction. Therefore, they perpetually blame others for everything, are unable to see themselves in any way dysfunctional, and they are always on high mental alert, strategizing defenses and defensive aggressive initiatives to protect themselves from others and from reality. Iago is a classic borderline and Shakespeare’s development of this character describes remarkably well how such persons function in terms of Family Systems theory. Whenever, two or more people attempt to function together as a family, committee, team, or the like, it is clear that there are lines of influence between each and all of them. If there are only two people on the team the lines of influence or force are only two, one from each direction. However, as additional persons are added to the team, the number and complexity of the forces at play between them increases exponentially, not just arithmetically, since each new member interacts with each of the others and they with that new persons. So three persons have nine lines of force or influence. Moreover, each of those nine is reshaped by the presence and influence of the additional person’s nature. If you have a constellation of twelve prominent characters, as in Shakespeare’s Othello, the lines of force are 144 dynamic influences. If one of these is a sick personality 24 of the 144 lines of influence are directly corrupted and all the others are secondarily corrupted. The entire system is poisoned by the one crazy character and there is no way to immunize the whole Family System, nor any part of it, from the destructive forces. Either the system is adequately resilient to sustain itself with this heavy destructive infection, or the entire system will be brought down. Moreover, the towering narcissism of the Borderline Psychotic is so strong in most cases that this person progressively dominates the entire system and consumes it to gratify and stabilize himself or herself. Thus, the destruction will be intentionally perpetrated upon all members of the system until the entire constellation is destroyed,

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leaving the insane perpetrator alive but alone. This is the ultimate defeat of the Borderline, unless he or she can quickly find a new Family System with which to hook up, so as to infect and consume it to maintain what seems to him or her like stability. How did Shakespeare understand this in such consummate detail as to paint such a classic Iago? Pure genius, profound intuition, meticulous observation, long and thoughtful life! Lear-like neurosis must have been just as present and just as mysterious in the seventeenth century as was Iago’s kind of crazyness. Shakespeare’s insights about this disorder are amazing in their meticulous discernment. Even today, when people encounter the kind of sensitive and overreaching type of tenderness and familial intimacy needs as characterize King Lear, their general reaction is to conclude that such a person is a remarkably caring and generous father who clearly has the best interest of his children at heart, and is prepared to be enormously self-sacrificial to achieve that. Even if we suspect that he is spoiling his daughters a bit, we consider it to be normal range behavior from which they will likely profit in the long run. We do not see it as pathology, destructive to the progeny. Shakespeare discerned that quite differently. His entire play is about how inherently narcissistic and self-serving Lear’s love really is, and how destructive it is inevitably going to be for the daughters in the long run. As it turns out, he shapes the story in such a way that it becomes clear in the short run that the daughters have been destroyed by their father’s type of manipulative loving, and Lear’s hope to fashion a close intimacy of mutual esteem with them is forever corrupted by his psychopathology. His need is to possess them, not free them to flourish and fly away so as to be able to return to him with respect and cherishing esteem—useable or functional love. One can speculate wildly about the sources of Lear’s psychological distortions. Usually one of two things is true. Either Lear’s kind of narcissism and effete neediness for exaggerated esteem and affirmation derives from his direct genetic inheritance of these character flaws, a very common source for this. Or it is a product of some severe deprivation as a child in the formative years between two and four years of age. Perhaps his mother died while he was an infant. Perhaps his father was too severe on all the family so that love could not grow. Perhaps he was physically and emotionally replaced by a sibling before he had developed a functional sense of his own selfhood. In any case, he is a deeply wounded, a vastly incomplete person. The love of his


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wife has not cured this. Perhaps she died too soon to get beyond the nurture of their children in infancy. So in one possible case, because of tragic deprivation Lear developed a bi-modal disorder as a defense against his fear of being extinguished as a self, as Kohut would suggest.9 He became a defensive aggressive narcissist, needing to devour his whole world, that is, possess it and control it, keeping it perpetually attached to him. At the same time he remained too diminished a self to believe that he could let his world be free. He could not be confident enough that he would not be thrown away by his world and its inhabitants; or evaporate as a self because his world and those in it whom he loved would fail to give him what he needed for comfort, hope, meaning, and gratification. In this case he is caught between his need for aggressive control and his lack of adequacy to make his claims known in a healthy manner in a healthy model of the world around him. In the other possible case, Lear inherited his narcissism, paranoia, and inability to place himself in other people’s feeling worlds and step outside himself to see himself objectively. He inherited his timidity and lack of an adequate sense of a self, for which he compensates by passive aggressive manipulation and control. Consequently, he only knows how to love by possessing the object of his love. This is the old Greek concept of eros, love that derives value from its object but gives none to it. Lear is, in this case, incapable of agape, genuine love which is oriented upon adding value to the object of one’s love, even at one’s own expense. Nor is he capable of caritas (Greek: filia), namely that kind of love in which both persons are lover and beloved, and both give and get value in the relationship. So Lear is betrayed by his genes or by his developmental deprivations. Hamlet’s case is different. We have no evidence that Hamlet was anything but a robustly normal child in a very happy royal home, marked by comfort and prosperity. He seems to have noticed nothing awry in this idyllic scene. So protected is he from any need or reason for fear or suspicion, any sense of threat to his regal realm, that the sudden death of his father seems to him like an absolute impossibility. Whatever craziness develops in his reaction to that death is strictly situational in source. We have every reason to believe that he was in no way predisposed, genetically or developmentally, to the classic 9

Heinz Kohut, Self Psychology and the Humanities, Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach (New York, 1985).

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pathologies that afflict humans generally: depression, anxiety, paranoia, neuroses, psychoses, or borderline personality syndrome. Tragedy hit, he could not figure it out, he was desperate to know why and how! The impasse between the existential reality, the moral quandary, and the emotional disempowerment, overtaxed his psyche. He needed to escape into an alternate reality to relieve his psychospiritual system from the immediate overwhelming blow. Insanity empowered him to buy time to discern the real from the unreal, to devise a course of action toward resolution of the impasse. At first he can only rage at the dastardly death, express horror at the apparition, verbalize incessantly with his friends. All these are forms of healing catharsis. Slowly his psyche begins to regulate itself again. He figures out that there is something he can do. He pours much psychic energy into devising a very creative and surprisingly complex course of action. The play’s the thing to catch the king! As he proceeds with the strategy he regains his sense of reality. Then the normal inadvertencies begin to intervene to defeat him, because this is intended by Shakespeare to be a tragedy. The strategy is enormously successful, but various details of the tactics go awry as they always do in life. The right people die for the wrong reasons in the wrong way by the wrong methods. The wrong people die by the right means and methods. The whole mess ends up, as life often does in its worst cases, in a heap of tragedy and death, but poor ole Hamlet is as sane as a statesman in his final moments and his grip on reality is intact, though full of unspeakable grief. The play closes sanely, of course, if civil war is ever sane, with Prince Fortinbras commanding matter-of-factly that the soldiers should clean up the messy stage and prepare for the military funeral. We have looked at three cases of madness in Shakespeare: Borderline Psychosis, Pathological Neurosis, and Situational Psychotic Episode. We have seen completely new ways in which the classic Bard continues to amaze those who are willing to invest the time and energy worthy of him, the time and energy to really read him in an informed and thoughtful way. I have offered just one more hermeneutical lens through which to see the work of Shakespeare, and by reflection, the dear man, the incomparable genius himself. Norman N. Holland declared in the very last sentence of Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare that psychology or psychoanalysis can assist literature in achieving what we have always expected literature to do,


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namely, to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.10 If I have done so here in some useful way, I am honored to have made a contribution to my old friend, William Shakespeare, and very glad to honor my old professor, the late Dr. Henry Zylstra, who so long ago taught me to love Shakespeare’s epic and lyrical vision.11

10 Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (Bloomington, Indiana, 1965). 11 Henry Zylstra, Testament of Vision (Grand Rapids, MI, 1961, 1st edition, 1958).

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Vision in the Eye of the Beholder

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VISION IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: TRANSLATION OR TRANSFORMATION Eolene M. Boyd-MacMillan

An English rendering of the Latin word “translation” is “transformation.” Translation occurs in a context, a context in which people hope to understand each other, and perhaps themselves as well, since all relationships effect change, however minutely. In the context of academic study, researchers and those being researched may hope for a minimum of “transformation” in their translations when the aim is to represent accurately a particular theory, view, or analysis. Why engage with a point of view that someone never actually put forward, but has been mistranslated or “transformed” in the translation process? Well, sometimes it is a fruitful exercise even if the original scholar’s ideas have been mistranslated or transformed! As we have learned, from science as elsewhere, the very act of observation changes the observer and what is being observed. The scholar “translates” a theory in her analysis of that theory, transforming and being transformed in the process. The changes inevitably wrought by translation can be desirable, for the knowing process requires new ideas and these can appear through one scholar’s “translation” of another’s work. The oftentimes-invisible dynamics of “translation transformation” take on the quality of an underlying bass-line played loudly in the symphony of spirituality. A scholar can “translate” a particular spirituality in such a way that all spiritualities can seem to translate each other, to be the same spirituality in different cultural languages, or the same melody in different keys. This view is associated with William James,1 Aldous Huxley,2 and Robert Forman,3 and has been termed the “common core” or “perennial” theory. Alternatively, a scholar can “translate” spirituality in such a way that all spiritualities can seem incapable of any dialogue with each other at all, a discordant caco1 2 3

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London, 1902). Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London, 1954). Robert Forman, The Problem of Pure Consciousness (Oxford, 1990).

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phony. This view is often identified with Stephen Katz,4 and modified versions with others like Wayne Proudfoot.5 Underlying these views is the challenge of how to relate the particular and universal claims inherent in each spirituality to such claims in other spiritualities, and to do so without mis-translations. In trying to relate different spiritualities to each other, are spirituality scholars trying to relate jazz to opera, or jazz to bebop? It might be argued that jazz and bebop are more similar than jazz and opera. If scholars of spirituality are relating jazz to bebop, then perhaps they are relating different forms of the common core music. If they are relating jazz to opera, then they are still relating different forms of music to each other, but perhaps music is not a common core as much as a common category, like religion or spirituality. If the notes translate from one genre to another, does that translation reveal an underlying universality or shared particulars? Does a translation between musical genres transform the notes so that they are no longer jazz, but opera, or uncover the transformation effected in operatic composition itself? If spiritual practices appear in both Christian and Hindu spirituality, then do they reveal a common spiritual core or the particular transformations effected in each tradition’s spirituality? The permutations could be endless. In the field of spirituality, this debate sounds like an orchestra tuning up as each section runs through the scales and adjusts its pitch, each readying to approach the music according to its own sound. Those blowing the French horn, bowing the violin, and shaking the tambourine each express the music through the instrument’s design. One issue in the debate involves whether or not theological considerations are inherent to the understanding of spirituality. Can the orchestra perform better without one section so that it interprets music differently from an orchestra? By “better,” perhaps the value is for inter-disciplinary research or inter-faith discussion. No one denies the possible relevance of theology, but many question its inherent relevance, even its contribution to inter-disciplinary and inter-faith contexts, and opt for an understanding of spirituality as a human phenomenon that may or may not involve theology. Whether one shares the views of William James and his descendants, translating all spiritualities into one melody sung in different keys, or those of Stephen 4 Stephen Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (London, 1978), pp. 22-74. 5 Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley, 1985).


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Katz and others, translating each spirituality so singularly that only a cacophony of melodies is ever possible, one must account for the particular distinctions of a spirituality and for the universal or shared features. Does the field of spirituality attain greater descriptive and explanatory power by addressing the translation issue of particularity and universality with or without God? Chief Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks (United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth) recently estimated that Christians make up 2.2 billion and Muslims 1.2 billion people in the world, with Jews numbering less than the statistical error for the Chinese census!6 Just these three faiths account for over half of the world’s population. One would never want to argue purely from numbers, but if the field of spirituality aims for descriptive and explanatory power, then it might behove its scholars to recognise the inherent theological nature of many people’s spirituality. And if spirituality is understood as experience of God (understood variously), then theological understandings are inextricable from experience; understanding guides what and how something is observed or experienced.7 Research of spirituality then involves the challenges of theological “translation:” “all the restrictions of context and perspective among competing theologies.”8 For Christian theologians, these restrictions focus on the tension between the particularity of the Christian faith and its claims to a universal ontology.9 Some Christian theologians appeal to the nature of Christ as embodying both particularity and universality, human and divine.10 Mystical spirituality then is understood as appropriating “Christ’s own consciousness, in which immediate relationship with the Father

6 Jonathan Sacks, “Dramas of Choice and Rejection: the Place of the Other in Scripture” (Paper presented to the Theological Society, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, March 11, 2004). 7 For a discussion of the historic separation of experience and understanding in mystical spirituality scholarship, as well as argument for their de facto inseparability, see Edward Howells, “Mysticism and the Mystical: The Current Debate,” in The Way Supplement: Christianity and the Mystical (London, 2001), pp. 15-27. At stake is a view of who can experience God. Separating knowledge from experience can lead to the exclusion of those who are disabled on either side of the false dichotomy. See John Swinton, “Restoring the Image: Spirituality, Faith, and Cognitive Disability,” Journal of Religion and Health, 36/1 (Spring, 1997), 21-27. 8 Howells, “Mysticism and the Mystical,” p. 19. 9 Ibid., p. 22. 10 Howells names Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Michel de Certeau, Rowan Williams, Michael Sells, and Denys Turner.

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is combined with a fully human life.”11 However, inter-disciplinary research between theology and psychology rarely carries through these Trinitarian and Christological insights,12 as if the insights represent a fugue appropriate for the context of a funeral alone. Such interdisciplinary efforts can result in what theologian and psychiatric nurse Alistair McFadyen calls the “post-it”™ approach. God is tacked on to research at the beginning or end, “neither mak[ing] any difference to that to which it is appended nor leav[ing] any sign of its presence when removed.”13 To continue the musical metaphor, it is like the muzac piped into a corridor outside of a conference room; it brackets the negotiations, but does not affect them. Might not theological insights represent a Beethoven symphony appropriate for many contexts, in part and whole, and not purely for devotees of Beethoven? 11

Howells, “Mysticism and the Mystical,” p. 25. For example, mystical spirituality historian and theologian Bernard McGinn blames both empirical investigators and students of mystical history and theory. See The Presence of God, vol. 1 (London, 1991), p. 343. Systematic theologian Mark McIntosh focuses on Sandra Schneiders, as “the founder and director of one of America’s leading graduate academic programs in the study of spirituality” and describes her views as “influential” in Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Oxford, 1998), p. 19. Schneiders identifies her approach to spirituality as “anthropological” (see her article, “Spirituality in the Academy,” Theological Studies 50 (1989), 682); Schneiders asserts that a researcher must choose between a “view from above” and a “view from below.” For McIntosh, “identifying the human search for wholeness as the true subject matter of spirituality (as academic discipline), the anthropological approach would seem to render God peripheral (Mystical Theology, p. 21).” Philosophical theologian Denys Turner argues, and claims that the mystical writers that he surveys argue (in The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism [Cambridge, 1995]), against a “psychologistic” or “experientialist” reduction of mystical spirituality that he finds in contemporary treatments of mystical spirituality (pp. 252-273). Interdisciplinarian James Loder argues for the inseparability of the views from above and below, proposing a methodology that relates both views in The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective (San Francisco, 1998), pp. 3-16. 13 Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge, 2000), p. 11. McFadyen argues for the descriptive and explanatory power of theological language with regard to concrete pathologies. “If God is the most basic reality and explanation of the world, then it must be the case that the world cannot adequately be explained, understood, lived in, without reference to God in our fundamental means both of discernment and of action (p. 12, italics original).” Similarly, McGinn, McIntosh, Turner, Howells, and others argue that spirituality requires reference to God. See previous note. I would note that this includes spiritualities that are specifically not theistic as a matter of specifying a spirituality’s assumptions and world-view. As the research of Ana-Marie Rizzuto has found, people cannot help but have a God-concept, even if purely as a representative of the God in which she does not believe. See John McDargh, “Creating a New Research Paradigm: Ana-Maria Rizzuto,” in Religion, Society, and Psychoanalysis (Boulder, CO, 1997), pp. 181-199. 12


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What happens if they are treated as inherent to the field of study? Is descriptive and explanatory power increased? The following sections evaluate the strategies of two translators for the field of spirituality. Neither self-consciously wrote as a scholar of spirituality, but I am placing their theories of transformation in that context to consider these last questions. Is it better to de-couple spirituality from God or to keep them partnered? The well-known transformation theorist, James Hillman, has been popularised by his protégé Thomas Moore through his best-selling books, such as Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life.14 Hillman puts spirituality on a plane that does not get bogged down in God-language. He says that Christianity is the problem. The Christian tradition has forced us to think of ourselves as a single self, relating to a single God. In reality, we have many selves and relate to the entire cosmos through what he calls the world soul. The way to handle the translation challenge of particularity and universality is through the world soul. Before continuing, I need to explain briefly how I can treat him as a writer relevant to the field of spirituality when he does not place himself in that context. Hillman adamantly insists that his archetypal theory is not one of spiritual disciplines in disguise,15 although he does assert that all psychology is religious.16 Moreover, spirituality scholar Sandra Schneiders describes spirituality as referring to “(1) a fundamental dimension of the human being, (2) the lived experience which actualizes that dimension, and (3) the academic discipline which studies that experience.”17 In an earlier article, she describes spirituality as the “human quest for meaning and integration.”18 Connecting Schneiders’ words with Hillman’s theory, one might say that (1) the world soul represents a fundamental dimension of human being, (2) soul-making the lived experience which actualizes that dimension, 14

Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (New York, 1992). 15 James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York, 1975), p. 168, where he states that he is talking psychologically and not religiously, although see his later comments (ibid., pp. 227-228; see following footnote). 16 Ibid., p. 227: “psychology is a variety of religious experience;” ibid., p. 228: “since its [psychology’s] inception it has been actively practicing religion.” 17 Sandra Schneiders, “Spirituality in the Academy,” Theological Studies 50 (1989), 678. 18 Sandra Schneiders, “Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?” Horizons 13/2 (1986), 268.

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and (3) archetypal psychology the discipline which studies that experience. The human quest for meaning and integration leads one to manifest the world soul. Through both his own presentation and the understanding of a spirituality scholar, Hillman’s transformation theory can be understood as a type of “human spirituality.” The world soul is a force or structure that guides and forms all that exists.19 Hillman also refers to it as the archetypal soul or anima mundi. He gets the concept from Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Ficino, Vico, and Carl Jung.20 Hillman addresses the translation issue of particularity and universality through the world soul. Everything that exists is an expression of the world soul. All people, trees, animals, rocks, oceans, mountains, everything expresses the universal world soul. This appeals to those of us concerned about our ecological crisis. Understanding nature as an expression of the world soul encourages us to treat everything with respect. As an expression of a universal “soul” force, we might insist that all livestock live in free-range conditions. We might insist that air and rivers not be polluted, full-stop. For Hillman, Christian focus on human salvation has led to our reckless disregard for the sacredness of the cosmos.21 Similarly, Christian mono-theism has impoverished our self-understanding.22 People who feel oppressed by a need to be one self, always in control, find relief in Hillman’s spirituality. If we think that we need to be one self, then we are ruled by the “heroic ego.”23 Our dreams and fantasies reveal that we have many different selves, expressing the many images in the world soul.24 By cultivating our dreams and fantasies, the world soul will relate the “heroic ego” to all our other selves.25 We will know ourselves as many different selves and the “heroic ego” will fade 19 James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. xiii; James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Woodstock, CT, 1997), p. 101; James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (London, 1997), p. 258. 20 James Hillman, “Plotino, Ficino, and Vico as Precursors of Archetypal Psychology,” in Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology (New York and Zürich, 1975), p. 151; James Hillman, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Dallas, 1983), pp. 1-5. 21 James Hillman, Insearch: Psychology and Religion (Woodstock, CT, 1967), pp. 135-141. 22 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, pp. 33, 41-42. 23 Ibid., pp. 32-37. 24 Ibid. 25 Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 55; James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (New York, 1972), p. 5; Hillman, Insearch, p. 58; James Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” in Puer Papers (Irving, TX, 1979), p. 71.


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in importance.26 We also will attend to the different selves in other people.27 Understanding human beings as manifesting the world soul creates a type of human spirituality. For Hillman, the “heroic ego,” the idea that we have core selves, is the unfortunate legacy of Christian monotheism.28 The world soul has an infinite variety of images or “gods,” with a small “g.” He uses the term “god” to convey the power and force of these archetypal images that constitute the world soul.29 These archetypal images manifest through everything, but through people as many different ways of being, or many selves. Since each self is part of the world soul, we are urged to respect our different selves as well as the different selves of others.30 Through the world soul, we can experience spiritual transformation. This transformation will free us from the tyranny of a monotheism that insists on unity at the expense of multiplicity. We will appreciate the rich variety of ourselves, other people, and nature, without the oppressive Christian God. All of our particularities come together in the universal world soul. Now we come to the translation questions. Does a scholar of spirituality “translate” Hillman’s transformation theory with greater descriptive and explanatory power without “God-language?” Can a scholar account for the particularities and universalities of his theory without theological considerations? These questions are rather unfair, since I know that Hillman has a “running engagement with Christianity” and the readers of this discussion might not. A fundamental aspect of Hillman’s transformation theory operates as a corrective to the Christian tradition, as he understands it. Hence, both descriptive and explanatory power increases if a scholar includes theology with psychology and the other human sciences in her study of Hillman’s theory, even though if it is considered spirituality, then it is a “human spirituality.” Hillman does not understand God, of any sort, as initiating or enabling any aspect of the transformation. Hillman’s only references to God, aside from “god,” are negative understandings of 26

Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 186; Hillman, “Peaks and Vales,” p. 71. Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 201; James Hillman, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion (Dallas, 1985), pp. 109, 111. 28 Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 265. 29 Hillman, Myth of Analysis, p. 265; James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Woodstock, CT, 1983), pp. 59, 74-75. 30 Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, 31. 27

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Christianity. And, as it happens, while he accurately identifies excesses of the Enlightenment and the sometimes collusion of the Christian tradition with these excesses, he unfortunately misunderstands both the Christian canon and Church history.31 Most Christians would reject the Christianity that he criticises. One might say that he mistranslates Christianity, transforming it into something that we hope all will resist. Yet, his mistranslation of Christianity, which I would argue he has done, does not prevent his transformation theory from yielding powerful insights and a cultural critique of ego-centric living. The second translator is James Loder. His spirituality could not be more opposite to Hillman’s. Hillman’s villain is Loder’s solution, or the problem is the solution. Loder integrates the particularity and universality in spirituality with God. For Loder, the relationship between human beings and the Christian God is the integration. This integration is germane to human nature and the nature of God. In human nature, the integration of particularity and universality occurs through the logic of transformation. Human beings function according to this logic of transformation. This logic characterises everything that humans do: their artistic creations, scientific discoveries, and therapeutic insights.32 The logic describes how we think. Moreover, the logic characterises human development itself. As we develop emotionally, socially, and cognitively, we follow this logic or pattern.33 Each developmental stage and stage transition involves this pattern. A five-phased pattern, the logic occurs in various sequences,34

31 Surveying the rulings of two church councils (787 Council of Nicea and 869 Council of Constantinople) and the Christian canon, Hillman holds the Christian Church responsible for “killing the (archetypal) soul,” denigrating imagery, and reinforcing ego-centric living. See Archetypal Psychology, pp. 5, 41-42; Puer Papers, pp. 54-56; Re-visioning Psychology, pp. 11, 169; Insearch, pp. 135-141. In his assertions he seems to misunderstand the council rulings, aspects of Hebrew thinking (see Hans W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testamant (Philadelphia, 1974), p. 8, and miscount key terms in the Christian canon (c.f. The Dictionary of New Testament Theology). 32 See James Loder, The Transforming Moment: Understanding Convictional Experiences (San Francisco, 1981), chapters two and five; James Loder, W. Jim Neidhardt, The Knight’s Move: The Relational Logic of the Spirit in Theology and Science (Colorado Springs, 1992), pp. 36-42, 232, 266; James Loder, The Logic of the Spirit: Human Development in Theological Perspective (San Francisco, 1998), pp. 12, 89. 33 See Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, which traces this pattern thoughout the lifespan. 34 Loder, “Transformation in Christian Education,” Religious Education 76/2 (1981), 209.


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over many years and coalesced into an instant.35 The key to the logic is the insight. The insight brings together unrelated frames of reference without reduction or synthesis. Loder uses Arthur Koestler’s term “bisociation.”36 For example, Archimedes needed to find out whether or not the king’s crown was pure gold. He did not know how to do this. He became preoccupied with the problem, searching for a solution. But, as he stepped into his bath, the water rose and he had his insight. He could compare the water displacement of a pure gold crown with the water displacement of the crown in question! Two unrelated frames of reference, the crown and the bath, came together to form an insight, or bisociation.37 As part of human nature, this logic of transformation characterises spirituality. In spirituality, according to Loder, a person encounters God. The insight is a “face-to-face” encounter best understood through the Chalcedonian formula.38 That formula describes the nature of Christ as fully human and fully divine. In one person are united two unrelated frames of reference, the finitude and temporality of human nature and the infinite eternity of God. The relationship between the two is not a reduction of divinity to humanity or vice versa. Neither is the relationship a synthesis of humanity and divinity. This relationship models how Loder integrates particularity and universality in spirituality. The relationship is the integration. By nature, humans respond to God’s invitation to relationship.39 From birth, human beings seek a face that will never leave. The techni35 Loder, The Transforming Moment, p. 112; Loder and Neidhardt, The Knight’s Move, p. 236; Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, pp. 305-307. 36 Loder, The Transforming Moment, p. 38. 37 Loder uses this example in various texts. E.g., “Transformation in Christian Education” and (with Neidhardt) The Knight’s Move, p. 266. 38 Loder asserts that “To say that Jesus Christ is the Face of God is to make reference to the long tradition and many-faceted metaphorical uses of ‘the face’ in Scripture to designate the personal presence of the holy God. In both Greek (prosopon) and Hebrew (panîm) the word for face also means ‘presence.’ However, the Face of God ceases to be metaphor and becomes historically and empirically concrete in the person of Jesus Christ. In him the relations between God and humanity is full, complete, and actualised in the same spatiotemporal and historical context in which we also exist (The Logic of the Spirit, p. 119).” I would qualify that the metaphorical understanding remains valid along with the historicity and concreteness of Jesus Christ. See the exploration of face and facing in David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge, 1999). 39 Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, pp. 90-91. This claim assumes religious faith premises.

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cal term in object relations and attachment theory is “imprinting.” Loder calls it the “face phenomenon.” Babies seek and respond to a face, even a schematic diagram of a face, by following it with their eyes and smiling. They become agitated when the face leaves. The return of the face calms the baby. She orients her world around that face. But, she longs for a face that will never leave.40 Eventually, the little person tries to satisfy her longing for a face that will never leave with her own face. She orients her world around herself via her ego. But she lets herself down. She can not meet all her own needs. Secretly, she continues to seek a face that will never leave. She hides this desire through her ego accomplishments and competencies.41 In feelings of loneliness or despair, during crises or quiet reflection, her desire for the face that will never leave might surface.42 Her limited nature stares her in the face. She will die and she will die alone. The faces of the void loom large. She faces her own nothingness, the inevitable fact of her own non-existence. In facing her own nothingness, she still seeks the face that will never leave. This seeking opens her to an encounter.43 She cannot cover over her inner void with her selfsufficiency. The seeming emptiness of the void reveals the fullness of God’s sustaining presence that simultaneously offers transforming relationship. The faces of the void can become the faces of God. There is a figure-ground reversal as God becomes the focus rather than the void.44 Again we come to the translation questions. No need for a trick question here; obviously a scholar of spirituality will “translate” Loder’s transformation theory with greater descriptive and explana40 Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, p. 95. Loder notes that “Erikson and others who have no particular theological axe to grind agree that this [the face phenomenon] has religious significance…this smiling response to the face or the consistent nurturing presence of another is a cosmic ordering, self-confirming presence of a loving other. That is, to be human is implicitly to be religious (ibid., p. 90).” Understood thus, the face phenomenon illustrates the connection between religion and somatic exploration (John Bowker, Is God a Virus? Genes, Culture, and Religion [London, 1995], p. 152). Bowker notes that the research of Eugene d’Aquili (who Loder also cites, see Loder and Neidhardt, Knight’s Move, p. 271) suggests that humans are prepared in the brain for God-recognizing behaviors (ibid., p. 62). 41 Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, pp. 92-95. 42 Loder, The Transforming Moment, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs, 1989), pp. 81, 159; Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, 1998), pp. 115, 119, 244. 43 Loder, The Transforming Moment, pp. 101, 115, 173; Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, p. 115. 44 Loder, The Transforming Moment, pp. 119, 121, 142, 170.


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tory power with “God-language.” A scholar cannot account for the particularities and universalities of his theory without theological considerations. Interestingly, some Christians would reject the Christianity that Loder portrays. He cites the reluctance that many members of his own denomination feel in disclosing that they have known experiences of transformation that are the focus of his theory for fear of being misunderstood or ostracised in some way. Might one therefore say that he mistranslates Christianity, transforming it into something that fits his own known experience? Elsewhere, I have argued that his transformation theory accords with the portrayals of mystical spirituality by four contemporary Christian scholars, who in turn engage with several spirituality traditions from the two thousand-year history of Christianity.45 Loder himself makes some of these connections.46 But, again, a possible mis-translation of Christianity (which I would argue is a mistranslation of Loder!), would not prevent his transformation theory from yielding powerful insights and a cultural critique of ego-centric living. Even so, his theory has greater descriptive and explanatory power if his Christian theological assertions have validity for Christian spirituality. What about the translation issues of particularity and universality that arise when a scholar relates Loder’s transformation theory to Hillman’s? Loder and Hillman do converge in particularities of their language. Both say that we should not live out of our egos. Both critique the social and cultural pressures that encourage ego-centered living. Both urge encounter. Both advocate respectful treatment of other people and our environment. But their theories do not translate each other. Hillman’s encounter is self-encounter, understood as the world soul. Each person is actually an expression of or shell for the world soul. Although Loder’s Christian spirituality insists on self-knowledge,47 the self-knowledge of Hillman absorbs the particularities of a personal self in the universal world soul. The particularity of self-knowledge for Loder relates a person directly to the particular and universal Tri-Une God who is humanly personal through Jesus Christ in the power of the

45 See Eolene Boyd-MacMillan, “Loder and Mystical Spirituality: Particularity, Universality, and Intelligence,” in Redemptive Transformation in Practical Theology: Essays in Honour of James Edwin Loder, Jr., eds. Dana Wright and John Kuentzel (Grand Rapids, MI, 2004). 46 See note above. 47 Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, pp. 94, 95.

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Holy Spirit. Is it possible to translate the world soul as the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity? In the 12th century, cosmologists, mystics, scientists, theologians, and philosophers all debated about translating the Holy Spirit as the anima mundi.48 By 1140, the Council of Sens had ruled that the Holy Spirit and anima mundi could not be identified. The ruling involved the following concerns: 1. Each person could be understood as having two souls—her own and the soul of the world. 2. The Third Person of the Trinity risked being subordinated to the other two Persons, making the Holy Spirit so identified with creation that it became temporal rather than eternal. 3. Understanding the Holy Spirit as creation’s vital principle blurred the distinction between mono-theistic Christianity and pantheism.49

Since 1140, the anima mundi- Holy Spirit translation has languished with occasional resurrections, as in a recent paper by Peter Ellard, entitled, “The World Soul: The Spirituality of the School of Chartres and Our Ecological Crisis.”50 Ellard, argued for translating anima mundi as the Holy Spirit. Bernard McGinn, a spirituality historian and theologian, asked Ellard about the 1140 Council of Sens’ objections. Ellard replied that he thought they were “spurious,” motivated by the political and theological conflict between the schools and the cloisters raging at that time. Yet, he did not address the three specific concerns just listed. Loder “stress[es] the irreducibly personal nature of the Holy Spirit, and opposes any semi-Arian view that the Spirit is an impersonal force emanating from God and detachable from God.”51 Human-divine encounter is with a mysterious being, not an impersonal force. Loder rejects the Platonic premise that requires a “third thing” to mediate the Hellenic dualism of unchanging being and changeable bodies.52 He points to the unchangeable Being God and the changeable human 48 Bernard McGinn, “The Role of ‘Anima Mundi’ as Mediator Between the Divine and Created Realms in the Twelfth Century,” in Death, Ecstasy, and Other Worldly Journeys, eds. John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane (Albany, NY, 1995), pp. 285-319. 49 Ibid. 50 Peter Ellard, “The World Soul: The Spirituality of the School of Chartres and Our Ecological Crisis” (paper, AAR Annual Conference, 2001), paper number A125, organized by the Christian Spirituality Group. Peter Ellard is affiliated with Siena College, USA. 51 Loder and Neidhardt, The Knight’s Move, p. 23. 52 Plato, Timaeus, 31c and 35a.


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body united without a “third thing” in the person of Jesus Christ. In the language of this paper, we cannot translate the world soul as the Holy Spirit without addressing the above three concerns of the 1140 Council. Handling the translation challenge of particularity and universality does not seem to require that scholars omit or marginalise God from spirituality research. In the study of spirituality, we do not need to choose between a “view from below” and a “view from above.” Loder proposes a methodology that uses the model of Christ’s nature as a union in opposition.53 In this methodology, researchers do not relate different spiritualities to each other through a third thing, e.g., culture, or philosophy, but directly to each other, as the Incarnation related human and divine natures directly to each other. Surprisingly, as explored only very briefly above, this methodology seems to facilitate rather than prevent discussion between different faiths, indicating areas for collaboration and respectful disagreement. We do not need to try to translate particular spiritualities into one universal spirituality, or conclude that without such a translation there is no conversation at all. Post-modern or late modern deconstructions of oppressive meta-narratives rightfully alert spirituality discourse to particularity. But our only option is not completely unrelated narratives. Within each of their worldviews or thought-systems, Hillman and Loder make universal ontological claims. Loder asserts that creation is contingent or dependent on God for its very existence. God sustains all that exists or it would not exist. The universal sustaining presence of God relates opposing particular faiths without reduction or synthesis. The integration of particularity and universality with God is expressed ultimately in the Trinity, the perichoresis or interpenetration of the three persons in one God.54 Trinitarian eros, or yearning, is constitutive of God’s existence. God yearns for us just as we seek a face that will never leave. To give away life and dwell in the other is what it means to be the Trinity. God gives life to all creation and dwells among us. The Incarnation reveals God as enfolding what opposes God with God’s self, particularly and universally on the cross. When God seems most absent, God is most present. Hillman asserts that the cosmos is 53

Loder, The Logic of the Spirit, chapter one. Harry Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge, MA, 1956), pp. 418-419. 54

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contingent or dependent upon the world soul for its very existence; this is not an assertion of creation, but present existence. The universal sustaining presence of the world soul relates opposing particular faiths, translating them into archetypes or images, transforming them into a common core. Including theological considerations in this analysis of spirituality theories facilitates greater descriptive and explanatory power of each theory’s response to the particularities of other theories, even when a theory is explicitly not theistic. The above discussion indicates that the challenge of translation in spirituality studies does not warrant the removal of a section from the orchestra. Whether a scholar sits in the pit with James, Katz, or another conductor, who leads her through the translation notes of spiritual transformation, her music will achieve greater descriptive and explanatory power with theological considerations than without. Loder’s proposed methodology of union in opposition relates jazz, opera, and bebop directly to each other, regardless of a theory’s or researcher’s musical tastes; that is, the methodology relates different spiritualities directly to each other, regardless of a theory’s or researcher’s view of the Incarnational model for the methodology. In that relating, translations and mistranslations will occur, yet the possibility for transformation is increased through greater descriptive and explanatory power. Do we not all hope for a transformative translation of our research and even ourselves?

Beyond three: Jung, Anthropology and Number

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BEYOND THREE: JUNG, ANTHROPOLOGY AND NUMBER1 John N. Crossley

Familiar yet mystical and mysterious are the numbers 1, 2, 3, and so on. In this paper I shall attempt to clarify a few questions about the natural numbers. The first few numbers, 1, 2, 3, and possibly 4, are well established, but the innocent looking phrase “and so on” lurks like a snake on the path. When so confronted, if one does not freeze in terror, as mathematics causes many people to do: “There is something about mathematics that reduces many otherwise articulate, intelligent human beings to a state of tongue-tied, self-effacing confusion,” as Jeromson notes,2 then one carefully goes around the snake keeping a respectful distance. In the nineteenth century Richard Dedekind asked the question “Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?” which may be translated as “What are the numbers and what should they be?” The German verb “sollen” is notoriously difficult to translate but there is an implied imperative or wish here. We try to answer his question and in the case of 1, 2, 3 and possibly 4 the answers are available. Dedekind’s attempt to deal with “and so on” is less than satisfactory and has led mathematicians to treat it as the snake is treated. Here we shall take the approach of the student of natural history. We shall observe and describe what we have found, even though we are not able to give a neat answer. The technique that we shall use is inspired by the approach in a thirteenth century work by Johannes de Grocheio on the theory of music.3 Instead of relying on the accepted wisdom of the day (as enshrined in particular in the work of Boethius in his De institutione 1 This work was aided and influenced by the work of Barry Jeromson, see n. 2 below. See also Robin Robertson, Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel, and the History of Archetypes (York Beach, ME, 1995). 2 Barry J. Jeromson, “Jung and Mathematics in Dialogue: A Critical Study” (Ph.D. Diss., University of South Australia, 1999), p. 77. 3 The author is in a group at Monash University Australia, which is making a new translation of Grocheio’s De arte musice. See Ernst Rohloff, editor, Die Quellenhandschriften zum Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio. In Faksimile herausgegeben nebst Übertragung des Textes und Übersetzung in Deutsche, dazu Bericht, Literaturschau, Tabellen und Indices (Leipzig, 1972).

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musica) Grocheio observed what was the actual practice of the men of Paris. So, instead of simply looking at philosophies of mathematics, we shall also consider how people actually use numbers. Of course we are influenced by what we have read so the ideas of Jung and other psychological evidence, together with anthropological and linguistic evidence, will be considered. The philosophy of mathematics, in particular, Bertrand Russell’s analysis of number will also turn out to be relevant. So this will be, in part, a Jungian essai and, like all such endeavours, will leave questions still to be answered. However, we shall try to make these questions clear but also endeavour to avoid a Jungian trap. This trap is evident in the last chapter, written by MarieLouise von Franz, of Jung’s Man and His Symbols,4 where the number archetypes for 1 to 4 briefly appear, and in Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind,5 where the reader is led to believe that the answer is in the next chapter only to find that he or she is reading the last chapter. “Can you count?” one asks a young child. The answer varies with the child’s age. Early there is a pride in answering, “Yes,” and then beginning to count, “One, two, three.” The supplementary question, “How far can you count?” will usually elicit a specific answer such as “Up to ten.” Later a game may be entered into where the child can go on counting beyond a number he or she is given. This game will eventually peter out because of lack of time or interest. However the adult tends to assume that it is possible to go on counting beyond any given number. We shall consider this later but let us now turn to the first few numbers. It has been argued that counting, at least up to a small number, is innate and indeed that animals and birds can count up to, say, three. The evidence for this has sometimes been found to be wanting. Such was the case with the famous horse, Clever Hans.6 However, it has been established that animals and very young babies can distinguish

4 Carl Gustav Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York, 1968). Translated from the German: Carl Gustav Jung et al., Der Mensch und seine Symbole, eds. Carl Gustav Jung and M.-L. von Franz, 13th ed. (Zürich, 1968). There is an unfortunate mistranslation on the last page where “Primzahl” is rendered as “primary number” but should be “prime number.” 5 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford, 1989). 6 See John N. Crossley, The Emergence of Number, 2nd ed. (Singapore, 1980), chapter I.


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between groups of two and groups of three.7 This applies not only to groups of objects but also to sound patterns. When the number of elements is larger than three the discernment is less reliable. Therefore it is clear that this use of the word “counting” is different from the use in “counting indefinitely far.” Further, there is a question of whether it is counting at all. This has been raised because it would appear to be possible simply to recognize groups of certain fixed numerical sizes, and there is experimental evidence for this, even as far as six, in the case of a raven and a grey parrot.8 Bertrand Russell, in his analysis of number,9 was able to give definitions of numbers without counting. First we need the idea of one-toone correspondence We have a one-to-one correspondence between two collections A and B when, to each element of collection A there is a unique corresponding element of B and vice versa and, further, when we go from A to B and then back to A we end up with the same element that we started with. A simple example is when, at a large dinner party, one wants to know if there are enough chairs and one simply asks people to sit down. If there are exactly enough chairs then everyone will find a place and there will be no unoccupied chair. Then Russell says that two collections “have the same number” if there is a one-to-one correspondence between the collections. Thus in our dinner party example, there are the same number of chairs and people, even though we do not know which specific number is involved. After this Russell goes on to define individual numbers such as one, two, and so on.10 In some societies, we find that small numbers were the only ones for which there were names. However, the myth that such societies counted “One, two, three, many,” or similarly, is hard to sustain. Many anthropological investigations reveal that societies had words for one and two but then became vague. Thus Walpiri, an Australian aboriginal language has tjinta meaning singular or one, tjirama: dual, two, wirkadu or mankurpa meaning paucal or several and panu meaning 7 See Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (New York, 1997). 8 See William H. Thorpe, Learning and Instinct in Animals (London, 1956). 9 See Bertrand Arthur William Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (London, 1903), para. 109, pp. 113-114 and also Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1925-1927). 10 In Russell and Whitehead’s Principia, Section *52 in vol. 1, Part II is devoted to the Cardinal Number 1 and *54 Cardinal Couples contains the definitions of the numbers 0 and 2. Neither section requires any reference to counting.

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plural or many.11 All languages necessarily have a limit to the size of numbers for which there is a single word simply because there are only a finite number of words in a language at any given time. In English the honour may still belong to googolplex which is ten to the power, 10100, where ten to the power 100 is 1 followed 100 zeroes.12 The actual number of number words may be small, as in the case of the Walbiri language, or quite large. During his search for the eighteenth century French explorer La Perouse, Dumont Durville’s ship was beached on the island of Tonga in the South Pacific. His naturalist Labillardière questioned the natives, amongst other things, about number words. They provided him with numbers into the thousands. However, they seem ultimately to have run out of patience and made fun of him by, essentially, using swear words as the response to his request for names of ever larger numbers.13 Nevertheless, the numbers one, two, three, and possibly four, seem to have their own existence. For Jung14 this existence was as psychological archetypes.15 “The archetype is a tendency to form...representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.” These archetypes manifest themselves as psychological instincts. Now because the simplest numbers are so omnipresent in our daily lives and we use them so often, it is natural for us to bring them into use in further situations. The very generality of applicability of the numbers one, two, three and possibly four, gives rise to further uses, in the same way that the ancient myths still strike a chord with us, because in each generation they are reinterpreted and resuscitated. We would also argue that, with numbers, the presence of the natural world and the use of language are essential. 11 Ken Hale, “Gaps in Grammar and Culture,” in Linguistics and Anthropology: In Honor of C.F. Voegelin, eds. M. Dale Kinkade, Kenneth L. Hale, and Oswald Werner (Lisse, 1975), pp. 295-315. 12 See Edward Kasner, James Roy Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination (Harmondsworth, 1968). 13 See the account in John Martin, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean: with an Original Grammar and Vocabulary of their Language, Compiled and Arranged from the Extensive Communications of Mr. William Mariner, Several Years Resident in those Islands 2 vols., 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1827). 14 See the last chapter of Jung, Man and his Symbols. 15 Ibid., p. 58. See also and in particular, Jung’s 1952 essay trans. R.F.C. Hull, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, in C.G. Jung: Collected Works 8, eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, (London, 1960), and the 1958 tract: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth Seen in the Skies, in C.G. Jung: Collected Works, 10).


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Consider first the number one. In the Middle Ages, in the newfound works of Aristotle one was not regarded a number but as the source of numbers (Metaphysics 1087b33-1088a15): The one signifies a measure, evidently. And in each case there is some different underlying subject, such as in the musical scale a quarter-tone; in magnitude a finger or a foot or some other such thing; and in rhythm a beat or a syllable.... And this is also according to reason [logos]; for the one signifies a measure of some plurality and the number signifies a measured plurality and a plurality of measures. Therefore it is also with good reason that the one is not a number; for neither is a measure measures, but a measure is a principle [arche], and so is the one. Likewise in the ninth century ad, al-Khwarizmi, who gives his name to algorism, the science and art of working with Hindu-Arabic numerals, says:16 “...every number is composite and that every number is put together from one. Therefore one is found in every number...” Nevertheless, counting did begin with one. In our world the differentiation of objects is all-pervasive. However, consider a world in which everything was made of drops. Then, when two drops met they might form into a single drop. In this way our idea that one plus one equals two would no longer be valid. In the new world one plus one would be one. In such a world there might be no need for counting at all. Thus I feel it is inappropriate to suggest that the numbers already exist in the world. This is not to say that we, as humans, do not have both physiological properties and psychological instincts that lead us to numbers. Maturana says:17 “A universe comes into being when a space is severed into two. A unity is defined. The description, invention and manipulation of unities is at the base of all scientific enquiry.” However, the idea of the visible world being differentiated is physiologically based. Marr18 shows how the presence of, say, a white speck on a dark ground, triggers an electrical impulse. Indeed, the boundary 16 See John Newsome Crossley and Alan Sorley Henry, “Thus Spake alKhwarizmi,” Historia Mathematica 17 (1990), 103-131, and for the full text, which has recently been discovered, Menso Folkerts, Die älteste lateinische Schrift über das indische Rechnen nach al-Hwarizmi: Edition, Uebersetzung und Kommentar, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse, Abhandlungen, neue Folge, Heft 113 (Munich, 1997). 17 Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, 1980), p. 73. 18 David Marr, Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information (San Francisco, 1982).

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between any two objects (unless of very close colours and textures) triggers such an impulse. Therefore we have a physiological tendency to distinguish objects. It is not a large jump from this to the distinguishing of small numbers of distinct objects. All that is required is some kind of memory to compare configurations. As Seidenberg19 pointed out ‘The basic things needed for counting are a definite sequence of words and a familiar activity in which they are employed. The creation ritual offers us precisely such sequence and activity. Processions of couples in ritual are well known. ‘‘Male and female he created them (Gen. 1.27).” ‘‘There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and female, as God had commanded Noah (Gen. 7.9).” Presumably a couple is announced (in rituals the Word always accompanies the Deed) and then they make their appearance on the ritual scene.20 The sequence of words so used might have come to be used as the initial number-words.’’ The continuing emphasis on rituals and the importance of small collections, such as the family, only serve to reinforce the idea of number. In the West, as in all other language groups that I have encountered or read of, the numbers one and two are clearly present. The emphasis on the number three seems less clear. In the Middle Ages the order in the world was thought of as a reflection of the heavenly order. In the Christian view the emphasis on the Trinity was not evident or clear, although the debate in the Council of Nicea and the concern over the views of Arius had taken place long before. The problem here is not just a theological one, the identification of the three persons of the Trinity as constituting one God required a conceptual view of numbers that was at odds with the normal use of the numbers one and three in everyday life. Four presents even more problems. In the East, especially in forms of Mahayana Buddhism, the mandala with its fourfold symmetry is significant and pervasive. Although Jung argues that, in his own experience, and in that of some patients, the mandala is also relevant, I find it difficult to believe that the four number archetype is as evident as those for one, two and three. Further, since in many languages, at least before their subversion by missionaries and other westerners, there 19 Abraham Seidenberg, “The Ritual Origin of Counting,” Archive for the History of Exact Sciences 2/1 (1962-6), 8. 20 (Present author’s note.) Similar ritual descriptions may be found in George Clapp Vaillant, The Aztecs of Mexico: Origin, Rise and Fall of the Aztec Nation (Harmondsworth, 1950).


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was no word for “four,” it seems hard to argue that there is an innate instinct of four. Thus in Pitjantjatjara, another Australian Aboriginal language: “The Pitjantjatjara count only to two, thus kutju ‘one,’ kutjara ‘two (1+1),’ mankurpa ‘three’—but also ‘few.’ It is not strictly (1+1+1). Nowadays in school ‘four’ is made from kutjara kutjara and ‘five’ from kutjara mankurpa but that is as far as they go. Nonetheless, mankurpa is currently employed as ‘few.’”21 This also suggests that the four archetype, and therefore possibly also the three archetype, are constructs in the psychological culture of a society. If one were to argue that there was a five archetype, then I think it would be very hard to justify this because of the large number of languages that had no word for five. Thus the Jungian number archetypes seem to run out around number four. This is consistent with the experiments described by Dehaene22 on babies. Indeed, it is consistent with a view that some animals have an innate sense of small numbers, but not exceeding about six. Beyond three or some small number there is, however, the potential for further development of the appreciation and assimilation of number words. When a society without number words beyond small ones is confronted by a society, such as that of the missionaries, then the range of number words rapidly increases by adoption or adaptation of the incoming vocabulary. This is true of the Walbiri people referred to above. “[T]here is a Walbiri-based method of exact enumeration which is highly favored, quite apart from the recent and not universally known, English-derived system of numerals23 wani, tuwu, tjiriyi, puwa, payipi, tjikitji, tjipini, yayiti, nayini, tini, lipni,...” Likewise, in the Philippines, where the Americans took over at the beginning of the twentieth century, I have observed that, for small numbers, in this case, less than ten or twenty, Tagalog words are used, but for numbers greater than twenty English words are used almost inevitably, even in conversations otherwise carried out entirely in the local Filipino language. Let us now turn to larger numbers, or rather the process of counting indefinitely far. In the latter stages of his life Jung moved from the sequence of number archetypes for one, two, three, four, to consider21 Personal communication from Miss M. Bain who worked with the Pitjantjatjara people, 23 January 1977. 22 See Dehaene, The Number Sense. 23 See Hale, Linguistics and Anthropology. Pronouncing these words out loud will quickly reveal their provenance.

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ing an archetype that was the archetype of all the natural numbers. This is discussed in his Synchronicity.24 The phrase “order archetype” seems, to a mathematician, to be misleading as a translation of the German “Archetypus der Ordnung,” which might better be rendered as “ordering archetype.” This would certainly be in accord with the approach, if not the technical details of Dedekind’s work (op. cit.). Consider again the small child who, on being tossed high into the air, requests: “Do it again!” a request that is repeated until an adult or child gets tired—usually, of course, the adult. In counting the child progresses from being able to count up to, say, ten, to being able to count to a hundred. After that the debate seems to change to a game of trying to name a largest number. When the child appreciates that beyond any number there is a larger one the debate changes again. Eventually the practice involved, if not the idea, of generating ever-larger numbers is established. This process can take place in two quite distinct ways that seem to be very different. First, if one uses number words, then, in any language there is a necessarily a largest number for which there is a single word.25 In English this used to be million but current usage goes at least as far as a trillion. In Latin it was usually a thousand. For numbers larger than this largest-number word repetition of the word is required. Thus one spoke of a “million million” and one could speak today of a “trillion trillion.” Indeed, it is inevitably necessary to repeat at least one number word as one names larger and larger numbers, since the collection of distinct words is finite. The same phenomenon occurs when one uses a particular notation for numbers, as with Roman numbers. Although there were some exceptions, a thousand, M, was usually the Roman letter for the largest number used in building numbers. Therefore, for very large numbers, it had to be repeated the requisite number of times. Ironically, the simplest system of numeration, using tallies, where we write, for example, ||||||| for seven, has exactly the same need of repetition!

24

See especially, Ibid., paras. 870 and 871. The largest-number word changes over time. In some literature, number words have been specially created for very large numbers that are not in common use, as, for example, “googolplex” referred to above. See, for example, W.D. Johnstone, ed., For Good Measure: The Most Complete Guide to Weights and Measures and their Metric Equivalents, new ed. (Lincolnwood, IL, 1998) and also John Newsome Crossley, The Emergence of Number, chapter I. 25


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Secondly, if one uses a place notation, as in the case in the HinduArabic system commonly in use (and also in Chinese), then it seems, at first, as if one is avoiding the kind of repetition just noted. While it is true that with each extra symbol (Arabic numeral) one can count many more numbers, that is to say, three figures allow us to write down 900 numbers from 100 to 999 while six allow us to go from 100 000 to 999 999 where we write down 900 000, nevertheless we have two tasks to perform in going to the next number. First we have to know how to increase a number other than 9. This is simple as we just write down the next number in the list 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. In the case of 9, we write down 0 and “carry 1.” Then we repeat the exercise with the next number to the left. Finally, if we find the last digit to the left is a 9, we write down 10. Note that the repetition in which we engage is of the same nature as we had when using tallies: in that case we simply go to the last position26 and write down another tally “|.” In either approach we are presented with the idea of indefinite repetition, which is evident in the phrase “and so on.” Dedekind endeavoured to capture this notion of indefinite repetition in his op.cit. He characterized27 the natural numbers in terms of what he called “systems.” One starts from an initial point, in our case, 1, and then has a procedure for going to the next, distinct, point. For numbers, the next number after x may be denoted by Next(x). We say Next(x) is the “successor” of x and x is the “predecessor” of Next(x). In order to avoid circularity, which would give us only a finite number of points, Dedekind imposes the restriction that 1 is not the successor of any point and that each point has a unique successor.28 The natural numbers clearly form such a system. However, there are other systems 26

With tallies this could be either the leftmost or rightmost position. Formally Dedekind provided a list of axioms for the natural numbers. These are now commonly known as the Peano Axioms. Such naming is not uncommon in mathematics. However Peano does explicitly note in, for example, Giuseppe Peano, “Sul concetto di numero,” in Opere Scelte, ed. Ugo Cassina (Rome, 1957-59), pp. 80-109, that the axioms are due to Dedekind (on p. 93). 28 Part of this characterization was already explicit in the work of Isidore of Seville, see William M. Lindsay, ed., Isidore Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Oxoniensis, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911). See in particular, Book III, Chapter 9, “Ita vero suis quisque numerus proprietatibus terminatur, ut nullus eorum par esse cuicumque alteri possit. Ergo et dispares inter se atque diversi sunt, et singuli quique finiti sunt, et omnes infiniti sunt.” (source: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Isidore/3*.html#%9, accessed 28 September 2005.) 27

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that do not look like the natural numbers and yet form a system. For example, consider the natural numbers arranged in the order 1,3,5,..., 2,4,6,..., where all the even numbers come after the odd numbers. Here the successor is formed by adding 2. We do not have circularity but we have an extraneous tail of numbers.29 To avoid this Dedekind added what has become known as the “Axiom of Induction.” This has the form: For every property P, if 1 has the property P and, whenever x has the property P, then so does Next(x), then every point has property P. This raises the question: What does “property” mean?

A full answer requires discussion of second order logic and we shall avoid this here.30 There are other problems! The first is that what is intended is to connect every point with the starting point in a finite number of steps. Circularity becomes apparent here.31 We are trying to characterize numbers but are using the phrase “finite number.” The second is that although Dedekind has provided a theory there is no guarantee that it is consistent. One way to ensure that it is consistent is to provide an actual model. Then, since the model actually exists, it is evident that the theory cannot be inconsistent. So how does one provide a model? In mathematics the standard procedure is to provide a mathematical proof. Dedekind follows this path and produces the most remarkable proof that this author has ever seen. The theorem he proves is (in translation): “There exist infinite systems. Proof. My own realm of thoughts, i.e. the totality S of all things, which can be objects of my thought, is infinite.” And for his Next (x) function he uses “the thought of x.” Is this a mathematical proof? If so, it is very strange indeed. One expects mathematical proofs to refer to abstract objects in a mathematical world, not the psychological aspects of the mathematician!

Isidore begins this chapter with the difficult to translate sentence Quot numeri infiniti existunt. The translation works if one inserts query after numeri, for Isidore answers the question in his final sentence: Ergo et dispares inter se atque diversi sunt, et singuli quique finiti sunt, et omnes infiniti sunt. 29 This example does not obey the requirement that every number have a unique predecessor. Examples that do have that property yet are not copies of the natural numbers are called non-standard models. An example of one of these is eloquently described in Dehaene, The Number Sense. 30 When one restricts attention to first order logic there are unintended, so-called ‘non-standard’ models of the system. See the previous note. 31 As noted above, Russell (Principia) avoids this circularity. However we shall see below that he runs into another difficulty.


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The question immediately arises as to whether it is possible to provide a truly mathematical proof. This seems impossible to the present author. The reason for this view is bound up with the earlier point we noted: the circularity. In order to present an infinite system one has to have, already existing (at least in the mathematical world), a process that can be repeated indefinitely. But this is exactly what we are trying to establish, namely, that it is possible to repeat some operation indefinitely. The reaction of mathematicians to this work of Dedekind was somewhat akin to the reaction of biologists to their first acquaintance with some Australian mammals. When a specimen of a Duck-billed Platypus (Ormithorhynchus anatinus) was produced in London it was held to be a fake and ignored,32 subsequently new classifications were made and then the platypus fitted in with the conventional nomenclature. In the case of mathematics, the Peano Axioms as formulated by Dedekind, changed status from being characteristics of the natural numbers to being the means of definition of the natural numbers. This change of status, as I have argued in my book The Emergence of Number, transformed the study of the natural numbers from a study of the world to an abstract study in the realm of pure mathematics. In another area of mathematics, namely set theory, in order to overcome the question of whether there was indeed an infinite set (such as that of the natural numbers), an Axiom of Infinity was introduced.33 This was modelled on Dedekind’s notion of what we have called the Next function.34 Now the archetype of ordering is not evident in the languages of the primitive peoples we have referred to above. Beyond certain small numbers there is a vagueness, which, in English, we refer to as “many.” 32 See, for example, http://www.platypus.org.uk/det-ancest.html, accessed 28 September 2005. 33 Russell tried to deduce mathematics from (pure) logic in his Principia. In this endeavour he was largely successful but there were two fatal stumbling blocks. One was the Axiom of Reducibility, which is a technical matter and not relevant here. The other was the Axiom of Infinity. This was of an entirely different character. The axiom of infinity in effect stated that there exists an infinite set of objects. Russell was unable to prove this as a theorem, which is why it had to be included as an axiom. However this axiom appears to require empirical as opposed to purely logical knowledge. We say ‘appears’ since there are insurmountable difficulties in verifying the existence of infinitely many objects. 34 All of this is unaffected by the debate between potential and actual infinities which arises in Aristotle. We are only concerned with being able to generate arbitrarily large (finite) numbers.

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Nevertheless, such vagueness does indicate a mode of accounting that is not precisely counting. It should also be borne in mind that Dedekind and Peano’s work took place only relatively recently in the history of the human race, that is to say, just before and just after the start of the twentieth century. If therefore, as we believe, archetypes evolve from our physical and psychic nature, then it should be unsurprising that the archetype corresponding to the construction of the unending sequence of natural numbers should have only appeared relatively recently. In the mathematical world the precursor of the axiom of induction only dates from the work of Francesco Maurolico35 in the sixteenth century. Further developments of the idea took place only slowly culminating in the work of Pascal and Bernoulli36 in the seventeenth century. If, as we believe,37 “Our sense of and use of number may rely on the basic properties of brains and even of neurons, but they develop through the inextricable interplay of the biological and the social” then Jung’s archetype of ordering does seem to come to the rescue here. Since archetypes, by their very nature, are not knowable but only manifest themselves through the human psyche, the fact that we cannot (without circularity) characterize the notion of the next larger number, or indeed, the idea of unending repetition does not impede us from appealing to the archetype as the underlying source of our thoughts and actions. It does not solve all our questions, but it does give us a model that we can usefully apply. The archetype gives us an instinct for the unending repetition of an act. The mathematical solution to the problem of characterizing what such a repetition might be in a mathematical context as apparently simple as that of the natural numbers, remains to be found.

35 See Francisco Maurolico, “Arithmeticorum libri duo,” in Opuscula Mathematica (Venice, 1575). 36 See Blaise Pascal, Traité du triangle arithmétique (Paris, 1665) and Jacob Bernoulli, Excerpta ex iisdem litteris, Acta Eruditorum (1686), 5: 360-361. 37 Steven Rose, “Downloaded at birth,” review of Dehaene, The Number Sense, The New York Times, 8 February 1998, see http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/08/ reviews/980208.08roselt.html, accessed 28 September 2005

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A VISION OF DWARFS Joanna Woods-Marsden La deformità ... piaceva più che se la fosse stata di bellissima forma composta: 1

A strange, even startling, feature of Renaissance court portraiture was the decision of some aristocratic sitters to be recorded for posterity accompanied by the “other.”2 In this essay I address the specific choice of a dwarf as portrait companion.3 Fig. 1 shows a portrait by Giacomo Vighi called L’Argenta of Carlo Emmanuele, duke of Savoy, circa 1570, as a 9- or 10-year-old, standing beside his mother’s pet dwarf Fabio.4 The birth defect that resulted in Fabio’s physical deformity was a disorder of bone growth, called achondroplasia, a genetic condition consisting in abnormally short stature, short arms and legs, and a 1 “His deformity pleased more than if he had been composed of the most beautiful form.” The Mantuan poet Battista Fiera writing on the death in 1499 of the court dwarf Mattello. Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, “Buffoni, nani, e schiavi dei Gonzaga,” Nuova Antologia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 3rd series, 34 (1891), 618-650, 636. 2 For the unfortunate tendency to use the word “other” as if it were a stable term, see Paul Freedman, “The Medieval Other/The Middle Ages as Other,” in Marvels, Monsters and Miracles, eds. T.S. Jones and D.A. Sprunger (Kalamazoo, MI, 2002), pp. 1-14. 3 The standard secondary sources for dwarfs are E. Tietze-Conrat, Dwarfs and Jesters in Art (London, 1957); W. Willeford, The Fool and his Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and their Audience (Evanston, 1969); M. Monestier, Les Nains (Paris, 1977); Monstres et Prodiges au temps de la Renaissance, ed. M.T. Jones-Davies (Paris, 1980). Beside the references given in the notes, see also Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister (Chicago/London, 1982); Roberto Zapperi, “Arrigo le velu, Pietro le fou, Amon le nain et autres bêtes: Autour d’un tableau d’Agostino Carrache,” Annales ESC 40 (March-April 1985), 307-327; Paula Findlen, “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990), 292-331; Robin L. O’Bryan, “The Dwarf in Italian Renaissance Iconography” (M.A. Thesis, San Diego State University, 1991); Anita Moskovitz, “An Inversion of Viewpoint: The Lunette of San Lorenzo, Vicenza,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 20 (2001), 18-24; Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2004). 4 Vittorio Viale, Mostra del barocco piemontese (Turin, 1963), 2:45, cat. 1.

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proportionately larger head in which the forehead is prominent.5 Alonso Sánchez Coello’s likeness, from the 1580s, depicting the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, daughter of Philip II of Spain, with the well known court dwarf Magdalena Ruiz holding monkeys, can be seen in Fig. 2.6 In this type of double portrait, power relationships were articulated visually. The princes were centralized within the composition and the dwarfs visually marginalized, so that the two figures were clearly differentiated into a protagonist and a subordinate, a status confirmed by visual details. In the case of L’Argenta’s portrait, for instance, only the duke was given a shadow to cast; in that by Sánchez Coello, while the Infanta was positioned against a hanging of rich brocade, her companion was placed against a dark void. In both works, the princes’ prominent, possessive gestures of hand and, in one case, arm, draped across the subordinates’ heads reads as signifying the dominion of the one and the subjugation of the other. Interpretations, when they are offered, for the inclusion of dwarfs in independent princely likenesses are limited to a celebration of their ownership or recognition of their exotic presence at court. Although these factors obviously played a role, I will propose that the Renaissance pictorial association of the aristocratic self with an unequal partner was more functional. Categorized by their contemporaries both as monstri, monsters, and as maraviglia, wonders of nature, these stunted creatures served as foils to rulers who sought grandeur through pictorial juxtaposition. As Barry Wind has shown for the Baroque period, such subsidiary figures promoted the superiority of the protagonist by demonstrating how much more beautiful, upright and better proportioned he or she was.7 In his Book of the Courtier Castiglione famously defined laughter as deriving from una certa deformità, “a certain deformity.”8 Given that 5

I thank Dr. Daniel Oakes for his help on this issue. See www.medicinenet.com/ acondroplasia/article.html. 6 Juan Miguel Serrera, Alonso Sánchez Coello y el retrato en la corte de Felipe II (Museo del Prado, Madrid, 1990), cat. 29. See also a portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger of Isabel Clara Eugenia with a female dwarf as a child, 1599, at Hampton Court. 7 Barry Wind, A Foul and Pestilent Congregation: Images of Freaks in Baroque Art (New York, 1998), p. 3, a source to which I am much indebted. 8 Baldassare Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, 2: 20: Il loco e quasi il fonte onde nascono i ridiculi consiste in una certa deformità, perché solamente si ride di quelle cose che hanno in se disconvenienza. The Singleton translation is used, as edited by Daniel

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other Renaissance sources, such as letters, also stress that deformity invariably provoked laughter and amusement, I further speculate that some visual representations of dwarfs must have had humorous connotations for contemporary viewers. Associated with entertainment in life, these unfortunate creatures surely evoked a similar response when glimpsed in art. Thus this essay addresses the image of the dwarf as marvelous monster, on the one hand, and as entertainment, on the other. To get a sense of how these princely companions would have signified for the portraits’ first viewers, I turn to Agnolo Bronzino’s independent portrait of the dwarf Morgante, depicted without an aristocratic protagonist (Fig. 3). Painted at the Medici court in Florence, c. 1550, it was a doubled-sided work that reflected the contemporary paragone, or competition, between painting and sculpture.9 Placed back to back in the same frame, on the verso Morgante was depicted in the guise of a bird hunter, the form of the hunt that was considered appropriate for dwarfs (Fig. 3a). Seen from the back, Morgante holds up a dead game bird and grasps a bundle of sticks; on his shoulder, sits Minerva’s owl, symbol of wisdom—and, hence, in a world upside-down—of folly.10 On the recto, seen from the front, Morgante is currently assimilated to Bacchus but apparently he originally held another owl instead of a glass (Fig. 3b).11 Yet a further level of meaning of these repetitive attributes is offered by Deborah Parker: in burlesque poetry, such as that by Bronzino, the owl was a common euphemism for a sodomite’s phallus.12

Javitch in The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation: An Authoritative Text, Criticism (New York, 2002). 9 Palazzo Vecchio: committenza e collezionismo medicei, 1537-1610 (Florence, 1980), pp. 273-274, cat. 513; James Holderbaum, “A bronze by Giovanni Bologna and a Painting by Bronzino,” Burlington Magazine 98 (1956), 439-443; Paul Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art (Columbia/London, 1978), ch. 6. 10 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Padua, 1611), s.v. civetta, p. 62; Consideratione, p. 98; Pecunia, p. 409. 11 Touba Ghadessi Fleming, “Identity and Physical Deformity in Italian Court Portraits 1550-1650: Dwarves, Hirsutes, and Castrati” (Ph.D. Diss., Northwestern University, 2007), pp. 97-98, citing the research of Dr. Diane Kunzelman of the Fortezza da Basso in Florence. 12 Deborah Parker, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet (Cambridge, 2000), p. 155. On the association of owls with sodomites in sixteenth-century Florence, see Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), pp. 109, 223.

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We have a well-known contemporary eye witness’ reaction to this work. Describing Morgante as ignudo tutto intiero, completely naked, the first art historian, Giorgio Vasari, characterized his limbs as “monstrous,” quella stravaganza di membra monstruose. However, Vasari ended his discussion by calling the painting, including those freakish limbs, bella e meravigliosa, beautiful and marvelous.13 Thus, in the Renaissance, the historical meaning of dwarfs may be constructed as oscillating between the two poles of the monstrous and the marvelous. Indeed, when the volume, Monstorum Historia, by the great Cinquecento naturalist, Ulisse Aldrovandi, was finally published posthumously in 1642, it included a woodcut depicting the dwarf belonging to Charles Sieur de Créqui, duke of Lesdiguières, ambassador to the papal court in 1624. Fig. 4 shows this fully dressed dwarf, probably copied from a painting, among such fantastical nude monstrosities as a man with pendulous ears that reach down to his knees, and another with one arm attached to his head.14 In both classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages, humans who deviated from the norm were considered instances of blemished humanity and therefore monsters of Nature. According to Aristotle, a monstrosity belonged to a class of “things contrary to nature,” and in the early modern period, a monster was understood as a being whose existence was a transgression or aberration of the natural order.15 Writing in 1560, the Florentine philosopher Benedetto Varchi defined monsters as both “deformed and ugly,” going on to state that they inspired repugnance because, by negating

13 Ritrasse poi Bronzino, al duca Cosimo, Morgante nano, ignudo tutto intiero, ed in due modi, cioé da un lato del quadro il dinanzi, e dall’altro il di dietro, con quella stravaganza di membra monstruose che ha quel nano, la qual pittura in quel genere é bella e maravigliosa. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, 1906), 7: 601. 14 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum Historia, preface by Jean Céard (Turin, 2002); Erminio Caprotti, Mostri, draghi e serpenti nelle silografie dell’opera di Ulisse Aldrovandi e dei suoi contemporanei (Milan, 1980). In point of fact, Créqui’s dwarf is documented as not being a victim of dwarfism, but as a midget who was much admired for the perfect proportion of his limbs: ...il qual nano era riguardevole per essere di membra gratiosamente proportionate. G. Gigli, Diario Romano (1608-1670), ed. G. Ricciotto (Rome, 1957), p. 135, as cited in Irving Lavin, “Duquesnoy’s Nano di Créqui and two busts by Francesco Mochi,” Art Bulletin 52 (1970), 132-149, 133n11. 15 Aristotle, Generation of animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge, 1979), p. 425, 4.4.770b; Mark Dorrian, “On the monstrous and the grotesque,” Word and Image 16 (2000), 310-317, 310; T. DaC. Kaufmann, “Caprices of Art & Nature: Arcimboldo & the Monstrous,” in Kunstform Capriccio: von der Groteske zur Spieltheorie der Moderne, eds. E. Mai and J. Rees (Cologne, 1998), pp. 33-51, 36.

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form, order, and hierarchy, they violated standards of decorum in nature and society.16 In the sixteenth century, Castiglione had not only already defined such “monstrous things” as “marvels” but also qualified the noun with the adjective dispettosa, meaning “scorn” or “contempt.”17 Accordingly, while, on the one hand, monsters such as dwarfs were seen as maraviglia, on the other hand, they aroused repugnance that in turn elicited disprezzo, contempt, and deriso, derision, on the part of the viewer whose limbs were well-formed. A few disparaging quotations from Shakespeare makes the point. Lysander in Midsummer Night’s Dream, said: “Get you gone, you dwarf;/You minimus, of hindering knotgrass made;/ You bead, you acorn;” and Auvergne in Henry VI, Part I declared: “Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf!/It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp/Should strike such terror to his enemies.”18 Francis Bacon also knew that the sight of deformity aroused scorn and contempt.19 Indeed, the class and social prejudices expressed in the language of contempt could lead to cruel outcomes. Documentation from the Medici court shows that dwarfs were often subject to what in our century constitutes abuse or ill-treatment. They were de-humanized by being made the focus of beatings, or the butt of crude, physical horseplay—that Renaissance propensity for coarseness and violence that is difficult for modern sensibilities to comprehend and accept.20 Albeit defined as jests of nature to be simultaneously marveled at while being derided, dwarfs, given the relative rarity of dwarfism, were nonetheless greatly sought after by princes. They were considered valuable possessions that added to the court’s magnificence, and, like lapdogs and parrots, were regarded as personal property. Indeed 16 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 11501750 (New York, 1998), p. 202; Thomas E.A. Dale, “The Monstrous,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford, 2006), p. 261. 17 Castiglione, 1: 20. Veggendo adunque alla qualità della persona, dico bastar ch’ella non sia estrema in piccolezza né in grandezza; perché e l’una e l’altra di questi condicioni porto seco una certa dispettosa maraviglia e sono gli omini di tal sorte mirati quasi di quel modo che si mirano le cose monstruose... 18 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3: 2; King Henry VI, Part I, 2: 3. 19 Francis Bacon, Essays, ed. M.A. Scott (New York, 1908), pp. 200-202, xliv, “Of Deformity.” 20 See Detlef Heikamp, “Il Nano Morgante: Tentativo di un ritratto,” in Giambologna: gli dei, gli eroi, eds. Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Dimitrios Zikos (Florence, 2006), pp. 286-93, 287 for a burla crudele in 1541. See also Barolsky, Infinite Jest, pp. 3, 7, 101, 145.

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Italian aristocrats delighted in the sensational appearance produced by grotesque disfigurement. “Everyone caressed [the dwarf] and were astonished at the sight of his body,” reads one letter from the Mantuan court.21 “[The dwarf’s] deformity pleased more than if he had been composed of the most beautiful forms,” reads an account that juxtaposed the terms deformità and bellissima forma, of another sixteenthcentury Mantuan dwarf.22 As the Florentine poet, Anton Francesco Grazzini known as Il Lasca, wrote about Morgante, he was tanto brutto che pareva bello, “so ugly as to appear beautiful.”23 Wherein lay physical beauty for this culture? “I would have [the courtier] well built and shapely of limb [ben formato],” wrote Castiglione, “and would have him show strength, lightness and suppleness [forza, leggerezza, discioltura]…”24 Obsession with bodily deportment was not confined to the writings of Castiglione. Erasmus, for instance, devoted a whole chapter of his treatise on civility, “On good manners for boys,” to correct deportment.25 This required an erect posture and evidence of male strength in a powerful chest and shoulders. “Men are wonderfully desirous of beauty, proportion, & decorum [bellezza, misura, convenevolezza]” wrote Giovanni della Casa in his treatise Galateo, “and, conversely, they avoid as much as possible that which is...shapeless & deformed [contraffatto, difforme].”26 “Ugliness, a defect of Nature,” wrote Giovanni Battista della Porta, “is an effect of disproportion.”27 Referring to “my own deformity,” Shakespeare’s hunchback Richard III echoed these concepts when he

21 ...tutti gli facevano carezze et staveno stupefatti in considerare la persona sua. Joanna Woods-Marsden, The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello’s Arthurian Frescoes (Princeton, 1988), pp. 130, 235. 22 Luzio and Renier, p. 636. 23 “...fu così contraffatto e stravagante/ e tanto brutto che pareva bello...” Anton Francesco Grazzini, Le rime burlesche, ed. Carlo Verzone (Florence, 1882), p. 640. 24 Castiglione, 1: 20. “...voglio che egli sia di bona disposizione e de’ membri ben formato, e mostri forza e leggerezza e discioltura...” 25 Georges Vigarello, “The upward training of the body from the age of chivalry to Courtly Civility,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2 (New York: 1989), pp. 148-199, 151. 26 “...gli uomini sono molto vaghi della bellezza e della misura e della convenevolezza; e per lo contrario delle sozze cose e contrafatte e difformi sono schifi...” Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, overo de’ costumi, ed. Dino Provenzal (Milan, 1950), p. 75, chap. 26; trans. in Galateo: A Renaissance Treatise on Manners, eds. Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett (Toronto, 2001), p. 86. 27 “la bruttezza è difetto di natura et effetto di sporporzione.” Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Della Fisionomia dell’uomo, ed. M. Cicognani (Parma, 1988), p. 499.

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lamented that he was “curtailed of this fair proportion.”28 St. Augustine followed classical authors in insisting that “all bodily beauty consists in the proportion of the parts… Where there is no proportion the eye is offended, either because there is something wanting, or too small, or too large.”29 Upright carriage and fair proportions were sought after not only for esthetic reasons but also for their connotations of inner moral rectitude. As Marsilio Ficino wrote, “The body is the shadow of the soul; the form of the body... represents the form of the soul.”30 In Medieval physiognomic theory, for instance, well-proportioned bodies, serene expressions, and elegant gestures were considered the appropriate physical attributes for holy personages and the Virtuous in general. Such somatic characteristics, suitable for the saintly, were soon considered equally appropriate to depictions of the nobility. Thus, the upper classes in the Middle Ages were traditionally represented visually with the same elegant, handsome, and well-proportioned bodies as those given to the holy, as well as being carefully differentiated from the lower classes whose bodies were constructed as short, squat, and bent. Concepts of social status and virtue merged, as if the nobility was, by definition, endowed with saintly characteristics.31 Breeding was evident in an individual’s somatic bearing, so that good posture served to reinforce class distinctions. Fabio and Magdalena were, I propose, included in the portraits of Carlo Emmanuele of Savoy and Isabel Clara Eugenia of Spain as counter-figures to the standard canon of beauty, that is, as exemplars of the brutto that tested and proved their masters’ bellezza, a contrast, as it were, between the firm & the infirm, of the normative body with the abnormal (Figs. 1 and 2). “In the portrait of a very beautiful and pleasant-looking lady,” wrote the French sixteenth-century chronicler Brantôme, “place next to her an old hag, a moorish slave or a hideous dwarf, so that the ugliness [laideur] and blackness [noirceur] may give greater luster [lustre] and brilliance [candeur] to her beauty and 28

Richard III, 1: 1. Augustine, The City of God, Loeb Classical Library, trans. Marcus Dods (New York, 1950,) book xvi, ch. 8, p. 531; book xxii, ch. 19, pp. 842, 843. 30 The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (London, 1988), IV [trans. of Liber V], pp. 66-67, #51. 31 Debra Hassig, “The Iconography of Rejection; Jews & other Monstrous Races,” in Image & Belief: Studies in celebration of the 80th Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. C. Hourihane (Princeton, 1999), pp. 25-46. 29

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fairness.”32 Such a function was not limited to the female gender. The stunted, mal formato, limbs and bruttezza of these “monstrous” pets provided a foil to the lord and lady’s well-proportioned, upright bodies, establishing their superiority and elegance, bodies that, albeit clothed, were surely intended to recall sublimely the idealized forms of classicizing sculpture, whether ancient or modern. The same connotations of the prince’s erect carriage, and his concomitantly elevated virtù, resonate in another type: portraits designed to make manifest the military commander’s virility and martial potency on the battlefield. In this type, dwarfs were often shown as pages holding the condottiere’s helmet. Fig. 5 shows Titian’s portrait of Charles V’s commander, Alfonso D’Avalos, c. 1533, in full armor including gauntlets, being handed his helmet by a dwarf, who is barely squeezed, as if a last moment addition, into the lower left corner. 33 All the sources comment on Avalos’ fine appearance. Paolo Giovio claimed he was the most handsome man in the world, and Brantôme wrote that he was handsome, well formed and tall [il était beau seigneur et de belle taille et haut].34 Avalos’ erect elegance is unquestionably emphasized by his page-dwarf’s tiny stature as well by the latter’s extreme marginalization. Another variation on this theme is provided by the Tintoretto workshop double portrait of 1561 depicting the Venetian commander Scipione Clusone, identified by his coat of arms (Fig. 6).35 The horizontal format, unusual for the genre, allowed the artist to separate the protagonist and his dwarf-page and locate them on opposite sides of 32 ...le portraict d’une forte belle et agréable dame, luy appose auprès d’elle, ou quelque vieille, ou quelque esclave more, ou quelque nain très laid, afin que leur laideur et noirceur donne plus de lustre et de candeur à ceste grand beauté et blancheur, cited in Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-Painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven and London, 1990), p. 134, giving reference to Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. L. Lalanne (Paris, 1864-82), 2: 414. 33 Jean Habert, Le portrait d’Alphonse d’Avalos par Titien (Paris, 1990); Scott Schaefer, Titian and the Commander: A Renaissance Artist and his Patron (Los Angeles, 2006), pamphlet. 34 Paolo Giovio, Gli elogi vite brevemente scritte d’hvomini illustri di guerra, antichi et moderni (Florence, 1554); Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Les vies des grand capitaines etrangers (Leyden, 1666), as cited in Karl Wilczek, “Ein Bildnis des Alfonso Davalos von Tizian,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 63 (1929-1930), 247. 35 Signed JACOPO TENTOR FECE MDLXI. Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti (Milan, 1994), cat. 24. For Clusone’s medal, see G.F. Hill, “Notes on Italian medals XIX: Scipione Clusona,” Burlington Magazine 27 (1915), 65-66.

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the picture surface where they enact the ritual of the helmet being assigned to its warrior before battle. The distribution of the pictorial surface is striking: silhouetted against a dark interior wall, the surfaces of Clusone’s body, garbed in expensive sword and armor, are spreadeagled over the right half of the canvas, while the profiled dwarf and Clusone’s helmet, poised above his gauntlets, share the left half, silhouetted against the sunrise of the world outdoors in which the combat will take place. Stylishly dressed, with dagger at waist, the dwarf appears to have been deliberately posed to echo the configuration of his master, including Clusone’s protruding left elbow that pierces the picture plane. We now turn to the entertainment potential for the Renaissance of human bodily disfigurement. In a typical Renaissance jest, Morgante was named satirically after the poet Luigi Pulci’s giant.36 Bronzino’s double-sided portrait points up another major Cinquecento reaction to dwarfs in court life: these deviants from the norm were regarded as sources of sollazzo, amusement, and diletto, pleasure, to their owners (Fig. 3). As Castiglione noted, “bodily defects often offer fine material for laughter,” a laughter that may have been a mechanism for coping with anxiety.37 We have contemporary documentation of this pleasure in the form of a ducal privilege drawn up by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1555 to accompany the gift of a farm to Morgante. It reveals that mental deficiencies were expected to accompany bodily deformity. “The very many amusements [oblectamenta] that you offered us,” it read, were due to “the stupidity of your spirit [fatuitate animi], and the weakness of your mind [mentis defectu], which for this reason were extremely pleasurable [iocunda] and offered us no little consolation [solatium]…”38 In short, in the words of the satirist Pietro Aretino, La buffoneria é vita e anima de la corte, “jesting is the life and spirit of the 36 Luigi Pulci, Il Morgante Maggiore, 1481. Similarly, the dwarfs of Philip II of Spain and Henri II of France were nicknamed respectively Montagna (mountain) and Grand Jean (Big John). Juvenal had suggested the nickname “Atlas” for a dwarf (Juvenal, Satires of Juvenal and Persius, Loeb Classical Libarry, trans. G.G. Ramsey [Cambridge, MA, 1957], p. 161). 37 Castiglione, 2: 50. “Ché si come i vicii del corpo danno spesso bella materia di ridere.” John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse, 2000), p. 262. 38 “...prestitisti plurimave oblectamenta per te nobis exhibita, que cum non parum procedere quasi ex fatuitate animi tui et multum ex tue mentis defectu facile cognoverimus, iocunda ob id admodum fuere et solatium non mediocre tribuerunt...” Heikamp, p. 292, doc. II.

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court.”39 As a jest of nature, the “monstrous” dwarf thus also evoked comic delight.40 In Bibbiena’s discussion in the Book of the Courtier of the causes of laughter (le cose che movono il riso), Castiglione used various terms to differentiate between the kinds of entertainment provided by dwarfs and others,. Among these were facezie, pleasantries, burle, practical jokes, and motti da ridere, laughable witticisms.41 Another term for practical joke, beffa, was frequently used by Il Lasca following Boccaccio.42 Cicero had contended that images of the deformed provoked “loud laughter,” directed at ugliness and physical defects, and, as we saw, Castiglione followed him by defining laughter as deriving from una certa deformità, a certain deformity.43 Leonardo da Vinci also defined deformity as, on the one hand, cose mostruose, monstrous things, and, on the other, as buffonesche e risibili, grotesque and laughable. It has been suggested that the deformed features in some of Leonardo’s caricatures were intended to be amusing and would have been found so by contemporaries.44 Indeed, the mere sight of a “new monster,” wrote Gregorio Comanini at the end of the Cinquecento, would bring allegrezza, cheer and happiness to the viewer.45 As late as 1755, Samuel Johnson defined deformity in his Dictionary as a “quality of something to be laughed at.”46 Dwarfs’ popularity as trastulli, playthings, in the Cinquecento was such that they were often exchanged between courts to lighten illness or dispel melancholy. Alfonso I d’Este of Ferrara, suffering from syphilis, spoke, for instance, about the delectatione, recreatione et piacere, delight, recreation, and pleasure, that he took from the Mantuan dwarf 39 Pietro Aretino, Ragionamenti di li corti, 1538, as cited in Luzio and Renier, p. 620. 40 Kaufmann, “Caprices,” p. 45. 41 Castiglione, 2: 46-49. 42 Michel Plaisance, “La structure de la beffa dans les Cene d’Anton Francesco Grazzini,” in Formes et signification de la Beffa dans la littérature italienne de la Renaissance, ed. A. Rochon (Paris, 1972), pp. 45-98. 43 Cicero, De Oratore, Loeb Classical Library, II, lxvi, 266, trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 3: 399-401. For more citations from Antiquity, see Wind, A Foul, pp. 6-9. 44 A.P. McMahon, Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting (Princeton, 1956), 2: 5, “sel pittore vol veder...cose mostruose che spaventano or che sieno bufonesche e risibili...”; Barolsky, Infinite Jest, p. 9. 45 E tutto’l volto imprime/Di novella allegrezza,/Al veder novo monstro... Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino (Mantua, 1591), in Paola Barocchi, ed., Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento (Bari, 1962), 3: 258. 46 Dorrian, “On the monstrous,” p. 314.

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Mattello.47 Indeed, when Mattello died, his epitaph, written by the humanist Tebaldeo, read: “He makes all Paradise laugh; if he’s in Hell, Cerberus enjoys himself ...”48 I propose that these comments about Renaissance dwarfs in everyday life offer suggestive hints as to the reception of their images by their first viewers. Given that laughter consisted in una certa deformità, Bronzino’s image of Morgante in a painting must surely have succeeded in raising the same guffaws of laughter—allegrezza or facezia—as his stunted presence in life. Cosimo I de’ Medici refered to Morgante as servitore amatissimo, much beloved servant. Supposedly faithful to their masters, dwarfs were often associated with hounds, another symbol of fidelity.49 Around 1550, Antonis Mor, Flemish court artist to the Habsburgs, painted the dwarf and hound belonging to Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (Fig. 7).50 The dwarf, shown frontally, is fashioned as imposing his will on the animal by means of his hand on its back, just as Carlo Emmanuele of Savoy had placed his on the dwarf Fabio’s head. Mastiff and dwarf define each other’s scale, their master in common being identified by the arms on the dog’s collar. To twenty-first century sensibilities, the dwarf has been degraded to a sub-human level by being assimilated visually to the animal’s scale. The Renaissance reaction, however, must have been similar to that of a viewer beholding Bronzino’s Morgante: the assimilation of the two creatures was surely understood then as a facezia, visual pleasantry, or burla, practical joke. Moreover, given the dwarf’s garb of matching damask, gold collar, sword, and commander’s baton, the painting may well have aroused further delectatione in terms of its possible reference to a work well known to Mor and to court culture in general: Titian’s famous Portrait of Charles V with hound from the early 1530s (Fig. 8). 51 The Emperor also stood frontally, gorgeously garbed in gold and silver, with his 47

Woods-Marsden, The Gonzaga of Mantua, pp. 130, 235, n. 31. “...Tutto rider faccia ora il paradiso/se e’egli e all’inferno, Cerber gode e tace. Luzio and Renier, p. 635. 49 The obvious example is Velazquez’ Las Meninas. See Tietze-Conrat, pl. 40, for Karel van Mander’s Portrait of the dwarf Giacomo Favorchi with a hound, c. 1650 (Copenhagen State Museum). 50 Edouard Michel, Catalogue Raisonné des peintures du Moyen-Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes: Peintures Flamandes du XVe et du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1953), pp. 222-224. Mor was in the service of Granvelle in his Brussels residence in 1549. 51 Miguel Falomir, Tiziano, Museo del Prado (Madrid, 2003), cat. 19 48

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hound posed as the epitome of fidelity. Furthermore, the very nature of the dwarfs’ poses in both Mor and Bronzino’s independent likenesses should be understood as representing another instance of the world upside-down. The small protagonists, who may well be presented life-size, are shown full-length, the format that, in midCinquecento portraits, was normally only employed for Emperors or Kings, that is, those at the very apex of the social hierarchy, rather than for those scorned creatures at its base.52 In a similar reading, one may ask whether Morgante’s nakedness should not be read as an obvious reference to, or satirical pun on, the nakedness of his lord, Cosimo I de’ Medici, in Bronzino’s portrait of the nude duke as Orpheus, son of Apollo—and hence another facezia or beffa (Fig. 9).53 Painted half a dozen years earlier, the work endowed the duke of Florence with the classicizing, muscled back of the Hellenistic Belvedere Torso, which in the Renaissance was believed to represent Hercules.54 Here the duke was constructed as personifying the strength and virtues of Hercules, the god considered the exemplar of “Heroic Virtue.”55 Certainly, Morgante’s body is the antithesis of the ideal strength and upright beauty with which Hercules and other classically-inspired male nudes were believed to have been endowed. Thus the nakedness of the body in Fig. 9 endowed it with greatness while that of the body in Fig. 3, defined as malformed, must have rendered it all the more available to jesting and mockery. Returning to the Tintoretto school portrait of Scipione Clusone and his page-dwarf, it is striking how the latter’s pose appears to deliberately echo that of his master, including the condottiere’s left elbow akimbo (Fig. 6). It seems legitimate to ask whether this work should not also be read as a visual beffa or jest, in which the small page, endowed with connotations of diletto, imitates—and perhaps parodies—his lord, depicted in this case within the same canvas? In conclusion, this normative culture was fascinated by the strange and the abnormal. In a society that espoused the ideal human forms of classical antiquity, pictorial display of the “monstrous” dwarf’s brutto, 52 Bronzino and Mor’s portraits measure 150 cm. and 127 cm. high respectively. Achondroplastic dwarfs are apparently approximately 131 cm. tall, plus or minus 5.6 cm. Fleming, “Identity and Physical Deformity,” p. 102. 53 Carl B. Strehlke, Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: the Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence (Philadephia, 2004), cat. 38. 54 Hans Henrik Brummer, The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere (Stockholm, 1970), pp. 143-52. 55 Ripa, Iconologia, pp. 537-538.

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malformed, body acted as a foil for the well-formed proportion and upright bellezza of his or her aristocratic master or mistress—and hence the latter’s Virtù & elevated rectitude. Indeed, the thirteenthcentury Franciscan, Alexander of Hale, wrote that “both morally and aesthetically the monstrous races help us to appreciate the finer humanity of others. By their contrast with human monstrosities, rational creatures are made more praiseworthy and of greater beauty.”56 Three centuries later, at the end of the Cinquecento, Tomaso Garzoni put a slightly different twist on this idea. Monsters, he said, were not really alien to Nature’s intentions, because ugliness was necessary to establish beauty: “the perfection [of the world] resides also in ugly things and in sin; otherwise, Virtue would not shine forth. Without monsters, perfect things could not be made manifest or exposed.”57 Thus, as well as providing sollazzo, entertainment and laughter, and allowing the lord to demonstrate his scornful superiority, these instances of “blemished” humanity demonstrated that which the protagonist was not. The lord and lady’s respective bodies were strong and well proportioned, not crippled or mal formato. As protagonists, they were hence morally, as well as esthetically, pleasing. Aristocratic superiority was being flaunted by means of the “other’s” corporeal forms, whereby dwarfs were visually exploited to endorse the protagonists’ beauty and virtue somatically. A purposeful subtext must be seen as underlying the introduction of the stunted dwarf into these likenesses that goes far beyond celebration of their ownership. As Garzoni put it, “without monsters, perfect things could not be made manifest.”

56 Friedman, The Monstrous Races, p. 187, citing Alexander of Hale, Summa Theologia (attr.), ed. Bonaventura Marrani (Florence, 1928), p. 574. 57 Che i mostri non sono fuori universalmente dell’intentione della natura…la perfettione [del mondo] consiste anco nelle cose brutte e ne’ peccati, perche se non vi fossero i peccati e gli uomini malvagi, non vi sarebbe la giustizia, la pietà, la misericordia, nè risplenderebbe così la virtù, e la perfettione delle cose. Tomaso Garzoni, Il Seraglio de gli Stupori del Mondo (Venice, 1613), pp. 59-62.

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The Dawes Act of 

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THE DAWES ACT OF 1887: A DREAM OF “CIVILIZING THE SAVAGES” THAT BECAME A NIGHTMARE FOR NATIVE AMERICANS Robert W. Hanning

George Armstrong Custer devotes the opening pages of his memoir, My Life on the Plains, or, Personal Experiences with Indians (published serially in Galaxy Magazine from May, 1872, four years before his last “experience with Indians” at the Battle of Little Big Horn), to a description of the American Great Plains. (I quote from the text with an Introduction by Edgar I. Stewart [Norman and London, 1962.]) As part of that description, Custer recapitulates several features of the Plains that challenge, and mislead, the visual perceptions of the unwary beholder. For example, “a journey by rail across the Plains is at best but ill adapted to a thorough or satisfactory examination of the general character of the country, for the reason that in selecting the route for railroads the valley of some stream is, if practicable, usually chosen to contain the roadbed. The valley being considerably lower than the adjacent country, the view of the tourist is correspondingly limited” (p. 4). Speaking of the “undulations, varying in height from fifty to five hundred feet” that appear like “gigantic waves” on the surface of the Plains, Custer notes that “the constant recurrence of these waves… is quite puzzling to the inexperienced plainsman, [who] imagines, and very naturally too, judging from appearances, that when he ascends to the crest [of one such undulation] he can overlook all the surrounding country,” only to discover “a second wave, but slightly higher than the first” obstructing any such panorama (p. 5). A further feature of the Plains sure to confound the eye is the mirage, “which is here observed in all its perfection. Many a weary mile of the traveler has been whiled away in endeavors to account for the fitful and beautifully changing visions presented by the mirage.” Custer recounts the experience of a fellow cavalry officer who, charged with pursuing “a party of Indians who had been committing depredations on our frontier,” seemed to see his prey, about a mile distant and galloping toward him. Ordering his troops to advance for battle, with

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“the Indians appearing plainer to view each moment,” the officer “soon discovered that the supposed party of Indians consisted of the decayed carcasses of half a dozen slain buffaloes, which number had been magnified by the mirage, while the peculiar motion imparted by the latter had give the appearance of Indians on horseback” (p. 10). Custer notes that “sometimes the mirage has been the cause of frightful suffering and death in its deceptive appearance,” specifying in particular wagon trains of emigrants, seeking water for themselves and their animals, “who are said to have been led astray by the mirage until their bodies were famished and they succumbed to thirst” (pp. 10-11). I have quoted these passages instancing characteristics of the Plains that induce faulty vision (or visions) on the part of those unfamiliar with them because, placed as they are at the beginning of a famous Indian fighter’s account of his often bellicose dealings with the indigenous inhabitants of those Plains—an account frequently interspersed with meditations on the “true nature” of these (to Custer) uncivilizable “savages”—such evocations of perception deceived provide an eerie emblem for the distorted understanding of Native Americans shared not only by their avowed enemies, but also by their self-proclaimed “friends” and rescuers, among the European-descended population of the United States. In the pages that follow, I recall an American social and religious movement, dedicated to enhancing the well-being of a beleaguered indigenous population, that culminated, 120 years ago, in life-changing legislation by the Congress of the United States. This is a cautionary tale of how good intentions, grounded in perceived religious and ethical imperatives, but also in ignorance and racist assumptions, can lead to social, political, and economic disaster when they are imposed on a subordinate group through the law-making power of a dominant culture. The law in question is the Dawes Act of 1887, and its enactment resulted in outcomes tragically and inexorably subversive of the prosperity, integrity, and cultural well-being of several Native American nations: in this case, reformers “led astray by the mirage” of bringing the blessings of “civilization” to “savages” were themselves “the cause of frightful suffering” to those they set out to help.1

1 As Banner (279) characterizes this clash between the aims and consequences of the Dawes Act, “rarely have so many well-intentioned people been so wrong.” See Chapter 8, “Allotment.”


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The opening words of the Dawes Act, or more precisely the General Allotment Law, passed by Congress on 8 February 1887, describe it as “an act to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty [that is, on an individual basis] to Indians on the various reservations and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians, and for other purposes.” The most consequential of those “other puposes” was nothing less than to break up “the various reservations” to which America’s native peoples had increasingly been confined by law and coercion, and in the process to arrange the transfer of millions of acres of reservation land to Euro-American settlers and business interests. With the possible exception of the Cherokee Removal Treaty (signed 29 December 1835, ratified by the U.S. Senate, 18 May 1836), the Dawes Act—so called for its ultimate sponsor, Sen. Henry L. Dawes, Republican of Massachusetts—was the United States’ most important nineteenth-century legislative response to the problem of an aboriginal population that stood in the way of complete European-American settlement and control of North America. To its most enthusiastic proponents—the reformers, mostly evangelical Protestants, who collectively considered, and called, themselves the “Friends of the Indian”—the passage of the General Allotment Law, which had been before Congress in one form or other during the entire decade of the 1880s, was, in the words of D.S. Otis, author of a thorough study of the Dawes Act and its consequences, “the occasion for rejoicing and high expectations,”2 for it culminated a decadeslong campaign to “civilize” the “savage” natives; to the reformers, the “civilizing” process involved converting the indigenous peoples to Christianity, making them farmers—each with his own, legally possessed and protected piece of land to cultivate—and, through education in the English language and Euro-Christian moral values, assimilating them to American society and ultimately making them American citizens. Only in this way, the Friends believed, could the United States atone for the offences against Native Americans that constituted the reformers’ litany of grievances: frontier violence initiated by both settlers and the U.S. Army; the repeated breaking of treaties and agreements; and the fraud and chicanery that marred the

2

Otis, p. 57.

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discharge of treaty-defined obligations by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency of the Department of the Interior.3 The Dawes Act was hailed by its supporters as an enlightened solution to the “Indian problem,” and thus a major contribution to the well-being of the indigenous peoples. But its promise was not fulfilled. Instead, it contributed substantially to the further impoverishment of Native Americans, and less than fifty years after its passage it was repealed during the New Deal. Today, to judge by my experience in and out of the classroom, the Dawes Act has largely been forgotten by those who are not Native Americans. On the other hand, a class-action lawsuit against the US Government on behalf of half a million Native Americans, filed in 1996 and still in litigation, seeks to recover for the plaintiffs tens of billions of dollars that they claim they are owed as a result of negligence, bad bookkeeping, or outright fraud on the part of the Government in its handling of trust accounts originating in provisions of the Dawes Act.4 The purpose of this essay is threefold: to heighten general awareness of the provisions and intent of the Dawes Act; to offer an admittedly incomplete overview of the social and political forces and religious ideologies that converged to make allotment of land to Native Americans in severalty, with the resultant breakup of the reservation system, seem like a desirable solution to the “Indian problem;” and to say something of its consequences, up to and including the lawsuit I have just mentioned. The following pages will present, and comment upon, a selection of nineteenth-century texts that provide an ideological paper trail for the project of “civilizing the savages” as it evolved through the latter part of the nineteenth century. The comments will argue that the reformers, though intent on righting the wrongs previously suffered by Native Americans, were doomed by their presuppositions about the native peoples to collaborate with their announced 3

For the beliefs and programs of the “Friends,” see Keller, Mardock, Priest, and Prucha, Great Father, Part Six, “Americanizing the American Indians,” esp. Chapter 24, “The New Christian Reformers; American Indian Policy in Crisis,” pp. 132-168, and documents in Americanizing the American Indians. Of special importance in disseminating the beliefs and proposals of the “Friends” were the Lake Mohonk Conferences of Friends of the Indian, convened at the Lake Mohonk Mountain House every year from 1883 to 1916. Excerpts from the Second Annual Address to the Public of the Lake Mohonk Conference (Philadelphia, 1884), outlining a program for “civilizing” the Indians similar to the provisions of the Dawes Act, are in Prucha, Documents #99/163-166 (indicating document #/page #s). 4 See below, nn. 34-36.


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enemies—unprincipled, land-hungry Euro-Americans—in depriving the indigenous population of both their land and their right to live in accord with the customs and values of their ancestors. The analysis I offer owes a substantial debt to the dedication of Francis Paul Prucha, whose magisterial The Great Father: The US Government and the American Indian is supplemented by two collections of relevant documents, as well as by other studies, and also to the other scholars, first among them Otis, whose labors are recognized in the “works cited” list at the end of this essay.5 I begin with the Dawes Act itself. Its legislative core lies in the first of its eleven sections, which authorizes the President of the United States, “whenever in his opinion any [Indian] reservation or any part thereof...is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes, to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed...and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon in quantities as follows: to each head of a family, one-quarter of a section [i.e., 160 acres, the normal amount of public land granted to a proposed frontier settler according to the Homestead Act of 1862]; to each single person over eighteen years of age and each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eigth of a section [80 acres]; and to each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President diecting an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section [40 acres].”6 Sections Two and Three expose the elements of paternalism and coercion underlying the legislation. The allotments will actually be carved from reservation land by government agents (Section 3), and then chosen by heads of families for themselves and their minor children, with the agents choosing for orphans (Section 2); furthermore, 5

Prucha, The Great Father; Documents ; Americanizing the American Indians. For a complete text of the Dawes Act, see Documents #104/171f, or the California State University, San Marcos and Yale websites listed under “Works Cited.” In coming to a fuller understanding of the importance of the Dawes Act I have been aided by the questions and comments of many students in the undergraduate course I formerly taught at Columbia University, “‘Race’ and racism: literary representations of an American crisis.” 6 Section 1 adds the provisions that if a reservation lacks sufficient land, the allotments will be pro rated; that if a previous treaty or (after 1871, when Congress abolished treaty-making with Native American nations) an Act of Congress has already arranged to allot greater amounts of land in severalty—there were such arrangements—those greater amounts will prevail; and that allotment of lands only suitable for grazing, not farming purposes, will be double the amounts spelled out.

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“if anyone entitled to an allotment shall fail to make a selection within four years after the President shall direct that allotments may be made on a particular reservation, the Secretary of the Interior may direct the agent of such tribe or band... to make a selection for such Indian (Section 2).” In other words, no dissent was possible from this plan to make individual land owners out of Native Americans, who for the most part had no such tradition; the Dawes Act did not offer allotment in severalty, it imposed it. Section Five contains the Act’s other crucial provisions. Once reservation lands have been alloted in severalty, the Secretary of the Interior “shall cause patents to issue therefor in the name of the allottees, which patents shall be of the legal effect, and declare that the United States does and will hold the land thus allotted, for the period of twenty-five years, in trust for the sole use and benefit of the Indian to whom such allotment shall have been made... and that at the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or his heirs as aforesaid, in fee, discharged of said trust and free of all charge or incumbrance whatsoever: Provided, that the President of the United States may in any case in his discretion extend the period.” Hence, any attempt by the allottee to sell or lease the land during that time would be null and void. This provision (subverted by subsequent legislation, as we shall see) was designed to prevent the allottees from leasing or selling their land to non-Natives, either out of an unwillingness to become the hard-working farmers that the Act, and the Friends of the Indian, desired, or an inability to protect themselves from the wiles of speculators or land-hungry neighbors. The existence of such land-hungry neighbors was practically guaranteed by what might be called the “Trojan horse” part of this very same section of the Dawes Act. When a reservation was broken up by the process of allotment in severalty, any land, which could amount to hundreds of thousands of acres, left over after all inhabitants of the reservation have received theirs—“or sooner if in the opinion of the President it shall be for the best interests [sic] of said tribe”—could be bought by the U.S. Government and, if “adapted to agriculture...shall be held by the United States for the sole purpose of securing homes to actual settlers,” who would be given homesteading parcels of 160 acres. The price paid by the Government for such land “shall be held in the Treasury of the United States for the sole use of the tribe or tribes of Indians to whom such reservations belonged;” the Act does not make it clear when this money would become available and how


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it would be divided, but no immediate disbursement seems contemplated, given that such funds “with interest thereon at three per cent per annum, shall be at all times subject to appropriation by Congress for the education and civilization of such tribe or tribes of Indians or the members thereof.” In seeking to understand the political and ideological climate in which the Friends of the Indian advocated, and then celebrated, the Dawes Act of 1887, one must start by recognizing a paradox in nineteenth-century America’s response to its indigenous populations. At one level, there is a radical disagreement about how to deal with them, but at another, deeper level there is a profundly shared, racialized understanding of who they are. To look at this shared understanding first: its basis is a twofold disapproval of Native Americans expressed by most colonists to the so-called New World, and inherited by citizens of the American republic. On the one hand, there was the repugnance of Christians for what they regarded as the heathenish superstitions of the indigenous peoples. On the other hand, there was the disdainful dismissal of a tradition-based, subsistence oriented culture by Europeans convinced of the superiority of their literate, technologically complex and innovative civilization that brought to its new colonies ideals of, or desires for, territorial expansion and the exploitation of nature for the creation of new wealth.7 It was these last commitments, to expansion of territory and concurrent increase of wealth, that put the colonists, and their descendants in westward-looking nineteenth-century America, on a collision course with the aboriginal populations who had ancestral, although 7 One can, I think, argue that each of these two responses drew on an historical paradigm of stereotyping. On the one hand, the Puritans of New England, who tended to think of themselves more as a new Israel than a Christian commonwealth, frequently equated Native Americans with the Gentiles (goyim), worshippers of gods other than Yahweh and political foes of the Israelites, whose destruction was pleasing to God. Later, as settlers pressed westward, their construction of, and response to, the indigenous peoples they found in their path (and whose lands they coveted) recapitulated Roman views of the “barbarian” nations of western Europe—“primitives” who resisted Imperial expansion by attacking the outposts of “civilization.” Charles C. Mann has recently argued persuasively that large parts of the indigenous populations of North and South America had become substantially urban and agricultural in the centuries before Columbus; the catastrophic encounter of these populations with European diseases, often before permanent colonial settlements, resulted in the “unspoiled wilderness” and subsistence cultures encountered (and stigmatized) by the first settlers from Europe (1491, pp. 90-148 and Chapter 10, “The Artificial Wilderness”).

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conceptually very different, claims on the land. And as the EuroAmericans used first technological, later numerical superiority to take land from the native peoples, they justified their expansion, and the power differential that enabled it, by the discourses of racism—discourses they were simultaneously applying to the African peoples they were forcibly importing as slaves, in order to justify taking their labor rather than their land. In the instance here under discussion, this meant systematically stereotyping the Native Americans as exemplars not of a different, or an inferior, civilization, but of no civilization at all—as savages, as a homogeneous “race” (conveniently categorized as “red,” visual evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) whose undifferentiated, nomadic way of life, full of violence, superstition, filth, and degradation, existed in binary opposition to the civilization of Euro-Americans (ideologically characterized as “whites”). The two binaries: red/white, savage/civilization, were mutually reinforcing.8 This racist construction of Native Americans, like all such constructions, had to ignore everything that controverted its self-interested ideology, from the many physical and ethnic distinctions observable among the native peoples—including the fact that some were at least as much agriculturists as hunter-gatherers—to the manifold debt that European colonists and immigrants owed to the native peoples, many of whose practices they borrowed in learning how to survive and prosper in the North American environment that challenged their inherited habits and attitudes.9 By occluding all such potentially complicating details, anti-indigenous racism helped clear the way for the widely held belief within nineteenth-century America that the republic had been chosen by Providence for a special role among the nations, and a sign of that role was the relentless push westward of Euro-American settlers, understood as this country’s “manifest destiny.” (The hunger for profits by land speculators and railroad builders, responding to the steady stream of immigrants from northern and western Europe was, at least as much as Divine election, the driving force of westward expansion.) The native peoples, on their traditional living and hunting grounds, stood athwart this expansion, and thus had to be constructed as savages resisting the inevitable and doomed to bow to it, if not to be

8 See Takaki Iron Cages, pp. 11-15 (“Race and Republican Society”), pp. 28-35 (“The ‘Lovely White’”), pp. 55-65 (“Red Lockeans”). 9 See, e.g., Weatherford, Native Roots; 1491, Chapter 11, “The Great Law of Peace.”


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destroyed by it.10 As Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Medill wrote in his annual report for 1848, “Apathy, barbarism, and heathenism must give way to energy, civilization, and Christianity; and so the Indian of this continent has been displaced by the European...” Medill’s report embraces the full range of stereotypes about Native Americans, in whose varied but tradition-based cultures he sees only an undifferentiated, savage cohort: “Stolid and unyielding in his nature, and inveterately wedded to the savage habits, customs, and prejudices in which he has been reared and trained, it is seldom the case that the full blood Indian of our hemisphere can, in immediate juxtaposition with a white population, be brought farther within the pale of civilization than to adopt its vices; under the corrupting influences of which, too indolent to labor, and too weak to resist, he soon sinks into misery and despair” (Documents, #53/77). Worthy of note is the report’s self-contradictory admission that the exalted state of civilization has its own share of “vices” and “corrupting influences.” A similar theme is sounded by Indian Commissioner William Dole, in his Annual Report for 1861: “There seems to be no means by which [the Indian] can be secured from falling an easy victim to those vices and temptations which are perhaps the worst features of our civilization, and to which he seems to have an almost irresistible inclination” (quoted Prucha, Great Father, p. 463). George Armstrong Custer, in the autobiography he published serially four years before his death at Little Big Horn in 1876, reveals an even greater ambivalence. Writing with heavy irony, he hypothesizes, “If I were an Indian, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot 10

See the famous picture, “American Progress,” chronolithograph published by George A. Crofutt, 1873 (reproduced Iron Cages, p. 172), showing railroads, stage coaches, Conestoga wagons, and farmers at the plough all heading west, guided by the giant, refulgent figure of a woman in white, as Native Americans flee into the shadows ahead of them. Farman, “Weakened Spring,” offers a corrective to this romantic image: “...thousands of people trailed the railroad and its costly properties into a region devoid of effective civil government” (p. 669). In his final report as General of the Army (27 October 1883), William Tecumseh Sherman told the House of Representatives that “I now regard the Indians as substantially eliminated from the problem of the Army… Immigration and the occupation by industrious farmers and miners of lands vacated [sic] by the aborigines have been largely instrumental to that end, but the railroad which used to follow in the rear now goes forward with the picket-line in the great battle of civilization with barbarism… The recent completion of the last of the four great transcontinental lines of railway has settled forever the Indian queston…” Documents #96/159 (Sherman’s emphasis).

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among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation”—note the revisionary binary, freedom/confinement, complicating savagery/civilization— “there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.” But then, aligning himself with the dominant myth of American destiny, Custer continues, “the Indian can never be permitted to view the question in this deliberate way. He is neither a luxury nor a necessary of life. He can hunt, roam, and camp when and wheresoever he pleases, provided always that in so doing he does not run contrary to the requirements of civilization in its advancing tread. When the soil which he has claimed and hunted over for so long a time is demanded by the to him insatiable monster, there is no appeal; he must yield, or, like the car of juggernaut [—a singularly strange simile for “civilization”—], it will roll mercilessly over him, destroying as it advances. Destiny seems to have so willed it, and the world looks on and nods its approval” (My Life on the Plains, pp. 22-23). Almost all nineteenth-century Americans shared a racialized view of Native Americans as savages, whose resistance to westward expansion lacked legitimacy because they were not Christians, but also because they were not good custodians of the land; they did not farm it to make it produce wealth, and so (in the eyes of the propagandists and evangelists of expansion) it in effect lay unused, in violation of the divine command to work the soil.11 But from this shared conviction diverged very different solutions to the “Indian problem.” On one path walked those who simply wanted the Indians out of the way, either overrun and exterminated by the armed might of the U.S. Cavalry, aided by settler militias and vigilantes, or at least pushed back and kept out of the way of the advancing waves of settlement. A divergent path was traveled by those Christian evangelicals who, inspired for the most part by religious conviction, undertook to be defenders and rescuers of the threatened indigenes. As Robert H. Keller, Jr. says, in the Introduction to his extremely useful study of the “Friends,” “during the struggle over a continent, myths about racial superiority

11 As early as 1817, Pres. James Monroe wrote to Andrew Jackson, contending that “the hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it, than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life, and must yield to it” (Prucha, Great Father, p. 184).


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and national expansion co-existed with Christian ideals of justice and human dignity.”12 This latter approach took vibrant shape as a program of reform in the years immediately after the end of the Civil War.13 The major and coordinate manifestations of reform included the emergence of a network of primarily evangelical Protestant groups known collectively as the “Friends of the Indian” and the establishment of a “Peace Policy” toward the Indians during the administration of U.S. Grant, a policy that featured turning over to the Protestant churches, under the sympathetic supervision of a para-governmental Board of Indian Commissioners, much of the responsibility for appointing Indian agents and supervising the distribution of goods and annuities owed Native American nations by law and treaty.14 As already indicated, the goal of the Friends of the Indian was civilization, not destruction: unlike their opponents they believed in the possibility of progress from a savage to a civilized state, arguing accordingly that the Native American could become a “real” American—specifically, a hard working, law-abiding Christian farmer enjoying the protection afforded by American institutions, free from both mistreatment by unsympathetic Euro-Americans and the uncertainties and degradations of a savage life. To accomplish this goal, according to the Friends, required breaking up the reservations onto which

12

Keller, American Protestantism, p. xii. See Prucha, Great Father, p. 480: “The concern [for reform] was fed by official reports of injustice toward the Indians, and the nation witnessed an upsurge of Christian sentiment demanding Christian justice for the Indians that would be proper to a Christian nation. This was a restatement of the paternal concern for Indian welfare that had existed for decades, and the program demanded little that was new. What was new was the totality of the agitation against perceived wrongs and the intensity with which evangelical Christians moved into Indian affairs.” See further note 3, above. 14 Wallace Farnham’s comment (“The weakened spring of government,” p. 671) about the role of the railroads in imposing order in the western United States holds true, mutatis mutandis, for the role of evangelicals in attempting to deal fairly with Native Americans: “in the west as in Washington, the government failed to govern, and private interests of necessity stepped into the breach.” See Documents #77/127128 for the instructions given to the Board of Indian Commissioners, 26 May 1869, by Ely S. Parker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (and the first Native American to hold that position); Parker’s accompanying letter says that he believes “that, in common with the President and other officers of the government, you desire the humanizaion, civilization, and Christianization of the Indians...” (p. 127). 13

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the Native peoples had increasingly been confined, and instead granting, or alloting, to each Indian land in severalty.15 There was an inconsistency at the heart of this reform program, namely that the civilization which the reformers held out as the salvation of the native peoples was the very same civilization that the Friends of the Indian accused of having abused and cheated him. Nor was this contradiction unnoticed: the Board of Indian Commissioners, in its first report (23 November 1869), admitted that “paradoxical as it may seem, the white man has been the chief obstacle in the way of Indian civilization” (Documents, #79/132). Furthermore, as Otis says in the chapter of his study called “Aims and Motives of the Allotment Movement,” “the [allotment] policy was regarded as a panacea which would make restitution to the Indian for all that the white man had done to him in the past;” yet, “the supreme aim of the friends of the Indian was to substitute white civilization for his tribal culture, and they shrewdly sensed that the difference in the concepts of property was fundamental to the contrast between the two ways of life” (8-9). The assumptions that guided the reformers in this endeavor to civilize, and thus rescue, the savages by depriving them of their cultural foundations were based above all on an evangelical outlook widely shared by members of 19th-century America’s cultural elite, who regarded The United States as a Protestant Christian republic. In Robert Keller’s words, “in the 19th century most Americans... looked on local, state, and federal governments not as secular bodies but as divinely created institutions obligated to assist Christianity in the moral and religious redemption of human beings” (American Protestantism, p. 2). Sen. James R. Doolittle, who chaired a Committee appointed by Congress in 1865 “to inquire into the present condition of the Indian tribes, and especially into the manner in which they are treated by the civil and military authorities of the United States,” was, 15

This is not to say that the goal of allotment in severalty was first articulated by post Civil War reformers; as early as 1826, the then Secretary of War James Barbour, in a letter dated 3 February, to John Cocke, Chair of the Committee on Indian Affairs in the House of Representatives, proposed that a bill arranging for the removal west of the Mississippi of all Native American nations should include the provision, “when circumstances permitted, extinction of tribes and distribution of property among individuals” (Prucha, Great Father, p. 188). Cf. Commissioner of Indian Affairs George W. Manypenny’s Annual Report of 1856 (Documents #62/89-92), which speaks of treaties “providing for the permanent settlement of the individuals of the tribes, at once or in the future, on separate tracts of land or homesteads, and for the gradual abolition of the tribal character” (p. 90). See further Otis, pp. 3-4.


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according to Prucha, “a deeply religious man who saw in the American republic the special guarantee of the Divine Providence and who boldly proclaimed that the Declaration of Independence was ‘the new gospel of man’s redemption’ and the Fourth of July ‘the birthday of God’s Republic, second only in history to the birth of Christ” (Great Father, pp. 485-486). It was such a melding—some might say a confusion—of Protestant Christian theology and American republican institutions that would contribute later in the century to the Nativist backlash against the great, all too non-Protestant, immigration from eastern and southern Europe. For much the same reason, as Prucha points out, Christian missionary efforts with respect to Native Americans embodied a fatal flaw, namely, “the complete disregard for the religious views and the religious rights of the Indians themselves. Quakers, Methodists, Episcopalians, and all the other Protestants, fighting for the religious liberty of their own groups on the reservations, made no move to grant so much as a hearing to the Indian religions. The record of the Catholics was no better.... Failure to study or appreciate the Indian side of the question, to adopt or build upon the societal forms that persisted in the Indian communities, weakened all the missionary efforts.... Catholics and Protestants alike saw little worth preserving in the Indian groups they sought to convert and civilize” (Great Father, pp. 524-525). Instead, the Friends of the Indian believed, as one of them reported President Grover Cleveland to have declared, that “... the solution of the Indian question rests in the Gospel of Christ” (Otis, p. 60). Another virtue exalted by the reformers, which they hoped to stimulate in Native Americans, was individualism, that proud (and perhaps partly imagined) strain of American self-reliance noted by Tocqueville, praised by Emerson, and recently regarded more ruefully by Robert Bellah and his associates, in their sociological study of twentieth-century America, Habits of the Heart.16 As Otis puts it, “supporters of allotment showed themselves children of their age in their deference to the principle of individualism” (p. 9). Hence Commissioner of Indian Affairs William P. Dole could insist, in his annual 16 Bellah’s title comes from Tocqueville, Democracy in America (p. 287). As Bellah puts it (Preface, p. vii), Tocqueville “warned that some aspects of [American] character—what he was one of the first to call ‘individualism’—might eventually isolate Americans one from another and thereby undermine the conditions of freedom.” Emerson, “Self-Reliance.”

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report of 1863, that “a policy designed to civilize and reclaim the Indians within our borders, and induce them to adopt the customs of civilization, must of necessity embrace, as one of its most prominent features, the ideas of self-reliance and individual effort, and, as an encouragment to those ideas, the acquisition and ownership of property in severalty” (Prucha, Great Father, pp. 464-465). Individualism provided them with a nexus between their agrarianism—Jeffersonian faith in the yeoman farmer as the backbone of American republicanism—and their embrace of the private ownership of land as the key to the Native Americans’ attainment of Christian civilization and American citizenship. As Indian Commissioner Hiram Price put it in his annual report for 1882, “Give the Indian his land in severalty. Let him feel his individuality and responsibility, and a sense of proprietorship. Encourage him to go to work and earn his living and provide for the future wants and necessities of himself and his family, and abandon his shiftless, do-nothing, dependent life” (Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, p. 94). A document written in 1877 by the Agent assigned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Yankton Sioux reservation emphasizes the link, in the minds and programs of reformers, between the imposition on the Native Americans of land possessed in severalty and their “progress” toward “civilization;” it also betrays a psycho-social synthesis of Christian opposition to “heathen” rites, suspicion of a life based in communal activities, and puritanical rejection of a style of living that exalted leisure and sociability above routines of exacting labor: “as long as Indians live in villages they will retain many of their old and injurious habits. Frequent feasts, community in food, heathen ceremonies and dances, constant visiting—these will continue as long as the people live together in close neighborhoods and villages… I trust that before another year is ended [it would in fact take ten more] they will generally be located upon individual lands of farms. From that date will begin their real and permanent progress.”17 Some of the rhetoric with which the Friends of the Indian championed individualism, private property, and agriculture may strike twenty-first century ears as quite extraordinary. In 1885, addressing the Third Lake Mohonk Conference, John H. Oberly, later Commissioner of Indian Affairs, proclaimed, “‘We, the people’ was the reply 17

Included in the 1877 Annual Report of Indian Commissioner Ezra Hayt, pp. 75-76; quoted Otis, p. 9.


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the Americans made to the King, by which answer every man who was devoted to the cause of independence said: ‘I, the individual, agreeing with my fellow citizens, in this conclusion:—I the individual, having an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unite with other individuals in saying that the answer to the heretofore unanswered riddle of statesmanship is Man, for whom all governments should be created, because from the individual all legitimate political power primarily flows’ (quoted Otis, pp. 9-10; Otis comments [p. 10] that Oberly here “went about as far as one could go in resolving the American society into its individual units” [p. 10]). At the same Mohonk conference, Sen. Henry Dawes, speaking two years before the passage of the bill that would bear his name, explained in Malthusian terms why one of the so-called Five civilized Tribes “have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common… [In such a situation] there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress.”18 Like other Friends of the Indian, Sen. Dawes does not appear to notice that the “selfishness” he praises as a civilizing force is the very impulse that was driving Euro-American settlers and land speculators to take reservation land, in which case it was stigmatized as “white encroachment” or “rapacity.”

18 Lake Mohonk Conference Proceedings, 1885, p. 56 (Oberly), p. 43 (Dawes). Over fifty years earlier, private property as a defining mark of civilization, and its absence a cause of Native American savagery, were already treated as truisms in the very first annual report of the first Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Writing in 1832, Elbert Herring avers that “the absence of the meum amd tuum (yours and mine) in the general community of possessions, which is the grand conservative principle of the social state, is a perpetual operating cause of the vis inertiae (force of inertia) of savage life… Nor can proper notions of the social system be successfully inculcated, nor its benefits be rightly appreciated, so as to overcome the habits and prejudices incident to savage birth, and consequent associations of maturer years, except by the institution of separate and secure rights in the relations of property and person” (Documents #47/63). Herring’s successor, T. Harley Crawford, writing in 1838, argued that “if you would win an Indian from the waywardness and idleness and vice of his life, you must improve his morals as well as his mind... by teaching him how to farm, how to work in the mechanic arts, and how to labor profitably… Unless some system be marked out by which there shall be a separate allotment of land to each individual whom the scheme shall entitle to it, you will look in vain for any casting off of savagism. Common property and civilization cannot co-exist” (Documents #51/ 73-74).

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These testimonies, which could easily be multiplied, suggest that the Friends of the Indians, in their zeal to transform savagery into civilization by means of allotments in severalty, were entirely unconcerned about whether the Native Americans themselves believed that this radical alteration in their lifeways was both necessary and worthwhile. As Prucha puts it, “here was a high point of paternalism… The reformers knew what was best for the wards of the government. Lacking all appreciation of the Indian cultures, they were intent on forcing upon the natives the qualities that they themselves embodied. It was an ethnocentrism of frightening intensity, and it set a pattern that was not easily eradicated” (Great Father, p. 610). Otis adds, “through allotment the magical principle of private property was to teach, develop, and refine the Indians as it had supposedly done everyone else. If the Indian was taught acquisitiveness and property put in his reach then all would go well” (p. 152).19 Against this optimistic expectation, evidence from limited instances of allotments to Native Americans before 1887 suggested that, in Otis’s words, “where Indians had the right of selling their lands it was in the nature of things that those lands should slip from their grasp” (p. 50) leaving them impoverished and demoralized. The two major reasons for this outcome—neither addressed in the Dawes Act—were, first, that (again quoting Otis) “the Indian simply did not take easily to the idea of becoming a citizen and an independent farmer” (p. 51), and thereby surrendering inherited values and practices and embracing a concept of property in land foreign to most Native American cultures; and second, that practically no effort was made actually to train adult Native Americans in the techniques of farming. Writing one year before the passage of Dawes, J.D.C. Adkins, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, warned that “A majority of the grown-up Indians on reservations, through want of early training and by reason of repugnance to any kind of manual labor, which their traditions and customs lead them to look upon as degrading, are very poor material out of which to make farmers” (Otis, p. 53).

19 Banner offers a somewhat different, but finally not incompatible, analysis: “It would be too simple to see allotment simply as a program imposed by whites on Indians. There were whites and Indians on both sides of the issue, just as there had been whites and Indians on both sides of removal and on both sides of whether to create reservations. As before, however, it was white opinion that mattered, and by the late 1880s white opinion was running in favor of allotment” (271).


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To head off the quick alienation of lands alloted in severalty to Native Americans, the Dawes Act, as I have noted, built in a twentyfive year period during which the government held the land in trust, and any attempt to lease or sell it had no legal standing. As will soon be clear, this policy was subsequently undercut by further legislation; meanwhile, the strategy chosen by the Friends of the Indian to counter widespread ignorance of, and resistance to, farming on the part of many Native American nations—especially on the Plains—proved self-defeating. Instead of educating adult natives in farming skills, the reformers placed their faith in educating Native American children at Indian schools in American values (but not agriculture), and assumed that (in Otis’s words) “for the old people, the mere possession of land could be trusted to work the miracle of turning a nomad into a husbandman.” Otis speaks of “the Government’s inability to comprehend that the whole allotment program, if it was to succeed, should first of all have been an educational program which would realistically be concerned with the Indians’ economic needs” (p. 102). By their willing acceptance of the fact, later encoded as law in the Dawes Act, that a major result of severalty would be the release of much land previously possessed by the Native Americans for settlement by homesteaders, the reformers, I’ve suggested, arrived, by however divergent a route, at the same bottom line as their opponents in the national debate on the Indian problem: the land (or at least most of it) had to pass from aboriginal to settler control. And this philosophical consensus (albeit obscured by a sincere discourse of civilizing the savages) itself reflected the reformers’ awareness that the U.S. government in the post-Civil War decades lacked the will, the power, or both, to prevent Euro-American settlers from invading lands set aside by law or treaty for Native Americans. To quote Keller again, “land rushes and railroads overwhelmed moral principles and good faith” (xii; see further Prucha, Great Father, p. 669; and Farnham, on how the weakness and indifference of the Federal Government contributed to the railroads’ corrupt business practices.). The helplessness of the government received blunt confirmation during a debate on an 1880 precursor to the Dawes Act which broke up the Colorado reservation of the Utes into allotments and opened up the remainder of the reservation to so-called “white” settlement. Sen. Richard Coke of Texas, after first explaining the bill, in terms very reminiscent of the Friends of the Indian, as one intended “to place [the Utes] on the highway to American citizenship,” continued, “the bill is

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in many respects a departure from the ancient and established policy of the Government with reference to the Indian tribes. The advance of settlements in the West has been so rapid that it has been found [note what might be called the buck-passive construction] inexpedient and impolitic, as leading to collisions between the whites and the Indians, to continue the system of locking or attempting to lock up large tracts of land within their exclusive occupancy. The whites cannot be restrained from intrusion upon these large reservations. The Indians will not use them except for hunting purposes and the whites will not permit them to remain unused. The bill simply recognizes the logic of events, which shows that it is impossible to preserve peace between the Indians and the whites with these immense bodies of land attempted to to be locked up as Indian reservations” (quoted Prucha, Great Father, pp. 661-662). Despite all the arguments, idealistic and practical, in favor of allotment in severalty, some voices were raised against it in the years leading up to the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, and if they were perhaps too dismissive of the reformers’ good intentions, they also make a persuasive case for the incompatibility between such intentions, on the one hand, and acquiescence in a culturally destructive land grab on the other. An earlier (1880) version of an allotment law, called the Coke Act after the Senator whose defense of the Ute allotment bill I have just quoted, encountered opposition from Henry Teller, a New Yorker by birth who was elected Senator from Colorado when it became a state in 1876.20 Prucha notes that Teller “could claim to have more first hand contact with the Indian problem and a sounder understanding of Indian culture than most of those who wanted to reform Indian policy, and his views on severalty were decidedly negative” (Great Father, p. 662). Teller called the Coke Bill “a bill to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth.” He prophesied “that when thirty or forty years shall have passed and these Indians shall have parted with their title, they will curse the hand that was raised professedly in their defense to secure this kind of legislation...” (quoted Otis, p. 18). The minority report of the House Indian Affairs Committee in the same year (House Report No. 1576, 46 Congress, 2 session, serial 1938, pp. 7-10) was equally scathing: “the real aim of this bill is to get at the 20

On Teller, see Elmer Ellis, Henry Moore Teller: Defender of the West (Cladwell, ID, 1941). Teller became Secretary of the Interior in 1882.


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Indian lands and open them up to settlement. The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indian are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them… If this were done in the name of Greed it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of Humanity, and under the cloak of an ardent desire to promote the Indian’s welfare by making him like ourselves, whether he will or not, is infinitely worse.” Noting the order of provisions in the Act, with allotment of lands to individuals coming at the beginning and the selling of all remaining reservation land to Euro-Americans at the end, the report opines, “the main object of the bill is in the last sections of it, not the first. The sting of this animal is in its tail.” The report concludes, “of all the attempts to encroach upon the Indian, this attempt to manufacture him into a white man by act of Congress and the grace of the Secretary of the Interior is the baldest, the boldest, and the most unjustifiable… We want their lands, and we are bound to have them. Let those take a part in despoiling them who will; for ourselves, we believe the entire policy of this bill to be wrong, ill-timed, and unstatesmanlike; and we put ourselves on record against it, as about all that is now left us to do, except to vote against the bill on its final passage” (Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, pp. 128, 129). So much for the background of the Dawes Act; what was its legacy? To its proponents, its entry into law was cause for rejoicing. Pres. Grover Cleveland, in the fourth annual message of his first term (December 1888), declared that “the condition of our Indian population continues to improve,” thanks to “a better realization of their true interests” [whether by the Government, the Native peoples, or both is left unclear]; in this context, Cleveland says of allotments in severalty that “no measure of general effect has ever been entered on from which more may be fairly hoped, if it shall be discreetly administered [a prophetic qualification].”21 The day of its passage was quickly judged by 21

See Parker, pp. 419-20. In the same year, James B. Thayer, Prof. of Law at Harvard, in an essay, “The Dawes Bill and the Indians,” Atlantic Monthly 61 (March, 1888), 315-22, subscribed to the necessity to civilize the Indians and break up the reservations and let the settlers get the excess land after severalty. But Thayer also saw the plight of the Native Americans, with the settlers surging around them in the West. His essay explains what the Act does and doesn’t do; raises questions about whether the Indians are ready for citizenship in one fell swoop; and expresses various concerns, e.g., will there be roads and courts in the broken up reservations? And will they still be exclusionary zones off limits to outsiders? Thayer argues that the government must keep its hold on the reservations, and not let them be placed under state or territorial law to the detriment of the native peoples. The essay manifests (albeit diplo-

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the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be worthy of inclusion among the holidays celebrated in the expanding network of Indian Schools charged with inculcating ideals of American citizenship—schools where children had their hair cut and their traditional clothes replaced by school uniforms, and faced punishment if they spoke their own ancestral languages instead of English. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Morgan, in his 1889 “Instructions to Indian Agents in Regard to Inculcation of Patriotism in Indian Schools,” decreed that “Washington’s Birthday, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas should be observed with appropriate exercises in all Indian Schools. It will also be well to observe the anniversary of the day upon which the ‘Dawes Bill’ for giving the Indians allotments of land in severalty became a law... and to use that occasion to impress upon Indian youth the enlarged scope and opportunity given them by this law and the new obligations which it imposes” (Documents #109/18081).22 But whatever the intention to “civilize the savage” by means of this legislation,23 its main practical effect was to transfer to the “white man” large amounts of land formerly under the control of Native Americans. In other words, the reformers’ idealism was quickly trampled on by the rush of settler boots onto newly available homesteads, or by the stealthier, but no less lethal footsteps of land speculators. As Otis says, “land-seeking settlers and wealthy business enterprises probably favored the allotment system as a means of freeing Indian lands. They were not primarily concerned with promoting Indian welfare. Once allotment was established, they would not be expected to spend much matically) a full awareness of all that can go wrong, and a clear sense of flaws in the Act. 22 Another excerpt from Commissioner Morgan’s “Instructions” that sheds light on the intentions of the reformers who strove for, then endorsed, the allotment of land in severalty to Native Americans reads as follows: “In all proper ways, teachers in the Indian schools should endeavor to appeal to the highest elements of manhood and womanhood in their pupils, exciting in them an ambition after excellence in character and dignity of surroundings, and they should carefully avoid any unnecessary references to the fact that they are Indians.” Such an attitude, taken together with the Indian Schools’ suppression of their students’ native languages and modes of dress and appearance, and with the proposed consequences of the Dawes Act, signals a commitment to what today would be called cultural genocide. 23 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price, in his Annual Report of 24 October 1881 (Documents #93), anticipates the proposals of the Dawes Act, averring that “to domesticate and civilize wild Indians is a noble work, the accomplishment of which should be a crown of glory to any nation” (156).


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thought and time, and certainly not much money, in the improvement of the Indian so that he might be better equipped to stand up against them in business competition” (p. 81). Or, as Sen. Dawes himself put it a few months after the passage of his bill, complaining to the Mohonk Conference about the speed with which Pres. Grover Cleveland, against his initial decision to move slowly in applying the Act, had quickly applied it to half a dozen reservations, “the bill provides for capitalizing the remainder of the land [i.e., what wasn’t alloted to individual Native Americans] for the benefit of the Indian, but the greed of the land-grabber is such as to press the application of this bill to the utmost… There is no danger but this will come most rapidly,—too rapidly, I think,—the greed and hunger and thirst of the white man for the Indian’s land is almost equal to his ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’” (Otis, p. 82). In fact, prying reservation land free for the use of settlers (and probably speculators) quickly assumed priority over the allotment process itself. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs reported in 1890, three years after the passage of Dawes, that “in numerous instances, where clearly desirable, Congress has by special legislation authorized negotiations with the Indians for portions of their reservations without waiting for the slower process of the general allotment act.” In Keller’s words, “When unavoidable conflicts arose over control of land... ideals fell to the wayside. Material motives such as land ownership and the temptation of new, easy wealth proved more powerful than a desire for justice” (xii).24 Far from objecting to such procedures, the Friends of the Indian applauded them, as hastening the day when the reservation system, seen as an enemy of the civilizing process, would be no more. There was, from this perspective, much to applaud: government statistics showed that of 155,632,312 acres of Indian lands in 1881, there were 104,314,349 left in 1890 and 77,865,373 in 1900.25 No wonder the Indian agent for the Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, and Oakland nations, writing in 1889 of the high pressure tactics being used to force Native 24 See also the important, somewhat revisionist essay by E.A Schwartz, “What Were the Results of Allotment?” Schwartz concludes, “Perhaps what was most significant about [Indian policy after the Dawes Act] was precisely what had been most significant during the four centuries before the Dawes Act: the continuing loss of Indian lands.” 25 Otis, p. 87 and n. 19; see his Chapter 7, “The Application of Allotment,” on the process of allotment to 1900.

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Americans to accept land in severalty and sell off the remainder of their reservations, warned that “small faith in the advice or counsel of the white man remains with the Indian character today.”26 The next crisis in the administration of the Dawes Act involved Native Americans leasing part or all their allotments to others, which the Act as written forbade. Calls to allow leasing came from Friends of the Indian, at Mohonk Conferences and elsewhere, on behalf of those who by age or gender could not farm their allotments, or of those who could use the income from leasing part of their allotment in order profitably to farm the remaining acres. Several laws were passed by Congress during the 1890s that allowed leasing within more or less strict limits;27 by 1900, the law allowed for leasing by Native Americans on the ground of any “inability” to farm their allotment; leasing for farming purposes could extend to five years, for mining to ten. The result was that throughout the decade the number of leases granted to Native Americans by the Secretary of the Interior, directly or through Indian agents, rose steadily, to the pleasure of land speculators, who could work with the Agents to lease native lands for very little, then offer kickbacks; and to the increasing alarm of the reformers who first suggested this modification of the Dawes Act: in 1900 the respective reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners, the Indian Rights Association, and the Mohonk Conference complained that such promiscuous leasing would result, not in civilizing the Indians, but in

26 Included in the 1889 Annual Report of Indian Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan, p. 195; quoted Otis, p. 97. 27 Among the private interests doubtless pleased with the provisions, and the passage, of an allotment act that stripped reservation lands from Native Americans were the railroad companies, eager to build more and more lines in order profitably to carry settlers westward, and the land speculators, who could buy up land cheaply along a future right of way and then sell parcels of it at a great profit once the tracks were laid. Indeed, section 10 of the Dawes Act recognizes “the right and power of Congress to grant the right of way through any lands granted to an Indian, or a tribe of Indians, for railroads or other highways, or telegraph lines, for the public use…” Otis (pp. 23-24) notes that “it is interesting that the same session of the same Congress that passed the Dawes Act went in for grants of railroad rights-of-way through Indian lands on a new and enlarged scale.” And he quotes the annual report of the executive committee of the Indian Rights Association for that same year, 1887, which says, “if any person accustomed to weigh evidence could still think it possible to maintain the old system of the isolation of the Indians, and to perpetuate the common ownership of their lands, a little reflection upon the relations of the railroads of the country to the Indian reservations would be sufficient to repel this delusion from his mind finally and forever” (Otis, p. 30).


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pauperizing them.28 By 1916, over 1/3 of the agricultural lands allotted in severalty to Native Americans was in the hands of lessees, of whom few if any were themselves Native Americans. Permission for a Native American to lease soon became permission to sell alloted property. Already in 1893 and 1894 Congress passed laws that chipped away at the twenty-five year period of inalienability built into the Dawes Act. The Burke Act, 8 May 1906 (34 United States Statutes, 182-83), and the so-called “Omnibus Bill,” 25 June 1910 (36 United States Statutes 855-63), made it possible for a Native American to take full legal possession of his land well before that 25 year trust period, and to sell it when and to whom he would.29 As a result of these laws, more and more land passed more and more quickly from Native American to Euro-American (and perhaps, in small quanities, AfricanAmerican) hands, with the cumulative result of ever-increasing Native American poverty and existence in a state defined by alienation from traditional culture and lack of acceptance (on racist grounds) in the dominant culture.30 D’Arcy McNickle’s semi-autobiographical 1936 novel, The Surrounded, offers the most distressing depiction I know of the long-term effects of the Dawes Act, and behind it the policies of the Friends of the Indian. The novel is set in 1914 on the former reservation of the Salish, a Native American tribe in Montana, now living in squalid poverty together with the much better off, but still economically challenged Euro-Americans who have bought the land sold off from the reservation as a result of allotment in severalty, only to see it drop in value thanks to drought and depression. An air of desperation hangs over the novel, reflecting the disastrous personal and communal consequences of America’s greed and racism in its dealings with its aboriginal population. Two passages from it have special relevance to this discussion. The first finds George Moser, an Indian trader turned proprietor of the town general store, pondering the effect of the Dawes Act on the native peoples: 28

Otis, p. 121 and n. 99 See Prucha, Great Father, pp. 872-879, “Modifications of the Dawes Act.” 30 One further obstacle to the success of allotment was the unsuitability of some reservation lands to farming because of poor soil, lack of water, harsh climate, and limited growing seasons. in 1891, Alice Fletcher, a longtime Friend of the Indian and supporter of allotments—she stated that the Dawes Act “may... be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country”—was reported by the Board of Indian Commissioners to have estimated that 2/3 of all Native Americans lived on such land (Otis, p. 100 and n. 10). 29

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Robert W. Hanning Everybody had expected that great benefits would result from throwing open the Reservation to white settlement. Even the Indians would gain by it, people said. At bottom, if you looked closely, there was a question of justice to the Indians. Years before, in the middle of the last century, as Mr. Moser understood it, the Indians had agreed to give up their hereditary claims to all of western Montana and northern Idaho in return for a fixed reserve—which was to be set apart for their exclusive use—and addtional compensation of money. The money disappeared into quicksand—there was lots of quicksand in the government service—and the reserve proved of little value to them as soon as the game vanished. That didn’t take long. And finally, at the opening of the new century, each Indian was given a separate piece of land, a “garden plot” of eighty acres, and the remaining area was opened for white settlement. There was a theory behind all that: he had heard it expounded but he couldn’t have repeated it now. It had something to do with civilizing the Indians. The justice of the procedure was, he admitted, a question, if you looked closely. But at the time the step was taken he believed with everybody else that the benefits which the Indians would secure would offset the wrong done them. If some white man also benefited, the Indians ought not to object; it was a fifty-fifty proposition. That was the talk. (pp. 30-31)

Thus does a Euro-American observer, not a Friend of the Indian, summarize the stages through which U.S. policy toward the native peoples evolved, from the forced confinement of the latter on reservations to the breaking up of those reservations by allotment in severalty—the constant being the compelled transference of land from Native Americans to colonizers. Balancing Moser’s soliloquy on the effects of allotment in severalty is this description of the allotment (or package or family allotments) belonging to old Modeste, the blind seer of the Salish. This passage constitutes the novel’s crushing judgment on the assumption of the Friends of the Indian that giving Native Americans a plot of land to call their own would turn them, as if by magic, into yeoman farmers in the best Euro-American tradition. There is a kind of chaos about an Indian’s homestead that, however complete and hopeless, is nevertheless not inherent; it does not belong to the man. In the tepee, everything is in place; but when houses are built and farming implements acquired, then nothing is surprising; the hayrake stands before the front door and a mowing machine, with many parts missing, turns to rust; a wagon not far away is covered with an assortment of harness and saddles which never find their way to the


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barn; as there is no concentrated rubbish heap, tin cans are scattered to the yard at large; here are the ruins of some shade trees, sold and even planted by an energetic travelling nurseryman, but broken away limb by limb to provide whips for a lazy horse—they had never been watered anyhow, except by the dogs and a kind sky; a grindstone that has long ago jumped from its iron trestle lies fractured, one end of its rusty shaft obtruding, like the upraised arm of a drowning man; and these are only a few of the evidences of a foreign world. (pp. 195-196)

Note the details: “one end of its rusty shaft obtruding, like the upraised arm of a drowning man...; a mowing machine, with many parts missing, turns to rust...; evidences of a foreign world...” Images of death and lost integrity—both personal and communal—converge in a bitter indictment of a scheme imposed on the Native American, supposedly for his benefit, that has resulted in his ruin. McNickle, himself half Salish by ancestry and as such recipient of a Dawes Act allotment, which he later sold to support his studies at the University of Montana and Oxford University,31 worked for a time in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, during a period that saw its rejection of the philosophy of civilizing the savage by breaking up the reservations—a period that culminated in the passage in 1934 of the WheelerHoward Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) that repealed the central features of the Dawes Act and re-established reservations, giving the Native Americans living on them a good deal of autonomy in running their own affairs.32 But this is not the end of the story with respect to that 1887 law, so widely praised at its inception, so disappointing and injurious in its long-term effects. One of the provisions of the IRA indefinitely extended the period during which allotments to individual Native Americans would be held in trust by the US Government. This extension, along with other less sweeping extensions of the trust period, or exceptions to the passing on of the title of an allotment to the allotee, means that approximately 11 million acres of individual Native American Allotments are held in trust by the government today. The proceeds of leasing an allotment for agriculture, grazing, logging, or

31 For a brief summary of McNickle’s life, see Lawrence Towner’s “Afterword” to the 1978 reprint of The Surrounded, pp. 303-305; McNickle’s papers are in the Newberry Library, Chicago. 32 See Documents #s 138 (text of the Act) and 139 (extract from Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier’s Annual Report for 1934, explaining the Act. See also Prucha, Great Father, Chapter 37, “The New Reform.”

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mineral extraction, including oil and gas, go into what is called the Individual Indian Money Trust (IIMT). In 1996, Eloise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet nation, a banker, and subsequently the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation so-called “genius grant,” filed a class-action suit against the federal government on behalf of approximately a half-million Native Americans who participate (or had deceased ancestors who participated) in the IIMT program. The suit charges that “defendants, the officers charged with carrying out the trust obligations of the U.S., have grossly mismanaged, and continue to mismanage, such [IIM] trusts” (and here I paraphrase) by failing to keep adequate records and to install an adequate accounting system for moneys received from individual allotments; by destroying “records bearing upon their breaches of trust;” by failing to account adequately to trust beneficiaries with respect to their money; and by having lost, dissipated, or converted to the U.S.’s own use the money of the trust beneficiaries; and having conspired to prevent the Special Trustee for American Indians established by a 1994 Act of Congress in connection with IIMT from performing his duties and responsibiliities. Altogether, the suit claims, the IIMT beneficiaries have been cheated out of as much as $137.5 billion, all of it deriving from provisions of the Dawes Act.33 During the first ten years of the suit—which may eventually be settled out of court for a considerably smaller sum—Royce C. Lamberth, the U.S. District Court Judge originally assigned to preside over the case in Federal District Court, Washington, D.C., repeatedly sided with the plaintiffs in the face of efforts by the defendants to have the case thrown out, holding two consecutive Secretaries of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt and Gale A. Norton, in contempt of court for their dilatoriness and obfuscation in responding to the suit and ordering the government to inform IIMT beneficiaries that its trust account records are not accurate. On 11 July 2006, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, responding to appeals filed by the Justice Department, ordered Judge Lamberth’s removal from the case, claiming that his “animosity” toward the Department of the Interior violated “the impartial application of law to fact.” He was subsequently replaced in December, 2006 33 Blackfeet Reservation Development Fund, www.Indiantrust.com. For a transcript of the original 1996 complaint, search under “documents” and scroll back to June 1996.


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by U.S. District Judge James Robertson.34 Ms. Cobell admits that pursuing redress of grievances sustained by Native Americans, ultimately as a result of the Dawes Act, has been a long, and draining experience for her and her associates, one which, given its magnitude and its relationship to the sad story of America’s treatment of its indigenous population, should be much better known than it is.35 The abuses that ultimately swamped whatever good intentions toward the well being of Native Americans underlay the Dawes Act must finally be attributed to the racism that constructed the aboriginal 34 “Appeals Panel Removes Judge Presiding Over Indian Lawsuit,” New York Times, 12 July 2006. See also “Cobell v. Norton—Removing Judge from Trust Case Would Send ‘Wrong Message,’ Appeals Court Told” email from Indian Trust ListServe ([email protected]), 12 April 2006. A propos Judge Lamberth’s putative animosity to the Department of the Interior, it should be noted that Alan Balaran, an investigator appointed by Lamberth in 1999 “to determine the finances” of the IIMT, resigned in April, 2004, and in a letter to the judge accused the Interior Department a “systematic failure to properly monitor” the energy companies operating on Native American land. “The agency’s [i.e., the IIMT’s] motivation is clear,” he wrote. “In recent months, I have reported evidence of a practice—abetted by Interior—of energy companies routinely paying individual Indians much less than they pay non-Indians for oil and gas pipeline easements across the Southwest.” Balaran also said that Interior had “destroyed valable trust information” and had “significant problems with its appraisal and record-keeping processes” (‘Indian Fund Investigator Angrily Quits,’ New York Times, 7 April 2004). The Times article also notes that “as a result of Mr. Balaran’s investigation, Judge Lamberth last month [i.e., March, 2004] ordered the [Interior] department to shut down much of its Internet access because of security problems related to the [IIMT] fund.” 35 Eloise Cobell, speech at Merrill Lynch Headquarters, New York City, 10 November 2004. In addition to the articles quoted in the preceding note, the Times has periodically mentioned the progress of the case, devoting several long articles to Cobell Vs. Kempthorne (as it is now called) and two editorials (“A Continuing Shame,” 26 September 2004; “Fixing an Old Injustice,” 4 August 2005), in which it sided unequivocally with the plaintiffs. On 8 August 2008, the Times reported (“Indians Gain a Slim Victory in Suit Against Government”) that Judge James Robertson, Judge Lamberth’s replacement as presiding justice in the case,” ruled on [7 August] that the plaintiffs, however much they had prevailed in proving government failure, were entitled to only a fraction of the billions of dollars they sought…. [I]nstead of the $48 billion that the descendants of the original trust holders claimed, the government was only liable for about $455 million.” Eloise Cobell issued a statement on 7 August, saying in part, “I know I speak for everyone in Indian Country when I say that it is difficult to reconcile the Court’s ruling with beneficiaries’ experience with the Individual Indian Money (IIM) Trust. I am disappointed to say the least.” On 25 July 2009, however, the Times reported that “a federal appeals court ruled that the Interior Department must account for the century-old land royalties owed to American Indians, reversing a lower court’s ruling that the task is impossible …. The appeals court said the district court erred in freeing the government from the accounting burden.” It is unclear at this point whether the district court’s assessment of the government’s liability at $455 million will stand.

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Robert W. Hanning

population of North America as inherently inferior to the Europeans who came to exploit, then to settle the continent. The raison d’etre of that racism was to justify driving the native peoples from the land they had long held, and this was the goal, whether the means were harsh— as in destroying the animal life that provided sustenance for many of them, and even resorting to mass murder—or beneficent, as in pursuing a noble vision of “civilizing the savages” by imposing on them Christianity, the English language, and ownership of land allotted in severalty. The General Allotment legislation of 1887 was but one act, albeit an important one, in a long, tragic drama, the dénouement of which has yet to be played.

index

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INDEX Abelard 40-42, 44, 45, 46, 47-48, 49, 50, 52, 56, 63-65, 75, 93, 96 accent 43-48 Agapithus 21 Alanus de insulis (Alan of Lille) 200 Alexander (the Great) 196 alienation 24 Ambrose 70, 79, 101 Angel of Dreams 171, 182 angels 10, 188 anima mundi 310 apparitions 274, 291 appreciation 319 “apocalyptic vision” 122 Aquinas, Thomas 137, 138, 146,159, 161, 164, 200 archetypes 316, 319 Aretino, Pietro 333 Arianism 101 Aristotle Categories 52 De anima 33 De interpretatione 52 Generation of Animals 328 Metaphysica 163, 210 Physica 43, 44 Poetica 210 Posterior analytica 163 artifex 56, 64, 76, 86-87 artificiosum 35 Augustine, “Augustinian,” 36, 64, 70, 73, 79, 83, 124, 133, 136, 137, 139, 143, 145-146, 150, 155, The City of God 72, 93, 94 Confessions 125 Soliloquies 163 Augustinian houses 43, 49, 50 Avicenna 187 Axiom of Infinity 323 Bacon, Francis 329 Bede 105 Beowulf 209 Bernard of Clairvaux 49, 55, 63, 65, 100, 106. 110, 111, 114 bisociation 307

Boethius 19, 20, 53, 89, 313-314 Borderlines 292 Brucker, Jacob 140, 142 brutto/bellezza 331, 337 Carmina burana 44 “Cave Metaphor” 127, 222, 225 Chalcidius 53, 57-58, 89 Charlemagne 28, 209 Cicero 52, 53, 334 clans 49, 50 Cleveland, Grover (President) 351, 359 copulationes 36 Corpus Hermeticum 188, 202, 206 Cosimo I de’ Medici 333, 335 cursus honorum 19 Custer, George Armstrong 339-340, 347-348 Dante Alghieri, Commedia 185, 215, 221 “dark speeches” 1 Dedekind, Richard 313, 321-322, 323 deformità 326, 330 demiurge 57, 86 demons, ghosts 264, 271 differentiae 42 Donne, John 100, 108-110 doubts 12, 13 “dream narration” 170 Elisha (prophet) 13 Epiphany (Feast of) 100 Eschaton 122 “family vision” 7 Ficino, Marsilio 331 figura 33, 35, 121, 123 flagellation, nakedness 235, 243-246, 249-253 forest 4, 24, 212, 263 Fulgentius of Ruspe 2, 17, 24 furor poeticus 262 Galen 292 Geoffrey of Monmouth 286

368 Gerson, Jean 248 Gilson, Étienne 154-158 “glad tidings” 173, 176 Gregory the Great (Pope) 53, 54 de Grochieo, Johannes 7, 313-314 Hercules 336 “heroic ego” 304-305 Hillman, James 303-306 Homer 210 homo viator 206 Honorius Augustodunensis 89 imitations, imitatio Christi 129, 248 integumentum 5, 121 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 200 Jung, Carl Gustav 314, 316, 318-320 al-Khwarizmi 317 Keats, John 267 kerygma 101 Lamentations (of Jeremiah) 31 Leonardo da Vinci 334 magic/kabbalah 199, 207-208, 263 maraviglia 326, 328, 329 mensura 82 modi, senses 2, 6, 34 modulatio 35 monstri 326, 328, 337 Moses 1 Nebuchadnezzar 9 New Deal 342 Nicea (Council of) 113 nightmares 7 Odoacer 18 oneiromancy 171 opifex 57, 61 Ostrogoth Period 18. 19, 21, 29 pathology 284, 290, 296 pax romana 118 Peckham, John 239 peh le peh 11

index pes 37 Peter de Celle 228 Peter Comestor 237 phantoms 271 phenomenology 44 “plain speech” 2 planctus, planh 31, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46 Plato Republic 127-128, 132 Timaeus 56-60, 61, 76, 85, 124 “pleasant vision” 4, 198 Porphyry 52, 124 property 322 Psalms 59 representation(s) 6, 316 Rorty, Richard 141 Rule of St. Francis 230 Russell, Bertrand 313-314, 315 Salomon 196 Sartre, Jean Paul 290 significatio 211 Song of Songs 105 stuff 38 style (“subdued,” “moderate,” “grand”) 106 symbolic dreams 10, 12, 15 Symmachus 19, 20, 21 talismans 188, 201 theology, new/old 55, 67, 76, 86-87, 9092, 95 theophany 16 Thierry of Chartres 56, 75, 77-78, 87, 93 translation 5 vision “apocalyptic” 122 “family” 7 “majestic” 279 “pleasant” 4, 198 “waking” 10 Walpiri 315, 319 William of Conches 56, 63, 90, 93, 97

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