Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus

The works of the enigmatic seventh-century author Virgilius Maro Grammaticus ('Virgil the Grammarian') are amongst the m...

Author: Vivien Law

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The works of the enigmatic seventh-century author Virgilius Maro Grammaticus ('Virgil the Grammarian') are amongst the most puzzling medieval texts to survive. Ostensibly a pair of grammars, they swarm with hymns, riddles, imaginary writers, invented words and attacks on authority. Conventionally interpreted either as a benighted barbarian's unfortunate attempt to write a 'proper' grammar, or as a parody of the pedantic excesses of the ancient grammatical tradition, these texts are desperately in need of a reading which takes into account their many idiosyncrasies. Why should a grammarian preach the existence of twelve different kinds of Latin? Why should he attack the very notion of authority, thereby destabilising his own position? The search for an answer leads via patristic exegesis and medieval wisdom literature to the tantalisingly ill-documented reaches of heterodox initiatory traditions.

WISDOM, AUTHORITY AND GRAMMAR IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY

WISDOM, AUTHORITY AND GRAMMAR IN THE SEVENTH CENTURY Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus

V I V I E N LAW DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

1 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521471138 © Cambridge University Press 1995 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1995 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Law, Vivien. Wisdom, authority and grammar in the seventh century: decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus / Vivien Law. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-47113-3 1. Virgilius Maro, Grammaticus, 7th cent. - Ethics. 2. Latin language, Medieval and modern — Grammar — Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Learning and scholarship - History - Medieval, 500-1500. 4. Latin language, Medieval and modern - Historiography. 5. Wisdom literature - Criticism, interpretation, etc. 6. Ethics, Medieval. 7. Seventh century. 8. Authority. I. Title. PA2819.L39 1995 485-dc20 94-12216 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-47113-8 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-47113-3 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-02769-4 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-02769-1 paperback

Contents

Preface Abbreviations

page ix x

Introduction

i

1

The outer layers: parody and word-play

5

2

The wisdom tradition

22

3

Avarice and the four keys to wisdom

41

4

The multifarious nature of wisdom

47

5

Heretical knowledge? The constitution of man

57

6

The Epistolae: Virgilius' Retractation

77

7

Concealment of mysteries: the techniques of secrecy

83

8

Virgilius and the seventh century

97

9

Conclusion

106

Appendix 1 Epistola II 14-93: The vocative of ego

109

Appendix 2

Epitome XV: The catalogue of grammarians 112

Notes Works cited Index

116 144 164

Preface

In 1983 Louise Scott and Martha Bayless, at that time students, combined forces to compel me to have another look at Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, about whom I thought I had said quite enough already. They were right: everything remained to be done. The results were tried out on various audiences from Lancaster to Naples, and preliminary reports were published in three articles. This book has benefitted greatly from the diverse comments of Gill Evans, Linda Heusser, Olga Holbek, Louis Kelly, Michael Lapidge, Line Playfair, Nick Shackleton, Patrick Sims-Williams, and an anonymous reader, who all read varying amounts of it in typescript. John Buczak, Annabel Cormack, David Dumville and Irene Rosier supplied important details. The production of camera-ready copy would not have been possible without the unflagging enthusiasm and inexhaustible expertise of Leslie French, who designed the Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic fonts. My debt to Michael Lapidge, who introduced me to Virgilius' writings in 1974, will be apparent throughout. Whether he or anyone else who helped me, directly or indirectly, agrees with the views expressed here is quite another question. I should like to thank them all nonetheless.

IX

Abbreviations

A

Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, Epitomae

B

Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, Epistolae

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

CCSM

Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis

CSEL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

GG

Grammatici Graeci

GL

Grammatici Latini

PL

Patrologia Latina

Translations of passages from the Bible are taken from the King James version except where the wording would obscure some important point.

Introduction

If any medieval author has a right to be called an enigma, it is Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. As baffling in his intentions as Marcabrun or Dante, as elusive a personality as King Arthur or Aethicus Ister, as fertile of imagination as any poet or novelist, he leaves his readers puzzled, uneasy, even angry. Paul Lehmann's taunt of arger Schalk, 'out-and-out charlatan', has been echoed by many a student, and yet Virgilius has attracted more scholarly attention than any other medieval grammarian. Despite a succession of dismissive judgements, his works exercise their hold on one generation after another, to the point where he even makes a brief appearance in a best-seller, Umberto Eco's // nome della rosa. No works of superficial interest have ever held an audience in the way that these have. What is it that gives them their special quality? At first glance Virgilius' Epitomae and Epistolae look improbable candidates for any best-seller list, medieval or modern. Ostensibly they are Latin grammars, written in Latin, and structured along traditional lines. Thus, the first of the pair, the Epitomae, is modelled on a famous grammar of Antiquity, the Ars maior by Donatus (c. 350 AD). Like the Ars maior, the Epitomae begins with several chapters on units smaller than the word — the letter, the syllable, metrical feet — and then progresses to the eight parts of speech. Both works conclude with a series of chapters on language in use: Donatus' on barbarisms, solecisms and figures of speech; Virgilius' on word-splitting, etymology and previous grammarians. Virgilius' second work, the Epistolae, corresponds to Donatus' shorter work, the Ars minor, in dealing only with the eight parts of speech. But although Virgilius' choice of subject-matter in each chapter stays fairly close to the traditional

2

Introduction

norm, his doctrine often departs sharply from that norm. He teaches grammatical forms and constructions known from no ancient or medieval writer, and his vocabulary rivals that of James Joyce. It is not the doctrine taught nor even Virgilius' own Latin, outlandish though it is, which marks these two works off from other medieval grammars so much as the non-grammatical doctrine — the trappings, as one might suppose. Grammars are normally dour and impersonal works. Virgilius', in contrast, are peopled by as luxuriant a cast of characters as a novel by Tolstoy or Dickens. Whether responding to Virgilius' importunate questions, or fighting for fourteen days and nights over a grammatical trifle, or simply providing Virgilius with passages to quote, these remarkable individuals come close to giving Virgilius' works the air of a grammaire dramatisee — and yet in a very different sense from the straightforward question-and-answer dramatisation with which Alcuin enlivened his grammar a hundred and fifty years later. Romans, Greeks, biblical characters and barbarians rub shoulders — Varro, Cato, three Virgils and three Vulcans, Aeneas, Origen, Sufphonias, Sagillius, Blastus, the Carthaginian sibyl, Gurgilius, Balapsidus, Galbungus, right down to Mr Lacedaemonian Phalanx. Not a few of these figures seem preoccupied with Creation, their own writings often opening with words which bear an uncanny resemblance to the start of Genesis. Others are historians manques, their utterances echoing the turns of phrase of Sallust or Livy. Donatus of Troy, reputed to have lived for a thousand years, heads a catalogue of twelve otherwise unknown grammarians, whilst others, like Virgil of Asia, turn out to be noted practitioners of scinderatio fonorum, the scrambling of words. The eccentricities could fill many pages more. Where does one begin with such a work? Researchers habitually focus on the historical context — author's identity, date and place of composition, sources. But in Virgilius' case even these basic facts are elusive. Michael Herren's review of opinions on his date and milieu shows how varied a range of possibilities exists: proposed dates range from the fifth century to the ninth, and suggested locations include Ireland, various parts of Gaul, and Spain.1 Herren's rigorous examination of the evidence for his date

Introduction

3

has provided a widely accepted floruit in the decades around 650, but Virgilius' place of activity remains more problematical. Herren's espousal of Irish origin has been challenged by several scholars on linguistic and typological grounds, but reasserted by others in view of the use of his works by Irish computistical writers.2 His identity remains no less obscure. That other topic of research beloved of nineteenth-century scholars, Quellenforschung, has attracted relatively little attention3 due to Virgilius' delicately allusive style and the egregiously novel character of much of his doctrine. We are left with few facts and much speculation. If the very framework for a study of these writings still eludes construction, it is hardly surprising that more daring questions are still awaiting a voice. So strange a pair of texts naturally sets the modern reader asking after Virgilius' intentions. His contemporaries read and copied his works repeatedly; presumably they understood, if only in a limited way, what their message was. Modern scholars have to a startling extent glossed over this problem. An older generation of scholars, up to the First World War, took the text at face value, reading it as a serious attempt to compose a Latin grammar by a well-meaning but hopelessly ill-informed teacher in some benighted part of the Roman Empire.4 The German scholar Paul Lehmann inaugurated a new approach, treating the works as a parody of the solemn pomposity of the grammarians of the later Empire. Here matters have remained. The dominant interpretation of Virgilius' intentions is still parody.5 That parody plays an important part in Virgilius' writing is undeniable; but it is no more satisfactory as a solution to the problem of his intent than the earlier hypothesis of earnest but misguided didacticism. Adopting the explanation of parody goes one step beyond the literal reading of the text; it peels off one layer of obfuscation. But it remains on the level of form, leaving the content — Virgilius' message — untouched. Until we delve deeper we will find no solution. Perhaps, though, we are wrong to expect a single and all-encompassing 'global solution'. More of our habits of thought than we realise have been permeated by the materialistic exigencies of natural science. In demanding a single solution to a problem, a single etymology for a name, a single

4

Introduction

underlying structure for a sentence, we transfer Aristotle's dictum, 'two bodies cannot occupy the same space', to a domain for which it was not intended. No medieval reader would have been so simplistic. Trained in the techniques of biblical exegesis, Virgilius' contemporaries knew that every event recorded in the Bible possessed at least four kinds of meaning: historical (i.e. literal), moral, anagogical (i.e. events of the Old Testament foreshadowing events of the New) and allegorical. Far from being mutually exclusive, these various interpretations existed simultaneously, enriching the reader's understanding with their interpenetrating levels of meaning. If we would seek to comprehend so complex a writer as Virgilius, it is incumbent upon us to try to adopt, as far as we are able, some of that agility of thought which characterised the medieval reader. Only by shaking off our ingrained craving for a single simple solution will we have any hope of understanding the nexus of intersecting planes of significance which Virgilius creates. That this book succeeds in doing so would be a rashly optimistic hope. Its purpose is more modest — to hint at new ways of thinking about Virgilius, focusing on these questions: what was Virgilius' purpose? why did his works appeal to his contemporaries? and why do they retain their appeal today?

CHAPTER I


A message concealed by a parody wrapped up in a grammar — so, with apologies to Churchill, might one characterise the works of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, Virgil the Grammarian. Virgilius calls himself a grammarian, grammaticus•, and ostensibly his Epitomae and Epistolae are simply a pair of grammars modelled, like so many others, on the renowned pair by Donatus (c. 350 AD), the Ars maior and Ars minor. Unlike most other seventh-century grammars they take the form neither of elementary descriptive grammars designed for foreigners, such as the grammars by Tatwine and Asper/Asporius, nor of commentaries on Donatus like the Ars Ambrosiana or Quae sunt quae? instead, they are structured as independent grammars covering much the same ground as Donatus, without the constant reference to the text of one particular work which characterises a commentary. There is nothing in Virgilius' own text to suggest that he intended it to be read in conjunction with another grammar, nor does he claim that it will shed light on the teachings of ancient grammarians2 — a point worth stressing. Nonetheless, his works resemble ancient grammars in overall structure and in many points of detail. Compare the contents with those of Donatus's two grammars: Ars maior

Epitomae

De De De De

De De De De

voce littera syllaba pedibus

sapientia littera syllabis metrorum conpossitione 5

6


De De De De De De

tonis posituris partibus orationis nomine De nomine pronomine De pronomine verbo De verbi qualitate De accidentibus verbi sex aliis De adverbio De reliquis partibus orationis De participio De coniunctione De praepositione De interiectione De barbarismo De scinderatione fonorum De soloecismo De cognationibus etymologiae aliorum nominum De ceteris vitiis [Three chapters have been lost.] De metaplasmo De catalogo grammaticorum De schematibus De tropis Ars minor

Epistolae

De partibus orationis De nomine De pronomine De verbo De adverbio De participio De coniunctione De praepositione De interiectione

Praefatio De nomine De pronomine De verbo De adverbio De participio De coniunctione De praepossitione De interiectione

In the Epistolae the parallelism is transparent; in the Epitomae it is broad rather than narrow, Virgilius retaining the overall structure by placing chapters on phenomena below the level of the word (letter/speech-sound, syllable, metrical feet) before those on the parts of speech, and language in use ('scrambling' of forms, etymology) after.


7

The parallelism extends also to the structure of individual chapters. In the chapter of the Epitomae on the noun, for instance, Virgilius discusses each of the properties of the noun in turn, in Donatus' order: qualitas, conparatio, genus, numerus, figura, casus 'quality [proper or common], comparison, gender, number, composition, case'. In the verb the list is a little different from Donatus', but nonetheless the properties are a traditional set: modus, forma,

coniugatio, numerus, figura, persona, significatio,

tempus 'mood, aspect, conjugation, number, composition, person, voice, tense'. The problems treated are often equally traditional — the declension of pronouns, the formation of adverbs, defective verbs, the comparison of participles and so on.3 What is very far from traditional is the manner of treatment. Let us consider one notorious example, the discussion of the vocative of ego. In the second chapter of the Epistolae Virgilius depicts two grammarians in bitter dispute over just how one addresses oneself: 'O I', 'O me', or what? (This episode is translated in appendix 1.) This protracted inquisition into the various forms of the first person pronoun tickles the modern sense of the ridiculous. Is the problem a grammatical one — or a psychological one? But Latin poetry raises the issue repeatedly in its melancholy soliloquies, so that the question became standard fare among fourth- and fifth-century grammarians.4 The details of the discussion reinforce the tongue-in-cheek impression created by such luxuriant verbiage devoted to so improbable a question. Virgilius appeals to all sorts of authorities, ostensibly grammatical or literary, who are themselves problematical figures. Even if they bear classical names — Terrentius, Aeneas, Servilius, Latomius, Virgilius Assianus, Sarricius — the writings with which they are credited are otherwise unattested and the forms ascribed to them are implausible. No classical Servilius would be caught writing agrum ego rapuerunt, nor a classical Latomius ego quid simus acturiV We might be more prepared to credit a Sarbon, a Galbungus or a Fassica with such solecisms, even though they and their barbarously named peers lead an existence confined to Virgilius' pages. The work is full of such references to books and writers which lack any external corroboration. Only in a very few cases can Virgilius be shown to refer

8


directly to a surviving work by an independently attested writer.6 The interaction of these figures further infringes the norms of late antique grammar. Grammarians normally adopt an impersonal didactic monologue as their mode of discourse. The authorities they cite — other grammarians and literary authors — keep a discreet distance: never do they figure as living protagonists. Compare the events in Virgilius' discussion of ego, where Virgilius depicts himself taking the vexed question of the word's inflection to his teacher, Aeneas, who, after a day-long discussion, pronounces in favour of one authority rather than another. On another occasion the two authorities, Terrentius and Galbungus, are reported to have spent fourteen days and nights in contention over the vocative of ego, a dispute eventually settled once more by the arbitration of Aeneas, with Virgilius as the intermediary. Aeneas, Terrentius and Galbungus are depicted as living characters, as individuals peopling Virgilius' memory. The passage has more the air of an old man retelling (or recreating) anecdotes from his youth than of the pedagogical narrative of a grammar. Whereas the language of a grammarian might be expected to conform strictly to the norm, Virgilius' transgresses the limits of ordinary latinity. In this passage, as elsewhere, his vocabulary abounds in terms which, although readily comprehensible, formed as they are from well-known Latin roots, are not to be found in any dictionary: inscrutari, gande, declinamentum, querelosus, to take a few examples. But, despite his luxuriant neologisms, his own morphology and syntax tend to follow classical rules. It is Virgilius' authorities — usually — who break the rules. The doctrine taught — ego as a monoptoton, a form valid in all numbers, genders and cases, or alternatively as an indeclinable, lacking all cases but the nominative; an alternative form mius\ and ego serving as its own vocative — is no less startling than the language in which it is taught. And yet all these features are to be found in the Late Latin grammarians. Compare Pompeius' rambling discussion of ego: On the other hand there is a pronoun where one case is lacking, ego: ego mei mihi me a me. There is no vocative. The vocative is totally lacking, just ego mei mihi me a me.


9

Many people insert 0: ego mei mihi me 0 a me, so that this 0 is the article of the vocative case, but this is shown to be false, as Astyagius teaches with this splendid argumentation. O cannot be the pronoun of the vocative case by the nature of things. Why not? Because the vocative singular must show some difference from the vocative plural. The nature of the thing demands it, and I shall tell you how. Take, for example, hie vir, hi viri 'the man, the men'. Look, hie is the article in the nominative. Or take huius viri, horum virorum 'of the man, of the men. Hie is not the same as hi, huius as horum, huic as his, hunc as hos, ab hoc as ab his. You can see that the articles are never the same. Now, it is different in this kind of vocative: 0 Turne, 0 Tumi 'O Turnus, O Turnuses'. See how it is not an article. It is obligatory for every article in every case to have one form in the singular and another in the plural, thus: in the singular hie huius huic hunc 0 ab hoc, and in the plural hi horum his hos 0 ab his. They don't agree, do they, except in that quasi-article, 0, which they substitute for an article. This cannot be, and the point is made that it is not possible that an article could be the same in both vocative singular and vocative plural, given that the other articles all differ in every case. It thus follows that you should say that, since it is an interjection, either you should call it an interjection, or else it is an adverb which is associated with the vocative. But it cannot be called an article of the vocative case: you can reject that option for the reasons just given. There, you now know where it is that the vocative case is not found.7 Pompeius' discussion is no less polemical than Virgilius', although instead of projecting the opposing views onto adversaries like Terrentius and Galbungus, Pompeius launches the attack himself. His mysterious Astyagius is a worthy counterpart to Sarricius or Galbungus. As for Virgilius' many authorities and their remarkable writings, they find a parallel in the exemplificatory quotations from Roman historians and playwrights in many a Roman grammarian. 8 In short, many of the ingredients for Virgilius5 rich brew are already present, though in less abundant measure, in the Late Latin tradition. By exaggeration, by sharpening the detail just a little more, Virgilius pushes the conventions of ancient grammar

io


over the brink of parody. On many a page he punctures the authority of the ancient grammatical tradition with his adept parodistic technique, deflating the unreflecting pompous bombast of his predecessors to the point of ridicule. Parody is seldom an end in itself. Occasionally its target is internal, aimed at the 'high-falutin" style or lumbering pretentiousness of the model. More often there is an external goal — to mock the bombast and self-glorification of the Roman emperors, as in the late antique Apocolocyntosis of Claudius, or to satirise the avarice or lax morals of the clergy, as in many of the late medieval parodies collected by Lehmann and Bayless.9 In the case of Virgilius, Lehmann argued, his acute wit was directed at the hair-splitting excesses of the Late Latin grammarians, and as we have just seen, much in Virgilius' method supports this. On one level one can — with some difficulty — read the Epitomae and the Epistolae as a pair of grammars in the ancient tradition; on another, we can enjoy them as a parody of that same tradition. Can we legitimately stop there? Any scholar who would urge that we should has several difficulties to explain away. First, the work is inordinately long, some 164 pages in Polara's edition. It is thus about three times as long as the Ars maior and Ars minor combined, and falls between Probus' Instituta artium and Pompeius' rambling commentary — two of the longer ancient grammars after Priscian's huge Institutiones grammaticae — in length. It thus contravenes one of the more consistent typological features of the medieval genre of parody: brevity. Secondly, much of the doctrine in Epitomae I, TV and XV, and in Epistolae praef, III and VIII, as well as scattered passages elsewhere, deals with subjects unrelated to grammar — history, wisdom, cosmology, avarice, the nature of man. Whereas the passages with a historical ring are paralleled in the many examples taken from Roman historians by Priscian and other Late Latin grammarians, those on wisdom, avarice, cosmology and the nature of man have no such antecedents. Such crossreading10 is rare in medieval parody, and yet, as we shall see, the extraneous matter has an important part to play in Virgilius' writings. Thirdly, despite the economic exigencies of the seventh-


n

and eighth-century scriptorium, the Epitomae and Epistolae were widely read up until about the middle of the ninth century. Although the direct transmission is represented by only four complete manuscripts (just one of which contains the Epistolae) and three fragments,11 an unusually large number of later grammars and florilegia include excerpts from one or both works.12 Whatever the choice of passages quoted by these later writers shows, the existence of such excerpts is an irrefutable indication of Virgilius' wide dissemination in pre- and early Carolingian Europe. That a work which was known to be a parody, an extended jeu d'esprit, should attract the attention and the degree of commitment required to multiply copies to an extent far beyond that attested for any contemporary grammar or parody is hard to credit. Either we must assume, with Polara,13 that Virgilius' parodistic intentions were totally misunderstood by his medieval readers, who took his work to be a serious grammar — in which case the almost total lack of cVirgilian' forms, colouring and vocabulary in the latinity of his readers has to be accounted for14 — or else we are left with the uncomfortable conclusion that it is not his medieval readers but his modern ones who have missed the point. Perhaps it is a mistake to take either the grammatical doctrine or its cloak of parody as the real message. But how are we to unearth the real message of a parodist? Which of his statements are sincere, which tongue-in-cheek? No rules exist, of course, for that is the essence of concealment. All we can do is to listen for hints from the author as to how to read his work. If their application provides a consistent reading, then we may be on the right track.

SIGNIFICANT NAMES

Let us begin where most medieval readers would, with the names of Virgilius' characters. Like most other grammarians, Virgilius devotes a paragraph to propria nomina (A V 15-34).15 While explaining why it is that names are called 'proper nouns', he says: 'Proper nouns are not to be read as mere noises, but as having some subtler interpretation.' This was common knowledge to his

12


contemporaries, accustomed as they were to searching for the significance of biblical proper names. To take an example, in the book of Genesis, the Lord a >pears to Abram and tells him: 'Neither shall thy name any me be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father oi: many nations have I made thee' (Gen. 17:5). The point of this change is lost upon the reader without Hebrew, medieval and modern alike. But whereas most twentieth-century readers would simply assume that the act of changing the name was itself the point of the passage, a seventh-century reader steeped in the methods of biblical exegesis would look to the meaning of the names. As a Spanish contemporary of Virgilius', Isidore of Seville, points out in his Etymologiae, a huge encyclopedia of words and their meanings, can analysis16 of words indicates adequately what is to be understood; many names are motivated by their own causes' (VII i 2), a commonplace echoed — or more usually taken for granted — throughout the Middle Ages.17 On encountering a strange but meaningful name Virgilius and his contemporaries could draw upon a number of aids: Isidore's Etymologiae, 'published' in 636, was just becoming available, and his Proemia in libros veteris ac novi testamenti provided explanations of biblical proper names to supplement Jerome's ever-popular Interpretationes hebraicorum nominum. From Jerome's Interpretationes we learn that Abram means pater excelsus 'lofty father', whereas Abraham signifies 'father seeing the people'. If Virgilius intended the names of his characters to be read 'not as mere noises, but as having some subtler interpretation', then the key to some, at least, should lie in works like Jerome's and Isidore's. Some of the names are transparent, like Plastus (B III 636), whose name is based on Adam's epithet, protoplastus 'first created', and who is appropriately the author of a verse on the four elements, or Ursinus (A XV 73), from ursusy 'bear', who speaks a kind of Latin concerned with earthly matters, exemplified by animal names. Others require Jeromes help:18 1 One of the authorities quoted by Virgilius is Fassica, 'a woman so wise and learned that her name will without doubt be celebrated as long as the world endures' (B II 58—60). According to Jerome, Fase means pascba, 'Passover' or 'Easter', and


13

Fasec and Fasee have the closely related sense of transgressus, 'crossing over' (13,11-12; 45,25; 64,21-2; 78,1-2). Naturally, then, Fassica's name will be celebrated to the end of time. 2 Virgilius' uncle Samminius has been known as Goelanus to this very day 'because he was the goela ('jewel'?) of his mother, that is, the precious one' (A V 46—8, following Polara's translation). Goel means propinquus sine redimens (13,16—17), 'relative [or 'nearby'] or redeeming'. The mention of two kinship terms in this one sentence is reinforced by Jerome's interpretation of goel. 3 Virgilius reports that Andreas wrote of Pyrrhus that 'apart from the forces (viribus) of Asia, he had 10,000 in his ranks' (B VII 85—8). The name Andreas, Jerome tells us (66,25—7), is best to be interpreted according to the Greek etymology apo tou andros, hoc est a viroy virilis adpellatur. Play on the similiarities between vir 'man' and vires 'strength', common in patristic and medieval exegesis, is at work here too. 4 Sufphonia(s) Hebreus is the author of some verses quoted to support the etymology of caelum 'heavens' from celare 'to conceal' (B I 334). The name of the Old Testament prophet Sophonias means abscondens eum, 'hiding him' (52,20). 5 Bel or Bala means vetustas 'old age, antiquity' (25,18; 49,22—3; 53,21; 56,5). Virgilius tells us of a certain King Belus who lived long before the Tower of Babel19 and was a contemporary of the fabled Latinus anneus, who was reputed to have lived two centuries (A I 42). In the catalogue of grammarians one Balapsidus is included (A XV 112—16) who, it turns out, 'recently enjoyed life'; his age is not revealed. The second element of his name, (p)sidus 'star', is hinted at in the opening sentence of his book: 'In the beginning the Spirit brooded within the heavens and the earth, the sea and all the stars {astro)' 6 The addressee of the Epistolae, Julius, bears a name meaning 'beginner' (incipiens 69,21). Already 'drunk on the delightful wine of divine Scripture and celestial teaching', Julius is urged by Virgilius to absorb the 'meagre stream of philosophical knowledge' — to begin again on this new path to wisdom (B praef. 36-9). 7 Aeneas, Virgilius' teacher, bears a name with three meanings, respondens aut pauper siue miseria, 'answering or poor or

14

The outer layers: parody and word-play wretchedness' (67,6). Virgilius repeatedly turns to him with questions on one point or another of grammatical doctrine, to which Aeneas replies using the verb respondere seven20 times, and with other verbs on another six occasions. (Significantly, the only other character to make a direct reply to one of Virgilius' questions, Lupus Christianus Atheniensis (B III 337), also bears a name — if Mai's emendation of athensi is right — interpreted by Jerome as respondens (67,10).) Aeneas is closely associated with poverty. After quoting one of his admonitions to let no day or night pass without searching for wisdom (A V 190-5) Virgilius remarks, 'He told me this above all lest I be ensnared by the urge to assemble money, for just as water extinguishes fire and darkness blots out light, so lust for money renders the wits of the wise man feeble and devoid of intelligence.' As for miseria, although Aeneas is once depicted smiling, he tells a story, indeed a tragedy, in tears' (A X 192), and on another occasion Virgilius confesses that he cannot 'speak of him without tears on account of his long absence' (A V 185—6).

Virgilius' modus operandi is thus more subtle and less explicit than that of an exegete or an etymologist. He plays on his readers' knowledge, on their shared study of the Scriptures and standard reference works. But he does not restrict himself to the Scriptures, nor indeed to proper names. Similar allusions to other kinds of reading matter are scattered through his writings. For instance, Virgilius joins a long series of imitators and parodists of Vergil's Eclogues in reworking the line Qui Bavium non odit amet tua carmina, Maevi (3,90) 'He who does not hate Bavius, may he love your songs, Maevius' to the more complimentary Qui favum mellis non amat, odit tua carmina, Maevi (B V 140) 'He who does not love honeycomb hates your songs, Maevius' and Maevius is extracted from his pastoral context to become one of Virgilius' authorities. Four lines are quoted from Maevius'


15

'most elegant poem on the eight parts of speech', a work which, needless to say, is known from this passage alone. But does the appearance of this line mean to say that Virgilius was well versed in the writings of his namesake? He leaves a telling clue. The verb with which Maevius is introduced, astipuletur, evokes the name of the trope which the grammarians exemplify with this line from the Eclogues: astismos.11 Virgilius' knowledge thus comes from a grammatical rather than a literary source. A similarly veiled allusion to a grammatical commonplace occurs in Virgilius' formidable example of hyperbaton (the inversion or splitting of words, phrases or sentences), at the end of the tenth Epitome. Indeed, this monstrous sentence is the tragic tale so tearfully told by Aeneas (A X 193-207): In it, he said (for we propose to recount how the Mithridatic war, which we know was a major event, was carried out), in it, I repeat, at that same time at which I had completed my twenty-fifth year (Aeneas told me that this was so) a certain Blastus Julius of the race of the Phrygians (he took the name of Blastus from the poets because he appeared to eat men through his excessive cruelty (which the Blasti are said to do)) — he, then, made for Rome from the north (for he came from that area) with his allies, the troops of the Germans, whose comradeship and friendship he had sought, in his company, and once the huge city had brought upon itself and its populace and people destruction (for he divided the community into seven parts all set to fight against one another) he launched against it an unbearable blow, so that practically the whole community gave itself up to slaughter. Julius Blastus attacks from the north, for he originated from that direction {a septentrione ex hac quippe parte oriundus Juit),11 and divides the city into seven sections against itself. Any reader trained in grammar would know the classic example of tmesis (a form of hyperbaton), the splitting of words for metrical purposes: septem- subiecta -trionis}^ The word thus split, septentrio(nis)> means 'north', the quarter of the Seven Oxen, better known to us as the Great Bear or the Big Dipper. To compound the violent atmosphere of the passage, the name Blastus meant habens lucrum 'possessing wealth',24 a pernicious state in Virgilius' eyes, as we shall see in chapter 3. The inmanitas 'cruelty' of which Aeneas

\6


accuses the Blasti is also a characteristic of the Germans, Blastus' associates: 'the Germanic peoples are so called because their rough bodies {inmania corpora) and savage nations {inmanes nationes) are hardened by the most violent cold'.25 Nor does Blastus' Phrygian origin offer any consolation to his victims: Phrygia meant scissio pectorum 'rending of chests'.26 Grammars and reference works were by no means the sole source of inspiration for Virgilius' word-play. Writings with no bearing whatsoever on grammar by the Church Fathers — the common heritage of people with a monastic education — provided an equally fertile quarry. Take the puzzling etymology of bestia, derived from bessu: bestia dicitur de bessu, hoc est more feritatis17 (A XI 69—70), 'bestia "beast" is so called from bessu, that is, from its habit of wildness'. Since bessu(s) is not to be found in any Latin dictionary, it has been suggested that it was formed from the Old Irish word bis, meaning 'habit', 28 and this provides a plausible explanation for its assimilation to the Latin fourth declension. On the other hand, in one of his letters Jerome speaks of the Bessorum feritas 'the wildness of the Bessi' (a barbarian tribe), and later in the same letter uses the next term Virgilius discusses, belua.^ Jerome was arguably Virgilius' favourite source, and many more allusions lie buried in Virgilius' luxuriant prose. But Jerome was by no means his sole reading-matter. His study of Augustine provides the key to a couple of enigmatic references to (as it would seem) the poet Horace. 1 Virgilius cites Horatius as the authority for the plural soles 'songs': 'some of the ancients called their actual songs soles, as Horace does at the outset of a certain work of his: "I commend my soles to all your church'" (A V 283-5). Any attempt to find this line in the writings of the classical poet is, needless to say, a wild-goose chase. The joke is characteristically complex: after a discussion of the noun sol in its usual sense of 'sun', Virgilius introduces this unprecedented usage. Since when does soles ever mean 'songs'? Would Horace or anyone else commend his songs to a church? If we apply Virgilius' own word-scrambling techniques, adding a syllable to read sodales 'companions' for soles, the line becomes sober enough: 'I recommend my


17

companions to all your church/ Carelessness might easily enough produce just such an error in a letter of introduction, and wilful misreading accounts for the rest. But why Horace? Needless to say, the classical poet wrote no such line. Augustine's Contra academicos provides the key. He describes there how one Flaccianus was often heard to say soles commemorare)0 Virgilius identifies Augustine's Flaccianus with the classical Q. Horatius Flaccus, and converts his favourite saying into an epistolary formula. 2 Flaccus' second appearance (A VI 21-3) leads us back to the same part of Contra academicos. Virgilius quotes a sentence from Flaccus' writings: ut vidimus ex Hebreis virum eligantem, admirati eum sumus atque conplexi 'when we saw an elegant man from among the Hebrews we marvelled at him and embraced him'. Augustine's Flaccianus elicits similar admiration and embraces: doctissimum et clarissimum uirum Flaccianum mirari solitum esse (I 6,18) and quia conplexa est eum (I 8,23). Forms of miror occur twice in this passage (I 7,21; I 8,23). From beginning to end the Epitomae and Epistolae are alive with these highly allusive plays on words, revealing a chain of associations which leads back to one late antique source or another. Virgilius' method differs greatly from that of most of his contemporaries. Not for him a direct quotation, with or without attribution; he prefers to work his allusions into the very fabric of his latinity, so that each sentence evokes reminiscences of knowledge shared among the members of the small community of scholars for whom he wrote. Is this verbal hide-and-seek simply another manifestation of Virgilius' joie de vivrei His remark on the significance of proper names is but one of several which hint at deeper levels of meaning in linguistic phenomena and in his own account of language, reminiscent of the biblical 'he who has ears to hear, let him hear'. Once again, are these tongue-in-cheek, poking fun at the pretentiousness of earlier writers who insisted on the existence of profound mysteries behind the literal text of the Bible, or have we at last succeeded in lifting a corner of Virgilius' cloak of parody?

18

The outer layers: parody and word-play SEEING WITH THE MIND'S EYE

From St Paul onwards one Christian writer after another insisted on the necessity of unveiling the oculi cordis 'eyes of the heart' or oculi mentis ceyes of the mind', to arrive at an understanding of spiritual reality, whether striven for directly or through study of the Bible.31 The oculi carnis, the physical eyes, are clouded by uncertainty and impurity, whereas the oculi cordis or mentis are capable of piercing through the opacity of physical phenomena to the truth beyond. Ambrose, for instance, urges his readers: Emunda oculos mentisy o homoy animaeque interiores optutus, 'correct

the eyes of your mind, o man, and the inner gaze of your soul',

and warns them: Noli ergo lunam oculo tui corporis aestimarey sed

mentis vivacitate, 'do not assess the moon with the eyes of your body, but rather with the alertness of your mind'.32 Although many patristic writers speak of two kinds of eyes, corporeal and incorporeal, there is only one Latin verb 'to see', videre)^ To fill this lacuna Virgilius modifies videre to create a new verb, vidare, explaining: 'vido refers to the eyes of the mind, video to the physical eyes' (A VIII 18—19). He uses the resulting distinction several times.34 Elsewhere too Virgilius sometimes feels the need of an analogous corporeal/incorporeal distinction in his own metalinguistic vocabulary. Whereas with vidare he carefully signalled the new verb, these other terms are introduced without explanation. It is up to the reader to exercise his oculi mentis if he is not to miss them. 1 The Late Latin grammarians divided up the semantic field covered by the English 'word' amongst several terms: vox, dictio, locutio, pars orationis, and, in a less technical sense, verbum. In practice, however, only pars orationis 'part of speech' was systematically used in a technical sense, the other terms being pressed into service on an occasional basis by individual grammarians. Virgilius distinguishes clearly and methodically between the word considered as a semantic entity — verbum — and the word considered as a physical or formal unit —fonum)*> One example of each will suffice. Virgilius, talking about the use of


19

the stress accent to differentiate homonyms, says: 'this distinction was invented particularly in order to differentiate similar-sounding fona, lest any possibility of confusion arise' (A IV 82—4), whereas at the opening of the work he says: 'there is a sort of sense of taste in the soul ... which discerns the force of words and sentences {verborum sententiarumqueY (A I 5—6). On more than thirty occasions Virgilius prefers fonum to verbum, and in practically every case he does so in order to distinguish between physical and non-physical aspects of the word. 36 2 His use of terms for 'sentence' is exactly parallel. The Late Latin grammarians rarely discussed the sentence as a semantic or syntactic unit; even Priscian's celebrated discussion of syntax, in Books XVII and XVIII of the Institutiones grammaticae, deals mostly with constructiones, or relations between the words within a sentence, rather than with larger units. The two terms available were oratio and sententia. Oratio is defined by Priscian thus: 'oratio is a well-formed sequence of words expressing a complete sense unit' 37 or thus by Scaurus: 'oratio is a sense-unit of meaningful words arranged according to reason'.38 Sententia was of concern not to grammarians but to rhetoricians. As Priscian said, 'the sententia is an utterance of general application urging a course of action or dissuading or showing how something is'.39 The sententia was thus the oratio considered from the point of view of its semantic content or pragmatic effect. Neither term was appropriate for denoting 'sentence' as a formal structure, sententia because of its overwhelmingly semantic connotations, oratio as much because of its polysemy — it meant 'speech', 'prayer', even 'word', as well as 'complete utterance' — as because of the looseness of the definitions current. The general lack of interest in formal syntax in late Antiquity rendered this a problem of little moment for most grammarians. Virgilius, on the other hand, addresses himself sufficiently often to questions of word order and to the substitution of the parts of speech for one another within the sentence to need an unambiguous term for 'sentence' as a formal unit. Oratio was out of the question, for he equates it with latinitas (A I 50—1), and tends to use it loosely in the sense of'utterance'. Sententia he uses fairly heavily, but almost exclusively in

20

The outer layers: parody and word-play contexts where the meaningful aspect of the utterance is uppermost. For instance, in the example just considered, the sense of taste inherent in the soul, which is capable of savouring the sweetness of the arts, 'discerns the force of words and sentences'; clearly, verhorum sententiarumque vim refers to the semantic content, not to the phonetic, morphological or syntactic structure. 40 Virgilius himself defines sententia as 'what is conceived by the understanding' {quae sensu concipitur, A XV 14—15). For the sentence as a formal unit, whether analysed into its constituent parts or used in combination with other sentences to form a text, another term was necessary. Virgilius used two, testimonium and quassum. Testimonium, often employed in patristic exegesis to mean 'example',41 could by an easy semantic shift come to mean 'sentence'. Virgilius uses it in this sense once: 'but in case anyone should feel cheated of this little gift too, I shall give you one example [testimonium] of this phenomenon' (A X 183—5). I n fact t n e < o n e example' consists of a single sentence which runs on for fifteen lines — Aeneas' tearful story about Blastus (p. 15 above). Quassum is used twice in the same sense.42 More often, however, both quassum and testimonium mean 'sentence': Blessed Aeneas thought that the noun should come before the verb in one situation alone, when a non-derivative noun precedes the verb and another follows, bringing a brief quassum to a close. Examples of this are readily available, for he said, Sol in caelo splendet radius and vir in eo viget cor, and elsewhere deus fortis est potentia eius. (A VI 150-6)43 The third [merit of the participle] is that if it is placed at the end of a testimonium it functions in lieu of a verb. (B V 13—15)44

In both 'word' and 'sentence' Virgilius perceived corporeal and incorporeal aspects parallel to those at work in viderel vidare, and his procedure was the same. The existing term retained its usual meaning, corporeal in the case of videre and incorporeal in verbum and sententia, whilst the new sense was denoted by a fresh term, either a lexical innovation {vidare, fonum, quassum) or a semantic shift (testimonium).^


21

Virgilius's modifications to Latin vocabulary are thus not always as unmotivated as they might appear.46 Videre and vidare make explicit a semantic distinction previously lacking in the Latin lexicon, although implicit in the patristic oculi carnis and oculi mentis. By means of the distinction between verbum and fonum Virgilius is able to give consistent metalinguistic recognition to a distinction made only sporadically by the Late Latin grammarians. The opposition between sententia and quassumi testimonium appears to be entirely his own idea. All three pairs of correlates have the same underlying motivation: to distinguish between corporeal and incorporeal aspects of the same phenomenon. No charlatan, parodist or madman would be likely to invent so well justified a series of distinctions, nor to apply them consistently in so lengthy a text. To find the verbum-fonum and sententia-quassumltestimonium distinctions buried, as it were, without any signal to draw our attention to them, warns us that Virgilius meant his admonitions to read at a deeper level — to 'read between the lines', to use our more superficial modern metaphor — seriously. The names borne by Virgilius' characters, and even his unconventional grammatical terminology, show that the flamboyant surface conceals a meaningful interior. If the very words he uses — the cloak in which his message is wrapped — reveal these manifold levels of serious (and not-so-serious) signification, what of the message itself?

CHAPTER 2


Few authors are more single-minded than an early medieval grammarian. From the opening sentences on the parts of speech, or speech-sounds or grammar itself, to the final remarks on the interjection, their attention bears upon the traditional stuff of grammar and on that alone. Commentators follow the words of their text with as much solicitude as their colleagues in biblical exegesis; seeming digressions are keyed closely to the text, as when examples in a list of neuter nouns in -er or of nouns which are always plural in form prompt a digression on the origin of truffles or on the gods after whom the days of the weeks are named.1 Not so Virgilius. Apart from their extraordinary content, the nongrammatical portions of his work are integrated into the text on the loosest of pretexts. Indeed, the reader cannot help wondering whether the usual relations are reversed: whether grammar is the pretext and the digressions the real substance. Right at the beginning Virgilius breaks with tradition, opening the Epitomae with a chapter on wisdom. Throughout the work wisdom remains one of the most prominent themes, whether in repeated descriptions of its nature and subdivisions, or in exhortations to its ceaseless pursuit, or in the curious riddling puzzles of the final pages. Virgilius' preoccupation with wisdom transcends any routine genuflexion. Nor can it reasonably be considered part of the apparatus of grammatical parody, being absent from grammars at large and hence hardly susceptible to comic exaggeration. Wisdom mattered to Virgilius, just as it mattered to the many ancient and medieval authors and compilers of the vast and as yet hardly studied corpus of post-biblical wisdom literature. Alien to our flippant age, this preoccupation with wisdom baffles and 22


23

embarrasses us. We see pretentiousness and platitude where Virgilius' contemporaries found profundity and humility. But to ignore it, to fail to come to terms with its concerns and conventions, is to cut ourselves off from a zone of their mental universe to which they ascribed far greater significance than they did to mere grammar. Wisdom was the ultimate goal to which grammar and all other studies led. Only by considering Virgilius' works against the backdrop of the wisdom tradition, imperfect as our knowledge of it is at present, can we hope to understand why wisdom figures so prominently in them.

WISDOM LITERATURE

Wisdom literature is a modern label attached initially to the Wisdom books of the Old Testament — Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, and the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus — and subsequently to other ancient and medieval texts concerned with purveying moral precepts and reflections upon human existence. It is not a genre but a content-based category, a class to which texts in a large number of genres may be assigned. The antecedents of the biblical Wisdom books are found in a heterogeneous group of texts from the ancient Near East, from Mesopotamia and Egypt.2 From the second half of the third millennium BC onwards proverbs, poems, myths, disputations and precepts offered a series of rules of conduct and often ironical reflections on life. Similar advice is liberally proffered by the Wisdom books of the Old Testament.3 But to the Old Testament writers wisdom meant far more than a practical ethics. Wisdom is more desirable than gold or silver (Prov. 3:14; 8:11; 16:16; Sap. 7:8), to be sought after as if it were riches (Prov. 2:4—5). I* ls personified, a figure who transcends earthly existence, present at Creation (Prov. 3:19-20; 8:22ff; cf. Sap. 9:2; Sir. 24:5ff.) and even before (Prov. 8:22ff; Sir. 1:1 and 4). In the New Testament the Wisdom of God is identified with Christ (compare Matth. 23:34 with Luc. 11:49) ,4 t n e sublime all-creating Word of God (Joh. 1:1); and yet the more down-to-earth nature of much of the Gospel teachings shows that the older tradition of

24


instruction was still active. The two traditions, popular and scholarly, moralising and transcendental, which coexist in the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, diverged in the early centuries of our era. Essentially popular in nature, collections of moral precepts, elevating sayings and pithily encapsulated paradoxes multiplied and enjoyed vast dissemination from late Antiquity onwards. The Apophthegmata patrum, the sayings of the Seven Sages, the Sentences of Sextus, and the Disticha Catonis provided sententious moral instruction avidly studied into the late Middle Ages. In the vernacular, Old Icelandic scaldic verse and the gnomic literature of Old English, Old Welsh and Old Irish made this doctrine accessible to a wider audience — or at any rate to those who had the patience to penetrate its tortuous brevity. Instruction, in the eyes of these authors, consisted not merely of stating the precepts, but of developing inner capacities in the listener. The challenge of penetrating a dense thicket of obscurity served both to hone the wits and to enhance the value of the content.5 Riddles were an enormously popular medium (sometimes interspersed with more or less straightforward questions relating to biblical doctrine and other miscellaneous material): in Latin, the Disputatio (or Altercatio) Adriani et Epicteti, the Ioca monachorum, the Collectanea of pseudo-Bede, Alcuin's Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi iuuenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico, and countless vernacular versions6 like the Old English Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus. Popular riddles and proverbs found a literary counterpart in the polished verse enigmataJ of English writers active in the early decades of the eighth century: Aldhelm, Tatwine, Eusebius. Unlike present-day riddles, which in their reliance on puns and ridiculous situations often strive for comic effect, early medieval riddles and enigmata pointed to the paradox and mystery inherent in humble things, encouraging the hearer to become 'diligent in the pursuit of wisdom'.8 Isidore of Seville regarded the riddle as 'an obscure analogy through which one is warned to sharpen one's wits and turn to those inner things which are to be grasped'.9 Aldhelm's (like many Byzantine riddles) focus on the natural world, revealing the play of the four elements and the mysteries of birth. Salt, for example, says this:


25

Once I was water, teeming with scaly fish; But by a new decree Fate has changed My nature: having suffered fiery pangs, I now gleam white, like ashes or bright snow.10 Despite their great diversity, the various forms of popular wisdom literature all reveal different facets of divine or earthly wisdom. Proverbs and moral precepts furnish material for meditation on the imperfection of man's moral development, along with a stimulus to self-improvement. Juxtaposed with reflections on the grandeur and infinite wisdom inherent in the divinely ordered natural world, they highlight the gulf between the divine wisdom which pervades Creation and man's patent inability to bring wisdom into his own inner life, let alone to the works of his hands.11 Riddles and enigmata heighten awareness of the wisdom of Creation: mundane objects or beings are invested with mystery, as the listener glimpses the elements at war within a humble cooking-pot or learns to marvel at the water-spider.12 The natural world plays a vital role in bringing the common man to recognise God's wisdom. Instead of looking outwards into Nature for visible manifestations of divine wisdom, the transcendental tradition sought to understand wisdom directly as a divine force incarnating upon Earth in the person of Christ, the Word of God. The nature of the divine Logos has remained a profound mystery at the heart of Christianity pondered, through the opening verses of St John's Gospel, by generations of scholars and devout Christians. Its theological aspects are beyond the scope of this work, but one theme will reappear: the relationship of the divine Word to the earthly word of human speech. Visible here and there in the writings of the Church Fathers, in Augustine's Tractatus in Iohannem and his sermons (e.g. 197 (288)), and in Hilary's De Trinitate (II 15), the subtle and vital stream of Logosmystik reappears with particular force in late medieval and early modern writers: Meister Eckhart, Nicholas Cusanus, Jakob Boehme, Hamann, Oetinger, Bengel.13 The wisdom tradition of the earlier Middle Ages thus has two aspects: a popular tradition which relied on an unselfconscious,

26


though by no means unsophisticated, use of language to awaken its hearers to awareness of the wisdom permeating Creation; and a scholarly, sometimes esoteric tradition which in attempting to comprehend the mystery of the Logos came to reflect upon the nature of that very human mystery, language.

VIRGILIUS MARO GRAMMATICUS AND THE WISDOM TRADITION

Genre and form Medieval wisdom literature is remarkably diverse in both form and — within certain broad limits — in content. In principle the characteristic substance of wisdom teaching could be conveyed in any genre at all; in practice, however, only a relatively limited selection of genres was in use in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In seeking to assign any text to the class, the danger of circularity, given the absence of a firm definition of wisdom literature, is ever-present. With Virgilius, where all ostensibly simple matters vanish into a billowing cloud of uncertainty, the problem is ten times worse. Here, if anywhere, is a case where the either/or logic of traditional Western modes of thought must give way to a kind of logic capable of accommodating simultaneity, indeterminacy, non-exclusivity — anathema to the latter-day Aristotelian; we must don habits of thought which, whilst they concede none of the rigorousness required in scholarly argumentation, have more in common with the mental processes of the people whose works we are studying. Here too a conceptual crux awaits us: how far can we legitimately project our genre categories onto the work of a medieval writer who may have been quite unaware of them? The danger of anachronism, always latent in such 'projective' historiography,14 is less acute here than in the case of biblical scholarship, for Virgilius and his contemporaries were themselves interested in questions of genre and had a well-developed vocabulary for classifying different types of text. Of those that will be discussed below, only autobiography lacks explicit early medieval recognition. With this in mind, let us consider the question of form: to what extent does Virgilius


27

make use of the forms characteristic of biblical and early medieval wisdom literature? And how far are his habits shared by other early medieval grammarians? We must distinguish first between the genre membership of Virgilius' works taken as a whole, and that of smaller elements within them.15 Superficially, Virgilius' writings conform to the model of the late antique grammar laid down in definitive form in Donatus' Ars maior. They consist of a pair of grammars divided into fifteen (of which twelve survive)16 and eight (plus a preface) chapters respectively, and set out largely in scholarly prose. The structural features of the Late Latin grammar are present down to the last detail: definitions, lists of properties, sub-properties and exceptions, discussion of anomalous forms, examples from classical (and other) authorities. But embedded in this familiar and well-defined structure are all sorts of extraneous elements, egregious infringements of the conventions of ancient grammar. Virgilius' outrageously named characters engage in verbal battle; they prophesy; they write hymns; they tell riddles; they reminisce. Disputations, puzzles, autobiography and allegory have no place in a grammar, ancient or modern, but they find a natural home in wisdom literature. Virgilius' aberrations from the norms of ancient grammar manifest some notable points of contact with analogues in ancient and medieval wisdom literature. Autobiography

Virgilius' appeals to his own experience far exceed the conventional authorial nos or the infrequent autobiographical asides in the Late Latin grammarians. We are introduced to Virgilius' teachers, to a number of his fellow-pupils, to several acquaintances, and to his uncle and grandfather.17 We hear of an episode of illness in his life, and of his grief over the protracted absence of his beloved teacher Aeneas;18 but most of all we hear of the instruction he received from Aeneas. Sometimes Virgilius simply reports Aeneas' teaching. Often he depicts himself turning to Aeneas for advice on a particular point of grammar, or recalls some characteristic admonition:

28

77?^ wisdom tradition Now that I am about to write on voice, I should be mindful of my Aeneas' precept. He said to me: 'When you are preparing to write, first clear up whatever may raise a question, so that the beauty of the work as a whole is not impaired by the murkiness of a single unsettled question.' (A VIII 124-8)

But Aeneas is by no means the only sage with whom Virgilius was in contact. He tells of advice from Lupus Christianus and Reginus Cornilius, 19 and of a visit from Mitterius, a Spaniard, whom he revered as one would a prophet: As an old man, indeed a very old man, he came to my house by night. When I had made him most heartily welcome, he said to me: 'O my son, if you have anything on your mind, ask me, and I will refresh you in return for your excellent hospitality.' And I said to him: 'I do have something to ask you. There are some very similar things which I cannot tell apart, which some people treat as nouns, others as pronouns, others as adverbs, and so on. Set this question and solve it yourself, since I cannot even manage to frame it properly' Then he replied as if filled with the spirit: 'I know how to foretell the question of your heart...' (B I 153-62) Several times Virgilius refers a point disputed by other authorities to Aeneas for arbitration, as we shall see below. Autobiographical asides, ranging from tags like miror etiam cur (A IV 215; cf. B I 324), memini me (A VII 1; B praef. 60; B III 336, etc.), and the simple mihi videtur (e.g. A II 22; B V 200) to incidents described in detail like the episode in which he was given the name Maro (A XV 120-5 ( s e e P- 75 below)), the battles between rival schools of grammarians, and the many references to his relationship with Aeneas, play an important part in Virgilius' presentation of grammatical doctrine. In the grammars of his contemporaries and predecessors the persona of the author remains hidden, peeking out shyly through the set phrases of the preface. Virgilius' highly selfconscious voice has no parallel in earlier grammatical literature, apart from Phocas' melancholy musings on the state of contemporary education. 20 It finds a later medieval analogue in the idiosyncratic Old Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise, dating from the middle of the twelfth century.21 In spirit it is closer to the self-assertiveness of the speaker in Ecclesiastes or


29

to the rueful asides in HdvamdL Virgilius' frequent (though by no means invariable) practice of putting his moral precepts into the mouth of his teacher or another of his authorities has a parallel in the Old English Precepts, and a still closer one in the Old English Vainglory, where the poet exhorts us to listen to what he was told by a wise man long ago, a device which lends the instruction greater moral authority. But the amount of detail Virgilius offers far outstrips the formal, quasi-universal character of the father—son, teacher—pupil meetings in these vernacular works, for which 'autobiography' would be an inappropriate designation.22 Disputation (Streitgesprdch)

In the early chapters of the Epistolae disputations play a prominent part. Introduced by Virgilius with rhetorical despair — 'What am I to do, given that the two contestants are still alive, and I have a friend on each side, and am obliged to arbitrate their dispute?' (B I 11—14) — the first of them is hinted at rather than reported in detail: 'There are two schools in Europe as a whole in which these controversies are for the most part said to be pursued, the school of Terrentius and that of Galbungus. Terrentius maintains that there are only three syllables in which the nominative case may terminate ... whereas Galbungus claims that the nominative can end in six syllables...' (B I 14—23). Virgilius leaves the rival schools to their dispute and resolves the issue himself. Two later disputes are reported at greater length — Terrentius and Galbungus clashing over forms of ego (B II 14—93), Regulus Cappadocus and Sedulus Romanus on the inchoative (B III 233—98) — and two others outlined briefly — Cornilius and Galbungus against Terrentius on the properties of the verb (B III 91—101), and Terrentius and Galbungus on the impersonal (B III 513—38). Only in the two longer accounts are the arguments reported in direct speech; elsewhere indirect speech is used. Controversy is often latent in ancient and medieval commentaries, and some grammarians do not hesitate to impugn the reliability of their colleagues. Pompeius, for example, warns his pupils to pay no attention to Sacerdos' misleading teaching: 'Don't follow

30


what Sacerdos said. He says that for the most part the genitive plural ends in -rum as often as in -urn. This is quite wrong.'23 By comparison with the medieval disputation this is tame stuff. In these later texts the argument is given a context and undergoes inner development leading up to a climax. But the boundary between a colourless genre category and a literary device which takes on life in its own right is by no means clearly delineated. The tales which provide at once the pretext and the frame for the Arabian Nights, the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales — do they sustain the reader's interest as successfully as the individual stories do? The riddling disputations of Adrian and Epictetus or Solomon and Saturn, or the riddles of Gestumblindi in Heidreks saga, are similarly marginal cases: a verbal battle, often involving high stakes, is the occasion for a series of riddles triumphantly solved by the beleaguered protagonist. In the Epistolae Virgilius presents full-scale disputations, a far cry from Servius' watered-down tendentiousness or Pompeius' pugnacious monologue, and still more remote from the pedagogical fiction of question-and-answer form as practised by Donatus or Audax. The sometimes ironical, sometimes acrimonious nature of the exchanges evokes the atmosphere of Job as readily as that of the later medieval disputation. But why do they occur only in the Epistolae} As we shall see, this aberration of genre, one of several respects in which the Epistolae differ from the Epitomae, is not without significance.

Allegory and prophecy Allegory was in Virgilius' day almost exclusively the tool of biblical exegetes; its somewhat questionable potential for illuminating, or at least enlivening, grammatical pedagogy,24 already attempted by Martianus Capella in his De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, was seized upon not so much by medieval grammarians as by their desperate modern counterparts, like Georg Schottel, the seventeenth-century German grammarian, or Paul Cacchella in his playful Vile de la grammaire (1894), an aid to adults struggling to master the principles of grammar. Virgilius' two allegories, remarkable less for their aptness or application to grammar than


31

simply for their presence, occur at the beginning and end of the Epistolae. In the preface Virgilius presents an extended prophecy which contains an allegory: We read in the tales of the Greeks that there was a prophet, one Tarquinius, who lived among the Persians. Whatever he foretold he recorded on tablets and notebooks until it came true, upon which he published his writings. Among other things he predicted a wondrous secret which, since he had not yet seen it fulfilled, he did not want to reveal to anyone until his death. Almost on the very day on which he ended his life he called one of his pupils, gave him a tablet, and said, Alas, alas, my son, that these writings have not yet been fulfilled! Happy and blessed will he be who lives in the age in which the things contained in this vision come true.' This vision was as follows. 'I saw,' said the prophet, 'a mighty river flowing down from the heights of heaven, and this river was of wine. I saw another little rivulet trickling out of the stones on the earth, and this rivulet was of water. When the orb of the sun rose, the stream was caught up to the river flowing down from above, and the two were united into one and turned into wine. And there was one river filling heaven and earth in which countless lambs and calves disported themselves, and, joyfully intoxicated from draughts of it, sang an epithalamion. Hearing their cry, heaven and earth rejoiced together.' (B praef. 2—23) Virgilius then interprets the allegory and urges the dedicatee of the Epistolae^ Julius Germanus, to take appropriate action. The act of prophecy depicted here represents another departure from the genre norms of the medieval grammar. Elsewhere too Virgilius mentions 'reading in a little book by the Carthaginian sibyl' (A VI 148—9).25 The Epistolae end symmetrically with a ludus filosophorum which comes close to allegory: He [Aeneas] said to me, 'Look, my son, let this bare stone which you can see has been worn away by water be a lesson to you. The wise man is worn away by water in the same way, that is, he lives in the world for the pursuit of wisdom without a penny' (B VIII 19-22) This could more aptly be compared with riddles of the vidi-typc like those in the Collectanea attributed to Bede. One could well

32


imagine this one beginning vidi lapidem nudum aquis conrossum, 'I saw a bare stone worn away by water...'

Precepts, maxims and gnomic sayings Rare in grammatical literature, moral and ethical pronouncements figure with surprising frequency in both the Epitomae and the Epistolae. Invariably delivered by one or another of Virgilius' various authorities, they create an atmosphere of moral sententiousness whilst ostensibly exemplifying some grammatical technicality. Thus Terrentius' alliterating pronouncements are introduced as examples of adverbs identical in form to neuter nouns (adjectives): necesse est Gallosfierifallaces cit is inevitable that Gauls should be unreliable' and facile est virum vinci viro virtutis subito superveniente 'it is easy for a man to be overcome by a man of strength coming upon him by surprise' (A IX 33—4). Cicero's admonition accussate quod rectum est 'do what is right' (A V 224—5) is occasioned by a discussion of the accusative case. Estrius, one of the grammarians who figure in the Catalogus grammaticorum (A XV 96-108), is particularly given to sententious utterances, including two on avarice (cf. p. 43 below) and one of general application: omnis homo prout valet vitat pericula, sed et suae vitae quaerit commoda 'everyone avoids dangers as best he can, but also seeks comforts for his life' (A IX 160—1). Glengus propounds the opposite sentiment, or so it seems: vir in acie fortiter pro domoy liberis et capite pugnat 'a man in the battle-line fights bravely for his home, his children and his head' (A IX 20—1). Galbungus, too, seeks to elevate his hearers: esto (= recte) vivunty quia mundi flaccida luxoriamina contempnunt 'they live rightly because they despise the flaccid luxuries of the world' (B I 203-4). The only true proverb is the sonorous non legit qui non legit Ciceronem 'he who has not read Cicero has not read anything' (B I 215), along with a reference to the antiquum proverbium about swine treading gems underfoot (A X 10; cf. Matth. 7:6). Such utterances are characteristic not only of Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, but of a vast range of secular texts in Latin and the medieval vernaculars, from the Disticha Catonis to the Welsh gnomic verses, the Irish tecosca,


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and the Old English Precepts and Maxims. One gnomic verse in Virgilius' writings bears on the natural world rather than the doings of men: Virgilius Assianus' 'scrambled' puzzle, resolved into glebae gignunty fruges ferunt 'the soil gives birth and bears fruit' (A X 35); but, as we shall see later (pp. 38f), the mixture of moral reflection and observation of the natural world which is characteristic of much didactic wisdom literature is equally prominent, though in a different form, in Virgilius too.

Riddles Biblical riddles are notoriously scarce: only Samsons famous example in Judges 14:14 belongs unambiguously to the type. They are scarcely more common in grammars. Exemplified among the varieties of allegoria^ they were utterly foreign to the grammarians' own stylistic repertoire. They found their natural home in popular wisdom literature: Adrian and Epictetus, Solomon and Saturn, the Ioca monachorum, the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book, and the riddles of Gestumblindi in the Edda are among the best-known collections. The Epitomae and Epistolae contain three references to riddling, each with clear links with the early medieval tradition of popular wisdom literature. One is an oblique allusion occurring toward the end of the Epistolae: loquitur ecce Andrianus quidaniy vir in solvendis problismatibus admodum eruditus 'look, a certain Andrianus, a man rather good at solving riddles, is speaking' (B VII 21—3). In the various versions of Adrian and Epictetus it is Adrian who puts the riddles and Epictetus who solves them; Virgilius reverses their roles in his characteristic looking-glass manner. On another occasion Virgilius reports two riddles from the innumerable writings of the venerable Donatus of Troy, who lived (it is rumoured) for a thousand years: 'Who, my son, is that woman who offers her breasts to countless offspring, and no matter how much they are sucked, they flow just as richly?' i.e. Wisdom; and 'What is the difference between word (verbum), speech (sermo), sentence (sententia), utterance (loqueld) and discourse {oratio)V (A XV 7-11)

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The first is a true riddle from the popular wisdom tradition, a curious picture which reappears in virtually the same words, with a more detailed gloss, in the Collectaneum of Sedulius Scottus (II i) and, less elegantly phrased, in the Collectanea attributed to Bede (§i; 539D).27 The second question, on the other hand, is a riddle only in a parodistic sense; it is a differentia, a type of definition which distinguishes among synonyms and near-synonyms. 28 Widespread in late Antiquity, it is a genre of which Virgilius made heavy use in his writings. Juxtaposing a lexicological commonplace with a riddle from the popular wisdom tradition gives the reader a jolt. Why juxtapose wisdom and language? What is Virgilius' real message? The Epistolae — and the work as a whole — finish with a collection of puzzles, word games and riddles tending towards allegory (p. 31 above), Virgilius' ludi filosophorum. After introducing Virgilius to the image of the worn-down sage, Aeneas looks toward the rising sun and says, 'Look, a horse jumps out of its stall and runs right around the field, and when on the point of returning to its stable, leaves room for a mule to jump with her foals', which Virgilius interprets as indicating by the field the sky, by the mule the moon, by the foals the stars, and by the stall the sea (B VIII 23-6). Galbungus' puzzle is this: '"What, tell me, flies through all regions in the space of an hour?" "The mind of a man flies through the whole world in a single moment."' Virgilius' own heavily alliterating conundrums, to which no solution is given, call to mind Aeneas' words at the beginning of the tenth Epitome: My son, words are scrambled for three reasons: first, so that we may test the ingenuity of our students in searching out and identifying obscure points; secondly, for the ornamentation and reinforcement of speech; thirdly, lest mystical matters which should only be revealed to the initiated should be discovered easily by base and stupid people. (A X 3—9) Some riddles, such as Aeneas' and Galbungus', awaken us to the mysteries hidden in the natural world by clothing the familiar in unfamiliar garb; an unsolved riddle sharpens the listener's wits in quite a different way. Both are essential to the wisdom tradition, as Aeneas' words make clear.


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Riddles, precepts, allegory, disputation, autobiography — all these genres, the normal garb of wisdom teaching, bulk large in the Epitomae and Epistolae. T h e unexpected setting heightens their impact. A dream prophecy in a grammar works with an altogether different force from its counterpart in a folk tale or a saint's life. In its habitual settings it may lead the reader to wonder at its timeliness, to admire its aptness; it advances the story or underscores a particularly significant m o m e n t . In a grammar, a prophecy, riddle or the like is an aberration, an infringement of the conventions of the genre. T h e presence of such an element gives the reader pause: w h y this deviation from the norm? T h e anomalous elements in Virgilius' writings do not help to advance the didactic exposition; only the disputations have any real bearing u p o n the grammatical content. In this context, the incongruousness of riddles, prophecy, autobiographical reflection and so on shocks the reader (and, insofar as such incongruousness is perceived as funny, they provide a comic stimulus), and alerts him to the undercurrents swelling u p beneath the surface of the grammar. Significant juxtapositions — the sapientia riddle and the metalinguistic differentia — guide h i m in the direction Virgilius intended. T h e external trappings of the wisdom tradition are a veil thrown over the wisdom content beneath, simultaneously hinting at its presence and concealing its features.

T H E W I S D O M C O N T E N T OF T H E 'EPITOMAE' AND 'EPISTOLAE'

Medieval wisdom literature reflects the long history of the wisdom tradition in its multiplicity of themes — moral developm e n t , nature wisdom, biblical wisdom, the divine Word, and W i s d o m herself. Works like Sedulius Scottus' Collectaneum or the Collectanea attributed to Bede, in which virtually all these themes are introduced, are rare; more c o m m o n l y a given text will take u p only one or two. In ancient Israel nature wisdom was conjoined with moral wisdom ('culture wisdom') as a means of demonstrating just how far m a n still fell short of the perfection

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77?^ wisdom tradition

which pervaded the natural world.29 Reflections on the habits of living creatures and the perfection of God's Creation fill Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, interspersed with precepts and exhortations relating to every aspect of moral conduct. Divine Wisdom pervades nature, present at Creation, there before the world came into being.30 Creation itself was discussed in scholarly exegesis and depicted in poems based on the biblical account like the Old English and Old Saxon Genesis, as well as in apocryphal literature, and in pagan vernacular myths. Some Germanic and Celtic collections of moral advice — Old English Maxims II, Old Welsh gnomic verse and Eiry Mynydd — display the same mixture of nature wisdom and moral wisdom: the chaotic, unbridled character of man's emotions and actions is juxtaposed with the well-ordered world of nature, the inevitability of the falling of snow or the yellowness of gorse.31 Isidore's Sententiae II and Alcuin's De virtutibus et vitiis make explicit the importance of the moral life for the attainment of wisdom. Both works open with a brief paean to Sapientia which is followed by an account of the virtues and vices, helps and hindrances in the quest for wisdom. Moral development is a prerequisite for the acquisition of wisdom. But in spirit this is still Old Testament wisdom. Whilst retaining or even heightening the emphasis on the need for a moral lifestyle, the New Testament transforms the nature of wisdom: the creative Wisdom of the Old Testament is revealed in the New as the creative Word, the divine Logos. The opening verses of the Gospel of St John, which express the all-pervading, all-creating power of the Word, were associated both with the Creation story in the first chapters of Genesis, and with the creation theology of the Wisdom books. But the popular medieval wisdom tradition remained preoccupied with Old Testament themes. Only rarely do the brain-teasing questions of the Ioca monachorum and similar works delve into the New Testament, attempting to master the word of God on the most literal level: Who was the first priest? Melchisidec. And the first deacon? Stephen.


37

Just as the anomalous structural elements in Virgilius' writings can be traced in the medieval wisdom tradition, so in the same manner much of the content foreign to his ostensibly grammatical subjectmatter finds its natural home in that tradition. Wisdom is the subject of the first chapter, and throughout the Epitomae Virgilius reverts to it repeatedly. The opening theme of the Epitomae, the complementary nature of earthly and heavenly wisdom, is recast in the preface to the Epistolae as a prophecy (see p. 31 above), indicating the redemption of earthly by heavenly wisdom and the ultimate union of the two. Both passages have a good deal in common with discussions of wisdom in the scholarly exegetical tradition such as Augustine's in De ordine and De doctrina christiana. The riddle on sapientia, on the other hand (A XV 7-9, cf. p. 33 above), comes straight from the popular tradition, and the Indus on the wise man at the close of the work (B VIII 19-22) is similar in style (see p. 31 above). As in this last case, many of Virgilius' allusions to wisdom bear on the conditions necessary for its attainment, like the moral wisdom in parts of Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, and in Isidore's and Alcuin's works on the virtues and vices. (He deals too with another aspect of the same problem, the conditions in which the dogged pursuit of wisdom is inappropriate — advice which could be taken to heart by many a workaholic scholar (A XI 5—13).) Instead of giving equal attention to all aspects of moral conduct, Virgilius is preoccupied with avarice and its pernicious effect on the would-be sage. His very first sentence stresses the incommensurability of wisdom and earthly riches: 'The perusal of our writings is profitable the world over, for it is not in financial transactions but in the pursuit of wisdom that we use our reason' (A I 1—3), and he reports that 'our instructors have pronounced that no one who is shackled by worldly delights and greed for money can penetrate to true knowledge of wisdom' (A IV 139—41). He shares his conviction that of all the vices avarice is the most damaging to the pursuit of wisdom with the compilers of a small group of texts, offshoots of the wisdom tradition from a later epoch: the Collectanea attributed to Bede, the Florilegium Frisingense, and the Collectaneum of Sedulius Scottus (see p. 4if. below). Vices such as anger, gluttony, sloth and sexual licentiousness find scarcely a mention in Virgilius'

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writings. Why avarice should weigh so heavily upon his mind will be considered in the next chapter. But even avarice takes second place to natural wisdom. The Epitomae and Epistolae are peppered with digressions and allusions which take up one aspect or another of Creation and cosmology. In the fourth Epitome^ an extended excursus on the Seven Liberal Arts leads into an account of the constitution of man (A IV 255-96). Virgilius first outlines a hierarchical quadripartite schema with Neoplatonic overtones: body (made up of the four qualities, wet and dry, cold and hot), anima (vegetative soul), mens (lower mental faculties, including moral sense and memory) and ratio (the understanding capable of surveying heavenly matters). A second version, ascribed to 'our instructors, particularly Sulpita and Istrius', relates different parts of man, the microcosm, to elements in the external world, the macrocosm. This latter passage is analogous to similar descriptions found throughout the apocryphal, patristic and medieval wisdom traditions, of which the closest is that in the Liber de numeris}z Nor is Virgilius unique in his own world in this interest, or so he would have us believe. No fewer than eleven of the characters who inhabit his writings are concerned with natural phenomena or Creation. Some single out particular aspects of nature for study, like Gergesus, whose twentyseven volumes of commentaries are said to have dealt with the sun, moon, stars and particularly the rainbow (A IV 65), Sagillius Germanus, whose little book is concerned with the sea and the moon (A IV 99), Primogenus of Cappadocia, 'a gentle man well versed in natural matters and expert at the computus of the moon and the months' (A XV 79—81), and Quintilianus, also a computist (B II 175). Others strove to comprehend Creation itself. Galbarius, for instance, is credited with an immense volume of commentaries on the created world, from which Virgilius quotes this sentence: In the beginning the visible world was created by an invisible power and adorned with the sun, moon and all the stars resplendent in a variegated scene; he conferred upon the mortals about to be born in it the opening of their manifold senses, and at the end of all things it will be dissolved or reshaped. (B V 93-101)


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Balapsidus of Nicomedia at Virgilius' suggestion translated the books of 'our law' into Latin. Their opening, like that of Galbarius' massive oeuvre, is a paraphrase of Genesis 1:1—2 with a touch of Vergil: 'In the beginning the spirit brooded within itself heaven and earth, the sea and all the stars' (A XV 115—6). Virgilius himself claims to have written a commentary on the creation of the world in refutation of the pagans, which begins: 'There is no one apart from God alone, who creates all things' (B VII 80-1). Likewise, Glengus' exposition on the gods opens with an allusion to the origins of the universe: 'Before the sun existed there were gods' (B VII 27), and Plastus' 'most elegant song' on the four elements also invokes Creation: 'Soluble clay, flowable water, burnable fire, movable air: the visible world was drawn from these beginnings, awesome grief weighing heavy upon it' (B III 638—41). Virgilius Assianus, we are told, wrote four books (at least) on the genesis of man (B II 47—8), whilst Originis Africanus, in his work on the condition of man, is quoted as saying: 'If the condition of man remains the way it began [or, with what he has undertaken], it will contain no element of instability but will be considered unchanging and eternal' (B III 134-6). A little speech by Aeneas comes close to the style of the Old Testament wisdom writers: 'My son, know that the nature of a thing is that with which it is born and without which it cannot exist or find its livelihood — man without activity, bird without flight, fish without swimming' (A XI 169—72).33 Virgilius' companions — real or imagined34 — are remarkably preoccupied with Creation and the natural world. More of their writings are devoted to this topic than to any other, including grammar.35 Creation obviously holds special significance for Virgilius — but what? This theme links him once more with the Old Testament wisdom tradition. In principio, 'in the beginning' — this is the opening not only of the Creation narrative in Genesis but of St John's Gospel as well: In principio erat verbum. As Virgilius points out, 'in the eloquence and composition of the Hebrews the verb [or Word] holds the principal place', primatum aestimatur verbum (A V 3—5).36 Overt traces of Logosmystik are infrequent, for Virgilius' message is epistemological rather than theological. Yet, although the Verbum figures only here, its implicit presence is pervasive.

40


With what else does grammar deal if not with verbal Our typographical distinction was unknown in seventh- and eighthcentury manuscripts, allowing free play to an author keen to take advantage of the associative resources of the Latin vocabulary. As we saw in chapter i, Virgilius takes pains to alert his readers to higher levels of meaning hidden in words, to the true significance of names and to the existence of both earthly and heavenly strata of interpretation. Virgilius' plea for the equal recognition of the artesfilosophiaeas possible routes to higher knowledge (see chapter 4) is both prepared and supported by his repeated use of themes and forms characteristic of biblical and medieval wisdom literature. Sapientia is the ultimate end, the goal of all human striving; and Virgilius reminds us of the various paths which lead to it. Along one lies the discipline of assiduous study, diligent questioning, respect for ones teacher, and a healthy disregard for worldly possessions. Another leads the student outward via a lively interest in natural phenomena and meditative reflection upon Creation to come to understand the divine mysteries behind it; while still a third is the study of the words of human speech, a feeble imitation of the true creative activity of the divine Word, perhaps (as Socrates reminds us at the end of the Cratylus), but a route which may nonetheless lead to illumination.

CHAPTER 3


Who will enter the inmost veins of wisdom? Who will devote every vigil and all their energy, every day, every night, to wisdom? Many people who make some little progress towards wisdom in their youth are shackled fast to worldly affairs at one fell swoop, and abandon their proper studies. Consequently, our instructors have pronounced that no one who is bound by worldly delights and the desire for wealth can penetrate to true knowledge of wisdom. (A IV 134-41) Practical aspects of the pursuit of wisdom are as much a concern of Virgilius' as its sublimer reaches. Throughout both the Epitomae and the Epistolae he exhorts the reader to practise selfdiscipline. Regular study is a prerequisite for the attainment of wisdom, as Aeneas points out: Let no day or night pass without the pursuit of wisdom, for if you fail to read for just one day or night and pick it up again the next day, you will find the sharpness of your wit slightly blunted; the daily practice of reading brings with it an increase in the acuteness of one s intelligence. (A V 190—5) Honouring one's teacher, one's 'third father', was another important part of the discipline of the would-be wise man: 'It is excellent, indeed outstandingly excellent, for every pupil to make tireless mention of his teacher at the end, and also at the beginning, of all his writings, for the teacher of human learning is known as a third father' (B V 4-7).* Several more injunctions of this kind are to be found in the florilegia compiled by Irishmen living on the Continent, such as the Collectaneum by Sedulius

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Scottus, active in the middle of the ninth century, and the anonymous Florilegium Frisingense, thought to have been compiled in the third quarter of the eighth century at the Bavarian monastery of Freising. The Freising florilegium attributes several sayings to Virgilius (some of which are repeated by Sedulius without attribution) which are not to be found in the Epitomae and Epistolae as they have come down to us. They tally so exactly with Virgilius' style and preoccupations that it is highly likely that they come from the three lost epitomae.1 Virgilius warns against oversleeping: 'You want to gaze upon the inextinguishable lamp of wisdom with alert mind and simultaneously to let your limbs relax with the sweet pleasure of deep sleep, which cannot be' (Flor. Fris. §97, §440). And he offers a series of precepts to guide the would-be wise man: You wish to contemplate wisdom: scorn wealth, avoid the market place and have no business affairs; sleep lightly, drink sparingly, eat plain food, keep continuous vigil, and pay assiduous attention to mastering the disciplines. {Flor. Fris. §217) His advice is summed up in the Four Keys of Wisdom, a concise little summary copied out over and over again:3 'Industrious reading, assiduous questioning, scorn for riches, and honouring your teacher are the four keys to wisdom'. Industrious reading and honouring one's teacher are expressly taught by Virgilius, and the attentive student would soon learn from his example that assiduous questioning was an essential part of one's training. 4 But what of despising riches? Avarice is the only one of the deadly sins to attract his attention in the Epitomae and Epistolae. At first sight one of the least likely to interfere with the pursuit of wisdom, by comparison with drunkenness, gluttony, sexual license, idleness and pride, it is avarice which Virgilius condemns from the very first sentence: 'The perusal of our writings is profitable the world over, for it is not in financial transactions but in the pursuit of wisdom that we use our reason' (A I 1-3). Even Aeneas' warning about letting no day or night pass without the earnest pursuit of wisdom was intended, Virgilius explains, to ensure that he would not be ensnared by avarice, congregandae


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cupiditas pecuniae, 'for just as water extinguishes fire and darkness blots out light, so lust for money renders the wits of a wise man feeble and devoid of intelligence' (A V 195-200). Not only Virgilius himself, but many of his 'authorities' are preoccupied with avarice, either as an evil in its own right,5 or, as above, for its damaging effect upon the pursuit of wisdom. Cicero, for instance, is quoted as the author of this pronouncement: 'Praiseworthy will be the contempt of money in every attempt on the part of the expert mind for the love of wisdom' (A X 126-9). Estrius the Spaniard admonishes the miser: 'O greedy man, why is it that heaven, earth and sea bring their gifts to you, whereas you bring none of your goods to your neighbour?', and again: 'Look, a fish of the sea devouring whatever it meets is insatiable; in just the same way the mind of a greedy man is unable to satisfy itself with the whole world' (A XV 103-7). Iscenus the African reproaches a certain miser by the name of Donatus: 'What will that Donatus get up to, an unstoppable thief, stingy with his own possessions and covetous of other people's?', providing Virgilius with a pretext for a digression on the difference between cupidus 'covetous' and avarus 'stingy' (B II 208—16). Virgilius could put it no more clearly than this: 'You want to be wise and rich, which is simply not possible' {Flor. Fris. §96, §441). Why are wealth and wisdom incompatible? It had not always been so. In Proverbs wisdom is often positively compared to riches: 'Possess wisdom for it is better than gold' (Prov. 16:16), and 'If you seek wisdom like money and delve for her like treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord, and you will find knowledge of God' (Prov. 2:4-5). Indeed, riches are not necessarily to be despised, although wisdom is preferable: 'Wisdom is more useful with riches, and benefits more those who see the sun. Just as wisdom confers protection, so money does too; but learning and wisdom have this in addition: they confer life upon their possessor' (Eccl. 7:12-13). But to Jesu ben Sirach, the author of Ecclesiasticus, writing several centuries later, around 180 BC, the evils of avarice require attack: 'There is nothing more criminal than a miser. Why is he so proud, man of dust and ash? Nothing is more wicked than to love money' (Sir. 10:9—10; cf. also 14:1—21; 3o:i4ff; 31:1—11). Whereas the authors of the earlier of the

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wisdom books had regarded worldly wealth as a prized possession to which wisdom could worthily be compared, Jesu ben Sirach and the New Testament writers repeatedly stress the importance of abandoning earthly goods. St Paul states categorically: 'Avarice is the root of all evil' (I Tim. 6:10), explaining: 'For they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition' (I Tim. 6:9). Despite this insistence on the evils of avarice, its insidious effect on the pursuit of wisdom is not spelt out. Nor were later writers unanimous about the central role of avarice among the deadly sins. Many preferred to follow Ecclesiasticus 10:15(13), 'the beginning of all sin is pride', and it is this view which was dominant, although not to the total exclusion of the avarice-based schema, from late Antiquity into the eleventh century7 and later. Augustine, Gregory and Isidore of Seville discussed both views;8 but for the most part avarice received no more attention than any other vice. Nonetheless several writers commented upon the damaging effect of avarice upon the pursuit of wisdom. Pelagius, in a letter long attributed to Jerome, warns that the love of riches is insatiable, leading to neglect of 'divine wisdom, heavenly wealth, undying honour'.9 Gregory the Great also cautions against the dangers of distraction: There are some who, while they seek to heap up worldly goods, do not look out for the true wealth of God and do not love their eternal homeland, for they believe it is sufficient to be sustained by temporal wares.10 Isidore too points out how riches weigh down the mind: 'A mind which pants after the desires and wants of this world cannot be free to contemplate God, for an eye shut by dust cannot look up to the heights.'11 He (or his unknown continuator) makes the point more graphically later: 'The sin of avarice is represented by the metal lead, which is heavy in nature, because it makes the mind it infects so heavy that it cannot be raised up to seek sublime matters.'12 In Virgilius' view avarice was to be fought with all one's strength. If one devoted all one's mental energy to the goods of this world, then what was left for wisdom? But the


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urgency of his concern is found in few other early medieval writers.13 Although the continental Irish compilers of florilegia were ready to admit this theme into their compilations, virtually all their material comes from Virgilius himself; only when they move to more familiar subjects — alms-giving to counteract avarice, drunkenness as an impediment to wisdom — do they turn to other sources. Alcuin echoes the theme in the introduction to his works on the Liberal Arts: 'What use are riches without wisdom? As much use as a body without a soul.'14 Wisdom is suggested as the cure for avarice in the prayer on the eight cardinal sins attributed to Alcuin.15 By far the most striking way of making the point is to be found, not (for once) in Virgilius' writings, but in a tale found in two continental Irish florilegia:16 There is a certain bird living in a region of India near the sunrise which has twenty wings. Anyone who hears its cry falls into a deep sleep, and its call is audible for a mile around. The name of this huge bird is Goballus. There is a stone of wondrous beauty in the ocean which is sometimes visible, sometimes covered with sand. After giving birth to a beautiful chick with a sweet voice, the bird caught sight of the stone glistening in the sea on a calm day, was seized with desire for it, and flew off to get it. But while her wings were still outspread the stone was washed over with sand. A huge sea monster saw Goballus flying towards the stone and rushed to the nest, carried off her fledgling, and ate it up. When Goballus returned to the nest panting and hot, expecting to find solace after her labours, she found the nest empty. She cried out seven times so piteously that not only did she weep great tears herself, but no one who heard her could help weeping. Then she hurled herself into the depths of the sea and drowned. You, man, are Goballus, with this fair nature which generates beautiful wisdom. The stone in the sea is the love of riches, which seduces man: abandoning wisdom he rushes off to heap up riches. The monster in the sea is stupidity, which carries off wisdom along with the riches. Stupidity comes into being, and man loses wisdom, loses his riches, and falls prey to a wretched death. Hence, Gelflidius said: 'Wisdom is better than gold, and good counsel more precious than silver, and more lustrous than any precious stone, and teaching more outstanding than any gem-encrusted garment.'

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The theme, characteristically (though not exclusively) Virgilian, and the mysterious Gelflidius, surely a variant upon Virgilius' Gelbidius (Gelvidius, Gilvidius), seem to take us back to the very circle about Virgilius; and yet the the creatures and motifs of Irish folk-tale do not elsewhere find their way into the pages of the Epitomae and Epistolae. Although it may be that this parable comes from the lost pages of the Epitomae, in default of other evidence it seems more likely that this Virgilian preoccupation was taken up by his eager Irish readers and clothed in familiar folk-tale garb 17

: .. Virgilius has relatively little to say in the Epitomae and Epistolae about the other deadly sins; it is as if he could presuppose a certain level of moral development and self-discipline amongst his monastic readers. Concentrating upon the vice most likely to impede their pursuit of wisdom — a vice which could, after a fashion, stand for all the rest — he shows how avarice was of all the vices the most to be shunned. At first sight an odd pair of antagonists, avarice and wisdom turn out to be aptly matched.

CHAPTER 4


Unremitting self-discipline was necessary for anyone who wished to persevere on the path to wisdom. But how could one be sure that one was on the right path? The danger of false tracks that might lead one astray was preached from every pulpit. The ultimate goal for every medieval Christian, wisdom was more highly valued than mere knowledge.1 To us a fuzzy-edged fusion of book-learning and experience, sapientia, 'wisdom', was of a far higher order than mere scientia, 'knowledge'. Sapientia, the divine wisdom through which the world had come into being, was Christ himself, 'for he reveals the mysteries of knowledge and the secrets of wisdom'.2 The route to wisdom was thus hardly a matter of indifference: on it hung the very raison d'etre of the Church. To hint that the Church's path might not be the only possible one was subversive, dangerous, potentially heretical — not an assertion to make lightly. By the early centuries of the Middle Ages, Christianity had become a religion which did not readily tolerate a divergence of views in issues connected with belief. The multiplicity characteristic of earliest Christian belief rapidly gave way to dogma. Only a few generations after the founding of the Church its leaders felt called upon to codify the tenets of the Faith and to agree upon a uniform interpretation of potentially controversial passages in the Scriptures. Councils were held to pronounce on disputed points of dogma, creeds were formulated, and authoritative interpretations of the Scriptures were laid down. Deviations were proscribed: in the matter of faith there could be no room for individual opinion, and those who refused to accept official teaching were cut off from communion with the Church and labelled heretics. Yet the fixing 47

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of the corpus of belief was by no means a straightforward process. Difficulties arose over many issues, as in the case of the conflicting scriptural accounts of the nature of man (see chapter 5). But there was a far deeper question which transcended even such crucial points of dispute, one with implications for the authority of the Scriptures and the Church itself, and for the future development of Christianity: was it in fact justified to assume that the body of Christian doctrine was limited to what was found in the Bible? Christ's words — 'But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you' (Joh. 14:26) — suggested rather that Christians might hope for further revelations. Gregory Nazianzen, for one, understood the passage thus, speaking of 'flashes of illumination lighting us up one by one' (Oratio 31.27), and the Eastern Church left open the possibility of continuing revelation.3 But in the West the Church rejected this idea and insisted upon the notion of its teachings as a 'deposit' to be preserved intact and handed on to later generations without augment or decrease. In the Epistle to Timothy the writer (no longer thought to be Paul) exhorts his addressee: 'O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge' (I Tim. 6:20). Irenaeus of Lyon (and later Vincent of Lerins) stated this doctrine more emphatically: 'The preaching of the Church presents a message that is in every place, and at each moment, consistent and unchanging ... Having received it from the Church, we keep it safe.'4 By declaring the inherited teachings to be the only true source of spiritual knowledge the early Church shaped a historical character for the Faith. The truth of any particular assertion could be ascertained only by comparing it with tradition; verification by any means independent of tradition — reason, meditation, experiment — was rejected. Renewed revelations through the individual were viewed askance, and the difficulties entailed in sifting true from false revelations in any case inclined the Church to disapproval. As early as the second century, in the words of Eno,5 the sect of Montanism 'was regarded as a notable threat, not because of its call for a stricter way of life but because, in principle, the notion


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of the Spirit speaking in an ongoing way through prophets went against the developing consensus of the idea of a closed revelation, a clear-cut deposit whose guardianship and interpretation were entrusted to the leaders of the institutional Church'. To speak in the seventh century of a plurality of routes to the truth, to stress the power of the individual to attain wisdom by his own efforts, was to challenge the position adopted by the Western Church early in its history and consolidated over several centuries. And yet the Epitomae can be read as a plea for plurality, for a multiplicity of roads to the same goal. The theme of difference, of variety, of parallel if not necessarily equal approaches, is as pervasive as that of wisdom. Wisdom, at once the starting-point and the goal, is depicted in the opening sentences of the Epitomae as a diversified, multifaceted entity: Wisdom (sapientia) is so called from savour (sapor) because just as savour is located in the body's sense of taste, so too there is a kind of savouring in the movement of the soul, tasting the sweetness of the arts, discerning the force of words and statements, rejecting the bitter ones and following up sweet ones. (We call those bitter which contravene the truth of the sects and sweet those which contribute to the understanding of every art and discipline.) This kind of wisdom is twofold, heavenly and earthly, that is, humble and sublime. The humble sort deals with human affairs and the sublime sort investigates and reveals what is above man. (A I 3-13) Of the two fundamental kinds of wisdom, bitter and sweet, Virgilius identifies his own striving firmly with the sweet, orthodox, variety. This is in turn subdivided into a heavenly and an earthly variety — the laws of the Hebrews (i.e. the Scriptures) and the arts of philosophy (the Liberal Arts) — and, as he tells us later (A I 24—5), all his energy is devoted to the humble earthly kind, the arts of philosophy. These disciplines are by no means in competition with orthodox scriptural studies; in Virgilius' view they unquestionably occupy a place on the ladder to celestial wisdom, even if they stand several rungs closer to the ground. Virgilius is one of a long chain of thinkers who pragmatically urged that education should begin with things immediately accessible to the senses, and only later rise to the abstract and the

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general. Socrates, in a famous passage in the Symposium (211B), eloquently describes how one should progress from an appreciation of physical beauty to beauty on the moral plane, and then to the beauty of knowledge, whence one will eventually make one's way to the highest knowledge, knowledge of absolute beauty. Many others, from Aristotle and Varro to Jerome, Augustine, Claudianus Mamertus, Gregory the Great, Bonaventure, the Tudor playwright John Rastell, down to Novalis and beyond, 6 recommended the study of the natural world as a means of honing one's understanding to the point where it could begin to comprehend the divine wisdom behind nature. But even as patristic writers urged the redeployment of the 'spoils of the Egyptians' in the service of Christianity,7 almost in the same breath they warned against the dangers of pagan learning and idle curiositas, the desire for knowledge for its own sake. Whereas writers in the earliest centuries of the Church had hoped to throw off all the trappings of pagan Antiquity and start afresh, the Fathers of the late fourth century — Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine — were keenly aware of the desirability of creating a Christian literary culture capable of competing with secular sophistication. Keeping the requisite balance, neither ruthlessly rejecting all aspects of ancient learning nor indiscriminately absorbing harmful elements, demanded cautious posturing from Christian writers. Augustine and Gregory were by no means alone in alternating fulminations against the misleading errors and false priorities of the philosophi with recommendations to use secular knowledge as a stepping-stone to knowledge of higher matters. This patristic ambivalence left medieval teachers in a difficult position. Lacking the authority of a Jerome or an Ambrose, they felt obliged to follow in their predecessors' illustrious footsteps: in one breath warning their students against the alluring (but generally inaccessible) intellectual delights of paganism, in the next they urged the study of grammar and other secular arts as a propaedeutic to the Scriptures.8 At the elementary level no monastic teacher would have wished to see Gregory's tirade against grammar applied literally. Ignorance meant illiteracy, and illiteracy within the Church threatened its very survival. Yet several medieval grammarians felt called upon to justify their activities to their


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reluctant pupils — Smaragdus, the Anonymus ad Cuimnanum, 9 various other anonymous writers. This brief text from an eleventh-century manuscript from the Catalan monastery of Ripoll10 is representative: Tell me, you who think you are a Christian, why you want to read the grammar of that pagan man called Donatus, when Jerome said 'I do not fear the ferules of the grammarians' and St Augustine said 'It seems to me ridiculous to bind the words of the celestial oracle with the rules of the grammarians.' This is how to reply to them. St Jerome was not talking about the rules of the grammarians, but about the practices of the gentiles, who pin their hopes exclusively on grammar. Nor did St Augustine reject grammar when he said 'I was virtually tortured by philosophers and grammarians', and St Gregory said 'It is not the words of Vergil which we criticise, which are, as it were, a golden vessel, but the wine of error which lying teachers have poured out for us.'11 The solution was pragmatic: while the traditional disparagement of the activities of the philosophers enjoyed a rhetorical existence, those aspects of secular learning which were vital to the continuance of ecclesiastical culture — notably grammar — were assiduously pursued. What did philosophia mean to a seventh-century monk? It was hardly the abstruse metaphysical discipline that philosophy is to most laymen today; its scope was far broader. In Latin amor sapientiae, 'love of wisdom', it was viewed, as Virgilius phrased it, as 'the fount and womb of every liberal art and discipline' (A IV 111-12) According to the ancient model handed down since the Stoics, philosophia was of three types: physical (or natural), ethical (or moral) and logical (or rational). Later thinkers saw it as branching out into the Seven Liberal Arts — the language arts, or the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic), and the mathematical arts, or Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy).12 A third scheme, current in the British Isles in the seventh and eighth centuries, and later on the Continent, added astrology, mechanics and medicine to the arts of the Quadrivium to make up a list of seven which excluded the language arts.13 Understandably, given the importance Virgilius ascribes to wisdom, filosophia and its

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practitioners, the filosophi, play a major part. He outlines its scope thus: Filosophia is the love and eager pursuit of wisdom, and is the fount and womb of every liberal art and scholarly discipline; hence, anyone who strives for wisdom with pure love and steadfast determination in any area, heavenly or earthly, is rightly to be called a filosophus. The arts of our filosophia are numerous. The chief branches of study are poetry, rhetoric, grammar, eloquence, dialectic, geometry and so on. They are not so much in competition as equal subjects of curiosity. (A IV 110-18) Adding astronomy, mentioned a little later (A IV 229), we have a list of the seven arts of filosophia. It is not unlike the traditional list of the Liberal Arts: Virgilius too begins with the arts concerned with speech, paralleling the arts of the Trivium, before embarking upon the mathematical arts. But the language arts have swollen to encompass poetry and eloquence as well as the more usual subjects, whilst the Quadrivium has been reduced to two, geometria and astronomia\ and it turns out that what Virgilius has in mind by geometria is herbal lore rather than measurement of surfaces (A IV 226—8). Virgilius discusses each of these arts in turn and, after a reflection on the misguidedness of those who trust in astrology (A IV 241—8),I4 concludes thus: All human effort, all wisdom, therefore has this in view, namely, to ascend from lower to higher things. By investigating knowledge of all natural things, i.e. physics, and mastering in lawful wise those matters which pertain to the improvement of ones habits, i.e. ethics, one should then attain to the rational discussion of higher matters, i.e. logic. (A IV 248-54) Plato's division reappears this time as a hierarchy ascending from the lowest, natural philosophy, to the highest, logic. The hierarchical relationship is subsequently confirmed in Virgilius' account of the constitution of man (see chapter 5), where natural philosophy again occupies the lowest rung and reason and intellect the highest. Despite the superior importance accorded to ratio15 and logic, it is natural philosophy which, as we saw in chapter 2, pervades


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Virgilius' universe. Moral issues are infrequently alluded to (the passionate denunciations of avarice are, as was apparent in chapter 3, closely linked with the pursuit of wisdom), and logic still less so. Yet it was with logic, or more particularly dialectic, one of the three artes sermocinales, that grammar was linked by later writers. Even as early as the ninth century the tools of dialectic were increasingly being appropriated by grammarians,16 a trend which was to culminate in the Speculative movement of the thirteenth century. Instead of looking to grammar's sister disciplines, related through language, Virgilius jumped laterally to a discipline which in its substance had nothing in common with grammar, but which occupied a parallel position in its own hierarchy. Natural philosophy was the first step on the road which led on via ethics and logic to filosophia; grammar, on the other hand, was the origo et fundamentum liberalium litterarum, the first and most basic of the Liberal Arts.17 Its subject matter, latinitas, is described as 'the tiniest little particle of knowledge' (A I 37—8). And yet it is simultaneously 'that copious realm of all latinity, and, so to speak, a vast ocean, such that no one could possibly define its infinite variety and new and unheard-of innovations' (B II 119—22). 'Infinite variety' is to Virgilius more than a rhetorical flourish. He returns to the point more forcefully in his attack upon his critics (B III 1—43), conscious that his oblique approach in the Epitomae had left them baffled. For in the Epitomae he gives the 'infinite variety' of language visible manifestation in the doctrine of the twelve Latins: There are twelve kinds of Latin. Of them, one is in common use, and in it the Latins write all their works. To give you a sample of the twelve types, I shall demonstrate them using a single noun. 1 In the Latin in common use ignis 'fire' takes first place, igniting everything through its essential nature. 2 It is called quoquihabin [which Virgilius declines in full] because it has the power of cooking raw food; 3 it is called ardon because it burns ardently; 4 calax calacis from its heat (calor); 5 spiridon from its blast (spiramen); 6 rusin from its ruddy colour (rubor); 7 fragon from the crackling (fragor) of its flames;

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The multifarious nature of wisdom 8 9 10 11 12

fumaton from the smoke (fumus)\ ustrax from burning (urendo); vitius in that it revives near-dead limbs with its vigour; siluleus because it leaps from the flint (de silice sileat); hence, nothing deserves the name silex 'flint' unless a scintilla 'spark' jumps from it; aeneon from the god Aeneas who lives in it, or by whom breezes are wafted to the elements. (A I 57-77)

As Virgilius hints, only the first word, ignisy will be found in a conventional Latin dictionary; the rest belong to latinitas inussitata, the Latin not in common use. A play on the grammatical commonplace in usu non est or ussitatum non esty 'it is not in use', latinitas inussitata transcends the bounds of parody to become the bearer of Virgilius' urgent plea. For latinitas inussitata is itself no monolithic entity. The twelve Latins reveal different aspects of fire — not only its ability to ignite other substances, but its cooking potential, its heat, its crackling, its ruddy colour, its smoke and so on. To regard anything — particularly something as central to human existence as fire — from a single viewpoint is to accede voluntarily to a restriction of insight. Why content oneself with one Latin, one little spark of wisdom, when there are so many more? Needless to say, when Virgilius returns to the twelve Latins at the close of the Epitomae (A XV, translated in appendix 2 and discussed in chapter 7), his perspective has shifted once again. No longer a series of complementary terms standing ostensibly in paradigmatic relation, but a brief characterisation of assorted wordscrambling techniques, this version transforms the very notion of the twelve Latins. But we are offered no more. Was the prospect of sketching twelve times twelve Latins too much even for Virgilius' fertile imagination, or did he deliberately leave the rest to the reader? Latinitas inussitata, which pervades the work, and alongside it the less frequent but equally curious latinitas filosophica, serve as Virgilius' vehicles for infusing something of this linguistic multiplicity into his work. Not that he invariably identifies himself with either; more frequently he distances himself. He explicitly sets latinitas filosophica against his own views in this passage:


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Pectus 'chest' was written by the Latin philosophers with the addition of an s because it inspects the secrets of the heart, whence Lucan said: 'What great thoughts flit about in the human breast

(spectore)\y But we say that pectus comes from combing (pectendo),

that is, distinguishing and enumerating the thoughts, whence it is structured rather in the manner of a comb to look at. (A XI 85—91) Latinitas filosophica is invoked mostly to furnish etyma for words which did not otherwise lend themselves to explanation: belua csea monster' is associated with the 'filosophical' bel 'sea'; manus 'hand' with the 'filosophical' man 'power'; and (in Virgilius' most notorious etymology) corpus 'body' with the 'filosophical' pus, meaning 'custody'. Such 'etymologies' are not etymologies in the nineteenth-century sense.18 Historical validity was no concern of Virgilius', nor of his contemporaries'. Medieval etymology stressed the multidirectionality of semantic relationships; not for Isidore, and still less for Virgilius, the unique (and to their way of thinking sterile) etymology based on phonetic form which for us is the only valid kind. Etymologies such as homo 'human being' from humus 'earth, soil', or reges 'kings' from recte agendo 'acting rightly', hint at strata of meaning which transcend the literal denotation, enlarging upon levels of suggestion and association which determine lexical selection on a more subtle and significant plane than that of referential meaning alone. Like latinitas filosophica, latinitas inussitata, and the twelve Latins, Virgilius' etymologies underline the creative force of multiplicity. At every level — the word, the Latin language, knowledge, the paths to wisdom — the world is characterised by plurality, by the coexistence of countless possibilities. Whether one chooses to pursue filosophia via the Seven Liberal Arts, beginning with grammar, or via the threefold division into physics, ethics and logic, beginning with the study of the natural world, is immaterial: both paths lead to the same goal. Yet filosophia, with all its branches, is only one possible route to wisdom, the humble earthly path. Divine Scripture, the auctoritas Hebreorum, is a higher path. And, existing in the background alongside these 'sweet' forms of enlightenment, are the bitter forms. What Virgilius is at pains to stress is the value of these possibilities and the crucial importance of their existence; to insist

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upon the exclusive Tightness of a single way is to impoverish the world. Even taking into account the all-encompassing authority of the Church, it is difficult, as long as we regard Virgilius as primarily a grammarian, to see why he cared so urgently about creating a climate favourable to a diversity of views. No grammarian would wish to encourage a plurality of Latins, and in that sense, taken literally, his teaching is nonsense. Challenging authority for the fun of it was risky and ultimately futile; only some fervently held belief in danger of suffocation could provide sufficient motivation to outweigh the peril. That Virgilius would run these risks merely in order to defend his own eccentric brand of Latin — which after all is as much medium as message — is implausible, and so extended a piece of self-indulgence as his works would on this interpretation become is unlikely to have been countenanced.19 We have only to open our eyes to what Virgilius tells us: whatever his 'official' designation and his role within his monastery may have been, he did not regard his task as one of upholding and transmitting a body of doctrine about irregular plurals and prepositional government. His concerns reached deeper, to the very nature of man.

CHAPTER 5


We cannot think about language without making some assumptions about the nature of man. Usually implicit, as often as not unconscious, our picture of the human being rebounds upon our view of language, shaping it to conform to our mental image of its speakers. For instance, from Augustine on, many a thinker has drawn a parallel between the division of man into soul and body, and that of language into meaning and sound. Augustine set it out in De quantitate animae thus: 'Since the word consists of sound and meaning, and sound pertains to the ears whereas meaning pertains to the mind, don't you think that in the word, as in any living creature, the sound is the body and the meaning the soul of the sound, as it were?' (xxxii 66). Reiterated by one medieval writer after another, this sentiment found expression even in the seventeenth century in the writings of the Cartesian philosopher Cordemoy.1 Tempting as it is to regard such remarks as a mere conceit, their implications reach far into the development of language study. Medieval thinkers regarded the body as an encumbering source of sin, an obstacle to salvation, and popular devotional literature is rife with tales of saintly asceticism. Medieval scorn for the flesh finds its linguistic counterpart in the reluctance to focus on the 'physical' aspects of language — sounds and sound-systems, word-formation and inflection. The subdisciplines of phonetics, phonology and morphology are all of Renaissance or later origin. What fascinated medieval scholars was the meaningful aspect of language, that zone where the word seems tantalizingly to hint at the Word which was the goal of all their intellectual endeavour. In the twentieth century the Behaviourists, at the opposite extreme, denied the existence of anything but 57

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Heretical knowledge? The constitution

of man

physical substance to the human being, attributing all human actions to physical stimuli. Their linguist colleagues, the American Structuralists, sought to eliminate that part of language which was least susceptible to analysis in quantitative terms: meaning. From Augustine to Chomsky, attitudes to language have always paralleled attitudes to man. Priorities in linguistics reveal a good deal about attitudes to human nature: those aspects of language the linguist considers worthy of study correspond directly to those facets of the human being given most attention by his contemporaries. Since the Renaissance scholars have preferred to objectify language, treating it as a-thing-out-there to be analysed in the same way as natural phenomena. Because the specific physical properties of language have little in common with those of the human body, analogies between the structure of language and that of man tend to strike modern readers as fanciful.2 In the age when Virgilius worked, when such connections came more readily to the mind than they do today, arguments gained more than mere metaphorical vividness from them. By showing how a linguistic phenomenon had its counterpart in human, or better still spiritual, reality, a writer could provide extra-linguistic rationale for what might otherwise be dismissed as beneath notice, arbitrary and caught up in continual flux. Such comparisons imparted universality to phenomena uneasily balanced on the boundary between universal and particular, natural and arbitrary. By the same token any such parallel has the power to reveal, beneath a seemingly casual exterior, a deeply held belief about the nature of the world. To take a few cases, the division of the alphabet into vowels and consonants is compared to man's constitution of soul and body by no less a grammarian than Priscian, as well as by a number of anonymous commentators both Greek and Latin; the five vowels are compared to the five senses; the seven vowels of Greek correspond to the seven planets;3 and body and soul are invoked again in an elaborate analogy: Just as the human body is composed of its members joined in a firm union, and that body is ruled and governed by the rational soul, so too articulate speech is made up of its units, limbs, as it


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were — speech sounds, syllables and words — into a single body, and is brought alive by another's understanding as if with life and soul.4 Grammarians are especially fond of drawing our attention to parallels between the nature of language and that of man: the one reflects the other. Virgilius, as we shall see, employed such parallels in the service of his programme of fostering an atmosphere sympathetic to intellectual multiplicity. But the very nature of the parallel invoked can itself be indicative of a particular doctrinal stance. Man as a being of body and soul — this image recurs so often in the writings of grammarians, theologians, poets and medieval literature at large that one might fancy it to be a mere cliche, a commonplace of ecclesiastical dogma. And yet this bipartite picture of man is at variance with a famous verse of St Paul's: 'I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ' (I Thess. 5:23).* In the early Church both bi- and tripartite formulas were used by such writers as Ignatius, Justin, Athenagoras, Tatian and pseudo-Hippolytus. Their Middle Platonist and Neoplatonist contemporaries distinguished clearly between what they called the rational and the irrational soul (spirit and soul respectively), although they too preferred to allow themselves flexibility. Philo of Alexandria, for instance, teaches now one view, now the other, in the course of his voluminous writings. But by the middle of the second century Plutarch, a prominent Middle Platonist, was remarking on a hardening of positions: Most people rightly hold a man to be composite, but wrongly hold him to be composed of only two parts. The reason is that they suppose mind to be somehow part of soul, thus erring no less than those who believe soul to be part of body, for in the same degree as soul is superior to body, so is mind better and more divine than soul.6 From the end of the first century on, Christian writers too were increasingly coming to portray the two views of man's nature as mutually exclusive, as a question of right or wrong, rather than as different facets of the same truth. What was at stake?

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Heretical knowledge? The constitution of man THE BEING OF MAN: TWO PARTS OR THREE?

At first sight an abstruse point of dogma, a philosophers' plaything, the question of man's constitution had immediate implications for every Christian. Man as a being of body, soul and spirit possessed a potential and responsibilities very different from those which were his as a being of body and soul alone, due to the contrasting capacities of soul and spirit. The soul was changeable and subject to error, the vehicle of passions, urges and strivings, whereas the human spirit was an eternal, unchanging seed of divine substance through which man could hope eventually to be reunited with God.7 Man as a being endowed with spirit was under an obligation to make his own way upwards along a path of inner development, taming the drives through which his soul might lead him astray, confident that the divine spark within would guide him to the goal. Denying man the spirit left him dependent upon divine grace and upon the mediation and intercession of the Church.8 The question of personal responsibility thus shaded over into the issue of authority. With an increasingly doctrinaire attitude within the Church to the problem of authority, the teaching that man possessed a spirit as well as a soul became suspect. In the West, Tertullian (c. 160—c. 225), one of the great teachers of the authority of the Church, saw the soul as a unity; the separate 'parts' recognised by other thinkers were simply its various 'powers', mind (mens) among them. The only kind of 'spirit' (spiritus) that Tertullian was prepared to acknowledge was the breath of life, the spiraculum vitae of Genesis (2:7). Heretics, he complained, wished to inject a spiritual seed into the soul,9 and were under the impression that by using mind alone, without relying upon sense impressions mediated by the soul, they could attain to true knowledge. Tertullian insists that the mind is powerless without the senses: in his view, they are our only possible route to knowledge and are utterly reliable.10 Tertullian marks the beginning of the divergence between the Eastern and the Western Church on this fundamental question. Although his successors in the West were reluctant to go quite so far, and indeed sometimes challenged his views outright, nonethe-


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less their thinking was deeply coloured by his vigorous attack on the doctrine of tripartition. Funerary inscriptions of the third and fourth centuries juxtapose body with soul or spirit, in effect treating soul and spirit as interchangeable.11 Eastern theologians, in contrast, were unaffected. Origen, writing a generation after Tertullian, provided an account of the threefold nature of man fully integrated with Christian teaching, showing body and spirit competing for dominion over the soul.12 Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom and others in the Eastern Church continued to teach the threefold nature of man with all its implications.13 In the West, Tertullian's successors, whilst favouring a less radical version of the bipartite doctrine than Tertullian himself, allowed themselves a certain amount of latitude. Lactantius (c. 250—c. 325) leaves the question open in De opificio Dei, written in 303 or 304 (although he visibly inclines toward dichotomy), but in the later Institutiones divinae he is emphatic in his rejection of tripartition. 14 Half a century later Ambrose, bishop of Milan (c. 339-397) propounded so great a variety of views that it is impossible to tell which, if any, he himself espoused. Both dichotomist and trichotomist views are used, sometimes interchangeably, and along with the Platonic tripartition of the soul into rational, concupiscent and irascible.15 He directs no polemics at any scheme, and throughout his exegesis acknowledges the coexistence of divergent interpretations of non-physical data.16 There is not a breath of controversy. Ambrose's tolerance contrasts oddly with the rapid hardening of positions among his contemporaries. Jerome (c. 347/8—420), so far as we can tell from his sparing references to the problem, believed firmly in man as a being of body and soul alone: the spiritus hominis is consistently explained away as a synonym for 'soul' or as shorthand for the gifts of the Holy Spirit.17 Yet he translated the treatise on the Holy Spirit, De spiritu sancto, by Didymus the Blind (313-398) from Greek into Latin, even though Didymus upheld (at least in passing) the tripartite view: Just as the soul is one thing and the body another, so too the spirit is different from the soul, which in places is given special mention. St Paul prayed for the spirit, asking that it should be kept safe with

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Heretical knowledge? The constitution of man the soul and body [I Thess. 5:19]. It would be an unthinkable blasphemy for the Apostle to pray that the Holy Spirit be kept safe with the soul and body, for it can receive neither decrease nor increase. Hence it is the human spirit that is meant in this saying of the Apostle's.18

His younger contemporary Augustine (354—430) handled the problem in the subtlest and most flexible manner to be found in the West.19 Not for him rigid insistence on a single formula. According to the context the soul might be viewed as consisting of various parts, or alternatively it might be seen in relation to the body or to God. It possesses seven powers;20 it has three parts and two different tripartitions (memoria> intelligentia, voluntas\ mens, notitia, amor) set out in the same work.21 It stands between the body and God, simultaneously servant and master.22 Underlying all these different schemata was the fundamental body-soul opposition. Asked point-blank about the constituents of man's being, he says: cWhen I am asked what man is composed of, I can reply: "Of soul and body'".23 As he was quick to acknowledge, this simple formula was not a complete answer, for it left no way of distinguishing man from animals, themselves endowed with a soul {animd) in the form of life-forces. What man possessed in addition was his ability to tell good from evil, to use his intellect — in short, a rational as well as an irrational soul.24 The higher part is variously called anima rationalise ratio, mens or spiritus, the lower part anima irrationalis or simply anima. Their relationship fluctuates far less than the names he gives them.25 That the anima rationalis might be different in substance from the anima irrationalis was a notion he combated with increasing vigour towards the end of his life.26 If, he argued, the rational soul was a part of God, it would be unchanging and incorruptible, capable of neither improvement nor deterioration.27 To say that it was divine was to impute to Divinity lasciviousness, wickedness, impiety and all the sins of which the soul was capable,28 a conclusion he found intolerable.29 Consequently, Augustine worked with the bipartite doctrine — with a more refined version of it than was used by most other Western writers, certainly, but the effect was the same: the individual was precluded from direct knowledge of and


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participation in the Divine except by grace. Of the three great Doctors of the Church of the end of the fourth century it was Augustine and Jerome who made the greatest mark; Ambrose's old-fashioned tolerance offered less for the uncertain teacher and would-be dogmatist to grasp. The most influential teachers of later generations tended to polarise the issue, outlining an extreme version of the inherited position. Gennadius' succinct and confident paragraphs in De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus (c. 490) were vehemently opposed to the doctrine of tripartition: Man consists of two substances only, soul and body: the soul with its reason (ratio) and the body with its senses... There is no third element, spirit, amongst the substances of which man is composed, as Didymus maintained; rather, the soul itself is spirit on account of its spiritual nature, or alternatively it is called spirit because it respires in the body. It is called soul (anima) because it animates the body into life and the giving of life. That spirit mentioned third by the Apostle [Paul] along with soul and body we should understand as being the grace of the Holy Spirit...30 Yet it was still possible for others to show restraint. Around 437 Antoninus Honoratus explained that ratio and anima are associated in the same way as heat and light are in a sunbeam: their effect is different, and yet they are inseparable.31 Prosper of Aquitaine (c. 390—after 455) maintained Augustinian moderation in his Sententiae (§335). The Regula Magistri mentions both bipartite and tripartite formulas several times without any sign of animosity,32 while the pseudo-Ambrosian De Trinitate adopts first a tripartite, then a bipartite stance, stating categorically: 'Just as there are three things in man, body, soul and spirit, so too there are three notable things which lead us to either good or evil, thought, speech and action', but a page later denies that man could have any divinity in his unitary nature.33 Toward the end of the sixth century the mild bipartite formulations of Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) suggest that by his time the matter no longer required discussion.34 His Spanish contemporary, Isidore of Seville (c. 562-636), in contrast felt it necessary to denounce tripartition. Both in the Differentiae and in his authoritative and widely read encyclopedia, the Etymologiae, he argued against the existence of a separate human spirit:

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Heretical knowledge? The constitution of man The evangelist declares that the spirit is the same as the soul when he says 'I have power to lay my soul down, and I have power to take it again' [Joh. 10:18]. When speaking of the time of the Passion, the evangelist referred thus to that same soul of our Lord, saying: 'And he bowed his head and gave up the spirit' [Joh. 19:30]. What is 'giving up the spirit' if not laying down one's soul?3*

He explains away spiritus, ratio and mens as faculties or aspects of the soul: The soul has got different names on account of its functions... While it animates the body it is anima; when it has desires, it is animus; when it has knowledge, it is mens; when it recollects, it is memoria; when it judges what is right, it is ratio; when it respires, it is spiritus; when it perceives something, it is sensus?^ Mid- to late eighth-century Irish and Anglo-Saxon writers in continental centres maintained the same emphatically bipartite doctrine. The pseudo-Isidorian Liber de numeris, from Irish circles in southern Germany, prefers not even to argue with doubters: 'Man, made in the image and likeness of God, consists of two substances, just soul and body...' (PL 83,12956). Another pseudoIsidorian text from the same milieu, the Questiones Sancti Hysidori tarn de novo quam de vetere testamentum, commits a significant slip: 'Tell me: what are the substances of which man consists? The reply: Three, namely, soul and body.'37 The commentary on Luke from the same milieu orthodoxly regards the soul as unitary, but possessing two effectiones 'functions'.38 The anonymous florilegium in London, British Library, Arundel 213, a manuscript which originated in Anglo-Saxon circles in the Wiirzburg area in the first third of the ninth century,39 goes to some lengths to reason away any tendencies to threefoldness: The soul [and body] is additionally known as spirit because the living creature {animal) respires through the body. The spirit does not differ from the soul in substance but is different in its function... In the creed it says that man consists of soul and body. Paul the apostle says: 'May [the God] of peace bless you through all things so that your spirit, soul and body remain whole' [I Thess.


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5:23]: by 'spirit' he means the grace of the Holy Spirit, in case anyone should think that this passage suggested that man consisted of three substances, spirit, soul and body, when the book of Genesis maintains that man consists of soul and flesh, and similarly the Lord says in the Gospels: 'Do not fear those who slay the body, for they cannot slay the soul' [Matth. 10:28].4° By dint of selective quotation this writer, like Isidore, conveys the impression that the authority of the Bible is squarely behind him. In England itself the Anglo-Saxons Aldhelm and Eusebius seem to take bipartition for granted, Aldhelm speaking of the twofold life in which 'the blessed soul is preferred to the actions of the body' and Eusebius referring to man's twofold substance, substantia

Given the apparent uniformity of doctrine from Gregory on, why did Isidore and the author of the passage in the Arundel florilegium feel they had to argue their case? The tripartite doctrine was not yet quite dead, as the slips in the Questiones Sancti Hysidori and the Ioca monachorum (note 40 above) show. Our sources are naturally few and indirect, for texts purveying teachings stigmatised as heretical found few copyists.42 Toward the end of the eighth century Elipandus of Toledo was reported to be teaching the tripartite nature of man. Paulinus of Aquileia, a prominent figure at the court of Charlemagne, wrote a treatise condemning his errors which on the orders of the Council of Frankfurt (794) was dispatched to Spain for circulation. Alcuin too was a staunch upholder of dichotomy, joining in the attack on Elipandus and repeating Isidore's teaching in his De animae ratione (c. xi).43 The picture is thus a complex one: some thinkers were willing to accept the tripartite doctrine or at least to admit the possibility, while others were adamantly set against it. Very many others were no doubt unaware of the debate and simply reported what they found in their reading. By the middle of the ninth century the direct attacks of Isidore and the Arundel florilegium had given way amongst opponents of tripartition to techniques of distortion. Basing themselves on Augustine, but creating a rigid opposition where the Church Father had seen subtle differentiations, opponents of the trichotomist doctrine presented it as an

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untenable belief in two souls. Thus crudely formulated, it could be counted on to arouse antagonism even on the part of those who might otherwise have been sympathetic. A few pages after he unostentatiously uses the tripartite formula, John Scotus Eriugena fulminates against the doctrine of the 'two souls' in his great work on nature, the Periphyseon (written between 862 and 866).44 In the same decade 'those who shamelessly teach that man has two souls', a heresy imputed by some to the Byzantine patriarch Photius, were anathematised by the Fourth Council of Constantinople (869-70).45 This council was effectively ignored by both Eastern and Western Churches until the end of the eleventh century, when it was revived largely on account of the welcome support it lent the Western Church in proscribing lay intervention in episcopal elections. But even without formal acknowledgement of the decrees of this council, the trend of opinion in the West was against trichotomy. Such echoes of it as occur in the twelfth century are faint, based on earlier sources, and often dismissed out of hand.46 The way was clear for the emergence of thoroughgoing empiricism and absolute faith in the perceptions of the senses, attitudes which become increasingly prominent as the Middle Ages progress. Empiricism, founded on the observations of the senses, has to place absolute trust in them — and yet the more consciously we rely on them, the more we realise their untrustworthiness. Colour perception, optical illusions, tactile 'blind spots', and the findings of psychological research, when set against observations made with the most accurate of scientific instruments, bring home to us the fact that the senses are in reality a highly imperfect tool. The relativism that results — how do I know that what you call orange and what I call orange are in fact perceived by us as the same colour? — leads in the end to the denial of the possibility of knowledge. The senses can furnish only relative, conditional knowledge, never absolute knowledge; but if this kind of knowledge is rejected, what is left? The knowledge attained through the third element of man, the spirit, Virgilius would argue.


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VIRGILIUS ON THE NATURE OF M A N

Virgilius, like his contemporaries, saw in man many parallels with language. He likens the five vowels to the five senses (A XI 198-200). The close relationship of verb and participle is said to resemble that between the body and the limbs (A VI 9-11). As for that standard element in the definition of the noun, corpus aut rem significans 'signifying an object or concept', Virgilius gives it this explanation: Many people are doubtful about res and corpus. Res is a Hebrew letter the name of which means 'head', so is equivalent to a primary noun. Just as the army is subordinate to its head, in the same way the body is entirely governed by its head. (A V 30—4) Via a double play on words (and a slight distortion of the Hebrew) Virgilius arrives at another human analogy. The Hebrew letter name res was universally interpreted as meaning 'head', 47 although the Hebrew terms are somewhat different (ttf*H res and \DWi ros respectively). First, Virgilius equates the Latin res 'concept', 'intangible thing' with the Hebrew letter, and secondly corpus 'object, tangible thing' slides into corpus 'body'. Two sentences later Donatus' 'object' and 'concept' have thus been transmuted into 'body' and 'head'! A few pages later the prolific 'offspring' of nouns and verbs brings kinship to Virgilius' imagination: It seems to my mind's eye that the progeny of nouns and verbs are similar to human genealogy, as when we speak of father, son, grandson, great-grandson. Let the noun of origin occupy the position of the father, e.g. glorificatio, the verb glorifico that of the son, that of the grandson the base noun derived from that same verb, gloria, and that of the great-grandson the adjective coming from the aforesaid noun, e.g. gloriosus gloriosa gloriosum. (AV324-32)48 Pronouns stand in the same close relationship to nouns as courtiers to king (A VI 15—16). The different levels of language are cele-

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brated by Aeneas in an extended comparison between the letter and the ages of man (A II 4-21). Analogies of this nature were relatively uncontroversial. But Virgilius went further, introducing repeated comparisons between language and the human constitution. On the opening page of the Epitomae he compares the relationship of the earthly and heavenly kinds of wisdom with that of the body to the soul: A parallel to the higher kind of wisdom can be found in man through the lower kind,49 in that he has a terrestrial created body and an ethereal soul. This earthly kind of wisdom is supposed to serve the sublime sort just as the body serves the soul. (A I 20-4) Verbum 'word' is also compared to man's twofold nature: Verbum consists of two parts, ver from the blow {verber) which the tongue inflicts upon the oral cavity, and bum from trumpet {bucinum) because the voice trumpets forth {reboare). Just as man is made up of body and soul, so the word is made by the tongue and the voice. (A VII 14-17) Unlike these two, which conjure up a bipartite view of man, the following analogy presents a tripartite vision: To go into the matter more closely, it seems to me that the littera is similar to the human condition: just as man consists of a physical portion, a soul, and a sort of celestial fire, so too the letter is permeated with its body — that is, its shape, its function and its pronunciation, which are its joints and limbs, as it were — and has its soul in its meaning {sensus) and its spirit in its higher form of contemplation {in superiore contemplatione). (A II 21-7) Homo and littera share threefoldness. The littera letter, speech sound' was in fact an entity which was traditionally considered to have three properties, nomen 'name', figura 'shape', potestas 'sound value'. Instead of relating each of these properties to the three parts of man's being, Virgilius sees them as together constituting the physical nature of the littera. For its higher elements he looks elsewhere: its anima 'soul' is its sensus 'meaning', and its spiridon 'spirit' its superior contemplation 'contemplation of higher things'


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(or 'higher form of contemplation'). 50 Note that Virgilius never uses the word spiritus undisguised; anima 'soul' in contrast appears as frequently as its Maronian counterpart ajfla. The passage appears to take as its starting-point Eucherius' account of the three levels of interpretation of Scripture: The body of Holy Scripture is found, they say, in the literal {littera) or historical level. Its soul is in its moral significance (moralis sensus), which is called tropological, and its spirit in its higher understanding (in superiore intellects), called anagoge.51 Although Virgilius works a linguistic analogy around tripartition only here, he mentions spirit and soul together again in the account of the twelve Latins in Epitome XV: The twelfth Latin is celestial, i.e. supernal, and treats of higher matters, e.g. affla for 'soul', spiridon for 'spirit', repota for certain 'supernal virtues', sanamiana anus for 'the unity of God on high'. Virgilius always used this kind. (A XV 73-8) The most detailed discussion of the human constitution occurs in the fourth of the Epitomae, following on from the observation that the ultimate goal of all human knowledge is the reasoned investigation of higher things (A IV 248—54). Virgilius continues with an account of the nature of man (with not an analogy in sight): Every wise man should know and ponder how and in what way man is constituted. He first received a body from the muddy earth and then a soul from higher spheres, and has these two parts conjoined in a manner which defies description, and thereby rejoices in a contradictory nature. The in-spired part, the soul, is aware that the body, a composite of coarser matter, of liquids and dry elements and cold and hot things, has been delegated to serve it; but since the soul only gives the body orders to the extent of animating it, as with all other animate things, it will be the case that unless this soul has mind (mens) and reason (ratio), it will fail to differ from animate creatures, which lack both activities. As the soul presides over the body, so the mind governs the soul and reason in turn rules the mind. Mind (mens), so called from measuring (metiri), opens the measure of the subtler senses to the soul. Once a capacity of this kind has been developed, the infusion

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Heretical knowledge? The constitution of man of a higher form of reason into the soul enables it to have perfect knowledge in all things. Hence, corresponding to the threefold scale of wisdom of which we spoke [A IV 248-54], there is a threefold state in man too. The soul (anima) possesses a kind of wisdom relating to natural matters, and in it there is ingenium 'wit, freedom' grafted in through the freedom of the creation from its Creator and named accordingly. The mind (mens) understands moral affairs, and in it is memory, with which it tenaciously remembers what it has seen and heard and overflows with countless thoughts all poured into it as if it were a sturdy pot. Reason (ratio) surveys lofty heavenly matters and shelters the understanding (intellectus), a fiery spark, as it were. It is by no means inappropriate that our instructors, particularly Sulpita and Istrius, thought of man by the name of lesser world,52 for within himself he contains everything the visible world is made of: earth in his body, fire in his soul,53 water in his fluidity54 and air in the swiftness of his thoughts; the sun in the radiance of his wisdom, the moon in the uncertain and unstable conditions of wealth and youth, a blossoming meadow in the nobility of his virtues and the equanimity of his mild temper, mountains in the heights of generosity, hills in the succession of the family line, valleys in the humbling experiences of tribulation, fruit trees in the fruits of largess; barren trees, rugged places and mucky bogs, thorns and thistles in his evil ways and insatiable greed, snakes and cattle in simplicity and prudence, and the teeming, surging sea in the storm-tossed depths of the heart of man and in reason itself. (A IV 255-96)

Here Virgilius adopts a tripartition similar in outline to the Aristotelian division of the non-physical portion of man into vegetative, irascible and rational souls (transmitted to the Middle Ages by Augustine in De civitate Dei55). But in its content it differs significantly from its predecessors. The lowest element, anima, through which we grasp the natural world (the function of the vegetative soul), has as its particular power or capacity ingenium, a term with special resonances for Virgilius. We learn later that it was because he was ingeniosus possessed of a modicum of wit' that he was given the name Maro (A XV 123; cf. p. 75 below).56 Ascending a stage higher, the mind {mens), replacing the Aristotelian irascible soul, has as its power memory; and at the highest level, ratio 'reason' — enriched by its association with oratio 'speech', the exegete's way of approximating to the associa-


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tive spread of the Greek Xoyo^ {logos) — having as its power the intellect.57 These three properties enable each of the higher constituents to grasp one of the (also hierarchically ordered) branches of philosophy: the soul uses its inborn wit so as to comprehend the natural world; the mind, with the help of memory, attends to moral issues; and reason uses the higher faculty of understanding to attain to the rational cognition of supernal matters.58 The latter part of this passage is a minutely elaborated account of man as microcosm, embodying within himself the entire external universe, whether in the form of the four elements or the heavenly bodies, or earthly flora, fauna and topography.59 Virgilius is thus far from consistent in his view of man — two-fold, three-fold, four-fold, or microcosm of the created world. Virgilius' apparent indecision in an age when bipartition was increasingly coming to dominate orthodox opinion is itself significant. His contemporaries in the generation between Isidore and Aldhelm were likely to view anything apart from a strictly bipartite account of man with suspicion. So delicate was the subject that no one between Cassiodorus and Alcuin ventured to write a work with a title such as De anima or De natura hominis.6° Whereas passing remarks might slip by unnoticed, to publish a full-scale treatise would invite critical scrutiny and suppression. It is in the guise of a self-mocking grammarian that Virgilius introduces all but one of his statements, draped with the veil of seemingly casual extra-linguistic analogies. As was the case with the twelve Latins and latinitas inussitata, Virgilius' superficial inconsistency makes a point: the importance of multiplicity. Here, however, the content matters as well. Although the bipartite scheme figures as often as the tripartite, there are no polemics against schemes which include the spirit. On the contrary, Virgilius readily accepts its existence.

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Heretical knowledge? The constitution of man THE FIRE OF THE SPIRIT

Sicut enim homo plasto et affla et quodam caelesti igne consistit, ita et littera suo corpore... suffunta est, animam habens in sensu, spiridonem in superiore contemplatione. (A II 23—7) In comparing the letter to man, Virgilius sets its spirit, its 'celestial fire', in its 'higher form of contemplation' (or perhaps, by scinderatio fonorum (see p. 84 below), the 'contemplation of higher things'). In man the faculty of'surveying lofty celestial matters' is that of ratio, a property which transcends mere mind, mens. Ratio contains the intellect (understanding) 'like a fiery spark'. Naturally ratio meant more than 'reason' to Virgilius and his seventh-century readers; ratio was frequently used as the equivalent of the Greek logos 'reason, principle, word, meaningful utterance'. Many an early Christian savoured the proximity of Latin ratio and oratio 'speech, word', and sought to link the two by explaining oratio as oris ratio 'reason/word of the mouth'. Ratio thus did not convey the antonymy to spiritual perception of its modern equivalents, and it would have been appropriate, even in staider circles than Virgilius', to speak of its 'surveying lofty celestial matters'. From Pentecost (Acts 2), and indeed from long before, the spirit and its intellectual faculty were associated with fire. Lactantius, Jerome, Eucherius, and many others spell out the connection, 61 one which recurs repeatedly in Virgilius. He speaks of man as consisting of 'body and soul and a sort of celestial fire' (A II 23); of the intellectus quodammodo ignitus flammosusque 'the understanding somehow set alight and blazing' (A IV 279—80); and includes spiridon 'spirit' among the aspects of fire listed in the first set of Latins (A I 70; see p. 53 above). Remarkably, fire figures repeatedly in the Epitomae. At the outset ignis is the model for the twelve Latins: 'in the Latin in common use, ignis, which ignites everything by its nature, takes first place' (A I 60—2). Understanding ignis as ordinary fire, we must regard this pronouncement as another of Virgilius' eccentricities; if, on the other hand, we associate with it the spirit, the divine spark which enables man to rise to higher knowledge,62 then its superior


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position, never abdicated to any other element, begins to make sense. At the end of the first list of Latins Virgilius makes a different connection: ignis in the twelfth Latinity is aeneon^ 'from the god Aeneas who lives in it or by whom wind is borne to the elements' (A I 76-7). The conflation with Aeolus apart, Virgilius creates a new association: between his teacher Aeneas, who is introduced in the opening lines of the next chapter, and fire. Aeneas is Virgilius' guide to higher knowledge, the mentor who urges him to let no day or night pass without study. The fire theme, prominent throughout the Epitomae, is reinforced by that of the sun, associated by the Church Fathers and throughout the Christian tradition with Christ. This symbolism was by no means strange to Virgilius, who interpreted the sunrise of Tarquinius' vision as signifying the coming of Christ (B praef. 23-7). Virgilius' authorities refer with remarkable frequency to the sun: some twelve quotations in the Epitomae make reference to it, often placing it at the centre of attention,63 and Virgilius himself mentions it several times.64 Estrius, carrying the symbolism one step further, tells us that the verb {verbum) occupies the place of the sun in sentences, Tor just as a day without the sun is not radiant, so a sentence without a main verb is obscure' (A XV 98—100). Virgilius' readers would have paused over that passage: verbum or Verbum (to take advantage of the resources of modern typography)? The uncertainty is exacerbated by Virgilius' choice of word for 'sentence': testimonium, 'witness' or 'evidence' in ordinary Latin, is a term of frequent occurrence in the Gospels, particularly in John. Although the sun/Son and fire/spirit themes are to be found in the works of the Fathers and early medieval exegesis, this fascination for them in so alien a context transcends the commonplace. All Virgilius' preoccupations — intellectual pluralism, seeing with the mind's eye, the fire of the spirit, the sustained effort needed to reach one's goal — are shared with the traditional paths of inner development, taught largely by esoteric movements, whether within the Church or outside it. The Cathars, the Rosicrucians, Jakob Boehme, Rudolf Steiner, Rene Guenon, and the practitioners of Qabbalah, Sufi, Buddhism and Theosophy recognised the same concerns. However different their routes might seem

74


externally, they arrive ultimately at the same goal, like Virgilius' lanes and byways arriving in the end at the metropolis (B III §i). Could Virgilius have been working within such a movement? Several other concerns and characteristics proper to traditions of inner development are to be found in the Epitomae. Aeneas, Virgilius' teacher, reminds us of the damaging effect of greed for worldly goods upon the pursuit of wisdom. The emphasis upon this weakness to the exclusion of all others arises naturally from the level of instruction: teachers working with the lay public had of necessity to direct the attention of their pupils to their moral conduct, urging abstention from gluttony and drunkenness, sexual excess, anger, jealousy, idleness and so on. A teacher of a path of inner development could to a large extent assume that his pupils, although still struggling to overcome many shortcomings, were already well-schooled in these moral precepts: a life of strict self-discipline has always been the prerequisite for embarking upon preparation for initiation in any tradition.65 Aeneas' and Virgilius' denunciations of greed and avarice reflect less a tendency to usury and hard deals on the part of their contemporaries than the fear that worldly possessions, worldly cares and concerns, might swamp the would-be seeker for wisdom even when he had already advanced some way towards his goal. As Virgilius puts it, 'many people, taking up the search for wisdom in their youth, are bound fast to the affairs of the world at one fell swoop and abandon their true concerns' (A IV 136—8: see chapter 3 above). Virgilius' deference to his teacher (a trait not to be confused with the larger issue of authority: see chapter 6 below) also links his writing and attitudes with those characteristic of the older esoteric traditions. Although both grammarians and exegetes occasionally mention their teachers, they do so with nothing like the frequency with which Virgilius refers (and defers) to Aeneas. We have already seen how he urges the pupil to make tireless mention of his teacher (p. 41 above). Virgilius frequently consults Aeneas on difficult points of doctrine and on points of dispute.66 His opinion of him could scarcely be higher: he says of him quern falli in nulla erat possibile ratione 'it was quite impossible that he should be in error' (A V 98). That affection as well as respect


75

belonged to the relationship is revealed by the repeated use of the expression meus Aeneas^ 'my Aeneas', 67 and by Virgilius' emotion at the thought of his teacher's long absence (A V 185-6). Were this the total extent of Virgilius' dealings with Aeneas, even though the depth of feeling goes well beyond that normally displayed in scholarly treatises, one need not suspect that the nature of the instruction was anything out of the ordinary. But one episode depicts an encounter such as one would not expect to find in the monastic classroom. In the Catalogue of grammarians (A XV) Virgilius tells us this: There were in addition three Vulcans, one in Arabia, another in India, and a third in Africa. My Aeneas had them as teachers and made a fair copy of their books via the art of shorthand. In them he found that there was a man called Maro near the Flood whose wisdom no age will be able to relate. Hence, when Aeneas saw that I was possessed of a modicum of wit {ingeniosus) he ordered that I should be called by this name, saying: 'This my son shall be called Maro, for in him the spirit of the ancient Maro has come back to life.' (A XV 117-25) This name-giving incident has all the ingredients of the esoteric tradition: the teacher bestows on the pupil a name which reveals something of his spiritual nature, a name with true symbolic value. (That of the name Vir-gilius would have been lost on none of his readers, of course.68) The significance of the episode is heightened by its context: the Catalogue of grammarians (translated in appendix 2) is no ordinary list of authorities such as one finds in the dedicatory epistle to Boniface's grammar, 69 nor is it an attempt to trace an unbroken tradition from one teacher to the next, like Gozbert's Grammaticorum diadoche?0 Even in the context of the inside-out world that Virgilius inhabits it is a puzzle. Twelve grammarians are named: the venerable Donatus of Troy, his pupil Virgilius of Troy, Virgilius Maro himself, Virgilius Assianus, Primogenus of Cappodocia, Estrius the Spaniard, Gregory of Egypt, Balapsidus of Nicomedia, the three Vulcans,71 and Virgilius' grandfather Martulis. The list thus includes a number who appear nowhere else in Virgilius' writings (Primogenus, Gregory(?), Balapsidus, two of the three Vulcans, Martulis), while several who

j6


play a prominent part elsewhere do not figure here — Galbungus, Terrentius, Regulus Cappadocus and Sedulus Romanus, along with Aeneas himself. But Aeneas' absence may be explicable in terms of another feature of the mystery traditions. Circles of twelve gathered about a sun figure have a venerable history, from Christ and the twelve apostles, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, up to Dante and Beatrice surrounded by twelve figures in the heaven of the sun (Paradiso X).72 Aeneas, as the teacher, the centre of the group, is not himself one of its members. Despite the title of the chapter, by no means all the pupils are portrayed as grammarians, either in the narrow or in the extended sense. Virgilius of Troy wrote verses, Primogenus was 'learned in natural science and most capable in the computation of the moon and months', Estrius was given to the composition of histories and Gregory to the writing of books on the history of the Greeks. The interests of Balapsidus (apart from translation) and the three Vulcans remain unclear, leaving only Donatus of Troy, two of the three Virgils, Martulis and Aeneas himself as grammarians in the strict sense. The historical veracity of Virgilius' account — less likely than ever in the light of the punning aspect of Virgilius' verses, Estrius' 'istories, and Gregory's Greeks73 — is not at issue. The kind of grammatica on which they were engaged had nothing to do with declensions and conjugations. The language of wisdom and the route to it were immaterial, as Virgilius hinted with his twelve Latins and the vagaries of latinitas inussitata. Through (o) ratio he hoped to transcend the words of human speech to attain to true sapientia. Not all seekers after truth are necessarily grammarians, nor all grammarians truth-seekers, yet all of them — in Virgilius' world — strive to comprehend the Word through the words of human speech.

CHAPTER 6

The Epistolae: Virgilius Retractatio?

The Epitomae, with its kaleidoscopic messages of multiplicity and quiet insistence upon the fire of the spirit, found a ready welcome among grammar teachers, to judge from its transmission: in the later eighth century it was incorporated into a number of codices which contained collections of grammars. Some monastic instructors, at least, felt no hesitation in preserving it, whatever they made of its message. The relatively large number of extant manuscripts and fragments of the Epitoma^ up to about the middle of the ninth century, and borrowings by authors such as Boniface and Bede, suggest that grammarians valued it highly. But not all its readers appreciated it. Virgilius' inflammatory rejoinder to his critics, part indignant, part defensive, at the start of the third Epistola makes it clear that his message of plurality had met with a poor reception in some circles at least: Before we put our hand to the explanation of the verb, on which we contributed some brief but wide-ranging remarks in the Epitomae, I think it is appropriate to reply to those who bark and snap at us with their unhallowed fangs, accusing us of appearing to contradict ourselves in our various arts when what one says, another apparently tears to shreds.2 They do not realise that Latin is so huge and so profound that to expound it fully one must use a multiplicity of methods, words, forms and meanings. Who in his right mind would believe that Latin is so narrow and restricted that each word could be encapsulated in a single form and meaning, especially when the varieties of Latin itself are twelve in number, and each variety embraces many (p)arts within itself? Everyone reading and scrutinising this with sound judgement (if, that is, he is not infected with envy: no one who is envious can possess sound

77

yS

The Epistolae: Wr£//«/j'Retractatio? judgement, for in envying others he deprives himself of the clear light of truth), indeed, every reader eager in his subtle wits to set out upon the multifarious paths of Latin speech should first consider the force and essence of speech itself, if, that is, it can be rightly grasped by anyone, in view of its subtlety and copiousness. Secondly, he should realise that there are many reasons for the alteration of individual words: all speech is subject to various kinds of necessity, distinctions of persons, metrical exigencies, the embellishment of utterances. If anyone could eliminate these things — which of course is quite impossible — he would be able to construct one and the same road, custom and view {sententid) to be held to always in the whole of Latin. Just as there is one public royal road which leads to the metropolis, but many little paths branching away from it which nonetheless all arrive at the same city (after all, when two people set out on the same journey and one elects to travel by the broad public way while the other prefers to take a short cut along a path, they still meet in the same city), so too this Latin with which we are concerned, although a single language in its essential nature, still contains within itself virtually unlimited sentences and utterances through which the truth of that one language may be manifested, albeit via different paths of speech. (B III 1-43)

Whereas in the Epitomae Virgilius had been content to let the message of multiplicity emerge gradually, here he feels compelled not merely to spell out his meaning, but to plead for it with much the same virulent scorn as his patristic predecessors had poured upon their adversaries.3 Nor is this passage the only feature of the Epistolae to hint at a certain lack of sympathy on the part of some of the readers of the Epitomae. The preface consists largely of a pointed reiteration of Virgilius' claims to orthodoxy. He urges others to join him in the assiduous study of the 'trickle of philosophical wisdom', recalling the careful explanation set out in the first of the Epitomae of the relationship between the 'humble earthly wisdom' which Virgilius pursues and the 'heavenly wisdom of the laws of the Hebrews' which the earthly wisdom seeks to adorn and elucidate. And here and there in the Epistolae Virgilius slips in remarks which underscore his orthodoxy. With such asides Virgilius does no more than strengthen a theme already present in the Epitomae. In other respects the

The Epistolae: K/>g///W Retractatio?

79

Epistolae differ strikingly from the Epitomae, both in the introduction of new themes, and, significantly, in the disappearance of several themes previously prominent — themes which comprised at once the most egregiously non-grammatical subjects of the Epitomae and the doctrinally most suspect. Gone are the twelve Latins, the asides on the nature of man and the divisions of filosophia, the passing references to the power of fire and the evils of avarice. Virgilius now focuses much more directly and singlemindedly on problems of Latin grammar: his views on other topics, although by no means totally excluded, tend to be integrated more closely with the overt teaching of the text. This applies too to one of the most prominent themes of the Epistolae, that of authority. Although auctoritas is mentioned (directly or indirectly) more than twice as often in the Epistolae as in the Epitomae, it was by no means ignored in the earlier work. We have already considered Virgilius' reverence for his teacher (a special kind of authority, it is true). But in addition he warns the reader that those who prefer their own authority to that of the ancients are not a reliable model to follow.4 He himself follows the doctorum scita, 'the facts known to the professors' (A V 291). Nonetheless, ancient usage is not necessarily to be equated with authority, or so he believes in the Epitomae: Even though these forms do not in my view exhibit indubitable authority, nonetheless they should not occasion open distrust, for they are used by a large number of very learned men. (A V 107-10) Similarly in the Epistolae: I therefore advise you, dearest brother, thus: although we do not use this manner of writing nowadays, all the same, because it was considered correct by the ancients, if you should encounter anything of this kind in writing you should not reject it altogether because it was used by the ancients, even if you think that it cannot be attributed to indubitable authority. (B I 42-7) To Virgilius auctoritas stands higher than mere consuetudo 'usage', even the usage of the ancients. Ancient precedent alone is insufficient to establish authority; as Virgilius makes very clear in the

80

The Epistolae: V/rg///w/Retractatio?

Epistolae, no matter how many writers used deviant forms of alius, unless they were to be found in the works of 'Cicero, Don, Cato, Virgilius of Asia or Virgilius of Troy, Galbungus, Terrentius, or the others who composed many works on the disciplines elegantly and ornamentally' (B II 129—33) — m other words, in the works of writers possessing auctoritas5 — they were unacceptable. A few chapters later his perception of where auctoritas might reside is refined: This ancient custom (consuetudo) of using participles for verbs held sway throughout many provinces of Africa and Europe; but no such practice of reading or writing anything in lieu of verbs was handed down to us by our teachers, so let us look to see whether any of the ancient fathers, the contravention of whose doctrines is strictly forbidden, ever used a participle for a verb or decreed that it should be so used. If we find such a case, we too should imitate it, even though we recall saying that a verb should not be made from a participle [cf. A IX 106-7]. Nevertheless, we will [in that case] change our pronouncement. (B V 103—14) Apparently lacking any confidence in his own authority, Virgilius offers to retract his own previously authoritative pronouncement (thereby denying his authority and by implication that of his teachers) and to defer to the writings of the Fathers. Consuetudo veterum 'usage of the ancients' is to be corroborated by consuetudo patrum 'usage of the Fathers', and personal authority is relegated to the sidelines. The respective roles of authority, usage and reason (auctoritas, consuetudo, ratio) in speech, discussed at length by Quintilian (Inst. or. I vi), was a question briefly alluded to by a number of Late Latin grammarians and developed by one, St Augustine. 6 In the Epistolae Virgilius several times takes up this theme, his turns of phrase not infrequently echoing those of Augustine in the Ars breviata. Virgilius discovers, like Augustine before him, that authority, at first sight supreme, in practice gives way to usage, and reason comes a poor third. His teacher Aeneas, for instance, surmises that a correction of his to the common view 'will not please the Romans, for they are used to following obstinate habit (consuetudo) rather than clear-cut reason' (B IV 61-2). 7

The Epistolae: Virgilius' Retractatio?

81

Virgilius' favourite manner of presenting questions of authority is the dramatised dispute, a particular feature of the Epistolae. Whereas in the Epitomae Virgilius set out the various arguments for and against a given view ex persona auctoris, in the Epistolae he puts the arguments into the mouths of his authorities: Terrentius and Galbungus on the vocative of ego, Regulus Cappadocus and Sedulus Romanus on the various forms of the verb. The second of these disputes is dramatically introduced: A by no means trivial dispute on these forms of verbs arose between Regulus Cappadocus and Sedulus Romanus and almost came to armed conflict. They went without sleeping or eating for fifteen days and as many nights, and each side drew up three thousand reinforcements [or, three soldiers]. (B III 233-8) Regulus, arguing (like Virgilius himself) that forms other than those in general use ought to be admitted, namely calescui, a perfect analogically formed from calesco; frequentative forms for every verb analogous to the series lecto legito lectito from lego; and a parallel set of inchoative forms in -isco alongside those in -esco (e.g. calesco calisco)? is challenged by Sedulus Romanus, the staunch defender of Roman tradition, to produce evidence from earlier writers. He succeeds in doing so for some cases but not surprisingly is defeated in others, which does not keep Virgilius from quoting several of his assertions. This inconclusive outcome is typical of the Epistolae: Virgilius not infrequently confesses his inability to decide among competing views, turning to Aeneas for guidance 9 or leaving the question unresolved.10 Although authority maintains a stronger presence in the Epistolae than in the Epitomae, Virgilius' views seem strangely inconsistent. Sometimes he stoutly maintains the authority of the ancients, but sometimes permits creeping uncertainty to destabilise the whole notion. Ambiguity is pointed out repeatedly,11 instilling insidious doubt into the reader's mind. If a grammarian cannot convey confidence in authority, who can? By his very inconsistency Virgilius signals his view: authority is (as a rule) as inappropriate a means of settling linguistic disputes as it is in other situations. Ambiguity, which after all is simply another sort of

82

The Epistolae: Virgilius' Retractatio?

plurality, is as mighty a force in language as in other spheres of activity.

CHAPTER 7

Concealment of mysteries: the techniques of secrecy

One of the strangest features of Virgilius' writing for a modern reader — and surely for his contemporaries as well — is his language. Grammarians, we learn in childhood, are the arbiters of correct speech. They record the usage of the writers acknowledged as the best, and thereby create a norm: descriptive in intention, prescriptive and ultimately proscriptive in application. Grammarians reserve the right to make up examples when their favourite authors refuse to oblige, giving rise to anything from the bland — la plume de ma tante or 'John is easy to please' — to the implausible — albus Socrates currit bene or the celebrated 'the postillion has been struck by lightning' — to the improving and morally directive: 'idleness produces want, vice, and misery'. But inventing words and scrambling forms? Such outrageous behaviour accords ill with the self-esteem and self-importance of grammarians from Antiquity on. Virgilius is not alone in twisting language, or so he would have us believe. The first in his circle to practise the scrambling of words (scinderatio fonorum) was his teacher Aeneas. Asked by Virgilius why he did so, Aeneas replied: My son, words are scrambled for three reasons: first, so that we may test the ingenuity of our students in searching out and identifying obscure points; secondly, for the ornamentation and reinforcement of speech; thirdly, lest mystical matters which should only be revealed to the initiated be discovered easily by base and stupid people. (A X 3-9)

84

Concealment of mysteries

Virgilius returns to the need for concealment toward the end of the Epistolae: 'The accents on these prepositions are there less because of their elegance in verse than because they are necessary to hide the mysteries and to give practice in teaching this kind of Latin' (B VII 33—6). Concealment is the essence of Virgilius' method. His fondness for riddles and significant names, his enigmatic quasi-personal asides, his delight in hiding important messages behind apparently casual analogies — these pervasive techniques warn the reader of the chasm that gapes between the surface and the essence of his writing. And yet he gives a guide (of sorts) to the devices of secrecy.

T H E SCRAMBLING O F W O R D S

In the tenth epitome, 'The Scrambling of Words' (De scinderatione fonorum), there is an open discussion of the conventions of concealment. After the brief introduction (above) in which Aeneas explains to Virgilius why words are scrambled, Virgilius launches into his exposition, illustrating it with generous quotations from the works of his unknown authorities: There are three types of scrambling. The first is when we scramble verses, as when Cato said: mare oceanum classes quod longae sepe turbatur simul navigant 'the oceanic sea / because strung-out fleets / is often troubled / sail together'. He should have said this: mare oceanum sepe turbatur classes quod longae simul navigant 'the oceanic sea / is often troubled / because strung-out fleets / sail together'. The second is when we scramble the words themselves

Concealment

of mysteries

85

or their syllables, as when Lucan produced this: ge ves ro trum quando turn affec omni libet aevo, which is solved thus: quandolibet vestrum gero omni aevo affectum 'I bear affection for you at all

times'. The third kind is when we scramble letters. The scrambling of letters is unnecessary, but nonetheless is permitted by cunning people of hair-splitting ingenuity. (A X 14-30) Virgilius then gives several examples of the scrambling of words, as in the rhetor Emelius' remarkable statement: SSSSSSSSSSS PP NNNNNNNN GGGG RR MM TTT D CC AAAAAAA Mil VVVVVVVV 0 JE EEEEEEEE, the solution of which is sapiens sapientiae sanguinem sugens sanguissuga venarum recte vocandus est 'a wise man sucking the blood of wisdom is rightly to be called a bloodsucker of the veins'. Other kinds of verbal disguise follow, as for example when only the ending of the verb is used instead of the whole word, as in Cicero's comment about the sun: magnum luminare quod totum circuit polum sol ur 'the great luminary which travels right around the sky ed the sun', where ur (ed in the translation) represents nominatur 'is called'. Latinitas filosophica habitually adds or drops letters or syllables — rogavisse for rogasse (both standard Latin forms), probaat for probat or donum for bonum (definitely non-standard). Some writers, he maintains, scattered the syllables of a scrambled word through the lines of a verse, as in this stanza attributed to Cicero: omne visum ab homine CU delectabile natura stigante PI ipsi indita, ex qui non potest TUR cupidine carere. 'Every delightful IS thing seen by man

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