The Classics in Sarasota

Eros in Plato

2012-02-14T08:35:00.000-05:00

Delancey Place offers "eclectic excerpts" from a large variety of books and blogs. You can subscribe and get them every day. Here's the excerpt from the Symposium for Valentine's Day:

In today's excerpt - symposia, the private banquets of the elite in ancient Athens. One such famous gathering was hosted by Agathon and attended by Socrates. The subject of the evening's discussion was the nature of Eros, the great god of desire. It is worth noting how esteemed homosexuality was at this time:

"Agathon, in a grand rhetorical flourish befitting a poet, concludes [the early portion of the discussion by saying] that though all the gods are happy, Eros is 'the most happy, since he is the most beautiful and the best.'

"To this much, all the participants save the still-silent Socrates agree. But beyond Eros's power and proximity to happiness, there is little else on which the guests can establish common ground. One speaker, Pausanias, refuses to see Eros as a single entity, claiming that he must be divided in two as Common Eros and Heavenly Eros - the one, a seedy creature drawn by sexual appetite and so depraved that he will even sleep with women; the other, a more transcendent being attracted by mind as well as beauty, who finds his consummate expression in the higher love between boys and older men. Eryximachus, on the other hand, views Eros as a pantheistic force found not only in the hearts of gods and humans but 'also in nature - in the physical life of all animals, in plants that grow in the ground, and in virtually all living organisms.'

"Finally, Aristophanes maintains in a celebrated fable that human beings were originally joined two at a time to form complete wholes. Overly powerful, these four-legged creatures provoked the suspicion of the gods, who had them sundered to reduce their strength; now each half walks the earth in search of its other. The fable explains our sexual orientation, for men originally joined to men will seek their complement in the same sex, while those originally joined to women will seek their other half accordingly. It also explains our sense of longing and loss, as we wander the earth in search of the one who will make us whole. '[W]here happiness for the human races lies,' Aristophanes concludes, is 'in the successful pursuit of love.' Eros is the great benefactor who will '[return] us to our original condition, healing us, and making us blessed and perfectly happy.'

"A pantheistic force animating the world; a schizophrenic deity both plebeian and patrician; a guide who leads us only to ourselves: Eros, clearly, is no simple god. He is, Socrates contends, no god at all. Drawing together the strands of these various reflections, Socrates maintains that Eros is, rather, a 'great spirit' who is 'midway between what is divine and what is human,' his ambiguous nature owing to the strange circumstances of his conception. Sired at the birthday party of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of Poverty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and the god Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. How Plenty is able to perform in such a state, we are not told (presumably, a feat of the gods), but perform he does, producing a son who is neither 'mortal nor immortal.' Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Constantly in need, he is 'hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless.' But, like his father, he is 'brave, enterprising, and determined.' Having inherited 'an eye for beauty and the good,' Eros continually searches for these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the presence of Aphrodite.

"Straddling the human and the divine, Eros is an emissary, conducting 'all association and communication, waking or sleeping,' between the gods and men. His twofold nature explains his defining characteristic - desire itself. For what is desire but the human acknowledgment that one is in need, that one is lacking? As Socrates explains, 'the man who desires something desires what is not available to him, and what he doesn't already have in his possession.' "

Author: Darrin M. McMahon
Title: Happiness: A History
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly PressDate: Copyright 2006 by Darrin M. McMahon
Pages: 32-34

Happiness: A History

by Darrin M. McMahon by Atlantic Monthly Press

Hardcover

If you wish to read further: Buy Now

"a cultural language that we have learned to speak"

2012-01-15T23:44:00.001-05:00

Mary Beard in the New York Review of Books:

Do the Classics Have a Future?

the classics are embedded in the way we think about ourselves, and our own history, in a more complex way than we usually allow. They are not just from or about the distant past. They are also a cultural language that we have learned to speak, in dialogue with the idea of antiquity. And to state the obvious, in a way, if they are about anybody, the classics are, of course, about us as much as about the Greeks and Romans.. . .
The study of the classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves. It is not only the dialogue that we have with the culture of the classical world; it is also the dialogue that we have with those who have gone before us who were themselves in dialogue with the classical world. . .

The second point is the inextricable embeddedness of the classical tradition within Western culture. I don’t mean that the classics are synonymous with Western culture; there are of course many other multicultural strands and traditions that demand our attention, define who we are, and without which the contemporary world would be immeasurably poorer. But the fact is that Dante read Virgil’s Aeneid, not the epic of Gilgamesh.. . . if we were to amputate the classics from the modern world, it would mean more than closing down some university departments and consigning Latin grammar to the scrap heap. It would mean bleeding wounds in the body of Western culture—and a dark future of misunderstanding. I doubt we’ll go that way.

The Jewish Annoted New Testament

2011-12-26T09:42:00.000-05:00

The New Testament is constantly being re-interpreted from a variety of perspectives. From feminists, to socialists, to traditionalists; there's even a version as seen through the prism of Star Wars.

Well now, you can add to the collection The Jewish Annotated New Testament by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler. More...

Tropes: Science and Isaiah

2011-12-25T12:17:00.000-05:00

On the value of metaphor to science:

The tentative discovery at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider of the Higgs boson -- among the key missing links in our fundamental theories of matter -- again shows the surprising power of mathematics to illuminate nature’s secrets. But the discovery also points to the value of scientific metaphor, of guessing that things we know nothing about might turn out to be surprisingly similar to things we’re familiar with. Indeed, the theory behind the Higgs boson owes as much to what’s already known about mundane things like iron magnets and metals as it does to exotic mathematics.

From a conversation with Walter Brueggemann:

Ms. Tippett: I'd love to talk about your image of God, and I want you to talk about that more personally. But I thought I might start, you know, for example, in one of your sermons, you are talking about some poetry, Isaiah, and you talk about that it offers five images for God. This is just one — (laughter) one passage in Isaiah:

"A demolition squad, a safe place for poor people who have no other safe place, the giver of the biggest dinner party you ever heard of, the powerful sea monster he will swallow up death forever, a gentle nursemaid who will wipe away every tear from all faces."

How are normal people, not biblical scholars, how are they to make sense of a text like that? Of a God — who God is?

Mr. Brueggemann: Well, they're going to make sense of it if they have good preachers and teachers to help them pause long enough to take in the imagery. But you see, what the church does with its creeds and its doctrinal tradition, it flattens out all the images and metaphors to make it fit into a nice little formulation and then it's deathly. So we have to communicate to people, if you want a God that is healthier than that, you're going to have to take time to sit with these images and relish them and let them become a part of your prayer life and your vocabulary and your conceptual frame.

Income inequality in the Roman Empire

2011-12-17T07:32:00.003-05:00

Two economists find income disparity in the Roman Empire at the peak of its population (150 C.E.):

To determine the size of the Roman economy and the distribution of income, historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen pored over papyri ledgers, previous scholarly estimates, imperial edicts, and Biblical passages. Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 C.E. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top 1 percent of Roman society controlled 16 percent of the wealth, less than half of what America’s top 1 percent control.

. . . They point out that the majority of extant Roman ruins resulted from the economic activities of the top 10 percent. “Yet the disproportionate visibility of this ‘fortunate decile’ must not let us forget the vast but—to us—inconspicuous majority that failed even to begin to share in the moderate amount of economic growth associated with large-scale formation in the ancient Mediterranean and its hinterlands.”

More...

The "Death" of Tragedy?

2011-12-06T11:20:00.000-05:00

A friend brought to my attention a book that might be said to address questions at the heart of this blog, i.e., the complex legacy of descending from two extremely different traditions, the ancient Greeks and the Jews of the Old Testament: The Death of Tragedy by George Steiner.

From the top review on Amazon:

Steiner argues that Tragedy is an Artform unique to the Western world. In his opening pages he makes the claim that for the Judaic sensibility there is no tragedy as it is "vehement in its conviction that the order of the universe and of man's estate is accessible to reason." pp.4 For Steiner tragedy arises out of a contrary view"necessity is blind and man's encounter with it shall rob him of his eyes, whether in Thebes or in Gaza." pp.5 For Steiner this is a Greek assertion.Steiner makes a learned survey of Western Literature showing the points at where tragic genius has flourished, and the many more where it has been attempted and failed. Close to the end of the work he makes this observation "..tragedy is that form of art which requires the intolerable burden of God's presence. It is now dead because His shadow no longer falls upon us as it fell on Agamemnon or Macbeth or Athalie. " Steiner then goes on to talk briefly about the possibility of renewal of tragedy under different circumstances. This work is a stellar piece of literary criticism- whether one takes issue with Steiner and believes Job on the one hand , and Willy Loman in another way , are tragic characters after all.

Without having read the book, it's impossible to be sure, but from our readings of the Greco-Roman classics, and from the Old Testament, I have a feeling that I'd be in major and lively disagreement with Steiner's basic premises.

Another snippet (p. 5):

Who says Dickenson is dead?

2011-11-24T08:14:00.001-05:00

NPR focuses on a citywide effort in Tucson to put people in touch with Emily Dickenson - in some cases almost literally.

Emily Dickinson is all over Tucson, Ariz. Reading, lectures, classroom lessons — it's all part of the Big Read Project, a National Endowment for the Arts project devoted to "inspiring people across the country to pick up a good book." In Tucson, people aren't just picking up Dickinson's poetry books — they're celebrating her in reading, dance and even desserts.

"You don't want to put somebody up on a pedestal and pay homage ... that's not very interesting," says Lisa Bowden with a laugh. Bowden is a publisher and poet, and the organizer of Big Read Tucson.

One of her ideas was to hold open recording sessions for anyone to read Dickinson's poetry and letters. Restaurants and coffee houses then play those recordings to stimulate conversation and creativity.

Folks are also invited to adapt Dickenson's style to texting, to which, indeed, it lends itself. A few more posts about Dickenson.

Nietzsche on Horace

2011-10-09T20:36:00.002-04:00

In his last year of literary production, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote several books, including Twilight of the Idols. By the time this book hit the booksellers, Nietzsche was no longer sane - he didn't recognize his own works. This is one of the last passages from that last work, in which he begins to reflect on his literary relationship to the ancients. The whole passage can be found here by scrolling nearly to the end.

WHAT I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS

1 In conclusion, a word about that world to which I sought interpretations, for which I have perhaps found a new interpretation — the ancient world. My taste, which may be the opposite of a tolerant taste, is in this case very far from saying Yes indiscriminately: it does not like to say Yes; better to say No, but best of all to say nothing. That applies to whole cultures, it applies to books — also to places and landscapes. In the end there are very few ancient books that count in my life: the most famous are not among them. My sense of style, of the epigram as a style, was awakened almost instantly when I came into contact with Sallust. Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm toward "beautiful words" and "beautiful sentiments" — here I found myself. And even in my Zarathustra one will recognize my very serious effort to achieve a Roman style, for the aere perennius [more enduring than bronze] in style.

Nor was my experience any different in my first contact with Horace. To this day, no other poet has given me the same artistic delight that a Horatian ode gave me from the first. In certain languages that which Horace has achieved could not even be attempted. This mosaic of words, in which every word — as sound, as place, as concept — pours out its strength right and left and over the whole, this minimum in the extent and number of the signs, and the maximum thereby attained in the energy of the signs — all that is Roman and, if you will believe me, noble par excellence. All the rest of poetry becomes, in contrast, something too popular — mere sentimental blather.

A sensitive reader

2011-10-09T07:31:00.007-04:00

The Genesis of Desire, a reading of some of the best known stories of Genesis with Avivah Zornberg. Scots-born Zornberg brings a lot to her reading of the Bible, including modern psychological study coupled with a deep knowledge of the Zohar and the Midrash. The Bible via this sensitive reader begins to seem a very strange, numinous place.

On the flood story:

Ms. Zornberg: Ah, what's happening there. I mean, everything is happening. I think whatever you can read in the text is happening. What I'm interested in is the issue of language and silence, a kind of defensive silence, and the basis for this apparently very modern theme actually is in the Zohar, in the source of Kabbalah.
Ms. Tippett: That's interesting too because we never — when that story is told to children, for example, I think it's mostly children who hear the Flood story — we never reflect on the life in the ark. You get the two by two coming on and then coming out at the end.
[snip]
Ms. Zornberg: Yes, yes.
Ms. Tippett: So how does the Zohar …
Ms. Zornberg: The Zohar and Midrashic sources — first of all, how did they all eat? How did the animals eat? It's a big …
Ms. Tippett: Right [laugh].
Ms. Zornberg: Yes. I mean, all right, maybe they brought on food for the animals, but how did they get at it? So Zohar imagines very beautifully that Noah spends his whole time, morning and night, day and night, feeding the animals. That's an expression of his desire to preserve the world. And he feeds each animal according to its own timing, it's own feeding schedule, so he's really rather fully occupied feeding the world. He doesn't get a wink of sleep, again, in these Midrashic sources. He has no sexual relations with his wife and no one does. There is no sex. Even the animals on the ark, you know, don't have relations.
[snip]
Ms. Zornberg: Absolutely. And on top of that, I think precisely the things that he can't do in the ark or he mustn't do, like sexual relations, sleeping, the way he spends all his time feeding, it occurred to me that these are descriptions of God. God feeds all living beings and God doesn't sleep. He doesn't slumber nor sleep and God, of course, has no partner. So in a sense, there's a kind of omnipotence that Noah is experiencing in this prison, which is, again, very natural that, once you have deprived yourself of life and you see that in some way as an ideal and as an expression of ultimate power because you are not compromised now in any way by the messy world of talk, of communication. So to me, it's a defense mechanism and he refuses to let go of it.

On reading:

Ms. Zornberg: You know, you don't read; you study. You study the text and that implies that you don't really understand it, first off. You read it and then you read it again and then you notice things and things don't work and things don't make sense and then you're exorcised by it. And that's what I call desire, because something is not. Something that should be there is not there and that's what gets people going. That's what gets people involved and this very intimate connection between the human being and the text, between Jews and this text, is a result of that.

A transcript of the full interview with Zornberg.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Zornberg is a celebrated literary teacher of Torah. Her books include The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious and The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis.

Another, briefer interview here.

Göbekli Tepe

2011-10-05T21:59:00.006-04:00

National Geo has a great cover story this month about the world's oldest temple, dating back some 11,600 years, being excavated in Turkey

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.

More here and here.

Mitchell "does" Homer

2011-09-30T20:51:00.001-04:00

Stephen Mitchell has a new treatment of the Iliad:

It's Not All Greek to Him

The 'rock star' of translators produces a daring new version of the epic poem; the 'B' word

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

In various versions of Homer's nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem "The Iliad," the Trojan warrior Hector is referred to as "glorious," "flashing helmeted," and "man-killing." But he's probably never been described as a "son of a bitch" before.

Getty Images

Menelaus pursues Helen of Troy before the altar of Apollo as recounted in 'The Iliad,' in an engraving by Piringer after the original Grecian vase.

Stephen Mitchell's take on "The Iliad," the first major new translation in nearly 15 years, is an action-packed, slick and contemporary rendering of the Trojan war saga. Mr. Mitchell took some unusual liberties: He cut about 1,100 lines, modernized the dialogue and left out most of the fusty-seeming descriptors attached to each character (swift-footed Achilles, bright-eyed Athena, crafty Odysseus).

The text is peppered with modern slang. Helen refers to herself at one point as a "bitch" (the Greek original is "dog-eyed one"). Elsewhere, Hector yells a phrase at a soldier that could be literally translated as "Begone, cowardly puppet." Other translators have struggled with the insult, rendering it as "wicked doll," "rag doll" and "glittering little puppet." In Mr. Mitchell's translation, Hector yells, "Go ahead, sissy, run!" And when Achilles rails at Hector, he doesn't call him, "You doer of deeds not forgotten," as the original Greek reads. Instead, Mr. Mitchell has Achilles say, "Don't talk to me of agreements, you son of a bitch."

Mr. Mitchell defends his movie-style dialogue. "If you translate literally, the English may sound stilted or phony," says Mr. Mitchell. Asked if he thought his version would stir controversy, he laughed. "Of course," he said. "That's how scholars earn their living, by disputing things."

Mr. Mitchell, 68, may be the closest thing that the translation world has to a rock star. He brings oblique sayings in ancient languages to the masses, upsetting established scholars and occasionally creating unlikely hits. His 1988 version of the Tao Te Ching sold more than 900,000 copies in the U.S. Several of his other popular translations, which include The Gospel According to Jesus, Gilgamesh and poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, have each sold more than 100,000 copies.

Some of his translations aren't, strictly speaking, translations, but adaptations. He knows Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian and Danish, but he's also rewritten works in languages he doesn't know—Chinese, Sanskrit and Babylonian. His interpretations of sacred texts have been criticized by evangelical Christians and "very irate Taoists," says Mr. Mitchell.

There have been plenty of English translations of "The Iliad," including several published in the 20th century. Mr. Mitchell says he felt he could do better. "I've never been able to read 'The Iliad,' actually, until I sat down to do this," he says. "I could never get past book one in any translation. I found the language very dull."

Several years ago, he picked up the original Greek text and began translating the opening lines for fun. He was quickly immersed in the dramatic story. The epic opens 10 years into the war, which the Greeks waged after the Trojan prince Paris kidnapped Helen, the wife of the Greek king Menelaus.

Mr. Mitchell, who was born in Brooklyn and studied comparative literature at Yale, bounced some ideas off Homeric scholars, including Martin West, who wrote a book about how "The Iliad" was composed. Using Mr. West's research as a guideline, Mr. Mitchell cut about 7% of the poem—because he believes those passages were added by later poets. He dropped book 10, which describes a nighttime raid against the Trojans, entirely. He left out most of the stock character descriptions because he felt that while the phrases serve a rhythmic function in Greek, they add nothing in English.

His next project: "The Odyssey."

A new digital resource for the Dead Sea Scrolls

2011-09-26T13:49:00.001-04:00

The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls.

Jerusalem

2011-09-23T10:44:00.004-04:00

Arline sends this link to a remarkable aerial tour of Israel: Watch it in full screen mode if possible. Its a preview of Jerusalem, an IMAX film set for release in 2013.

Masada

Genesis and the Genome

2011-08-09T11:43:00.003-04:00

This recent NPR story about a debate over belief in a literal Adam and Eve raises some interesting interpretive points. While there's a longstanding basis for interpreting Genesis allegorically, some scholars say if you remove the literal Adam (and Eve), you remove Paul's interpretation of the meaning of the work of Jesus Christ.

"Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul's description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament," [Albert] Mohler says.

...

"The evolution controversy today is, I think, a Galileo moment," says Karl Giberson, who authored several books trying to reconcile Christianity and evolution, including The Language of Science and Faith, with Francis Collins

A book that looks interesting and perhaps relevant

2011-08-06T14:10:00.006-04:00

I'll be curious to see how Esotericism and the Academy, due in 2012, develops this fascinating topic:

View larger image

Esotericism and the Academy

Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture

Wouter J. Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam

Hardback

ISBN: 9780521196215

4 tables

Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm

Not yet published - available from January 2012
Academics tend to look on 'esoteric', 'occult' or 'magical' beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.Table of Contents

Introduction: hic sunt dracones
1. The history of truth: recovering ancient wisdom
2. The history of error: exorcizing Paganism
3. The error of history: imagining the Occult
4. The truth of history: entering the Academy
Conclusions: restoring memory.

The 17th Century

2011-07-04T11:25:00.004-04:00

Hooke, Micrographia

In this interview, novelist Neal Stephenson touches on a peculiar aspect of the age of Milton and Newton:

The medieval is still very much alive and well during this period. People are carrying swords around. Military units have archers. Saracens snatch people from European beaches and carry them off to slavery. There are Alchemists and Cabalists. Great countries are ruled by kings who ride into battle wearing armor. Much of the human landscape--the cities and architecture--are medieval. And yet the modern world is present right next to all of this in the form of calculus, joint-stock companies, international financial systems, etc. This can't but be fascinating to a novelist. Complete interview here.

We're mostly about Ovid these days

2011-06-25T08:58:00.000-04:00

As most of our current focus is on Ovid, please bookmark the Ovid Blog, where we' re posting with some regularity. Thanks.

Milton's God and Wagner's Wotan

2011-06-21T11:15:00.008-04:00

Anyone who subscribes to the New York Review of Books should have a look at Stephen Greenblatt's piece, "The Lonely Gods." Here's the beginning of the article from the NYRB site:

When James Levine’s tangled halo of white hair was picked up by the spotlight shining down over the orchestra pit at the May 9 performance of Die Walküre, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the audience roared with pleasure and relief. With good reason. Levine’s bad back and other health woes had forced him to pull out of multiple events he was scheduled to conduct, including one recent performance of this opera, the second in the Ring cycle. But there were no signs of diminished vigor or control on that evening.

Greenblatt eventually gets to something important regarding the visions of divine power and human freedom as found in Paradise Lost and Die Walkure, but the full article is behind a paywall. Thanks to Jutta I have a print-out and will be happy to share. Here's a comment on it from a listserv. By all means have a look, especially if you happened to catch the recent Met Opera performance of Wagner's opera.

An elegy by Catullus

2011-06-07T10:52:00.004-04:00

Little could be further from the dramatic turns of Milton's Lycidas than this simple expression of pure, helpless grief:

By ways remote and distant waters sped
by Gaius Valerius Catullus translated by Aubrey Beardsley
By ways remote and distant waters sped, Brother, to thy sad grave-side am I come, That I may give the last gifts to the dead, And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb: Since she who now bestows and now denies Hath ta'en thee, hapless brother, from mine eyes. But lo! these gifts, the heirlooms of past years, Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell; Take them, all drenched with a brother's tears, And, brother, for all time, hail and farewell! Found on Poets.org

King James Translation at 400

2011-06-03T12:06:00.002-04:00

Shaw sends us a link from this month's Harper's Mag marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible:

KING JAMES, REVISED
History’s Best Seller Turns 400
A Forum with John Banville, Charles Baxter, Dan Chiasson, Paul Guest,
Benjamin Hale, Howard Jacobson, and Marilynne Robinson

Milton's Hamlet?

2011-05-21T14:23:00.002-04:00

From a review of Harold Bloom's latest book, The Anatomy of Influence.

“The Anatomy of Influence” is Bloom’s effort — his last, he says — to recalibrate his great theory, only shorn of its “gnomic” obscurities and written in “a subtler language that will construe my earlier commentary for the general reader and reflect changes in my thinking.” One of those changes is that over time his notion of influence has become more orthodox, growing closer, in its sensitivity to echo and allusion, to the approach of the hated New Critics.

In a superb chapter, “Milton’s Hamlet,” Bloom shows how the Satan of “Paradise Lost” is the offspring of Hamlet, each a soliloquist who stands at a remove from the tragedy that engulfs him, puzzling out eloquent conundrums that press toward “depths beneath depths,” limitless self-consciousness. “It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not,” Bloom writes. “Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor, intervening between Luther and Calvin, and later Descartes and Spinoza.”

Philyreius in Ovid and Milton

2011-05-09T11:03:00.005-04:00

Here's a poem composed by John Milton when he was in his teens. His deep acquaintance with Ovid among other ancients is apparent in the use of "Philyreius," which means "son of Philyra." One would learn from Book 2.676 of the Metamorphoses that Chiron was sometimes called Philyreius.

Philyra incidentally has her own tale of transformation, told by Apollodorus among others:

PHILYRE (or Philyra) was an Okeanid nymph of Mount Pelion in Thessalia loved by the Titan Kronos. When his wife Rhea came upon their rendevous, he quickly transformed himself into a horse to escape detection. As a result, Philyre birthed a half-horse, half-man hybrid, the kentauros (centaur) Kheiron. To ease her shame, Kronos transformed the girl into a linden tree (philyra in Greek.)

Here's Milton's poem:

Learn to submit to the laws of destiny, and lift your suppliant hands to the Fate, O children of Iapetus who inhabit the pendulous orb of the earth. If Death, the doleful wanderer from Taenarus, shall but once call you, alas! vain is it to attempt wiles and delay, for all must pass through the shades of Styx. Were the right hand strong to repel destined death, fierce Hercules had not lain dead on Aemathian Oeta, poisoned by the blood of Nessus; nor had Ilium seen Hector slain by the base guile of envious Pallas; nor Sarpedon whom the phantom Achilles slew with Locrian sword, whilst Jove wept. If Hecatean words could put to flight sad fate, the infamous mother of Telegonus had yet lived, and the sister of Aegialeus, who used the powerful wand. If mysterious herbs and the art of the physicians could thwart the triple goddesses, Machaon with his skill in simples had not fallen by the spear of Eurypylus; and the arrow smeared with the serpent's blood had done you no injury, O Philyreius; nor had the arms and bolts of your grandsire harmed you, O son, who were cut from your mother's womb. And you, too, Gostlin, greater than your tutor, Apollo, you to whom was given the rule of the gowned flock, had not died, whom now leafy Cyrrha mourns, and Helicon amid its springs. You would still live, happy and honored to have shepherded the flock of Pallas. You would not have gone in Charon's skiff to the horrible recesses of the abyss. But Persephone broke the thread of life, angered when she saw how many souls you snatched from the black jaws of Death by your arts and your potent juices. Revered Chancellor, I pray that your body may rest in peace beneath the soft turf, and that from your grave may spring roses, and marigolds, and the hyacinth with blushing face. May the judgment of Aeacus rest mildly on you, and may Sicilian Proserpina grant you a smile, and in the Elysian fields among the blest may you walk for ever.

Latin text here, notes here.

Cross-posted @ the Ovid Blog.

Book VI: Bum's Rush

2011-02-27T23:45:00.008-05:00

As our reading of book 6 comes near to the end, a few things stood out in our discussion. To briefly summarize, Milton pulls out all the stops in bringing the first, cyclic half of his poem to a climax:

- the three-day structure of the book echoes the larger three-part structure of the poem, and of sacred history, which begins with a war in heaven, continues with a messianic triumph on Earth, and concludes with an apocalyptic final battle at the end of time.

- the hint that God and his creation are moving toward an ultimate convergence when God shall be "all in all."

- the diminished role of Satan, who is not directly presented or given a speech, yet ends up being mercilessly parodied.

- Milton's flawless use of Homer and the Bible, especially Exodus and Ezekiel, in portraying the action of the third day, when the Son in his Chariot singlehandedly triumphs over the rebel angels. The parallel with Achilles, whose rage dooms him, and the parody of Satan as a misguided Moses, leading his people to take a final stand before an onrushing King, only to find that instead of the Red Sea rolling back, the walls of heaven part to disclose a Promised Wasteland.

- The remarkable structure of the poem that presents a complete whole, or circle, narrating the doom of fallen Satan, then with Book VII opens a new book, a new world, and a new sense of what is at stake, of what can be lost, and where this might lead,

with wandering steps and slow.
Whatever the second half of Paradise Lost is, it is not a circle.

Notes on the Chariot of the Son

2011-02-23T21:17:00.002-05:00

The chariot in Book 6 draws upon the vision in Ezekiel:

The Biblical Merkabah

Passacaglia

2011-02-09T22:59:00.001-05:00

Here's a tune by Stefano Landi that Milton might have heard on his visit to Italy in 1638-39. If nothing else, the stylized structure of the Baroque -- powerful emotion under the pressure of controlled form -- lends itself to the grand gestures and potent speeches of Milton's angels.

Blake's Warring Muse

2011-02-06T22:14:00.004-05:00

The perpetual contention between Athens and Jerusalem, Greco-Roman tradition and Biblical Scripture, turned up in concentrated form as I was looking into online sources for Ovid. It came via a well-known line of William Blake's:

the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration.

On the cusp of the metamorphosis of the Enlightenment into the Early Romantic Age, Blake assumes a strong, uncompromising position on the relative merits of the two great traditions. Who needs Homer or Ovid, he asks:

The Stolen & Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid; of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible. but when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce; all will be set right: & those Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men, will hold their proper rank. & the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakespeare & Milton were both curbd by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword[.] Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashonable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live forever; in Jesus our Lord.

In support of his argument, Blake offers one of his most famous lyrics:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets
Numbers XI, ch 29.v.

New Dates for Milton

2011-02-04T08:33:00.000-05:00

As many know we're beginning Ovid's Metamorphoses at our regular Wednesday time on Feb. 16th. A separate blog will concern itself with those readings. It's entitled OvidsMetamorphoses.blogspot.com - click to go to it.

The Milton Reading Group's new schedule:

Fridays at Gulf Gate 10:15-12:15:

February 11 and 25
March 11 and 25
April 15 and 29

A less than entirely helpful god

2011-02-03T14:09:00.002-05:00

We wondered yesterday about "Nisroc" -- why choose this Assyrian deity precisely to represent the Wimp Brigade among Satan's legions?

in th' assembly next upstood
Nisroc, of Principalities the prime;
As one he stood escap't from cruel fight,
Sore toild, his riv'n Armes to havoc hewn,
And cloudie in aspect thus answering spake. [ 450 ]
Deliverer from new Lords, leader to free
Enjoyment of our right as Gods; yet hard
For Gods, and too unequal work we find
Against unequal arms to fight in paine,
Against unpaind, impassive; from which evil [ 455 ]
Ruin must needs ensue; for what availes
Valour or strength, though matchless, quelld with pain
Which all subdues, and makes remiss the hands
Of Mightiest. Sense of pleasure we may well
Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine, [ 460 ]
But live content, which is the calmest life:
But pain is perfet miserie, the worst
Of evils, and excessive, overturnes
All patience.

Clearly he's averse to pain, although perfectly happy to join the revolt. A quick search turns up the information that he was a god of agriculture, that his name probably signified "eagle," and that he was associated via the Hebrew word "neser," which referred to a plank of wood that King Sennacherib was told came from Noah's Ark. In good pagan form Sennacherib proceeded to worship the plank of wood as an idol.

In fact he was worshipping that very piece of wood when he was murdered by his two sons.

36So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned, and dwelt at Nineveh.

37And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with the sword: and they escaped into the land of Armenia. And Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead. 2 Kings 19.36-37

Some suggestive patterns: Even as Moloch and Adramelech earlier were associated with the blood sacrifice of young children, here this god does nothing even as the king worshiping him is being murdered by his own children. The story also fits a deep motif in Milton -- the stupidity of idolatry. First Sennacherib was dumb enough to believe some con artist's tale of a tub about a plank, then he bows to its worship, getting assassinated for his pains. (In some versions of the story, his sons kill him by toppling a lamassu -- a heavy stone idol, also purportedly a "protective" deity -- on him.) Finally there's the thread fundamental to Book 6 of the relation of father and sons, originator and offspring, central in so many ways to the poem.

Following Moloc(h)

2011-02-01T18:50:00.008-05:00

Gabriel meets "Moloc" in Bk. 6.355:

Mean while in other parts like deeds deservd
Memorial, where the might of Gabriel fought, [ 355 ]
And with fierce Ensignes pierc'd the deep array
Of Moloc furious King, who him defi'd
And at his Chariot wheeles to drag him bound
Threatn'd, nor from the Holie One of Heav'n
Refrein'd his tongue blasphemous; but anon [ 360 ]
Down clov'n to the waste, with shatterd Armes
And uncouth paine fled bellowing.

We readers have met Moloc twice before. The first time was in Bk. 1 -- he got top billing as Satan's henchmen were identified as the pagan gods:

First Moloch, horrid King besmear'd with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,
Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud
Thir childrens cries unheard, that past through fire [ 395 ]
To his grim Idol. Him the Ammonite
Worshipt in Rabba and her watry Plain,
In Argob and in Basan, to the stream
Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with such
Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart [ 400 ]
Of Solomon he led by fraud to build
His Temple right against the Temple of God
On that opprobrious Hill, and made his Grove
The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence
And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell. [ 405 ]

And again in Bk 2.43 ff, at the council in Pandemonium, Moloc argues for "open Warr":

He ceas'd, and next him Moloc, Scepter'd King
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest Spirit
That fought in Heav'n; now fiercer by despair: [ 45 ]
His trust was with th' Eternal to be deem'd
Equal in strength, and rather then be less
Care'd not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse
He reck'd not, and these words thereafter spake. [ 50 ]

My sentence is for open Warr: Of Wiles,
More unexpert, I boast not: them let those
Contrive who need, or when they need, not now.
For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,
Millions that stand in Arms, and longing wait [ 55 ]
The Signal to ascend, sit lingring here
Heav'ns fugitives, and for thir dwelling place
Accept this dark opprobrious Den of shame,
The Prison of his Tyranny who Reigns
By our delay? no, let us rather choose [ 60 ]
Arm'd with Hell flames and fury all at once
O're Heav'ns high Towrs to force resistless way,
Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms
Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his Almighty Engin he shall hear [ 65 ]
Infernal Thunder, and for Lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels; and his Throne it self
Mixt with Tartarean Sulphur, and strange fire,
His own invented Torments. But perhaps [ 70 ]
The way seems difficult and steep to scale
With upright wing against a higher foe.
Let such bethink them, if the sleepy drench
Of that forgetful Lake benumm not still,
That in our proper motion we ascend [ 75 ]
Up to our native seat: descent and fall
To us is adverse. Who but felt of late
When the fierce Foe hung on our brok'n Rear
Insulting, and pursu'd us through the Deep,
With what compulsion and laborious flight [ 80 ]
We sunk thus low? Th' ascent is easie then;
Th' event is fear'd; should we again provoke
Our stronger, some worse way his wrath may find
To our destruction: if there be in Hell
Fear to be worse destroy'd: what can be worse [ 85 ]
Then to dwell here, driv'n out from bliss, condemn'd
In this abhorred deep to utter woe;
Where pain of unextinguishable fire
Must exercise us without hope of end
The Vassals of his anger, when the Scourge [ 90 ]
Inexorably, and the torturing hour
Calls us to Penance? More destroy'd then thus
We should be quite abolisht and expire.
What fear we then? what doubt we to incense
His utmost ire? which to the highth enrag'd, [ 95 ]
Will either quite consume us, and reduce
To nothing this essential, happier farr
Then miserable to have eternal being:
Or if our substance be indeed Divine,
And cannot cease to be, we are at worst [ 100 ]
On this side nothing; and by proof we feel
Our power sufficient to disturb his Heav'n,
And with perpetual inrodes to Allarme,
Though inaccessible, his fatal Throne:
Which if not Victory is yet Revenge. [ 105 ]

He ended frowning, and his look denounc'd
Desperate revenge, and Battel dangerous
To less then Gods.

Milton was surely aware of the Medieval and Renaissance sources for demons, including grimoires like the Pseudomonarchia Daimonum and The Lesser Key of Solomon. Asmodeus appears in these, but not Moloch.

Note the word that clings to Moloch. First he's the "furious King," then the "horrid King," and then, "the Scepter'd King."

Quite a bit about him can be found in the Old Testament.

Power and the People

2011-02-01T16:18:00.009-05:00

At our last meeting, the question came up of Milton's relationship to England's absolute monarchy, its authority rooted in the "divine right of kings," and the turbulent institutional transition going on in 17th century England to a broader parliamentary mode that governed while representing the sovereign will of the people.

Everyone at the moment is finding all sorts of analogs and parallels to the recent actions in Tunisia, Cairo and Jordan, so why not we? In a certain sense, the Middle East today can be seen as beginning that difficult transition that shook England so powerfully 350 years ago.

Horatian Mash-Up

2011-01-26T19:28:00.005-05:00

Thespis, they say, discovered the Tragic Muse,
An unknown form, presenting his plays from carts,
Sung and acted by men, faces smeared with wine-lees. (faecibus)
Aeschylus, after him, introduced masks, fine robes,
Had a modest stage made of planks, and demanded
Sonorous speech, and the effort of wearing buskins.
Old Comedy came next, winning no little praise,
But its freedoms led to excess, to unruliness
Needing legal curb: the law was obeyed, the chorus,
Shamefully, fell silent, losing its rights of attack.

Horace, Ars Poetica

As we discovered reading Horace last year, he's more our contemporary than most. Here, a group of Flamenco dancers, using swarm technology, take a kind of satyr's chorus to the bank.

A bit of philology

2011-01-21T11:45:00.007-05:00

I knew that Whewell had coined the term scientist, but this story of how it came about was new to me:

It was June 24, 1833, at the meeting of the recently-founded British Association for the Advancement of Science. William Whewell (pronounced “who-ell”), a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and former professor of Mineralogy, had just finished a speech opening the conference. When the applause died down, the members were shocked to see a frail, grizzled man rise slowly to his feet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the celebrated Romantic poet, had written a treatise on scientific method decades before. Coleridge had hardly left his home in Highgate for the past thirty years, yet he had felt obliged to make the journey to attend this meeting.

At that time, the practitioners of science were known primarily as “natural philosophers.” Coleridge remarked acidly that the members of the association should no longer refer to themselves this way. Men digging in fossil pits, or performing experiments with electrical apparatus, hardly fit the definition. They were not, he meant, “armchair philosophers,” pondering the mysteries of the universe, but practical men – with dirty hands, at that. As a “real metaphysician,” he forbade them the use of this honorific.

More here.

As ever, poets steer the tongue..

"Liquid Texture:" Epic Evanescence in P.L. Book 6

2011-01-20T20:44:00.036-05:00

A long-ish post -- I hope it begins to tap into larger themes that have preoccupied this blog from the start.

As noted a while back, Book 6 thrusts us into territory that we've only glimpsed before in Paradise Lost. The epic/mock epic battle of the immortal angels poses a challenge Milton must have thought about for a good long time: how to present a battle scene that can draw upon the potent epic voice of Homer and Virgil, and include the many standard features of war poetry that accompany that voice -- the brave talk and repartee, the dual of two great fighters, the glory achieved in death, the clash of weapons and the strategies of generals in battle -- how to present this in Heaven?

The other day we looked at this depiction of Satan in the midst of the strife:

long time in eeven scale [ 245 ]
The Battel hung; till Satan, who that day
Prodigious power had shewn, and met in Armes
No equal, raunging through the dire attack
Of fighting Seraphim confus'd, at length
Saw where the Sword of Michael smote, and fell'd [ 250 ]
Squadrons at once, with huge two-handed sway
Brandisht aloft the horrid edge came down
Wide wasting; such destruction to withstand
He hasted, and oppos'd the rockie Orb
Of tenfold Adamant, his ample Shield [ 255 ]
A vast circumference:

In this "raunging" we see the physical dominance of the Homeric warrior in motion; we can almost feel the weariness of fighters, who, after a long day under the hot sun battling their enemies, sense that things can go either way, and then see their leader stand forth to do even greater deeds.

Milton is telling it here just as an ancient epic poet would, full of thrust and parry, the arduous heat of battle and the suspensful uncertainty of outcome. Yet we know, because Milton has made it clear from the beginning, that the rules here are different. These armies are self-organizing, require no leaders, and consist of vast ethereal beings who cannot be killed. Here are Satan and Michael:

two broad Suns thir Shields [ 305 ]
Blaz'd opposite, while expectation stood
In horror; from each hand with speed retir'd
Where erst was thickest fight, th' Angelic throng,
And left large field, unsafe within the wind
Of such commotion, such as to set forth
Great things by small, If Natures concord broke,
Among the Constellations warr were sprung,
Two Planets rushing from aspect maligne
Of fiercest opposition in mid Skie,
Should combat, and thir jarring Sphears confound.

Instead of seeming stymied by these complications, Milton makes a virtue of poetic necessity. After preparing the scene above, he vividly describes how Michael "shar'd" Satan with his sword:

deep entring shar'd
All his right side; then Satan first knew pain,
And writh' d him to and fro convolv'd; so sore
The griding sword with discontinuous wound
Passd through him, . . .

We experience the direct horror of epic warfare . . . but only for the length of this clause; rather than ending in death, it marks the end of pathos with a comma, before moving on, as Milton's verse relentlessly does, with "but":

. . . but th' Ethereal substance clos'd [ 330 ]
Not long divisible, and from the gash
A stream of Nectarous humor issuing flow'd
Sanguin, such as Celestial Spirits may bleed,
And all his Armour staind ere while so bright.

Before the reader or Satan can revel in the anguish of his war wound, it's closed -- indeed, we sense as we read forward that the immediately preceding verb:

passd through him

is now capable of an entirely different reading. Instead of penetrating guts, the sword is merely splicing air. Our attention is steered from Satan's innards to the matter of a stain on his Armour. Odd indeed, and more oddness is to come.

Next come the angel medics, rushing out to bear their leader off the field -- one thinks of several fallen Homeric heroes -- e.g. the rescue of Hektor, (Iliad xiv.428) -- carried off by comrades after valiant service. But Milton's peculiar alchemy won't leave it there. The battle, the wound, the pain, the bleeding (and immediate return to wholeness) the bearing off are very fine, but look at the utterly unexpected lines the scene closes with:

Yet soon he heal'd; for Spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part, not as frail man [ 345 ]
In Entrailes, Heart or Head, Liver or Reines;
Cannot but by annihilating die;
Nor in thir liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more then can the fluid Aire:
All Heart they live, all Head, all Eye, all Eare, [ 350 ]
All Intellect, all Sense, and as they please,
They Limb themselves, and colour, shape or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.

Instead culminating in an admiring send-off for the fallen hero, the poetry morphs into this mind-blowing disquisition upon the properties of "Spirits," involving an utterly different form of corporeality than the part/whole relations we humans are more or less stuck with. The fusion of "limb" and "limn" teeters on the grotesque, while "all Head, all Eye, all Eare" defies imagining.

Reading the War in Heaven as told by Raphael, then, is unlike other war spectacles. Somehow Milton is capable of sounding the diapasons of glory and heroism, and of instantly transforming their predictable pathos and eternizing glory into something far more imaginatively rich and strange. Readers caught up in the surreality of "all Head, all Eye, all Eare," forget Satan before he manages to get comfortable in his chariot.

Book 6 plays a remarkable poetic game. Milton is having us have it several ways in multiple registers. He delivers the heightened sonorities of classic heroics, yet as we listen they're already dissolving into something whose scope and daring novelty, for want of a better word, cause the lethal scenes we've just been enthralled by to strangely go from the mind.

It's not quite an oscillation: the battle is played for all it's worth, but even as we enter into its stirring spectacle, it's being deflated, obliterated if not annihilated.

Here is the same effect achieved in a single word:

. . . deeds of eternal fame [ 240 ]
Were don, but infinite:

Book 6 is not simply, then, a battle of good and bad angels. Or, perhaps it is, only they are the angels of classical tragedy and Biblical comedy, a war that's riven Western poetry from the moment these traditions were first brought into enigmatic synthesis.

Polkinghorne Interview

2011-01-16T12:27:00.013-05:00

… a dark

Illimitable ocean without bound,

Without dimension; where length, breadth, and highth,

And time and place are lost; where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.

Those intrigued by Milton's effort to grapple with the question of scientific authority within a theological frame that posits free will might be interested in this interview with John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist and Anglican theologian.

From the transcript:

If working in science teaches you anything, it is that the physical world is surprising. And I was a quantum physicist, and the quantum world is totally different from the world of every day. It's cloudy, it's fitful, you don't know where things are, if you know what they're doing. If you know what they're doing, you don't know where they are.

And:

20th-century science has seen the death of a merely mechanical and merely clockwork view of the world. It came first of all through quantum theory. At the subatomic level, quantum events are not precise and determinate. They have a certain randomness to them. They have a certain cloudiness to them, so that that process isn't clockwork.

. . . So the world is certainly not merely mechanical. And I think, actually, we always knew that because we have always known that we are not mechanisms. We are not automata. We have the power to choose, to act in the world.

. . . 20th-century science has loosened up our view of the physical world. It's no longer a piece of gigantic cosmic clockwork. It's a world in which we can conceive ourselves as the inhabitants and acting in it and helping to bring about the future.

There's a very interesting scientific insight which says that regions where real novelty occurs, where really new things happen that you haven't seen before, are always regions which are at the edge of chaos. They are regions where cloudiness and clearness, order and disorder, interlace each other. If you're too much on the orderly side of that borderline, everything is so rigid that nothing really new happens. You just get rearrangements. If you're too far on the haphazard side, nothing persists, everything just falls apart. It's these ambiguous areas, where order and disorder interlace, where really new things happen, where the action is, if you like. And I think that reflects itself both in the development of life and in many, many human decisions.

Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos

First Edition of P.L.

2011-01-15T16:14:00.003-05:00

A bit of Googling turned up the text of the original 1667 edition of Paradise Lost in 10 books, easily readable online here.

Barring several additions and minor modifications, the text is the one we have. But the division into 12 books for the second edition of 1674 (which is now the standard edition) came about by halving two very long books:

The original Book 7 became what we now have as book 7 and book 8.

The original Book 10 became what we know as book 11 and book 12.

Here's a collection of essays that looks at the first edition.

O'Halloran on Parnell: Joyce Birthday 2011

2011-01-08T11:40:00.008-05:00

The program for this year's James Joyce Birthday Celebration includes a talk by Irish scholar Kevin O'Halloran entitled "Charles Stewart Parnell: A Joycean Hero."

Olivia Swaan, a singer and harpist from Dublin, will perform musical selections before and after the lecture.

The celebration takes place Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011, at the Historical Society of Sarasota, at Crocker Memorial Church, 1260 12th Street, between N. Tamiami Trail and Cocoanut Avenue.

Following the program, stay for refreshments and Joyce's 129th Birthday Cake. The celebration is an annual event presented by The James Joyce Society of Sarasota.

For more information, contact Margaret Hoffman: 358-5827.

[Added later]: Shaw Waltz points us to Ricorso, a very rich biographical online source about Joyce.

Vicissitude

2011-01-02T11:36:00.006-05:00

Book 6, like Book 5, begins with a dawn:

till Morn,

Wak't by the circling Hours, with rosie hand

Unbarr'd the gates of Light.

Verity notes "rosie hand" in Jonson's Masque of Oberon - a nice version of which can be found at the link.

It might reward patience to look at how this description of dawn in Heaven differs from the earthly in Book 5:

There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne, [ 5 ]
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night;
Light issues forth, and at the other dore
Obsequious darkness enters, till her houre [ 10 ]
To veile the Heav'n, though darkness there might well
Seem twilight here; and now went forth the Morn
Such as in highest Heav'n, arrayd in Gold
Empyreal, from before her vanisht Night,
Shot through with orient Beams:

A few sources for P.L. 6

2010-12-30T13:55:00.015-05:00

Andrew Marvell admits he had his doubts about Paradise Lost:

When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,
In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown'd, Gods Reconcil'd Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav'n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song,

One has to wonder if those dubieties peaked with the War in Heaven of Book 6. This action-packed "epic" ("mock epic" seems not right, but nearly just as right as "epic") features sword-wielding angels in cubic phalanxes, mountains flung like mudpies, a novel mode of canon-formation, truly execrable puns, and the Merkabah, a souped-up Chariot that blows away the works of drag-racing enthusiasts.

Some critics pass over Book 6 in as few words as possible. It has to be one of the strangest poetic concoctions ever undertaken, and it's a measure of the poet's confidence that he boldly proceeded with his over-the-top treatment of the war of Satan against the Heavenly Hosts in such detail -- a scene that receives the barest mention in a few scattered places in the Bible. After the quiet meal and contemplative conversation of Book 5, Book 6 is non-stop action. But the strange poetic mode might prod us to wonder: what is action?

Shackling Michael and Gabriel in Homeric garb is one thing -- after all, they are traditionally envisioned as warriors. But the escalation of the techniques of violence from swords to howitzers to mountains seems all Milton, and it risks falling into comic-book bathos as precipitously as Satan and his legions plummet into the gaping maw of hell at the book's end. Once again in the poem, a fall is staged, but here in full military regalia. With Marvell, we might want to ask: what was he thinking?

A few bits of fable and old song to have in mind for Book 6 would necessarily include Hesiod's battle of the Olympians and Titans from his Theogony, Homer's accounts of duels and combat in the Iliad, the chariot of Ezekiel 1 and 10, and the allusions to the war in heaven in Rev. 12. If others come to mind, be sure to share them as we make our way through this strangest of literary depictions of war.

From "Who saw?" to "I see"

2010-12-18T08:43:00.029-05:00

This post is a bit long, and not finished. Just trying to tie together several threads that emerged from our close look at Book 5 of Paradise Lost this fall.

We noted the other day a contrast in the poetics of the book: on earth, the rich, full-blooded Keatsian bounty of Eve's table:

fruit of all kindes, in coate,
Rough, or smooth rin'd, or bearded husk, or shell
She gathers, Tribute large, and on the board
Heaps with unsparing hand; for drink the Grape
She crushes, inoffensive moust, and meathes [ 345 ]
From many a berrie, and from sweet kernels prest
She tempers dulcet creams,

In heaven, the somewhat anodyne, music-box routine of the angels:

Forthwith from dance to sweet repast they turn [ 630 ]
Desirous, all in Circles as they stood,
Tables are set, and on a sudden pil'd
With Angels Food, and rubied Nectar flows
In Pearl, in Diamond, and massie Gold,
Fruit of delicious Vines, the growth of Heav'n.

On the level of sheer poetry, the book is already arguing that to be human is to share Satan's impatience with too much passive ease and involuntary order.

Book 5 looks at how we got from paradise to humanity -- the problem of the fall, and of knowledge -- from a variety of perspectives. As Professor Rogers has noted, the poem opens out to multiple models of the world that are not necessarily in agreement with each other:

As a poem, Paradise Lost places all of its divergent theories and all of its competing ideologies and visions of the way the world works -- places them all side by side on something like a level playing field, the playing field of the poetic line.

We've looked in particular at the complex imagery of stars and sun, dawn and eclipse interwoven throughout the book. With regard to the theme of mind, of knowing, they offer an entirely consistent model of human understanding as illumination: a power of seeing, clarifying, distinguishing:

know that in the Soule [ 100 ]
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
Reason as chief

This is science, and it's entirely rooted in nature and compatible with the classical model of education, of paideia in Plato's sense as a turn from darkness to light, shadow to truth.

So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves [ 480 ]
More aerie, last the bright consummate floure
Spirits odorous breathes: flours and thir fruit
Mans nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd
To vital Spirits aspire, to animal,
To intellectual, give both life and sense, [ 485 ]
Fansie and understanding, whence the Soule
Reason receives,

Via the alchemy of conversation, or dialog, one communes, questions and consumes, digests, ruminates and refines in the manner of the chain of being:

one Almightie is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return, [ 470 ]
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Indu'd with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous, and pure, [ 475 ]
As neerer to him plac't or neerer tending
Each in thir several active Sphears assignd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportiond to each kind.

As Raphael's narrative continues, God, invisible in brightness, puts something new into this order -- his only begotten Son. The dawn of this Son, unlike the natural sun, is not something that simply rises out of the order of things. It is new, and it confounds the sense of reason that has been developing throughout the book. How can the Son be new if, as Word, He created the angels and all else? Is he the same as the Father or different? The new Son disturbs, runs counter to all that can be "understood" through natural light. It's going to take more than conversation, observation, and rumination to digest this new being.

At the same time, ignorance is not an option: all are under orders to actively acknowledge and obey this power, or be forever fallen:

him who disobeyes
Mee disobeyes, breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls
Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place
Ordaind without redemption, without end. [ 615 ]

Satan will invoke reason in his resistance to this mandate:

Who can in reason then or right assume
Monarchie over such as live by right [ 795 ]
His equals, if in power and splendor less,
In freedome equal? or can introduce
Law and Edict on us, who without law
Erre not,

Satan is using all the resources of logic and rhetoric to persuade his followers. Only Abdiel remains unmoved, and intuitively goes to the question of origin, generation, primacy:

But to grant it thee unjust,
That equal over equals Monarch Reigne:
Thy self though great and glorious dost thou count,
Or all Angelic Nature joind in one,
Equal to him begotten Son, by whom [ 835 ]
As by his Word the mighty Father made
All things, ev'n thee . . .

And it is this that Satan seizes upon, because he can summon reason to assist him:

who saw
When this creation was? rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?

If Abdiel can't provide empirical evidence, Satan suggests, then isn't it more likely, more"reasonable," to understand that we are self-generated?

We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd [ 860 ]
By our own quick'ning power,

But as he immediately goes on to say, to understand this sort of origination is to invoke a model of the world as determined, a natural system guided by Fate:

when fatal course
Had circl'd his full Orbe, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav'n, Ethereal Sons.

We are all sons, but natural offspring of an order that runs on its own, without any Maker. No one created the program, it just runs -- always has, always will, nothing new under the sun.

Abdiel wastes no time arguing the issue. Instead he responds to Satan's "Who saw?" with "I see":

I see thy fall
Determind,

For Abdiel, it's not reality that's determined, but Satan. By choosing to deny the Son, he denies the Father, and in choosing that, he commits to an understanding -- "reasonable," to be sure -- that removes all freedom, not from the world, but from himself. Abdiel doesn't just "see" this, he hears it:

other Decrees
Against thee are gon forth without recall; [885]

Against the visual, differentiating, communal, scientific world of reasoned knowledge -- which Milton and Raphael both value as the pinnacle of human being -- this introduces another kind of knowing. Abdiel here is neither seeing Satan literally falling, nor hearing audible decrees. Yet he "sees" that Satan's passport to paradise has been cancelled, just as Adam and Eve, in a sudden revelation that has nothing to do with argument, evidence, or the light of the sun, will see that they are naked. The book ends:

And with retorted scorn his back he turn'd
On those proud Towrs to swift destruction doom'd.

Abdiel turns away from a world that is doom'd by its knowledge that actively ignores power or knowing that might lie beyond the sun.

For Milton, as for Dante, all that the human mind can learn from itself and about nature falls within this doom. This is the natural world of science, the seasons, the rising and falling sun, the arc of life, the inevitability of death.

In Dante's Purgatorio, what lies outside that system arrives with Beatrice in the garden at the top of the mount. Here in Book 5, what lies outside that system is what Satan rejects: the Son and the inexplicable obligation that is imposed with Him.

Abdiel rejects that rejection, and foretells the eclipse of Lucifer. It's interesting to note that untold millions of angels, including other Seraphim (Abdiel is "among the Seraphim" in Satan's retinue), are swayed by Satan.

Rogers argues with some detail that Paradise Lost is not coming down finally on any side of this. He says, for example:

it's not absolutely clear to me that Satan is wrong to claim that the angels are "self-rais'd / by their own quick'ning power." I think on some level this has to be seen as true, at least according to what we know of the dynamic processes in Milton's account of the monistic Creation.

More than ever, then, we as readers are Adam, hearing a story that seems to have justice on both sides. So it'll be worthwhile to look at the horrific destruction of the War in Heaven in Book 6, and at the Creation in Book 7, with these complications in mind.

Culturomics

2010-12-17T22:14:00.004-05:00

Scientific American:

Can culture be decoded like a genome? A team from Harvard University has teamed up with Google to crack the spines of 5,195,769 digitized books that span five centuries of the printed word with the hopes of giving the humanities a more quantitative research tool.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer, launched online December 16 and described in a paper in Science, allows Web users to query their respective areas of interest based on n-grams (a method of modeling sequences in natural language). The Harvard team is calling their analysis "culturomics" based on the notion that culture "is something you can study like evolution in biology," says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard's psychology department and in the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, who helped lead the charge with Aiden. As a gene or phenotype changes over time, so, too, the researchers propose, do cultural sensibilities.

The Economist suggests that science is invading the humanities:

Reading by numbers
Science invades the humanities

But what if this sort of rich stew of millions of books also manages to humanize the sciences?

Ngram Viewer

At the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg

2010-12-16T09:29:00.007-05:00

At the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete:

Theater in Ancient Art: The William Knight Zewadski Collection

This exhibition of approximately 50 antiquities, dating from the sixth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D., celebrates the theater tradition in Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art and culture. The artworks recreate a theatrical experience that was communal, often celebratory, and sometimes erotic. Found here are not only large-scale vases with finely executed paintings, but also objects used in daily life such as oil lamps, loom weights, and a theater ticket. Highlights include the Calyx Krater—depicting Orestes, his sister Electra, and Apollo, the god of Delphi—and two vessels by the Darius Painter, considered the most erudite and important artist of Apulian pottery (present-day southern Italy). These holdings, on extended loan to the Museum by trustee William Knight Zewadski, comprise one of the most comprehensive American collections of its kind and rival similar groupings in the Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Of angels and regicide

2010-12-15T14:07:00.008-05:00

A few links pursuant to our discussion today of Book 5 of Paradise Lost:

The author of the treatise on the angels entitled Celestial Hierarchy, is known today as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The "pseudo" was added later to distinguish him from an Athenian convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34. A bit more about Dionysius is here.

The Celestial Hierarchy in full is here. More about angels here and here.

Mystical Theology, another brief work by Pseudo-Dionysius, is here.

As for our poet's writings on regicide, Milton wrote more than one defense of the actions taken by Cromwell, where the regicide is discussed and defended:

With the parliamentary victory in the Civil War, Milton used his pen in defence of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended popular government and implicitly sanctioned the regicide; Milton’s political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. Though Milton's main job description was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin, he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor. In October 1649 he published Eikonoklastes, an explicit defence of the regicide, in response to the Eikon Basilike, a phenomenal best-seller popularly attributed to Charles I that portrayed the King as an innocent Christian martyr. A month after Milton had tried to break this powerful image of Charles I (the literal translation of Eikonoklastes is 'the image breaker'), the exiled Charles II and his party published a defence of monarchy, Defensio Regia Pro Carolo Primo, written by the leading humanist Claudius Salmasius. By January of the following year, Milton was ordered to write a defence of the English people by the Council of State. Given the European audience and the English Republic's desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy, Milton worked more slowly than usual, as he drew on the learning marshalled by his years of study to compose a riposte. On 24 February 1652 Milton published his Latin defence of the English People, Defensio Pro Populo Anglicano, also known as the First Defence. Milton's pure Latin prose and evident learning, exemplified in the First Defence, quickly made him a European reputation, and the work ran to numerous editions.^[27]
In 1654, in response to an anonymous Royalist tract “Regii sanguinis clamor”, a work that made many personal attacks on Milton, he completed a second defence of the English nation, Defensio secunda, which praised Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector, while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution. Alexander Morus, to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor (in fact by Peter du Moulin), published an attack on Milton, in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655. In addition to these literary defences of the Commonwealth and his character, Milton continued to translate official correspondence into Latin. The probable onset of glaucoma finally resulted in total blindness by 1654, forcing him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses (helpers), one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell. One of his best-known sonnets, On His Blindness, is presumed to date from this period.

Milton dictating to his daughters

2010-12-04T12:41:00.003-05:00

This image of Milton's daughter taking down the poetry of Paradise Lost is by Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli. Jutta had shared it some time ago, but Google had a glitch with images on blogs.

Tales told by Socrates and Raphael

2010-12-03T19:56:00.014-05:00

As has been mentioned before, Verity's notes to Paradise Lost, some of which are available online, are quite sensible and useful. His notes to Books 5 and 6 can be accessed here.

Of the Father's 16-line decree that begins on line 600 announcing the Son, his rule, his power of mediating the Father's glory, word and will, the editor wisely begs off, saying, "upon the particular theological bearing of this passage it would, I think, be out of place to comment," confining his note to scriptural sources, of which there are several.

Rather than look at the theology (we did, somewhat, in our last session, finding it more subtle, cryptic and complex than its austere brevity lets on), I want to suggest that the shape of Raphael's story might offer some interesting parallels and contrasts with Plato's cave allegory, which Socrates tells in Republic 7. The reasons for the comparison should become clear.

In the Republic, Socrates describes the human condition as essentially benighted. We are bound, like prisoners, fixed in the darkness, compelled to look at shadows of stage props. The props are behind us, between our backs and the fire that projects their images on the cave wall.

The story tells how one of these turns his neck and sees the two-dimensional props, and immediately understands that he's been seeing something of less substance than these. He's then dragged out of the cave into the bright light of day, where he is at first blinded, then gradually becomes accustomed to the sun's illuminating actual things. Socrates assures us that if this fellow were to return to tell his fellow cave dwellers what he saw, they would take him for a madman. But the shape of the story is clear: it's a journey through space, a paradigm of the eye and of light. It moves from darkness and servitude to light and freedom, from illusion to truth, from a kind of dreamworld to a stable, clear and serene upper world where one can contemplate things as they really are. So far, Plato's tale can be said to correspond to the pervasive solar imagery of dawn in Book 5 -- a process of gradual illumination.

If we turn to the story Raphael tells Adam and Eve, we find an parallel ascent, from Nature, the garden, the flower that turns to the sun, upward along a dynamic scale of being which follows the sublimation being described by the Angel as all things are consumed, transformed and refined. At a certain point, prompted by Adam's questions, Raphael has to pause and make clear that he is about to speak of warring spirits and high matter beyond the reach of human experience:

how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits; how without remorse
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfet while they stood; how last unfould
The secrets of another World, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good [ 570 ]
This is dispenc't,

He is, then, going to speak in allegory, in figure -- we must be wary of taking what is said too literally, it will require interpreting:

and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shaddow of Heav'n, and things therein [ 575 ]
Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?

One might be tempted here to find a suggestion of Platonism -- the spiritual world is to the physical world as Plato's Forms are to the shadowy figures on the walls of the cave.

But the story Raphael goes on to tell is anything but a journey that ends in gradual, eye-opening enlightenment. Instead we are carried back in time to a prime moment before our world was made. And we hear, rather than see, an act of power. God decrees the rule of his Son, and almost instantaneously Satan conceives malice, revolts, and launches the cataclysm of Book 6. Instead of a tranquil contemplative conclusion, Raphael's tale rises to a moment of perfect order; at God's Word, heavenly order shatters.

Raphael's story is but a beginning -- an enigmatic opening of a story still unfolding. He will go on to speak of Satan's rout and fall, which brings us back to the opening of Book 1. But is this a purely cyclical structure? With the creation in Book 7, another chapter begins; it will encompass another fall, then all of human history, then look beyond history.

The shape of Milton's story strongly diverges from Plato's. Where the cave dweller begins in dark servitude and ascends to brilliant plenitude, the tale of the angel and the poet begins in sweetness and light, and falls into disorder and harsh history. In Plato, knowledge, gained by toil and struggle, is the goal and liberating end of education; for Adam and Eve, knowledge will neither be the goal, nor the means of leaving or repairing the fallen world. Still, the Greek world's highest literary form was tragedy, where the culture of Milton and Dante finds its fullest expression in the comic.

Labor, Science, Adamic Innocence

2010-12-01T22:47:00.006-05:00

Jutta sends along a review of a substantial new book about early modern ways of thinking about science, labor, and the public sphere. Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England by Joanna Picciotto is about

"the fertile conjunction between literature and science as it developed in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, offering new discussions on the ideas and texts of authors such as Francis Bacon, Gerrard Winstanley, John Evelyn, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Thomas Sprat, Andrew Marvell, William Davenant, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Celia Fiennes, and above all John Milton."

In the Renaissance vision of an unfallen Adam Picciotto finds the roots of a labor that leads to the producing of truth in a disinterested way, which in turn becomes a model for benign experimentalism in modern science, according to the review. More here.

Such a view would seem congruent with the vision of man in nature that emerges in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. In the garden, Adam and Eve are rooted deeply in a natural world whose order the human mind can labor to comprehend, cultivate, and master.

High matter, warring spirits

2010-11-26T22:58:00.009-05:00

The natural language and ordering of the world as found in Adam and Eve's morning orison, and in Raphael's description of the system of nature -- essentially a kind of heliotropism, all in keeping with the metaphorics of dawn in Book V -- seem to be jettisoned as the angel, in response to Adam's request, begins to tell the origin of the war in heaven.

High matter thou injoinst me, O prime of men,
Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits;

It might be worth asking some straightforward questions about how Raphael/Milton choose to tell this story. For example, while it seems to narrate a tale with a clear beginning, a sharp conflict, and a definite ending (at the end of Book VI, which leads right into the opening scene of Book I), does it reflect the natural ordering of time, space, agency, etc. that belong to nature and science, or is this a different kind of telling? Does it obey what we normally think of as the dictates of Reason?

In the description of the angelic congregation (580 ff), much is made of hierarchies, degrees, flags, a kind of militant order, and geometry is invoked:

Thus when in Orbes
Of circuit inexpressible they stood, [ 595 ]
Orb within Orb

Any observations about this sort of mathematical ordering?

How does the angels' meal compare with that of Adam, Eve and Raphael?

Since all the angels were used to worshiping the Father, why does Satan begin to conceive malice when he hears the decree about the Son?

How odd is it to find God smiling, and the Son joining in his laughter at Satan?

How cogent is Satan's reasoning when he says:

rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;

How is Abdiel "seeing" when he says:

I see thy fall
Determind,

How does he hear/know of these decrees:

other Decrees
Against thee are gon forth without recall;

Why does Abdiel leave the towers of Satan behind?

What other questions come to mind?

"Happiness is a dangerous word"

2010-11-21T06:44:00.000-05:00

A fine essay by Joan Bakewell about reading, the work of contemplation, and the precarious situation of public libraries in the UK. A BBC podcast available for the next seven days here.

The book whose author I couldn't recall

2010-11-17T23:14:00.000-05:00

A few books Jutta found

2010-11-16T06:48:00.001-05:00

Jutta sends a note:

In the latest PMLA they were advisements for several Milton books by Duquesne U P. (800 666-2211)

Visionary Milton. Essays on Prophecy and Violence. Edited by Peter E. Medine, John T. Shawcross and David V. Urban $60

The Divorce Tracts of John Milton. Texts and Contexts. Ed. by Sara J. Van den Berg and W. Scott Howard $75

Milton and Monotheism by Abraham Stoll. $60.

Another currently featured on the Duquesne U.P. site:

The Development of Milton's Thought. Law, Government, Religion. John T. Shawcross. $60.

Also:

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. By Ingrid D. Rowland. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.

Dawn in P.L. 5

2010-11-15T10:00:00.021-05:00

If we needed assurance that Paradise Lost breaks neatly into thirds, consider the opening of Book 9:

NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest

With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd

To sit indulgent, and with him partake

Rural repast, permitting him the while

Venial discourse unblam'd:

The poem that opens with Satan landing in hell with a thud turns, in book 5, to a human state suffused with images of dawn, of flowers and fruits, of the primal world of humanity working the world and conversing with angels. There's a striking difference between Adam and Eve's work in the garden and the harsher world of Virgil's Georgics, where the varied labors of cultivation require unremitting effort as well as study. If labor vincit omnia in Virgil, it does so with the qualifier improbus, whose relevant meanings include restless, indomitable, persistent, as well as, connotatively, fierce and violent. One result of the Fall is that we fell into Virgil's world of labor improbus.

The opening of Book 5, the mid-section of the epic, puts enough stress on dawn that the reader would be well advised to consider the manifold chain of images that invariably comes with it: figures of a gradual (rosie steps) enlightening that entails an ever more detailed differentiation of the visible realm; initiation of the temporal realm of hours, of the approach of the sun and the train of things that derive from it, the clearing of mists, the creation of rain leading to the biosphere, where all things consume and are consumed. And Dawn is naturally accompanied by the fairest of stars (166).

Adam's paean to the sun (of this great World both Eye and Soule) greets the day, and Dawn is the "sure/pledge of day" (167-68). Before the hours run, at the very beginning, is Prime - it's worth noting how that word returns four times in Book 5. The first occurrence is when we hear Adam, calling to the still sleeping Eve, we lose the prime (21).

Lucifer precedes dawn, but dawn is followed by the advent of Raphael, who, to Adam

seems another Morn
Ris'n on mid-noon

The angel will speak to Adam and Eve of high things - the appointment of the Son as head, the revulsion of Satan, and the prophetic voice of Abdiel. At this point we are beyond the natural light of the sun, but it would be worthwhile to consider echoes of the first half of Book 5 as they occur in the second half -- Satan's speech to Beelzebub, or words such as "impair'd" and "entertain." Milton seems to not use a word without its interestingly resonating with other instances of the "same" word.

Dawn and primacy resonate throughout: Look, for example, how at the end of Book 5, Satan can't swallow the idea that he was made, authored. Parodying the voice out of the whirlwind of Job (parody is the ultimate in secondary tropism), Satan can't accept that he is not primordial:

That we were formd then saist thou? and the work
Of secondarie hands, by task transferd
From Father to his Son? strange point and new! [ 855 ]
Doctrin which we would know whence learnt: who saw
When this creation was? rememberst thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd [ 860 ]
By our own quick'ning power, when fatal course
Had circl'd his full Orbe, the birth mature
Of this our native Heav'n, Ethereal Sons.

The speed with which the angels intuit, decide and act is in marked contrast to the gradual taking in and development of knowledge, thought and feeling in Adam and Eve, or for that matter, in the reader of Paradise Lost. For Satan there is no logical argument or intuitable evidence that anything, including the Sun/Son, preexisted him. It is never going to dawn on him that he derives from something more primal than himself. The cogent logic of Book Five's images helps us see how and why no creature other than Lucifer could be the morning star.

"The Knight-Errant of Philosophy"

2010-11-09T12:41:00.007-05:00

That is the epithet assigned to Giordano Bruno by Pierre Bayle, according to this brief account of Bruno's life and thought.

Bruno was born near Naples in 1548 and died in flames in Rome in 1600. In between, he lived a restless life, moving through various Italian cities to Paris, where he interested the king in his famed arts of memory, then to England, where he befriended Sir Philip Sydney, gained the favor of Elizabeth, and published a few key works, including the Heroic Furors, dedicated to Sydney. He visited Oxford while there, and, as he'd done in other locales, he departed in disgust, writing that the Oxford profs "knew more about beer than about Greek."

From England he went to Germany, where he managed to be excommunicated by the Lutherans, then on to Venice, perhaps the most intellectually "open" city of the day. It was there that the Inquisition arrested him and had him extradited to Rome, where he remained imprisoned for 7 years until his execution in the Campo dei Fiori on Feb. 17, 1600. In that Roman square, a statue of the rogue priest/theologian/natural philosopher/magus/satirist/playwright/heretic memorializes the event.

Whatever Bruno's philosophy ultimately has to teach, it's fair to say that it is hauntingly evocative - richly figural and allegorical, tending to meld disciplines and the study of nature, theology, and science as if they were so many elements of a vast Bouillabaisse. Every account attempting to summarize some core of his teaching sounds unlike every other account. The body of Bruno's work, like its earthly equivalent, vanishes within the fires it feeds. Let's hear a bit of what he sounds like (in translation):

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.

The universe is then one, infinite, immobile.... It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile.

In this infinite space is placed our universe (whether by chance, by necessity or by providence I do not now consider).

Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles.

My son, I do not say these are foals and those asses, these little monkeys and those great baboons, as you would have me do. As I told you from the first, I regard them [Aristotle; Plato] as earth's heroes. But I do not wish to believe them without cause, nor to accept those propositions whose antitheses (as you must have understood if you are not both blind and deaf) are so compellingly true.

One can perhaps see in this description how Milton might have recognized a kindred imagination:

Bruno also affirmed that the universe was homogeneous, made up everywhere of the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air), rather than having the stars be composed of a separate quintessence. Essentially, the same physical laws would operate everywhere, although the use of that term is anachronistic. Space and time were both conceived as infinite.. . .

Under this model, the Sun was simply one more star, and the stars all suns, each with its own planets. Bruno saw a solar system of a sun/star with planets as the fundamental unit of the universe. According to Bruno, infinite God necessarily created an infinite universe, formed of an infinite number of solar systems, separated by vast regions full of Aether, because empty space could not exist. (Bruno did not arrive at the concept of a galaxy.) Comets were part of a synodus ex mundis of stars, and not—as other authors maintained at the time—ephemeral creations, divine instruments, or heavenly messengers. Each comet was a world, a permanent celestial body, formed of the four elements.

Clearly, Bruno was no Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). Indeed, had Bruno lived during the time of that rigorous Dominican, it's likely that his furious books, along with his hide, would have fed the Bonfire of the Vanities. It's equally likely he'd have said to Savonarola what he reportedly told the judges who ordered him to be burned:

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

Constituting happiness

2010-10-31T12:00:00.004-04:00

Latent in Milton's rendering of Paradise in PL V is a richly imagined understanding of the world, humanity, the creator, and the purpose/meaning of this inaugural state. Clearly we were meant to be happy; the beauty of the world carried significance; as fallen descendants, we must turn back to understand our present through an imagined glimpse of the world before all went astray.

A few snippets from a multi-faith conversation about pursuing happiness (from Krista Tippett's On Being) might be relevant.

Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: The definition of a Jew, Israel is as it says in Genesis 34, one who struggles, wrestles, with God and with humanity and prevails. And Jacob says something very profound to the angel. He says, "I will not let you go until you bless me." And that I feel about suffering. When something bad happens, I will not let go of that bad thing until I have discovered the blessing that lies within it.

Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori: There's this ongoing tension between seeing happiness as joining with God, as communion with God, that's only possible in the afterlife, and the insistence that human beings are created to be happy, that happiness is possible in this life. There's the particular piece of Christianity that insists that sometimes suffering is a root to happiness for the larger community. That kind of suffering may not be chosen, but it contains blessing within it. The sense that our goal is this fully restored creation at right relationship with all that is and sometimes the journey there requires us to enter into suffering and to demand, to insist, that there is blessing in the midst of that, wrestling with the angel. It must be there. You have created us to be happy, you have created us to be good, now show us. Show us the way through this. Show us the possibility for which all that is is created.

Professor Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: First of all, in the Arabic language, the word for beauty and virtue is the same, and goodness, all three. In the Islam — Muslim mind, they're not separated from each other. In the deepest sense, goodness — in the ordinary sense, these were external actions. In a deeper sense, virtue is within us. Beauty can deal also with external forms and it can deal with beauty of the soul, beauty of the spirit, within us. But beauty in a sense is a more interiorizing. Beauty is what draws us directly to the Divine, to the Divine reality.

The Dalai Lama: I always believe and also share with the people, the very purpose of our life is for happiness. Those nonbeliever also they felt that religion — religious faith is a — brings a lot of sort of complication. So without that, they feel the easier to achieve happy life. So I think the very purpose of our existence is for happiness. So that mentioned, your constitution. And then also is equally their right. You see, happiness not come from sky, but we must make a happy life. So we have a responsibility. The government cannot provide happiness. Happiness must create within ourselves and our family. So ultimately, our own responsibility, isn't it?

At the point we are in Milton's idea of humankind's trajectory, Adam and Eve need not wrestle with the angel. See Dore's image here.

Falling through time

2010-10-30T08:35:00.002-04:00

A few images about the fall - more here, including works of Cranach, Chagall, Tintoretto, Brueghel and Poussin.

Eve persuades Adam

Hugo van Goes

Raphael

Gossaert

The Green Fuse

2010-10-27T16:28:00.001-04:00

In honor of Dylan Thomas's birthday:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

==

Hard to ignore the sound, in "fuse," of phusis, the Greek word for "nature," the root of "physics."

Interestingly (for Milton, if not for Thomas), the first appearance of phusis comes in Odyssey 10, and involves a god (Hermes) explaining the nature of an herb with pharmacological powers to Odysseus:

ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας πόρε φάρμακον ἀργεϊφόντης ἐκ γαίης ἐρύσας, καί μοι φύσιν αὐτοῦ ἔδειξε

Argeiphontes [=Hermes] gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me its nature.

This day...

2010-10-20T13:45:00.005-04:00

Book V begins with "Now" and moves from dawn's "rosie steps" in Paradise to Raphael's account of an announcement from God:

Hear all ye Angels, Progenie of Light, [ 600 ]
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers,
Hear my Decree, which unrevok't shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My onely Son, and on this holy Hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold
At my right hand; your Head I him appoint;
And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow
All knees in Heav'n, and shall confess him Lord:

As the Dartmouth site notes, this entire scene has its textual roots in Psalm 2, of which Martin Luther says, "In a word this Psalm is one of the most important Psalms of the whole Psalter":

¹Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

²The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,

³Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

⁴He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have them in derision.

⁵Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

⁶Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

⁷I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.

⁸Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

⁹Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

¹⁰Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.

¹¹Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

¹²Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

Here's Luther on the now-ness of "today" in verse 7:

But Christ neither began to be born, nor will ever cease to be born, but is ever being born in a present nativity. He is rightly said therefore to be begotten "today," that is, being always begotten. For "today" implies neither a yesterday nor a tomorrow, but always a present time, a today. As it is said, John 8:58, "Before Abraham was I am."

For what it's worth, here's Calvin on the same verse.

Update: Should have pointed to Milton's verse translation of Psalm 2, in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme.

Outline of Paradise Lost Found

2010-10-20T08:54:00.000-04:00

A reminder that a nice outline of Paradise Lost can be found here.

The Italian Milton

2010-10-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

Author and friend Peter D'Epiro (The Book of Firsts, Sprezzatura, What are the Seven Wonders of the World) sends this virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel, which allows movement and close-ups of any part of the interior of the building.

http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html

I can think of no Italian work of art that more appropriately matches the ambitious scope and sustained power of Milton's epic than this. Can you?

Pete's books are chock full of learning, style, and the exercise of curiosity with regard to things of lasting cultural value. (And I don't say that because of my meager contributions to them):

Spring in Botticelli and Milton

2010-10-16T11:55:00.010-04:00

then with voice

Milde, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,

It's possible Milton saw Botticelli's Primavera while in Italy. He surely was familiar with Poliziano's Rusticus -- a poem of country life described as an updated version of Virgil's Georgics and Hesiod's Works and Days -- with which it is often associated.

Botticelli's painting is understood to be allegorical, with sundry interpretations (here's one interesting example). It's also a literal anthology, with "500 identified plant species depicted," including 190 different flowers. If Emily Dickinson placed flowers and plants amid the leaves of books, Botticelli seems intent on naming Flora, or Chloris, through sheer abundance of example.

Similarly Milton will reel off a litany of floral names, and here, in Book V, the poem is permeated with the names and scents of flowers and herbs, and sounds of birds and water and gentle breezes:

th' only sound

Of leaves and fuming rills, Aurora's fan,

Lightly dispers'd, and the shrill Matin Song

Of Birds on every bough;

For a stupendous virtual reproduction of Botticelli's Primavera, go here. The image is so rich it takes a while to load, then can be zoomed to a remarkable level of detail. A right-click of the mouse allows a full screen image, which itself can be zoomed in and out, or scoured from one edge to the other.

The opening of Paradise Lost V is imbued with the dawn and with spring. Perhaps it's mere coincidence that Hermes makes a cameo appearance both in Milton's garden and in Botticelli's painting. In the Primavera, the god appears on the left. His right hand holds the cadeceus that reaches the clouds; his left rests on his hip inches from his sword handle.

In P.L. V, he's woven into the initial description of Raphael:

A Seraph wingd; six wings he wore, to shade

His lineaments Divine; the pair that clad
Each shoulder broad, came mantling o're his brest

With regal Ornament; the middle pair [ 280 ]

Girt like a Starrie Zone his waste, and round

Skirted his loines and thighes with downie Gold

And colours dipt in Heav'n; the third his feet

Shaddowd from either heele with featherd maile

Skie-tinctur'd grain. Like Maia's son he stood, [ 285 ]

And shook his Plumes, that Heav'nly fragrance filld

The circuit wide

If nothing else, both Raphael and Hermes traditionally are messengers connecting heaven and earth. The conversation between Adam, Eve and the angel will, among other things, depict an intricate and coherent account of that linkage.

Next Up: King Lear, the Heavy Metal Tour?

2010-10-04T19:22:00.001-04:00

We owe our acquaintance with this priceless bit of news to Shaw -- who is keeping up with us from Seattle:

Like it or not, Western Civilization's great epic poems are being adapted into testosterone-oozing mega productions. In the past few years we've watched Brad Pitt strut around in a big screen version of "The Iliad" and seen Dante's "Inferno" became a Blockbuster gore-fest of a video game. I guess we can only wonder how "Paradise Lost" lasted so long.

This past week, Variety reported that an adaptation of Milton's epic poem will hit theaters in 2012 under the direction of Alex Proyas, whose credits include The Crow, Dark City, Knowing and I, Robot. More at HuffPo

Wagner and more coming to a theater near us

2010-09-30T11:47:00.000-04:00

The schedule for the 2010-11 Met Simulcast season offers two works by Wagner, along with ten other operas, including unusual works of Rossini, Puccini, and John Adams ("Nixon in China").

Never, with Nietzsche, say "never"

2010-09-29T22:44:00.000-04:00

Attempting to slot Nietzsche into a narrow, predictable pigeonhole is a doomed enterprise. With all the dialectical energy directed against Judaism and Christianity in his works, there is nonetheless a fidelity to the qualities and power of whatever book he's reading -- an inability to deny the extraordinary wherever it may be found. In this case, from Chap I of Beyond Good and Evil, entitled Prejudices of the Philosophers, the book is the Old Testament:

52. In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian literature has nothing to compare with it. One stands with fear and reverence before those stupendous remains of what man was formerly, and one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little out-pushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by all means, to figure before Asia as the "Progress of Mankind." To be sure, he who is himself only a slender, tame house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people of today, including the Christians of "cultured" Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins—the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and "small": perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound up this New Testament (a kind of ROCOCO of taste in every respect) along with the Old Testament into one book, as the "Bible," as "The Book in Itself," is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against the Spirit" which literary Europe has upon its conscience. Beyond Good and Evil

52.

Im jüdischen "alten Testament", dem Buche von der göttlichen Gerechtigkeit, giebt es Menschen, Dinge und Reden in einem so grossen Stile, dass das griechische und indische Schriftenthum ihm nichts zur Seite zu stellen hat. Man steht mit Schrecken und Ehrfurcht vor diesen ungeheuren Überbleibseln dessen, was der Mensch einstmals war, und wird dabei über das alte Asien und sein vorgeschobenes Halbinselchen Europa, das durchaus gegen Asien den "Fortschritt des Menschen" bedeuten möchte, seine traurigen Gedanken haben. Freilich: wer selbst nur ein dünnes zahmes Hausthier ist und nur Hausthier-Bedürfnisse kennt (gleich unsren Gebildeten von heute, die Christen des "gebildeten" Christenthums hinzugenommen -), der hat unter jenen Ruinen weder sich zu verwundern, noch gar sich zu betrüben - der Geschmack am alten Testament ist ein Prüfstein in Hinsicht auf "Gross" und "Klein" -: vielleicht, dass er das neue Testament, das Buch von der Gnade, immer noch eher nach seinem Herzen findet (in ihm ist viel von dem rechten zärtlichen dumpfen Betbrüder- und Kleinen-Seelen-Geruch). Dieses neue Testament, eine Art Rokoko des Geschmacks in jedem Betrachte, mit dem alten Testament zu Einem Buche zusammengeleimt zu haben, als "Bibel", als "das Buch an sich": das ist vielleicht die grösste Verwegenheit und "Sünde wider den Geist", welche das litterarische Europa auf dem Gewissen hat. Jenseits von Gute und Bose.

An anniversary and personal aside

2010-09-29T22:15:00.010-04:00

It struck me the other day that this blog is nearly at its fifth anniversary. Of course, the classics group has been in existence far longer -- I've been happily participating since, I think, 2001 -- joining the group in the middle of Homer's Odyssey as I recall. It was a few years before the idea of making some online notes about our readings occurred to me.

The blog's first post, of Oct. 7th, 2005, was entitled "A few links to start with," and concerned sources for Hesiod, Genesis, and the Enuma Elish, a reminder of the days at the Fruitville Library where we looked at cosmogonies from the Greeks, Hebrews, and others, discovering intriguing differences, and becoming acquainted with myths of origin that have returned again and again through the subsequent years.

If I were to highlight a few key themes from our readings -- not an easy exercise, as the works we've been dealing with possess extraordinary thematic range -- I'd probably start with three:

a) Stories of generation (like the ones we started with) allow certain possibilities of how stories are told - and preempt others, giving rise to highly articulated traditions with distinct genres, modes of narrative and styles. We've adverted several times to Erich Auerbach's Mimesis in this regard.

b) Western "tradition," as T.S. Eliot reminds us, is a way that minds and texts have linked across centuries -- kind of a long, slow macro-conversation. An element in a tradition can be a monocultural growth, as the Book of Samuel appears to be vis a vis the Old Testament, or bi-cultural, as with the poetics of Horace in relation to Greece, or it can be cross-cultural, as we find with poets who craft large systemic visions, like Dante or Milton. They're grappling with powerful yet deeply incompatible assumptions about the nature of reality inherited from the classical world on the one hand, and from the Bible, Old Testament and New, on the other. Then we have Nietzsche, who seems to be having an intense exchange less with a single text than with all ancient Greece at once.

c) The third "theme" I'd choose is more of a meta-theme, as it concerns our modus operandi rather than the content of works we've been reading. By reading aloud, listening closely and discussing them with attention to their unique qualities, our group apparently has been doing something both rare and suddenly fashionable, engaging in what is called "close reading," or "slow reading." Strange to say, the act of experiencing a text by actually reading it -- whether it's Augustine's Confessions, or Dickinson's "These are the days when Birds come back" (130) -- is not so common as to be undeserving of note or notoriety.

There's a brief piece entitled "The Return to Philology" that speaks to this third aspect of what we've been doing. It was written perhaps 30 years ago by one of my profs. Here's the salient bit, his description of a Harvard Humanities Course taught by Reuben Brower in the 1950s.

Students, as they began to write on the writings of others . . . were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge. ~ The Resistance to Theory.

While it sounds somewhat Draconian in the way it's stated, one could say we've been adherents of its principles without quite so fussily formalizing them (much as Moliere's M. Jourdain finds he's long been "doing prose").

I'd welcome your thoughts on themes from our reading that have been significant for you. Also, as a way to spend time, this rocks! I'm look forward to future macro and micro conversations with gratitude and delight.

Did Milton Write a Bawdy Ditty?

2010-09-23T16:53:00.001-04:00

NPR considers the possibility:

A little-known poem has been retrieved from the Oxford University archives, which appears to reveal a 17th century attempt to besmirch the reputation of John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost. The poem is a bawdy ditty laden with sexual innuendo, and is labeled "by Milton." However, since Milton is best-known as a great religious and political polemicist, it hardly fits with the rest of his work -- and some academics believe the poem was actually the work of a jealous political rival.

The poem in question with more about it on HuffPo.

Birth and Rebirth in Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragödie

2010-09-23T10:49:00.022-04:00

There's no simple way to talk about The Birth of Tragedy. As many note, it's "a young man's work;" Nietzsche felt compelled to write it, and equally compelled, many years later, to take it apart, regretting especially sections 16 - 25 which foretell a German cultural rebirth, thanks to the midwifely exertions of Richard Wagner in the wake of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer.

What's clear is that in writing it, Nietzsche was committing professional suicide, as Marianne Cowan notes in her intro to Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks:

The Birth of Tragedy presented a view of the Greeks so alien to the spirit of the time and to the ideals of its scholarship that it blighted Nietzsche's entire academic career. It provoked pamphlets and counter-pamphlets attacking him on the grounds of common sense, scholarship and sanity. For a time, Nietzsche, then a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche's courses. WP

It seems fair to say that Nietzsche wrote under the pressure of several enthusiasms: for Greek culture (especially early tragedy); for music (especially that of Wagner); for epistemological questions (represented mainly by Kant); as well as by several critical obsessions -- a detestation of his contemporary German world of newspapers, politics, "Alexandrian" music and decadent sensibility.

So he tells us a story of the birth of an art form - tragedy - out of the spirit of another art form - music. What follows is merely an effort to describe and summarize his argument.

Nietzsche referred to the nature of the relation of Apollo and Dionysus as "the capital question" (die Hauptfrage). In Nietzsche's story, they tend to be associated with a variety of artistic and cultural polarities, e.g., painting vs. music, verbal differentiation vs. harmonic unity, the power of statement vs. the power of voice, culture vs. nature, science vs. art, prose vs. poetry, classic vs. romantic, spatial vs. temporal, eye vs. ear, stillness vs. motion, recognition vs. revelation, contemplation vs. action, figurative vs. proper* meaning, and the like.

The Apollonian dream is an unavoidable, uncontrolled response (it holds out "the head of Medusa" (sect. 2)) that shelters us from the sheer annihilative power of Dionysus. At the heart of Greek tragedy is the chorus of dancing satyrs -- not optimistic middle-class cafe goers -- who are rapt in an apprehension of the God who dissolves all that is, and because that apprehension is intolerable, a dreamlike realm of extraordinary beauty is thrown up as a shield -- the tragic hero and his tale, on the stage.

So we have the originary progenitor, Dionysus, only apprehended through music, who fathers, or causes, the counterblow of the plastic, visual realm of the Apollonian. In tragedy these two art forms, or modes, strike a balance that is perfect in Aeschylus, already slipping in Sophocles, and, by the time of Euripides, whom Nietzsche accuses along with Socrates of destroying music, is thoroughly debased.

Just as Euripides reduced the gods and heroes from mythic stature to characters not unlike ourselves in his plays, Socrates placed the word, the intellect, the logic and method of scientific inquiry above the wild dance of the satyrs, and has led us on a voyage of discovery unlike anything that came before. Socrates is the major articulation in Nietzsche's "history," since he at once ends the glory days of Dionysus and Apollo, and begins the voyage of the scientific mind.

Science gives us the world made over in an image the human mind can fathom. But look around us, Nietzsche says -- do we see a culture that nourishes Homeric visions and Aeschylean magic? Something important has been left out -- ignored, suppressed, or destroyed -- along the way. In section 15, the original ending of the book, the good ship Socrates runs into trouble:

But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points; and while there is no telling how this circle could ever be surveyed completely, noble and gifted men nevertheless reach, e'er half their time and inevitably, such boundary points (Grenzpunkte) on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail -- suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy. (Kaufmann trans. p. 97-98).

Nun aber eilt die Wissenschaft, von ihrem kräftigen Wahne angespornt, unaufhaltsam bis zu ihren Grenzen, an denen ihr im Wesen der Logik verborgener Optimismus scheitert. Denn die Peripherie des Kreises der Wissenschaft hat unendlich viele Punkte, und während noch gar nicht abzusehen ist, wie jemals der Kreis völlig ausgemessen werden könnte, so trifft doch der edle und begabte Mensch, noch vor der Mitte seines Daseins und unvermeidlich, auf solche Grenzpunkte der Peripherie, wo er in das Unaufhellbare starrt. Wenn er hier zu seinem Schrecken sieht, wie die Logik sich an diesen Grenzen um sich selbst ringelt und endlich sich in den Schwanz beisst - da bricht die neue Form der Erkenntniss durch, die tragische Erkenntniss, die, um nur ertragen zu werden, als Schutz und Heilmittel die Kunst braucht. Project Gutenberg EBook.

A few interpretive comments: Nietzsche tells a story of origin which becomes a story of destiny. The logic of his narrative presents Apollo, Dionysus, and Socrates as three interrelated entities who are necessary to each other even as they remain, in various and not simple ways, antagonists. Smiling Socrates ended the tragic Dionysian era, and at the end of his scientific quest, inevitably (unvermeidlich), lies the horror that lay behind the glorious culture he killed, auguring a new tragic culture on the horizon.

In the sections following 15 we hear strains of another Nietzsche -- not the cool analytic philologist or gifted philosopher of aesthetics, but Nietzsche the scathing critic of contemporary society. A prophetic note enters as he foresees a new beginning in which Germany is to play a central role. We may sense that the book founders at this point, but it seems doomed to do by the structure of its argument. Like the head of the ourobouros, the seeds of that future rebirth are there from the beginning of his tale.

*This particular polarity is made much of by Paul de Man.

Reflection of contradiction

2010-09-08T14:02:00.000-04:00

Raphael, Transfiguration

"Here is the reflection of eternal contradiction, the father of things. (ist hier Widerschein des ewigen Widerspruchs, des Vaters der Dinge.)" Birth of Tragedy, Sect. 4.

Nietzsche's Eris

2010-09-06T13:42:00.002-04:00

Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toe-holds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reached.

That's the young Nietzsche, from notes written (but left unpublished) around 1873, the same time he produced The Birth of Tragedy. The notes were intended for a separate book to be entitled Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which now exists in English translation under that title. In it he addresses several of the pre-Socratics, and apparently intended to carry on with several more, but never completed the book.

According to Marianne Cowan, translator of Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche's preoccupation with Hellenism stemmed from a pedagogical concern:

Nietzsche's most deeply felt task at this time was undoubtedly one of education. He wanted to present the culture of the Greeks as a paradigm to his young German contemporaries who might thus be persuaded to work toward a state of culture of their own; a state which Nietzsche found sorely missing.

Cowan then cites Nietzsche directly, in a passage worth noting for its attitude toward and understanding of philosophical and philological learning:

There is a certain kind of thoroughness which is but the excuse for inactivity. Think of what Goethe understood about antiquity: certainly not as much as any philologist, and yet quite enough to enable him to engage in fruitful struggle with it. One should not, in fact, know more about a thing than one can oneself digest creatively. Moreover the only means of truly understanding something is one's attempt to do it. Let us try to live in the manner of the ancients -- and we shall instantly come a hundred miles closer to them than with all our learnedness. Our philologists nowhere demonstrate that they somehow strive to vie with antiquity; that is why their antiquity is without any effect on the schools. (Nietzsche's emphasis)

This agonistic vision imbued Nietzsche's writings on the Greeks with fervor and dialectical verve. In a sense, he was competing with them, and wanted his students and readers to strive with them, to outdo them. For in that duel lay the path to cultural growth. In the above passage he also wrote:

To get past Hellenism by means of deeds: that would be our task. But to do that, we first have to know what it was!

To which he added:

My aim is to generate open enmity between our contemporary "culture" and antiquity. Whoever wishes to serve the former must hate the latter.

Job and Milton

2010-09-03T07:54:00.003-04:00

Our brief time with Job left many of us wanting more. It's a book full of extraordinarily rich poetry, a fact which sometimes gets lost amid the briefs and court papers we compile in our minds in order to arraign and indict (a) God, (b) Satan, (c) Job, (d) his friends, (e) all the above. A book that generates so much resistance and diverse responses in its readers might warrant a bit more attention. The good news is, we can return to it anytime we like.

Perhaps when we get to Book 7 of Paradise Lost - the account of the Creation - we can spend a few minutes reading aloud from the final chapters.

See, for example:

out of the ground up rose
As from his Laire the wilde Beast where he wonns
In Forrest wilde, in Thicket, Brake, or Den;
Among the Trees in Pairs they rose, they walk'd:
The Cattel in the Fields and Meddowes green: [ 460 ]
Those rare and solitarie, these in flocks
Pasturing at once, and in broad Herds upsprung.
The grassie Clods now Calv'd, now half appeer'd
The Tawnie Lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from Bonds, [ 465 ]
And Rampant shakes his Brinded main; the Ounce,
The Libbard, and the Tyger, as the Moale
Rising, the crumbl'd Earth above them threw
In Hillocks; the swift Stag from under ground
Bore up his branching head: scarse from his mould [ 470 ]
Behemoth biggest born of Earth upheav'd
His vastness:

But even earlier in Milton's epic, in the new found land of hell, for example, we've seen passages that were probably influenced by the astonishing originality of the poet of Job::

A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness. 10.22

Kermode and Suspended Endings

2010-08-27T22:40:00.005-04:00

Among the many notices of Frank Kermode's passing, this from AKMA along with this in the Telegraph and this in Slate are memorable. AKMA also put some words of Kermode here - it's a reflection on a time when he gathered an amazing assortment of British readers to spend some time working on the torrent of Continental literary, critical, psychanalytic and philosophical work coming from mainly from France in the 1970s.

What comes through in the last is Kermode's sense of an ending, a divergence of ways, in 1974. It comes as he evokes a time in which he had everything to do with the realization, for at least a brief moment, of a tolerance to take in, to examine, works written in languages other than English by authors whose thought rested on vastly different theoretical and technical underpinnings from those familiar, safe and sane to the Anglo-American critical community.

If anyone ever was the embodiment of the patient labor of reading, contemplative work with sufficient integrity to not need to enter into academic infighting, buzzword fusillades, or damnation through faint feints of praise, it was Kermode. That he was able to engage a certain insularity of English approaches with the full force of his considerable intelligence -- and to come away enriched by the experience -- is a tribute to his critical scope. I'm reading a couple of his collections these days, and will probably have more to say about him.

Some of the books he'll be remembered for are:

Two about reading from NPR

2010-08-21T17:51:00.004-04:00

Classic Lit No Longer Makes The Grade Among Leaders

NPR notes that world leaders no longer seem to immerse themselves in the classics - unlike ~~Yeats~~,* Alexander the Great, who slept with the Iliad under his pillow, or John Adams, who read Thucydides in Greek. Click for more.

*Thanks to an alert friend for calling attention to my having heard "Great" as "Yeats."

...and...

Why Johnny Can't 'Deep Read'

In the audio of this NPR story about "deep reading," Google Chairman Eric Schmidt laments the loss of this faculty. More here.

Early Days of Printed Matter

2010-08-15T11:17:00.000-04:00

Mussy sends along this review by Robert Pinsky of The Book in the Renaissance. A snippet:

For a time, civil and religious authorities controlled the immense scale of explosive information and misinformation. When the Protestant Henry of Navarre ascended to the French throne in 1589, the news was available to English readers in “at least 40 pamphlets,” while his 1594 conversion to Roman Catholicism “was greeted with deafening silence in London.” Gradually, however, centralized control was overwhelmed by the reckless abundance of the tumultuous, street-oriented press. Petty gossip, ignorant screeds, inflammatory pamphlets and religious tracts flowed and overflowed.

Upcoming: The Book of Job

2010-08-07T10:21:00.001-04:00

Keeping to our summer schedule, our next two sessions, Aug. 18 and Sept. 1, will involve reading The Book of Job. It will be interesting to compare different translations -- the King James Version is readily available, of course. Coincidentally, Robert Alter, whose translations of Genesis, Samuel and the Psalms have stood us in good stead in the past, has a new translation of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes entitled The Wisdom Books. It can be pre-ordered from Amazon, but alas the release date is Oct. 11, 2010.

Here are Alter's other Old Testament translations on Amazon:

Language as human nature

2010-07-26T14:45:00.004-04:00

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition. Lera Boroditsky in WSJ

This story in the Wall Street Journal was the most tweeted story of the past weekend. Nothing surprising there, the relationship of language to thought, lexis to logos, has long been investigated and reflected upon and is probably fundamental to our experience of the world. The discipline of philology seems relevant here, and reading seems highly relevant to philology. That is to say, when we read (especially if, along with Nietzsche, we read slowly), we make the effort to apprehend the sense of words, the play of figures, the relations of characters, the structure of the narrative, the allusions and debts owed to previous texts, i.e., tradition. We call upon our knowledge of grammar as well as of rhetoric, logic, history and culture. In Horace's "Epistle to the Pisos," the line between a strictly textual property, such as meter, and an extra-textual realm, such as the growing power and complexity of the Roman state, is not merely thin, but becomes a membrane in which the music of the Carmen and the manners of society are interrelated parts of some larger whole.

All of which is just to say we happily tweet about our metaphors, our languages, and our world, but to get beyond received ideas about such subjects takes some care, some reading, and some time. When Prof. Boroditsky writes:

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature.

we nod in assent, but we also should continue to ask: if language is part of what makes us human, what is the proper way for we humans to "study language"? We can remark on different patterns, and linguistic structures found in diverse tongues, and make inferences about how different native speakers experience the world differently. That begs the question of translation, the carrying over of meaning from one tongue to another, which begs in turn the more basic question of meaning, its provenance, nature, action, and relation to what is real. One thing's clear: there's far more to language, and to human nature, than time sequencing and the direction one writes in. For some far-reaching aspects of language we literally may have no words.

Herrick and Wilmot

2010-07-25T13:34:00.001-04:00

For Robert Herrick, the samples include:

Delight in Disorder

To the Virgins That Make Much of Time

Corinna's Going a-Maying

Upon Julia's Clothes

~~~

Robert Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Could I but make my wishes insolent
And force some image of a false content?
But they like mee bashfull and humble growne
Hover att distance about Beautyes throne
There worship and admire and then they dye
Daring noe more Lay Hold of her than I. Reason to worth beares a submissive spirritt
But Fooles can bee familliar with merritt.
Who but that Blundring blockhead Phaeton
Could e're have thought to drive about the Sun.
Just such another durst make Love to you
Whom not ambition led but dullness drew,
Noe Am'rous thought would his dull heart incline
But he would have a passion, for 'twas fine
That, a new suite, and what hee next must say,
Runs in his Idle head the live Long day.
Hard hearted saint, since 'tis your will to Bee
Soe unrelenting pittiless to mee
Regardless of A Love soe many yeares
Preserv'd twix't Lingring hopes and awfull feares
Such feares in Lovers Breasts high vallue claimes
And such expiring martyrs feele in flames.
My hopes your selfe contriv'd with cruell care
Through gentle smiles to leade mee to despaire,
Tis some releife in my extreame distress
My rivall is Below your power to Bless.

More Rochester can be found here.

Some links to Herbert

2010-07-22T12:33:00.014-04:00

Thanks to my friend Kia Penso, an ardent admirer of 17th Century English lyrics, we now have a link to all of George Herbert's The Temple. The Table of Contents is here. In an email, Kia recommended several poems, including Affliction (I), which a few of us were enthralled by the other day. Here's Kia's brief list, with links to the individual poems:

Affliction (i) "When first thou didst entice to thee my heart")

Another poem, quite long, entitled the Perirrhanterium, precedes the Temple and seems to offer the reader instructions on preparing to enter it. The word [fr. Gk perirranth, to besprinkle] is rare : "an instrument used for sprinkling holy water, esp. upon the newly baptised, or the font used for such."

The relevance of Herbert in the context of Milton and the British Protestant imagination is clear. Take, for example, these two stanzas from The Holy Communion:

Before that sinne turn’d flesh to stone,

And all our lump to leaven;

A fervent sigh might well have blown

Our innocent earth to heaven.

For sure when Adam did not know

To sinne, or sinne to smother;

He might to heav’n from Paradise go,

As from one room t’another.

More on Herbert here. Many thanks to Kia, who blogs at Gall and Gumption.

Is the Classics Group about to be claimed for the avant-garde?

2010-07-21T22:21:00.008-04:00

According to the Guardian, the new thing is slow reading:

a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.

A few associated links:

Lance Fletcher, founder of The Academy of Slow Reading, points us to Nietzsche.

And here's a blog apparently devoted to slow reading.

Here's Fletcher on the process:

The intention of the teaching of slow reading (which, as I said, is what I understand philosophy to be) is to subvert the customary mode of reading. Its intention is to afford students (i.e. those who make us the gift of their listening) some critical access to their own interpretive activity.

Newsweek was not slow in picking it up, and found a professor who says:

"schools should encourage old-fashioned exercises such as reading aloud."

What a concept!

[The Classics Group has been meeting in Sarasota for some ten years, reading aloud complete works from the ancients - Homer, Virgil, Plutarch, Horace, Genesis, Samuel I and II - along with works of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton and others. With no tutors or presenters, we read and enjoy, attending to texts, pausing to observe, comment, question, or simply take them in with relish and, occasionally, vinegar.]

Undoing Donne

2010-07-17T22:29:00.004-04:00

As we noted last time, Donne's poems often take the form of arguments, playing upon wit, logic, and verbal fireworks to make a case to a petitioned recipient.

It's also noteworthy that his poems often spring to life with a command:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God...

Death, be not proud...

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love...

Mark but this flea, and mark in this...

The imperative launches the poem, but after reading the entirety of the poem's argument, one understands that the poem must begin there because the poet is under pressure from some predicament which is becoming more and more intolerable - the girl won't sleep with him; the world won't let them love, etc.

That is, the poet knows he's right, he sees, more clearly than others, how much his cause has reason -- it is the reason of superior love, of the rightness of two matched souls, of the need to have defenses broken. There is a "pent-upness" to the poetic energy -- it begins, like the BP oil pipe, by bursting -- steam is rising and expanding, and must be released.

Donne more than any other poet made the expostulation one of his signature opening gambits -- all the feeling of the poem is present at the beginning - the stanzas unpack it, turn it into a rhetorical performance, but they don't really add anything to that initial thrust - the totality of the feeling, and of the poet's feeling, is there before he opens his mouth.

Underlying this head of steam is the poet's vision of perfect love, ideal desire. There would be little point in begging three-personed God to batter his heart if Donne did not believe something lies between him and a more perfect union. The poet's seeming impatience with things can come into play because the obstacles he encounters are, he is sure, neither immovable, nor infinite.

In the case of The Flea, the obstacle is the lover's will - her crushing the life out of the insect merely opens another avenue of rhetorical assault; in Batter my heart, the situation is perhaps more complex, since the obstacle is Donne himself - he's confronting his will, his unsusceptibility to the force and logic and wit of any argument, including his own poem. Here he's sort of at his wit's end - demanding brutal relief from his own intransigence -- relief that a multi-personed divine entity can -- no, must -- bring, if it is to come at all.

And that's again part of the motive for the expostulatory opening: for Donne, the defenses his art must overcome are less in the addressee than in the one demanding relief. He begs to be delivered of the very defenses that occasion the address he's giving. If relief were ever to come, would it then relieve him of the poetic impetus? If the poem were truly to persuade its destined auditor (we readers are never that recipient - we're simply allowed in as spectators) it would undo the occasion of its own outburst.