The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

  Why the ancients made so little of Nature, and the medievals so much, may be easier to understand after a glance at her history.

  Nature may be the oldest of things, but Natura is the youngest of deities. Really ancient mythology knows nothing of her. It seems to me impossible that such a figure could ever arise in a genuinely mythopoeic age; what we call ‘nature-worship’ has never heard of what we call ‘Nature’. ‘Mother’ Nature is a conscious metaphor. ‘Mother’ Earth is something quite different. All earth, contrasted with all the sky, can be, indeed must be, intuited as a unity. The marriage relation between Father Sky (or Dyaus) and Mother Earth forces itself on the imagination. He is on top, she lies under him. He does things to her (shines and, more important, rains upon her, into her): out of her, in response, come forth the crops—just as calves come out of cows or babies out of wives. In a word, he begets, she bears. You can see it happening. This is genuine mythopoeia. But while the mind is working on that level, what, in heaven’s name, is Nature? Where is she? Who has seen her? What does she do?

  The pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece invented Nature. They first had the idea (a much odder one than the veil of immemorial familiarity usually allows us to realise) that the great variety of phenomena which surrounds us could all be impounded under a name and talked about as a single object. Later thinkers took over the name and the implication of unity which (like every name) it carried. But they sometimes used it to cover less than everything; hence Aristotle’s Nature which covers only the sublunary. In that way, the concept of Nature unexpectedly rendered possible a clear conception of the Supernatural (Aristotle’s God is as supernatural as anything could be). The object (if it is an object) called ‘Nature’ could be personified. And this personification could be either treated as a mere colour of rhetoric or seriously accepted as a goddess. That is why the goddess appears so late, long after the real mythopoeic state of mind has passed away. You cannot have the goddess Nature till you have the concept ‘Nature’, and you cannot have the concept until you have begun to abstract.

  But as long as the concept covers everything, the goddess (who personifies the concept) is necessarily a jejune and inactive deity; for everything is not a subject about which anything of much interest can be said. All her religious, and all her poetic, vitality depends on making her something less than everything. If she is at times the object of real religious feeling in Marcus Aurelius, that is because he contrasts or confronts her with the finite individual—with his own rebellious and recalcitrant self. If in Statius she has moments of poetic life, that is because she is opposed to something better than her self (Pietas) or something worse (the unnatural, such as incest and fratricide). Of course there are philosophical difficulties about this opposing to the goddess Nature things which the concept Nature must certainly include. We may leave Stoics and other Pantheists to get out of this scrape as best they can. The point is that the medieval poets were not in the scrape at all. They believed from the outset that Nature was not everything. She was created. She was not God’s highest, much less His only, creature. She had her proper place, below the Moon. She had her appointed duties as God’s vicegerent in that area. Her own lawful subjects, stimulated by rebel angels, might disobey her and become ‘unnatural’. There were things above her, and things below. It is precisely this limitation and subordination of Nature which sets her free for her triumphant poetical career. By surrendering the dull claim to be everything, she becomes somebody. Yet all the while she is, for the medievals, only a personification. A figurative being on these terms is apparently more potent than a deity really believed in who, by being all things, is almost nothing.

  Before leaving Statius I cannot forbear adding a paragraph (which the incurious are invited to skip) on a mere curiosity. In the fourth Book of the Thebaid he alludes to a deity he will not name—‘the sovereign of the threefold world’ (516). The same anonymous power is probably meant in Lucan’s Pharsalia (VI, 744) where the witch, conjuring a reluctant ghost back into the corpse, threatens it with Him

  quo numquam terra vocato

  Non concussa tremit, qui Gorgona cernit apertam.21

  Lactantius in his commentary on the Thebaid says that Statius ‘means δημιουργόν, the god whose name it is unlawful to know’. This is plain sailing: the demiurge (workman) being the Creator in the Timaeus. But there are two variants in the manuscripts; one is demogorgona, the other demogorgon. From the latter of these corruptions later ages evolved a completely new deity, Demogorgon, who was to enjoy a distinguished literary career in Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gods, in Spenser, in Milton, and in Shelley. This is perhaps the only time a scribal blunder underwent an apotheosis.

  D. APULEIUS, DE DEO SOCRATIS

  Apuleius, born in Numidia about 125 A.D., is now usually (and deservedly) remembered for his curious romance, the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass. For a medievalist, however, his essay On the god of Socrates is more important.

  Two passages from Plato underlie it. One is in the Apology (31c–d), where Socrates explains why he abstained from political life. ‘The reason’, he says, ‘is one you have often heard me mention. Something divine and daemoniac (θεῖόν τι καὶ δαιμόνιον) happens to me. . . . It has been so ever since I was a boy. There comes a voice which, whenever I hear it, always forbids something I am about to do, but never commands.’22

  ‘God’ and ‘daemon’, as present here in their adjectives ‘divine’ and ‘daemoniac’, may be synonyms, as, I take it, they often are for other Greek writers both in prose and verse. But in the second passage (Symposium, 202e–203e), Plato draws a clear distinction between them which was to be influential for centuries. Daemons are there creatures of a middle nature between gods and men—like Milton’s ‘Middle spirits—Betwixt the angelical and human kind’.23 Through these intermediaries, and through them alone, we mortals have any intercourse with the gods. For θεός ἀνθρώπῳ οὐ μίγνυται; as Apuleius translates it, nullus deus miscetur hominibus, no god converses with men. The voice that spoke to Socrates was that of a daemon, not a god.

  About these ‘middle spirits’ or daemons Apuleius has much to tell us. They naturally inhabit the middle region between Earth and aether; that is, the air—which extends upwards as far as the orbit of the Moon. All is, in fact, so arranged ‘that every part of nature may have its appropriate animals’. At first sight, he admits, we might suppose that birds provide the ‘appropriate animals’ for the air. But they are quite inadequate: they do not ascend above the higher mountain-tops. Ratio demands that there should be a species genuinely native to the air, as gods are to the aether and men to the Earth. I should be hard put to it to choose any single English word as the right translation of ratio in this context. ‘Reason’, ‘method’, ‘fitness’, and ‘proportion’ might all put in a claim.

  The daemons have bodies of a finer consistency than clouds, which are not normally visible to us. It is because they have bodies that he calls them animals: obviously, he does not mean that they are beasts. They are rational (aerial) animals, as we are rational (terrestrial) animals, and the gods proper are rational (aetherial) animals. The idea that even the highest created spirits—the gods, as distinct from God—were, after their own fashion, incarnate, had some sort of material ‘vehicle’, goes back to Plato. He had called the true gods, the deified stars, ζῷα, animals.24 Scholasticism, in regarding the angels—which is what the gods or aetherial creatures are called in Christian language—as pure or naked spirits, was revolutionary. The Florentine Platonists reverted to the older view.

  The daemons are ‘between’ us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this cl
ass an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ‘witness and guardian’ through life (xvi). It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man’s genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.25

  Apart from its direct contributions to the Model, this little work has a twofold value for those who are embarking on medieval studies.

  In the first place, it illustrates the sort of channel through which scraps of Plato—often scraps which were very marginal and unimportant in Plato’s own work—trickled down to the Middle Ages. Of Plato himself they had little more than an incomplete Latin version of a single dialogue, the Timaeus. That by itself, perhaps, would hardly have sufficed to produce a ‘Platonic period’. But they also received a diffused Platonism, inextricably mixed with neo-Platonic elements, indirectly, through such authors as Apuleius and those whom we shall be considering in the next chapter. These, with the Platonici whom St Augustine read26 (Latin translators of the neo-Platonists), provided the intellectual atmosphere in which the new Christian culture grew up. The ‘Platonism’ of the early ages was therefore something very different from that either of the Renaissance or of the nineteenth century.

  In the second place, Apuleius introduces us to two principles—unless, indeed, they are really the same principle—which will meet us again and again as we proceed.

  One is what I call the Principle of the Triad. The clearest statement of it in Plato himself comes from the Timaeus: ‘it is impossible that two things only should be joined together without a third. There must be some bond in between both to bring them together’ (31b–c). The principle is not stated but assumed in the assertion of the Symposium that god does not meet man. They can encounter one another only indirectly; there must be some wire, some medium, some introducer, some bridge—a third thing of some sort—in between them. Daemons fill the gap. We shall find Plato himself, and the medievals, endlessly acting on their principle; supplying bridges, as it were, ‘third things’—between reason and appetite, soul and body, king and commons.

  The other is the Principle of Plenitude. If, between aether and Earth, there is a belt of air, then, it seems to Apuleius, ratio herself demands that it should be inhabited. The universe must be fully exploited. Nothing must go to waste.27

  CHAPTER 4

  SELECTED MATERIALS: THE SEMINAL PERIOD

  And oute of olde feldes as men seith

  Cometh at this newe corn.

  CHAUCER

  All the texts we have hitherto looked at belong unambiguously to the old world, to Pagan antiquity. We now turn to the transitional period, which can be regarded as beginning, very roughly, with the birth of Plotinus in 205, and ending with the first datable reference to pseudo-Dionysius in 533. This was the age which brought the characteristically medieval frame of mind into being. It also witnessed the last stand of Paganism and the final triumph of the Church. Cardinal dates in that story are: 324, when Constantine urged his subjects to embrace Christianity; 331–3, the reign of Julian and his attempted Pagan revival; 384, when the elder Symmachus pleaded in vain that the altar of Victory should be restored to the Senate House; and 390, when Theodosius forbade all Pagan worship.

  In a prolonged war the troops on both sides may imitate one another’s methods and catch one another’s epidemics; they may even occasionally fraternise. So in this period. The conflict between the old and the new religion was often bitter, and both sides were ready to use coercion when they dared. But at the same time the influence of the one upon the other was very great. During these centuries much that was of Pagan origin was built irremovably into the Model. It is characteristic of the age that more than one of the works I shall mention has sometimes raised a doubt whether its author was Pagan or Christian.

  The precise nature and even, in some senses, the width of the chasm which separated the religions can easily be mistaken if we take our ideas solely from political or ecclesiastical histories: still more, if we take them from more popular sources. Cultured people on both sides had had the same education, read the same poets, learned the same rhetoric. As was shown sixty-odd years ago,1 social relations between them were sometimes friendly.

  I have read a novel which represents all the Pagans of that day as carefree sensualists, and all the Christians as savage ascetics. It is a grave error. They were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man. The leaders on both sides were monotheists, and both admitted almost an infinity of supernatural beings between God and man. Both were highly intellectual, but also (by our standards) highly superstitious. The last champions of Paganism were not the sort of men that Swinburne, or a modern ‘Humanist’, would wish them to have been. They were not lusty extroverts recoiling in horror or contempt from a world ‘grown grey’ with the breath of the ‘pale Galilaean’. If they wanted to get back ‘the laurel, the palms, and the paean’, it was on most serious and religious grounds. If they longed to see ‘the breasts of the nymph in the brake’, their longing was not like a satyr’s; it was much more like a spiritualist’s. A world-renouncing, ascetic, and mystical character then marked the most eminent Pagans no less than their Christian opponents. It was the spirit of the age. Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. The modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons. Both alike would have embarrassed him with stories of visions, ecstasies, and apparitions. Between the lower and more violent manifestations of both religions he would have found it hard to choose. To a modern eye (and nostril) Julian with his long nails and densely populated beard might have seemed very like an unwashed monk out of the Egyptian desert.

  It will occur to everyone that in an age of conflict those authors whose allegiance has been doubted may have deliberately made it doubtful through caution. This is always a possible hypothesis, but not a necessary one. Where so much ground was—or at least seemed to be—common, a writer could sincerely produce much that was acceptable to many Christian and many Pagan readers alike, provided his work was not explicitly theological. The remoter religious implications of philosophical positions were not always grasped. Hence what we might take to be the difference between a clearly Christian and a possibly Pagan work may really be the difference between a thesis offered, so to speak, to the Faculty of Philosophy and one offered to that of Divinity. This seems to me to be the best explanation of the gulf that separates Boethius’ De Consolatione from the doctrinal pieces which are (I presume, rightly) attributed to him.

  On its highest level the Pagan resistance can almost be identified with the neo-Platonic school. In it the great names are those of Plotinus (205–70), Porphyry (233–304?), Iamblichus (ob. 330), and Proclus (ob. 485). The first was a genius of the highest order, but Porphyry—and even he often indirectly—was the principal influence in the West. The whole school, while partly a spontaneous development of the Greek genius, seems to me to be also a deliberate response to the challenge of Christianity and, in that respect, indebted to it. In it the last Pagans are carefully dissociating themselves from popular polytheism and saying in effect, ‘We too have an explanation of the whole universe. We too have a systematic theology. We, no less than you, have a rule of life—have saints, miracles, devotions, and the hope of union with the Highest.’

  The present study, however, is interested not in the short-lived impact of the new religion on the old but with the enduring effect of the old upon the new. The last, and neo-Platonic, wave of Paganism which had gathered up into itself much from the preceding
waves, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and what not, came far inland and made brackish lakes which have, perhaps, never been drained. Not all Christians at all times have detected them or admitted their existence: and among those who have done so there have always been two attitudes. There was then, and is still, a Christian ‘left’, eager to detect and anxious to banish every Pagan element; but also a Christian ‘right’ who, like St Augustine, could find the doctrine of the Trinity foreshadowed in the Platonici,2 or could claim triumphantly, like Justin Martyr, ‘Whatever things have been well said by all men belong to us Christians’.3

  A. CHALCIDIUS

  The work of Chalcidius4 is an incomplete translation of Plato’s Timaeus stopping at the end of 53b (that is, about halfway through) and a much longer commentarius. This is hardly what we should call a commentary, for it ignores many difficulties and expatiates freely on matters about which Plato had little or nothing to say.

  It is dedicated to one Osius or Hosius, who has been identified, not very certainly, with a Bishop of Cordova who attended the Council of Nicaea (325). Even if the identification is correct, this would not enable us to date the work very closely, for we are told by Isidore that the Bishop lived to be over a hundred.

  The religion of Chalcidius has been questioned. In favour of his Christianity we note:

  (1) The dedication to Osius (always assuming that he really was the Bishop).

  (2) He calls the biblical account of Adam’s creation ‘the teaching of a holier sect’ (sectae sanctioris).5

  (3) After glancing at a supposed astrological doctrine in Homer, he mentions the star of the Nativity as something vouched for by ‘a holier and more venerable story’.6