The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

  downward purg’d

  The black tartareous cold infernal dregs. (237)

  Verity takes this to mean that He expelled them from the spherical area, purging them ‘down’ into chaos, which in Milton, for certain purposes, has an absolute up and down. But ‘down’ might equally well mean towards the centre of the cosmic sphere, and ‘dregs’ would exactly fit the conception of Macrobius.

  To a modern reader what Macrobius has to say about dreams (I, iii) will seem a not very important item in his commentary; the Middle Ages must have thought differently, since it is clearly to this section that he owes the title Ornicensis or Onocresius which follows his name in some manuscripts and is there explained as quasi somniorum iudex or somniorum interpres: both words would be garbled transliterations of ὀνειροκρίτης. His scheme is derived from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus (first century A.D.). According to it there are five species of dreams, three veridical, and two which have ‘no divination’ (nihil divinationis) in them. The veridical kinds are as follows:

  (1) Somnium (ὄνειρος). This shows us truths veiled in an allegorical form. Pharaoh’s dream of the fat and lean kine would be a specimen. Every allegorical dream-poem in the Middle Ages records a feigned somnium. Nearly all dreams are assumed to be somnia by modern psychologists, and the somnium is the ‘dreem’ in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame, I, 9.

  (2) Visio (ὅραμα). This is a direct, literal pre-vision of the future. Mr Dunne’s Experiment with Time is mainly about visiones. This type appears as ‘avisioun’ in Chaucer (op. cit. I, 7).

  (3) Oraculum (χρηματισμός). In this one of the dreamer’s parents or ‘some other grave and venerable person’ appears and openly declares the future or gives advice. Such dreams are Chaucer’s ‘oracles’ (op. cit. I, II).

  The useless kinds are:

  (1) Insomnium (ἐνύπνιον). This merely repeats working preoccupations—‘the carter dremeth how his cartes goon’ as Chaucer says (Parlement, 102).

  (2) Visum (ϕάντασμα). This occurs when, not yet fully asleep and believing ourselves to be still awake, we see shapes rushing towards us or flitting hither and thither. Epialtes or nightmare is included in this class. Chaucer’s ‘fantom’ is clearly the visum (Hous of Fame, I, II), and his ‘sweven’ is presumably an insomnium. This is more likely than the alternative equation (‘dreem’ for visum and ‘sweven’ for somnium) in view of the contempt with which Dame Pertelote speaks of ‘swevenes’ in B 4111–13; she was a well-educated bird and knew both physic and the Distychs of Dionysius Cato.

  A dream may combine the characters of more than one species. Scipio’s dream is an oraculum in so far as a venerable person appears in it to predict and warn; a visio in so far as it gives literal truths about the celestial regions; a somnium, in so far as its highest meaning, its altitudo, is concealed. To this altitudo we must now turn.

  Cicero, as we have seen, devised a heaven for statesmen. He looks no higher than public life and the virtues which that life demands. Macrobius brings to the reading of Cicero a wholly different point of view—the mystical, ascetic, world-renouncing theology of neo-Platonism. The centre of interest for him lies in the purgation of the individual soul, the ascent ‘of the alone to the Alone’, and nothing could well be more foreign to the mind of Cicero.

  This change of spiritual atmosphere meets us very early in his commentary. Cicero’s feigned somnium could be attacked, as Plato’s vision of Er had been attacked, on the ground that no species of fiction is becoming to a philosopher. Macrobius replies by distinguishing different kinds of figmentum: (1) where all is feigned as in a comedy by Menander. No philosopher would use this. (2) Where the reader’s mind is stimulated to behold some form (or appearance) of virtues (or powers)—ad quandam virtutum speciem. This may be subdivided into (2A) and (2B). In (2A) the whole story is feigned, as in Aesop’s fables; but in (2B) ‘the argument is grounded in solid truth but that truth itself is exhibited by means of fictions’. The stories about the gods in Hesiod or Orpheus (which of course Macrobius interpreted allegorically) are examples. The knowledge of holy things is here hidden under ‘a pious veil of figments’. This last is the only sort which philosophy admits. But note: it does not admit even this on all its themes. It will treat thus of the soul or of the aerial and aetherial beings or of ‘the other gods’. But the licence to feign extends no further. Philosophy would never use this method when speaking ‘of God the highest and first of all things, whom the Greeks call τἀγαθόν (the Good) and πρῶτον αἴτιον (the First Cause), or of Mind, whom the Greeks call νοῦς, which is the offspring of and procession from the Highest, wherein dwell the archetypal Forms of things which are called Ideas’ (I, ii). We have here a chasm between the Divine and all merely creaturely beings (however exalted), a sheer transcendence, which earlier Paganism, and especially Roman Paganism, had never dreamed of. The word gods in this system is simply not the plural of God; there is a difference in kind, even an incommensurability, between them, as there is also between the ‘holiness’ of the ‘holy things’ (sacra) shadowed forth in Orpheus or Hesiod and that Holiness which Macrobius, though he does not use the word, so obviously feels when he thinks of the First Cause. Paganism here becomes, in the full sense, religious; mythology and philosophy have both been transmuted into theology.

  The God and Mind mentioned in the last paragraph are of course the first two members (or persons? or moments?) of that neo-Platonic Trinity which is at once so like and so unlike the Christian. God de se Mentem creavit, created Mind out of Himself. A Christian would probably be ill-advised to give creavit a sense that could be opposed to ‘begot’. The words ‘out of Himself’ discourage the Nicene distinction (‘begotten not created’) and creare in Latin is freely used of sexual generation. This Mens is the Noys of Bernardus Silvestris. As soon as Macrobius begins to describe Mens, he reveals a profound difference between neo-Platonism and Christianity. ‘In so far as Mens contemplates her parent she preserves the full likeness of her author; but when she looks back at things behind her, she creates out of herself Anima, Soul’ (I, xiv). The Second Person of the Christian Trinity is the Creator, the provident wisdom and creative will of the Father in action. The idea that He became less one with, or turned away from, the Father by creating would be repugnant to Christian theology. In Mens, on the other hand, creation is almost a sort of infirmity. She becomes less like God by creating, declines into creation only because she turns her gaze away from her origin and looks back. The next step is the same. As long as Anima fixes her attention on Mens she puts on the nature of Mens; but gradually, as her contemplation withdraws, she sinks (degenerat), though herself incorporeal, to the making of bodies. That is how Nature comes into existence. Thus from the very beginning, where Christianity sees creation, neo-Platonism sees, if not exactly a Fall, yet a series of declensions, diminutions, almost of inconstancies. The universe seeps, as it were, into existence at those moments (for we can talk only in temporal language) when Mind is not perfectly ‘waiting upon’ God, nor Soul upon Mind. We must not, however, press this too far. Even on these terms the glory (fulgor) of God illumines the whole world ‘as one face fills many mirrors placed in due order’. Dante uses this image in Paradiso, XXIX, 144–5.

  All this, I suspect, would have interested Cicero very little; certainly Macrobius, thinking such thoughts, cannot be content with an ethic, and an eschatology, centred on civic life. Here, therefore, occurs one of those amazing tours de force to which syncretism is driven by its determination to find in all old texts what its own age accepts as Wisdom. Cicero, explaining his statesmen’s heaven, had said that ‘Nothing—nothing anyway that goes on on earth (quod quidem in terris fiat)—is more pleasing to God than those councils and communities of men bound together by law which we call commonwealths’ (Somnium, xiii). What Cicero meant by his parenthetical reservation I am not sure; probably he was distinguishing earthly affairs from the motions of the heavenly bodies, which God would undoubtedly
prize more highly. But Macrobius (I, viii) regards this saving clause as Cicero’s way of leaving room for a whole system of ethics which Cicero might have strongly repudiated: a system which is religious, not secular; individual, not social; occupied not with the outer but with the inner life. He accepts the classical quaternion of virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice. But he adds that they all exist on four different levels and on each level their names have different meanings. On the lowest, or Political, level they mean what we should expect. The next level is the Purgatorial. Up there Prudence means ‘to contemplate divine matters with contempt of the world and all that it contains’; Temperance, ‘to renounce, so far as nature permits, all things that the body requires’; and Justice, to accept the practice of all the virtues as the only road to the good. Fortitude, on this level, is not so easily grasped. It enjoins ‘that the soul be not terrified when, led by philosophy, she recedes in a manner from the body, and may feel no shudder at the height of the perfect ascent’. This is based on Phaedo, 81a–d. On the third level, which is that of souls already purified, Prudence means no longer to prefer divine things but to take no account at all of any others. Temperance means, not to deny, but wholly to forget, earthly desires. Fortitude means, not to conquer the passions but to be ignorant of their very existence; and Justice, ‘to be so linked with that higher and divine Mind that one keeps an inviolable pact with her by imitation of her’. There remains the fourth level. Within Mens or νοῦς itself dwell the four Archetypal Virtues (virtutes exemplares), the transcendent Forms, whereof the four on the lower levels are shadows. Apparently it was to leave room for all this that Cicero wrote the five words quod quidem in terris fiat.

  Like Cicero, Macrobius believes that the soul can return to heaven because she first came thence;49 that the body is the soul’s tomb;50 that the soul is the man;51 and that each single star is larger than the Earth.52 Unlike most authorities, however, he denies that the stars produce terrestrial events, though they may by their relative positions enable us to predict them.

  C. PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS

  In the Middle Ages four books (The Celestial Hierarchies, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchies, The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology) were attributed to that Dionysius who was converted by hearing St Paul’s address to the Areopagus.53 This attribution was disproved in the sixteenth century. The real author is thought to have lived in Syria, and he must have written some time before 533, when his works were quoted at the Council of Constantinople. He was Latinised by John Scotus Eriugena who died about 870.

  His writings are usually regarded as the main channel by which a certain kind of Theology entered the Western tradition. It is the ‘negative Theology’ of those who take in a more rigid sense, and emphasise more persistently than others, the incomprehensibility of God. It is already well rooted in Plato himself, as we see from Republic 509b and the Second Epistle54 (312e–313a), and central in Plotinus. Its most striking representative in English is The Cloud of Unknowing. Some German Protestant Theology in our own time, and some Theistic Existentialism, has perhaps a remote affinity with it.

  But this, though the most important thing about pseudo-Dionysius, is not the one that concerns us. It is by his angelology that he contributed to the Model, and we can therefore confine our attention to his Celestial Hierarchies.55

  Our author differs from all earlier and some later authorities by declaring the angels to be pure minds (mentes), unembodied. In art, to be sure, they are represented as corporeal pro captu nostro, as a concession to our capacity (i). And such symbolism, he adds, is not degrading, ‘for even matter, deriving its existence from the true Beauty, has in the fashion of all its parts some traces of beauty and worth’ (ii). This statement, in a book which came to be so authoritative, may be taken as proof that educated people in the Middle Ages never believed the winged men who represent angels in painting and sculpture to be more than symbols.

  It was pseudo-Dionysius whose arrangement of the angelic creatures into what Spenser calls their ‘trinall triplicities’, into three ‘Hierarchies’ containing three species each, was finally accepted by the Church.56

  The first Hierarchy contains the three species, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. These are the creatures closest to God. They face Him ἀμέσως, nullius interiectu, with nothing between, encircling Him with their ceaseless dance. The names of Seraph and Throne are both associated by this author with ideas of heat or burning; a characteristic well known to the poets. Hence Chaucer’s somnour had ‘a fyr-reed cherubinnes face’,57 and it was not only for rhyme’s sake that Pope wrote ‘the rapt Seraph that adores and burns’.58

  The second Hierarchy contains the κυριότητες or Dominations; the ἐξουσίαι (Potestates, Potentates, or Powers); and the δυνάμεις or ‘Virtues’. This does not mean moral excellences but rather ‘efficacies’, as when we speak about the ‘virtues’ of a magic ring or a medicinal herb.

  The activity of both these Hierarchies is directed towards God; they stand, so to speak, with their faces to Him and their backs to us. In the third and lowest Hierarchy we at last find creatures who are concerned with Man. It contains Princedoms (or Principalities, or Princes); Archangels; and Angels. The word angel is thus both a generic name for all the nine species contained in the three Hierarchies, and also a specific name for the lowest—as sailor in English sometimes includes all seafaring persons and is sometimes confined only to those who berth forward.

  Princedoms are the guardians and patrons of nations, so that Theology names Michael the Prince of the Jews (ix). The scriptural source of this is Dan. xii. I. If Dryden had written his Arthuriad, these creatures would now be better known, for he intended to use them as his ‘machines’.59 They are Milton’s ‘Angels president in every province’60 and Thomas Browne’s ‘provincial guardians’.61 The two remaining species, Archangels and Angels, are the ‘angels’ of popular tradition, the beings that ‘appear’ to human individuals.

  They are indeed the only superhuman beings that do so, for pseudo-Dionysius is as certain as Plato or Apuleius that God encounters Man only through a ‘mean’, and reads his own philosophy into scripture as freely as Chalcidius had read his into the Timaeus. He cannot deny that Theophanies, direct appearances of God Himself to patriarchs and prophets, seem to occur in the Old Testament. But he is quite sure that this never really happens. These visions were in reality mediated through celestial, but created, beings ‘as though the order of the divine law laid it down that creatures of a lower order should be moved God-ward by those of a higher’ (iv). That the order of the divine law does so enjoin is one of his key-conceptions. His God does nothing directly that can be done through an intermediary; perhaps prefers the longest possible chain of intermediaries; devolution or delegation, a finely graded descent of power and goodness, is the universal principle. The Divine splendour (illustratio) comes to us filtered, as it were, through the Hierarchies.

  This explains why even a message of such cosmic moment as the Annunciation, even to so exalted a person as Mary, was brought by an angelic being, and even by a mere archangel, a member of the lowest species but one: ‘angels were first shown the divine mystery and, afterwards, the grace of knowing it reached us through them’ (iv). On this point Aquinas, centuries later, quotes pseudo-Dionysius and confirms him. The thing was done thus (for several reasons, but among them) ‘that even in so great a matter (in hoc etiam) the system (or pattern, ordinatio) whereby divine things reach us through the mediation of angels might be unbroken’.62

  By a tour de force comparable to that which Macrobius performed when he made Cicero into a good neo-Platonist, our author finds his principle confirmed in Isa. vi. 3. There the Seraphim are crying to one another ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. Why to one another rather than to the Lord? Obviously because each angel is incessantly handing on his knowledge of God to the angels next below him in rank. It is, of course, a transforming, not a merely speculative, knowledge. Each busily makes his colleagues (coll
egas) ‘images of God, bright mirrors’ (iii).

  In pseudo-Dionysius the whole universe becomes a fugue of which the Triad (agent-mean-patient) is the ‘subject’. The total angelic creation is a mean between God and Man, and that in two senses. It is a dynamic mean, as God’s executive. But it is also a mean as a lens is a mean, for the celestial Hierarchies are revealed to us in order that the Ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth may imitate, as nearly as possible, ‘their divine service and office’ (i). And the second Hierarchy is doubtless a mean between the first and the third, and in each Hierarchy the central species is a mean, and in each individual angel, as in each individual man, there are ruling, and intermediate, and obedient faculties.

  The spirit of this scheme, though not every detail, is strongly present in the Medieval Model. And if the reader will suspend his disbelief and exercise his imagination upon it even for a few minutes, I think he will become aware of the vast re-adjustment involved in a perceptive reading of the old poets. He will find his whole attitude to the universe inverted. In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light. He will also understand that something besides individual genius (that, of course) helped to give Dante’s angels their unrivalled majesty. Milton, aiming at that, missed the target. Classicism had come in between. His angels have too much anatomy and too much armour, are too much like the gods of Homer and Virgil, and (for that very reason) far less like the gods of Paganism in its highest religious development. After Milton total degradation sets in and we finally reach the purely consolatory, hence waterishly feminine, angels of nineteenth-century art.