The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

  The impossibility, under the supposed conditions, of such visual experiences is obvious to us because we have grown up from childhood under the influence of pictures that aimed at the maximum of illusion and strictly observed the laws of perspective. We are mistaken if we suppose that mere commonsense, without any such training, will enable men to see an imaginary scene, or even to see the world they are living in, as we all see it today.11 Medieval art was deficient in perspective, and poetry followed suit. Nature, for Chaucer, is all foreground; we never get a landscape. And neither poets nor artists were much interested in the strict illusionism of later periods. The relative size of objects in the visible arts is determined more by the emphasis the artist wishes to lay upon them than by their sizes in the real world or by their distance. Whatever details we are meant to see will be shown whether they would really be visible or not. I believe Dante would have been quite capable of knowing that he could not have seen Asia and Cadiz from the stellatum and nevertheless putting them in. Centuries later Milton makes Raphael look down from the gate of Heaven, that is, from a point outside the whole sidereal universe—‘distance inexpressible By Numbers that have name’ (VIII, 113)—and see not only Earth, not only continents on Earth, not only Eden, but cedar trees (V, 257–61).

  Of the medieval and even the Elizabethan imagination in general (though not, as it happens, of Dante’s) we may say that in dealing with even foreground objects, it is vivid as regards colour and action, but seldom works consistently to scale. We meet giants and dwarfs, but we never really discover their exact size. Gulliver was a great novelty.12

  B. THEIR OPERATIONS

  So far our picture of the universe is static; we must now set it in motion.

  All power, movement, and efficacy descend from God to the Primum Mobile and cause it to rotate; the exact kind of causality involved will be considered later. The rotation of the Primum Mobile causes that of the Stellatum, which causes that of the sphere of Saturn, and so on, down to the last moving sphere, that of the Moon. But there is a further complexity. The Primum Mobile revolves from east to west, completing its circle every twenty-four hours. The lower spheres have (by ‘kindly enclyning’) a far slower revolution from west to east, which takes 36,000 years to complete. But the daily impulse of the Primum Mobile forces them daily back, as with its wash or current, so that their actual movement is westward but at a speed retarded by their struggle to move in the opposite direction. Hence Chaucer’s apostrophe:

  O firste moeving cruel firmament

  With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay

  And hurlest al from Est til Occident

  That naturelly wolde holde another way.

  (Canterbury Tales, B 295 sq.)

  The reader will no doubt understand that this was no arbitrary fancy, but just such another ‘tool’ as the hypothesis of Copernicus; an intellectual construction devised to accommodate the phenomena observed. We have recently been reminded13 how much mathematics, and how good, went to the building of the Model.

  Besides movement, the spheres transmit (to the Earth) what are called Influences—the subject-matter of Astrology. Astrology is not specifically medieval. The Middle Ages inherited it from antiquity and bequeathed it to the Renaissance. The statement that the medieval Church frowned upon this discipline is often taken in a sense that makes it untrue. Orthodox theologians could accept the theory that the planets had an effect on events and on psychology, and, much more, on plants and minerals. It was not against this that the Church fought. She fought against three of its offshoots.

  (1) Against the lucrative, and politically undesirable, practice of astrologically grounded predictions.

  (2) Against astrological determinism. The doctrine of influences could be carried so far as to exclude free will. Against this determinism, as in later ages against other forms of determinism, theology had to make a defence. Aquinas treats the question very clearly.14 On the physical side the influence of the spheres is unquestioned. Celestial bodies affect terrestrial bodies, including those of men. And by affecting our bodies they can, but need not, affect our reason and our will. They can, because our higher faculties certainly receive something (accipiunt) from our lower. They need not, because any alteration of our imaginative power15 produced in this way generates, not a necessity, but only a propensity, to act thus or thus. The propensity can be resisted; hence the wise man will over-rule the stars. But more often it will not be resisted, for most men are not wise; hence, like actuarial predictions, astrological predictions about the behaviour of large masses of men will often be verified.

  (3) Against practices that might seem to imply or encourage the worship of planets—they had, after all, been the hardiest of all the Pagan gods. Albertus Magnus gives rulings about the lawful and unlawful use of planetary images in agriculture. The burial in your field of a plate inscribed with the character or hieroglyph of a planet is permissible; to use with it invocations or ‘suffumigations’ is not (Speculum Astronomiae, X).

  Despite this careful watch against planetolatry the planets continued to be called by their divine names, and their representations in art and poetry are all derived from the Pagan poets—not, till later, from Pagan sculptors. The results are sometimes comic. The ancients had described Mars fully armed and in his chariot; medieval artists, translating this image into contemporary terms, accordingly depict him as a knight in plate armour seated in a farm-wagon16—which may have suggested the story in Chrétien’s Lancelot. Modern readers sometimes discuss whether, when Jupiter or Venus is mentioned by a medieval poet, he means the planet or the deity. It is doubtful whether the question usually admits of an answer. Certainly we must never assume without special evidence that such personages are in Gower or Chaucer the merely mythological figures they are in Shelley or Keats. They are planets as well as gods. Not that the Christian poet believed in the god because he believed in the planet; but all three things—the visible planet in the sky, the source of influence, and the god—generally acted as a unity upon his mind. I have not found evidence that theologians were at all disquieted by this state of affairs.

  Readers who already know the characters of the seven planets can skip the following list:

  Saturn. In the earth his influence produces lead; in men, the melancholy complexion; in history, disastrous events. In Dante his sphere is the Heaven of contemplatives. He is connected with sickness and old age. Our traditional picture of Father Time with the scythe is derived from earlier pictures of Saturn. A good account of his activities in promoting fatal accidents, pestilence, treacheries, and ill luck in general, occurs in The Knight’s Tale (A 2463 sq.). He is the most terrible of the seven and is sometimes called The Greater Infortune, Infortuna Major.

  Jupiter, the King, produces in the earth, rather disappointingly, tin; this shining metal said different things to the imagination before the canning industry came in. The character he produces in men would now be very imperfectly expressed by the word ‘jovial’, and is not very easy to grasp; it is no longer, like the saturnine character, one of our archetypes. We may say it is Kingly; but we must think of a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous. When this planet dominates we may expect halcyon days and prosperity. In Dante wise and just princes go to his sphere when they die. He is the best planet, and is called The Greater Fortune, Fortuna Major.

  Mars makes iron. He gives men the martial temperament, ‘sturdy hardiness’, as the Wife of Bath calls it (D 612). But he is a bad planet, Infortuna Minor. He causes wars. His sphere, in Dante, is the Heaven of martyrs; partly for the obvious reason but partly, I suspect, because of a mistaken philological connection between martyr and Martem.

  Sol is the point at which the concordat between the mythical and the astrological nearly breaks down. Mythically, Jupiter is the King, but Sol produces the noblest metal, gold, and is the eye and mind of the whole universe. He makes men wise and liberal and his sphere is the H
eaven of theologians and philosophers. Though he is no more metallurgical than any other planet his metallurgical operations are more often mentioned than theirs. We read in Donne’s Allophanes and Idios how soils which the Sun could make into gold may lie too far from the surface for his beams to take effect (61). Spenser’s Mammon brings his hoard out to ‘sun’ it. If it were already gold, he would have no motive for doing this. It is still hore (grey); he suns it that it may become gold.17 Sol produces fortunate events.

  In beneficence Venus stands second only to Jupiter; she is Fortuna Minor. Her metal is copper. The connection is not clear till we observe that Cyprus was once famed for its copper mines; that copper is cyprium, the Cyprian metal; and that Venus, or Aphrodite, especially worshipped in that island, was Kύπρις, the Lady of Cyprus. In mortals she produces beauty and amorousness; in history, fortunate events. Dante makes her sphere the Heaven not, as we might expect from a more obvious poet, of the charitable, but of those, now penitent, who in this life loved greatly and lawlessly. Here he meets Cunizza, four times a wife and twice a mistress, and Rahab the harlot (Paradiso, IX). They are in swift, incessant flight (VIII, 19–27)—a likeness in unlikeness to the impenitent and storm-borne lovers of Inferno, V.

  Mercury produces quicksilver. Dante gives his sphere to beneficent men of action. Isidore, on the other hand, says this planet is called Mercurius because he is the patron of profit (mercibus praeest).18 Gower says that the man born under Mercury will be ‘studious’ and ‘in writinge curious’,

  bot yit with somdel besinesse

  his hert is set upon richesse.

  (Confessio, VII, 765.)

  The Wife of Bath associates him especially with clerks (D 706). In Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis19 he is the bridegroom of Philologia—who is Learning or even Literature rather than what we call ‘philology’. And I am pretty sure that ‘the Words of Mercury’ contrasted with ‘the Songs of Apollo’ at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost are ‘picked’, or rhetorical prose. It is difficult to see the unity in all these characteristics. ‘Skilled eagerness’ or ‘bright alacrity’ is the best I can do. But it is better just to take some real mercury in a saucer and play with it for a few minutes. That is what ‘Mercurial’ means.

  At Luna we cross in our descent the great frontier which I have so often had to mention; from aether to air, from ‘heaven’ to ‘nature’, from the realm of gods (or angels) to that of daemons, from the realm of necessity to that of contingence, from the incorruptible to the corruptible. Unless this ‘great divide’ is firmly fixed in our minds, every passage in Donne or Drayton or whom you will that mentions ‘translunary’ and ‘sublunary’ will lose its intended force. We shall take ‘under the moon’ as a vague synonym, like our ‘under the sun’, for ‘everywhere’, when in reality it is used with precision. When Gower says

  We that dwelle under the Mone

  Stand in this world upon a weer

  (Confessio, Prol. 142)

  he means exactly what he says. If we lived above the Moon we should not suffer weer (doubt, uncertainty). When Chaucer’s Nature says

  Ech thing in my cure is

  Under the Moone that mai wane and waxe

  (Canterbury Tales, C 22)

  she is distinguishing her mutable realm from the translunary world where nothing grows or decreases. When Chaucer says ‘Fortune may non angel dere’ in the Monk’s Tale (B 3191) he is remembering that angels inhabit the aetherial realm where there is no contingence and therefore no luck, whether good or bad.

  Her metal is silver. In men she produces wandering, and that in two senses. She may make them travellers so that, as Gower says, the man born under Luna will ‘seche manye londes strange’ (VII, 747). In this respect the English and the Germans are much under her influence (ibid. 751–4). But she may also produce ‘wandering’ of the wits, especially that periodical insanity which was first meant by the word lunacy, in which the patient, as Langland says (C X, 107), is ‘mad as the mone sit, more other lasse’. These are the ‘dangerous, unsafe lunes’ of the Winter’s Tale (II, ii, 30); whence (and on other grounds) lunes in Hamlet (III, iii, 7) is an almost certain emendation for Quarto’s meaningless browes and Folio’s unmetrical lunacies. Dante assigns the Moon’s sphere to those who have entered the conventual life and abandoned it for some good or pardonable reason.

  It will be noticed that while we find no difficulty in grasping the character of Saturn or Venus, Jove and Mercury almost evaded us. The truth which emerges from this is that the planetary characters need to be seized in an intuition rather than built up out of concepts; we need to know them, not to know about them, connaître not savoir. Sometimes the old intuitions survive; when they do not, we falter. Changes of outlook, which have left almost intact, and almost one, the character of Venus, have almost annihilated Jupiter.

  In accordance with the principle of devolution or mediation the influences do not work upon us directly, but by first modifying the air. As Donne says in The Extasie, ‘On man heaven’s influence works not so But that it first imprints the air’. A pestilence is caused originally by malefical conjunctions of planets, as when

  Kinde herde tho Conscience and cam out of the planetes

  And sente forth his forayers, fevers and fluxes.

  (Piers Plowman, C. XXIII, 80.)

  But the bad influence operates by being literally ‘in the air’. Hence when a medieval doctor could give no more particular cause for the patient’s condition he attributed it to ‘this influence which is at present in the air’. If he were an Italian doctor he would doubtless say questa influenza. The profession has retained the useful word ever since.

  It is always necessary to remember that constellation in medieval language seldom means, as with us, a permanent pattern of stars. It usually means a temporary state of their relative positions. The artist who had made the brazen horse in the Squire’s Tale ‘wayted many a constellacioun’ (F 129). We should translate ‘looked out for many a conjunction’.

  The word influence in its modern sense—the sense in which this study has so often forced me to use it—is as grey an abstraction as the whole range of our language affords. We must take great care not to read this, the word’s withered senility, back into its use by older poets where it is still a fully conscious metaphor from astrology. The ladies in L’Allegro (121) ‘whose bright eyes Rain influence’ are being compared with the planets. When Adam says to Eve

  I from the influence of thy lookes receave

  Access in every vertue.

  (Paradise Lost, IX, 309)

  he is saying far more than a modern reader might suppose. He is making himself an Earth, and her a Jove or Venus.

  Two traits remain to be added to our picture.

  Nothing is more deeply impressed on the cosmic imaginings of a modern than the idea that the heavenly bodies move in a pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity. It was not so in the Medieval Model. Already in our passage from Lucan20 we have seen that (on the most probable interpretation) the ascending spirit passes into a region compared with which our terrestrial day is only a sort of night; and nowhere in medieval literature have I found any suggestion that, if we could enter the translunary world, we should find ourselves in an abyss of darkness. For their system is in one sense more heliocentric than ours. The sun illuminates the whole universe. All the stars, says Isidore (III, lxi) are said to have no light of their own but, like the Moon, to be illuminated by Sol. Dante in the Convivio agrees (II, xiii, 15). And as they had, I think, no conception of the part which the air plays in turning physical light into the circumambient colour-realm that we call Day, we must picture all the countless cubic miles within the vast concavity as illuminated. Night is merely the conical shadow cast by our Earth. It extends, according to Dante (Paradiso, IX, 118) as far as to the sphere of Venus. Since the Sun moves and the Earth is stationary, we must picture this long, black finger perpetually revolving like the hand of a clock; that is why Milton calls it ‘the circling canopie of Night’s ext
ended shade’ (Paradise Lost, III, 556). Beyond that there is no night; only ‘happie climes that lie where day never shuts his eye’ (Comus, 978). When we look up at the night sky we are looking through darkness but not at darkness.

  And secondly, as that vast (though finite) space is not dark, so neither is it silent. If our ears were opened we should perceive, as Henryson puts it,

  every planet in his proper sphere

  In moving makand harmony and sound

  (Fables, 1659)

  as Dante heard it (Paradiso, I, 78) and Troilus (V, 1812).

  If the reader cares to repeat the experiment, already suggested, of a nocturnal walk with the medieval astronomy in mind, he will easily feel the effect of these two last details. The ‘silence’ which frightened Pascal was, according to the Model, wholly illusory; and the sky looks black only because we are seeing it through the dark glass of our own shadow. You must conceive yourself looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music.

  Much could still be added. But I omit the Signs, the Epicycles, and the Ecliptic. They contribute less to the emotional effect (which is my chief concern) and can hardly be made intelligible without diagrams.

  C. THEIR INHABITANTS

  God, we have said, causes the Primum Mobile to rotate. A modern Theist would hardly raise the question ‘How?’ But the question had been both raised and answered long before the Middle Ages, and the answer was incorporated in the Medieval Model. It was obvious to Aristotle that most things which move do so because some other moving object impels them. A hand, itself in motion, moves a sword; a wind, itself in motion, moves a ship. But it was also fundamental to his thought that no infinite series can be actual. We cannot therefore go on explaining one movement by another ad infinitum. There must in the last resort be something which, motionless itself, initiates the motion of all other things. Such a Prime Mover he finds in the wholly transcendent and immaterial God who ‘occupies no place and is not affected by time’.21 But we must not imagine Him moving things by any positive action, for that would be to attribute some kind of motion to Himself and we should then not have reached an utterly unmoving Mover. How then does He move things? Aristotle answers, κινεῖ ὡς ἐρώμενον, ‘He moves as beloved’.22 He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it. The Primum Mobile is moved by its love for God, and, being moved, communicates motion to the rest of the universe.