Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau: Romantic Souls, Realist Lives

Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau Romantic Souls, Realist Lives

Simon Haines

Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

Other publications by Simon Haines SHELLEY’S POETRY: The Divided Self

Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau Romantic Souls, Realist Lives Simon Haines Australian National University

© Simon Haines 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–4418–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haines, Simon, 1955– Poetry and philosophy from Homer to Rousseau : romantic souls, realist lives / Simon Haines. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4418–0 1. Poetry—History and criticism. 2. Self (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Self (Philosophy) I. Title PN1083.S46H35 2005 809.1′9384—dc22 2004051744 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Jane, Catherine, William and Edmund and in memoriam Nicolas Haines, 1918–2000, philosopher Shelagh Haines, 1925–2000, teacher of literature

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface

x

1 Homer: Passion in the Iliad

1

2 Sophocles’ Antigone and Thucydides’ Athens: Romanticism and Realism in Politics Antigone Thucydides

17 17 23

3 Plato and Aristotle: Concept and Passion Socrates and early Plato Plato: Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium Plato: Gorgias, Republic Aristotle: Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima Aristotle: Ethics, Politics, Poetics

33 33 36 39 42 45

4 The Inheritance of Augustine: Confessions Confessions (1) Virgil: Aeneid IV Ovid Augustine and Platonism St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans St Mark’s Gospel Confessions (2)

53 53 55 57 58 60 62 64

5 Aquinas and the Realist Revival Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy Abelard – and Heloise Aquinas: God and the soul Aquinas: Ethics Chaucer: the wife and the clerk

71 72 73 75 78 84

6 Dante and Medieval Romanticism Beowulf La Chanson de Roland Chrétien de Troyes and Courtly Love The Roman de la Rose Dante’s Divine Comedy

90 90 91 94 96 98

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7 Renaissance, Reformation and Shakespeare’s Realism Machiavelli Humanism Luther Shakespeare: Coriolanus

109 110 115 116 118

8 Romanticism from Descartes to Rousseau Recapitulation Descartes’ eye Hobbes’s blobs Leibniz and Spinoza Locke’s liberal self Vico: realism romanticised France: sensation and sentiment Britain: sympathy and sentiment Hume’s realism Rousseau’s romanticism

131 131 132 135 138 141 146 151 154 160 163

Notes

175

Bibliography

197

Index

205

Acknowledgements I am grateful to my colleagues in the English Department and to successive Deans of Arts at the Australian National University for allowing me the time to work on this book in parts of 1997–1999 and 2002–2004. The Acting Director of the Humanities Research Centre and the Head of the Social and Political Theory Program in the Research School of Social Sciences at the University kindly granted me Visiting Fellowships (and with them the stimulating company of some exceptional colleagues) during 2002 and 2003–2004 respectively. I am grateful to staff at the British Library, the Chifley and Menzies Libraries at the ANU, and the libraries of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Université Libre de Bruxelles for their assistance. Versions of three chapters of the book appeared as articles in the Critical Review, and I thank the editor for permission to use this material in a revised form. Anonymous readers of the manuscript made several invaluable suggestions. A substantial portion of the book has been presented as papers read to colleagues in the HRC and the School of Humanities at ANU, to the 1999 Martha Nussbaum Conference on Ethics and Literature at the ANU, to the 2003 British Association of Romantic Studies conference at Bologna and to the 2003 Australian Homer conference; many helpful suggestions were made on all those occasions. Discussions of Rousseau, Machiavelli and Shakespeare at several Liberty Fund conferences in Australia were enormously stimulating: thanks to organisers, participants and Fund. The book would never have been finished without the forbearance, advice and companionship of many friends, colleagues and students, including Kathie Barnes, Mary Besemeres, Geoffrey Brennan, Richard Campbell, Axel Clark, Andrew Clissold, Conal Condren, Lilla Crisafulli, Graham Cullum, Sonja Doyle, Keir Elam, Madeleine Forey, Richard Freadman, Chandran Kukathas, Niki Lacey, Fred Langman, Richard Lansdown, Owen Larkin, Tori McGeer, Elizabeth Minchin, Michael O’Neill, Heather Nash, David Parker, Philip Pettit, Stephen Prickett, Adam Shoemaker, John Stephenson, David Soskice, Paul Thom, Susan Tridgell, David Walsh, Anna Wierzbicka and, above all, Jane Adamson and Chris Miller, without whose inspiring and enlightening friendship I could scarcely even have started it. Its deficiencies, of course, are owed solely to its author. I am particularly indebted to members of the Departments of English, Classics and Philosophy at the ANU in 1972–1975, who introduced me to so many of the writers discussed here. My greatest debts are recorded in the Dedication.

ix

Preface

This book has its origins in two epochs and two disciplines of thought. The first is modern ethics: more precisely, the work of a number of philosophers who have been arguing since the 1960s that the subject has for too long – since G. E. Moore: since Kant: since Descartes – been dominated by certain unhistorical pictures of language and of human personality or sense of self. They argue that moral concepts have become impoverished, anaemic: that ordinary life has lost touch with the history living within them, with their cultural and conceptual pasts, their range of nuance, their distinctive adjacencies to other concepts; and that academic philosophy has divided them into core component (fact, prescription) and marginal packaging (value, description). And this is not “taking language seriously”, in Iris Murdoch’s phrase: not “life with the concept”, in Cora Diamond’s. Meanwhile (still Diamond), “the philosophy of mind which is the source of our inarticulateness in ethics presents to us, as a philosophical necessity, that picture of the human personality which our culture in general has inherited from the Enlightenment”. Behind an impoverished model of moral language stands an equivalently divided picture of the self whose seventeenth-century roots and classical antecedents have been exposed by Stanley Cavell, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams, among others. Rorty and Taylor, in particular, have drawn attention to the “punctual”, dimensionless nature of the rational self, isolated from both its own emotions and other selves: while MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum have reminded us powerfully of less divided though equally ancient alternatives, especially in the Aristotelian tradition. In a 1997 book and a 1993 article I suggested that this movement within philosophical ethics is also of great value for literary studies, making the case it does for closer attention to character, narrative, the virtues and the passions; to richer or “thicker” moral language; to literature itself, moral language at its richest, about which many of these philosophers have written well. The “long view” taken by some of them, comparing Aristotelian with Nietzschean visions of the world, for example, or tracing conceptions of the self through Plato, Montaigne and the Victorians, or writing about Greek tragedy in one book and the nineteenthcentury novel in the next, may also have something important to offer to a neighbouring discipline (or group of disciplines) which has seemed over the same period to be by turns entirely unhistorical and exclusively periodist in its approaches to its own material.1 The second origin is in British Romantic poetry. In several articles over the last ten years or so, and in that same book, I tried to grapple with x

Preface xi

Wordsworth’s aestheticising of certain aspects of human experience, the troubled relationship in his poetry between virtue and pleasure, beauty and good; with Tennyson’s haunting but finally vain attempt to integrate a relational, participative model of human experience with an individualised, sensory model; and with the divided Shelleyan self, an unrepresentable idea or abstraction shining at its core and chaotic, unformed passions threatening all the time to overwhelm it. All three poets manifest some form or other of the “dissociation” remarked by the moral philosophers; Diamond and Williams both use the word. T. S. Eliot’s theory of “dissociation of sensibility” (hardly theory: little lines of sacred wood run wild), reductive of so much English poetry from Milton to the Great War, was long ago discredited by Frank Kermode and others as unhistorical: as short-sighted Anglo-Catholic propaganda. But Eliot may nevertheless have been alive to English expressions of broader and older tendencies in European thought. Behind Wordsworth and Shelley stands Rousseau: behind him not only that Enlightenment picture of the self disparaged by the moral philosophers, but those earlier, even ancient pictures, such as that described by E. R. Dodds, of which it and its contrary are transformations. Perhaps literary studies might take up the philosophers’ gauntlet, then, by adopting their longue durée approach but really taking language seriously (the old quarrel!): treating a handful of poetic texts, with supplementary philosophical ones, as central to a story that culminates in Rousseau and points towards modernity. Auerbach’s Mimesis is beyond emulation but its example is heartening. A dozen or two principal books and writers, and some ancillaries, within a comprehensible but long-duration span: this approach leaves little enough room for them, let alone for engagement with any more than a tiny part of the universe of scholarship and secondary literature surrounding this material, indeed enabling all conversation with it. Even to put a toe in this ocean would make the book unwriteable in anything like its present form – would more than double its length and fatally obscure its line of thought – would make it impossible to attend in this way to the living thought in such writers, and to the vital connections between them. I have accordingly had to sidestep not only the work of the moral philosophers mentioned above (inspiring though their example has been), but such seminal scholarship as that by Christopher Gill on personality in Greek poetry and philosophy, Susan James and J. B. Schneewind on the passions and on moral autonomy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, and Timothy Reiss on “patterns of personhood” from Plato to Descartes. This book does not aspire to emulate any of those. Anyone who reads its title and expects some abbreviated version of Reiss, for example, will be most disconcerted. Still, having spent a good deal of my career outside universities, I am convinced that there are many readers, not only within universities, at undergraduate and later levels, but also outside, in the professions and elsewhere, who are looking for conversation of another kind about Homer, Dante, Shakespeare

xii Preface

or Rousseau: who do want real thought about real thinkers, but who may find that a substantial work of historical scholarship, of academic discourse, engaging at length with other secondary material and with many primary and intermediate texts, is not exactly what they need. This is not to disparage either kind of book: only to suggest that there may be a need for both. Finally, the book really does stop at Rousseau. This means that explicit consideration of important later writers whose work must also have indirectly informed it (Nietzsche is one obvious example, Wittgenstein another) will have to be deferred until another occasion. “Poetry” is broadly defined here so as to include not only the Iliad and Coriolanus but also Mark’s Gospel and the autobiographies of Rousseau and Augustine (for how could “literature” not include Plato?). The readings centre on single works, sometimes one in a chapter (Iliad, Antigone) and sometimes several but with one predominating (Beowulf, Song of Roland, Chretien’s romances, Romance of the Rose and Divine Comedy in Chapter 6; Aeneid IV, St Mark, Epistle to the Romans and Confessions in Chapter 4). Chaucer (mainly The Wife of Bath’s Tale) has a half-share of Chapter 5, as Sophocles (Antigone) has of Chapter 2. Shakespeare is also represented by just one play, but dominates Chapter 7, which is otherwise about non-poets. As for the philosophers, more than one work is discussed and at least an idea of the corpus as a whole is given in the cases of Plato and Aristotle (Chapter 3), Aquinas (5), and Descartes and Hume (8). The discussions of Machiavelli (7) and Hobbes and Locke (8), however, are again centred on the single works for which they are most famous. The other half of Chapter 2 is devoted to the single work of the only historian considered, Thucydides; on the other hand in Chapter 7 there are only brief considerations of three seminal writers of Renaissance and Reformation, Pico, Erasmus and Luther, who are likewise neither poets nor philosophers. Chapter 8 is much the longest: a more or less self-contained consideration of the self, chiefly in philosophy, from Descartes to Rousseau, opening with a retrospective glance at the rest of the book (in place of a formal “conclusion” at the end). Specialists in any of these writers or periods will, I fear, find such treatment of them cursory, even trite: but they may also find something to think about, while outside their fields they will be in the same condition as everyone else (including me). I have tried to give some flavour of the original languages whenever possible, supplementing others’ translations with my own where I was able. Footnotes have been kept to the minimum necessary to acknowledge establishers of texts and to point non-specialists towards helpful introductions and commentaries. The book argues that on the one hand there are poets (Homer, Ovid, the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and in special senses Sophocles and St Mark) and philosophers (Aristotle, Thucydides, Boethius, Abelard, Ockham, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hume) in whose work the self is presented as passional and relational: constituted first of all in emotions and interactions, or

Preface xiii

emotions as interactions: both “affective” and “intersubjective”, as the jargon goes. Reason, will, thought and belief are aspects or orientations of a fundamentally passional self. Other selves are part of its constitution, while God, or faith, is something like a limit of its thought. On the other hand there are poets (Virgil, St Paul, Augustine in Confessions, the Roland poet, Dante, Chrétien de Troyes and Rousseau) and philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Erasmus, Luther and most of the major seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury figures from Descartes to Rousseau) for whom the self is a willing, choosing, deciding, reasoning or believing centre of being, often captured or determined by a single concept or idea, and embedded within a fabric of emotion, sense, imagination and memory. This makes other selves hard to reach or fathom, while a God of some kind is often in the centre, often is the centre, as well as being transcendently outside everything. This “inner” self is unchanging, something like a “soul”, whereas the passional and relational self looks outward for its meanings and thinks of itself as changing or evolving: as a “life”. The book further proposes that the soul-centred view has become increasingly dominant as time has passed, and that this view tends to devalue experience. Maybe this is only to say that much of human experience has been unhappy and that we have needed ways of deflecting it or desensitising ourselves to it. But the other view does not deny suffering. I am only too aware, incidentally, that speaking of “two models” or “two views” of “the” self (“personality” has Kantian dividedness already built into it) can sound reductive and reifying, as if the world of thought were neatly divided into dualist and non-dualist theories about some entity or other (as it has been divided before into Platonist and Aristotelian, classical and romantic, naïve and sentimental, hedgehog and fox). And yet in a way the book is about the ramifications and drawbacks of a dualist mentality, which it sees as even more deep-seated and damaging than anti-Cartesians, or indeed anti-Platonists, do: which does tend to worship entities where there are none even to be found. I have had, finally, to label the two views. Any terms at all would be controversial, but it seemed impossible to do without some. The passional view I have called “realist”, thinking mainly of Cora Diamond’s essay on “the realistic spirit”, itself based on Wittgenstein’s remark: “not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing”. The “punctual” or nuclear view I have called “romantic”, with a lower-case “r”: not out of any perverse and anachronistic wish to add yet another to the disorderly mob of “romanticisms” identified by Lovejoy, but just because this kind of inwardness seems to terminate in, or apply to, such a remarkable constellation of post-Rousseauans, Romantics with an upper-case “R”, and their successors. Whatever this family resemblance may consist in, it is detectable in Byron, Pushkin, Goethe, Whitman, Yeats, Sartre and Heidegger: but also, I believe, in Augustine, Dante and Plato.2

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1 Homer: Passion in the Iliad

European literature begins with the word µηνιν (mênin). This is the accusative singular form of a Greek noun usually translated as “wrath”, “anger” or “rage”, but also connoting “bane” or “malice”. “The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles, that deadly anger which heaped up a myriad sorrows upon the Achaeans”: these are the first two lines of the Iliad, a formulaic oral composition probably of the later eighth century BC.1 These two lines, rather than the poem’s title, announce its theme and disclose its quality. This is the story not of the fall of Troy (Ilium), but of Achilles’ passion. The poem does not offer a sequential account of the Greek (Achaean) expedition to recover Helen from the Trojans, but represents the emotions and behaviour of Achilles and the other leading characters of the war in relation to a single illuminative episode in it. The mênis of Achilles has two principal phases. First, as a leader of his own tribe, the Myrmidons, he is furious with resentment at the loss of face inflicted on him by the Greek supreme commander, Agamemnon, in repossessing his concubine, Briseis. Achilles vindictively resolves to make good this loss by humiliating Agamemnon in return. Secondly, he is furious with grief at the loss of loving friendship inflicted on him by the chief Trojan warrior, Hector, who kills Patroclus, his dearest companion since childhood. Patroclus had been impersonating Achilles in the battle from which his companion had resentfully abstained. Now Achilles murderously resolves to make good this loss by killing Hector in return. Only in fulfilling both resolutions does Achilles come to understand his life. The rest of the poem folds around this double helix of vengeful anger and grief. Agamemnon and the other Greek chieftains; Hector, with his family and city: each of the two entourages corresponds to one of the two phases of Achilles’ passion. Each, like him, suffers its own consequent recognitions of reality, although for Hector and the Trojans, whose fall is the poem’s titular subject, the suffering is greater, the reality more terrible, the understanding deeper. 1

2 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

Achilles’ passion is first born as an achos, a nameless “ache” or distress of spirit, at the moment when Agamemnon asserts his superior status in front of the assembled Greek army and announces his decision to take Briseis away. Achilles’ passion immediately assumes the form of cholos or anger (our “choler”), and his manner of realising it is to see it as either fulfilled in killing Agamemnon or suppressed in quelling his own spirit, his very passionality (thumos). That is, the passion must be realised in some sort of action. His leader has acted as if he is without aidôs, the disposition to be affected by public esteem or disesteem (our “shame” only half-captures this). He has shown hubris, an overweening pride manifested in behaviour far beyond what is regarded as acceptable, and normally incurring nemesis, the retribution attendant on such behaviour. But the goddess Athene stops Achilles just as he is drawing his sword, telling him how to enact his wrath in another way. He calls Agamemnon a coward, and swears that he will not fight the Trojans again until Agamemnon is forced to recognise how valuable Achilles is, how much timê, honour, worth or value, he has. This quarrel takes place in the first book of the Iliad.2 By the ninth book, after more than a third of the poem, the Greeks are faring so badly without their invincible champion that Agamemnon sends an embassy of reparation to Achilles. He offers gifts of enormous value: masses of gold, whole townships with their lands, many women, his own daughter for a wife. He will swear he never lay with Briseis. But all these gifts, even ten times as many, must weigh as nothing in the balance of Achilles’ passion. Briseis was dear to him not so much in herself (although Achilles does profess some personal affection for her) as in her meaning as a prize of honour, as the embodiment of all he had done and been for the Greeks in the many campaigns of the war. As a gift from Agamemnon she had been the recognition and correlative of his excellence, his outstanding quality as a warrior. This excellence is called his aretê; the cognate term aristeia as a singular noun means the deed of excellence, while as a plural noun it means the rewards of the deed. Agamemnon’s taking her back is a disrecognition of Achilles’ quality and honour. He is made to seem just an ordinary man, or worse, a worthless person, ex-communicated, an alien. Small wonder that his mênis is unaffected even when Odysseus, leader of the embassy, invokes Achilles’ father Peleus, picturing him begging his son to keep his thumos, his cholos, within his breast. This is typically shrewd, for as the poem’s first two lines told us the second most important thing about Achilles, after his wrath, is that he is Peleus’ son: but it is to no avail. The elderly Phoinix, Achilles’ guide and teacher, has been a second father to him, and the same paternal note is struck a second time as he gives examples from legend of heroes who have for the community’s good overcome their mênis. But he fares no better. The giant warrior Aias then asks Achilles to see all the offered gifts as a kind of blood money, as material apology. This hits nearer the mark, and Achilles at least sets a term to his passion.

Homer: Passion in the Iliad 3

He will relent, his anger will cease, when the Trojans reach his own ships.3 He repeats this promise seven books later, speaking to Patroclus. His friend refers to his aretê as ainê, terrible or dreadful. Stung, Achilles says that he never intended his wrath to last for ever. Patroclus may wear his armour and this should terrify the Trojans for a while.4 This concession marks the turning point between the first and second phases of Achilles’ passion. But the first phase is not properly over until he says so, and not just to Patroclus but in public. He literally un-says his choler in another assembly, three books later still. Let the past be past, he repeats; let us subdue our passion; by necessity we cannot always be wrathful. Egô pauô cholon: I cease anger. Only saying this here will make it true: and only saying it will. The insulted one says he is not insulted, so there was no insult. Agamemnon responds by saying that he must have been possessed by Atê, the goddess of discord, delusion and mischief. Even Zeus is sometimes her victim, so what could poor Agamemnon do? Just as Achilles needed Athene to rechannel his mênis, so Agamemnon needs Atê to redescribe his hubris. He must retain his own dignity and status, or he will not be the proper person to receive Achilles’ unsaying and restore his honour. Now all those gifts are quite acceptable: not as reparation, of course, but as further correlatives of esteem and value.5 Achilles can return to his tent, his status, his war and the second phase of his passion. Patroclus had at first repelled the Trojans, driving them back to the city. But finally his aristeia went beyond the bounds prescribed by the gods, which were his destiny, and Hector killed him, driving the Greeks in turn back again to their ships. In Book 18 Achilles hears this news. Now there is no fulfilment for him in the Greeks’ predicament because he has lost his philos, his beloved friend, the recipient and reciprocator of his philia. This is love for friends and family, as distinct from erotic desire, or the strong relational feeling between guest and host, or benefactor and benefited. Homer is not interested in what we usually call “love”, which is the first of these. He thinks very little about that erotic desire of Paris for Helen which provoked the war in the first place,6 and he does not even consider the possibility of comparing Achilles’ personal affections for Patroclus and for Briseis, least of all as a matter of emotional interest peculiar and somehow “internal” to him. Achilles’ vengeful withholding of his excellence, on the other hand, now appears to the hero as of great importance: excessive and blameworthy. He reflects bitterly on anger, “sweeter than dripping honey, burgeoning like smoke in men’s hearts”. The paternal advice of Odysseus and Phoinix returns to haunt him. Now it is anangkê, necessity itself, sheer ineluctable event, which compresses his passional spirit in one of its aspects, mênis, by inflating it in another, penthos (grief, sorrow). Loss of honour must be made good, or one is a nobody, a nowhere, and might as well be dead: but culpable loss of loving friendship presses even more insistently. Anger and honour are involved both times, but anger-at-dishonour is less oppressive

4 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

than remorse-anger-grief. The quality of the anger is altered by what it combines with; the quality of the dishonour is affected by the nature of the dishonouring event. Necessity also decrees that Achilles balance his moral account and regain his honour by destroying Hector, the destroyer of his philos. These may seem like two different sorts of necessity, but they are not. To Achilles the pressure of event on the passional spirit and the pressure of moral thought on it are of the same experiential order, and both of them force the spirit to become, or issue in, the same passional action. He appears above the Greek battlements and simply by shouting his war cry, full of grief and rage, fills the Trojan army with panic and puts it to flight.7 In all these considerations the poem treats the passions (anger, grief, love, senses of shame and honour) as distinct perturbations of the spirit. They are not forms of achos, but they are the different things an achos might turn out to be, just as an indistinct hum might turn out to be an aircraft, a wasp or a conversation. Resolution of the ache into a passion, as with the hum, involves a clearer perception of an outer phenomenon (insult, death), the use of a concept (anger, grief), and a reciprocal action (kill, mourn). Passions are properly themselves here only when they are seen as irreducible, conceptually or experientially, into more basic, primary sensations, such as pleasure and pain, or aches; when they correlate with outer events and public concepts; and when they complete themselves in an action. No passion on this understanding of the matter can be something that wells unbidden and formless up from within or beneath the self, to rule or misrule it, to be subjugated by or to subvert it: for the self is only defined in recognising the passion. On the other hand a passion cannot be a kind of ideal entity, a purely intellective concept whose function it is to subjugate these nameless perturbations of the spirit by naming them. The disjunction, either passionas-nameless-disturbance-of-spirit or passion-as-pure-intellectual-concept, is fundamental to later thought but absent from Homer. And yet passion here is still thought; it cannot just be identical with either inner disturbance or (as the behaviourists claim) with outer action. A Homeric passion is a function of thinking life: a realised concept.8 Another kind of necessity, this time a religious rather than an ethical kind, requires that Achilles’ own death will follow soon after Hector’s. Achilles and the poem itself both acknowledge this kind of necessity, calling it fate or destiny.9 The Greek term moira has the sense of one’s due share or allotted portion, but perhaps the idea is best understood as a sense of the bounds or limits of a life, as if it were a garden (an allotment). Here the contrast with the experienced pressure of events and moral thought is clearer. Achilles accepts this aspect of necessity almost dispassionately; he even welcomes it, since the only kind of moral pressure it exerts on him is as a fixed limit within which to act his life out properly. Knowing it is there brings relief from the uncertainty of events and the turmoil of passional thought. His acceptance of Athene’s advice during the quarrel in Book 1 manifests this same religious

Homer: Passion in the Iliad 5

sense. The grief of his mother, the immortal nymph Thetis, is certainly forceful enough, more so perhaps than her son’s for Patroclus, but as an immortal she understands destiny too, or even better, and hurries off to have a new suit of divine armour made for him, for what she knows will be his last aristeia.10 Thetis’ presence marks Achilles out as the poem’s only human character in constant intimate conversation with divinity: especially as Thetis often appeals directly on his behalf to Zeus himself, the Father of the Gods. Achilles’ destiny, his life’s limit, is something we are thereby particularly asked to attend to and remember. He is the poem’s central religious figure. This is clear when the arms arrive. Hephaistos has made the shield, Achilles’ divine defence and reflection, into something that delimits and reflects all of humanity. Pictured on it, in 130 lines11 that themselves amount to a miracle of art, is a god’s view of the whole human world: a view from nowhere. The earth, sky, sea and stars, the sun and moon, and the Ocean River flowing around the edge, all are here, the cosmological limits of the natural world: but they receive only nine lines between them. They are just the edge. The next eighteen describe a peaceful city. We see marriages, festivals, a quarrel in the market place, the justices sitting at the bench. The lawsuit, unsurprisingly, takes up half this space, half of this life. Then nearly forty lines show a city besieged, a miniature Iliad. Next come ploughmen in the field, each being handed his honeyed wine at furrow’s end; the ploughed parts even look darker than the unploughed, says the poet admiringly. Reapers and binders next, a king watching contentedly, a feast in preparation; then a vineyard, heavy with grapes, filled with young men and women picking the fruit, a singer entertaining them, they dance to his music while they work. Here are cattle moving out of the farmyard to the pasture near the river, two lions taking a leading bull, the dogs snarling but prudently keeping clear; there is a meadow full of sheep and cottages; last comes a floor full of dancers in subtle patterns, two acrobats leaping amongst them, a multitude watching happily. This is the only such moment in the poem, a recreative reminder of enduring human life outside the world of the poem. Achilles holds the whole of life on his shield. The mood is mostly of fulfilment and celebration: quite unlike the quarrelsome, all-too-human encounters among mortals and immortals alike elsewhere. From this viewpoint all people are alike; this is life’s limit, and to define it is to praise it. The shield of Achilles reminds us that art is not life, because life is just too passionally and morally complex for any art to capture it in its full particularity (we return almost regretfully to the usual turmoil of the poem): but it also shows us that art does have its ways of looking at life, its own manner of abstracting shape and meaning from that impossible complexity. But this is most of all a moment of religious vision, in which we see that being able to see life as if from a vantage point outside it is occasionally necessary if we are to bear being in it, even though we cannot really stand at such a point, and seeing life like this is not actually living.

6 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

And so we plunge back into art’s version of ordinary life. After his public unsaying of his anger Achilles returns to his tent to grieve over Patroclus’ torn body, remembering how his philos used to set dinner before them. He thinks of his father Peleus, with nothing to wait for but the day when he hears Achilles too has been killed; his horse Xanthos, also immortal (only Achilles may have a talking horse and an immortal mother), reminds him that that day is soon.12 For the next three books (20–22) Achilles’ grief-anger is manifest or realised in killing. This is where he is at his most repellent to inner-directed modernity. This must surely be the emptiest of souls, we think, a creature with no heart, at best an elemental force like a wind or a bush fire, as the poem says, and at worst an evil spirit, although it does not say this. Trojans are slaughtered by the dozen; the earth runs with blood. The very river where he kills so many, the god Apollo himself, can hardly stop him. He spares a dozen young noblemen, but only so that he will be able to sacrifice them on his friend’s funeral pyre. When he finally confronts Hector he refuses to promise that if he is the victor in their necessarily mortal combat he will treat his adversary’s body decently, and when he does kill Hector he duly drags the body in the dust around the walls of Troy and then leaves it for the dogs to eat outside his camp. He appears derisive as he destroys his victims, but his treatment of Hector especially seems not merely cruel but outrageous, impious: excessive, surely, in Homeric terms, not just in ours. Perhaps not quite. On the matter of his derisive treatment of the lesser Trojans, it seems obvious to Achilles that they must all (necessity again) go on atoning for Patroclus’ death until Hector too has died. He uses the verb tinô, meaning “pay the penalty”, “acquit the debt”.13 He himself is their acquittal, their atonement. His human vengefulness, his exultant triumph, is the reflex of their fate. His passion is their death. The hapless Lycaon, another son of Priam, clasps Achilles by the knees and vainly begs for his life, recounting his misfortunes (the chief one being to meet Achilles in battle twice) and offering a king’s ransom. You must die, my friend, is the answer (still philos: they are in one of the most intimate of relationships). Patroclus did, and he was a much better man than you. I am better still by far, son of a fine mortal, a king, and of a goddess: and yet I too must soon die in battle.14 Achilles does not see death, life’s limit, as of great account, morally or passionally. What really is important to him, or in him, is enacting life’s moral imperatives. This is living. Before Patroclus died he was often merciful, he says.15 Now he cannot be; those imperatives will not let him. We may find it hard to understand this conception of the moral life, even in its debased Hollywood form: “a man has to do what a man has to do”. For us any judgement that a person – the modern ethical term not for a man or a woman, a life, but for the moral abstract of a man or woman – must do something is founded either on some sense of animal necessity (we must eat, sleep, avoid danger, fear death, desire to continue the species or to be

Homer: Passion in the Iliad 7

dominant members of it: in short feel or anticipate pleasure and pain) or on some rational principle of duty (we must maximise the general good/happiness, treat persons always as ends not means, will the maxim of our action as a universal law, afford each person an equal right to the most basic liberties).16 But for Achilles and this poem moral imperatives, passional-moral concepts, are not reducible in this disjunctive way to animal needs or rational duties. His moral concepts are lived, or known in use, not analysed, or known in thought; but just because he does live with them his necessities are those of a human life, not an animal one. (Incidentally those formulaic phrases essential to orality – long-haired Myrmidons, Hector breaker of horses, resourceful Odysseus, wine-dark sea, and so on to the point where for some critics the entire poem is a tissue of received formulae – are more valuably grasped not as presumptive evidence of multiple authorship, which is how our equalising and determinist age has often wanted to read them, but as a reflection at the stylistic level of this same moral and conceptual irreducibility. They are the poem’s own basic units of thought.17) What about the treatment of Hector’s body? Here, it is true, the poem itself finds fault with Achilles, but in doing so it actually reinforces this unfamiliar conception of the moral life. This behaviour too, it turns out, is an aspect of his passion, his grief-anger. At the opening of Book 23, Achilles leads the Myrmidons in mourning Patroclus, in a public demonstration of grief involving dirges and weeping. Patroclus appears to him in a dream asking him not to waste time, reminding him that he too is soon to die, and asking that their bones be buried together, just as they grew up together. As part of his mourning, Achilles does not wash his hair until he has burned a lock of it with Patroclus on his funeral pyre; he sacrifices the twelve young Trojans, as well as sheep, cattle and two of Patroclus’ own dogs; and he arranges splendid funeral games with generous prizes, over which he presides with matchless authority and grace, solving any squabbles that arise with good humour and tact, and showing us that here, now that the passion is fulfilled, is a great leader, as able to exert his own dominance over the Greeks, including even Agamemnon, as he was to subvert Agamemnon’s.18 All this is grief as recognition. The grief is not behaviour, because it is not identical with the acts of mourning, but is Achilles’ way of living out or experiencing the reality of Patroclus’ death and of their philia. Nor is it pure emotional disturbance; it is experienced as grief, and not as something else. But his experience is not exactly one of cognition either, as if he had said “ ‘grief’ is the concept-name for this disturbing experience”. This is passion as disturbance, act, event and concept jointly recognised as one of many pre-existing modes of living. But Achilles also thinks up and carries out on Hector’s body actions that are aeikea, literally not-good-likenesses or -images, and by extension notseemly.19 These are inadequate or failed recognitions. (We shall see later that an eikon, a life-like or plausible image, is what a poet makes.) Remembering

8 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

all that he and Patroclus have done together (we are now in the last book, 24) Achilles weeps all night, but his manner of recognising this grief when dawn comes is to renew his furious assault on Hector’s body, dragging it behind his chariot three times around the tomb of his friend. This, the poem says, is aeikês. This is not a good likeness of grief. The god Apollo expostulates with the other immortals: this man is all hard-edged unyielding destructiveness, with no accommodation, no flexibility. His passions and purposes are not enaisimoi, conformable to fate or what is fitting. He has expelled all pity (eleos) and capacity for shame (aidôs) from himself, and although shame may give men pain they also need it as a reminder of what is seemly, what is human. Hera, the queen of the gods, defends Achilles on what might nowadays be termed race or class grounds: he is the son of an immortal, almost “one of us”, as she does not quite say; Hector was not. In other words Achilles should be permitted to test the boundaries of shame more severely than an ordinary mortal. But Zeus, who has throughout the poem disapproved of his wife’s partisan support for the Greeks, agrees with Apollo. Hector was a pious man, respectful of the gods. Zeus loved him as much as Hera does Achilles. He says, in effect, “we can’t have this; Achilles must just return the body”. The verb he uses, luô, has the senses of “dissolve” and “loosen”, as well as of “return”, and Zeus just wants this passional knot untangled, resolved.20 But Achilles is not to be punished. His transgression is seen as a regrettable but understandable exaggeration of admirable actions and passions. His treatment of Hector, unlike Patroclus’ excessive aristeia or Agamemnon’s lack of aidôs, can easily be redeemed: literally, for the Trojans will still have to buy the body back with the proper ransom. So after all, we want to say, this is a question of “discrimination”. Achilles is half-immortal, and Zeus has to treat Thetis properly. But the poem’s stance is that Achilles has not behaved in a truly outrageous fashion; in fact for the most part he has behaved outstandingly, shown true aretê. He has misperceived or misbehaved his reality, but only at the margin. We see how Achilles himself comes to understand this. His mother tells him what Zeus has said, and he replies with simple dignity, showing the same deference as he did with Athene in Book 1, that if Zeus has indeed decreed this whole-spiritedly (thumos once more), then so be it.21 This deadliest of warriors, proudest of leaders, most passionate of friends, has had to be reminded (by his mother) that even the deadliness proper to war, the grief proper to friendship, the hauteur proper to leadership, have their own limits, beyond which they simply become something else: viciousness, vindictiveness, arrogance. As Patroclus suggested to Achilles and then showed by his own example, any excellence that is the greatest in its kind tends to excess. Achilles has to step back a pace: no more. And yet that one step to his life’s limits and back, that unseemliness, or blurring of the sharp moral-passional image, is what finally impels him to his clearest recognition of those limits, and enables the poem to convey its own clear-eyed understanding of that kind of life and its imperatives.22

Homer: Passion in the Iliad 9

One of the most moving encounters in poetry takes place in lines 471–691 of Book 24. Priam, Troy’s old king, manages with divine help to penetrate unseen into Achilles’ very tent to plead for the body of his son. Before anyone has even seen him he is clasping Achilles’ knees and kissing, the poem says, those murderous hands that had killed so many of his sons. Remember your own father, he says: distressed, unprotected, surrounded by intrigue, and yet still glad to hear the news of his son, hopeful of seeing him again. I have lost many of my fifty sons, including Hector, the best of them all, and yet I kiss the hands of the man who killed them. Show aidôs towards the gods and eleos towards me (he is echoing Apollo).23 Priam’s words arouse in Achilles the desire to weep for his father. They grieve together, one for his son and one for his father and his friend, until Achilles is contented or replete, his desire for grief’s practice exhausted; the poem again sees action and passion as convertible. Let us leave our sorrows in peace, he tells Priam, not continue to pain ourselves in aggravating them. My own father had just one untimely child (the Greek means “child all-not-of-the-hour”,24 and the sense is both that Achilles will die an untimely death, and that his is altogether an untimely life) and I cannot care for him in his old age because I am here, afflicting you in yours. Still, grieving achieves nothing practical – accomplishes nothing beyond its own fulfilment in understanding, one might say, putting highly un-Homeric abstractions into his mouth – so do not prolong yours indefinitely. You are more likely to suffer more of the same than to bring him back. Priam is anxious to hand over the ransom and leave at once to begin his mourning, but Achilles frowns. Do not reawaken my wrath out of my sorrow, he warns: a final rumble from the volcano. Do not make me sin against a suppliant and guest, and defy the gods as well. He knows very well what must be done; the gods have told him, and have clearly helped Priam already. He has the body cleaned and arrayed, lest Priam see it as it is and be angry, thus provoking Achilles’ own wrath. He asks Patroclus to forgive him for giving Hector back. He prepares food for his guest, since even the sorrowful must eat. He finds Priam a sleeping-place where the other Greek leaders will not disturb him with their endless planning meetings. They never leave me alone, says Achilles ruefully, and if they see you the ransom process will take forever. Finally he asks Priam how long he will need for the burial and its rites, undertaking to hold the Greeks back until they are over. There is not the slightest doubt of his power to do this. Those last two touches perfect this portrait of Achilles. Nowhere is he more human than in that aside about his aristocratic peers, or in his offer to keep them at bay for the sake of his enemy. He and Priam show themselves completely to each other, and each recognises in the other the reality of his own condition. Priam looks at the death of all his sons, of his dearest son, and sees himself as desolation; Achilles looks at the desolation of his father and the death of his friend and sees himself as an affliction, as the doomed, untimely one. In this recognition he is able to behave perfectly, to be most

10 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

completely himself, in all his power, all his restrained passion, all his courtesy and kingliness. He now knows all that he is and how to live it. He acts in full acceptance of his own impending death. His behaviour here is as much a part of his aretê as the armed combat was before, except, we feel, that Homer has now moved a step beyond the representation of the warrior’s ethic of honour and excellence to something even profounder. Achilles has understood his life in both its limits and its contours, but he still respects it as he lives it. It has not lost its value or meaning for him, but he does not fear its end. At the same time the poem recognises the nature of those limits and contours. This ethic of honour and excellence may indeed look like a calamity, an affliction, including to its practitioners. But Achilles has still understood his life in pushing his passional-moral understanding to its very limits. The poem has understood this “life” for us by showing a character in action and passion as the abstract of a real life, realised among other lives or put in religious perspective from the god’s-eye-view on the shield. Achilles is a limiting case, as it were the realist ideal. His assurance, his power to see and do, is semi-divine. We cannot hope to emulate him, but according to the poem we should try to live, we can live, something like this, without those distinctions we too often experience as categorical: between what we feel and what we think; between what happens to us and what we do; between our concepts and our lives; between life and death. As a glimpse of another of the poem’s lives there is none better than Hector’s anguished soliloquy at Book 22 lines 99–130, as he stands before the Scaean Gates awaiting the onrushing demi-god. Hector is mortal, decent, mostly brave and strong: a recognisable ordinary man, one like us. Zeus loves him but in the end cannot protect him. We have met his people, his family: a wife who beseeches him not to fight, though she knows that he will and that he will be killed; a baby son who shrinks away from his father’s armed figure; a mother and father who now lean down from the walls and beg him to run, although Priam too knows he will not, and knows that Troy will soon fall. Practising an exemplary self-criticism in this first of Greek and European poems, the Iliad is also a sympathetic representation of the destruction of a foreign civilisation:25 a model, even, for Thucydides’ account of the destruction of Athens – by Athens. Achilles looks like the rootless destroyer, seen from inside the Trojan walls rather than from the Greek camp, while Hector appears as the desperate and doomed protector and citizen, the family man weakened as well as enriched by his affiliations. Achilles knows himself as an outsider, an untimely calamity, and the whole Greek force, with its quarrelsome leaders and argumentative assemblies, is from the Trojan point of view an anti-polis, a destructive horde. The poem knows, of course, that there will always be an Achilles for every Priam, a nemesis for every city that over-reaches. Paris stole Helen, but no one in Troy could right his wrong against his host by making him give her back. Yet Hector is the pillar of this over-reaching city, an essential and typical

Homer: Passion in the Iliad 11

part of its political fabric. In his innocence we realise that politics in the Iliad is like ethics: a recognitive negotiation, its terms irreducible and enacted. Its meaning and existence is in the relational activity and understanding of each character. Individuals are not the playthings, functions or battlegrounds of huge impersonal forces, whether inner or outer, although this is a common enough misunderstanding of poetry, politics and history.26 Here, conversely, the forces are humanised; the gods are just like people, and the fate with which even the gods may not contend is just their lives seen from outside their limits. Justice issues, or does not, from lives; it is neither a set of rational principles, nor a disguised search for animal dominance (these are the two poles between which political conflict, politics as conflict, is endlessly played out), but an extension of the individual spirit, itself constituted, as we have seen, in recognitive, passional and moral public activity. It is no truer to say of this world that ethics is political than that politics is ethical. Activity or passivity in the public sphere cannot determine an “inner” self if the self is forming the public sphere even as it is formed in it. Hector’s life is ordinary political and ethical life. “Ô moi egôn”, begins Hector, untranslatably: “oh to me I”.27 “Poor pitiful me” is a poor pitiful modern equivalent; in the Greek this is a highly appropriate beginning to a passage in which a man is talking to his soul, or rather in which his soul is talking: one in which his life is at its krisis, its critical moment, its time of judgement. (The critic is properly “one whose business is judgement”.) To paraphrase what he says: “if I go back inside I will be disgraced. I insisted that we should fight when Achilles reappeared and as a result many Trojans have died. If I now retreat they will say I overvalued my own strength and ruined my own army. That would be shameful. Better to slay Achilles now, or die gloriously myself. But wait a minute: what if I put down my arms and try to bargain with him? Offer to give back Helen, with her possessions and half of Troy’s own wealth besides? No: this too is my own (my dear) spirit (philos thumos)28 conversing.” (The Greek is unfortunately all but untranslatable here too, but Hector is saying that this is idle talk, the wheels of thought turning unengaged.) “Achilles is just as likely to kill me unarmed, shamefully, like a woman. I can’t chatter away to him as if we were a boy and girl whispering sweet nothings in the rocky grove. Best to get on with it and just find out whom Zeus wants to give the glory to.” And then after all Hector does run, unable to control his fear: three times around Troy in front of all the citizens, his family, his companions in arms, until he is tricked by Athene into standing his ground, and finds out that it would indeed have been useless to parley with this man, who will not even grant his dying wish to have his body treated with respect. Hector’s moment of self-recognition shows us a character falling short of the Achillean ideal: but a Homeric character none the less. “I” speaks to “me”, “my” spirit converses, but there is nothing here we would regard as the inner, conflicted voice of self-doubt or self-awareness. Like Achilles in

12 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

the beginning of his wrath-at-dishonour, Hector realises his passion, which is fear, as alternative imaginary public actions, each already moralised as irreducibly conceptual: shameful or glorious. For him too aidôs, the single dispositional coin whose two moral faces are shame and respect, is part of a world of human experience in which there is no clear demarcation between individual and general consciousness. He can therefore instantly recognise fantasy as thought unattached to public-conceptual, actional-passional reality. Out of his fear he has made up a little story about talking to Achilles, and so he retells it parodically as another little story about young lovers in order to show himself its emptiness. He does not mention the fear itself: he enacts it. But Achilles’ recognition of reality is deeper. He grasps his passion more fully and in it sees the limits of his life, so that death is no longer fearsome. Hector cannot quite bring himself, once this moment is over, although he does while it lasts, to recognise his fear as cowardice, which would reveal reality to him and show him again the proper fulfilment of both the passion and his life (how many of us could?). “I cease anger”, says Achilles finally; “I cease fear” is what Hector is too briefly able to say. He is only mortal, after all. In the end Athene has to do the job for him, but then she also did it for Achilles in the beginning. In Hector’s relative falling short as much as in Achilles’ attainment of full self-knowledge, we see Homer’s understanding of character as the being and doing of a life wholely and clearly, with no cognitive or spiritual remainder. There is nothing to see or know except what one actively and consciously is and does. No Hamlet here, no Faust: Hector’s soliloquy reveals another kind of being entirely, where the moral (if not quite the passional) imperatives support the self from outside, and where as a consequence the nature of the “I” is not troubling. In so far as this “I” disturbs the consciousness at all, it is dismissed as idle chat or experienced as a briefly unresolved hum or ache. We can see something of the same kind of heroic being in the first great English poem, the eighth-century epic Beowulf. But Beowulf’s adversary Grendel, unlike Hector’s foe Achilles, really is a monster, with an even more monstrous mother, both morally inaccessible by definition: whereas Achilles is a very human demi-god, with what we might call an “anxious and involved” though admittedly immortal mother, and his human passion is the lynchpin of the Iliad. Homer’s vision is thus humanly more searching than that of the Beowulf poet: politically too, although its sense of the vulnerability of a raw new civility and polity is one of the great originalities of Beowulf.29 Possibly the Odyssey might be seen as further enabling the kind of self-consciousness that ultimately issues in Hamlet and Faust. Odysseus, more of a human Hector than a semi-divine Achilles, wanders in search of home; later Aeneas wanders in search of Rome; eventually Werther and Childe Harold just wander. But Odysseus always has the Homeric sense of his consciousness as in tune with the world’s. What the later poets responded to was not so much his sense of himself as his symbolic situation

Homer: Passion in the Iliad 13

as a wanderer, under which aspect he appears to them precisely as someone not in tune with the world. That Homeric kind of self might be termed “spirit”, perhaps risking confusion with thumos, spiritedness or passionality: or better still “life”, passional spirit extended over time. A conception of the self more familiar to us involves a reflective centre, a conflicted and alienated “soul”, aware of its own autonomous or unrelational identity, seeing its passions not only as surrounding and perhaps threatening it but also as peculiarly its own, verifying its concepts only by its own inner sense of logical certainty.30 Another way of looking at the matter for those who want to save the “soul” might be to say that in Homer the soul is the whole self, while in the contrary tradition the soul inhabits, regards and rules the rest of the self, standing in opposition to it. But this matter may also be understood in terms of what we have called “passion”. Wrath, grief, love, but also excellence, shame and honour: in Homer these are both agencies and conditions (or states, textures and orientations) of the self in its recognitions of reality. The Greek verb paschein and its cognates, especially pathos, together comprise a rich cluster of conceptual values indicated in English, a language intellectually less massive but more fluid, by “suffer”, “be affected”, “undergo”, “experience”. The contrary terms in Greek are the closely related poiein, to make, do, produce, create, bring about (“poetry” itself, significantly, is our derivation); and prattein, to act, achieve, fare. The distinction is clear enough: between incoming and outgoing, accepting and inflicting. But as for shame and esteem, so for passion and action: neither is itself, neither even makes proper sense, without the other. Faring well and experiencing well are reflexive functions. In Greek metaphysics paschein and poiein-or-prattein were regarded as the two aspects of power or potency, dunamis, itself a “potential” realised only in energeia, actual functioning.31 Passion is as much an aspect of power as action; pathos and praxis are the same power seen from the two sides or poles of a sheet of paper or a street. “Excellence” and “shame”, or “anger” and “grief”, are not terms indicative just of what someone suffers, nor just of what someone does, but of all that someone is: what a whole man or woman is, not just an abstract “person”. These reflexive considerations make “passion” a more valuable exploratory term for morals than some of its obvious rivals. “Affection” (Enlightenment moral philosophy uses the term almost interchangeably with “passion”) has connotations of attitude, inclination, making-of-the-self-towards experience (ad-facere), perhaps with a hint of insincerity (“affectation”): rather than of a more profound condition or state. The insincerity has then to be balanced by introducing the pseudoscientific “affect”. “Emotion” (e-movere) implies movement out of an unmoved centre, rather than the radical turbulence of a whole being. Both affection and emotion suggest a demarcation between experiencing self and experienced world. Meanwhile “feeling”, with its more sensory implications, is ambiguous as well as vague: “I feel hot”, “I feel angry”.

14 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

The most influential ethical tradition in the West, Platonism, has tended to confirm the disjunction between passion and action by regarding the passions distrustfully as either subverters or subjects of the ruling, active philosophic mind, impediments to its perception of moral reality. But here at the beginning of our recorded moral thought is the mênis of Achilles, unabstracted from his understanding or his behaviour. Achilles and Hector are characters, not “persons”; they are Homer’s manner of thinking about lives, not Kant’s. In Homer’s thought “character” is the pattern, tendency or tenor of a whole life. The passions are not so much the temperature, volatility, or mere agitation of character, as its shaping constituents. What we might think of as the “purely intellective” functions of life, including especially conceptual thought, are accidental to character, but passional thought is essential. The analyst could not sublime it further, nor the psychologist uncover it as bedrock. It is the shape our lives have. Homer’s poetry works with it as it is. Of course his poetry is not life itself, just as a living man’s character is not his life, is not the countless minutiae of impinging events and responsive actions. Achilles is a poetic character, not even a living man’s character, let alone a living man. But character and poetry stand in analogous abstracting relationships to life. Describing someone’s character is analogous to making a poem (epic, novel, drama, autobiography). By contrast, the ethical tradition distrustful of this life-centred way of thinking derives from a cognitive practice essential to which is the treatment of pure concepts, abstracted from lives, as the primary objects of thought. Passions appear in this tradition only as intellectualised entities called “anger”, “fear”, “shame” and so on, rather than as lived experiences shaped in these terms; and these “merely affective” entities are treated by the tradition as conceptually equivalent but cognitively inferior to intellective entities such as “truth”, “goodness”, “justice” and so on. Since most of us practise within this contrary tradition every time we think, we find it hard to read Homer in any real awareness of his way of thinking, in which concepts can still enrich lives as the forms of their passional thought. In Homer the meaning of mênis is everything Achilles says and does. As its first lines announce, the Iliad is Achilles-in-wrath in sung poetic form. Of course, whatever wrath may be, and whatever else “wrath” may be, “wrath” is also a concept: and yet the poem is not an analysis of the concept “wrath” but a use of it. The difference is between “the anger of Achilles is an overpowering desire to kill Hector and humiliate Agamemnon” and “all this is what anger is: its meaning is its use by Homer and its function in these characters”. In Achilles himself wrath is neither an entity nor an abstraction but a moral and passional thought-experience, an activity. We can call this way of thinking “realist” or “realistic” as a way of indicating that in it passions are represented as they really are in our living of our lives, as actually operative, and not as the intellectualised abstractions they become when we are thinking about our lives, or rather thinking about thinking.32 Just as importantly,

Homer: Passion in the Iliad 15

intellective concepts are in this way of thinking also represented as “real”: that is, as constituents of the self experienced on an equal footing with the passions, not as dislocated ideal entities. In general passions and concepts alike are treated here as operative and functioning, not as divorced objects of consideration, and the selves they inform are treated as dynamic, not schematic. The reality of an extended self, a spirit or life, is diffused right through it, rather than concentrated in one central point, a “soul”, which is qualitatively different from all others. Lives are also extended, of course: through time, in which they are fulfilled or completed. The realist self has, one might say, an “experiential” way of understanding the world: neither an empirical or materialist way, in which sense-impressions are seen as fundamentally constitutive, nor a rationalist and idealist way, in which pure concepts are so seen. Experientialism gives equal status to sense and concept, as well as to action and passion. “Passivity” is not in question. This is an understanding of the self as radically active, as constituted in its agency rather than its disengaged reflectivity or what might be termed its “inner”. But the realist self is not a behaviourist self, such that “he feels anger” means “he shouts and kills people”. Realism here is the representation of the reality of passion not just as bodily action but as conceptual recognition. Nor is the realist self a centreless self, an evenly diffused tissue of awareness, of variegated passions, without any individualised consciousness or awareness.33 Realism represents passion as particularised and realised in self-recognitive action. The realist self, furthermore, is thoroughly social and political, in a sense which also makes it non-behaviourist and non-centreless. Its understanding of anger is derived more from the angers of other angry people than from a definition of “anger”, or from some special inner authenticating awareness of what anger “feels” like. The same would be the case with “justice”, a passional-moral recognition, not a conflict of concepts and forces. As for the place of the religious sense in this realist self, it is as a kind of “fate” or limit of the human world, a sense of this world as having occasionally to be seen from its limits or just beyond them, rather than (as in the contrary model) a voice within the solitary self, presumed also to be the voice of an eternal entity beyond the limits of the human world. A final observation: the passions as we have seen them in Homer, irreducible, public, recognitive and active concepts, are finally also metaphors: life-metaphors. Aidôs is a concept which is seen by Achilles and Homer only in use, as a real constituent of a life, and this seeing is itself a metaphorical activity. Seeing something like a concept as integral to something like a life is a metaphorical thing to do. The poem thus regards moral life as essentially metaphorical, and the poetry is metaphorical in regarding moral life like this. But when the passion concepts are regarded as entities, names mysteriously signifying feelings, feelings signifying an invisible self, then the activity involved is essentially symbolical (or sometimes allegorical, for allegory looks like symbol from a metaphorical point of view).

16 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

The distinction between realism and non-realism, clearly, is not just between poetic and philosophical thought, with the former (Homer) attending to lives and the latter (Plato) to concepts. Some philosophers, especially Aristotle and his heirs, share Homer’s realism: so this is not a Plato-Aristotle distinction either; but of course they have the philosophical attitude to concepts. Many poets, meanwhile, do not share it. Dante is perhaps the greatest exemplar of non-realism in all Western poetry, as we shall see. Sophocles, to whom we now turn, was aware of the powerful attractions of non-realism in life and poetry, and represented it in one of his plays as an almost irresistible magnet for self-consciousness. The Romantic poets were nearly all nonrealists, several generations of them at the very start of our own epoch and at the very roots of modern thought. Romanticism, indeed, in all its diffuse variety, can be seen as the latest and still operative manifestation of that non-realist tradition; as a constant reminder of this important fact about the modern self this book will also refer to non-realism as “romanticism” (small “r”).

2 Sophocles’ Antigone and Thucydides’ Athens: Romanticism and Realism in Politics

Antigone A page or two about one or two scenes from one play would be an absurd gesture to make towards classical Greek tragedy, and perhaps not very much that could be inferred about Sophocles from such a narrow glimpse, even in the most general terms, could apply to Aeschylus or Euripides as well – although it is worth remembering that the three lives overlapped to a surprising degree. But this is a book about romanticism in literature, not about Greek poetry, and so we have no room here for more than a glance at two representative Greek Enlightenment attitudes to the self, of which furthermore only one is the poet’s, the other being a historian’s. “The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son Achilles”; “Oh my dear Ismene, sister-kin”; “Thucydides the Athenian wrote down the struggle between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians”: these are the opening lines of the Iliad, Antigone and the History of the Peloponnesian War; an epic romance, a tragic drama and a historical narrative. The first two if written today would be a novel and a screenplay, but the third would still be a history. Aristotle was the first writer we know of to discriminate methodically between these differing species and sub-species of literature: between history and poetry, and within poetry between epic and tragedy. With their examples in mind, he argued that poetry attends principally to the moral meaning of the events it represents, including their capacity to educe and illuminate human character in action and passion. Poetry must therefore be plausible and unified, and so it needs to be fictitious, to tell stories. History attends principally to the causative function of events, or specifically deeds, and therefore is defined by its need to be accurate. Epic and history are both forms of narrative, however, and Aristotle finds narrative less well suited than drama to the poetic ends of unity and plausibility, and hence discovery of character. 17

18 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

The Iliad, it is true, begins not exactly with Achilles but with wrath: with a passion-concept, not a character. It develops into the first of the great character studies in literature, but it might be said of the poem, of any narrative, that while concepts in it are used or lived, rather than defined as in philosophy, character is explored, written about, as much as used. Antigone, on the other hand, begins with Antigone naming Ismene.1 In drama character, not passion, is the first agent of thought. But it is clear from the first line onwards in this drama that Ismene is more important to Antigone just as sister-kin than as anything else a sister might be; philia is not the same kind of presence in her as it was in Achilles. Sophocles uses character to explore the self just as Homer uses passion, but the self he discovers in this play is in fact less passion- and more concept-centred, more obsessively dogmatic, than the one Homer writes about. This is a self whose passion is not itself thought about, is not itself thought, but which merely inheres, an unobserved and unobserving pressure, in thought that is primarily about moral and specifically political concepts. Anger is almost as essential to Antigone as to the Iliad, but now, with a strangely modern aspect as generation conflict,2 the anger is a symptom or side effect of the collision between sealed moral systems, not a mode of self-recognition. This is what Sophocles wants to show, of course. The agonised city this time is Thebes. A curse on the royal house has afflicted three generations. Oedipus has died after his terrible discovery, the subject of Oedipus the King, that he was the murderer of his father Laius, Labdacus’ son, and the husband of his own mother Jocasta. His sons Eteocles and Polyneices have fallen out over the succession and have killed each other, the former defending the city and the latter attacking it. Sophocles’ older rival Aeschylus had written his own play about this part of the story. Creon, Jocasta’s brother, is now king. He will not bury Polyneices, whom he regards as a traitor, and he decrees death for anyone who tries to. But Antigone, the elder daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, regards leaving the body unburied as an awful crime against the family and the gods, worse than Polyneices’ crime against his city. She does try to bury him. She is discovered, and Creon has her walled up in a cave; she hangs herself rather than starve, lamenting her family’s evil fate. Sure enough the angry gods had sent a plague to Thebes. Tiresias the prophet holds Creon’s action responsible, but Antigone dies before Creon can undo it. Creon’s son Haemon and wife Eurydice also kill themselves, the former for love of Antigone, the latter for love of her son. Creon is left a broken man. During the play a Chorus of Theban elders repeatedly evokes an apparently unresolvable conflict between our senses that human potential and achievement are all but limitless, and that there is after all some ancient, radical limit on both, to transgress which brings disaster. The play was probably composed in the mid-fifth century in Athens. Pericles was the pre-eminent political figure of the age, a moderate aristocrat

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who nevertheless seemed to some to offend the old gods by his vision of human political self-sufficiency, while others found him tyrannically overbearing, and others still insufficiently progressivist. More generally, new democratic opportunities conflicted with older aristocratic and religious habits of mind. The threat of large-scale Persian invasion on the one hand and the small-town Peisistratid tyranny on the other were still potent memories.3 “Periclean” Athens, agonising over these questions even as she extended her sway over other Grecian cities in the period preceding the general war, seemed almost like a tragic character herself. But poetry thinks in its own ways about politics, as we saw with the Iliad. Political practice, never theory, and never the mere physical struggle for dominance, was seen there as a function of individual lives which were already essentially “political”, in that it was part of their humanity always to recognise themselves as being in relation to others in recognitive communities: but as a function of individual lives, whose political practice is just one aspect of their self-recognition, not its major determining constituent. In Antigone the rival claims of genos and polis, clan and city, can likewise only be understood as passional-conceptual conflicts in the individuals, Antigone and Creon.4 The same is true of that deep conflict evoked by the Chorus between thrasos, which has senses ranging from daring, boldness and resolve to rashness, presumption and wilfulness; and moira, fate, destiny, limit. In both cases, unlike in the Iliad, the poetry thinks about politics as conflicted, not co-operatively recognitive: and yet for Sophocles this is an aberrant and abhorrent condition. In her opening exchanges with her sister Antigone almost ritually intones the familiar ethical catalogue: shame, honour, outrage, family sacraments. She is also aware of the curse as a kind of limiting evil, a category of her life. Creon’s treatment of Polyneices’ body is merely the latest episode in the long tale of affliction that defines this family.5 When Creon appears he begins by genuflecting towards kin and family pollution too (he is after all Antigone’s uncle and great-uncle), but clearly his heart is more in what comes next, a long, slightly hollow discourse on the civic virtues, counterbalancing Antigone’s initial pieties. The city is our ship; preserving it is the first duty of the citizen and the best test of the lawmaker’s quality not just as a politician but as a man.6 The Chorus chimes in with a grand Enlightenment Ode to Man, the chorus’s function in Greek tragedy often being to enlarge upon and so expose sentiments expressed by the protagonists. Only man sails the stormy seas (Creon’s metaphor), subdues the earth by cultivation, tames and traps the beasts, discovers speech, constructs civil shelter from savage nature: noble in reason, infinite in faculty. Highest of all is the hypsipolis, the high-political man, the pious lawmaker, the upholder of all that makes man most himself. Lowest is the impious and lawless man, the reckless transgressor against divine decree and positive law. He is and must be apolis, cast out.7 Yet when Creon and Antigone confront each other a few moments later their quarrel is precisely over the incommensurability

20 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

of piety and law. She tells him everyone approves of her pious behaviour, but is too afraid of his law to say so. “Doesn’t thinking so differently (so apart) make you feel aidôs?”, asks Creon: even if they do approve, does not it make you ashamed to expose yourself like this? Antigone replies, and this is crucial, that what she feels is not shame, but reverential awe, respectful piety, sebas, for someone born from the same womb. But Eteocles was also your brother, says Creon; surely honouring this man is acting impiously towards him, especially since he saved our city? Should the deserving man get the same treatment as the worthless one? Does an enemy become a friend just by dying? Antigone’s responses here appear inadequate at first: a dead body cannot see, be hurt by or testify to what the living do; and besides it was not some slave who died, but a brother. But all this is beside the point, she says. This is the law of the dead. We cannot know what will seem blameless or blameworthy after death. All we know is that the experience we are born into is one of affection, not enmity: of family relationship, not repudiation. Well then, go to Hades, says Creon, repudiating her. Be with your precious family if you must.8 This rapid-fire exchange (stichomuthia) brings to a head the play’s conflictual thought about family and city, divine and positive law, and religion and politics. The two antagonists, however, are on the same side in another kind of conflict; they are kin, after all. According to the Chorus the family of Oedipus is subject to two eternal truths: that a house once shaken by the gods goes on suffering; and that great wealth and natural advantages of themselves will bring suffering down on their possessors. The choral ode seems to conflate the two, so that hyperbasia or overstepping seems a concomitant of family greatness, to be rewarded by affliction.9 Antigone and Creon are full of thrasos.10 They are resolute but headstrong: exceptionally forceful, commanding people, one might say. Haemon, defending Antigone’s behaviour, repeats that the people approve it as righteous, and warns his father precisely of this family failing, this inability to bend (Apollo deplored it in Achilles).11 The implacable, unsentimental Chorus condemns this quarrel as unfilial. Haemon’s mind is unbalanced by erôs, sexual passion for Antigone.12 But Tiresias repeats the criticism,13 and by the play’s end Creon himself has accepted his son’s verdict as applicable not only to his behaviour to Antigone, where sheer anangkê in the form of plague has suppressed his thumos, forcing him to acknowledge divine law: but to his treatment of Haemon himself, now also intemperately self-murdered, and of Eurydice, who makes just one brief, dignified appearance before killing herself.14 Creon himself has gone to a hell of his own making. Antigone in her cave, meanwhile, is judged by the Chorus as having confronted the city law with the same generic lack of a compromising spirit, not only unlike Eurydice showing no womanly reticence (a woman was not an alien but a non-political being), but unlike Creon recognising no human criticism at all, leaving the verdict to the gods.15 She had to do what she had to do, but she put her

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21

dead brother before the city’s laws, her living sister and her unborn children (of course she would not have wished for more suffering Labdacids). This criticism of Antigone, together with her earlier answer to Creon, is critical to the play itself. Her philia, we said earlier, is not like Achilles’. She shows no tenderness towards Ismene, and her feeling for Polyneices is not realised in the way that Achilles’ grief for Patroclus was. Even her magnificent and unanswerable rebuttal of Creon is a relatively unimpassioned restatement of what she has been saying all along: this is what we are, we are born like this, this is what death enjoins, these are our limits, this is how we act. She would not have done the same for a son or a husband, she says later.16 This could not be a modern liberal doctrine of sibling or universal love, then, in view of Antigone’s strikingly unliberal attitudes; it is a religious recognition. The limits are the limits and she knows them when she sees them. Dead bodies tell no tales, she says: meaning simply that what she does is not within his ken and what he thinks is not within hers. It takes such a person (one who can say “he’s my brother, not any old slave”, meaning “he’s my brother, and I’m not just anybody”) to keep seeing them, keep insisting on them.17 The equivalent in Achilles is not the grief for Patroclus but the murderous anger against the Trojans, the instant obeying of Zeus and Athene, the dispassionate acceptance of his own death. Criticism of the characterisation on the grounds that there is nothing very human about Antigone is, as she would say, besides the point. She is this kind of human being. Sophocles wants to show us such a life: one in which a single passion, a filial reverence, has entirely occupied the soul and so controls the life. Beside it the life of a Creon is bound to look weak, although he may be no weaker than a Hector, who looks weak beside Achilles. Creon’s political thought, however, is also essential to our view of human well-being, or wellfaring. The Periclean metaphor of the city as a ship on the ocean of life in the storm of events, manned in the common sense of the common good and guided by those experienced few for whom the ship is more important than any individual on it, including themselves, is a vital part of our received wisdom. At one level Sophocles is thinking about how this political idea, like Antigone’s ethical passion, may turn into an autocratic presence in the soul. But he is even more interested in the conflict between the two lives, and Antigone’s is stronger. We are born first into families, not cities; cities are made, families born. The life we make together, however well, still has a boundary, which we best recognise in birth and death. This is a disagreement between the political and religious views of life, between order and righteousness, faring well together and facing mortality alone, and Sophocles wants to show just how much at odds the two imperatives can be. This is why he has not given us an Oedipus this time: nor an Aeschylean Orestes, nor a Euripidean Medea. Those characters are “richer”, so to speak, just because, or in that, they are passionally more conflicted, more Achillean. Antigone has no new recognitions, no conflicted passional thought; to the

22 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

extent that he does, this is Creon’s tragedy, not hers, although even his political thought is not passionally substantial enough to offer much for his later recognitions of reality to penetrate into. His convictions are rational but flimsy, just as Antigone’s are inarticulable but rock-like. For him metaphor ossifies into symbol, for her one passion stifles all the others. Concept for him, passion for her: shibboleth for both. This is the romantic problem; this is how the political rationalist and the religious fundamentalist look to each other, and to everyone else. Sophocles’ achievement here, one of rare genius, is to show the degeneration of the conceptual-passional moral self. It is not that tragedy, or drama, is generically less able to represent this self than epic: it is that this tragedy sets out to show how the passional self collapses. Oedipus the King, by contrast, shows how the strongest human spirit, daring or resolve, which is what we need to overcome life’s greatest challenges, is precisely the one that will smash hardest into the limits of life. But this collision of moira with thrasos and thumos is explored and understood in the passional self-recognitions of Oedipus himself. This is Homeric realism, even though Sophocles thinks with character about passion and morals and Homer thinks with passion and morals about character. Homer articulates character, Sophocles uses it; Homer describes Achilles, Sophocles is Oedipus; Achilles is obviously a character, Oedipus is a convincing facsimile of a real man. Epic is more expository, more an offering of a conversation with the reader about the character; drama is more “plausible and unified”, more a conversation between the reader or playgoer and the character seen as a real man or woman: in a way, then, also more feigned; less openly, though no less effectively, exploratory. We need to pinch ourselves to remember that this is still only art, a parallel world in which the characters that are all we now see still display only the salient features of characterisation, abstracted from the opacities and uncertainties of life (we do not need to know what Oedipus liked for breakfast). But whether their material is character or passion, Homer and Sophocles are both realist poets. In Antigone, however, Sophocles has developed the non-realist possibilities latent even in Achilles to the point where self-recognition ceases to occur. Homer saw these possibilities too, of course: in Achilles’ untimeliness, in an honour and an excellence so egregious, so “like a god”, as Hamlet says, that they expose the very ethic they exemplify. Antigone has all Achilles’ indifference towards death, at least until towards the end, when in her despair she seems for a moment a little more like Hector; but in her the grasp of life’s limits which enables Achilles to achieve that indifference has become an obsession, while his passionate intensity about life itself has entirely vanished, or been crowded out. She spends her life looking at the rim of the shield. As for Creon, not least in the Chorus’s amplification, he also exaggerates Achillean passional-moral practices (aidôs, aretê) into obsessional dogmas, lacking both the recognition of life’s limits and the passional

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23

understanding. He looks only at the centre of the shield. What happens when religious and political self-recognitions harden into conceptual dogmatism, so that the passion which should inform moral thought is separated from it and becomes corrupted into mere conviction or intensity, into “commitment” to the state, the family, the gods? When on one side the political self cannot see the inhumanity of what it is doing or becoming, while on the other the religious self devalues the world by its denial of the world’s claims, and so is dehumanised in turn? When a well-intentioned but shallow-rooted rationalism discovers the primitive will to power in itself, its own thinness and inflexibility, precisely in the act of confronting an unflinching sanctimonious piety? The Creon in all of us brings out the Antigone, and vice versa. Repressive states turn strong people into resistance martyrs whose families suffer. Fundamentalist proponents of a myriad faiths and causes make political life impossible for well-intentioned liberals and everyone else. Sophocles is a realist poet, but here he discloses the romantic self, which sees itself as individuated in the rationality of its principles and the intensity of its faith, not in the acuity of its passions. This is the self without qualities, the punctual self.18 Here the soul is not co-extensive with the self, the life, but is constituted only in its commitment or force, its sheer resolve or determination (insistence on its own terms): or lack of these things. “Passion” is present only quantitatively, as a measure of the degree of resolve: not as an individuating quality or a mode of self-understanding. Action flows directly and unmediatedly from this will, this soul, rather than emanating from a whole passional life. Concepts become battle-cries, symbols, not the metaphorical constituents of the moral life: as in Antigone’s opening catalogue, and then her entire inarticulate committed being; or in Creon’s ship, so soon exposed as a mere symbol of his desire for power, rather than the metaphor of self-understanding it appears at first. In Antigone Sophocles became the first great poet to represent this most common degenerative disease of the Western self. The human condition as he represents it here may even be worse than tragic, or rather may no longer be capable of tragic depth, because tragedy implies the profoundest self-discovery, and here that is not achievable, because Creon is not profound enough and Antigone does not discover anything. The play’s popularity in modern times perhaps testifies to its contemporary significance as a drama of dissociation, of the loss of that very capacity for self-knowledge which makes tragedy thinkable.

Thucydides Thucydides was Homer’s heir too, but he inherited different qualities of his thought, renouncing others. Sophocles, after Aeschylus, developed what Aristotle was to call poetry’s plausibility and unity. Homer’s incidents and characters are realistic, but by the nature of his thought they cannot be real in the sense in which our neighbours’ and ancestors’ lives are. His thinking

24 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

about the limits and experience of life is a kind of abstraction, though not a conceptual kind: a concentration on certain of life’s moral and passional aspects. In such an activity the distinction between fact and fiction is insignificant. What matters most is whether the representation is experientially and cognitively compelling. We must feel these lives as intimate with and as intimating our own. If we do not, we will not want to know about them. Sophocles’ incidents and characters are even more compelling in that there is no mediating narrative voice: only an appearance of real people. But in both cases the paradox is that for the poetry to be realistic it must be unreal. The only way for it to be compelling is to give the experience of passion-action which it represents the kind of shape and texture that ordinary confused experience cannot have. This shaping and texturing activity is thus necessarily fictive to some degree or other; it must not only ignore and suppress much of experience, but also adapt that part of it which it does represent to the needs of the thought. We can never know real people, least of all ourselves, with this sort of clarity. Thucydides inherited Homer’s setting: a war; and his narrative method: the relatively guileless speaking voice, the discursive, consequential account of events, the dramatic and decisive interventions of individual character. But he utterly renounced Homer’s fictiveness: sheer invention, use of mythical material, uncaringness about fact and evidence. Muthos19 is something like “pure story”, speech as not necessarily related to deed (ergon). Whether in Homer or in the work of his own great predecessor Herodotus, the “father of history” and the Aeschylus to his Sophocles, this fictive quality of thought, from Thucydides’ empirical, causative, evidentiary point of view, yields manifest implausibility. For him the distinction between fact and fiction is fundamental. He did, it is true, inherit from both Homer and the tragedians a wish to give moral shape and texture to his story. He contrives the semblance of a shaping plot and the impression of general passions; to a certain extent he represents individual character. But his kind of unity, while closer to Homer’s than Sophocles’, is again fundamentally unlike either, and this is again because of his attitude to the distinction between fact and fiction. Life is first seen here not as experiential but as empirical; not as passion-action but as event – although passional experience is powerfully evoked in the end. Plausibility arises from the verifiable rather than the authentic. Unity is only ever provisional, never final or intrinsic. The kind of knowledge we can have is of what someone did: not, or not primarily, of what someone felt, thought or was. These distinctions are worth making because poetry’s way of thinking is confused with history’s as often as with philosophy’s, even though the latter confusion is more central to this study. One perennial view of poetry is that it is so to speak saturated with history. In some of today’s extreme versions of this view epics, dramas, romances and lyrics must be understood only in terms of the social, economic, cultural and political circumstances of

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the times in which they were composed, and chiefly as the products of those circumstances. Any features not understandable in this way are invisible, or at best decorative and arbitrary. Thucydides himself held an unexceptionable version of this view; indeed he invented it. He is the first of those historians for whom poetry’s chief value is as evidence of what actually happened, and for whom it is otherwise, at least in principle, morally suspect in its cavalier attitudes to reality. This does not of course prevent him from adopting in his practice some of its most effective and characteristic ways of thinking. Socrates and Plato also disapproved of Homer’s implausibility and fictiveness, although for them his flaws appear as intellectual and conceptual, rather than empirical; and yet Plato too practised some of poetry’s ways of thinking. A more insidious modern theory is the converse one: that history (or philosophy) is saturated with poetry. Truths of fact (or concept) are here relativised into individual interpretation, and ultimately into illusion. This theory travesties both sides of the equation, because its view of poetry is misguided too. It regards poetry as essentially fictive, rather than essentially experiential and so necessarily fictive. We are to read Thucydides as “poetic” because to give shape to the war is to “invent” it.20 But as we have seen the fact that these distinctions are not salient for poetry is exactly why they are not definitive of it. They are on the other hand definitive of history, as conceptual definition is of philosophy. Sophocles also inherited Homer’s orality. Drama is to be seen and heard, not read. Here again Thucydides and the tragedians part company. Like Plato, again, but quite unlike Socrates, the historian was consciously literary. “Thucydides the Athenian wrote down (xunegrapse) the struggle”, he begins.21 He never uses the word “history”; Aristotle devised it in order to contrast this kind of thought with the poetic kind.22 This is the writing-down of a war as opposed to the singing of a wrath, and its “graphic” quality is offered as part of its veracity. One might say that Plato and Thucydides, philosopher and historian, between them invented literature, which is thought rigorously articulated in writing, its style being consequential on the mode and degree of rigour. Thucydides adapted Homer’s simple, profound diction into a new discursive, informative prose never equalled for profundity and simplicity; Plato several decades later adapted the spoken poetic drama into a literaryphilosophical prose drama whose like has never been seen again at all. Both were above all writers. Only recently23 has “literature” become shorthand for something misleadingly called “imaginative literature”, as if neither imagination nor writing played any part in philosophy or history, and often as if poetry were the exhalation of an eerie power called “imagination”, able to grasp transcendent, noumenal truths beyond the appearances of ordinary life, the “phenomenal” understanding of ordinary people (phainomena are “appearances”).24 It would be highly misleading to regard the thought of Homer or Sophocles as “imaginative” in this way. If they are fictive it is because fiction is a way of thinking about ordinary human lives precisely so

26 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

as to stop seeing them as just “ordinary”. If they are passional it is because they see the passions as agents of thought about lives, and poetry as a mode of thought peculiarly well-fitted to passional operation. But if they are imaginative they are so in virtue of their shape-finding activity, as pursued in fiction and passion. Thucydides, however, would then also be imaginative and passional, and of course literary, though not fictive. Plato would be imaginative and literary, though not passional or fictive. The shape he finds is a conceptual shape, and his fiction and passion are ancillary to this conceptual shape-finding. Thucydides, like Plato, was crystallising a new form of thought, written not spoken, as the accurate, narrative representation of event, rather than as the plausible, dramatic presentation of character, or as the articulation and definition of concept. The passion-and-action sheet of paper is seen from the other side. The title of the Iliad, not its first two lines, defines the undertaking. Not that character disappears, not even the narrator’s own; but the two-way street of human faring is studied as scrupulously as possible from the active side of fact and deed, rather than the passional side of story and character. When Thucydides began to write, in the 430s, Periclean Athens had just begun her long conflict with Sparta and her allies. Sophocles was in his sixties and Antigone was twenty years in the past. This new kind of writing about “real” events was nevertheless a confirmation of “realism”, of both the ancient Homeric and the recent Sophoclean understandings of the political self. Now the city under siege as a result of her own excesses was not far-flung Troy but the very centre of Greek civilisation, and yet the besiegers were also Greeks. This was civil war, stasis: a condition beyond even the afflicted deadlock of Antigone; that which results when passionand-action as potency or capacity (dunamis) is no longer being converted into any kind of productive political energy or deeds (energeia).25 Political practice is reduced to naked conceptual and appetitive confrontation; no more passional self-recognition can take place. This is not because individuals are absorbed into or driven by “historical forces” or “mass movements”. It is true that in Thucydides’ drama, for all his Homeric cast of characters (Pericles, Nicias, Brasidas, Cleon and Alcibiades all play leading roles, exhorting and swaying assemblies, leading armies) the tragic, diseased agonist often seems to be Athens herself. It is also true that the most terrible feature of the Greek civil war for Thucydides is the way that, in our terms, concepts can come to assume a sinister one-dimensional presence, as the justifying instrument of appetitive force within a hitherto complex passional individuality, a force as natural and destructive as the physical disease that afflicts Athens. But still he diagnoses the trouble, and the cure, as located in individual hearts, minds and bodies. The figures on this shield are those of people who are real, in both senses. Athens is important because she is an essential part of her people’s lives. They flourish partly in that they do good things together that the other Greeks do not do; for Athens to falter is for those good things

Sophocles’ Antigone and Thucydides’ Athens

27

to become harder to do. Concepts such as “democracy”, “freedom” or “Athens” help to enrich, indeed they inform, thinking and feeling lives; but they can become debilitators of moral thought once it starts to be only about them, once the life-thinking starts to serve the concept-thinking rather than the reverse. Passion becomes a mere nameless force, a brutal aggressiveness driving the concept, rather than the concept being part of the passional understanding of a life. The modern theories of poetry and history just mentioned depend on misrepresenting or denying this realist view of the political self. They see all history as “writing” and “interpretation”, but this is only to say that they see all event as radically subjective, a matter of arbitrary personal perception, of delusion and “fiction”. They see all poetry as “culturally determined” and “politically engaged”, but this is only to say that they see all lives as radically subjected, driven by inhuman forces such as “language”, “power”, “subconscious drives”, “history”, “Athens”, “the people”. These accounts suppress real event on one hand and real individuality on the other. Realism in both poetry and history, however, sees these two realities as reflexively confirmatory. Here, then, is an outline of Thucydides’ narrative, or at least of its moral gist. In the middle of Book 1 (there are eight books) some chance Athenian visitors defend their city before the Spartan assembly. Athens acted out of motives of security, honour and advantage, they say, in acquiring her empire after the defeat of the Persians. This is to act as human beings do act. Spartan talk of justice is only a mask for the pursuit of their own equivalent self-interest.26 Shortly afterwards Pericles, the pre-eminent Athenian of the time, tells the Athenian assembly that war is necessary because of Sparta’s aggression, but that if Athens behaves with restraint, that is, if she does not try to expand her empire further, if she preserves her fleet and if she does not risk the city itself, she will win.27 In Book 2, the war having begun, he commends Athenian democracy and national spirit in another speech, the famous “funeral oration”.28 In Athens, he says, political power rests with the whole citizenry, not with tyrants or cliques, and everyone is expected to take part in political life (our word “idiot” is from the Greek for “private” or “personal” as opposed to “public” and “political”). All citizens are equal before the law; merit is esteemed more highly than rank or class; openness of military training and planning contrasts with Spartan secrecy; love of honour, glory, beauty, wisdom and freedom is combined with courage and daring enterprise in defending and extending the life in which these things are salient, whereas mere financial wealth, for example, is not. The dead, whom Pericles is celebrating on the city’s behalf and whose example he is extolling, embodied these qualities. The “citizens” comprised a minority of the Athenian populace. Neither women nor the large slave population played any part in politics at all, and Pericles in fact encourages women to remain invisible.29 These things make the polity highly objectionable to us, aware as we are of the waste and

28 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

impoverishment of human potential they imply. But it is not always easy for us, who are so aware, to remember that these things have been customary in most places and at most times in human history, while almost none of the billions who have lived with and accepted them has been able to offer an account of his political practice which even in its celebration of that political life might make it possible for these customs to seem objectionable one day. The genius of a Pericles is to articulate a political ethos, not anticipate its confusion; and we have incorporated much of this one into our own, which has its blindnesses too. We have accepted the argument that democracy’s prime function is by judicious distribution of the currency of political practice to keep as much of it as possible out of the hands of the insatiable few; we have also accepted many of the other goods evoked in the speech. This is a hymn to human achievement without any of the pointed irony of Creon’s Chorus, a detailed inspiring evocation not only of honour and excellence, those Homeric and Sophoclean standard-bearers of ethical and political thought, but of freedom and well-being. Thucydides says he always puts down the words which a given statesman would be most likely to have said in the circumstances, while retaining the gist of what he is reported to have said. He as well as Pericles, then, is fulfilling that essential function of using the conceptual metaphors political communities live by so as to revitalise or recreate them for everyone else. Almost immediately after this, however, there comes a terrible plague, which kills perhaps a third of the population of the city and utterly demoralises the rest.30 Under its influence people become indifferent to every law of nature or the gods. Desire for immediate pleasure (hêdonê) drives out zeal (prothumos) for what is usually regarded as virtuous behaviour, all those goods Pericles invoked: although that zeal seems itself rather febrile here, an ardent self-promoting not a settled conviction.31 Whatever practice serves pleasure is now regarded as honourable. The city does eventually recover its health and spirits, but its principal spokesman, the one who because he can speak its goods can understand its people and educe their best qualities, dies in the plague. (Thucydides caught it too,32 and his account of both the physical and the moral symptoms is intimately compelling.) So in Book 3 the violent populist Cleon becomes de facto leader, insisting in a critical debate that if the empire is not to unravel it must be a dictatorship controlling its unwilling subjects by fear and, if necessary, massacre. Pity and decency are not for imperial powers. An obscure opponent argues, successfully on this occasion, although the whole exchange takes place in what has become a distinctly sub-Periclean moral atmosphere, that mercy is the better policy, since cities facing certain extinction will never give in, while the pro-Athenian democratic factions elsewhere will be encouraged by decent Athenian behaviour.33 As the war escalates democratic Athenian parties and oligarchical Spartan parties do spring up in many cities, but in extremist opposition to each other. This is stasis,34 violent civil war or revolution, Hobbes’s war of

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all against all (Hobbes was a translator of Thucydides). So long as human nature (phusis anthrôpôn) stays the same, says Thucydides, calamities will occur, but they can vary in severity according to circumstances, and this kind of conflict produces the most unnatural behaviour35 (atopos, “out of place”: compare Achilles’ “untimeliness”). In a passage of universal application, Thucydides details the symptoms of collective moral collapse. Above all, concepts dissolve; the customary or “ethical” (êthos means “custom”) relationships of names to deeds are reshaped by expediency. Wild recklessness is called true comradeship, prudence becomes cowardice, moderation is weakness. Impulsiveness and extremism are qualities to be trusted, while their contraries are not. Plotters and counterplotters are reliable; those who play straight are subversives and cowards. In the end kinship itself is regarded as less reliable than factional loyalty; family ties will constrain the partisan. The faction exists for its own good, not the polity’s, and in its eyes the law is an impediment, not a defence. It is better to be seen as a cunning rogue than as a good and simple man. The stupid and violent act faster and therefore survive better than the wise and peaceful. Those who belong to neither party are destroyed by both. The causes of this collapse, claims Thucydides, are to be found in its ethical and passional sources. Men are driven at such times not by honour and victory themselves but by the love of these things (philotimia, philonikein); they act not out of spirit (thumos) but out of zeal (prothumos again).36 These are no trivial distinctions. Honour is no longer an experience and agent of metaphorical self-knowledge and moral understanding, but an object of desire, a mere featureless name, a symbol. Instead of being a thought-passion-action, a way to understand oneself in understanding it, it matters only in the quantity of sheer will-power or desire involved in its pursuit. Love of honour is ambition, not honour; love of victory is not victory as part of the understanding of conflict, but mere will-to-win; zeal is the desire to show one’s quantity of spirit, rather than a quality of one’s being. Moral agents are bestial or mechanical, differentiated by their degrees of “drive”, “dominance” or “will to power”: our terms for a primitive appetite which crowds out all passional discrimination. They use, says Thucydides, catch-phrases such as “equal rights for the many” or “balanced excellence”, avoiding the contentious “democracy” and “oligarchy”;37 but their activity is not that of pursuing the common weal, as these phrases would imply in a moral life, but that of possessing it, and by whatever means. Concepts have become the tools of pure desire, not its mediators and refiners. This is not an Achillean wrath, but what that passion becomes when it is dissociated from its cognitivity. Simone Weil movingly reads the Iliad as a “poem of force”,38 but it is surely Thucydides, not Homer, who has described the world of pure force. Here the human phusis has become akratês orgês, “powerless over its urges”,39 its animal or even vegetable appetites, to the point where in their savagery men take pleasure in flouting those basic and irreducible moral understandings

30 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

which alone would have protected them when they in turn became the victims. So great is our need for protection against such savagery that many philosophers, starting with Socrates, have tried to find arguments against it, which is surely a vain effort. Better, perhaps, to act like Pericles, so as to develop the passions as moral and conceptual agents, not analyse them intellectually into their supposed appetitive components. Honour, decency, courage and shame are foundational cognitions of moral reality, not forms of desire for pleasure and pain, or just of pure desire. Sheer orgê will always make itself felt, unless human nature changes, which it shows no signs of doing. But passion is not animal appetite, and by not keeping the distinction in mind we disenfranchise our best ally in the struggle against our worst enemy. By the sixteenth year of the war, the coarse and violent Cleon has died and the outstanding Athenian leader is Alcibiades, brilliant but erratic, a figure of flawed and excessive aretê. Plato was to write about him too, as an admirer of Socrates. In Book 5 Athens lays siege to Melos, a small Spartan island colony. There is no hope for the colonists, and the Athenians ask their leaders (this is not a democratic assembly) to surrender: otherwise everyone will be killed or enslaved. In a grimmer version of those earlier debates, one at the beginning of the war before Sparta’s own assembly, one within Athens’ as the war began to escalate into universal stasis, the Melians appeal again for justice, but the Athenians answer that justice is only possible when conditions of “equal necessity” (isê anangkê)40 obtain for both sides. Otherwise the pre-eminent must experience dunamis, pathos-and-praxis, as actors, while the weak do so as sufferers. This is sheer natural necessity. Whoever has more force rules: just as stones roll downhill, one might say. The Melians refuse to surrender and some months later the Athenians carry out their threat. Immediately after this brutality Book 6 begins, and with it the last great chapter of the history. Books 6–8 tell the story of the daring Athenian invasion of Sicily, a huge and populous island, with a great force of ships and men. With its faint echoes of the Trojan expedition, this neo-Persian hyperbasia or over-reaching, promoted but not led by Alcibiades, is contrary to all the Periclean principles (preserve the fleet, do not enlarge the empire, always protect the city). Thucydides’ account is profoundly moving; this is Athens’ nemesis. The mighty invasion comes to utter ruin. Thousands die in battle or of starvation and disease; many are imprisoned for months on end in unspeakable conditions in stone quarries; the generals are put to death, including Nicias, the best of them, the one who least deserved this end41 and who had spoken out against the campaign from the start. The war is not quite over, and neither is the history, but this is really the end. In Antigone Sophocles shows the realist self dwindling into the romantic soul. In his account of the war Thucydides shows the realist self collapsing into sheer animal appetite; but he also shows that when concepts suffer such a romantic dwindling, total moral collapse is at hand. When thrasos

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comes, is stasis far behind? As his story opens the Athenian concept-use in the Spartan assembly is gloriously amplified by Pericles. But sheer event has its own ironies. Political well-being, like its individual equivalent, is partly luck, or at least the absence of bad luck. We feel that this city as spoken for by this man might survive military disaster and plague alike, but the man dies, and no one else can speak as well. Human flourishing, it seems, is a highly complex and unstable state requiring tireless vigilance and thought to minimise the effects of malign events, which are natural necessities, and of sheer appetite, which is also a natural necessity. Appetite will never be eliminated and must never be overlooked or underestimated, but it can be managed by proper passional-conceptual thought. In politics this management calls for exceptional talent, and once a Cleon replaces a Pericles there is no regaining the former equilibrium. The old language is impoverished and debased. Chaos spreads just as fast as concepts collapse. Then force is all there is. The Melian episode shows us how far Athens has fallen; she learns this for herself in Sicily, which is not a punishment but another outcome of her condition. Her language and behaviour alike now lack all Periclean understanding. She cannot begin to show the Melians why surrender might mean for them something other than physical survival: why, for example, it might be better to be an Athenian ally than a Spartan colony. Nor can she understand Nicias when he explains the folly of the Sicilian adventure. But the self-recognition of tragedy is present in the work of Thucydides, an Athenian. He never moralises. He does create a moral shape, but he leaves the conclusions for us to draw, or not, as events left them for him. Yet he never relativises either. Human political suffering, its reality, inevitability and mitigation, is his theme. Realist awareness of force or appetite and attention to passion and concept will help decrease the suffering, as thoughtful attention to symptoms will in a plague. We should all attend and beware, but we need a Pericles too. Thucydides believes in articulating the concepts we live by to keep them alive, and neither Cleons nor Creons are the people to do it. Democracy needs leaders with outstanding characters not appetites. Individual, passional lives, those of the suffering many and the mitigating few, are always the underlying moral reality of which Thucydides’ political realism is most solicitous, though he generally writes about whole cities or armies. Thucydides sees human reality from the point of view of fact. What meets his eye is whether someone empirically did something. Homer and Sophocles see it from the point of view of story. What meets theirs is whether a character did something illuminative. But the belief that passional, moral thought in action is the fullest realisation of lives, whether political or private, whether particularised or generalised, unites all three. They also share a sense that romantic concepts, names narrowed to a point with no purchase in the passional texture of life, threaten that reality by exposing it to its greatest danger: appetitive force. For the founders of Western moral philosophy,

32 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

however, for Socrates, twenty years older than Thucydides, and for Plato, thirty years younger, passions are almost as dangerous as appetitive force, and pure or dissociated concepts are the best defence against both. At the centre of the self, seeing and desiring all concepts, is the soul; this seeing and desiring is the fullest realisation of a life. A third philosopher, Aristotle, believed a generation after Plato that while their discipline of thought amounted to a conceptual rather than an experiential understanding of the moral life, the passions were nevertheless as Homer saw essential to selfrealisation. The soul, for Aristotle, was better understood as the whole self in the act of knowing itself.

3 Plato and Aristotle: Concept and Passion

Socrates and early Plato Sophocles distrusted the enlightened Periclean humanism springing up around him as Athens enlarged her empire. He saw it as hyperbasia, an overreaching, a failure to recognise the passionality and the limits of life. Thucydides, forty years younger, saw the age in decline and retrospectively admired its political and conceptual assurance, even though his account of its implosion resembled Sophocles’. Socrates was midway between the two in years, a very child of the age, perhaps its greatest. In him an entirely new way of thinking took shape which was both derived from and directed against Periclean conceptual humanism. Socrates, like Antigone and Creon (but not Sophocles), and to a far greater extent than Pericles and Thucydides, saw virtues such as wisdom, courage, balance and justice as necessarily and sufficiently constitutive of human well-being and well-faring. He took the key terms of Athenian moral life as he found it and subjected them to an unprecedented and still unrivalled scrutiny (the elenchos). His intention was to defend the moral life against force and appetite. For Pericles and Thucydides, who had the same intention, these concepts lived only in use, but for Socrates use mutates all too rapidly into expediency and relativism, and his task is to prevent that mutation by fixing the meaning of the concepts. Using concepts whose meaning is unclear opens the door to Cleon, the Sophists and stasis. Socrates’ clarificatory activity is thus deeply ethical and political in purpose: but it can paradoxically appear to be, or can actually be, destructive of the very concepts it seeks so fearlessly to protect. Criticism of concepts must always appear threatening to those who live by them, and yet without it language and thought is at risk from the direction of appetite and force. Socrates, however, seems to wish not just to clean up and save the conceptual world for us all, but to take all moral concepts right away from the lives they belong in, leaving the lives enfeebled or impoverished; and to take 33

34 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

permanent possession of them for a different kind of life altogether, one most people do not understand and are not fitted for. To Homer and Sophocles this would have seemed an almost Antigonean enterprise, subversive of passional understanding, fanatical, perversely religious. The manner of Socrates’ death-by-principle would have seemed to bear out such an assessment. From a Periclean and Thucydidean point of view this way of “saving the concepts” is grounded in and productive of serious and even dangerous misunderstanding about life with concepts. But for much of Western thought, Socrates’ life and death, his fearless exposure of the meretriciousness of words and their users, are universally exemplary. This new, enlightened way of thinking had its roots in a kind of speculative natural science, a philosophical cosmology, practiced in Greece 150 years before Socrates’ birth, which is to say from about 150 years after Homer. The natural universe as it appeared around the edge of Achilles’ shield was at the centre of this speculation. In the sixth century the Ionian or Eastern Greek thinkers from Thales to Heraclitus wondered what kind of primal stuff or principle (archê) the universe was made of (fire, water, air), and what its fundamental state was (change or rest). Its motive soul or self-animating capacity (psychê), critically, was an aspect or quality of this primal stuff, not a distinct inhabitant of it. By Socrates’ time Democritus thought of the stuff as atomic or particulate; so, two centuries later, did Epicurus and, later still, Lucretius. The Italian or Western Greek thinker Pythagoras, to return to the sixth century, was more a mystic than a cosmologist, but he too believed in an underlying order (logos), reflected in musical and mathematical harmony or interval, and present in nature as a kind of universal spirit or soul, which he saw as the immortal and reincarnate inhabitant of inanimate matter. The Eleatic School was the child of Parmenides, who brought Ionian “science” to a standstill in the first half of the fifth century by arguing, in verse, that reality was one, unchanging, unmoving substance, intelligible but not sensible.1 The doctrines of Pythagoras and Parmenides exercised a powerful influence on Plato, but for Socrates the cosmological controversies of what we now call the “Pre-Socratics” were merely tedious. The Eleatics might have argued that a sort of universal Mind was the basis of the universe, but for him the question was not how but why Mind made the world the way it was. The Ionians wanted to know what the underlying stuff of the world is, but only of the natural world, not the human one; even Pythagoras seemed to think of soul as a kind of natural principle, not a moral condition. Socrates derived from these traditions a passionate interest in the search for an underlying something, but like most of his Periclean contemporaries, especially the notorious Sophists, his arch-enemies on the Platonic account, he was not interested in the natural realm, but in the moral one. The relativising Sophists threw out the baby, the search for archê, with the bathwater, natural science. Socrates still thought that there were basic substances, but

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for him they were called “excellence”, “beauty”, “courage” or “justice”. If there was one primordial super-stuff it was called not “fire” or “water”, but “the good”. In Plato’s earlier dialogues the character “Socrates” is generally agreed to be at its closest to the historical figure, and again and again in Apology, Euthyphro, Charmides, Laches and Lysis we find him asking: “this and this are excellent acts, but what is excellence (courage, wisdom, holiness, balance, well-being, happiness, friendship, love, death, belonging, resembling, piety, justice, art, the state, being, becoming)? what quality do all acts of excellence have in common? these are the attributes of excellence, but what is it really?”2 He seeks an account or definition (logos) of the form (idea, eidos) of each concept, as the essence (ousia) of the underlying something, and he sees this unremitting search for definition and essence, this reflection upon and sorting of central moral concepts which themselves converge on unity, as the only kind of activity which can yield reliable self-understanding, knowledge of how to live, health of soul, security in a world of change. For Socrates himself this is a true vocation; God, or at least divine voices, guide him in his search.3 He does not search for, or desire, concept-definitions merely in order to use them. The best life, if we are to follow his example, the healthiest activity for the soul, is the one spent in the search. It is a kind of religious life, although here religion is not a sense of the limits of life but an ascetic renunciation of its passional and conceptual confusion.4 Poetry’s kind of moral thought and of life recognition fare very badly on this view of things, much worse than in Thucydides. Socrates is repeatedly and aggressively adversarial towards Homer in particular and poets in general. Poets had long attacked each other as incompetent, misleading and so on, but this was something new. Socrates is trying to eliminate what he sees generically as a dangerous rival and a damaging influence. In Apology he finds the poets unable to explain their own poems to him, and concludes that they compose not out of theoretical wisdom (philo-sophers have philêsis for sophia) but out of base nature (phusis) and divine possession (enthousiasmos).5 Poetry is part of the realm of gods-in-nature explored by Thales and others, but is of no significance in Socrates’ realm of logos and theoretical knowledge (epistêmê). In Euthyphro he affects surprise at the immoral behaviour of the gods in poetry and painting and doubts whether such things could ever have happened;6 art is twice culpable. In Ion, a light-hearted earlier piece, he argues again that neither the rhapsodes, professional reciters of poetry, nor the poets they recite understand what they say in any rational or technical way. They are possessed, but they know nothing about war, politics, fishing, horses, medicine – or philosophy. This was a radical attack. Homer was the fount of Greek practical wisdom, a Bible, but can his poetry really be called “thought” (dianoia), says Socrates, when it is composed only after the poet’s “reason” (nous) has left him?7 Poets and Sophists are both attacked at once in the most substantial of these earlier dialogues, Protagoras. The degree of this double threat to

36 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

Socrates can be gauged by how visibly his likeable opponent shakes him. The character “Socrates” is as nearly at a loss here as anywhere in Plato. More explicitly and intelligently than any other of Socrates’ opponents, Protagoras resists the elenchos, the technique of collapsing moral debate into an argument about concept definitions, and finally reducing all concepts to one: in this case aretê. For Socrates the language world Protagoras inhabits is a shimmer of deceptive appearances, and moral thought should consist in tearing them aside to reveal the rock-like reality behind. For Protagoras his world is reality, is all we have (linguistically speaking), and moral thought consists in preserving and refining its distinctions, saving its appearances. To him “the good” is poikilos, dappled, variegated, and pantodapos, manifold.8 Socrates’ world is a rocky lunar landscape with no air, smell or colour. But we are reading a dialogue by Plato, and we cannot expect Socrates to be defeated. Protagoras is a Sophist, a professional teacher, and what he professes to teach is precisely aretê, excellence in one’s ethical and political life. His medium of instruction is poetry. He claims that literary criticism is the best form of education, and tries to illustrate this by establishing an inconsistency in one poem’s attitude to aretê.9 But Socrates destroys him. His own reading of the poem is a magnificent piece of criticism, the first great example of the genre in European literature, and a total vindication of the poet, whom he shows to be consistent and subtle, with a mind capable of real, if not theoretical or philosophical, intelligence (dianoia).10 And yet having thus gone beyond the Ion and vindicated Protagoras, for the criticism is of great interest, Socrates impatiently dismisses the whole approach.11 Talking about poetry is best left for mediocre minds at drinking parties, he says. No two people will ever agree on what a poem means, and even the poet doesn’t usually know. Enough of all this Attic loquacity. Let’s get back to true Spartan brevity; let’s agree on basic concepts. “Fear”, now, and “cowardice”: aren’t they expectation of evil, or rather of painful consequences? And can’t we measure pain, and so choose between actions?12 This is Socrates’ way of knowing fear. Homer used fear to know Hector, as he used anger to know Achilles and excellence to know both. This is what Protagoras would have been able to say had he thought harder, or had Plato let him. Consequentialism, measurability, definition: Bentham may seem only a step away, but Protagoras is forgotten. Excellence can only be known and taught as a single concept, perhaps in the end even as a sensory matter; his many irreducible concepts are not knowable or teachable, certainly not agents of knowledge themselves.

Plato: Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium Plato reached maturity under the influence of this overwhelming personality, this relentless intellectual search for conceptual clarity and unity within passional chaos, for definition and underlying form beneath the profusion

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of nature. Well-born himself, and a poet, he knew nothing of Periclean civilisation at first-hand. As he listened to Socrates he saw Athens crumbling, demagoguery triumphing over political principle, relativist expediency rampant in speech and behaviour. He saw Socrates himself put to death by those who feared his concept-questioning. As the thought of Pythagoras and Parmenides began to assume greater salience for him, his poetic, literarydramatic art evolved away from the characterisation of the early dialogues, dominated by that character and by quotidian, homely themes and examples, towards something more discursive and metaphysical. In the middle dialogues, Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, Gorgias, masterpieces of intense and variegated philosophical drama as they are, the concepts themselves are beginning to take over from the personalities. They are becoming what we now know as the Platonic Forms or Ideas. In Meno we hear again that the only way to be an excellent person is to know the concept “excellence”. We learn that this true kind of knowing, epistêmê, is an intellectual grasping, in a moment of quasi-mathematical certainty, of the concept’s necessity and unchangingness. Only an unchanging necessary being, furthermore, can grasp an unchanging necessary truth. The soul is that immortal part of us.13 Phaedo is Plato’s Consolation of Philosophy, or rather that work is Boethius’s Phaedo. Socrates tells his grieving friends that death is only of the body, which is an imprisonment and contamination of the soul, a distraction from the search for reality.14 Beauty, good and magnitude are purely intelligible concepts inhabiting the eternal realm of Essence or Being (ousia again), although they also inhere, in debased form, in the sensory world.15 This is Plato, not Socrates. Concepts have become transcendent, where for Socrates they were only immanent. Wisdom is the intellection of these concepts and the suppression of bodily passion. “Socrates” refers to the soul as an oligarch and tyrant over the passions, not a mere congregation of them: a metaphor of profound import and influence.16 The passions have lost all recognitive capacity of their own, and a vital attempt at intellectual clarity has become a despotic occupation of experiential reality. The wonderful Phaedrus and Symposium raise the flag of final victory over this dissociative occupation of the self by the soul. They do so in the name of love, erôs, hitherto seen by the Greeks as erotic passion, a disease of the spirit and a threat to the relationship affection, philia. Haemon was afflicted with it. Homer found it less recognitively valuable than wrath. Had he not, Greek attitudes to it might have been less dismissive. But for Socrates/Plato it is first of all to be defined, namely as a kind of desire, epithumia. This is a thumos that follows eagerly after an object, rather than the one that sought in Thucydides to push itself forward: prothumos.17 All varieties of thumos can lead to hubris, outrageous excess. The soul, “Socrates” now says, is a place of conflict between an innate appetitive desire and a received belief in those eternal objects of knowledge which the immortal soul, imprisoned on earth, cannot quite remember for itself, and which no poet will ever succeed in

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describing (Dante heard this). So erôs is a false, exaggerated mortal possession which nevertheless prepares the way, shapes the mould, for the true divine possession, which is not poetic or religious frenzy but philosophic insight. At the moment of conceptual knowledge we once more see and love Truth and Being, the Beauty which is only distantly echoed, glimpsed or recalled in the beauty of the earthly beloved. We must learn to love without yet knowing what real love is (Augustine heard this).18 Plato describes his own moment of insight elsewhere as one no serious man would think of trying to describe to ordinary people.19 One has to struggle towards it not through the rhetoric of a Pericles or Protagoras, ordinary men, but through the Socratic method of dialectic, the use of definition to reduce apparent multiplicity to unity or dissolve uniformity into its component essences, so as to reach the bedrock of concept.20 Nor is literature a good medium for this struggle, says Socrates, sounding more like himself here. Reading is an inertia of the soul.21 He does not want conceptual confusion to arise out of mental overcrowding or distraction, and few of us could keep the whole Phaedrus in mind without artificial assistance. As for Plato, he has forsaken orality but nevertheless wants to argue for the new Socratic kind of thought. He too seeks clarity and simplicity, and wants to alter minds. His attitude would be: “read as if you were actually speaking with Socrates”. The dialogue did indeed change the intellectual and experiential realms for ever. Plato begins, as Homer might have, with a passion: not mênis, but erôs. But where Homer would have proceeded to use that passion to understand the self and, in this case above all, another self as well, and where Dante was to use it to do the first of these things but not the second, Plato dialectically defines it as a species of a more general passion: desire-for-x. Then he replaces the original x, say a certain boy, with an utterly different kind of entity, “beauty”: a concept. These two desires are now seen as purer and impurer, “higher” and “lower”, versions of the same underlying yearningfeeling: rather than as quite different passions for quite different objects. And finally that original erôs is brought back in, by the back door, as the debased form of, and thus for want of any better our only name for, that more general passion. This is an absolutely foundational philosophical manoeuvre, intrinsic to the thought of Neoplatonism, Augustinian Christianity and Hegelianism alike. Love for an idea is experienced as passionally comparable with but intellectively more stable and certain than love for a human being, and hence truer and more real. This experience turns into the claim that an idea is more important than a human being. Imperceptibly a passional concept, a life-recognition, has been turned into a depassionalised concept, an intellectual construction. A life-concept becomes first a reason-concept and then an entirely autonomous entity, which can itself be the object of an impoverished passion; we can desire desire, as Augustine was to, and in doing so we show just how thoroughly passion has been idealised by this Platonic manoeuvre. Of course the passional germ at the heart of all this is the need

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for a refuge from the effort of passion, from the reality humankind cannot bear very much of; and that need is itself essential in human being. What is not essential is to degrade what we cannot bear, to make invisible what we do not like to look at, to resign ourselves to reality by denying it. Plato wanted to show not just that philosophy does a better job of thinking than poetry does but that it does a better job of thinking about just what poetry is supposed to be better at thinking about: passions. He wanted to do this because he was a poet, deeply interested in the passions: but his interest was in ruling them, subordinating them, not using them, living with them. He also chose what we call “love” as the paradigmatic passion, and so it has remained; Homer chose wrath and grief. Symposium is Plato’s other great poetic essay on love, even more influential than Phaedrus. This is a drinking party, the kind of occasion when mediocre minds turn to poetry. Poets are praising the God of Love. Socrates begins as so often with palpable disingenuousness. Such eloquence! How embarrassing! What can I possibly contribute? Silly me, to think just stating the facts and pursuing the truth would do! I should have known truth was not the issue here.22 But still, let’s see: what is love, really? Surely the desire for what one has not. So Love must lack Beauty, Wisdom, Goodness and so on. So he can not be a god: maybe an aspiring intermediate deity of some kind. What we really want to understand is Desire itself, all longing, the real God. But what do we really desire? Eternity, surely: not to die. The lover of bodies wants to achieve this by reproducing himself on them; the lover of politics by reproducing himself in a constitution (that is, on the body of the state); the lover of pure Existence or Being, at the apex of the pyramid of human desire, by joining it, reproducing himself in it.23 The beautiful, aristocratic young general, Alcibiades, bursts half-drunk into the party at this moment to deliver a eulogy of Socrates, not only the bravest of soldiers but he who alone can move the soul and shame the man of affairs into the life of contemplation by his simple, Spartan words.24 Like Alcibiades, we have climbed the ladder, in simple steps, from the foul rag-andbone-shop of the heart to the light of eternal Being. It is impossible not to notice what powerful poetry this simplicity makes: though a romantic poetry, indeed, for like Phaedrus it begins in love but ends in concepts.

Plato: Gorgias, Republic Politics can be dealt with in the same way as ethics. Gorgias is another attack on the Sophists, but all civility is gone. The real enemy here, Callicles, is no mild-mannered professor of poetry, but a Cleon, the voice of the beast, of force, appetite, expediency: something against which the Sophists offer no defence, but whose growth they actually encourage by their relativism. No one wills evil, says Socrates. Tyrants are really acting against their will. Doing evil is worse than suffering it; to do it is to suffer more. Not to do it is to be happy, even under the tyrant. To understand all this, however, it is

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essential to grasp the concept “good” dialectically.25 What rubbish, snarls Callicles: pure philosophers’ claptrap. We all know that what people want is advantage, which is satisfaction of appetite. Nature favours and selects the strong.26 But this is what I meant, says Socrates. Does “the good” really mean “pleasure”, “satisfaction”, dominance over others? Or perfection of soul, one’s own and others’? Your soul will be judged after death. The tyrant will suffer then, but not the philosopher.27 Callicles is talked down, but unpersuaded, by this attempt to define and intellectualise force and appetite away, and indeed it is hard not to feel that Homer and Thucydides understand them better and offer better defences against them – although no defence is sure. Plato encourages intellectuals to stay out of politics altogether, out of the “civil” world – which is in no one’s interest. The same dilemma is at the heart of Plato’s most celebrated work, Republic. There the Callicles character is called Thrasymachus, and he is even more coarsely and savagely insulting. To defeat him Plato has to undertake the most elaborate of all his conceptdefinitions, that of “justice”. He has to show that justice, properly understood, even when accompanied by pain and dishonour, is better than injustice, even when accompanied by pleasure and honour. Not even the sophisticated Hobbesian or social contract version of the Callicles-Thrasymachus position can be allowed: the one that acknowledges force and appetite but sees justice as consisting in our assent to curbs on us, the many, in exchange for the same curbs on an insatiable few. A spot of covert or even quite flagrant injustice (in order to acquire plenty and esteem for one’s family, say) is not only acceptable but desirable, provided that the general structure is preserved. But Socrates has to show that justice is to be understood from the inside of the soul, and here there is no compromise. Only this will utterly defeat Thrasymachus and leave the just man completely invulnerable to all oppression.28 Again Plato’s practice is in direct competition with the poets’. The soul is a mechanism to be understood, not a life to be experienced. Justice is a reasonconcept to be defined, not a life-concept to be used. One soul, indeed, is too small a place in which to see justice working properly, Socrates says; we must look at a whole imaginary city.29 This is a symbolical procedure, in which an abstract concept is used to explain a psychic reality, rather than a metaphorical procedure, using a physical reality to explain a political concept. The guardians or leaders of this city are the better parts of its soul, and we must train them as we do it, to perceive excellence, beauty, truth. No diet of poetry for them, with its false and immoral stories about the gods. Poets just do not know what reality is. They imitate imitations of the Forms. They are dazed by sense-impressions. They encourage us to surrender to our appetites, not curb them. Even Homer shall not live in this city unless he can show himself beneficial to it. Only wholesome and simple conceptual food, Spartan constitutions, for our guardians. The rest of the people, the other two parts of the soul, are the passions and the appetites, poetry’s realm.

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The rational part, like a philosopher-king, must rule them alike, practising eugenics, commonality of children, separation of classes and so on, all in the light of the eternal realities its eyes are fixed on.30 Thucydides and even Sophocles would have recognised this as the human condition when kinship affections are fully displaced by political ones. The task of the guardian soul is to stamp, not on a human face forever (in Orwell’s phrase), but on plastic human nature, on the slate wiped clean, that image only it can perceive: of eternal reality and essence, of Form and Idea, of God.31 Using true dialectic, the philosophic soul must struggle to bring the light of the sun of Good, which only it has seen, to the rest of recalcitrant humanity in its dark cave. Geometry, music and astronomy will give valuable assistance, says Plato: and they remained central to the educational curriculum for the next 1800 years.32 The happy soul, or constitution, is that in which passion and appetite accept the guidance of intellective reason: this is “aristocratic monarchy”. Below this, in order of descent, are timocracy (Spartan, indeed almost Achillean, government by honour and shame), oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. The last, much admired by poets, according to Socrates, is the one ruled by fierce and lawless desires. Democracy prepares the way for it with its surfeit of liberty and freedom of speech, leading to universal licence and the dissolution of all authority.33 So justice is seen from inside the soul – but at a price. The soul has been turned into a political image; passion has become an idea; appetite and force have turned into pure concepts; pure concepts such as Form and the Good have been turned into entities; God and the sun have become mere symbols of those entities. The cognitive shift is as it was in Phaedrus. We begin not with justice in a just life, but with “justice” as a concept; and we go on to explain how that concept, or even the search for it, will bring security from passion and appetite alike. The concept then becomes an entity, an object of religious veneration, mystical awe; the seeker after it becomes an adept, a priest. Meanwhile another concept, “democracy”, will look like a failure to grasp an intellectual entity and thus like a surrender to “passion” and “appetite” (not passion and appetite): rather than a term for the passionalconceptual moral practice, democracy. Plato’s thought, an extension of Socrates’, works by concept-abstraction, not character-abstraction like Homer’s. This makes him a philosopher. But when he claims, as a poet might, that concepts are gods, he becomes what we have termed a “romantic”: someone for whom the soul (later the will) is that central fortress within the self from which passions are ruled and in which they are turned into shadows of the concepts, ideas, universals and classes whose real existence is not in the individuated sensory world at all, as valuable explanatory principles, but, as transcendent entities, in the world of pure Being. That world is the true home of soul, an intellectual splinter of eternal Mind quite separated from passion and appetite, which therefore has no individuating textures and limits at all: no qualities.

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Plato’s development still further away from Socrates and back towards Parmenides and Pythagoras, in the late dialogues Theaetetus, Parmenides, Sophist, Statesman and Philebus, was a further working out of this romanticism. Knowledge is understood as of classes, not individuals; reality is seen as unchanging and One, and the intelligence as what grasps it; the dialectical method is developed to near-absurdity; all emotions are reduced to measurable pleasures and pains; health is described as the condition of the soul knowing the Good. Timaeus is an almost Pre-Socratic cosmogony, hugely influential in Christian Platonism, and Laws is a vast, detailed blueprint for a state, a kind of Benthamite Republic in which music and poetry are roundly condemned and the constitution itself is regarded as the best of all possible poems.34 The poetic soul, if it is to be admitted into the City of Philosophy, must see not just concepts but all the things of this world as mere symbols of those eternal Entities – never as metaphorical articulations of its own life.

Aristotle: Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima This strange mystic-autocratic idealism of logos and eidos seems a long way from the street-corner concepts of Socrates where it began: concepts which are themselves the “enlightened” Periclean descendants of Homer’s “primitive” passions-in-character. But it seems an even longer way to “dipterous insects never have a posterior sting”, or “we must first grasp the final cause of the testes”.35 This is the teleological empiricism of Aristotle, writing in the midfourth century, the dawn of the Alexandrian Hellenist age. The advent of an absolutist superstate, absorbing the relativist world of petty states surrounding his teacher Plato, forty years older, perhaps curtailed Aristotle’s need for conceptual absolutes; but in any case he was a natural scientist by temperament, not a philosopher-poet. His lost works are reputed to have been literary gems, but “Aristotle” must mean the Aristotle we have, and he is at best a writer of methodical, prosaic treatises, often hardly more than notes or lecture outlines, certainly not inspired prose dramas. Many of them are of little relevance here; indeed much of the natural science and the logic is obsolete, although both fields of thought were not only founded by Aristotle as systematic disciplines but were carried on in his ways until the early seventeenth century, in the case of the science, and the early twentieth, in the case of the logic. What still endures is his moral and metaphysical thought, the foundation of what we have been calling “realism” in philosophy as Homer’s thought was in poetry.36 In his logical works (Categories, Prior and Posterior Analytics, De Interpretatione, Topics: known collectively as the Organon) and in his general theory of nature and man (Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima), Aristotle sees philosophy’s business as to clarify concepts, but not to reify them.37 He sees the business of concepts as to clarify our perception of individual objects, for truth ultimately resides in them, and not in species, genera or universals. Individual

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lives are integrated dynamic systems. They are not characters, for this is a philosophical understanding of the self, rather than a poetic one, or something in between the two; but they are entire, complex evolving conditions, not unchanging intellective points amidst a chaos of appetites and passions. Philosophy observes these complex individuals, the complex objects of the world in general, by their appearances, the phainomena, and uses concepts to make sense of these (Socrates wants to save the concepts, Aristotle wants to save the appearances). It does not posit ideai, reified Forms, as realler realities lying behind the mere appearances of ordinary things. Roughly, what we ordinarily see is what there is. This is “teleological empiricism”. First, it is empirical. If you observe two-winged insects you will see that they never have stings at the back. Experience, for which his term is empeiria, is seen by Aristotle as just our usual way of knowing, and not as inferior to the theoretical way. But, secondly, this experience is not modern empiricism either: not a sensory-subjective understanding of a materialist world of sensa. Each of the discrete individual things out of which Aristotle thinks the world is objectively composed, each life, drama, llama, dynamo, set of testes, has its own telos, its fulfilment or successful completion. The term is not seen instrumentally, as referring to a thing’s goal, purpose or function, as perceived by a controlling mind: “what is it (used) for?” For Aristotle making final sense of a thing’s appearances involves seeing it as evolving into its own fullest condition – “what is it in all its ripeness?” – by beings having the kind of intelligence which does this sort of conceptual, plenary grasping of a real, individuated world: beings capable of experiencing the world like this. “Experiential realism” might be another term for this philosophy. According to this experiential realism we do have multiple senseimpressions of confused masses of things, but we organise each of these clumps of remembered impressions into an aisthêsis, the grasp of the sensible shape or eidos of each thing. Indeed it is only because things have such an eidos that they are graspable at all; but how unlike the eidos of Socrates and Plato this is. That basic stuff or substance of the world in which the Pre-Socratics were so interested is only knowable in, for us only “comes in”, individuated lumps or chunks. Experience of many like objects enables us to articulate their logos, the concept-statement of their archê, the universal principle or the shape they share, which does not exist independently of them. The more organised, systematic or scientific our thought (epistêmê) becomes, the more it concerns itself with concepts, and the more and more fundamental these in turn become, until we are thinking (noêsis) at the level of the greatest posssible conceptual and scientific generality about principles and causes, a rock-bottom beneath which we cannot go, demanding ever more fundamental concepts, explanatory principles, demonstrations. Here we must just stop: and even here we have not taken the concepts out of lives. The name for the conceptual level where we do just stop is ousia, sometimes translated as “being” or “reality”, and sometimes more confusingly as “substance” or

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“essence”. For Socrates this ousia is the level of logos, of essences-as-definitions (“what is excellence really?”). For Plato and Hegel it is no longer just a conceptual level at all but the noumenal or transcendent realm of Being; for Neoplatonism and Christianity the logos is God. For Aristotle the “being” of a thing is no more than what it is to be the thing, which is more Socratic than Platonic. Yet what it is to be a thing is not what it is to be a concept. Socrates’ “things”, the objects of his thought, are purely conceptual; Aristotle’s, crucially, are conceptual and sensory. In fact he is less interested in what it is to be excellence than in what it is to be Socrates. What it is to be Socrates is his soul. Socrates’ soul is above all not a Cartesian ghost in a machine, on this view: not a centre of will, decision, intellection or reflection. It is Socrates being himself. The soul does not think; the whole man thinking is his soul. His soul realises his body; it is his body’s “form”, its cause, principle, end and essence. The two are one as a piece of wax and its shape are one (this is more Pre-Socratic than Platonic). A soul cannot exist without a body, cannot be immortal, but a dead body has no soul. The five senses and the passions are functions of an embodied soul, an ensouled body: a life. A life has functions shading all the way from minimal sentience (nutrition as basic life-support, the simplest tactility) through animal appetite (hunger, perhaps dominance) to increasingly public-conceptual passionality (anger to honour) and intellective concept-thought (logical necessity, the order of the heavens); but this is not a “ranking” so much as a spectrum, a continuum, with a centre of moral gravity nearer the middle than the latter end. We do, however, most certainly need the latter end as a stable point of reference in the swirling mists of animal and even passional life. Reason is a Pericles, reminding us as reflective souls of the concepts we live by. Without it we fall into stasis: but we must not let it become a tyrant. Aristotle’s general view of “being” as a fundamental conceptual principle in the world is exemplified in his particular view of the relation of soul to body: not as its fundamental stuff, nor as its ruling entity, but as its living aspect. Not even Aristotle could be Plato’s student without retaining some of the master’s more romantic tendencies of thought, as well as the entire framework of philosophical possibility bequeathed to him by Plato, and to both by Socrates. In the latter sense all Western philosophers and to some extent all thinking people are Socratists. Aristotle thoroughly disapproved of the doctrine of Forms, the reifying of concepts of all kinds, including being and soul, as a superfluous device in the explanation of reality; but the idea that thought’s distinctive objects are not like sense’s, but are of some “higher” kind, was still foundational for him. The difference between a concept and a rock sometimes seems for him to lie at the very heart of all thought (but should it?). The mind, the soul, does have an intellective function; but sometimes it seems that for him what chiefly makes this function unlike all the others is that it has nothing to do with the body (but hasn’t it?). The best life, he claims, is surely the one spent in intellectual contemplation, for

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this is the most self-sufficient of activities (but is it?), the most distinctively human (but isn’t the human everything we are?), the nearest to a working of the divine in us.38 The better our intellective function grasps the causes and principles of the world as concepts the more clearly it must see, he argues, that there has to be some explanatory factor other than ousia itself (but in the world or only in concepts?). He asks: how do things come to be at all? “Being” may not exist as a thing in itself, but everything must have had its being from something else: so where did the first thing have its being from? (But what first thing?) These two adjacent lines of speculation,39 on the mind and the world, converged in the idea of the divine principle, the unmoved mover and first cause of all things which our minds may join in grasping it, as that most Neoplatonic of notions, thought thinking itself.40 It sometimes seemed essential to Aristotle to posit this idea of a necessary being, one, indivisible and good, in order to escape the consequences of complete materialism (but is it?). These more romantic moments, however, are not frequent enough in his thought as a whole to change its overall realistic aspect. And when he includes observation of the starry heavens in his definition of the contemplative life, and argues that not human but heavenly bodies are the “best” things in the universe, so that to think about stars is “better” than to think about people,41 we see how romantic Platonism can be distilled into a recreative empirical antidote to the drug of human selfabsorption. No better relief from the storms of passion than to look up on a starry night. We need not see ourselves as the best things in the universe. But that looking up and away can’t be all of life, any more than Achilles’ shield can, and the starry heavens are no better a model for the rest of life than pure concepts are.

Aristotle: Ethics, Politics, Poetics It is his realism that dominates Aristotle’s three great moral works: Nicomachean Ethics,42 Politics and Poetics. He no more drew a line between private and public flourishing than did Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides or Homer. Individual flourishing must incorporate political activity and political flourishing must incorporate private goods, as Pericles said. Individual well-being or welfare (eudaimonia, “having a good demon”) and the equivalent state for a polity required the same kind of excellence of soul, Aristotle thought. But this was an excellence of êthos, a word originally signifying “habit” or “custom” and then coming to mean “character”: hence our “ethos” and “ethical”. The Latin mos similarly yields “moral”. This is still Homeric and Periclean, but no longer Platonic. Character, not intellect, the centre of gravity of the moral spectrum, is the salient moral aspect of the soul, and character is shaped in grasping appetites, passions and concepts alike as a matter of practice, usage, habit: before grasping concepts alone as a matter of intellect. This is the praxis-and-pathos sheet of paper with its active side up; Aristotle is more

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a conceptualised Homer than an empiricised Plato. Civil and civic behaviour is more like bicycle-riding than geometry: a matter of practical wisdom (phronêsis), not theoretical (sophia). The inexperienced student will see his own passions unrecognitively as entirely constitutive of his, of all reality. Only when he has practised them, understood them and himself as moral passion-and-action, as Achilles did, will he be in a position to benefit from philosophical discussion, to see concepts as realised in himself and others, and thus to see lives as real, as well as really to live. Moral discovery is not a science, an inscribing of eternal truths on a blank slate. “The Good” does not exist. There is no monolithic moral entity underwriting all the goods of the world; they are too unlike. Some are certainly goals of deliberative action: honour, wealth, power, pleasure. Others are matters of luck: looks, health, family, children’s survival, even an aptitude for excellence. If people generally call all these things goods then they are, no matter what philosophers say (despite the superiority of the contemplative life). But no one of these goods holds the key to flourishing, whatever their proponents may say: and the life cannot really be judged a flourishing one until it is over, because only then can it be seen whole. As a teleological ethics this is directly contrary to the utilitarianism we saw Socrates getting so close to in Protagoras. Instead of analysing moral concepts piecemeal into sensory quanta, pain and pleasure, Aristotle sees whole souls habituating themselves to find varieties of pleasure and pain in doing the things they come to recognise as good. We should not try to act in accordance with a rational principle, a theory of the good. To act well is to act from a settled disposition to act that way, recognising that to do so is to behave as good people behave and that we are like that ourselves. To act well is to enact the right amount of passion at the right time for the right ends about the right things towards the right people in the right way.43 This account of Aristotle’s experiential ethics gives no impression of his empirical energy. He tries to explore all the received goods of the world, and his ethics is an induction from them, not a deduction of them from first principles. In Socrates and even more in Plato the lists of virtues and vices are short and constantly tending to a unity which they, we feel, have already seen but to which we need to be shown the way. In Rhetoric and Eudemian Ethics as well as Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle makes catalogues of dozens of virtues and their corresponding vices44 in which the virtue is usually a mean between two vices (cowardice, courage, foolhardiness), although not always so (justice, injustice): but in any case is a concept in a life, not a temporal sign of an eternal verity. He also offers advice on how to attain virtues and avoid vices, for ethics is a practical subject for him, a technique, even a knack: but not a science. He gives examples of the passions in context, noting that one concept can imply quite different qualities and behaviours in different people and settings, being modified in every tiny individual contingency.45 His realism enables him to shed a dappled, Homeric light, rather than the

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Platonic chiaroscuro, on the Greek moral world. How unlike the Christian versions of them are his pride and humility, for example; how invisible to Christian morality are his magnanimity and magnificence.46 For Aristotle a more or less sensory grasp of the individual case is to be preferred to general principles, and descriptions are better than definitions. En tê aisthêsei hê krisis: judgement is in the particular perception.47 Concepts are not to be pulled out of lives or reduced to more basic concepts; moral lives are not to be eviscerated by having their concepts pulled out of them. Concepts are still essential, of course, to thought, but clarifying them in thought is only preliminary to and part of using them in lives. Thinking as if Courage exists does help us to think about the only moral entities that really do exist, namely intermittently and contingently courageous people. But Courage does not exist, and so no amount of rational, definitional knowledge of it will help us do a single courageous thing, as Socrates and Plato thought it would. On the other hand a passional-conceptual knowledge will help, while still allowing us to describe the courageous action as willed or voluntary, the free act of an agent whose motive principle is his own. Moral choice is a deliberativedesiderative alloy of concept, passion and appetite, rather than the disjunctive either-intellective-or-just-arbitrary affair it becomes for Platonists. We cannot “choose to flourish”, for example, as in Plato we “will the good” in knowing it; we can only wish to flourish, knowing that flourishing is a complex state heavily dependent on luck and vulnerable to damage right up to the very limits of life, and even beyond. Someone’s life might be described as flourishing by his contemporaries or even his immediate survivors, only for all its achievements rapidly to crumble. What we choose, in given circumstances, can only be the act which we know at the time to belong in a flourishing, excellent life. This alloyed view of choice actually increases our level of responsibility for our virtuous or vicious lives, since even states we would regard today as bodily exonerations, like alcoholism or stress, Aristotle would regard as morally chosen, and also of course as alleviable, from within an agent life. Political justice, as a matter of practical wisdom, is as intrinsic to flourishing lives for Aristotle as for Pericles or indeed Achilles.48 The Christian or Romantic hermit, the solitary, the purely private person, is precisely an “idiot”, apolis, not fully human, because he is inactive and thus insensible in this vital part of life. Man is a political or social animal in the teleological sense that his life is only completed or fulfilled in recognitive and not just appetitive groups. We are not chimpanzees in dominance relations, although at times of stasis we may sink to that level. The family or household is the most fundamental and primitive forum in which a kind of deliberative justice can be exercised, but even there is considerable scope for it, as Economics shows. The village or collection of households is an intermediate forum, but the polis or city-state, the collection of villages, is the fulfilment of political life for Aristotle, who had not seen cities collect into nations. He approaches that life inductively,

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not only describing a number of existing constitutions before arriving at constitutional generalisations but also asking what a citizen is before deciding what a state is. He takes issue with Plato and Socrates in Republic and Laws because in effect those works do the opposite. States must, he says, be understood as reciprocative pluralities of citizens, but those states are not intended as states at all but as schematised individuals with symbolised brains, stomachs and so on. (Had Plato been thinking metaphorically instead of symbolically, we might add, he could have seen his republic as an ensouled citizen body, the expression of each individual’s political agency, not as a guardian brain ruling a farmer stomach and artisan limbs.) They regard all property and indeed all people as indistinguishable component parts of a single mechanism; this communism denies and destroys affectional affiliation, which relies on the contrary sense that certain people, places and things are part of us. Citizens are human beings collectively both safeguarding and enriching their lives by engaging in the business of constituting and preserving self-sufficient communities, which are then states. That is, a state exists not just to protect life and property and facilitate exchange of goods, but as the realisation of a human potential. Those who are not engaged in this business are not citizens. The labourer or plutocrat who has no time for politics and the “politician” whose real goals are his own wealth and power are not strictly citizens, although they are lucky enough to be given that name sometimes. States, properly so-called, seem to have three fundamental forms, although there are many variations and combinations.49 In monarchy one man rules in the interests of the state; in aristocracy a few men do so; in “polity” many men do so. The perverted forms of these three, in which the rulers act in their own self-interest and in which therefore states do not strictly exist, are tyranny, rule of the dominant one; oligarchy, rule of the wealthy few; and democracy, rule of the indigent many. Thucydides would recognise these devourers of the common weal as the constituents of stasis. Changes from one of these constitutions to another come about in extreme situations: when the rule of one intolerably oppresses all, when rule by the few intolerably oppresses the many poor, or when rule by the many intolerably oppresses the wealthy few. Democrats think that equality in one respect (political freedom) should entail equality in all (redistribution of wealth); oligarchs and tyrants, conversely, think one inequality (concentration of wealth, power) must entail others (personal worth, political freedoms). This political philosophy could hardly be less Platonic, indeed hardly less what in a Platonic world is usually seen as “philosophy”. The kind of thought is indeed much closer to Thucydides’ than Plato’s. Instead of an imaginative definition of “justice” Aristotle has offered us a kind of constitutional handbook, a taxonomy of justice. “Justice” is all the constitutional practices we have, although some do afford more scope for individual political fulfilment, for realisation of lives, than others. Individuals constitute states (which are themselves a kind

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of concept), and not the other way around; politics is a set of practices before it is a set of concepts, and not the other way around. A state is not a blueprint we work from, but what we end up with when we act politically. Aristotle’s thoughts on the best size and location for a state, or on marriage and education, are extrapolations from experience, not programmes for the soul. The untheoretical cast of Aristotle’s thought on this subject is what preserves its value even in the face of what are for us unacceptable assumptions about the status of women and the necessity of slavery.50 About women he thinks as Pericles does, although women are shown in Economics as having some deliberative status in one forum at least (the household). Plato, on the other hand, treats men and women as politically indistinguishable. What is noteworthy, however, about the two approaches is that to introduce the contrary set of assumptions about the political status of the sexes would leave Aristotle’s taxonomy unaffected, while Plato’s concept-state would collapse. If women in Aristotle’s polis demanded and received equal political rights their state would survive and be enriched or completed in very much the ways modern states have been. If women in Plato’s republic demanded their children back they would destroy the state. As for slavery, some slaves are recognised in Politics as deliberatively capable (namely victims of war), and in general there is a path from Aristotle’s palpable unease on this matter to our view that all people, not just an intellectual few, are capable, in that they are human, of at least some sort of deliberative political life. But he does also say, repellently, that some slaves are slaves by nature. Still, even this means, not that some people can be treated as if they were insensible, nor that some people are to be regarded as possessing no human qualities at all (neither of which views he subscribes to), but that some people are less capable than others of rational deliberation. We have what Aristotle would call a democratic prejudice against this view; for us all are equally free so all are equally capable of deliberation. For him a slave is no more despicable in not being a citizen than a hermit, a non-political businessman or a self-serving “politician” is, and he would see de facto slavery in many modern “states” where we are too fastidious to recognise it, let alone name it. Beyond the occasional vote, what does political practice amount to much of the time even for “Western democracy”? Don’t most of us usually let someone else take responsibility, and power? If enough of us think that way for long enough we are slaves in practice – although we may retain, complacently, temporarily, dependently, our capacity for freedom. Although to us he may seem complacent, or worse, Aristotle’s unpalatable realism may still be a better guide to what actually happens in the political world than the romanticism we hardly notice ourselves practising. Aristotle’s moral thought, like Homer’s and some of the Pre-Socratics’, is remarkable for its “outwardness”. Souls are not mysterious inner entities but the living aspects of bodies. Lives are recognised as passional but realised in

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action. The passions are not really recognisable as themselves until they are enacted as irreducible public concepts. Character is not recognisable as itself until it is acted. This unsentimental outwardness is part of what makes both the Iliad and the Politics distasteful for us in places. But nowhere is it more evident, or more intrinsic to Aristotle’s thought, than when he is himself thinking about poetry. He says in Politics and Poetics that experience of poetry and music will chiefly help us live with our own passions, help us understand them and ourselves better; the famous katharsis, purification, implies clarifying as much as purging.51 He says in Rhetoric and Poetics that passion and metaphor are effective aides to persuasive speech, and that metaphorical capacity, which some scientists and philosophers also have, enables poets to see illuminative similarities in different orders of object and categories of thought, and is poetry’s single most valuable tool and distinguishing mark.52 This is Protagoras, not Socrates. Instead of horror at poetry’s falseness and immorality there is acceptance of its truth to life and moral value. According to Poetics, as we saw earlier, poetry must be plausible, where history must be factually accurate. Now “plausible” strictly means “provoking applause”; in poetry what provokes applause, widespread recognition, is being lifelike or probable: eikos. The poem must be exactly what Plato disliked most, an eikon, an image of reality, as opposed to an eidos, the Form that is reality. Being eikos, in fact, entails being general or universal, katholikos; that is, being applicable to numberless particular cases. In history each fact or deed (ergon) is singular (hekaston).53 Although these deeds too are numberless, each applies only to itself. The more particulate, individuated, a life is, the more itself and the less like any other life it becomes. What Oedipus had or even liked to have for breakfast is a matter of historical but not poetic interest. There are two ways of being general: through fiction, story or plot, muthos,54 and through concept, logos. The first way is poetry’s, the second philosophy’s. Thus poetry and philosophy resemble each other and differ from history in being ways of thinking generally about lives; but poetry thinks fictively, while philosophy thinks conceptually. From its rivals’ viewpoints, of course, muthos is distinct from ergon as word from (real) deed, and from logos as word from (real) thought. All three, Aristotle suggests,55 are species of that nameless representative or mimetic technique which uses words alone; nowadays we call it “literature”. Poetry’s fictive images of reality are what we have called recognitive. Following the example of the poet’s own ekstasis, or capacity to “stand outside” his own passionality and inside another one,56 we seem to recognise shapes and meanings which, we feel, normally lurk undetected in the welter of passional reality itself. (Socrates and Plato thought the poet’s divine frenzy useless as communicable thought, indeed destructive of it.) To achieve this effect an “image” must not be too complex. A playgoer, for example, must be able to keep its story straight in his mind, while finding its few major turns both consummatory

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and revelatory. He must have the impression of beginning at a point that needs no prior causative explanation, travelling through plausible sequences of cause and effect and ending when no further effect cries out to be shown. He must find the protagonist(s) plausible too, of the same general order of humanity as himself in both strengths and flaws; but this interest is a function of the story-interest.57 The image’s line is plot; its colour is character. In tragedy and even epic we recognise passion, character, flourishing, principally as action. A tragedy with no development of character is more thinkable than one with no development of plot. Wouldn’t imagining a virtuous, vicious, noble, evil, complex, simple, angry, just, pious, ambitious character to whom nothing whatever then happened, or who then did nothing whatever, be tantamount to not imagining the character? The poet asks: in given circumstances, what would such a character do? What, in that case, would anger be? We have come full circle. To say that human passion only sees itself in action, as Aristotle does, is to see what Homer shows us, that human character and indeed human being itself exists only in its dynamic interactivity, its potent energy. For Homer passional-conceptual thought is our recognition and realisation of our lives as active and outward, within their limits and in the common human world. Sophocles in Antigone shows how this process of self-realisation and self-recognition can harden or distil into a condition in which passion survives only as a conflicted force of will or intensity of resolve, invested in increasingly private or inner intellectual concepts, but focussed beyond life’s limits. Homer and Sophocles think in story and character, the modes of thought in which passional concepts automatically appear as constituents of lives. In the stasis world of Thucydides, who thinks in event and deed, only force and appetite survive, passion has disappeared entirely, and concepts are mere expedients: although for him as for Sophocles this conflicted world is still seen as post-lapsarian, the brutal remains of a civil predecessor in which politics was still recognitive knowledge. Socrates’ philosophical way out of this impasse is to save the concepts by extracting them from lives, and in Plato this becomes the attempt first to reify and then, going beyond life’s limits, to deify them: especially Love, Being and Justice. By now the passions are seen as either mere animal appetites or pure concepts, and we have called this disjunctive vision “romanticism”. Aristotle tries to revive Homeric “realism”, but philosophically: by taking passionalconceptual thought seriously, while not himself thinking in that way. This effort must involve taking poetry seriously too, as that mode of thought in which passion-concepts appear in experience, in use, as the constituents of character and the companions of plot, rather than as logical abstractions from these realities. But Aristotle’s works, or rather the notes and drafts that are all we have left of them, were lost entirely for two centuries, and only became objects of general veneration in the twelfth century AD. Plato continued to exercise the profoundest influence on Western thought for the

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whole of that 1400-year epoch, eclipsing or outshining both Aristotelian and Homeric realist thought. The conceptions and practices of the self and of poetry which evolved during that long romantic ascendancy, and which regained their prestige in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after the scholastic interregnum, are once again paradigmatic for us today.

4 The Inheritance of Augustine: Confessions

Confessions (1) European literature began with mênis, but romantic literature always begins with amor. For St Augustine, finding out what “love” really meant, discovering love’s proper object and understanding his own life were three aspects of the same process. By the time of his Confessions, written at the turbulent close of the fourth century AD, with the Roman Empire about to collapse, that concept so compellingly evoked by Plato at an earlier epoch of collapse had become the one essential and reliable constituent of all self-understanding. Quid enim miserius misero non miserante se ipsum et flente Didonis mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean, non flente autem mortem suam, quae fiebat non amando te, deus, lumen cordis mei? What more pitiable than the pitiful one who pities Dido, dying for love of Aeneas, but not himself, dying for not loving you, my God, my heart’s light?1 Augustine’s characteristic, spiralling syntax always coils tightly around its critical concepts, and at the heart of the spiral is love. Here he is disparaging his own third-hand adolescent passion for the passion of a poetic character, Virgil’s Dido. Even when the counterfeit love of poetry no longer satisfied him, he realises, its false image continued to mislead him in the passional realm. Nondum amabam, et amare amabam . . . quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare. He was in love with the idea of love, but did not yet know what to love, and so did not yet really “love”.2 Confessions sees a life as the search for and final apprehension of its own meaning; confessio means “acknowledgement”, or even “recognition”, rather than “owning up to”. We might now call this way of representing one’s own life “spiritual autobiography”, but for Augustine the only generic precedents were classical history and memoir, chronicles of the events and actions in lives; and Christian or Stoic renunciation and revelation narratives, which reported on single transforming moments. By combining the two genres Augustine was able to show his own life as a drama, as a story with a meaningful shape, a muthos culminating in understanding. This dramatic, directional quality sets the Confessions apart from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Augustine’s 53

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only peer in early autobiography.3 Its discovery of meaning in the shape of a life, as well as in the truth of a concept, also sets the book apart from Phaedrus and Symposium, its great conceptual precursors. And of course its form, that of an intimate conversation with Love or Meaning seen as a person (or rather the Person: te, deus), which derives ultimately from the Old and New Testaments, sets it apart from both Marcus and Plato. A still more profound and revealing contrast is with Homer. He and Augustine, unlike Plato, both tell life stories, or write a kind of poetry: but how unlike each other are Homer’s discovery of Achilles in wrath and Augustine’s discovery, later perfected by Dante, of himself in love. There are two fundamental differences. First, the wrath of Achilles enables him to understand his life, while the love of Augustine is his life. His self appears to have a passional core, but that core is composed of a single passion. This is an introduction into poetry of the Platonic conception of love as not just any passion, but that consuming desire, of which erotic and filial love are feeble anticipations, for Desire itself, for Being, for God, for Life grasped by transcending the limits of ordinary life. This desire is so consuming that it leaves no room for other passional thought, and so loses its own contrasted and genuinely passional identity, reducing the self to a kind of unfilled conceptual space: the soul. Secondly, Achilles is not telling his own story, while Augustine is. In Homer’s way of thinking a character is that fictive showing forth of the irreducibly passional lives of others which enables us to make sense of them, and so perhaps of our own. In Augustine’s, other characters and fictions distract the soul from that inner, unqualified, single sense of true meaning which is its own proper realisation and goal. It took a mind first immensely receptive and then reactively hostile to both passion and poetry, as Plato’s had also been, to combine the literary genres of memoir and renunciation, or more radically the life-thinking of poetry itself, with the Platonic suppression and re-definition of both passion and poetry. The result was a poetic autobiography claiming irrefutable first-person authenticity for its passional perceptions. Only I saw this; this is the kind of thing only I can see; I can only see it by looking inward; for each of us the kind of thing only he or she can see in this way is the most important kind of thing; for each of us there is one most important thing of this kind; this one thing is the meaning of our life. Poetry which concerns itself with love as generally understood, with the erotic as just one, albeit the typical, human passion, must on this account seem as seductively dangerous as the passion itself. According to the Confessions, poetry should become not a manner of thinking passionally but a means of channelling passional energy into a direct relationship with personalised concept-Being. The disturbing achos will simply vanish. No need to think or live with it any more. Homer’s kind of poetry is made redundant by this new kind. Thinking about the Confessions, clearly, must involve consideration of other literary works, whereas thinking about the Iliad did not. Homer seems

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unprecedented to us (although of course he could not have been), while Augustine’s text itself acknowledges dozens of precedents great and small, mainly from the Bible and from the golden age of Latin literature around the turn of the millennium. By now, after all, European literature was over a thousand years old. We allow Homer alone to represent centuries of unrecorded thought before and after him, but even Socrates is better understood in the light of the “Pre-Socratic” tradition, while Confessions cannot but be read as part of a great literary tapestry or conversation.4 This chapter and its successors must accordingly glance from time to time at a number of other writers standing in salient relation to the principals. In this case some of those others were greater writers even than Augustine, but the importance of his book lies partly in its extraordinary capacity to recognise the greatest literature of the past and make that literature part of its own revolutionary life-picture. Confessions is a small but brilliantly representative part not only of Augustine’s own vast oeuvre, itself the intellectual and moral foundation of medieval Christianity, but also of late classical and early medieval literature in general.

Virgil: Aeneid IV The poet whose thought enabled Augustine to arrive at his own view of poetry was not Homer but his Roman heir and successor, Virgil, whose epic Aeneid, four hundred years old when Augustine read it, first shaped his passional life and then became the correlative of that same passional life when he came to disclaim it. The poem was later to be of equal importance to Dante, though not for quite the same reasons. In Virgil’s story, fallen Troy rises again as Aeneas, one of Homer’s own characters, escapes its ruin, and after Odyssean wanderings and Iliadic battles establishes himself in Latium as the ruler of what will become Rome. Aeneas’ mother is the goddess Venus (Aphrodite in the Iliad); Hector is referred to as the uncle of Aeneas’ son Anchises;5 the Romans are “Hector’s race”, the rightful successors to the Greek world which had overwhelmed Troy; and Augustus Caesar, Virgil’s Emperor, patron and friend, is placed in direct line of descent from the mythic and Homeric pantheon.6 The political imagination of the European mainland being fundamentally Roman, the influence of this epic has been entirely commensurate with its vast ambition. Some subordination of muthos to historia was by no means unprecedented in poetry; Homer’s own story must have served to persuade many a Mycenaean chieftain of his heroic ancestry. Virgil’s chief innovation in this area was at the level of individual character. To say that the principal virtue of Aeneas is pietas, our “piety”, does not begin to convey the importance of the concept in the poem or in his life. In the Iliad Aeneas had been like Hector, one who was beloved of the gods in that he never failed to give them their due gifts and sacrifices.7 For Homer this giving, a diurnal awareness of life’s

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limits, is being beloved of the gods, part of being fully human. In Virgil pietas is the defining quality of an admirable character. It is not like the nearest Homeric equivalent, aidôs, a disposition to recognise one’s proper place in the human world and its proper place in the cosmos. It is not the proper recognition of the timê or honour of and due to the gods. In his piety and general decency Aeneas does and is clearly meant to resemble his cousin Hector; but his ruling passion is also reminiscent, in ways that Virgil certainly did not intend, of someone else: Antigone. Her reverential awe, sebas, is much more like piety seen as an end in itself, as the very termination of moral debate. Pietas in Aeneas, however appealing his compunctions as he submits to it, is an absolute or categorical imperative. This is god-fearingness made into an inner sense of duty and mission overriding all other claims of the human world and pre-occupying the soul. This passion had to be thoroughly objectionable to Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Aeneas’ hostess and lover in the poem’s most celebrated episode: the one Augustine is referring to in the first paragraph of this chapter. Carthage was to be Rome’s great rival for Mediterranean supremacy in the two centuries up to the lifetime of Virgil. Shipwrecked near the city at the time of its legendary birth, only to become himself the complaisant object of its queen’s affections, Aeneas is growing all too contented by the fourth of the poem’s twelve books. Jupiter sends Mercury to remind him, and us, of his destiny. Confronted by the god, hearing the divine warning and command, Aeneas is not merely attonitus, thunderstruck, but amens, out of his mind. His hair stands on end. He desires ardently, he burns with passion (ardet) to escape Carthage and resume his quest. He feels amor for Dido, certainly, and cura, care or distress (though not exactly dolor, deep grief or affliction), at leaving her and at seeing her suffering; but this ardor is stronger. He tells Dido he saw the god with his own eyes; he must go: but of course non sponte, not of his own free will.8 Odysseus also had to disappoint two lovers on his travels, Circe and Calypso, both immortals; but he was drawn by his own need for his home, his son and his wife.9 Aeneas is driven by divine edict, seen as private vision, towards an unexperienced future that is not even just his own. This is a morally remarkable innovation. Aeneas’ humanity is drastically subordinated to his significance; he has become as much a symbol as a character. As for mortal Dido, the same symbolic imperative has turned her into the archetype of all passionate abandoned women, down to Anna Karenina. She dies, as Augustine says, for erotic amor, which overcomes first her pudor, her shame or sense of reputation, almost her aidôs, and then her very desire to live: but not of course her lover’s pietas. Furiis incensa feror, she cries; I am carried off in flames by furious passion. Unlike Aeneas, she does feel dolor. What excess will shameless Love not drive mortal hearts to? sighs the narrator. Cursing Aeneas, trembling, frenzied, pale with passion, Dido falls on her sword.10 These scenes have moved readers for centuries, striking

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many as the very heart of the epic and as Virgil’s chief contribution to “romance”: a kind of story he could be said to have invented, in which the hero’s mission is to found a new “Rome” (the words “Rome” and “romance” are cognate), and the heroine is both possessed by love for him and thwarted by his corresponding possession by his quest (the Aeneid is the prototype of the vernacular “romances” of medieval Europe). Her passion allows no more scope for compromise, for wider self-recognition, than does his. Could Achilles have died for wrath? The passion was how he understood his whole life; it was not the whole of the life he understood. Again, Antigone is the better analogy. She too died for an idealised passion, a principle. Dido’s amor, dolor and furor, and her lover’s ardor, are not self-recognitive like the aidôs and pudor they displace: they are self-consuming. But Virgil, though full of compassion for Dido, is without Sophocles’ ironic perspective on the moral significance of his heroine’s frenzy. This amor, this voracious, unperspectivised model of what true passion is, has become paradigmatic in European poetry. How many women, and not just in fiction, have immolated themselves in its name, re-enacting the lives of Dido, Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary, believing that their passion is the way to a new life? How many men, like Aeneas and Augustine, have turned their backs on its demands? Aeneas’ god-fearingness, a love of destiny or future history, is a variant of the Platonic love of Being, which grows in the space created and vacated by erotic passion. Both concepts are all-consuming. Under their influence the whole self, reduced to a punctual soul, becomes either one will (Aeneas) or one passion (Dido).

Ovid This romantic conception of love had a counterpart too scandalous and subversive for Augustine to make much reference to it. This counterpart found its classical expression in the poetry of Virgil’s politically incorrect younger contemporary, Ovid. Where Virgil died, an honoured friend of Augustus, Ovid died in exile and disgrace, having offended the Emperor by some unknown error or transgression, and by carmen, his poetry.11 The Amores (“Loves”) and the notorious Ars Amatoria (“Art of Love”) are indeed of a kind to offend censorious moral centralists. This is not because they are what the puritanical would call “lewd” or “cynical” (“frank” or “realistic” to liberals): but because their ironical celebration of seductive contrivance bursts the romantic bubble, refusing to worship the ruling passion or treat the soul as its exclusive preserve. In his greatest work, Metamorphoses, Ovid similarly refuses to regard the characters of myth or the structures of epic as any larger than ordinary life, but instead sees the capacity for ordinary life in them. The poem’s doctrine of immortal soul inhabiting a world of ever-changing material shapes is Stoic, Pythagorean and Heraclitean, but its claim that the soul is wax and the body its shape is in practice almost

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indistinguishable from Aristotle’s, that the body is wax and the soul its shape: that we are ensouled bodies or embodied souls. Besides, the poem as a whole is not a treatise, but a vast gallery of individual lives, an inexhaustible chapbook for posterity. Ovid’s souls may be immortal, but they are always individually embodied, never without qualities; and his moral thinking, not always profound, is always grounded in them. His culminating treatment of Rome’s Trojan lineage, with its own apotheosis of Augustus, is a graceful and knowing redrafting on a more human, everyday scale, of Virgil’s grand but impersonal historical scheme.12 The contrast with Virgil is at its most striking in the vivid cameos of Heroides, dramatic monologues in the form of letters from legendary women to their faithless lovers. Briseis and Penelope, the two women at the centre of Homer’s poems, assume here the personalities he withheld from them. But Ovid’s Dido is at a subtler tangent from the Virgilian point of origin. The essential features of her predicament and of her ambivalence are the same: she loves him, she curses him, she fears for him; and yet the passions of this Dido are less elemental, more shifting, more sharply probing into both herself and him. Facta fugis, facienda petis, she tells him: you abandon solid achievement, and ever pursue what is unachieved. Why must you be so obdurate? Will you find a third woman to love you in Italy? Why risk your son’s life and your own any further? What you seek will recede until you are old. Transfer Troy here; be king here. Or at least wait till the weather’s better and your ships are refitted (Aeneas had been there several years); give me and the sea time to calm down.13 This Dido is as insistent and variable as Virgil’s, but if her mind is less majestic and tempestuous in its consuming furor and dolor it is more supple and conversible, more conscious of itself in relation to others: more morally intelligent, in short. And of course more dramatic, more undilutedly itself, because unmediated by narrative voice. Ovid’s women, his lives generally, may not always be the greatest or noblest in fiction, but greatness and nobility are often confused with subjection to a single passion or idea. Their freedom from this subjection is what is original with and remarkable about Ovid’s lives.

Augustine and Platonism This realist conception of poetry and the passion it thinks with never became part of Augustine’s life. He recognised Virgil’s Dido just because she was noble and subjected in ways he was aware of in himself. Virgil’s Aeneas was the model of how a man must overcome this noble subjection. Augustine himself, notoriously, came to Carthage (veni Karthaginem) and found a cauldron of burning or inflamed loves (sartago flagitiosorum amorum); he too had to leave for Rome, ravished away by his God (me raperes).14 The mind must exercise dominion over the passions of the soul just as Aeneas exercised it over the tears of Dido, as he says again in The City of God. This was his

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master-treatise, and Christianity’s first: a kind of Christian Republic and Laws combined, but often just a much fuller treatment of the intellectual and spiritual journey traced in the Confessions.15 Both works tell us that an essential halfway house on the road from immoral poetry and erotic passion to the love of God, from Virgil and Homer to the Psalms, Gospels and Epistles, was Platonist philosophy.16 Now Hellenistic philosophy’s two chief strands were the Epicurean, represented in the first century BC chiefly by Lucretius, and the much more influential Stoic, whose many adherents had included Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and Horace. The Pre-Socratic Democritus initiated an atomist philosophy of nature, in which even soul is corporeal, particulate and perishable, and Epicurus in the generation after Aristotle added a materialist theory of sense-perception and a hedonist ethics, in which pleasure, understood especially as the absence of the limitless desires of the body, is the measure of well-being. Lucretius turned this proto-utilitarianism into a magnificent consolatory verse treatise.17 But although Augustine was attracted to this doctrine of worldly temperance and human limit, his early allegiances, formed largely by Cicero, were more to Stoicism, and particularly to its belief, traceable to Heraclitus, admired by Ovid and later given enduring life for thoughtful people by Marcus Aurelius, that human rationality is the immanence in us of a vital and immortal spirit, or Primary Being, dispersed throughout the universe. This makes the enlightened, ascetic soul capable of freeing itself from sensory desires and passions.18 In the end, however, Augustine was temperamentally drawn beyond both Lucretius and Cicero, with their roots in Pre-Socratic natural science and its more materialist view of the soul and body as closely linked, to Plato, with his roots in the mysticism of Pythagoras and Parmenides and the concepts of Socrates, where mind and body are sundered. The agent of transmission was the second-century philosopher Plotinus, who with his biographer and editor Porphyry was the fount of what is known as Neoplatonism. The Enneads of Plotinus ring some mystical changes on key Platonic themes: especially the soul’s ascent towards the Good from Republic, the Tripartite One from Parmenides and the unmoved mover as Thought thinking Itself from Aristotle. An individual soul must be purged of passion and desire, of the matter or non-being which makes it ugly, if it is to enter into the All, or universal Soul; courage is having no fear of the separation of body and soul; wisdom is intellect leading soul up away from matter; the Intellectual Principle (nous), Being (to on) as Knowing, is the image of the One (to en), and soul is its emanation. There is nothing here of evil or sin, nor of Jesus the Son of God in whom the word is made flesh; this is Being-Mind-Soul, though not yet Father-Son-Holy Ghost.19 But Augustine learned here, he says, of the word which was in the beginning, and which was God; and of knowledge of God as universal Being, which is knowledge of one’s own being. Intravi in intima mea, he says, “I entered into my deepest self, and found beyond the soul’s eye, beyond the mind, that changeless light.”20

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For Augustine “the Platonists” were the philosophers who most nearly approached Christianity; but Christianity for Augustine had more to do with that inner light in his deepest self than with a whole life. When he turned belatedly to the Bible, overcoming his stylistic distaste, as a student of Virgil and Cicero, for the Old Latin of the only translation available to him,21 the books he most often turned to were Genesis, the Psalms of David, St John’s Gospel and the Epistles of St Paul. The Confessions reads in many places like a tissue of quotations from these sources, and the whole of the last book (13) is a symbolical reading of Genesis I. There Augustine sees the intellectual Plotinian trinity become God the tripartite Creator of the world, with being, knowing and willing as the three corresponding aspects of the inner human self.22 His preferred Psalms are 4 (“. . . know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself”), 42 (“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God”) and 139 (“O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me . . . Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?”).23 In the opening verses of John, of course, he found the fulfilment of the Neoplatonist conception of God as the Word (verbum in Latin, but logos in the original Greek).24 This is the spiritual disposition of an Aeneas, an Antigone, a Plato. This amorous self or soul has only one real relationship: with a personalised concept, infused with all the soul’s passional and ideational energy. He “hates” all other lives that are not likewise alienated from life by, or taking refuge from life in, this exclusive passion for a concept.

St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans To such a disposition John’s Gospel, with its visionary mystical opening, its doctrinal emphasis on the transformation of Judaic into Christian practice, and its vivid aphoristic exposition of the symbolical meaning of Jesus (“I am the resurrection and the life”, “I am the light of the world”), was far more congenial than the other three, whose homelier narratives closely resemble each other, and whose principal burden is just the life.25 But better still was “great Paul” (O Paule magne),26 for here was the disposition itself. The Epistle to the Romans, written in Greek in the middle of the first century, is Paul’s greatest and most Augustinian work, and in it we can see just how Pauline Augustine is. The gist of its complex and circuitous morality is that Christ by his death freed humanity from sin and from Judaic law. The law had told us what sin was, but sin had used the law to strengthen its hold on us; thus “sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful”. “With the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” Only God’s grace revealed in Christ’s death can destroy this sin, and so “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth.” But because we are bodies, not just minds, “there is none righteous, no, not one”, and because “we are not under the law, but under grace” we can only “live by faith”. Even so only “God’s elect”, those whom he “did predestinate” to

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be “justified” or made righteous (just, or in Greek dikaios), will be saved. Paul’s letter is itself addressed to an elect.27 The reinvention of Christianity and, of course, of Paul himself, an apostate rabbi who became the second founder of another faith, started on the Damascus road with an “inner” conception of Jesus as the vision or voice of transcendent Being itself, rather than as the living man known to the apostles. This vision or voice by its nature was perceptible only to Paul’s mind. Jesus had become an idea, and the being-knowing-willing Neoplatonic soul which has such ideas was now quite unrelated to the passional soul, the one that also feels epithumia or desire, which in Plato had been contrasted with reason and was now associated with the body as the principal constituent of sin.28 The soul now has only one affiliation, which is with God or Being. The normal experience of this affiliation, apart from rare moments of direct quasi-sensory epiphany, is called “faith”. This is a knowing-and-willing of God: the heir of Plato’s compulsive knowledge of Being. This faith constitutes the only real validation of the inner soul, utterly dependent for its existence on the Being only it can know-and-will and which alone can preserve or save it. What is essential to those who most profoundly experience this sense of dependence is the knowledge and will of God as having chosen them, rather than the converse. Despite, or perhaps because of, the essentially solitary and indeed solipsist nature of this faith as a having-been-chosen, such Platonic guardians of the faith see themselves as the souls of the people, ministers of justice or “righteousness”: self-appointed replacements, indeed, for the very Pharisees Paul seeks to displace. The corollary on God’s side of this human knowing and willing, His action or disposition to save the soul regardless of its “works” or deeds but not of its intensity of faith, is called “grace” (charis in Greek, caritas or gratia in Latin).29 This has the sense of a disinterested and inscrutable giving, an unearned and unearnable benison. But with this sense goes an all-important shared passion linking divine grace and human faith: love, as an inexhaustible selfless esteem for its object. In New Testament Greek this love is agapê, in Latin dilectio and again caritas: certainly not erôs or amor. The authorised translation is best known from another of Paul’s epistles, I Corinthians: “charity”. For Homer this passional space was occupied by a filial esteem for good or deserving people (agapê for agathoi); for Antigone and Aeneas, by consuming piety for a dead brother or an imaginary city; for Plato, the closest predecessor, by the philosophical Love of the Good. But now, as part of faith and grace, love has become God’s passion for us and ours for Him. It is a passion with and for a conceptual centre, rather than a passional concept; that centre is a kind of inarticulable moral blank, a binary switch. Either God grants you His grace or He doesn’t; either you have the faith or you don’t. Only you really know, and from whether you do or not everything else about you and the world follows: but your knowing is an on-or-off condition of the soul towards which the rest of

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the self is oriented, and it is this orientation of the self, not one of its many recognitive activities, which is “passion”. The first Christian Reformation, Paul’s, like the second, Luther’s, insisted on the Platonic inwardness and privacy, the de novo originality for each person, of faith: and on a concept, God, as the only proper object of passion. This passion for God became not just the only proper passion but the only passion, as passion was properly to be understood: the pure force or intensity of a turning of attention to a concept. Amor became, as erôs had been in Plato, the name for that attentiveness, as well as for the filial or sexual passions between people. Now that we in turn have lost the authorised sense of “charity” the profound generic difference between these two kinds of “love”, the whole of this huge moral equivocation and displacement, has again been covered up by our use of a single word to describe them both.

St Mark’s Gospel This is the romantic Christianity Augustine inherited; it is not that of the Gospels, which are the outward stories of a life. The Gospel of St Mark makes perhaps the most striking contrast with the Epistle, being probably the closest to it in time of composition30 and of similar dimensions, and yet having the least sophisticated narrative and language of the four gospels, and so being the most obviously addressed to ordinary people, and the least likely to appeal to Augustine. Mark was not an apostle, and even if his was the first gospel – Augustine did not think it could have been31 – it was still probably written twenty years or so after the Epistle. It should therefore be regarded as a semi-fictive life at best: certainly not as a first person witnessing. Yet this only serves to highlight the vital differences between the two books. Mark is telling everyone the story of a certain Jesus, known as the Son of God; Paul is telling the story of Paul to the elect, the cognoscenti of faith. Those present at the Capernaum synagogue in Mark’s first chapter “were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes”. In the second chapter the scribes themselves question Jesus’ authority to forgive sins, and he answers them by saying to the man sick of the palsy: “take up thy bed, and walk”. “We never saw it on this fashion”, say the onlookers. Authority is there to be seen, in the energy of the living man; potestas, the Latin word, refers no longer to a legal capacity but to a personal potency, in Greek a dunamis, an action that is also a passion. Forgiveness of sins becomes something this man does and is, not a legal right exercised by a lawyerly sect; thus “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath”. Jesus is seen as freeing us of sin, or forgiving us, in his potent life, not his symbolical death; and sin is more like sickness than mortality, an impediment to life, not its very condition and limit. “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance”, he says, adding in the third chapter that “all sins shall be forgiven”. Jesus is speaking to

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everyone, not only the just, and as forgiveness personified, not justice. He is “moved with compassion” towards the five thousand, the “sheep not having a shepherd”: not a Pauline sentiment, since for Paul what counts is the quality of his love for God, not for other people. The parable of the sower in Chapter 4 is for the multitude, not the disciples, and Jesus’ very exposition of it to them as metaphor is not so much an initiation of a select clerisy into “the mystery of the kingdom of God” as an invitation to all who “have ears to hear” to attend to this kind of thought, which goes deeper and deeper the more closely one does attend. This poetic kind of thought is like the grain of mustard seed which “becometh greater than all herbs”. The true elect are not those who use the laws to dispense righteousness to the multitude, but those who try to enlighten themselves by thinking in this way. “For he that hath, to him shall be given”; and yet the poem is there for all, and “all things are possible to him that believeth”. “He that hath” may be anyone who believes.32 Although this teaching has the same double core as Paul’s, namely faith as the knowing and willing of Being, and love as an intensity of interest in it, there is a fundamental difference between Mark and Paul in how they realise Being itself. “Whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Socrates might easily have said the second sentence, but he could never have said the first. Paul and Plato both thought of “his own soul” as distinct from someone’s life or self, consisting chiefly in knowledge and love of Being as a concept. But Christian faith is present only when that knowledge and love is of Being not as a concept but as one unique human life. For his sake the faithful soul can see “its” life, the life it perceives and manages, as “saved”, as utterly changed, lost and found again. His life is sui generis in that it demands unconditionally, categorically, that we believe its claims about itself: that it is not just a quest for truth, but truth itself. “This is my body . . . this is my blood”; “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul”. No compromise. With the centurion we must say: “Truly this man was the Son of God.” What for Socrates was a concept must for Christians be a life. Mark has to make this unique life plausible, which on Aristotle’s account is exactly what a unique life cannot be. He does this best not in the Pauline quasi-sensory transfiguration scene, when God speaks to the disciples out of a cloud (“This is my beloved Son: hear him”), but in the two ordinary moments when Jesus is most alone: at Gethsemane, and on the Cross. “Father . . . take away this cup from me”; “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Dramatic imagination of such force is utterly outside not just Paul’s poetic range but his very conception of a self, a life.33 Like Homer, Mark endeavours to represent the passion of his leading character as he recognises reality, the contours and limits of his life. But this is the Son of God, not the son of Thetis. The meaning, the shape, of this life

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can only lie in the character’s own passionate certainty that he is what he says he is. The limits of his life are not something his passions help him to recognise; in this unique, limiting case of both life and passion, they are what his passion is directed at. Christ’s passion is knowledge of Being; Christ himself is this passion. He is Grace, the Love of God: a pure intensity of orientation or attentiveness towards humanity. This is a poem about a life which has no limits, is continuous with Being: the romantic life, which is not just at its centre, its mono-passional or conceptual soul, but throughout its fabric, the belief that it is God, the Being concept; that it is love, is the realisation of grace and faith. (Perhaps the life of the Buddha is the only other one like it.) This unique story that does finally tell us so plausibly about a man who thinks he is God has persuaded much of humanity not just that he believed this was true, but that it was true. We are quite sure that at the least Jesus meant what he said, but the mere possibility that he may also have been right, a possibility which is the creation of the Gospels, has staggered the world for 2000 years. Like the Aeneid but unlike Antigone (two other poems about conceptual souls), this story regards its central life utterly without disapprobation. As told by all four evangelists, it turns that most incredible romantic idea, the very romantic attitude itself, into a successful drama, and so it must be called the greatest and most successful of all romantic poems: the very realisation, making-realistic, of romanticism. Indeed it is the only such poem; there can only be one. Turning the Being concept into the very being of a second life, and eventually all lives, is on the Gospel poets’ own account unthinkable. And yet Christianity’s first reformer made the new faith into one in which exactly that manoeuvre has been seen as definitive of it by many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Paul wished to know Being not dramatically, in the third person, but autobiographically, in the first: not in the life of Jesus, but in the soul of Paul. The Gospels’ achievement was to understand Being in an ordinary life, but Paul looked back beyond that unique achievement to Plato’s aspiration, or Antigone’s: to understand Being as incompatible with ordinary life, but nevertheless as present in oneself, as one’s soul. Christianity as interpreted by Paul was not so much the completion of romantic conceptualism in a single exemplary life for the sake of most ordinary people (its greatest glory), but the re-awakening of conceptualism for the smaller but more vociferous company of adepts of the soul.

Confessions (2) Three centuries later Augustine described his own transition from passionality through Neoplatonism to Pauline Christianity. In doing so he had to break free of a ten-year adherence to the doctrines of the Manichees, a late Gnostic sect whose members admired Paul but dismissed the Gospel story, seeing the world as a place of dualistic conflict between universal Spirits of Good

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and Evil visible only to an Elect: none of which Augustine found repellent. He only came to distrust Manichaeanism, as he did astrology, because of the obviously false natural science that followed from its esoteric mythology.34 His Christianity, then, was from its roots up romantic-conceptual, PlatonicPauline; and its flower is the Confessions, a literary work second only to Paul’s in its influence on the quality of the reformed faith it professes. Augustine went a step further than his master in the domestication of romantic conceptualism by representing his ordinary, pre-conceptual passional life in much fuller circumstantial detail, thus making the story of its superseding all the more compelling; and by building the bridge between concept and faith, between Plato and the Old Testament, that so many dispositional conceptualists have crossed since. We cannot remember our infancy, he begins, but we can observe what we cannot remember, and we should trust this evidence more than what we are told about ourselves by those who knew us as infants. What he knows from this empirical observation is that from birth he was greedy and jealous, that these desires or wishes (voluntates) were internal (intus) to his soul (anima) while those who could satisfy them were external or foreign (foris) to it, and that he therefore had to make sounds and movements as signs resembling (signa similia) the inner desires. But of course he cannot remember having them, so he has to assume they were the same ones he has had since. All passion is thus seen here as desire-or-will, as selfish and wilful, indeed sinful, and as an inner phenomenon communicable to an outer world only by corresponding symbols. Each soul is alone with its sin, and each of us can only conclude empirically, behaviourally, that another has the same experience. As our sensa, our thoughts, perceptions and emotions, become more coherent, we need more and more complex signa, until we are using language itself to name both our inner states and objects in the world. But greater symbolical sophistication does not in itself bring spiritual or moral development. Generally it just enables us to enter more deeply into the maelstrom that is human associative life. The schoolboy forced to read is disobedient and proud (tantillus puer et tantus peccator: so small a boy, so great a sinner), the teacher who forces him envious and ambitious, thinking we learn only in order to become wealthy and famous. Their desires or wills are vicious. So is the poetry, the Virgil or Homer, the obscenities of Terence, which one forces the other to read and to become corrupted by. Augustine’s attacks on Homer, tragedy, and poetic ornament closely resemble Socrates’. Plain grammar and simple speech is better; at least the former gave Augustine the ability to read and write, and thus became a pathway to salvation, not only because he came to read the Bible, but also because he eventually came to read it as symbolic language possessing a secret meaning for the elect. But goodness is better still; no symbols can penetrate to the soul itself. Non est interior litterarum scientia quam scripta conscientia: the knowledge of letters is

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not so inward as the writings of the conscience. The word-thought, as so often in this poetic book so dismissive of poetry, is scintillating, omnipresent and all-important: scientia is what we know by ourselves, con-scientia is what we know with God, whose own “writings” are innermost in us. He is our deepest and truest “inner”, if only we can see beneath passion, refine our symbols, turn away from the human association and multiplicity that fragment and disperse our souls, and turn back to the unity that recollects them. The concept in our deepest souls is the God who created Heaven and earth.35 One night Augustine and his cronies stole pears from an orchard. Was it just the pleasure of the illicit act he craved? Not really. The world as God made it is beautiful; pears and friendship are beautiful. But vice is a distortion of virtue; his desire for pears and friendship was a distorted recognition of their beauty. Distorted by what? By association with others; in such company pudet non esse impudentem, it is shameful not to be shameless. As when he observed infant desires, the adult Augustine does not show us outgrowing these vices, does not show the vices as growing into virtues. These peccadilloes are offered as illustrative of what we always are, until we see the God within us.36 It is not the good that we pursue together, as Homer and Aristotle thought, but evil. To sin is to seek life instead of God. This is most destructively and intimately so in the case of amor. The sexual inferno, the thorns of lust (vepres libidinum), had by now claimed the young man. Along with many other murky affairs (variis et umbrosis amoribus) he began a 15-year partnership with the mother of his son: his con-cubina, the woman he slept with. But this too he represents as a matter of insatiable venereal habit, libidinosus amor, finally cured only by his Christian conversion. He dismisses her in the end in Aenean grief, but finds another sleeping partner almost at once, and never even tells us her name. His son he later mentions with admiration but little affection. There is not much contest in this life between erôs and philia, amor and amicitia; the former possesses it entirely, first as sexual desire, then as love of God.37 Augustine did have a true friend, however, an amicus. This friendship was more agreeable or pleasant (not dulcis but suavis) to him than all the other pleasant things of life. They seemed one soul in two bodies, each the other’s alter. Friendship is conversation, sharing, joint action, learning and teaching, longing and welcoming; it is signified by word, look and gesture. But friends can die, and so did this one. Now everything the survivor looks at is death; he is full of the fear of death. Groaning and weeping seem sweet now, but they do no more than replace the sweetness of the friendship he cannot bear to remember. Misery is the condition of every soul conquered or subdued (vinctus) by the amicitia of mortal things. To love a human being is to pour out one’s soul on the sand.38 Only the love of God is certain, for God is the life of souls, life of lives, living itself (tu vita es animarum, vita vitarum, vivens te ipsa).39 Augustine’s dolor is most unlike Achilles’ penthos. For Achilles, to

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grieve was to enact the meaning of loving friendship and to recognise life in its limits; for Augustine it is to feel an absence of meaning, a fear of life and hatred of its limits, a need for “life” grasped as pure concept. The human relationship he deals with at greatest length is the one with his mother, Monica, praised and revered by Augustine as a devout woman constantly praying for her thankless son’s conversion and salvation. That is, her passion for him is represented as the enabling agent of his for God. The meaning of her life lies in its value for his soul (again, how unlike Achilles and Thetis this is). When she dies his soul is wounded, his life torn apart, because he has lost this support, this habit (consuetudo). He is unable to weep about and for her and himself (de illa et pro illa, de me et pro me) until he is alone, or with God, because public weeping is a sign of pride and mere carnal affection when the dead are with God. We should plead with Him for their souls, but not grieve with each other for their lives.40 This attitude of mind, heart and spirit would have seemed not just alien but offensive to Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides or Aristotle, and yet both familiar and proper to Antigone, Plato, Aeneas and Paul. Augustine’s expression of it in the Confessions was so conclusive, and has been so decisive, because of the way his thought is at once of Virgilian kind, in its realisation as exemplary life story, of Platonic, in its intense need for concept development, and of Psalmic and Pauline, in its preoccupation with God as inner Being. The first and third of these together issue in the spiritual autobiography to which so many have responded for so long, but the second and third together give to this work, and in far greater degree to the City of God, an intellectual authority and systematic solidity which presage and indeed provoked scholasticism. Augustine’s was not a mind to leap directly from passion to illumination; it needed an intermediary concept. The concept he pursues throughout the Confessions is “substance” (substantia), or more precisely spiritual substance, the stuff of God and of the soul. “Is all of you everywhere?” he asks God at the very beginning of the book, in his intense, psalmic, opening invocation. “Can anything that exists contain you, if it cannot exist without you? Am I in you or are you in me?” The Manichees saw Good and Evil as immaterial minds, but exposure to the scepticism of Cicero and Sextus Empiricus about the possibility of any final knowledge on such matters turned Augustine towards the materialism implicit in Stoic and Epicurean thought (though the Sceptics rejected this too): perhaps God was some kind of huge but subtle body, diffused through space? But to think in this way was to stay trapped, it seemed, in Aristotelian categories. The Categories themselves looked like a straightforward account of physical substance; this was all Augustine knew of Aristotle – no metaphysics, no psychology, no ethics: no ousia. Plotinus freed him from this impasse by suggesting that spiritual substance might be whole everywhere and yet never in one place, infinite without being diffused through all of space: just as the mind forms images of places and things without occupying any space

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itself, or as the memory is a vast interior hall, containing mountain ranges, oceans, the sky. Neoplatonism showed him how to imagine the infinite otherwise than just as the indefinite: how to picture the substance of Being.41 Augustine needed all this post-Platonic conceptualising in order to have an idea of a world more real than the repulsive one of passion and materiality. But he was not a Plato; he could not lose himself in the pure concepts themselves. His mind needed another sort of convincing that there really is an incorruptible substance and that corruptible substance really does come from it. It was Paul who provided this, by showing him two things: the meaning of Jesus as the grace and sacrifice of God and the redemption and salvation of humanity, which is the City of God; and an attitude towards God of contrition, humility and confession.42 From the first of these Augustine concluded that substance had come from incorruptible substance, the flesh from the word; but from the second he knew how to be towards this concept. This was the keystone of the Augustinian bridge (there are others) from Socrates to Jesus. The concept had to be passionalised and embodied in Jesus, given a voice by the Psalms, for him to grasp it, or for it to grasp him – he was that much of a realist, a believer in lives; but then he could not actually think passionally for himself about this passional life and its relation to his own. Like Paul, he had to turn the life back into a concept and once more think of his own life as debased in relation to it. From the beginning of the book he represents passion as a dark and sinful inner force, signifiable but not recognitive, and associative human life as evil and deathly. He can only save himself from this sense of the world by finding the Being concept within him, and by proving without absurdity that it also has outward substance: that the ruling principle of the universe is also his soul, and that it alone is life, properly speaking. But even that turns out not to be enough. The inner force, the old amor, is mysteriously still there, still unsubdued. Augustine’s struggle to subdue this inexplicable passional resistance to the Being concept gave birth to a new concept-entity of incalculable importance to our sense of ourselves. As we saw he uses voluntas to mean a fundamental desire-or-wish-for, a volitional reaching towards. Greek philosophy had no equivalent. For Aristotle there were important discriminations to be made between spiritedness, desire, passion, appetite, wish and choice. Even for Plato, less discriminating about these things, the wishing-for that accompanies knowing the good is not the wishing-for that accompanies desire, just in that knowing is not desire. But in Augustine a strong aversion to passional thought, combined with Latin’s less rigorous concept-thought, produced a new form of intellectualised desire: “the will”. His horror of passion impeded his understanding of conflict between passion’s kind of knowing and concept’s kind. He had to invent an account of how the soul seemed to “desire” both passion and concept. The two-stage erôs was Plato’s way of thinking about this: bodily desire becomes Ideal desire. Augustine preferred

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to treat this desiring function not as a passion but as an agent, an entity so critical to or definitive of the soul that later romanticism more or less identified them. Both in Confessions and in his separate treatise on the subject43 Augustine speaks not of his free choice, nor of the free choice of a man or men, nor even of that of a soul, but of the free choice of the will (liberum voluntatis arbitrium). Knowing that “he had” a will, he says, was just as effective as knowing he was alive in raising him towards the light of God, who is knowing itself and willing itself.44 The thought is distinctly Cartesian: I will, therefore I (really) am; the will, like Descartes’ doubt or thought, is me. How else to account for that last crisis of conversion, in which the soul hangs back in mute trembling from what it knows to be the Good, to be God: in which arrival at the destination is so deeply desired and yet so stubbornly deferred? Imperat animus, ut velit animus, nec alter est nec facit tamen. unde hoc monstrum? The soul commands that the soul will, there is no other and yet it does it not. Whence this monstrosity? Mecum contendebam et dissipabar a me ipso: I struggled with myself and was dispersed from myself. How could this unnatural dissociation be? How can a punctual soul, a point which is nothing else than the source of all command, disobey itself? A point has no qualities; its movement is as apparently arbitrary as that of an Epicurean atom (materialism goes very deep in idealists). There cannot be two souls, as the Manichees claim. I know I am one, not two: so there must be two wills, a changeless one to God, which is in fact God’s will, and a variant one to sin. Both are coeval with the individual soul; “original sin”, another of Augustine’s coinages, is the condition of the will as turned towards ordinary life.45 So when Augustine at last hears the chanting voice in the garden (a child’s? an oracle’s?) saying Tolle lege, tolle lege, “pick up, read,” and turns as a Christian soothsayer would to the book, it falls open as we might expect at the Epistle to the Romans: “But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”. Quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo, omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt: peace of mind poured like a stream of light into my heart, dispelling all the shadows of doubt.46 God’s grace is made manifest in the voice in the garden. The recalcitrant will of original sin, of passional life, collapses, and Augustine is able at last to feel like a disembodied punctual soul, a pure will possessed by the will of God. Love becomes Will. He has found what amor really is: surrender of the passional self to the Being concept, dissolving of the former into the latter. Compare this crisis with Hector’s before the Scaean Gates. That one was entirely in the common world, observed by the whole world, thought out impersonally as part of that world: as a public act, almost, of the world. This one has no outward existence whatever. Augustine reports on it to his friends as if sending – or receiving – news bulletins from another dimension. Where is all this happening? Inside. But where is that? He asks God at the

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beginning of the book to tell him whether he “was anywhere” before he was born,47 and the question bespeaks a sense of the self as utterly independent of all its qualities except that of unity with God. This is an Old Testament, Psalmic self,48 hearing only its conversation with God, and used not merely to dissolve but to decry Homeric passional life. That these are confessions thus turns out to be fundamental to the book’s sense of the self. An Augustinian confession or recognition is the paradigmatic inner act: tacet enim strepitu, clamat affectu; for it is silent in terms of sound, but in its passion it shouts aloud. The inner intensity or force of its attitude to God is what counts about the soul, not an outer, shared reality. Augustine turns again here to Paul: “what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?”49 Not truth but truthfulness, not veracity but sincerity: and who but I can be the judge of my own truthful report on what I sincerely believe? These confessions are to help others on this road, and yet even they cannot know except by love (caritas), by their own inner certainty of love’s true meaning, that I am not lying.50 To confess is to observe this inner, to regard the soul just as this inner, that one quality being offered as both definitive and confirmative of the soul’s nature. To know oneself is to observe one’s inner, on this Augustinian and Cartesian account – and to see that inner as God. There is a circularity here, a legerdemain. I am my inner and nothing else, and it is God: and I know this because looking in is how we know things, and because God tells me this is so. And yet we have seen that for Hector or Achilles, for Sophocles, even for Mark, to know oneself, to have a substantial self and not just a dimensionless central point, is to use or enact oneself, to be activated, energised or dynamised, to experience the world, to know others. But most of us now assume and enact the romantic model of the knowing self. We assume that the proposition “only I know what I am thinking” is self-evidently true, and that it means something much more profound than “only I think my own thoughts”. We do not know how to read the passional outer so we treat it as a sign of a hidden inner. After not just Augustine’s Confessions but Rousseau’s we cannot help thinking of ourselves as “wills”, or observing ourselves as Beings whose principal characteristic is that they observe themselves.51 It is hard for us to see that we need not see ourselves in this way.

5 Aquinas and the Realist Revival

The self does not have to turn towards and collapse into a hidden inner soul, or be swallowed up quasi-passionally by a single concept. Not even the Christian self has to do this; St Mark, for one, was able to represent the only perfectly romantic life in history in a thoroughly realist way. But whether the invisibility of Aristotle or the exile of Ovid were straws in the wind or signs of the times, the model of the self produced by Virgil, Paul, and Plotinus, with some Stoic and Gnostic variations and details, was the one which more and more of those people who thought about such matters responded to during the four centuries after the life of Jesus, the great age of imperial Rome. Consolidated as it was by Augustine, this model then became paradigmatic for seven centuries and more after him: through Rome’s fall and the collapse of European civilisation in the fifth to eighth centuries; through the partial revival of that civilisation under Charlemagne and its second Dark Age in the tenth and earlier eleventh centuries; and then on into the scholastic era. Neoplatonist and Gnostic mysticism combined with Pauline and Patristic dogma, and some residual Stoicism, made a powerful spiritual sanctuary for besieged and solitary souls without civil defences. In universal stasis lives could no longer be conceived or exercised as integrated and passional constituents of an active and enduring outer realm, and they had to recognise themselves instead as dimensionless, isolated souls deriving their meaning from an order beyond the limits of life, apprehensible only by faith. Credo ut intelligam, as the saying went: I believe in order to think. Dispositional Augustinians for almost a thousand years, from the PseudoDionysius and Gregory of Nyssa to Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux, experienced the Being concept as the enabling precondition and very source of thought, rather than as a boundary and unique object of thought. Many still do. This is faith as the inner dimensionless point of assent to the reality of that concept – not just as a concept but as an entity. The full revival of Western civilisation did not take place until the later eleventh and above all the twelfth centuries, by which time the violent tribal agitations in the north and east of Europe had reached some sort of 71

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new equilibrium. What we call “the Renaissance” looks from both a Dark Age and a modern point of view more like a continuation than an inception. As it happened, this earlier, eleventh-century renaissance coincided with an enthusiastic dissemination of the works of Aristotle, long available to a few scholars in Greek and Arabic, but only now translated extensively into Latin, the language of all educated people. This revival of civilisation witnessed some philosophical variants within the Augustinian tradition so distinctive that they amounted to criticisms of it, and one Aristotelian rethinking of Christianity so powerful that it amounted to a renunciation of Augustine. Long before this, too, even in the very darkest times, there were attitudes to the self clearly at odds with full-fledged Augustinianism. In the first part of this chapter we shall look briefly at some of these variant philosophers, and in its closing paragraphs at a dissenting poet, all of them writing outside and against the Augustinian romantic tradition explored in the last chapter and in the next one. But our main concern here will be with the great system of Aquinas, romanticism’s most formidable intellectual adversary in two thousand years.1

Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy The philosopher-theologian Boethius was a patrician in the higher reaches of the Roman administration a hundred years or so after Augustine’s death. He was a scholar, a student of Plato and Porphyry, and the first and most influential of all translators of Aristotle into Latin. He was also falsely accused of conspiracy, tortured and put to death by Theodoric, the Vandal chieftain then occupying the city. He wrote his best-known book, Philosophiae Consolationis, while imprisoned; he did not live to finish it.2 The Consolation of Philosophy begins by showing the beleaguered philosopher struggling to make sense of his fate in an entirely Calliclean world. He became an administrator, he says, because he believed the state needed philosophical rulers; but he found himself overwhelmed by subterfuge, intrigue, ambition: appetite. The book’s only other character is Lady Philosophy, who appears to him as an imperious goddess with burning eyes, angrily reproaching his self-pity and banishing the Muses of Poetry from his presence (his opening lament is in verse). Poetry merely encourages weakness, she says. Philosophy helps us transcend wickedness and stupidity. We know, she goes on, using many Aristotelian and Socratic examples and demonstrations, that the world’s pleasures and pains, fortune’s gifts, are transient and inconstant; that many blessings still remain even to a man in this position – especially true friends; that even Rome herself is only an insignificant part of the whole creation; and that true happiness lies in the self-sufficient contemplation of the eternal good, of God, which is our name for the world’s ruling principle (rerum omnium princeps): than which nothing better can be conceived, in which all creation continues in being, that

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which we must all desire. For all her disparagement of the Muses of Poetry, Lady Philosophy sings hymns in praise of the starry heaven, Stoic-Deist or Pythagorean in cast, based on Timaeus but anticipating even Kant.3 This is a conventional enough piece of Platonic thinking, though expressed with that rare elegance and completeness which together with its author’s Socratic situation gives the work its poignancy and chastening authority. But what makes this consolatio so different from Augustine’s confessio is its temperament, the quality of its faith. Boethius thinks in order to believe; intelligo ut credam. Lady Philosophy is impatient with his initial display of doubt, but she does not demand a new faith, a remaking of his soul. God is not so much a Person as a principle, whose mere existence Boethius does not bother to question. What he seeks to prove by reason is God’s status as the culmination and unity of all the excellences we in fact desire and the ordering principle of the ordered universe we in fact observe. Sui paulisper oblitus est, she says; the philosopher has temporarily forgotten himself in dolor and ira, grief and anger:4 but this Socratic criticism of passion is quite without the Augustinian sense of sin and alienation. Boethius recovers himself in a classical and logical world of public concepts and experience. He turns an interior monologue into a dramatic conversation. His consciousness, like Hector’s but unlike Antigone’s or Augustine’s, does not consist in an anguished “what am I?”; he does not agonise his own life, and he makes no Pauline reference to that of Jesus. He had written treatises on the trinity and on the Catholic faith, but in his great crisis he prefers Socratic bypassing of passion by reason, or Aristotelian argument from passional experience to concept, to Augustinian conversion of passion into faith, or passionate Platonic knowing and willing of the Good. This is a realist disposition managing to express itself in a world of romantic concepts.

Abelard – and Heloise Five hundred years later, as far into the revival of civilisation as Boethius had been into the Dark Ages, Peter Abelard showed something of the same variant temper. He was a logician so brilliant that his work in this most modern of disciplines is still of interest; and his logic has a moral dimension. On what is known as “the problem of universals” he was more of a “nominalist” than a “realist”. The terminology is misleading, but what it amounts to is that he believed, against Platonism, that universal terms such as “tree” or “man” do not refer to “real” universal entities, but are merely “names” (nomina) for classes of particular objects. Concepts are conveniences of thought, not real beings. Not all words correspond to singular objects, on the symbolical Augustinian model of language.5 In the field of ethics, on the other hand, Abelard seems if anything hyper-Augustinian. He argues that the morality of an action is wholly determined by the intention of the actor.

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When we sin, we willingly and knowingly consent to evil. Without this consent even the worst of actions is morally neutral, and whether or not we accomplish our intention is irrelevant to its morality. The struggle within the will for control of the self is everything.6 But Abelard’s views attracted fierce criticism from orthodox Augustinians, especially Bernard of Clairvaux. His nominalism, Aristotelian, anti-Platonist, seemed to them to imply an exaggerated regard for human reason, although to him it was no more than an attempt both to perfect and to delimit the reason God has given us. His ethics similarly seemed to them to overlook Augustine’s emphasis on original sin. Sin is innate in us, they said, and we depend on God’s grace, not our own will and knowledge, to overcome it. Abelard saw the exercise of human will as the faithful acceptance of a gift of God; mainstream Augustinianism saw it as a proud denial.7 It is worth remarking that two hundred years later still, at the time of Boccaccio and Chaucer, another nominalist logician pushed Abelard’s (and perhaps Boethius’s) distinction between faith and ethics even further. William of Ockham argued that although the sheer existence of God as an intellectual principle can be logically demonstrated and is therefore the proper subject of reason, everything else about his nature and his intervention in the world is in the province of faith alone. Reason has no place for extra entities.8 Renaissance philosophy did indeed then follow several different paths: natural science in Bacon, logic, epistemology and psychology in Descartes, theology in Luther. Abelard and Ockham wanted to set faith outside thought as its boundary, but their separation of the two made the former vulnerable to attack from the latter; the Augustinians sensed this. Abelard’s most famous work, however, is his autobiography, the rather theatrical and self-justificatory Historia Calamitatum or “story of disasters”, usually published with letters to and from his former lover Heloise.9 She had borne him a son; they married in secret to protect his reputation (she would have preferred to be his paramour, the better to preserve for him an Augustinian independence of worldly ties); her enraged uncle had him castrated. He became a monk and she a nun, and they were separated. The Historia, addressed to a nameless friend, sees this terrible story as a decisive episode in a life full of calamity. Abelard offers the story as a kind of consolatio: his friend’s troubles will look insignificant by comparison with these terrible afflictions, and yet he, Abelard, has overcome them. Heloise heard of the narrative by chance, learned of Abelard’s whereabouts, and wrote in bitter reproach of his neglect of her, as well as with continued passionate feeling for him: remorse at what she feels herself to have done to him, painful delight in her physical memories, a sense of having achieved the reality of love through that physical connection and its reflective aftermath. Abelard’s replies are theologically learned, quite patronising, and almost chillingly distant in emotional terms; he tells her that what he felt for her could only have been lust, not love. She is equally learned, but also passionate,

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practical-political (the Benedictine Rules must be adapted to cater for nuns as well as monks), and shrewdly literary (she knows and uses Ovid well). She has all Dido’s passion and sense of loss, and much in common with Augustine’s concubine; but she is able to turn the full power of a richly passional mind to saving both the lives involved. Her letters superlatively enact and demonstrate the role of passional thought in the recognition and recreation of the self. As for Abelard, his physical affliction at least partly explains his coldness, and even reveals Aeneas as the greater moral eunuch of the two. He does not in the end abandon his concubine, but struggles and finally manages (thanks largely to her) to explain himself in terms they can both accept. Their letters stand as something of a reproach to Virgil and Augustine in their imagining of love.

Aquinas: God and the soul What Heloise shares with Boethius, Abelard and Ockham is a sense of being more at home in the world than out of it: despite the terrible afflictions endured by the first three. Her love, certainly, but even their faith, engaged as they were in thinking conceptually about it as well as in living with it, were for them parts of life’s familiar plenitude, not refuges from its alienating disorder. To domesticate the Pauline and Augustinian concept-faith, something essentially hostile to ordinary life and reductive of ordinary passion, without actually denying it; to retain its spiritual energy but not its autocratic spirit: in the thirteenth-century Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, this was the goal of all his intellectual activity. His success in the great venture of amalgamating Augustine and Aristotle, of making out of Christian faith a matter of general intelligence and common sense by attending to the clarification and not the reification of vital concepts, made him the pre-eminent philosopher of the two thousand years from the death of Aristotle to the advent of Hobbes and Descartes, perhaps even of Kant. This architect of late- and post-medieval Christian thought prolonged the life of his faith for centuries by broadening its appeal, defending it against solipsist zealotry and strengthening its intellectual underpinnings: by saving its appearances, preserving its complex ethical and spiritual phenomena in the face of various attempts to reduce them to their supposed essentials. Many of his concepts, lacking anyone of his stature to give them new life, were condemned and displaced only by the more romantic ones of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, engaged in their own dissociated and immoderate struggle between natural science, faith and reason. Aquinas is concealed by his eight and a half million words of Latin, his enormous masterly commentaries on the Gospels and the works of Aristotle, his untranslated or inaccessible fifty-volume editions, his long-disused scholastic argument forms, his obscure technical terminology and complex systembuilding, his dry and dispassionate prose, and his ambivalent Catholic status

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as both foundational and antiquated. But as a moral philosopher he has not been superseded.10 His great work is the Summa Theologiae, “the summation of theology”: a two-and-a-half million word synopsis of the subject for students, written in just the last seven years of his life (he died at the age of 49). “Theology” for Aristotle, it is worth recalling, was another term for what he generally called “first philosophy”, which we might also term “metaphysics”: the philosophy of being, of ousia. Part I of the tripartite Summa is on God and the created world, including especially the soul. This is Aquinas’ revision of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics and De Anima. Part III, which we must all but ignore here, is on the meaning of the life of Jesus, and on the sacraments. Part II deals with the emotions and dispositions, the virtues cardinal and theological, law, and grace. Together with the treatment of the soul in Part I this is his moral and philosophical masterpiece, his treatise on human nature: an Ethics and a Politics. But the Summa as a whole is, indeed, about being: about “being” as the name of the level where concept-thought must stop; about “what it is to be” a thing, what concepts mean in our lives: but not about Transcendent Being, the Being Concept grasped as an entity. Aquinas’ thought, like Aristotle’s, is purely philosophical. He clarifies concepts, rather than reifying them. He eschews the poetry of Plato and Augustine: the concept-drama of one, the self-drama of the other. Both of them mix poetry and philosophy; they treat concepts as living beings. Aquinas and Aristotle are proper philosophers; they purify concepts for use in real lives. This seems more useful, given that we are not concepts but people. Beside the work of poets true philosophy can look colourless, and yet that is its business: it is the solvent that cleans away the verdigris from our language. The strange excitement to be found in this activity, which is the authentic passion of philosophy, should not be confused with the false philosophical excitement of creating new conceptual Forms.11 Part I of the Summa begins with several proofs of God’s existence, the famous “five ways”. Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century had tried to deduce God’s existence purely from the logical definition of his nature, from concepts. God is something than which none greater can be thought; what exists must be greater than what does not: so God must exist.12 Now this was about the Being Concept. Aquinas prefers to induce God’s existence from the sensory world. We see things changing or causing each other; they cannot change or cause themselves; the sequence of change or cause must have had some originating point, some unchanged changer or uncaused causer. Again, things have finite degrees of existence, excellence and awareness, which by the same reasoning must derive from some source which is maximally existent, excellent or aware. The first of these arguments is thoroughly realist. The concepts “change” and “cause”, motus and causa, emerge seamlessly out of our experience; intellection is continuous with sense. Even the second argument conceives Being itself as a quasi-physical

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stuff with a place of origin, not just as a concept with a definition.13 In general where Augustine and Anselm regard faith as the inarticulable precondition of experience and reason alike, Aquinas, like Abelard and Ockham, regards experiential reason as the evidence and articulation of faith. He saves the self, preserving all of it as the texture in which faith inheres. He also saves the world, preserving it as the condition of faith and the limit of experience. Unlike Aristotle’s, however, his experience of the world is precisely one of faith. He feels the being or existence of the world as a mystery beyond the limits of life and thought, the mystery which is not how the world is (Aristotle’s concern) but that it is: that it is.14 But unlike Augustine he finds this faith, or sense of the mystery of being, in the world, not out of it. We shall return to these distinctions later. Part I also contains Aquinas’ account of the soul, which for him is the activity of all mind and sense, of all knowledge: not just the apprehension of Being, the point of faith or the controlling centre of the self.15 Anima means “soul”, “life” and even “breath” in Latin, rather as spiritus does. Aquinas also uses anima rationalis, mens and intellectus, “rational soul”, “mind” and “intellective understanding”, more or less interchangeably to denote the cognitive aspect of soul, as opposed to its appetitive aspect, which after Augustine he calls voluntas. But he does not treat the two as distinct functions, nor sub-divide voluntas, as Plato and Augustine do, into earthly and heavenly desire or will. Soul for him as for Aristotle is the living principle or animation of the body, its actuation or activation: not the body’s shape, essence, function, definition or consciousness, but the body considered as the being only it is. The soul is not, as in Plato and Descartes, a disembodied “I” seen as my real self, that which rules or owns its body: but all of my deciding, acting, feeling and thinking. Such a soul is not to be known or seen by looking inwards, as in Augustine. Knowing oneself is a recognitive action of an ensouled body. I learn by experience what it is to be myself. And yet the soul cannot be wholly identified with the body, either, as it is in the materialism of Democritus, Epicurus and the French Enlightenment: or in behaviourism. Just as Aristotle still felt he needed a conception of “active reason”, as the emissary within us of “thought thinking itself”, in order to save him from the consequences of complete materialism, so Aquinas needs the conception of an immortal soul to preserve his Christian faith. How can such a soul not be more real than the body which is its temporary home? The answer Aquinas gives is that the kind of thing that makes a being what it is is not the kind of thing that can perish; what makes someone himself will always be what made him himself. And that same thing will make him himself once again after the resurrection of his body, in which a Christian must believe purely as an article of faith. This argument places the burden of faith on the resurrection, rather than, in Augustine’s way, on the quality of the soul and the reality of God. Aquinas preserves an Aristotelian soul, human reason and a Christian faith.

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The soul, then, is the animation of our body; but it is also our capacity to perceive the ordinary world. Here too Aquinas rejects both Platonism, which he sees as inserting between ourselves and the ordinary objects of the world extra objects so entirely different in kind from the ordinary ones that the former cannot possibly help us to make sense of the latter; and materialism, that conception of the mind as a passive organ bombarded by sensory images and twitching in reflex response. The senses do indeed provide the images, but this raw material of knowledge is only turned into organised understanding by an active process of abstraction, akin to concept-thought: a process not of turning abstractions into independent entities, but of singling out and retrieving with more active imagination (phantasia) and retaining or storing in more passive memory that abstractable aspect of an image which it shares with other images. Our minds are activated in this common-aspect imaginative discovery not of a species but of individuals as a species. Our minds are our souls in the activity of knowing individual objects better by seeing them under various aspects. We know our own minds, furthermore, not by looking in at them as if they too were objects, but just in thinking. Only by experiencing, by just having, our own acts of understanding do we come to know what our minds are: knowing our own minds is just using them.16 This is an entirely un-Augustinian picture of the mind, though it has clear affinities with Homer’s; above all it has no “inner”, no extra entity behind our thought for us to think about.

Aquinas: Ethics This picture of the soul or self as an agent, this claim that we are what we think and do, is at the heart of Aquinas’ moral philosophy, which is expounded chiefly in the first part of Part II of the Summa.17 Those materialist reflexes are actus hominis, the instinctive acts of the human animal. Moral life, on the other hand, consists of actiones humanae, the deliberative actions of a human being. Moral action is just another name for human action. All action, as distinct from mere act, aims at something: intends a goal. Aquinas’ ethics are teleological. Grasping the goal informs the action. In non-human actions the animal actor does not grasp the goal as a goal, but merely as it were falls towards it. Human actions are voluntary or willed. This is for Aquinas another way of saying that they are knowingly goal-directed; what we will is a goal, just as what we understand is a truth, or what we see is colour and shape. We are creatures that grasp abstractions or concepts. We see individuals under different aspects, and this makes what would be animal inclination or affective appetite in less abstracting or conceptual creatures, the mere tendency to incline towards individual objects, something more like “will to good” in us. An action is a willed or goal-informed movement; “will” is just our word for motivated activity. The will is a performative shape taken by the mind in grasping an object as a goal. The

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agent mind is the assemblage or presentation of an object, forming an object under an aspect; but the will is seeing it as a goal of action, which is the same as pursuing it. Intending is out-tending, tending towards a goal in the grasping of which lies the morality of an action. We have to ask of an action: what is its goal, and what object is it being exercised upon? A good deed is what is done by a good will, and a good will is the recognition of a good goal; goal and deed alike are outward, and the deed’s moral kind is determined by the goal, not by some inner quality of the soul. Contra Abelard or Kant, therefore, a good will does not in itself make a good deed; both the goal and the “matter” or details of the deed also need to be good. But a bad will, informed by a bad goal, is enough by itself to make a bad deed. Sins are “disordered” actions; they lack good goals. To will bad goals and objects is either to perceive with the appetite alone, not with a blend of appetitive and conceptual thought; or to perceive with both but ignore the latter. The life of pure appetitive satisfaction is impoverished because it lacks conceptual understanding; it literally does not know the meaning of “good”. But to know the meaning of that concept is not necessarily to perform the good action or enjoy the good life, as Socrates argued; we are creatures of understanding and appetite. As for choice, that modern shibboleth, it is to be regarded as the will deliberating only about the means to its goal, never about the goal itself (the will cannot deliberate about itself); and freedom is the will, seen in this act of deliberating. Freedom is goal-grasping and choice-making activity; it does not exist unless this activity exists, actually and not just potentially.18 Aquinas has by no means ignored the voluntarism he inherited from Augustine; “the will” is still a central explanatory feature of his moral philosophy. But he has placed it within Aristotle’s experiential realist picture of the self. For him, as for Aristotle, the agent soul is also the passional soul. This is the familiar picture of the ensouled human body as vegetative, sentient, appetitive, passional and intellective, all at once. Aquinas places even more emphasis than Aristotle does, however, on appetite, on desire, on affection or inclination, which he sees as operating at the most fundamental level of perception. We do not just perceive things, sensorily and conceptually, or so to speak neutrally; we perceive them as attractive or repulsive, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, useful or harmful. The laws of reason, the rock-bottom first principles of knowledge, are not just conceptual, as when we grasp that contradictions cannot both be true, or that the whole is greater than the part. They are passional or appetitive too: preserve life and avoid death; perpetuate the species; live together. The fundamental truth which we all grasp is being itself, grasped as a mystery and a necessity. Being human means that we find these “natural laws”, as Aquinas calls them, as basic to our thought as we do the laws of logic or physics. All sentient creatures have appetitive awareness; this is what sentient life is. But in us, who are reasoning as well as sentient, this awareness has a distinctive

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aspectual or conceiving cast. We do not just live the laws; we see them as the laws of life. So moral life is a blend of appetite, sense and intellect; “the will” is just appetite actively and knowingly pursuing a goal. Aquinas has taken the reificatory “inner” out of the idea of will, while modifying the idea of appetite as an active principle so as to represent it as one of the grounding realities of the moral life: amenable to reason, not just a mere stubborn trace of the animal.19 To admit more of the appetitive self into the realm of the moral or human is also to see the appetite as more human: to passionalise more of it. A passion is an appetite, not a perception, says Aquinas, in that it consists in being affected by objects, by perceiving them as good or bad – this suggests how appetitive perception can be, but also how influenced by perception, by the mind, by reason and its concepts, appetite can be. A passion is affective, a change of state in soul and body alike. Strictly speaking, indeed, passion is more “change of state” than simply “being acted on”, its usual sense, for this usual sense applies also to pure perception: objects act on us even when all we do is perceive them. Seen from the praxis side, the defining moral event was goal-informed action; seen from the pathos side, it is this change of state in an ensouled body. Passions are not actions, not specifically human or goal-oriented phenomena, for change can have a goal but never be one; and even animals have passions but not goals. But passions can be thought of as activities, as re-actions of the whole self to an immediate grasping of objects not even as good or bad, but simply as attractive or repulsive. Then the presence of concepts, of reason, makes them into human passions; only by sharing in reason can appetites cause human behaviour. The soul is a tyrant to the body in the sense that it is the very life or being of the body, but the passions listen to reason as free citizens listen to their leader, recognising their own sensory or imaginative realities, but also its conceptual ones. A Pericles needs to articulate the concepts they live by, we might say, even if theirs are the lives.20 If we think of lives not in their actions and passions but in their dispositions to be active and passional, as they show their bent or tendency to realise some capacity rather than another (inanimate objects have no disposition, being merely determined by their physical properties to realise a single capacity: a fish needs no more disposition to swim than a stone does to roll down a hill), then we see that reason or concept-thought is disposed easily, while desire or passion-thought is disposed only with difficulty. One demonstration is enough to convince us permanently of a logical truth, and it is all too easy to mistake that conviction for real passion; but repeated experience and example, mediated by concepts, is needed for any lasting direction, shaping or education of our passion. Only this difficult disposing of passion, involving both repeated recourse to passional concepts and actual recasting of the passion itself, can bring about any enduring change in our moral lives, in our souls, in that volatile fabric of what we are out of

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which emerges what we do. It is therefore to this disposing of our passional selves that we must devote most of our moral energy; our collective disposing usually takes the form of mores, the customs that Aquinas calls our second nature.21 Virtues or vices, qualities of the soul, dispositions of passion towards good or bad action, are like contours or creases in the heavy fabric of the self, resistant to but still capable of alteration or reinforcement; customs are the corresponding collective contours. There are dispositions of mind: speculative ones, such as the disposition to know first causes, or reason towards truths; and practical ones, such as the disposition to know how things work and then make them work. But the true moral virtues are dispositions of passion in accordance with the goals perceived by reason and grasped by the will. An act done only because of the discipline imposed by reason and will would therefore not be virtuous, since the passions themselves would not be well disposed. Aquinas distinguishes four “cardinal” virtues, central passional-conceptual folds into which all the others finally flow: courage, the facing of evil; moderation, restraint or measure in the desirous pursuit of good; prudence, the capacity for intelligence and discrimination in that pursuit; and justice, the balancing of many such pursuits. All the virtues, considered more extensively in the second part of Part II of the Summa,22 are conjunctions of reason, passion and will. They are passional dispositions to recognise good objects as goals of action. The final such object or goal is the good life, the life which most fully manifests or realises this kind of recognitive human action. Aquinas’ term for this life, seen both as a goal and as an achieved state, is beatitudo or “blessedness”. This of course is a close cousin to Aristotle’s eudaimonia, our “well-being” or “flourishing”, which originally signified the good will of a divinity.23 The passion we must dispose towards this goal is the primary one, the root of all the others: love. All desires, appetites, tendencies towards, perceptions of objects as agreeable or attractive, are essentially forms of love. To “love the good” is to dispose oneself to feel this passion for the life in which the full human potential is best realised: to have our ultimate goal as our ultimate goal, as Aquinas says archly. Nothing could be further from the Platonic and Augustinian understanding of love, of amor and erôs, as sexual desire transmuted into a conceptual quasi-passion. With Aquinas amor regains its full recognitive valency: as appetitus, desire or appetite (orexis and epithumia in Greek); amicitia, friendship (philia); or caritas, charity (agapê). The critical distinction for him is between the first two. We feel desire for things we want to possess or enjoy but we feel friendship for those whom we want good things for, and this second kind of love takes us out of ourselves, instead of absorbing others as things into us. To love someone is thus to desire a good for an amicus (a philos), with the primary emphasis on the latter, since to us as living beings a living being is a worthier and more attractive object of passion than a good. Desire by itself is wanting to absorb something

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or someone into oneself: wanting them as a good for oneself. But we should try to love not just others but ourselves with the love of friendship: to desire goods for ourselves both rationally and disinterestedly, as tending to realise the full human potential of this being who is our closest friend. We should love ourselves as friends for whom we desire good things. Love yourself as a neighbour who lives your life. This kind of self-love is the beginning of all true friendship. As for charity, that is the perfected form of desire-friendshiplove, the form in which the desired good is beatitudo itself.24 But now we approach the heart of the Summa as theologica. Beatitudo and charity are concepts whose meaning is completed only in God, or in faith in God. Charity is only to be fully understood as God’s love for us and ours for him. Beatitudo is fully attained only in the life of contemplation of God. Only God, by his grace, can instil in us the three “theological” virtues, faith, hope and charity, and thus dispose us to a perfect happiness beyond the reach of the “cardinal” and other merely natural virtues. Natural law itself is installed in us by God as our experience of sharing in the eternal law. The being we grasp as the most fundamental first principle of knowledge is what God thinks. The common or political good that we will as a goal in willing rightly is God. Our bodies will be resurrected. Mankind cannot be the supreme good, and therefore the fulfilment of flourishing lives must lie outside them, in what we call God: in his unearned grace and forgiveness of our sins; in our willed not reasoned assent to him or belief in him; in our choice to believe that the life and death of Jesus were what he said they were. God is not just at the heart of the Summa, in fact, but everywhere in it.25 And yet what sort of God is this: what sort of faith: what sort of “everywhere”? Aristotle set the concept of Supreme Being only at the very apex of all thought; Aquinas sees God at the end of every single path of thought. But this is not Augustine’s passionate, intimate te, deus: not the personal Being at the centre of a personal confession, the central meaning of a punctual self. This God is so ubiquitous, the thought is so philosophical, that personality disappears once again. Augustine’s inner conversation with God, his preoccupation with his own faith, replaces all other thought about life, and indeed replaces all other life. His God is a vortex into which all thought, passion and life disappear. Aquinas takes his faith for granted as the limit of thought, takes his God for granted as the limit of a life which is only made liveable through having some boundary. Indeed like Aristotle his point of departure as a thinker is that there must be a limit to thought, and like Homer’s his thought assumes a limit to life. Aquinas turns faith into a defence against the fanatical Augustinian inner; he makes it an “outer” faith. And just as God is everywhere in the Summa, so Thomas is nowhere. The Confessions is obsessed with self; the Summa has no self. Aquinas does not want to make his book into a life; for him books serve life. He offers a purely philosophical account of the faithful self that will model, not enact, most ordinary experience, as bounded but not evacuated by faith.

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This model of the self was generally accepted by the Christian world for two and a half centuries, and the Roman Catholic world has never entirely abandoned it, though Thomism has lost some of its influence even there in recent decades. But at all times, one suspects, the model has had more of a dogmatic than a recognitive value; non-Christians and even non-Catholics are bound to find it inaccessible. Nearly all the myriad commentators on the Summa have been theologians, more interested in the subject matter of Parts I and III than in that of Part II: not moral philosophers with the contrary interest.26 Indeed this is not surprising, given the balance and texture of the work itself. But one of its two chief groups of opponents, namely Luther, Calvin and their Reformation heirs, were also those who wanted faith to be once again the whole picture of the self, not just its frame. They were Augustinians, seeking to reinstate his model. As for the other group, the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their heirs, they were on the contrary those who could recognise no divine or faith-like limits to concept-thought, or to life. The picture of the self is framed for them by the natural universe (Bacon, Newton, Einstein), or by the nature of thought itself (Descartes, Kant, Freud), or by human history (Vico, Hegel, Marx). The first of these three Enlightenment models did at least avoid the paradox of representing humanity as framed by itself. Indeed to begin with its picture was not unlike the one on Achilles’ shield: although by Darwin’s time the frame had become the whole picture, with humanity shrunken or banished to a small dot at the edge. But in the other two cases the paradox flourished, and Nietzsche and his heirs concluded from this that there was no frame any more, and that the picture was leaking away. Faith as understood by Aquinas, or indeed by Homer, is a choice or assent that disposes us to flourish in life by setting a term on our thought about what is beyond life’s limits, rather as hereditary constitutional monarchies and other devices may limit the ambition of politicians and thus enlarge the sphere of political life for ordinary people. Such an attitude of and towards thought is just not conceivable for those whose most pressing moral need is for physical and conceptual certainty, for proof. As we saw with Virgil, this need affects poets as well as philosophers. Under its influence the latter try to turn concepts into entities, into lives; the former try to turn lives into concepts. Virgil refashioned Homer’s passional-recognitive form of thought, trying to imagine Rome as a transcendent Troy, the fulfilment of Aeneas’ quest and of human, or at least European, history. Aeneas himself became a symbolic life rather than, as Hector had been, a real one. This was a seductive and enduring transformation of poetic thought, and we shall see in the next chapter how deeply it influenced Dante, Virgil’s heir. But as with the philosophers, some poets persisted in their own distinctive way of thought. Lives can just be lives; passions and concepts alike can be lived, and yet not seen as lives themselves. Poetry is older than philosophy, fed from deeper and more plentiful sources;

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there are always new lives for language to shape and be shaped by, while the stock of concepts is finite. This depth and variety made poetry slow to conform itself to philosophy’s new model of the self, but also slow to abandon it. Plato’s dissociated and punctual view of both poetry and the self did not take root in the central practices of European poetry until Virgil, three centuries later, and a thousand years after the first beginnings of that poetry; but since Virgil the “new” view and practice, reinforced by the Old and New Testaments (the Psalms, not the Song: Paul, not Mark), have persisted for two thousand years more, alongside or overshadowing the older versions. Aristotle’s more accommodating and saving views were able to make no deep or general impression until a thousand years or more after Virgil, but by the late Middle Ages, and notably after Aquinas, they had made some.

Chaucer: the wife and the clerk The pre-eminent poetic witness to this new saving of the self was also the first great English poet. Shakespeare apart, indeed, Geoffrey Chaucer is still the greatest realist poet in the language. He produced his best work in the 1380s and 90s, a hundred years after the Summa of Aquinas, even less after the Commedia of Dante (to which we will turn in the next chapter). This was the England of Richard II: a country of three or four million people rebounding from the great plagues of the 40s and 60s into both widening prosperity and a greater concentration of political and economic power. This commercial and cultural quickening brought with it new social and political recognitions and antagonisms, reflected in the Peasants’ Revolt and other similar episodes on the one hand, and equally persistent baronial hostility to the monarch on the other. The three-hundred-year NormanPlantagenet tide was only just beginning to ebb, and the century of French wars that went with half-French rulers had not yet given place to those brutal English wars that so maimed the century to come. Meanwhile a divided papacy and many other gross evidences of worldly appetites within the Church provided the Lollards and other less radical critics like John Wycliffe, harbingers of Reformation, with plenty of ammunition for their attacks on clerical venality in the name of a renewed Christian piety. This small English tribe, with its tiny but cosmopolitan educated class of nobles and knights, merchants, clerks and churchmen, hardly larger than the citizen body of classical Athens, was just at the point of turning into a nation. The catalyst, as ever, was language. The educated class had hitherto lived its culture almost entirely in French, which had been the language of the court, statesmanship and European commerce since the Norman Conquest; and in Latin, which had been the language of the church and of the educated class since Roman times. But in the second half of the fourteenth century the English vernacular embarked on the same process of asserting itself against French and Latin that Italian had just gone through with

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Dante: a process never fulfilled in Old English, despite its status as the first great poetic language after the Dark Ages, because under the Normans the English ruling class was culturally French. English now began to be used in courts and in the parliament; French was beginning to be an educated accomplishment as much as a mother tongue. And Geoffrey Chaucer, merchant’s son, much-travelled and multi-lingual civil servant to Edward III, Richard II and John of Gaunt, translator of Boethius’ Consolations and of Le Roman de la Rose, apprentice of Dante and admiring younger contemporary of Boccaccio, found his way out of the romance-and-romantic, VirgilianEuropean tradition, in which he had already written several fine poems, and into the more Ovidian world of the Canterbury Tales, a foundational poem of our own literature.27 The General Prologue to the poem opens with an unsurpassed evocation of spring – April sunshine, sweet winds, fresh showers, tender shoots, birdsong, new journeys – as the seasonal and even cosmological setting for the two dozen or so human portraits that follow. The sense of the natural world is itself spring-like in its freshness; nature is still only the frame, but it is the limit of human life seen as itself brimming with life.28 The pilgrims, whose social standing, character, clothes and appearance are described in the rest of the Prologue, and whose passions will constitute the rest of the poem,29 appear in this setting almost as natural phenomena themselves: gently or loudly spoken, curly-haired or gap-toothed, gold-pinned, threadbare, brown horse or thin horse, white neck, forked beard, sallow-faced and red-faced, lank-haired, close-shaven and hairy-warted. Unlike Homer, Chaucer has made his poem out of the quotidian life on Achilles’ shield. Here are the ploughmen themselves; there are no gods and no heroes. But the shield itself did offer that view of life as a possible one. Chaucer’s world is the comic counterpart of Homer’s. That is, his poetry supersedes not realist Homeric tragedy but romantic Virgilian pietas. His exposures and subversions of medieval romance are destructive not of true nobility or piety but of their hollow-souled facsimiles. At the same time his comic representations of ordinary life are not destructive but recognitive of its appetitiveness. The poetry also supersedes the medieval fable in being neither burlesque nor satire; human grossness is perceived in neither Rabelaisian hyperbole nor Augustinian disgust. Like Thucydides, Chaucer sees human beings as irrevocably and predominantly appetitive, but in him the appetitive world is congenial to civilised thought, not a wilderness of force hostile to it. England’s own time of stasis had not yet come, and so a Shakespearean level of thought about moral and political collapse was not yet possible. The vernal frame and setting of Chaucer’s comedy is designed not to show nature as a new God, nor to show humanity as a mere function of natural force (both of which are romantic undertakings), but to initiate the displacement of romantic concept-thought, especially the allegorical type so common in medieval poetry, by realist passional thought about ordinary life. When

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Chaucer does think explicitly about God, as in the pious “Retraction” at the other end of the poem, that thought is quite outside the natural frame. Within the frame, life is naturally appetitive. Many of the twenty-odd tales told by Chaucer’s pilgrims (some of them incomplete, as is the whole cycle30) could be said to be about “love”, that lodestar of Virgilian and Augustinian thought. But to see how Chaucer thinks this passion is to see what it means to say that Virgil and Augustine, and the allegorical and romance traditions after them, only think about it. In the long confessional preamble to her tale, the only such episode of selfdisclosure in the poem,31 the Wife of Bath shows us nothing of amor or erôs, of caritas or agapê. “Love” of this kind occupies about as much space in her life as it did in the lives represented by Thucydides or Homer. In hers, as in theirs, love is a kind of appetite; but in her life Chaucer, unlike Thucydides and Homer, and of course unlike Plato and Augustine, thinks sympathetically about appetitiveness. “I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun, / But evere folwede myn appetyt”, the Wife admits. Solomon “had many a myrie fit” with his hundreds of wives: why should Alisoun not have had the same with her five husbands? Even St Paul, she points out, did not command universal virginity; “bet is to be wedded than to brynne”. Is the sole purpose of “oure bothe thinges smale” merely to “knowe a femele from a male”? “I wol use myn instrument / As frely as my Makere hath it sent . . . Myn housbonde shal it have bothe eve and morwe” – whether he wants it or not. Always “wol” and “shal”; her sexual wilfulness is part of a more generally appetitive nature. In following her “inclinacioun”, her will, Alisoun is happy to use its “instrument” unscrupulously, as barter for her husbands’ compliance in all her other desires: for clothes and worldly goods, for going about where and when she wishes, for lovers, for the sheer dominance she eventually and outrageously persuades all her husbands to see as best for them. Only her last husband, twenty years younger than her, shook her complacency. The earlier ones she paid in kind when they denounced her as shrewish or extravagant, or when they found lovers, but Jankyn the clerk, with his “book of wikked wyves” from Eve onwards, his copious flow of disapproving proverbs and sayings about women, had even her at a loss, though not for long. She remembers all his stories of female contrariety and ferocity and tells them to her listeners in detail. For a moment the poem leaves its readers, as Jankyn’s book left his wife, half-persuaded. But then she reminds herself, and her audience, that men wrote all the books. And so without warning she ripped out several pages of the “cursed book” Jankyn was remorselessly reading out to her, and at the same time hit him so hard that he fell backwards off his chair. He hit back; she fell, deafened, in a dead faint. In his alarm and contrition, and with her encouragement, he ended up like all the others, gladly surrendering to her “al the soveraynetee”, the “governance of hous and lond” (which had strictly in any case been hers to start with, deriving as it did from her earlier marriages), and of course burning

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his miserable sermonising book, which nevertheless her own story has partly vindicated and contributed to. After that they never disagreed again, and she loves him still as she never did any of the others. The “loathly lady” fable that the Wife of Bath now offers as “her” tale reinforces what she wants to say to men: surrender all conjugal power and even an old hag will become for you a beautiful young woman, your life with her a joy. More than anything else, “wommen desiren have sovereynetee” over men; let them, and you will find happiness yourselves.32 Ever since Socrates and Callicles, and no doubt long before them, many people have been inclined for various reasons to read poetry as “rhetoric”, meaning by this a debased kind of philosophical persuasion, part of the appetitive not the intellectual world, appealing to the passions and the senses by means of verbal colours, shapes and sounds, rather than to the intellect by means of conceptual argument.33 Such people would read the prologue and tale of the Wife of Bath, for example, as an ingenious anti-feminist discourse, like its prototype, Jean de Meun’s discours de la vieille in the allegorical Roman de la Rose. “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me”: from her very first words, they would say, the Wife is intended by Chaucer, as the Old Woman was by Jean, to show femininity as hostile to civility and education: as instinctively philistine, coarse and appetitive. Women destroy books and men; all they want is sex and power. A less gender-obsessed version of this view would see the Wife as appetite itself, as sheer will to power, sheer desire for sensory gratification. In its domestic way, hers is an economy of force, presaging the bloody and anarchic century of Towton and Tewkesbury, of the national strugggle for “sovereynetee”. On this account Chaucer would be following Plato and Thucydides in their variant criticisms of, or prescriptions for, the appetitive world. But the all-powerful Platonic perception is exactly the one it was Chaucer’s genius to have transcended. A century after its Aquinean renaissance, passional thought reached again in him something of the penetration into appetite it had enjoyed in Ovid, and before him in Aristophanes, perhaps a greater comic poet than either. Yes, Alisoun’s is an appetitive life; of course she experiences and represents marriage as a struggle for dominance in which there is no quarter asked nor given, little time to recognise another’s reality, and above all no room for children (though one of her justifications for serial marriage is that God meant us “to wexe and multiplye”). But she is neither a Callicles nor a Cleon: no mere oracle of force, no lynchpin or litmus test of general moral collapse. There is no collapse here. What is here, incomparably more present to us than in Plato or even Thucydides, than in Jean’s vieille or even Virgil’s Dido, is a life. From her gap teeth to her unmentionable birthmark, from her shrewd and retentive assimilating, enlisting and distorting of alien “auctoritee” to her half-understood soft spot for her last husband, the Wife of Bath is life seen as appetitive selfrecognition.

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But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte rote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte bote [does my heart good] That I have had my world as in my tyme. “I have had my world” recalls not “I am carried off in flames by furious passion”, but “let’s find out who gets the glory”. The remote ancestor of this kind of complete self-awareness, untroubled by intimations of an unassimilated romantic soul, is not Dido but Hector. In the source passage pressing most immediately on Chaucer’s, Jean de Meun’s Old Woman says flatly that her body is reinvigorated (me resbaudissent li membre) when she remembers her bon tans and her jolivete vie, her good times and pleasurable life. But Alisoun lives, as the Old Woman never did, in that tickle about her heart’s root. Chaucer and Homer think of people as whole passional selves fully possessing their world in the time they have, their being and doing co-extensive with their thinking and feeling. Virgil thinks of people as souls dispossessed of their world and their time by their ideas and their passions, and medieval allegory and fable think of ideas and passions as people. Virgil and Augustine think of the will as God or the Devil in us. Plato thinks of appetite as a force of nature to be tamed by pure concepts; Thucydides thinks of it as what is left after passional concepts have lost their purchase in the fabric of human being. Like his predecessors Aristophanes, Ovid and Aquinas, Chaucer thinks of appetite in pursuit of its goal, which for all of them is the same as the exercise of will, as the ordinary human condition, the moral condition, always redeemable by the slow ameliorative pressure of passional thought towards concepts that inhere in lives. Alisoun herself shows no little capacity for conceptual argument, as well as for appetitive self-recognition. And she and Jankyn “with muchel care and wo” do resolve their domestic civil war. But to say Chaucer “thinks of” appetite or will “as” anything at all makes him sound too like Aquinas. What he “thinks of” is an ordinary life, and he thinks of it so as to enable us to grasp it as both our own and someone else’s. We both live it and evaluate it; we recognise it. Chaucer does not think that the life of an Alisoun is all that femininity, or rather humanity, is capable of; it is rather that in his thought as the life of an Alisoun we can see what full human perception is capable of.34 It is intrinsic to this kind of thought that Chaucer should imagine the Wife put not so much in her place as in a new perspective by the meek little Clerk of Oxford, as it were on behalf of Jankyn himself.35 The Clerk retells Petrarch’s excessively piteous fable of Patient Griselda, whose humility and obedience is tested beyond all humanity and finally proved even to his own satisfaction by a husband whose laboratory coldness with his wife’s feelings seems to us today, perhaps even more than it would have in Chaucer’s time, abusive to the point of sadism. But the Griselda of Petrarch and of the Clerk,

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like the “loathly lady” of the Wife’s Tale, but unlike Chaucer’s Clerk and Wife themselves, is a creature of fable. The Clerk is moralising, as clerks do: recommending the life of Christian patience and humility. If Griselda could suffer the capricious tyrant Walter, he says, surely we, though so much less virtuous than she, can find our peace in the will of God. Our task is “nat for to knowe our wyl”, but to “lyve in vertuous suffraunce”; “oure beste is all his governaunce”.36 We remember the Wife’s advice to men: find your peace in women’s “wyl” and “governaunce”. And then the celibate and demure Clerk wickedly concludes that since no real woman could ever be like Griselda, that “flour of wyfly pacience”, all should strive instead to emulate Alisoun, that “tygre”, and make their husbands as miserable as possible.37 What he now appears to be recommending in marriage is not Christian patience, but civil war. Is the Wife excessively forceful and appetitive, then: or has her advice a grain of truth in it? Is the Clerk too romantically conceptual, bookish, misogynist: or somehow a master of both irony and piety? The kind of thought which can sketch all these possibilities cannot itself be captured in concepts; it is life-thought. But Chaucer was exceptional. His European predecessors thought differently, as we are about to see. So, for the most part, did his late-medieval and early Renaissance successors, European and English alike. Not all of them, of course, as is clear from any brief glance at the poetry of François Villon, for example: A maint homme l’ay reffusé— Qui n’estoit a moy grant sagesse— Pour l’amour d’ung garson rusé Auquel j’en feiz grande largesse . . . Par m’âme, je l’amoye bien. “I turned most of the men down, which wasn’t wise of me, all for the love of a bright lad who got it for free . . . by my soul, how I did love him”: thus another old woman who knows she had her world as in her time, and whose soul is what she had it with.38 But Chaucer was not widely known in France or Italy, and even the English poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries generally read him as archaic and romantic. Except for Shakespeare, no one until the time of Dryden and Pope, of Fielding, could see him for the great and rare realist poet he was. Realism was rare, even in the Renaissance. But now we must retrace our steps, back to the beginnings of post-classical European poetry and the rise of medieval romanticism: a current of poetic thought even Chaucer could not stem.

6 Dante and Medieval Romanticism

Beowulf One of Northern Europe’s first great poems is set in Scandinavia at around the time of Boethius. It was composed orally in eighth-century Northumbria or Mercia, in that small oasis of civilisation presided over by Bede, and only written down in the Anglo-Saxon or Old English of Wessex at around the turn of the millennium, a century or so before the birth of Abelard. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that outside Old English and Old Norse, and pockets of monastic Latin, there was no other literary tradition in Europe during this long period. In Chaucer, perhaps, English poetry was reborn, but with the writing down of Beowulf it was born. These claims may appear excessive. After all, did Chaucer’s contemporaries not include William Langland, the Piers Plowman poet; John Wycliffe, the first great translator of the Bible into English; and the many creators of those rich cycles of morality and miracle plays, of dream visions and romances, which constituted the English language’s contribution, culminating eventually in Malory and Spenser, to that European romance heritage with which this chapter is chiefly concerned, and which was itself reborn in La Chanson de Roland just after Beowulf was written down? Back on the other side of the Norman watershed, was the Beowulf era not also that of Alfred, Bede himself, Cædmon, The Dream of the Rood and The Battle of Maldon? Yes: and the Iliad itself must surely have been not just accompanied but enabled by other poems. The Canterbury Tales are peerless in the sheer scale and depth of their human inventiveness, in their distinctness from the romance and fable traditions they grew from but shook themselves free of. As for Beowulf, it too, alone in its era, spanned the gulf between orality and literacy: while its size and the nature of its story also differentiated it from its English and French peers, Maldon and Roland, respectively.1 Like the Iliad, the poem is about the struggle for civil survival. Grendel, the monster that the hero Beowulf has to destroy, is called a child of Cain (Caines cynne) – the poet was Christian – and an enemy of mankind (feond 90

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man-cynnes); “he fought with right, alone against all”. He lives in a dark private world of pain and malice, hearing the festivity within the Danish King Hrothgar’s new hall; hating the “clear song of the poet” (swutol sang scopes) which tells of the origins of human life; and seeking by violence to destroy this small primitive polity.2 Grendel is the anti-political spirit itself; his prey is not just life but a community. This poet recognises the precariousness of civilisation far more urgently than Homer needed to. So narrow is this horizon that all of human civility seems threatened by Grendel’s assault, and Beowulf seems to save the whole world in saving that one hall. One strong man between the fire on the hearth and the monster in the night: this is a terrified, heroic vision of barbarism itself. But Beowulf, whose very name means “bear”, is more a mythical Heracles than a legendary Hector. He is finally overcome by a dragon. Grendel is a troll, an ogre, not an Achilles, and his equally loathsome mother, a creature whom the hero also has to kill in her submarine lair, is certainly no Thetis. These are not battles between Danes and Swedes, or Trojans and Greeks. A fascination with the folk-past of Northern Europe is one of the legacies of German Romanticism, initiated by J. G. Hamann and Johann Herder 250 years ago:3 and as the heirs of Romanticism we can clearly see the elements of Virgilian symbolising in this poem. Its leading character seems more significant as the bulwark of a pre-Christian civilisation than interesting as a man. His adversaries are proto-Gothic monsters, his heathen comrades the subjects of pious narrative commiserations. But perhaps we can look at Beowulf in another way. In Grendel and his mother, in Beowulf himself, are the makings of real passional thought: about untimeliness, malignity, courage. These are dim, unrealised analogues of Achilles, Thetis and Hector. If Homer’s poetry evolved out of and away from such a mythic world, perhaps Beowulf is unevolved realism, a sign of what might have been. Byrhtwold’s last speech in The Battle of Maldon (“the smaller our strength, the stronger our wills, the braver our hearts, the greater our souls”)4 is a later glimpse of a kind of thought that was never fully achieved. For Old English was overwhelmed and marooned by a literary deluge which by comparison really was romantic, a truly Virgilian tradition. After the Norman Conquest, Beowulf and its kind were unreadable in their own land for nearly a thousand years, then misrepresented by the Romantic folk-revival, and finally, belatedly, recovered and popularised not long ago by Tolkien and others.5 This may indeed have been a new beginning, but it turned out to be a dead end.

La Chanson de Roland The deluge began in about 1100, at the time of the First Crusade, or of Abelard’s Historia. Like the Iliad and Beowulf, La Chanson de Roland was composed (by “Turoldus”, according to its last line: no more is known of

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the poet) out of a formulaic oral tradition, several hundred years after the events it describes.6 Historically, Charlemagne’s nephew “Hruodland”, to use his Frankish name, was killed in a skirmish with the Basques in the Pyrenees. In the poem Roland dies gloriously, inflicting heavy losses on a much larger force when Charlemagne’s rearguard, under his command, is ambushed at the pass of Roncevaux by the Saracens as the army is returning from a successful campaign against them in Spain. But these Franks and Saracens are not like Homer’s Greeks and Trojans. As Roland himself disarmingly observes, speaking for the poem, Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit: pagans are wrong and Christians are right. Pagans idolise images of Apollo and Mohammed, and yet throw them petulantly in a ditch when they lose a battle. Christians fight bravely because it would be shameful not to, and because they will go to Paradise when they die. Marsile, the Saracen leader, does not even plan the ambush himself, but is told what to do by Ganelon, Roland’s treacherous and traitorous stepfather. In the end he dies cravenly, of sheer misery. His overlord, Baligant, is indeed wise, brave, powerful and handsome. Quel baron, s’oüst chrestientet, observes the narrator judiciously: what a great lord – if he had been a Christian. Even Charles the Great is wounded and nearly killed by him in their single combat at the end of the vengeful counter-attack – mais deus ne volt, God did not wish it. Baligant lives just long enough to see his army in ruins and to realise que il ad tort e Carlemagnes dreit. As with Aeneas and Turnus, this is trial by combat with the outcome divinely pre-ordained.7 The Franks, meanwhile, do behave like Greeks in one respect: their quarrelling leaves their Emperor all but helpless on occasion. Ganelon, his plots unmasked, dies unrepentant. Brave, handsome, a true leader, he would have been a perfect baron, says the poem, had he not happened to be a traitor. Roland himself is headstrong and aggressive, but also pious, brave, honourable and loyal. When his philos Oliver, seeing the enemy’s numbers, urgently and famously advises him (Cumpainz Rollant, kar sunez vostre corn) to blow his horn and summon the main army, he refuses. This would be shameful, he says. A good vassal should perform his task without asking his lord for help, and a good knight should not avoid occasions for glory. Inevitably they are overwhelmed, and most of the Franks are killed. When Roland in belated desperation and regret wonders what to do, Oliver is scathing. In any event, he says, you must not blow your horn. That would make our deaths more shameful still. The Archbishop has to calm them down. At the end Oliver, his sight and hearing gone, confesses his sins. Roland, having at last blown his horn so hard that the effort proves fatal, tries with his last strength to break his sword so that the enemy shall not have it; remembers his life and his lord; confesses; leans his head on his arm; dies. Si penuse est ma vie, says the grieving Charlemagne dispiritedly at the poem’s end, as the Angel Gabriel sends him off on yet another campaign.8

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Précis can convey very little of the poem’s pathos and wit – or of its complacency, the profound dogmatism of its conceptual and passional thought. Roland is brave and Oliver is wise (Rollant est proz e Oliver est sage);9 Charles is valiant, happy and weary; all are pious and right. Baligant is wise too, but wrong. Ganelon is brave, but a traitor. The opportunities for recognitive thought (Roland’s death, Charles’s grief, Ganelon’s motives) are passed over. The characters have symbolical significance but no depth. How unlike the contemporary thought of Heloise this is; Beowulf and even Grendel are already more interesting than Roland and Ganelon, and potentially more interesting still. This moral flatness may be partly an effect of the emerging language. Beside the Latin of Heloise the Old French vernacular of “Turoldus” seems raw, undifferentiated, adolescent (verna was a domestic or house-born servant in Latin). The Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf had no such innate disadvantage. But there may be another factor at work. The Virgilian and Augustinian soul, unlike the various and recognitive Homeric self, is possessed and defined by a single quasi-Platonic concept (pietas, amor, voluntas) which is impervious to passional thought. Charlemagne is what Aeneas was doomed to dwindle into; there can be no broadening or deepening of that central pious blank. This is not an observation specifically about Christian thought. Virgil knew nothing of Jesus; Sophocles had long since understood the depth of the human need for a central uncompromising blank, a concept to live by and die for. The thought of Heloise, Aquinas and St Mark is both Christian and realist. But for the Old Testament writers and St Paul alike God’s chosen people just are God’s chosen people. This conviction was as preoccupative of the soul and as passionally blank as any Platonic concept, and in the same way. After Augustine it was the general mode of response in Europe to that deep human need for certainty. Virgil’s thought was congenial with Augustine’s, not entirely fortuitously; and not even poets, whose first concern was with lives not concepts, could resist their combined influence. Releasing that essential, punctual uncompromisingness back into the solvent sea of passional thought is an activity few wanted or were able to undertake, either in the Middle Ages or later. Still, Beowulf and Roland alike are men of action, not passion. They are Aeneas’ heirs, not Dido’s; their business is with arma, not amor. These poems are known as chansons de geste, epic songs of the deed, militantly constitutive of their peoples’ collective sense of self. What of that other strand of the Virgilian inheritance, not epic but stanzaic or lyrical: the eleventh century chanson d’amour? This was a Provençal blend of the classical pastoral poem, derived from Theocritus and from Virgil himself,10 with the Christian lyrical hymn to the Virgin Mary. The rift between songs of love and songs of deeds had started with Virgil, and the Homeric integration of action and passion was gone. In Aeneas piety, a divinely installed concept, cannot be a moral and passional thought-experience, an activity, as wrath was in Achilles. Nor can that piety’s carnal counterpart, Dido’s “love”: the

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two are complementary versions of each other, as we saw earlier. Leaving Dido or killing Turnus are not Aeneas’ realisations of the meaning of pietas. Killing herself is not Dido’s realisation of the meaning of amor. In each of them an act follows from a fixed concept as if by definition. The concept is not understood as part of a life in such a way as to constitute the act. This dissociative loss is registered within each of them, but also in the two of them together. “Passion” is for Dido, “action” for Aeneas. In Achilles and Hector passion and action, character and plot, were the two sides of a sheet of paper.

Chrétien de Troyes and Courtly Love So in Roland piety is a given, an inarticulable blank space that is the soul of an almost mechanical warrior. In the parallel genre the space is called amor. Although Ovid is omnipresent here as a mythological and narrative source, Virgil is still the presiding moral spirit. In 1137 Eleanor of Aquitaine, a powerful and cultured patroness of the arts, married Louis VII of France, and transplanted into Northern Europe, with its more heroic tradition, the heritage of Provençal courtly verse, inaugurated a hundred years earlier by Arnaut Daniel and Giraut de Bornelh,11 and struggling from its outset with the conflicting passions of love for the mistress and love for the Virgin. Eleanor’s daughter Marie de Champagne was in her turn the patroness of the greatest of all medieval poets of romance. This was Chrétien de Troyes, who in the 1170s and 1180s united the chanson de geste and the chanson d’amour in the roman courtois, a short verse novel of 7000 lines or so (half an Iliad), written in the vernacular but with a courtly tone, and concerning both armes and amors. His material was an ancient oral story-cycle from Brittany or Britain, the matière de Bretagne, about a legendary king called Arthur. Many writers used this material. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s factitious Historia Regum Britanniae, dating from the 1130s, had traced Arthur’s lineage from Troy, and there were other attempts to justify this heroic vernacular “present” in terms of the classical past. But in his five romances, where the Grail quest and the story of Lancelot and Guinevere make their first appearances in literature, Chrétien so completely and knowingly fused heroic deed with passionate love, the two kinds of love with each other, the new vernacular courtesy with the old Dark Age sense of struggle for survival, that the “courtly” sensibility became permanently constitutive of European ideas of civilisation. English ideas too, of course: Eleanor’s second marriage was to Henry II, and Chrétien spent part of his career in Norman England; King Arthur’s is in many respects a Plantagenet court. This was the synthesis that had evaded Old French and Old English alike. Once it was achieved, most poets not only accepted it as the principal manner of thinking about the relations between men and women, but also assumed that thinking about those relations in these ways was poetry’s principal contribution to human thought in general. What is so remarkable

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about Chrétien, however, is that he not only invented the courtly synthesis but also sensed its limitations from the start. And yet his re-invention of romanticism was so dazzling that his ironical reservations about it went unnoticed by his romantic heirs, perhaps even until Flaubert: while realist poets like Chaucer, who proffered alternative ways of thinking, thereby placed themselves outside the main conversation. His first romance, Erec et Enide, is a story of marriage, not of the conventional adulterous courtly love. The exceptionally valiant, handsome and noble knight gives up the life of chivalrous adventure for the love of his exceptionally beautiful and sensible wife. But this renunciation seems to her to diminish his worth, and thus hers. So he proposes that she accompany him on his knight-errantry – provided that she play no part in it, not even warning him of danger, on pain of utter denial of their love. In the end their shared vicissitudes bring them closer together than ever. Or ont faite lor penitance . . . Or ont lor amor refermee; enduring their penance, they reaffirmed their love. The poem almost, not quite, recognises that armes and amors will remain empty concepts in false dichotomy unless their meanings are enacted in shared lives. The narrative is so full of the incidental details of gory wounds and rich fabrics, grim weapons and fine palfreys, feasts, tournaments and enchantments, that the passional thought is crowded out. What the whole poem actually reaffirms is the life of unexplored armes and amors, of mere action tricked out by concept.12 Chrétien’s third romance was Le Chevalier de la Charette, “The Knight of the Cart”. Here are some of Chrétien’s polished octosyllabic couplets, stylistically so much more influential in European poetry than the rough decasyllabics of Roland. Et cil de la charette panse Con cil qui force ne desfanse N’a vers Amors qui le justise, Et ses pansers est de tel guise Que lui meïsmes en oblie, Ne set s’il est ou s’il n’est mie, Ne ne li manbre de son non, Ne set s’il est armez ou non, Ne set ou va, ne set don vient, De rien nule ne li sovient Fors d’une seule, et por celi A mis les autres en obli, A cele seule panse tant Qu’il n’ot ne voit ne rien n’antant. “He of the cart broods like one who has no strength or defence against Love, who rules him. His thoughts are of such a kind that he forgets himself, does

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not know where he is or is not, has no memory of his name, doesn’t know if he is armed or not, nor where he is going to or coming from. He remembers nothing whatever except one person, for whom he has forgotten all others. He thinks so much of her alone that he hears, sees and understands nothing else.”13 This is the condition of Lancelot, from the moment when he is discovered shamefully riding in a peasant’s cart in order not to fall too far behind his queen’s kidnappers, until his single tryst with her, when he loses a fingertip getting into her room but does not notice the pain or the blood all night. At her word he stops fighting suddenly in the middle of the fiercest of combats, allowing himself to be battered; he fights behind his back rather than avert his gaze from her; capable of lifting a stone slab ten others can barely move, of defeating dozens of foes even when badly wounded, he faints in a religious transport at the sight of her comb with a few strands of her hair still attached – though of course beside this hair gold thread a hundred thousand times refined would look like deepest night beside brightest day, says the narrator, deadpan. The God of Love esteems this soul so highly for its capacity to love that no love is left for anyone else; no one else can truly be said to know what love is. Love possesses this soul so absolutely that it has no other motive power at all.14 This Lancelot is a tin man with a borrowed heart, less and less able to become real the closer he gets to the object of his journey, who is herself by turns a mirage and a puppeteer. He suffers terribly, but his suffering is exemplary: this is what happens when the soul is occupied by a single concept, and there is nothing else to the self than that soul. Chrétien has seen what Augustinian and Virgilian love must come to, at the place where amor and caritas merge in confusion. He anticipates a thousand fantasies about heroes who save entire civilisations from destruction while remaining oblivious to the voracious and infantile concepts occupying their own souls. But again: what the poet must have intended, at least in part, as an exposure of a dehumanising convention, had the effect of massively reinforcing that same convention. The picture itself is so compelling that it obscures its own minatory purpose. Lancelot’s inhuman determination in the face of unspeakable suffering and overwhelming odds is so impressive that we forget his inhumanity, the absence in him of real thought and feeling. For all his understanding of the poetic and moral convention he knew, Chrétien did not have the capacity to imagine those; he was almost as much a prisoner of Love as Lancelot himself.

The Roman de la Rose The epoch’s purest vision of Love’s prison is an allegorical one. The Roman de la Rose is actually two poems: one of 4000 lines by Guillaume de Lorris, dating from the 1230s, and another of 17,000 by Jean de Meun, added forty years later. Guillaume’s is a vivid, tight but unfinished narrative, Jean’s

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a discursive, digressive treatise loosely arranged around the same narrative situation. The two poets differ widely in temperament and method, or practice, but sharing Chrétien’s uneasy fascination with amors they jointly offer or seem to offer another way of thinking about it. Guillaume brings us a young narrator who in a dream sees a beautiful garden enclosed by a high wall covered in portraits of quasi-human figures, all representing disincentives to love: Envy, Sorrow, Old Age, Hatred, Avarice. In the garden he meets Idleness, Joy and Diversion, all incentives; and he finds at last a perfect Rose. The God of Love then shoots him with arrows called Beauty, Simplicity and Courtesy, making this Rose the object he desires most in all the world, but she is well protected by more figures: Resistance, Shame, Fear, Jealousy and others. Reason tries to warn him against his obssession, but he angrily rejects her. Despite the assistance of Pity, Candour and Fair Welcome, however, he cannot reach the Rose. In Jean’s poem these various figures, and others besides, notably Nature and the Old Woman, do discursive battle at far greater length, with numerous philosophical digressions. At the end the Rose is plucked in a passage of highly explicit sexual symbolism. For all their differences, the two poems are alike, and remarkable, in their capacity simultaneously to convey carnality and spirituality, sensible advice and base urging, irony and prurience, homily and satire, learned disquisition and wicked innuendo. Betwen them they are a medieval Ars Amatoria or art d’amours, an allegorical essay on the arts and metaphysics of love.15 The Roman de la Rose is a kind of foil for the related roman courtois, an attempt to succeed where its cousin fails. Both are witty, vivid, intellectually and artistically sophisticated, and deeply interested in desire. In their cleverly developed and decorated concept-figures Guillaume and Jean try to represent what Chrétien could not: the inner, conflicted soul of the lover. And yet their inner battles between Love and Reason tell us no more about a unique personality, a life, than his outer ones between Lancelot and Guinevere. The complementary genres are hampered in complementary ways. Where the allegory asks us to think of an inner concept-battle as a likeness of what happens in a conflicted soul, the romance asks us to think of an outer feat of bodily endurance as an expression of that same conflicted soul. In both, a soul is imagined only as a conceptual battleground or stronghold, and in such a place no battle can be any more than an anonymous grab for a symbolical prize. No Chaucerian gap teeth, no Homeric active-passional thought. The allegory, even at its Renaissance apogee in Spenser or Ariosto, even at its most robustly appealing in Bunyan, is a galvanising of moral concepts, a belated (and attractive) Ovidian attempt to pump an artificial life into Thomist clarificatory devices. These allegorists are neither stupid nor dull; they are using a complex literary and rhetorical device, consciously and often brilliantly. But neither Ovid nor Aquinas could have approved a device fundamentally so Virgilian and Augustinian. To turn moral concepts into lives is not to treat them as constituted only in lives; to turn lives into

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conceptual, inner souls is not to see them as everything else they are. Allegorists and romance poets alike choose, or are chosen by, forms of poetic thought in which the living self of a man or a woman is eclipsed by concepts. Such forms may be both pleasing and instructive, but instead of allowing poetic thought its full and distinctive scope, they tend to subordinate it to conceptual thought.16

Dante’s Divine Comedy All such observations appear redundant, however, in the case of that apotheosis of allegory, the Divine Comedy. This is a dream vision of Love related to both the Romance of the Rose and the Lancelot romance, but incomparably richer, fuller and clearer than either. We have so far come across only one completely successful romantic poem: the Gospel story, about the single human life which was also the Being concept. We have encountered a second, roughly contemporary and almost as successful, about a life entirely determined by human history: the Aeneid. Not for thirteen centuries was there to be a third of comparable stature. Dante’s poem returned unerringly to those deepest of sources. He frequently and explicitly acknowledges the doctrinal and imaginative influence of the Bible, especially the Gospels, the Psalms and the Epistles. His entire narrative structure is modelled on Aeneas’ descent into the underworld and on that greater journey which supposedly altered the course of history; “Virgil”, as a poetic character, actually guides “Dante”, the pilgrim, narrator and witness, through much of the poem. Dante’s main literary inspirations, then, are much the same as Augustine’s, and like the Confessions the Comedy explores the inner landscape of the believing soul, as it were the inside of the cathedral. But in two critical respects this poem appears to leave the royal road of romanticism. First, the authority Dante most often mentions, apart from the Bible, is Aristotle, and the poem’s conceptual and theological thinking draws heavily on Aquinas, Aristotle’s Christian heir, who died when Dante was nine. Secondly, and above all, Dante’s sensory-moral imagination, his capacity to realise the meanings of landscapes, of concepts, and above all of lives, both historical and fictional, in the most compelling sensory detail, in a few strokes or across a huge canvas, is simply unparalleled in literature.17 This capacity is fresh testament to the power of a new language in its first surge of self-recognition – although in this salutary case the genius of the language itself and that of its exemplary poet are clearly impossible to distinguish, no one since having extended its reach further than he, its chief initiator. (Languages can never be more than their best practitioners make them.) The Comedy, like Beowulf and Roland, is a seminal vernacular poem. Dante found a literary language still struggling to differentiate itself not only from the parent Latin, with which of course it was far more implicated even than Old French had been, but also from Old French itself,

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and from Provençal: those elder siblings of roman and chanson. Italy had no court like Queen Eleanor’s, and so no style courtois. Dante and his contemporaries developed instead what he named the dolce stil novo, the sweet new style, stripped of the courtly politesse that now looked artificial, still offering the everyday awareness and directness of a new speech, and retaining from Latin the lapidary authority without the antique stiffness and formality. In his prose essays18 Dante defended Latin in Italian just as powerfully as he advocated Italian in Latin, and in his hands Latin was remade into the vernacular. Virgil’s secular Latin, the high speech of the New Troy and the Civitas Romana, becomes Christian Italian, the neo-Augustinian humble speech of universal salvation and the Civitas Dei. Pietas becomes pieta. Dante’s imagination is just as political as it is spiritual, moreover, and his life was marked just as deeply by exile and factional strife as by love. Under the auspices of a new language and renewed faith he also advocated a new emperor for all Italy, to bring secular justice to its warring city-states.19 Virtus becomes virtù; the Virgilian conception of the man of destiny metamorphoses into the Machiavellian.20 A poem, then, of unique intellectual and historical grasp and scope, but also of unequalled sensory-moral power: how Dante imagined the Christian universe in the second decade of the fourteenth century became, for many Christians, how it was and would always be. No wonder the work has been in an exegetic class of its own. In a standard modern Italian-English edition21 its 14,233 lines are accompanied by 2000 pages of notes. This is only the smallest tip of a vast iceberg, of course. No other European poem has benefited, or suffered, from so much scholarly and interpretative attention (some of it very helpful). Only the Bible, and perhaps a few philosophers, theologians and jurisprudentialists, have attracted such vast libraries of commentary. At the same time few poets have inspired so many others to admiration and emulation: Chaucer, Milton, Shelley and T. S. Eliot, to name just a few in English alone. The Comedy, it seems, has two faces. From one side it is a complete and systematic re-imagination of all politics, ethics, theology, cosmology, mythology. Its symbols, its allegory and its numberless sly and learned allusions and references incorporate a sizeable proportion of classical learning, Biblical vision and Italian history. Here is Aquinas for poets, Virgil for theologians, Aristotle for Christians, Augustine for pragmatists, the Gospels and Prophets for humanists, a reformed Church for Catholics, Guelfs and Ghibellines for everyone, an imperial Italy or even Europe for Florentine and all other republicans, Christianity for intellectuals: all of it organised, synthesised, patterned and visible in the smallest human detail and the sublimest cosmological vista. From the other side, however, scores of glowing vignettes, or lunettes, the most vivid and compressed studies in character and passion, leap, sometimes literally, out of their prodigiously compelling panoramas and niches. The entire canvas, with its narrative line, incidental composition and descriptive colour, is itself a re-imagination of

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many literary genres and forms: epic, autobiography, lyric, drama, romance, dream vision; all done in the sparest, truest, and most vividly immediate of poetic languages. What is most salient for us is the relation between these two aspects of the poem: its system, and its lives. Many of its readers, especially in the earlier Renaissance, and in the Romantic and modern eras, have deprecated or ignored the first while marvelling at the second. Others, especially during the Reformation and the Enlightenment, found the first alone so objectionable or obsolete, because so inseparable from its doctrine, as to make the whole work unreadable.22 But neither response is as true to the poem as the one which can accept its system, whether in faith or imagination. For the poem’s entire vast array of life-realising activities is directed by, and makes sense only in terms of, Dante’s own extraordinarily intense passion for a single concept. Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi (“behold a god stronger than I, coming to rule over me”); L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle (“the love that moves the sun and the other stars”): in these lines are his beginning and end.23 The Latin sentence is from his first major work, the Vita Nuova, a spiritual-autobiographical prose narrative interspersed with lyrics in the form of ballads (ballata) and odes (canzoni24), in which he finds his own calling and theme. He is speaking of the moment when he first saw Beatrice, his life’s inspiration; he was nine years old and she eight. But she was not the God: Love was. The Italian phrase is the final line of the Paradiso, of the whole Comedy, of Dante’s life: starting in Latin, ending in Italian; starting with Beatrice, ending with God; always possessed by Love. The Italian stilnovisti had already taken French courtly love to its despairing extreme. Non sentio pace ne riposo alquanto/poscia ch’Amore e madonna trovai . . . va’ragionando della strutta mente, wrote Guido Cavalcanti, Dante’s close friend and poetic rival: “I feel no peace nor any repose where I find Love and my lady . . . go, tell of my ruined mind”.25 In the Vita Nuova Love appears to the eighteen-year-old Dante in a dream, like an angel – or a Christ. Ego dominus tuus, he says, “I am your Lord”. He offers the poet’s heart to Beatrice, and she eats it.26 (In “real life” Dante married Gemma Donati at about this time, incidentally; they were to have four children, and do not seem to have been unhappy.) But the point of the work is to show how Dante avoided Cavalcanti’s way of despair, how he escaped the fates of Lancelot and the Rose narrator, those core-less automata of amor. Like Aeneas, Dante had to leave Dido behind. He says he learned to think of women not as pure femmine, pure females, but as gentile donne, courteous or gracious ladies, those who have intelleto d’amore, intelligence about love, understanding of its true significance.27 They are not the objects of earthly but the adepts of heavenly desire. Passion has already become a concept: or rather, the conceptualism which for Dante was always at its centre is being revealed. Then, providentially, Beatrice dies (she was twenty-four). The poet

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has learned to see all women as the vessels and agents of intelligent Love, and is now able to see his love for this woman as a spiritual path, a way to God. Unlike the pagan Aeneas and Virgil, for Dante is both hero and poet of this story, but like the Christian Augustine, hero and poet of the Confessions, he has converted amor into caritas. This amor was never libidinosus, of course; Beatrice was no Dido, no concubine, no Guinevere even: but this rarefied or transcendent version of courtly love is all the more reducible into pure idea and pure desire. The force that drives the Comedy is still the intense Augustinian belief in or passion for an idea that will save the self, save us all, move the sun and the stars; but in this case the idea, untouched from the start by bodily thought, is personified as the woman herself. She is Being.28 Dante’s Aristotelian system and Ovidian lives may appear realist enough, but they are the filters through which he shines the romantic searchlight of Platonic erôs and Pauline faith. System and lives alike, of course, are constituted in one of the most highly organised of all poetic structures. The poem’s form aspires to the perfection appropriate to its subject, showing the same wonderful degree of finish as the other aspects of its thought. Every smallest syllable seems to belong in its place as in a mosaic, while the overall pattern seems always before the eye, no matter how absorbing the local detailing. The fundamental verse unit is the standard Italian eleven-syllable iambic line (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita), corresponding to the English ten-syllable (“Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit”).29 The line is deployed in three-line stanzas called terzine, rhyming aba bcb cdc; Dante invented this terza rima. Anywhere from 38 to 53 terzine make up a canto, an episodic narrative unit deriving from the canzone. Each of the Purgatorio and Paradiso has 33 cantos, while the Inferno has 34, including an introductory canto that takes us into the world of the poem. Thus there are exactly 100 cantos in all (numerological meanings of various kinds abound, especially concerning the number 3, for the Trinity: 100 is 33 × 3 plus the One); the total length of the poem is much the same as that of the Iliad. The three famous cantiche or “canticles” are the poem; it has no other formal title – Dante refers to it twice as his comedìa, but not as divina.30 The 100 cantos present a kind of Augustinian-Aquinean Odyssey. After meeting the shade or soul of Virgil in the first canto, the Dante-narrator descends under his guidance through the nine concentric infernal regions: first the unbaptised, and then the circles of lust, gluttony, avarice, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. Finer corruptional discriminations exist within the circles; that of the fraudulent, for example, includes barrators, soothsayers and simoniacs. The uncommitted wraiths who hover at Hell’s gate are not to be confused with the distinguished and virtuous classical poets and philosophers of Limbo, unlucky to be born before Christ but defective in the prophetic power of their Old Testament contemporaries. The last three circles, “lower” Hell, are categories of

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deliberate malicious evil. These are all directly Aquinean intellectual distinctions, but they are vividly realised in sensory terms. The pilgrim finds himself at the beginning of the poem in a dark wood, not just in moral confusion. The carnal sinners are tormented by a hurricane, not just by desire. The wrathful bite each other in a bog. Physical details proliferate and intensify as we descend: the violent are represented as poisonous thornbushes, their words dripping from their broken twigs like bleeding sap; the thieves are pursued, pierced through and then burned, by snakes; the traitors, frozen together from the chest down in a pit of ice, go on battering each other with their heads. The Inferno is a meteorology, a topography and a geography of sin: its paths, cliffs and dark streams, its Infernal City, its vernacular demons and classical monsters, the three-faced, witless, slobbering Satan at the bottom of Hell and the centre of the earth, the “down” that becomes “up” as the travellers pass him and start to climb out again towards the other side of the world.31 There they keep climbing away from the vast ocean on the shore of which they emerge, through Ante-Purgatory, where souls wait to begin their penance, and then up the increasingly steep slopes of Mount Purgatory itself. Its seven realms of purgation correspond to the seven deadly sins; each has its appropriate physical characteristics. At the summit is the Garden of Eden, where the pilgrim has a revelatory, apocalyptic and symbolic vision, recalling Ezekiel’s and John’s, of angels, prophets, the virtues, the corrupted contemporary Church and the Holy Trinity. He then passes from Virgil’s guidance to that of Beatrice herself, or of her soul, suffering in the process an emotional and spiritual purging as a preparation for rising to Paradise. She now leads him through the ten concentric heavenly spheres, inhabited by the hosts of the blessed. The Paradiso contains long complex paragraphs of theological exposition, and the pilgrim has to undergo a stiff examination by Peter, James and John of his knowledge of faith, love and grace. The canticle also boasts several wonderful hymns. Its culminating image is of the vast 1000-tiered amphitheatre which is the Heavenly City, at once the centre and the circumference of the universe. There the Host of Heaven, including the great reformers of the Church, the other saints, angels, evangelists, Adam, Moses and Hebrew women, sit below the Virgin, who gazes up even higher towards God, the primum mobile and Three in One. The poem ends with the pilgrim himself gazing on and suddenly understanding this greatest of all sights, this light of lights. Throughout the Purgatorio and Paradiso the imagery becomes increasingly ethereal and lucent, but it never fails to persuade, to match and illustrate the equally consistent conceptual thought. Likewise the narrative and passional centre of this autobiography, the consciousness of Dante-as-pilgrim, always holds, uniting love for Beatrice with her Christian significance, and affection for Virgil with Dante’s place as a Christian Aeneas or Odysseus, hero and poet of the epic of faith, abused critic of Florence, Italy and a corrupted Church.32

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Even all this, however, still only adds up to Augustine plus Aquinas, a magnificently re-imagined medieval monument to a conceptual faith and a sublimed passion, a brilliantly illustrated coded reference dictionary of classical and Biblical figures, motifs, myths and symbols. What makes the Comedy so much more than an allegorical autobiography is its gallery of brief quasi-Ovidian lives. Dozens of individual characters are conveyed in one or two lines or in whole cantos. “Virgil” himself is one of the foremost of these, from the moment when he apologetically and somewhat hoarsely (lack of practice) introduces himself, through his many speeches of encouragement and explanation, and glimpses of his own anxieties and inadequacies, to the moment when, unnoticed and unneeded at the end of Purgatorio, he silently fades away.33 The figures in Paradise and upper Purgatory, it is true, are more oracular than human. Beatrice, of course, is a transubstantiated person, a private passion become a public concept. St Bernard, St Thomas (Aquinas), Justinian, Charles Martel or Piccarda the inconstant nun are all historical figures recast as the constituent mouthpieces of a particular historicotheological vision.34 Even Arnaut Daniel, the original Provençal chansonnier, here called miglior fabbro del parlar materno by the early stilnovisto Guido Guinizelli, can speak to the travellers in his own language, and yet be here because of what he is, not who he is. He is here in a capacity, not in a character.35 But further down the purgatorial slopes we find Forese Donati the erstwhile and now emaciated glutton, a sparring partner of Dante’s in life, praising his widow, whose prayers and tears saved him from a worse fate, and excoriating the “shameless” (sfacciate) women of Florence, whose nipples show over their lowcut bodices. Oderisi of Gubbio, the illuminator, thinks Giotto, Dante’s friend, has superseded Cimabue just as Cavalcanti did Guinizelli. But maybe another has been born who will supersede both poets, he says politely, here in Dante’s poem: adding that of course all reputation is as grass. Oh yes, absolutely, says the pilgrim, glad you reminded me, I was feeling a touch of pride coming on. These two brief encounters are passionally not just conceptually imaginative.36 In Forese’s sensual moralism and pious self-interest are the very textures of a life Dante had himself observed, and is now revenging himself upon, with interest. Purgatory aside, we feel that this was Forese, that this is a character. Of course a great running joke in both Inferno and Purgatorio is that all these people are not just dead but reliant on Dante for their reputations. He can reinvent them as characters in his poem. But the joke can also be on him, as when Oderisi catches the complacent “pilgrim” out. Dante lets us see him having his cake and smugly eating it too. There is little of Homer, or indeed of Virgil, in this overwhelmingly autobiographical consciousness, and more of Pope than of Chaucer in its mordant irony. Its sense of other lives is quite inseparable from its sense of self – and yet those lives are still rivetingly presented. The whole world is drawn into the “inner” and there successfully remade.

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This triumph of romanticism is most striking in the Inferno, where there are so many lives that are both utterly distinctive and completely determined. The story of Francesca and her husband’s brother Paolo surpasses all other chansons d’amour in pathos and freshness. They were reading the story of Lancelot, she tells the travellers, and when they came to the moment when he kisses Guinevere la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante . . . quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante: “he kissed my mouth all trembling, and we read no further that day”. Dante reminds us of the courtly tradition even as he transcends it: for these lovers are in the carnal circle of Hell. The pilgrim, hearing the story, swoons with pieta, with reverent pity: reliving and purging the sinful passion, participating in amor but graduating to caritas. Lancelot becomes Aeneas and then Augustine. The desiring and desirable lady of romance becomes the carnal soul, the victim, not the adept, of Love seen as mere human appetite.37 Further down, in the circle of heresy, Dante is startled when a figure suddenly rises up out of its tomb, its head thrown back and chest thrown out com’avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto, as if holding Hell itself in scorn. This is Farinata, a famous Florentine nobleman, leader of the faction opposing the one Dante’s family belonged to. Through every detail of their exchange, right down to the very flicker of an eyebrow, he is the Great Man: one who genuinely had his people’s interests at heart, a courageous and plain-dealing saviour of his city surrounded by petty conspirators; but also one who illustrates the perils of faction, sustained by arrogance and productive of bloodshed and suffering. Magnanimity is also a kind of pride, aristocratic openness flaunting itself before the necessary caution of lesser men. Farinata is damned for heresy, though, not pride: he was an Epicurean. He did not believe that the soul survives the body. Intrinsic to the great-souled life, it seems, is the belief that this is the only life one has. Just as Francesca subverts Ovidian passion, so Farinata subverts Homeric and Aristotelian magnanimity.38 Deeper still, in the eighth or fraudulent circle, there is a bolgia or “pouch” which contains evil counsellors, deceitful advisers. These are not human figures, but tongues of flame, signifying their deceit. One is actually forked: its greater “horn” is Odysseus, here known by his Latin-Italian name, Ulisse; its lesser is his usual companion in the Iliad, Diomedes. Their principal crime was the scheme of the Trojan horse. These Greek tricksters expect little sympathy from Virgil and Dante, heirs of Aeneas, but Ulisse’s “spirit” within its flame still tells them the story of his last voyage, wagging or wobbling like a tongue as he speaks. Ulisse confesses that neither his pieta for his father, nor his dolcezza, tenderness, for his son, nor yet the love due (debito amore) to his wife, could conquer his ardore to explore the mondo esperto, the “experienced world”, of human valour and vice. But when his ship reached the Pillars of Hercules, the limits of that world, he had to exhort his shipmates further:

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‘O frati’, dissi, ‘che per cento milia perigli siete giunti a l’occidente, a questa tanto picciola vigilia d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente non vogliate negar l’esperïenza, di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente. Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.’ “‘ Brothers’, I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand dangers have gained the west, even to this smallest remainder of our senses’ vigil do not deny experience, of following the sun, of the unpeopled world. Consider your seed: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.’ ” They cannot resist his silver tongue, and they go on, seeing at last in the distance a mountain of extraordinary height, but sinking in a whirlpool before they can land.39 Like Aeneas, his successor-predecessor, Ulisse is a wanderer torn between an ardore and an amore. But his ardour is of the wrong kind; it is not pious, but experiential. For him human sense and human passion are the world, and he tries to go on being human even beyond its limits. Dante represents himself too in the poem as a traveller, but one in whom the two kinds of ardour are fused into a greater third. More than once in the Comedy he refers to his own poetry as a frail craft, a little bark (navicella) struggling to survive a stormy voyage.40 The mountain Ulisse saw was Purgatory, and he thought it was somewhere you could just sail to, like Tenerife. The Dante pilgrim finds it on foot, but only by taking the short cut, or leap, of faith, which permits him to know what kind of place Purgatory is. Ulisse is a kind of Aristotelian, and Dante called Aristotle “master of those who know”.41 The Metaphysics begins “All men by nature desire to know”: meaning, human beings are so constituted as to reach out towards a knowledge of what things are.42 What is important about us is that we do reach out like this. But for Plato the important thing is what we reach out for: that is, the truth. Ulisse’s formal place in the Inferno is determined by what the Trojan-Roman tradition (Ovid apart) thought of wily Greeks, but in Dante’s poetic thought his real error lies in having the wrong idea of what knowledge is: namely, a moral-experiential activity. For Dante it is a conceptual-religious vision of Truth. So he convicts Ulisse, as the Catholic Church later did Galileo, of excessive confidence in our capacity to experience the natural and human worlds purely as matters of sense, in which mountains and virtues alike are “mere” phenomena, rather than emanations of God. Indeed the scientific, empirical spirit of the Renaissance, of the Enlightenment and of modernity, which since Bacon has been the inveterate enemy of arid concepts and

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unproveable faiths, has increasingly forgotten, as this Ulisse is showing signs of forgetting, as Tennyson’s Romantic Ulysses later forgot entirely,43 how to repatriate the discoveries it brings back from the “unpeopled world”, from the smallest margins of sense. Even science’s least human discoveries still have their being not in the empirical but in the experiential, the peopled world, the world of whole lives in communities. But this is not a Dantean criticism of science. He would say that the phenomena are God; the true Ulyssean might say that they are us. At the very bottom of the pit in the centre of Hell are Brutus, Cassius and Judas, traitors against their leaders, chewed in the mouths of Satan. Just above them, still in the ninth, innermost circle, are the traitors against faction and country, only their purple faces visible above or under the surface of a frozen lake. Two of these heads are locked together, one behind the other like a hood, but a hood with teeth, gnawing at the head in front of it. This horrible intimate chewing is Dante’s visualisation of the bestial hatred of faction itself. The passion is more fully and completely realised in its image than, say, Grendel’s hatred of human society, as he chews on the flesh of the Danes. This is not just because of Dante’s stronger visual imagination, but because he is thinking a human passion, incarnated in human figures, while Grendel is an abstract spirit of hatred itself. The two heads belong to Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa, noblemen of the generation before Dante’s, like Farinata. They conspired to betray their own faction, but Ruggieri then betrayed Ugolino, who as a result was imprisoned (probably wrongfully) with two of his sons and two grandsons, all five eventually being allowed to starve.44 Ugolino lifts his mouth from his fiero pasto, his “savage meal”, and wipes it on his enemy’s hair, in order to tell the travellers how he died. He and his four young sons (Dante used this simpler and more poignant version of the story) had been imprisoned for several months when he awoke from a dream of a huntsman and his hounds on the point of dragging down a wolf and his cubs, to hear the children crying for bread in their sleep. They too wake, made as uneasy by their dreams as he by his, to hear the awful sound of hammering as the prison door is nailed shut. He looks into their anxious faces without a word or a tear; si dentro impetrai, “so stony was I within”. “Why do you look like that, father?”, asks little Anselm, but still no tear or word, all that day, all the next night. In a small ray of light the following dawn he sees his children again and bites his own hands in rage and grief, dolor. Thinking he is doing this out of hunger, they struggle up, telling him to eat them instead: it would give them less pain; he is entitled to the flesh he gave them. He suppresses his dolor, and they all remain mute, that day and the next. Ahi dura terra, perché non t’apristi, he cries: “oh hard earth, why did you not open?” On the fourth day Gaddo throws himself at his father’s feet and dies, saying Padre mio, ché non m’aiuti?, “my father, why do you not help me?” Over the next two days the father watches his other three sons starve, ad uno ad uno. Blinded by hunger and grief, he fumbles

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over their bodies, calling to them for two more days, until hunger achieves what dolor could not, and he too dies. His tale told, Ugolino with “eyes twisted away” (occhi torti) once more seizes Ruggiero’s head with his teeth, “strong as a dog’s on the bone”. The death of Cordelia is hardly more painful, at least on the page. Dante’s language has an appalling simplicity. Gaddo’s words, in echoing Christ’s on the cross, emphasize how utterly this father in his own perverse passion has forsaken his children. They offered him their bodies to eat and he could not offer them a word or a tear. He was the hard stony earth that did not open. His heart was hammered shut. His blindness to them and to his love for them becomes proper blindness when they are dead. His real self is displayed in the obsessive, bestial, furtive chewing on his enemy’s skull. In an Ugolino, in a Pisan or Thucydidean stasis, faction exists as a deep moral confusion between party and family, the ideological and the passional affiliations of the self. This confusion was not possible in Achilles, for whom grief, rage, love and honour were unhindered and simultaneous passional activities. Ugolino is frozen, immobilised for ever in his rage. He cannot distinguish between his own bitter sense of injustice and his children’s suffering, chewing over the former instead of feeling the latter. His dolor is real enough, but it is a bestial passion, recognising no limits: an excessive insultedness, an unappeasable hunger for revenge. Once again the poem’s life-thought seems tangential to its concept-thought. Ugolino’s sin, doctrinally speaking, was to betray the Pisan Guelfs, not his children. Ulisse was damned for being an evil counsellor, not a false knower: Farinata for being an Epicurean, not a great-souled man: Francesca for carnality, not romance. The Ovid in Dante cannot help finding more and other significances in these lives than the conceptual ones which the Aquinas in him wants to show. But this divergence in his thought is itself an indication of that deeper infiltration of lives by concepts which we have been calling “romanticism”. Only a sensibility indisposed by its own founding faith in Love to compare an Achilles and an Ugolino will try to fit lives into a conceptual scheme at all, no matter how Ovidian the first and Aquinean the second. That same faith will also work against a realist understanding of either the lives or the concepts. The four characters we have just encountered, these studies in amor, nobilitas, esperïenza and dolor, are in effect, if not in intention, criticisms of Homeric and Aristotelian realism. The passions of Francesca, Farinata, Ulisse and Ugolino are not recognitively thoughtful. They enable no new self-knowledge; they are prisons, not passages. The four characters are the victims, not the agents, of their passions; the poetry sees passion as aberrant, not inherent, and moral concepts as intellectual, not experiential. What the four of them lack, but the pilgrim does not, is a vision of the Love-concept, which is also the Being-concept, as the one to which all other concepts and all lives are subordinate, and from which they derive their meaning. Grendel may be less human than Ugolino, but at least he has the

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makings of the passions that could make him into a man. Ugolino is utterly, terrifyingly human, but in a way he is even more of a dead end, condemned never to evolve because his soul lacks the one obligatory concept. The only soul Dante shows us evolving is his own, the prime subject and determining origin of the whole Comedy. Or rather, what he shows us in the poem just is his soul, the universe within that dimensionless point. The souls in Paradise move freely, but are fixed just as firmly in their identities as the ones in Hell; only the pilgrim really travels, really changes. Poetry has been subordinated to the concept, but with such power that the reverse appears to be true; one can only speculate in awe on the dramatic-autobiographical, realist masterpiece that might have been, were the reverse actually true. As it is, the romantic masterpiece we have is one Plato himself might have applauded, at least from a methodological point of view. Had he been born in 1300 he would probably have written it. Curiously enough it was Guido Cavalcanti, not his distinguished friend, whose treatment of passion anticipated the humanist Renaissance. Petrarch and Boccaccio, lukewarm admirers of Dante at best, wrote love poetry more like Cavalcanti’s without despair than Dante’s without God. To them the Comedy was the glorious achievement of an already-antiquated world-view; and yet it still dwarfs their achievements in the next generation. Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Trionfi look anaemic beside it, and even Boccaccio’s Decameron, fresh and delightful as it is, seems pale and thin in comparison. His passion for Love burns hotter than their passion for lives – although perhaps not hotter than Chaucer’s. These comparisons, however, have little specifically to do with “humanism” or “Christianity”. What matters here is the difference between a conceptual soul and a living self. A humanist can see himself as the former, and a Christian can see himself as the latter. The question is whether one’s moral universe appears to revolve passively around some fixed concept, or whether concepts and passions alike appear in it as species of activity. The first of these pictures is essentially philosophical, although many poets have accepted it; the second is essentially poetical, although some philosophers have (visionaries are essentially philosophers, not poets). In the centuries between Virgil and Dante, and especially after Augustine, the first picture exercised a decisive influence on the European imagination, as we have seen in the last three chapters. But its appeal was broader, older and deeper, as we saw in the three before – possibly it has always appealed especially to people who have both an exceptionally forceful or intense imagination and a strong sense of their own singularity. Now, through Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, those Christians who most insisted on their fixed concept often left it more vulnerable than those who did not, while anti-Christians often insisted on new fixed concepts rather than turning to the other picture, the Homeric and Aristotelian one.

7 Renaissance, Reformation and Shakespeare’s Realism

“Shakespeare and Dante divide the modern world between them”, wrote T. S. Eliot in 1929; “there is no third”.1 The “modern world” of European poetry is now about a thousand years old, and we have seen that its first four hundred years were dominated by a conception of the self deriving ultimately from Plato, Virgil, Paul and Augustine, but culminating in Dante. The philosophical system of Aquinas, it is true, offered a resistance and an alternative to this conception strong enough to appeal even to Dante. In the two hundred and fifty years between the death of Ockham and the heyday of Bacon, however, scholasticism was increasingly eroded from without, especially by the Neoplatonist humanists from Pico and Ficino to Erasmus and More, while calcifying from within into the rigid and brittle structure pulverised in the seventeenth century by the new science and philosophy.2 In the same way the structures and practices of the Church, having long ago assimilated and discounted the realist revival of St Francis and the mildly Augustinian and Pauline reforms of St Dominic, were now threatened by the more radical Augustinianism of Luther.3 As for the poets, the instinctive, reactive and somewhat tentative realism of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer evolved during the same period into the romantic picaresque of Ariosto, Tasso, Lope de Vega and Spenser, while the contrasting, increasingly realist humanisms of Rabelais, Montaigne and Cervantes were still palpably struggling with the romantic legacy in its various aspects: philosophical utopia and the monster story, the “inner” world of autobiography, the chanson de geste.4 Clearly, then, even if we overlook for now the more recent phases of our millennium, we can hardly say that Shakespeare and Dante divided its first six centuries between them as if their senses of how lives are excluded or contained all other possible senses. Still, we have encountered so far in this study two principal kinds of poetic thought about how lives are, and Dante does seem to have been a magisterial exponent of one of them: the kind which more readily lends itself to exposition, has a point of view, shows us how lives are as if proposing how to live. The other kind, whose foremost 109

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ancient exemplar was Homer, seems only to show us how lives are: although to those who prefer the other, more advocatory kind of poetry, this appearance may seem to be sustained largely by prejudice. Eliot’s own praise of Dante is unquestionably more sustained, even apostolic, than his scattered appreciations of Shakespeare.5 One of the twentieth century’s most influential English-speaking poets and critics has given us yet more grounds to think of Shakespeare as Homeric not Dantean, as the supreme realist poet of a romantic modern era inclined to regard any kind of realist thought as defective or subversive.

Machiavelli There are few clearer illustrations of the early modern hostility to realism than the reception accorded to Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe, written in 1513 and first published in 1525. Proscribed by the Counter-Reformation, its author’s very name demonized as “Old Nick” by Elizabethan dramatists, The Prince has been widely regarded ever since as at best a vicious and corrupting handbook for ruthless political schemers, at worst the voice of the devil himself. To Socratic humanists the work appears to encourage Thrasymachus, Callicles and Cleon: to recommend sheer force and mere expediency. Virgilian humanists see it as a denial of pietas and amor, of virtues and passions as inner truths. Augustinian and other Christians can hardly accept its treatment of the Church as merely another contemporary political actor, or of their faith as just another religion, and a politically ineffective one at that. To them this is an anti-Roland, saying that chrestiens unt tort e paien unt dreit. Meanwhile even the book’s defenders are equivocal. Is it the first unbearable, unforgivable realisation that we live with incommensurable value systems? Or is it an early modern account of human nature as unchangingly appetitive, and of the preservation of political communities by any means as the best way of adapting our lives to this fact – for adapt to our circumstances we always must? Is Machiavelli a pluralist, or a pragmatist? Is it our burden endlessly to reinvent ourselves with Nietzsche, or ceaselessly to protect ourselves with Hobbes?6 “How to live” books for the princes, magistrates and courtiers of the citystates were an Italian Renaissance commonplace. Baldesar Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, perhaps the most celebrated example of the genre, was being written at the same time as The Prince. The Courtier rests on a modified Platonic account of the virtues as seeds planted in the soul but hedged about with desire (affetto, appetito). The philosopher-courtier must help his princely pupil cultivate and understand them, including as defences against that very desire. Then he will behave towards his subjects with true virtú, earning both honour and benefit (onore and utile). In Platonic terms, of course, the last two goods are obviously Calliclean, not Socratic. Thucydides would have recognised them as mere objects of ambition in a world of

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stasis. But in fact all Castiglione’s virtues and passions are mere objects. They are the currants in a cake, not the flour. What Homer and Aristotle would have understood as aretê, excellence discernible as the outstandingness of a life, has now become a virtú defined as the knowledge of how to choose the good (un saper eleggere il bene). The very good itself, understood by them as eudaimonia, the life of well-being, and by Plato as the contemplation of Being, is now seen only as the attainment or possession of an “honour” which is no more than the empty husk of timê and a “benefit” which is easily confused with mere wealth. Romantic concepts are highly vulnerable to appetitive force, as we have seen before.7 Castiglione and his fellow-compilers of advice books for princes could only follow the guides they had, of course. The most widely read moral treatise of the Renaissance was Cicero’s De Officiis, or On Duties. Cicero was the last great defender of the Roman republic, while Virgil a generation later was the first great apologist for the Roman empire: and yet the two writers shared a Stoic, and ultimately Heraclitean, view of lives as revolving around virtuous centres of pietas or honestum, microcosmic fragments of the Primary Being infusing the whole universe. Virgil’s own prince was an important Renaissance and romantic prototype. Cicero’s central honestum or virtuousness is sub-classified into the familiar cardinal virtues, and passion is treated as an intemperate movement of the soul (motus animi), as in anger or greed, needing like appetite to be restrained by reason. For the wise man, he says, there can be no final conflict between honestum and utilitas, virtue and expediency. The good leader by his freedom from vice and his possession of the virtues gains the goodwill of the people. Cicero did not claim to be an original thinker. He was a man of affairs and a clear-headed master of rhetoric using Socratic-Stoic conceptual materials to condemn force and enjoin moderation; readers in times of stasis have valued him accordingly. Oppressed by a tyrant we need to hear someone saying to him “be liberal, be moderate, and for these reasons”. But this model can only treat the self as an empty arena in which isolated virtues (or vices) and passions are displayed approvingly or otherwise. They have no living reality. Advice-book lives are animated concepts, and tyrants pay them no attention.8 A related criticism can be made of the most famous of all Renaissance life models, Giovanni Pico’s “man the miracle” in De hominis dignitate, the “Oration on the Dignity of Man”, written in 1486. The deepest sources for Pico’s conception of the magnum miraculum are in the gnostic speculations of the second and third centuries: those magic, pagan-oriental alternative religions, including the thought of Plotinus and the Hermetic and Cabalist writings to which Pico so often refers, against which emergent Christianity was defining itself. God put Man in creation, Pico says, as the single being qui tanti operis rationem perpenderet, pulchritudinem amaret, magnitudinem admiraretur: who might ponder on the plan of such a great work, love its beauty, marvel at its scale. Man is nullis angustiis coercitus, held by no

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constraints, and he acts pro [suo] arbitrio, by his own choice. God tells Adam that He made him ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorariusque plastes et fictor, in quam malueris tute formam effingas: “so that you may make yourself into whatever shape you choose, as a matter of choice and honour, as it were, the moulder and maker of yourself”. Quasi carries a terrible burden: as if you were your own Maker, as if by your own choice and for your own honour. The witness and celebrant of creation becomes the reason for it, and then the reasoning principle of it, and then the creative principle itself. Qui enim se cognoscit, in se omnia cognoscit; for whosoever knows himself, knows all things in himself. This magus figure is the precursor of the Romantic scientist, Faustus or Frankenstein, not the empirical one, Copernicus or Galileo. His ancestors are mainly gnostic, though Creon’s hymn to Man from Antigone and Protagoras’ vision of man as the measure of all things also come to mind; but the most important of them is that ex-Manichee, semi-Plotinian and anti-gnostic, Augustine. Pico’s Man is defined by his own will or choice to be angel or beast. The moment of willing or choice is critical; the rest of the life is incidental (the contrary, realist view holds that the will is no more than the orientation of the whole self towards a goal). The “freedom” of such a will, such a soul, is its detachment from and shaping of the rest of the self. The Augustinian soul realises itself this time not as God’s will but as Man’s.9 Machiavelli set his face against these Renaissance models. If Pico’s magus and Castiglione’s courtier-prince were the humanist ideals, with their isolated virtú, honestum, pietas and arbitrium, then he was no humanist. In his Discourses on Livy, a longer and cooler work than The Prince, Machiavelli reflects on Livy’s history of the Roman republic, trying to account for its health and longevity compared with the generally wretched condition of its modern Italian counterparts. His interest is in the flourishing of states, nations now as well as cities, and he finds a republic (in Greek terms a combination of aristocracy and polity, or oligarchy and democracy) on the whole more likely to endure independently than a principality (monarchy or tyranny) in that groups of people will generally display greater adaptability and stability, and better judgement, than single people: although the latter must always be the creators and first lawgivers of all states. Constitutions thus displaying a mixture of all three elements will be the likeliest to flourish. Machiavelli shows little of Aristotle’s or Thucydides’ senses of political activity as a way of realising, not just protecting, individual lives. But like them he does want to think about the flourishing state rather than the good one, and about actual states not ideal ones. His instinct is taxonomic, not definitional, and his representation of actual individuals as political actors is a realist criticism of the ethical paragons of Pico or Castiglione, and of the faceless Platonic republic they originated in. He uses the existing ethical vocabulary unreflectively: impious, violent, ignorant, lazy, cowardly; honour, fame, glory; courage, prudence, justice. He is not interested in defining, dismantling or reducing it. He insists that the moral world has always been

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“in the same state”, that its omori (humours), passioni, desideri and appetiti are always and everywhere “the same”, medesimo. His model of the self has no concept at its centre, no handful of concepts scattered through it. Instead it is a mutable but homogeneous passional material only fully realised when we conceptualise it; that realisation is moral thought. Virtú as Machiavelli’s central concept is the true Homeric aretê, excellence or outstandingness, understood in Aquinean terms as the passional disposition to recognise a good object (namely civic flourishing) as a goal of action: not as the knowledge of how to choose the good.10 As Machiavelli says himself this is an unfashionable way of thinking in that it attaches more importance to l’onore (Homeric timê) than to la verità (Augustinian Truth). Inevitably it sees religion as a matter of civilised necessity, not of truth: as a way of seeing the limits of the self in an active and worldly not a passive and transcendent light. From such a point of view the Christianity of contemporary Italy, unlike the paganism of the Romans, does not deserve to be called a religion at all. Francis and Dominic, humble and contemplative men, “good” men, succeeded only in maintaining a dishonest institution as an enervating and destructive force within the body politic. Concepts like “good” and “bad” sit awkwardly in a moral philosophy whose touchstone is excellence not truth. Men nowadays do not know how to be “honourably bad”, Machiavelli says; and on another occasion, “men become bored with the good and long for the bad”. He is impatient with such would-be foundational or essential concepts; to him they seem drab and undiscriminating. Like Homer he recognises shame and glory, honour and distinction; more passionately, with Thucydides, he fears and hates stasis, seeing states everywhere falling into the chasm between the appetitive force which according to Thrasymachus and Cleon is all there is, and the eviscerated, discontinuous concepts which according to Augustine and Socrates are our only defences against it. The ethical climate in which Machiavelli thought was far more insidiously conceptualised than the one Thucydides knew. Less reflective about character, he was not able to fully rejustify the old ethical vocabulary, but he fought the powerful modern one he so distrusted by insisting that as a matter of evident political fact it did not save either the appearances or, more importantly, the state. Above all salvare la patria, or mantenere lo stato as The Prince puts it. “Good” men, “goodness” itself, are obviously inadequate to deal with appetitive force, so let us return to an older recognition of passional reality, and incidentally to an older vocabulary of honour, courage and excellence. This is neither pluralism nor pragmatism. On this account we do not live in several equally appetitive but conceptually incommensurable worlds; we live in one passional world. Our moral life is not a series of free pragmatic, intellectual or aesthetic choices by the will or soul between competing concept systems – always of course against the grain of appetite: it is the constant discriminating struggle of the whole self to recognise its passions

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as, or to realise them in, one concept or another. The Prince expresses this heretical point of view more concisely and forcibly than the Discourses, in a tone that appears to romantics not only to prescribe tyranny but also to describe it for tyrants. To control a state eliminate its ruling family; in general those who cannot be won over must be destroyed; rulers who have to be cruel should do it “well” (quickly, all at once) and not “badly” (lingeringly, indecisively); make the art of war your first study; learn how to be “not good”, to “embark on evil” (entrare nel male); better to be feared than loved, for most men are ungrateful, deceitful, changeable, greedy, timid, selfish, fonder of their property than of their fathers, of their honour than their wives; know how to use brute force as well as human law; appear to cultivate the virtues, even do so, but always be able to act in the opposite way.11 How are we to read all this without flinching? Only by realising how scornful Machiavelli was of the prevailing romantic models of the self. He felt himself to be rubbing his readers’ noses in reality. He says his business is with la verità effettuale della cosa, the actual truth of things, not with la immaginazione: with how men do live, not with how they ought to. If we look at flourishing principalities – not murderous tyrannies – this is what their princes do, and their actions and lives, not a list of virtues, should therefore guide us if we want a flourishing principality too: nor are republicans entitled to be any nicer. Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, Achilles, Alexander: leaders aspiring to greatness should study these, and from the outside, as outstandingly creative of political bene essere or well-being, not from the inside, as “good” or “bad”. Machiavelli recognises cruelty, mercy, treachery, loyalty, courage, cowardice, honesty and deceit; he assigns power but no glory, and probable destruction, to the wicked prince who dishonourably, mercilessly and without respect for life’s limits massacres his fellow-citizens. The ruler whose subjects and fellows hate or despise him is unlikely to survive or to be honoured by posterity. But no one, Machiavelli believes, can ever possess or display all “the virtues” and none of “the vices”. Political and moral life is a matter of constantly evaluating them all as ingredients of that general well-being in the realisation and maintenance of which lies the only sure way to popular and indeed universal esteem: mantenere lo stato. Generosity, for example, is not the same as ostentation, and miserliness looks like a virtue in a ruler who must spend others’ money. Savonarola might blame Italy’s plight on the sin of fornication; Machiavelli thinks the more culpable sin is that of employing mercenaries. What does it mean to praise Hannibal’s success as a leader and condemn him for the cruelty which enabled it? Machiavelli resists the model of the virtues and virtuousness as inwardly convergent on unity by offering an account of variegated excellence in a passional world. He rarely refers to God, of course, to that implied reference point for all the rival accounts of the virtues not as arguable constituents of life but as fixed points. When he does so it is without impiety, and yet only as to a limit on what he knows or can speak

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of: not as to a justifying source. In the end aretê or virtú is for him our disposition to live our lives in so far as they are free, namely within the limits imposed by luck, circumstance or necessity, in such a way as to promote our own bene essere. What lies beyond those limits is God, but our attitude to Him, which is our religion, is just as necessary to life as our politics.

Humanism There was little chance that so heretically realist an attitude to the passional self would be given any sort of hearing, let alone a fair one, in the 1520s. For romanticism had just embarked upon one of the fiercest of all its arguments with itself. The roots of the argument lay in Augustine’s Platonic and Pauline doctrine of the will, expounded in Confessions and De Libero Arbitrio. He had re-invented voluntas as intellectualised desire, trying to make sense of the way he both yearned for and hung back from the Being concept. Aquinas was to say that passional beings, extended selves, pursue various goals, including God, the highest goal. “Will” is only a name for this pursuing activity of the self. Augustine, however, thought of a self as a point, a central “soul”. This soul could turn in only two directions: towards God or the world. “The will” is invoked as the turning agent of the soul – not just the soul turning, but that which turns it. The will thus becomes a new entity, an object of desire; we want a good will.12 Now it appears that this reified will has liberum arbitrium, a free choice or decision-making power, as between its two directions. It certainly makes subsidiary choices within each sphere. But finally how could any one entity freely choose the bad? There must be two wills in the soul: that of original sin, inherited from Adam; and that of God. Only the latter can “save” the soul, and our only real “choice” is to submit to it, as Augustine eventually did. This can hardly be called free choice, however, as the British monk Pelagius pointed out at the time in his own De Libero Arbitrio. May we not save ourselves by freely willing God? Must salvation depend entirely on His grace? Are we not born good, even if we are corrupted later by Adam’s bad example?13 Augustine spent much of his later career rebutting Pelagius. He won; the Catholic Church still regards Pelagianism as one of the most insidious of heresies. But Pico’s Gnostic magus is also rather Pelagian, as the thought of Ockham and Abelard had been. Humanism’s recovery of the classical past disturbed pagan ghosts, too, even as its biblical scholarship revived Christianity. The Stoic and Socratic moralities of Cicero and Virgil had assumed the world-spirit cosmologies of Heraclitus and Pythagoras, and humanism absorbed this generalised deism along with the particular theology of Jerome and Augustine – himself no mean classicist. The humanist mission was to leap back over medieval scholastics and Dark Age barbarians alike to Greek and Roman civilisation, to Plato and the Church Fathers as wise men of letters, rather than as witnesses to Being.

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The pre-eminent humanist scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, began his career in the 1510s as a great promulgator and advocate of secular classical literature and literary style.14 He secured his contemporary reputation with a mock encomium moriae in the manner of the Hellenistic satirist Lucian, and with a hugely popular volume of colloquia, ironical conversations on religious and moral topics between realistic characters (often thinly disguised portraits of real people) from all walks of contemporary life. The Praise of Folly and the Colloquies were fundamentally serious recommendations of the Socratic-Christian life of wisdom, but they looked to most readers like ironical lampoons of the practices of priests, theologians and everyone else in a hypocritical Christian world (Rabelais much admired them). The Education of a Christian Prince and Handbook of the Christian Soldier, pacific rule-books for the virtuous, were as Ciceronian as they were Christian, looking back, one might say, to Castiglione’s Prince and yet also forward to Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, that fiercely inward handbook of the CounterReformation.15 Erasmus’ magnum opus, a new edition of Jerome’s Vulgate Latin Bible with Greek translation and commentary, revitalised and popularised Christian thought by refocussing it on the life and “philosophy” of a Christ seen as a historical figure comparable with Socrates but of even greater spiritual wisdom, and as accessible to ordinary people without the intermediation of a priestly caste. Neither Rousseau’s natural theology nor the German “higher criticism” of the nineteenth century was so original or daring as this, their shared progenitor. In the thought of Erasmus, classical and Biblical scholar, Christian Platonist and devout satirist of Christian manners, Renaissance pointed towards Reformation. His humanism set out to clear away the scholastic grime, theological and institutional, obscuring the salutary texts and lives of antiquity; but the texts and lives it chiefly restored were the archetypal romantic ones. The authority of Plato, Virgil and Cicero, of their models of conceptual lives in an abstract deist cosmos, was reinforced, while that of Paul and Augustine was not challenged. The life of Jesus, while certainly emerging from humanism looking more like Mark’s version than it had before and less like Paul’s, more the subject of Jeromean scholarship and less that of Augustinian zeal, showing persistent traces of the scholastic ethics no monkish training could yet discard, was at the same time diminished, seen not as the exemplary limiting case in human history but as an unusual life in a materialist world presided over by an impersonal Being. Such a life, so liberal and compromising a view of the world, is of little value as the basis of a religion.

Luther Those who saw this most clearly were the true Augustinians of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation alike: Martin Luther before them all.16 His assault

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on the Church began in 1517 with the declaration that repentance must be an inner not an outer reality. No more indulgences or confessions, no more Purgatory or priests; the Church is within, salvation is by faith only. At first Erasmus sympathised. Luther’s criticisms of the Church, his calls for a return to the scriptures and to the life of Christ, were after all fundamentally Erasmian. But in the end Luther’s model of the self was too revolutionary. His “inner” was no place for the humanist virtues, for magic self-making. Reluctantly Erasmus published in 1524 a “diatribe” or disputation directed at Luther. This was his own De Libero Arbitrio, its title claiming descent from Augustine but its tone emollient, synoptic and Pelagian. He found a patristic consensus for a view of free choice as that power of the human will (vim humanae voluntatis), that attribute of this particular currant in the cake, which enables us to pursue or ignore whatever leads to salvation. Luther replied the next year with De Servo Arbitrio, a Reformation manifesto accepting that “the will” is fundamental to our self-understanding, but showing as little patience for the view of it held by Erasmus, Pelagius and Jerome as for the lack of any view of it at all in popes, cardinals and bishops. Augustine is repeatedly invoked, and the doctrinal part of the work uncompromisingly recapitulates Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Jesus was not some sort of moral philosopher, Luther insists, nor are the scriptures arcane works of theological obfuscation. They tell a story of dazzling clarity, unknown to the great pagans, which is the central mystery of Christianity: that once and once only God became human. The only proper attitude to this eloquent mystery is that of faith in its reality, and the proper question to ask about this faith is how it is attained. Augustine, Paul and Bernard knew how: by God’s grace, which we may only pray for, never deserve, earn or command. To be saved, or chosen, is not to feel pride in being part of a “justified” elect, but to be humbled by the knowledge that we have no free choice or will in the only truly significant event of our lives. Liberum arbitrium in its Erasmian sense is a grandiose non-entity. Free choice of the will, or rather free will itself (for to speak of the free choice of the will is to multiply punctual entities, and Luther wants only one) is just our aptness or preparedness to be seized by the Spirit and filled with grace, as the only creatures made for eternal life or death: vim qua homo aptus est rapi spiritu et imbui gratia Dei, ut qui sit creatus ad vitam vel mortem aeternam. The will is subject not free, servum potius quam arbitrium, as Augustine says. Once it is set on its path it can run on its own, but God still knows where it will go, and only He and Satan can change the path; we are beasts pulled between two masters (chariots pulled by two horses, said Plato), not wills choosing between two options. We cannot change our wills by force of desire or intellect; we can only prepare and humble ourselves, learn what sin is from the law, and wait for grace. “There is none righteous, no, not one”, as Paul says. Reason is folly; great minds are less likely to be saved than those of limited understanding. Aretê is irrelevant to this model of

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the self: so are all the scholastic and humanist virtues. The only answer to a Thrasymachus who points out that thieves prosper in this life is that in the next they will not. Luther’s insistence on the life of Christ as the meaning of Christianity revived the religion as Erasmus’s scholarly excavations alone could not. But Luther’s insistence on the inner point of faith as the sole meaning of every other life tended to disconnect the religion from other kinds of thought about the meaning of lives. Reformation and Counter-Reformation differed over whether true religious authority lay with Bible or Pope, but mostly they shared Luther’s view of faith and attitude to lives.17 Scholarly humanism and its younger cousin empirical science, meanwhile, drew on various pre-scholastic, pre-Aristotelian ethics and cosmologies, not on Plato alone, for their deist models of Being and the universe; and they took from Paul’s model of the self only its punctuality. They replaced the single point of faith in each life with many arbitrary points of will, of choice, of human self-making; and they replaced the Ptolemaic and Dantean cosmos in which God had been both centre and limit with the potentially centreless and limitless Copernican cosmos.18 Punctual souls and centreless selves: the two romantic discourses of the sixteenth century, one religious and one secular, the latter rapidly growing in authority relative to the former, were thus reflexes of each other, as well as harbingers and ancestors of other discourses to come. One saw a world whose meaning lay in its brilliant, central, originating point; the other saw the same world without that point, but with many weak, scattered points, each failing to illuminate either itself or its world. The former found ordinary life alone empty and abhorrent, but was able to see it as redeemed by faith; the latter set out on the empirical search for new inner certitudes or outer limits to redeem ordinary life. Some of the former group, Hooker and Donne for example, were able to bridge Luther’s gap, to find that faith vastly enriched moral and political meanings already to be found in lives.19 (The Anglican case peculiarly combines the return to the life of Christ not with that extreme inwardness, that limitless moral and political drive to power, which characterises the Calvinist and Loyolan exaggerations of Luther, but with an almost Aquinean disposition to preserve and live in the world as it is.) For the latter group, even for a Rabelais, Montaigne or Cervantes, the enterprise was to reimagine lives and communities as completed and fulfilled in themselves, not just as empty shells around missing kernels that had to be reconstructed artificially. This was a harder task.

Shakespeare: Coriolanus Shakespeare did not absorb and then transform humanism as Dante did courtly love. If anyone did that in English it was Milton. Ben Jonson incomparably embodied humanism; one measure of Shakespeare’s mind is that he

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alone transcended it, made realism out of it. His was the stock, unrefined material of his trade in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Seneca’s tragedies, Plutarch’s lives, the Stoic-Platonic, Ciceronian ethos of the first century AD adapted for Renaissance England, alongside popular versions from Holinshed, Daniel or Italian romance of episodes from British or Italian history.20 Remarkably, the influence on this material of Virgilian medievalism and its Platonic-Christian counterparts is negligible: no Gospel story, no Paul or Augustine, no reified Being or Love. The main stream of romantic thought does not flow through this poetry; it is fed only by the subsidiary Stoic current – and by Ovid, whose tales, characters and attitudes often bubble up within it. But pace much recent commentary, speculation about sources, influences and analogues, about contemporary culture and politics, can do less for this poetry than it can for Milton’s, Jonson’s or indeed Dante’s. This thought is unlike theirs precisely in its lack of determinative investment in the particular facts, events and concepts it transforms into its lives. For the purposes of this book we can make sense enough of Shakespeare’s thought about lives by looking at just one play: that being the smallest field in which a dramatic poet’s way of thinking can be seen functioning. The mature comedies and late romances think about love as passional thought in lives, not as God’s sign in souls. The history plays think about the Wars of the Roses and the legitimacy of princes in Machiavellian not Erasmian vein. The tragedies peel back or flay off the layers of their lives in devastating recognition that they have no single “inner”. Hamlet is one of the deepest criticisms of the romantic will (Pico’s magic self-making) since Antigone, which is why the Romantics thought of it as the Shakespearean drama. King Lear, the post-Romantic successor to that title, sees love of kin as the redeeming limit of a life. Another good choice for our purposes might be Antony and Cleopatra: Dido and Aeneas for grown-ups. Octavius, Virgil’s patron and the embodiment of Roman destiny, appears as the Virgilian Aeneas, favoured by fortune, calculatingly pious about “universal peace”, prudishly scornful of all “voluptuousness”. Antony is Aeneas as he might have been without the punctual soul, a soldier’s soldier and a woman’s man: “let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space”. Cleopatra is the woman, a realist Dido, more than Ovidian, of an “infinite variety” to match his “infinite virtue”. When they go to the Elysian fields, he says, “Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, / And all the haunt be ours”, while back on earth, she says, there will be “nothing left remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon”. Augustan Rome rolls over them, of course, as it did over Dido, but unlike her they emerge “smiling from / The world’s great snare uncaught”.21 The final triumph is theirs; they make us feel indeed that the great story of imperial Rome is unremarkable. But at much the same time, probably in 1608 or 1609, Shakespeare wrote another Roman play, based even more closely than its companion on

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Thomas North’s version of one of Plutarch’s lives.22 Coriolanus is the very antithesis of Antony and Cleopatra. Its setting is early republic, not early empire; it is localised and claustrophobic, not spacious and panoramic. It is full of anger and blood rather than love and negotiation: hard and bare instead of sumptuous and textured. Its language is crabbed, austere, almost dysfunctional, rather than richly metaphorical and splendidly omnipotent; its very personality is tortured and unappealing, rather than magnetic and seductive. Thus handicapped the play feels at times almost un-Shakespearean, and yet it was written by a poet at the zenith of his career. If Antony and Cleopatra was his Aeneid, this is his Achillead, and it may show us his realism more starkly than its better-favoured companion. Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s most Homeric tragedy. It is also his most Thucydidean history, and possibly his greatest political drama. Caius Marcius Coriolanus was a legendary Roman general of the early fifth century BC, a time of famines at home and wars abroad. Rome’s last king, Tarquin, had been expelled, and the long struggle for dominance between patricians and plebeians which made Rome great, according to Machiavelli, was about to begin.23 (The political situation in Athens at that time was not dissimilar.) Thus the Coriolanus legend was associated both with extreme republican virtus overcoming neighbouring tribes and tyrant kings, and with the ancient antagonism between the poor many and the noble or wise few (“noble” and “knowledge” both derive from gnôsis). Six hundred years and several versions of the story later Plutarch adapted it for his book of moralised lives; fourteen hundred years later still it reached North and then Shakespeare. Plutarch had bequeathed to the Renaissance a cautionary tale for the education of princes. This Coriolanus is full of natural virtues but devoid of learned ones: a fatherless, untaught warrior. He is the embodiment of virtus as “valliantnes”: fearless and fearsome, big, strong, swift and hardy, high-minded and incorruptible, naturally eloquent. He is also “chollericke and impatient”; “churlishe, uncivill . . . unfit for any man’s conversation”; insolent and self-willed; without gravity, affability, learning, reason. On the one hand he wishes for no reward for his “noble service”, not even honour, which he sees merely as a goad to further valiant deeds. He has no political ambitions. The only reward he desires is his mother’s joy in his military achievements. On the other hand he is exceptionally sensitive to slight or insult: inflammable, vengeful, arrogant, scornful towards anyone less noble and valiant than he.24 One might call him “Cholerianus”; he has something of the vernacular romantic concept hero, the Roland or Lancelot, because he is a Roman concept hero, a prototype like Aeneas: or rather, like a romantic Achilles. He is characterised not by piety and erotic love but by valour, choler and filial love, and he too is set apart from ordinary men. This means the plebeians. In Plutarch they are oppressed mainly by usurers; what they want most is relief from crippling debts, as recognition of their

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own war service. They are not unwarlike themselves; they admire their general’s bravery and success, and want their share of the plunder. But they fear and distrust his martial aspect when it is turned upon them, as when he opposes first debt relief and then distribution of free corn as illegal and politically subversive. They are easily inflamed against him by their scheming representatives, the tribunes: “flatterers”, “pratlers”, fomenters of “sedition”. Coriolanus is an obvious candidate for consul, the chief soldier-magistrate of Rome; two were chosen each year by the plebeians, but only from candidates proposed by the patrician Senate. In this case the people feel that the candidate’s deeds deserve the office, but when they see him in his pomp among his peers they refuse to vote for him. His disposition combined with the tribunes’ manipulativeness – they falsely accuse him of wishing to be a tyrant – almost lead to civil war. Coriolanus, goaded by insult rather than ambition, is only prevented from leading a Volscian army into the city to destroy the plebeians by his mother’s pleas. “I see my self vanquished by you alone”, he tells her. Rome is saved, but he is murdered by the disgruntled Volscians.25 Shakespeare hardly changes this story. He drops the usury, but plays up the free corn. He drops the reflection about fathers and the education of princely virtues, but plays up the mother’s character. He omits many details about Roman politics, religion, names and superstition, but he uses many others not mentioned above. He retains the leading personalities, and the very terms and inflexions of several major passages. None of his plays stays closer to a source. How conveniently it must have come to hand, after all: James I was asserting his divine right to rule; Puritan lawyers (“tribunes”, he called them) were speaking of but not always with the voice of the people, and scheming to extend Parliament’s powers at his expense; many ordinary people had resisted the wars abroad advocated by the great nobles; food and enclosure riots were taking place in the Midlands.26 The greediest historical interest in Shakespeare’s sources, times and opinions, the most voracious ideologised obsession with political concepts, can glut itself on this ancient tale of the one, few and many, retold with the Civil War just around the corner. Two centuries later Hazlitt thought the play obviated recent debate about the French Revolution, while Coleridge found a “wonderful philosophic impartiality in Shakespeare’s politics”.27 Modern commentary is no less romantic than its great forebears in reading poetry as infiltrated by or emanating from various non-poetic sources and centres: political events, historical movements, biographical incidents, subconscious drives, conceptual beliefs, the great entity Language itself. The habit is Erasmian and Lutheran; it has its roots in their models of the punctual soul and the centreless self. If poetry cannot have the central soul of philosophical and theological Being its centre must be dispersed amongst many local influences, contexts, networks or webs.

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What if poetry need not have a centre, however, but rather is one? What if poetry when most itself is both a representation and an analogue of lives as coherent, unique, extended, passional, self-recognitive? Perhaps in reading Coriolanus we would do better to attend not so much to its characters or its politics as to its very way of conceiving character and politics. Is Shakespeare’s hero a romantic Achilles or a way of rethinking Achillean life – all poetic lives? Is his Rome one site of the eternal conflict between the masses and the rulers, or a way of rethinking political life? At about 3350 lines (800 in prose, the rest in blank verse) the play is a quarter of the length of the Iliad, twice that of Antigone. It presents itself to us in three phases or movements. In Act 1 (11 scenes, 758 lines) a patrician soldier intimidates mutinous plebeians at home and routs the enemy in battle abroad. In Acts 2 and 3 and the first two scenes of Act 4 (8 scenes, 1430 lines) he is drawn against his will into a long political struggle with the plebeians and their tribunes: defeated and banished. In the rest of Act 4 and Act 5 he vengefully leads the foreign enemy against his own city, but in the end is defeated again, this time by his mother, and killed by the foreigners (11 scenes, 1156 lines). The scenes vary in length from 7 lines to 339, but some shorter ones could be run into their neighbours, while some longer ones could be sub-divided. Act and scene divisions in Shakespeare’s plays, like many passages in the texts themselves, can be speculative and controversial; but these underlying movements are what every audience will sense.28 They take place in three interleaved moral (and physical) realms: the domestic, the political and the foreign. We are introduced to these realms, indeed to all the play’s main lines of thought, in its three opening scenes: the first half of Act 1 (428 lines).29 “Let us kill him” shout the Roman citizens as the play begins; “kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him” shout the Volscians as it ends. This death at the hands of a crowd is what the whole play defers, suspending its sentence on a hero who must live his untimely life not just as an alien warrior, like Achilles, but as a man of the polis, like Hector. Excellence in one realm may be excess in another, as Machiavelli saw, and as one man realises here, in and with his own body. A polis is not a mob, of course, and these citizens are more legalistic and disputatious than murderous and starving: “The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance”. They dismiss Coriolanus’ “services . . . for his country” as done only “to please his mother and to be partly proud”, but in their shrewd, shallow, Plutarchian-humanist ascriptions to him of these inner motives, even as what “he cannot help in his nature”, they show their unawareness of the dilemma their lives have made of his life. No such dilemma afflicts Menenius, an elderly patrician and fatherly counsellor to Coriolanus, who tries to calm things down by telling them a “pretty tale” or two: of the “Roman state, whose course will on / The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs” far stronger than their “impediment”; and of the body politic, in

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which the “senators of Rome” are the “good belly”, the “storehouse” and distributor of “public benefit”, while they are “the mutinous members”. His models seem aptly Platonic, but this senator is no sinister, cerebral guardian. He is a practical politician among ordinary lives, using well-worn but serviceable rhetorical tools to shore up and justify his own Periclean conception of politics as that steering of the state which can only be practised by a few at a time. Coriolanus himself disdains politics and citizens alike. “Dissentious rogues”, he shouts when he arrives, “scabs”, “curs”, “fragments”, “rabble”. Their “complainings” are tired “proverbs”; without the Senate they’d “feed on one another”, or else he’d “make a quarry / With thousands of these quartered slaves”. “Who deserves greatness deserves your hate . . . With every minute you do change a mind”. He sees not a state but a many-headed beast devoid of any excellence of mind or body, and he will easily cow or destroy it, hand to hand, face to face: as he now finds he must a worthier and a more human enemy, the Volscian leader Tullus Aufidius. Coriolanus seems at this point less inward than Hector, even less reflective than Roland. There is an enemy: hit him. The Senate is right, the plebs are wrong. “Was ever man so proud as is this Martius?” asks Sicinius, one of the two tribunes just appointed to placate the citizens, much to Coriolanus’ disgust. Sicinius is representatively echoing the citizens’ own judgement. He and his fellowtribune, Brutus, have a private conversation in which they attribute all the ambitious desires diagnosed by Thucydides for concepts in themselves, which are their desires (“we were chosen tribunes”), to Coriolanus. But they do not understand what he is any better than their constituents or their rival Menenius do. This is not pride; it is pure self-enaction, with no trace of self-regard. Coriolanus has nothing to do with Dante’s Great Man, Farinata. When Aufidius appears briefly in Scene 2, then we see a certain pride, ambition, calculation, as he plans his campaign, fences with his senators, refers to Coriolanus as implacably as but much less admiringly than Coriolanus did to him moments before. The foreign realm is a lesser Rome without a hero, but the hero is already an enigma to Rome herself. We might expect some interior light to be shed on him in the domestic realm of Scene 3. Here are his mother Volumnia and wife Virgilia, sewing, and speaking chiefly in prose: often the medium of ordinary domestic and sub-political speech (mobs, spies, servants) in Shakespeare. When Volumnia pictures her son in battle, as when later she herself appears in public, she rises into verse as to the manner born. Just now, however, she has no patience with Virgilia’s anxiety for her husband at the wars. If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love . . . considering how honour would become such a person – that it was no better than, picture-like, to hang by th’ wall if

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renown made it not stir . . . [had he died] his good report should have been my son. “If only my son were my husband”, she almost says, but although she never mentions the dead father again, her desire for the son is clearly not sexual. Any husband of hers would matter more to her in his valour, honour and fame than in his love or his person. She is no Andromache, then: but no Thetis, either. Her son’s aristeia is more to her than his life: is his life. Could such a mother’s son ever recognise his own life as anything more than a walking picture of honour, a mere absence in which to win it? Well, maybe he could. His own wife is a woman of great presence but few words. She asks to retire when a visitor arrives; “you shall not”, commands Volumnia. But when both of the older women together repeatedly press her to go out visiting, her own unshakeable “I will not”, “I must not”, defeats them. He is in danger, so she will stay at home to pray: “Heavens bless my lord from fell Aufidius”. Volumnia dismisses her fears; Coriolanus will “tread upon his neck”. But in the end Aufidius does tread on Coriolanus. Their son, no Astyanax, has been tearing a butterfly. The other women enjoy the story as Roman matrons should: “his father’s moods”, “a noble child”. “A crack”, says Virgilia drily: what a rogue. Jane Austen has no finer epitome of ironic self-possession under siege. Coriolanus’ unforgettable greeting to Virgilia on his return in Act 2, “My gracious silence, hail”, strengthens our sense of a relationship, of a vital aspect of Coriolanus himself, established as it were tacitly, outside the play. In these three scenes the three moral realms are thought in terms of character: purely domestic in Virgilia, domestic becoming political in Volumnia, foreign seen as political in Aufidius, purely political in Menenius and the tribunes. Virgilia’s passion for her husband, and later his for her, are represented as a limit of language and life, not as an inner conceptual point. Volumnia’s passion for her son, but not his for her, is thought in entirely outward and public terms (fame, honour). Both of them exist for her only as vital constituents of the Roman polis. Menenius can also think of himself and others in this way, but in him the thinking is both limited by his model of the self and enriched by his fuller awareness of other lives. Aufidius and the tribunes are straightforwardly appetitive, although Aufidius does at least feel appetite on behalf of his polis as well as himself; the foreign is the political entity seen whole, from a distance. Characters are not lives, but they are ways of thinking about lives as extended and passional rather than as punctual and conceptual. What they tell us here is that in lives ethics and politics appear alike as passional interactivity with other lives, so that the self, private or public, appears to be chiefly realised in contingent human relationships, not in some self-explanatory conceptual point or points. This may have seemed obvious to Homer, but Shakespeare had to struggle with an ancient contrary model. Nowhere in his work is this struggle more

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palpable and morally consequential than in the central character of this play, a character that has no centre, but rather is a centre. In the remaining eight scenes of Act 1 (330 lines) Coriolanus is at war, and in his element for the only time in the play. With the generals he is among equals. They regard “valour as the chiefest virtue” and him as valour itself, a “thing of blood . . . reeking o’er the lives of men”, a red “planet” like a “carbuncle” (a ruby).30 He appears “as he were flayed”, almost sweating blood, claiming that it does him good. As for the troops, he curses them for cowards and looters, just as he did the citizens: for of course they are the same men. In return they abandon him without compunction when the odds look impossible (“To th’ pot, I warrant him”). When he, nevertheless, resurfaces he invokes fame, courage and country, and they all cheer, lifting him shoulder-high; but his words are sparse and stiff compared, say, to those of Henry V at Agincourt. What they follow, or shoulder, is a battering ram not a leader. “Make you a sword of me?”, he shouts. It is his one moment of true glory. Beaten for the fifth time, Aufidius abandons honour and valour and swears to “potch at him some way” in the future. Now come the accolades, and he is at once ill at ease. Cominius, the commander-inchief, feels that Rome must thank the gods properly for such a soldier. Agamemnon-like, he offers Coriolanus a tenth of all the horses and treasure captured, not as a reward but as a “sign of what you are”, a correlative of his value. But this Achilles insists that all praise, even his mother’s, is a distressing enervation of language, and that all reward is “common” payment or hire. He will take no more than an ordinary soldier (more cheers: their shares increase). But he does accept Cominius’ own horse, as from an equal, and he does gruffly accept the name of the defeated city, Corioles. He also asks that a poor man of the city, who was once his host, be set free – but cannot remember his name. Plutarch wrote a conceptual and humanist description of a character; Shakespeare’s strange, utterly credible figure is a character. Plutarch wrote a life story; Shakespeare made it into a life. This difference might appear very small but is very great. The play offers us no key to the character, specifically denying what both Plutarch and the citizens asserted: the importance of the mother’s praise. Coriolanus does not accept his honourcorrelative, either, because he does not know what “honour” is. He does what he does and that’s all there is. Shakespeare has out-Homered Homer in order to re-expose the flayed self, dramatic character itself. This is a life as seen, not as inner; all we know about this character is what he says and does, which is in fact all we can know about someone else, and all we can be to anyone else. This already makes Coriolanus unlike Roland or Lancelot, determined as they are by known inner concepts. But he will not be a Hector or Achilles until his life is understood in its limits, its full extent. So far the character is real, which is saying a great deal; but it does not yet enlarge our understanding of reality in lives. To do so it has to be tested or proved out of

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its normal constituting element. This testing is the heart of the play. It takes place in the next eight scenes (2.1–4.2), set in the political realm of Menenius, Volumnia, Sicinius and Brutus. Political activity is seen by the play in terms of contending characters rather than contending views of the state or of justice. From Volumnia’s passion for her son’s renown and Menenius’ more ingenuous delight in his success one could extrapolate the view that outstandingness in the service of the city entitles the outstanding one to, and equips him for, government. From the sheer appetite of Sicinius and Brutus for “office” or “authority” in itself (their words) one could extrapolate the view that its discharge is civic excellence. But the play is interested in the views only as aspects of character, and it obviously dislikes the tribunes. Meeting Menenius alone they display the caginess, self-importance and summary Pharisaism of born politicians. They call Coriolanus proud and boastful, and add that they are not alone in thinking this. They are most anxious to know what the Senate thinks of them, but when Menenius tells them they merely reply that he is “known well enough” as a better drinker and wit than magistrate and senator. What he tells them, frustratedly, outspokenly and intemperately, is that if they could “make but an interior survey” of themselves they would see that they were the proud ones, sanctimonious in their profession of public service, incompetent in their provision of it, and above all greedy for public esteem. Having sounded this opinion they can dismiss it just because its “interior survey” of them is deficient. They make their own later, in private, showing a contempt for the plebeians the equal of Coriolanus’ own, and a fear of his ambition and popularity as directly rivalling their own. They do not understand him; but the Senate does not understand them. To them he is an antagonist, and so an equal, in the struggle for a political authority derived from a public which they too despise (despite being of it) but whose opinion only they can control. That “public” appears now as groups of citizens, many-minded and argumentative as we all are in groups, but no longer hungry, and generally agreed on two things: that Coriolanus seems always to have disliked them so strongly as to cultivate their dislike for him, which behaviour is as reprehensible as its converse, flattery, and is disturbing in the Senate’s nominee for consul; and that his entitlement to their gratitude, expressed as popular acclamation of that nomination, is now nevertheless overwhelming. In other words they, like Menenius and Volumnia, and the humanist handbooks for princes, assume that excellence entails office. But they have misgivings, and unlike the patricians they do not overlook their own essential role in the entailment. Between the excellence and the office falls the popular acclamation, the “voices”. Volumnia tells her son there’s now only “one thing wanting” to fulfil all her wishes, and with Menenius she eagerly inventories his wounds, “to show the people”. His gloriously scarred body is already the consulship she always wanted. Menenius listens impatiently,

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infuriated by the tribunes’ cavilling, to the formal eulogy in the Senate. This means, he hastens to tell Coriolanus, that “they are well pleased / To make thee consul”. Seeking the citizen’s “voices”, showing them his scars, is the mere “form” or “custom” in which the “honour”, the consulship, is clothed. Deed entails recognition entails office. Apart from the tribunes the only one who does not share this view of things, this prejudice, is Coriolanus himself. Of course this is the nub of the tragedy (and of the tribunes’ significance). He finds public praise acutely painful, as we know: “it does offend my heart . . . to hear my nothings monstered”. He owes the city “his life and services”, but he will offer these things in his own way, “not theirs”. “Better it is to die, better to starve” than to be a mercenary, to “crave the hire which first we do deserve”: least of all when the hire is the people’s “breath”. “I love them as they weigh”, he admits. He feels no malice or hate towards them, but is physically revolted at the prospect of speaking “kindly” (as kin) or showing his body to citizens called “Hob and Dick” whose very reality hardly weighs with him (“Hang ‘em”, he keeps saying); who seem to confuse flattery with nobility and form with feeling; who often run away in battle; who must be mutable because they are many. Roman office and Roman honour is for those who can do what Coriolanus cannot. He finds his own city’s political customs meretricious and delusive. And yet for all this, with gritted teeth, after many a sarcasm, he does finally make himself do the thing he hates but everyone else expects. “Indeed I would be consul”, he says, and the people, seeing his dislike and yet wanting only these words, acclaim him. Wanting to be consul is not a passion Coriolanus can recognise, however, and he has now surrendered himself, specifically to Sicinius and Brutus, but generally too. Hitherto he has just lived himself, enacted the passions which are himself. Now he has entered a realm in which as it seems to him a passion, a very self, is something that can be chosen or adopted. An Achillean life has been immersed in a Machiavellian passional world where individual aretê is only completed in political well-being. The great enemies of individual excellence, perhaps of political well-being too, are appetite and ambition. The tribunes waste no time in destroying this newcomer, easily persuading the citizens that Coriolanus’ demeanour bespeaks an “inner” of malice and hate, and that they must “revoke” their acclamation. He is thus confirmed in his view of what we might see, kindly, as representative democracy. “Must these have voices, that can yield them now / And straight disclaim their tongues?” He knows this for a tribunes’ “plot / To curb the will of the nobility”; to put themselves on a level with the consuls; to level senators with plebeians; to show that real power lies with “the greater poll”, “the yea and no / Of general ignorance”, not with “gentry, title, wisdom”, “the honoured number / Who lack not virtue”. In an insulted but vindicated fury he says the things that unsay the particular polity he serves: “when two authorities are up, / Neither supreme, how soon

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confusion / May enter ‘twixt the gap of both and take / The one by th’other”. This state works as an unstated equilibrium, not an open struggle, but he only knows open struggles in which the winner is an outstanding individual. The power here, however, is as he fears with tribunes speaking as the voice of the people. “Now we have shown our power, / Let us seem humbler” says Brutus privately later. They are not outstanding men, but he is provoking exactly the struggle they want. “The people are the city”, shout the people, rightly and also wrongly. For a moment civil war is at hand. Menenius and the Senate know this “must be patched / With cloth of any colour” and hurry Coriolanus away, explaining that he “is ill-schooled / In bolted language”. Now Menenius and Volumnia must force him all over again to play politics, to speak and show himself to the people: but this time, much worse, as repentant. It’s only words, they say, just “policy”, nothing to do with “your bosom’s truth”. He is again bemused, resistant, finally dutiful. “Would you have me / False to my nature? . . . Why force you this? . . . Well, I must do’t . . . I will not do’t . . . Look, I am going”. And all over again the tribunes make mincemeat of him, accusing him in public of aspiring to “power tyrannical”, provoking his wrath (“The fires i’ th’ lowest hell fold in the people”), orchestrating an outcry for his death, generously commuting the sentence to banishment “since he hath / Served well for Rome”. Coriolanus’ immediate reaction is to refuse to see himself as banished by a city he does not recognise. “I banish you”, he cries, “you the city”. He is a city himself, a god or a beast (“lonely dragon”), an Achillean apolis. Volumnia is voluble in her passion, having lost a son and a consulship: Virgilia almost wordless (“O heavens!” “O the gods!”) in hers, having lost a husband and her life’s limit. But Coriolanus thinks there is “a world elsewhere” where he can be himself again. In the play’s last sequence (eleven scenes, 4.3–5.6) he comes to realise why this is not so. He tells himself at first what he thinks he has learned: that human passion is mere caprice, a tap to be turned on and off. “So with me. / My birthplace hate I, and my love’s upon / This enemy town.” He calls it “spleen”, “mere spite / To be full quit of those my banishers”. But this revengeful humour is not the trickle from some garden hose; it is the tide of his life. Expecting no reward or praise, indeed spurning them, he was told that the consulship was the correlative of his deeds; that he must nevertheless ask for it; that he must then apologise for asking. Even all this, even the disrecognition of his deeds in the withdrawal of their correlative, he might have borne. But his “thankless country” recognised his “painful services” to it, which constituted his life, by banishing him, and so alienating the very services themselves, emptying his life of its meaning. It seems to him therefore that he can continue to live only in becoming, or serving, a foreign city, which means making war on Rome. So he seeks out Aufidius, who being a politician as well as a soldier is able to turn on the tap, or more accurately to discover in himself the expedient affections, embracing his hated enemy

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as his dearest friend and giving him command of the Volscian army. This Coriolanus, he thinks, “could not carry his honours even”, had no conception of how honours and offices work or how to live with them, could not “be other than one thing”, had no social or political dimension to his character. But “our virtues / Lie in th’interpretation of the time”. We are known only by what we say and do, and we know others only by what they say and do. Virtues and lives are not “inner facts” but outer relationships. Coriolanus knows life as passional acting, as outer doing, but he thinks of it as acting and doing alone. Soon the Volscians are at the gates of Rome. Complacent tribunes are dismayed, senators recriminatory, citizens in denial (“I ever said we were i’ th’ wrong when we banished him”). But the city is still whole. Cominius having failed to dissuade Coriolanus, the tribunes urge Menenius to try. He too plays the cards he has (“He called me father . . . I think he’ll hear me . . . O, my son, my son”) and loses, more irritably than brokenly. And so finally the domestic, political and foreign realms coalesce, as Coriolanus’ family arrives at his camp (5.3). He is determined still to be an autogenous being, Pico’s romantic distortion of the Achillean self: “As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin”. But like the real (and realist) Achilles he does have kin. He is moved more by their very presence, by Virgilia’s kiss, by his kneeling mother and son, than by Volumnia’s pleas that he is forcing them to an impossible choice between himself and their country, that if he conquers Rome he will be the very antithesis of honour, nobility and fame. This kind of thought has never weighed much with him, and just now it is exactly what he is denying. “Why dost not speak?”, she says in frustration. But what he is thinking of is not her arguments, her words, but herself, them all, as people. “Daughter, speak you”, she says, sensing this; “Speak thou, boy”; and then that potent old Italian gambit, “Thou hast never in thy life / Showed thy dear mother any courtesy”. A last hazard: “Come, let us go”; this is some Volscian stranger. This is enough for him; he knows he is not an alien to them. “O mother, mother! / What have you done? . . . You have won a happy victory to Rome; / But for your son, believe it, O believe it, / Most dangerously you have with him prevailed”. She, they all, have shown him that his life is present to theirs and theirs to it, that it has meaning in theirs and theirs in it, that he lives not only in agency but in collective recognition. This is what Achilles realised too: that he was a centre of life, not just a force of life. Volumnia is clever enough to have given her son, and herself, a way of thinking about all this as honourable action. He need not change sides again, but must “reconcile” Romans and Volscians, make peace not war. He knows (she still does not) that this means his own death, for he can only be a soldier; but he will, as ever, go through the motions she expects. The women return home to a triumphant welcome. Aufidius returns home to “potch at him” at last, for now Coriolanus rivals him not only militarily but

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politically, as he did the tribunes: and violence comes more naturally to Aufidius than to them. The Volscian crowd is more easily inflamed than the Roman one was; Coriolanus had killed many Volscians. Aufidius calls him traitor for withdrawing from Rome, he reacts angrily, and then himself provokes the death which has been awaiting him since the beginning: “Cut me to pieces, Volsces”. Then it is “kill, kill, kill” and “Aufidius stands on him”. A moment later Aufidius pronounces himself “struck with sorrow” and swears Coriolanus “shall have a noble memory”: political passions, these, but real enough. Coriolanus is an extreme case among Shakespeare’s characters, a self which has no centre, only limits, but which is a centre, finally recognising itself as such. He is an Achilles reinvented in the teeth of a dominant humanist and romantic conception of the self: an old-fashioned Achilles overwhelmed by a Machiavellian, modern public world. Plutarch’s story and Jacobean politics are incidentally contributory but essentially irrelevant to this achievement, for Shakespeare’s thinking about the ethical and political self is on a far broader canvas. He sees characters as what can be seen of lives by poetry, by art; and with them he sees lives individually and collectively as passional interactions between centres of self, not as conceptual points surrounded by passion. But it took a Shakespeare to re-imagine and sustain such a realism, and the great romantic current flowed on regardless in Milton, Descartes, Rousseau and their heirs.

8 Romanticism from Descartes to Rousseau

Recapitulation Homer represented passion as bodily activity and conceptual recognition experienced as part of a public, outer world. His exemplary passions of wrath and grief are hardly distinguishable, morally or experientially, from pride and shame, or indeed honour and excellence. A life is a self-recognitive conglomeration of such passions collectively limited by death and other forms of necessity. A poetic character is a model of a life, and poetry is thought about character and lives in general. Several centuries later Sophocles and Thucydides represented passion as degenerated into mere appetitive force pressing on a concept. The former still thought from within the oral poet’s practice of modelling mythical lives in speech; the latter invented a literary-historical way of modelling non-mythical events. Both were disapproving witnesses to the arrival of a new, more conflicted model of the self. Piety and honour had become its intense determinant centres, its soul, and this field of discrete warring concepts was stasis. Meanwhile Socrates and Plato were supplying an immensely powerful philosophical rationale for this model, calling its central concept “Love” or “Being” and finding its authenticating roots not within the bounds of life but beyond them. Aristotle’s re-imagination of “being” from within life’s limits and his rehabilitation of the Homeric passions gave the older or realist model a rationale of its own without reducing the influence of its rival, which from Roman times on, and particularly in the examples of Virgil and Cicero, was clearly the more prestigious of the two, despite Ovid’s enduring contrary legacy. The effect of Old and New Testament poetic thought was immeasurably to strengthen this newer or romantic model of the self. Augustine united its Platonic, Virgilian and Christian strands, renewing the tradition of love- and beingcentred thought about the self as inner soul or will so effectively that it not only survived the fall of Rome (indeed found itself peculiarly adapted to do so) but also eventually attained courtly medieval perfection in Dante, and then after a fresh injection of classical and gnostic thought sprang 131

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rejuvenated into the Renaissance of Pico and Castiglione and the Reformation of Erasmus and Luther. The older model, meanwhile, enjoyed a more secluded life in the thought of Ovid, Beowulf, Heloise, Abelard and Chaucer. Thomas Aquinas turned the tables on romanticism by adapting Aristotle’s account of being and passion to accommodate Christianity, rehabilitate the appetite and discredit the inner will. But his legacy ossified into the scholastic system, a kind of idealising conceptualism latent even in Aristotle himself. The new realism in politics and poetry of Machiavelli and Shakespeare, proposing lives shaped by their limits and by each other and recognising themselves in their passional thought, was overshadowed by a resurgent and revolutionary romanticism, proposing lives commanded from, recognising themselves in, nuclear conceptual centres.

Descartes’ eye In the century between Shakespeare’s death and Rousseau’s birth this nuclear centre became a supernova, expanding so rapidly and brilliantly from its reformation-humanist point of origin that its light filled the imaginative cosmos. Astronomy, indeed, was the detonator of this explosion, as in some sense it had been with the Pre-Socratics. Copernicus certainly laid the charges with De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1537), but he was an Erasmian-style humanist, a theologian and physician as well as a mathematician, a Pythagorean critic of the Ptolemaic scheme from within a stillscholastic world. A century later, however, ab exteriore, polemically and in the vernacular, Galileo brought down the entire edifice, Ptolemaic astronomy, Aristotelian physics, the whole scholastic cosmology, in Dialogo sopra ì due massimi sistemi del mondo tolemaico e copernicano (1632). This was anything but a theological diatribe; Galileo simply saw himself in relation to a natural world within which God or Being played no perpetual or recurrent part. We must still seek salvation in the scriptural language of the Bible, but we may observe motion in the mathematical language of the heavens; of course God created both. The inner point of faith is taken for granted – and can be forgotten. Luther had saved it, leaving the rest of the universe for Galileo. The only testimony that counts now is that of l’esperienze sensate. Galileo remarks that if Aristotle had only been able to see the mountains on the moon, the spots on the sun, his model of the universe would have been more Copernican. What is at stake here, however, is a model not merely of the universe but of the lives we enable for ourselves in thinking about it. Mathematics and instrumentation were undergoing their greatest metamorphosis since the Greeks, and doing so simultaneously; Einstein remarked that the empirical and rational impulses do not conflict in Galileo. As powerful tools do, they impelled their users to see the world in terms of their uses. They changed it from a place of interactive being, a quasi-biological continuum of sensible qualities grasped by passional lives, to a place of

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discrete sensa, a quasi-physical discontinuum of sensory, measurable quantities impinging on an observing, calculating mind, a brain behind an eye behind a telescope. The distant anticipators of the model are Thales, Democritus and Pythagoras.1 That observing eye, or “I”, stares unblinking, like a searchlight, out of nearly all the New and Enlightened philosophy of the next 150 years, that great watershed in European thought out of or away from which flow Romanticism and its heirs. The pre-eminent spokesman for this philosophy was René Descartes, who united Galilean mathematics and mechanics with Socratic conceptual certainty and Augustinian inner will so effectively that his illustrious successors often appear scarcely to change his terms of reference, even where they extend them. Descartes furthered the experimentalism of Galileo or Bacon considerably in his own work on optics, anatomy, astronomy and geology. But where they were pragmatic about the senses’ capacity to deceive, he was remorselessly sceptical. His universe is as mechanistic, as particulate, as theirs,2 but he turned the telescope on the act of observing itself. The material universe, he decided, can for its part be observed to consist of no more than extension and motion; the best way to represent it is geometry. But his burning interest is in the observer: not the fallible eye, but the “I” behind the eye. Galilean science took the crucial step from “what is it to be x?” to “how is x to be observed?”; Cartesian philosophy took the equally crucial correlative step, to “what is it to be an observing thing?”, “what kind of being asks of an x how it is to be observed rather than another question?” Inexorably, he concluded that such a being has no discernible qualities at all – except that of discerning. This is the self without qualities, the unextended thinking soul corresponding to unthinking extended matter. In the end only God, only the presumption of a Perfect Being, could restore life to such a soul.3 Ego sum, ego existo; certum est. Quandiu autem? Nempe quandiu cogito . . . sum igitur praecise tantum res cogitans. I am, I exist, that is certain: but only while I think. So I am precisely a thinking thing, a mind, a soul, an intellect, a reason (mens, animus, intellectus, ratio). Here is the unmistakeable Cartesian voice: meditative, introspective, clear, distinct, utterly concentrated on its definitional task of establishing the irreducible minimum, the necessary or certain, meaning of the concept “I”. It is the voice of most philosophy: a Socratic not a Homeric voice. Certum est me a corpore meo revera esse distinctum; this “me” (ce moi, in the original vernacular, c’est-à-dire, l’âme par laquelle je suis ce que je suis) is utterly distinct from my body – though also closely conjoined (coniunctum) with it. It is a soul at once “lodged in the human body like a pilot in his ship” and completely “united” with it, but the pilot image is more vivid, clearer and more distinct, in Descartes’ writing than the mingling imagery.4 What we generally call the “sensations” of the “five senses”, he says, originate in bodily contact with objects, but strictly these sensations are “affections” of the pilot soul as it perceives movements

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in brain, nerves and fluids. The lynchpin of this materialist and mechanist model, Descartes claims, is the pineal gland, the siège principal of the soul in la machine de notre corps, the hilariously precise physical location in which occur most of the exchanges between the dimensionless soul and the body it contingently finds itself in. The soul has only two functions of its own. The first is “passive” or contemplative: the function of knowing or understanding. This includes pure abstraction and intellection, as of mathematical truth; knowledge of good and evil as what ought to be loved or hated; intellectual passions or “interior emotions”, such as joy in feeling sadness at a play; and of course the paradigmatic Cartesian knowledge of one’s own thinking. Only the last of these, the soul’s reflexive self-awareness, seems infallible or limitless. All other knowledge, even at its most certain, seems limited and fallible beside the perfect knowledge we attribute to (or call) God. But the second, “active” function of the soul, willing or volition, does seem limitless and infallible. Sola est voluntas, sive arbitrii libertas, quam tantam in me experior, ut nullius majoris ideam apprehendam; it is only will or free choice which I experience as so great within me that I can have no idea of anything greater. God’s will is infinitely potent and informed, but no purer in its sheer capacity to choose. (Human error stems only from the imbalance in us between limitless will and limited knowledge.) But those very functions of the soul which make it itself, namely its knowledge of itself in knowing and its enactment of itself in willing, are exactly what make everything else in the world, including the body in which the soul is located, unknowable and unwillable. If all the knowing and willing in the world are in the soul and of the soul, if the only true knowledge and will are in and of the inner, then the outer world can have no reality for the soul. It is an axe chopping itself, an eye watching itself. The kind of being which sets out to observe the Galilean universe has turned out to be the only observable thing in it. But such an outcome is as unthinkable as the non-existent observer was. For the will to be itself it cannot just will but must will something. Knowing must know not just itself but something else. Descartes attempts to find a way around this problem by offering definitional proofs of God as a necessary and perfect outer Being. From the fact that I am what I am (that I have the idea of God which I have, indeed that there is an “I” to have it) it follows that God is what He is – and not the other way around. From this in turn, given that the God I have an idea of is perfect and so not a deceiver, it follows that the material world is not a demonic figment of my imagination. Atque ita plane video omnis scientiae certitudinem et veritatem ab una veri Dei cognitione pendere: and so I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge hangs upon the single recognition of the true God. The reality of an abstract conceptual Being as the guarantor of himself turns out to be just as important for Descartes as for Augustine: more so, indeed, since the observed world, other people, his very body, have no reality of their own, or at best a purely

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material one. The only final reality is the inner “I”, the dimensionless observing soul, imagining an arbitrary Will, a huge shadow of itself, as the sole ordering principle in the universe.

Hobbes’s blobs The reality of other people, the body and the observed world was fundamental to the thought of Thomas Hobbes.5 British empiricism and Continental rationalism are often seen as antithetical pictures of the knowing self, synthesised by Kant; but they can also be seen as the pair of Galilean moral compasses whose single principle and use Kant discerned, describing with it the circle modern lives are bounded by. Hobbes is said to have been inspired to philosophy by Euclid’s geometry, with its deductive axiomatic method, which he called “the only Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind”: meaning the only pure science, the very type of science. He was Bacon’s amanuensis. He thought of Galileo, whom he also met, as the creator of modern physics, which he saw as the study of matter in motion, the only constituent of the universe. “Life it selfe is but Motion”; the body is just a mechanism; the senses are no more than the reactive outward movement of our organs against the inward motion of external objects. Hobbes and Descartes belonged to the same intellectual circle in Paris; their thought has the same geometrical and physicalist basis. But Descartes’ materialism was simply not radical or consistent enough for Hobbes. Why cling to an incorporeal soul, to a Being of an entirely different nature to the rest of the universe? These are redundant. Sense-impressions and their decaying “relics” – imagination, memory, experience, even dreams – suffice to inform us of the predictable material world which is also us. Our passions spring from our classified stock of sense relics. Desire or aversion is the interior beginning of motion towards or away from good or evil exterior objects, pleasure or pain. All the more complex passions are modifications of these elementary ones according to their likelihood and degree of satisfaction. The will is “the last Appetite, or Aversion, immediately adhaering to the action” that satisfies desire; power is the means of that satisfaction; felicity or eudaimonia is continual (never final) success in it. A man’s value is just the price of his power, and honour is its estimate or measure. The “generall inclination of all men” is “a perpetuall and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death”. When all follow this inclination force is a better ally than wit. Hobbes is no Thrasymachus; this human being is more than a complex amoeba. The salient disjunction now is not between extended body and thinking soul, but between the absolute, factual knowledge of the senses and the conditional, definitional, consequential knowledge of science or reason. The disjunction is still complete; no quantity of facts discloses a cause (you can never actually see one). The relation between names and

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objects, language itself, is finally arbitrary or conventional, imposed by us on objects, not natural or necessary, imposed by them on us. Still, the use of language and the recognition of logical consequence do make us human. A “person” is one who owns his words, not just his actions. “The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words”, not as the names of real beings but as the connected signs which register, recall and declare our thoughts, our decaying images of sense. Truth and falsity are the attributes of language and argument, not of fact; judgement is the “last Opinion” in the arena of reason and cause as will is the last appetite in the arena of sense and fact. Understanding is “conception caused by speech”; we must agree on definitions and argue logically. Language is much abused, however. Metaphors, poetry, moral concepts themselves are unreliable and generally absurd as guides to truth, because they are relative to passion. Names are applied inconsistently, given where there are no objects, or used as tools of power; religions and their priests, philosophers and their schools, invent names for fictional substances or objects of fear and worship. Humanity is linguistic and reasonable, then, in that language is fundamentally conceptual, arbitrary and significative, and reason is definitional, consequential and individualising. Meanwhile passion is animal, in that it is natural, necessary, selfish and homogeneous. Desire, whether for gain, safety or honour, is not checked but fuelled by this natural equality, and the life of nature, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, is one of preemptive satisfaction of desire, unrestricted use of power, decay of concepts: in short, of stasis. The right of nature is the liberty to preserve oneself by any means, and so pre-emptively to act as seems useful against anyone else. But the reason, reflecting on the collective definitional concepts attached to this life and this right (insecurity, fear, peace), can derive from them two fundamental laws of nature: to seek peace; and to lay down or transfer the right of nature, so that each man is contented with no more liberty against others than he would want them to exercise against himself. This transfer of rights is a contract, a product of reason and a safeguard of concepts; ex hypothesi it cannot work between individuated equals. Only the artificial inequality of a greater power can guarantee it and all the later subordinate contracts which constitute a just civil society and give a scientific basis to moral concepts: justice is keeping the laws, virtue is the desire to. That greater power is arbitrarily and reasonably created by a transfer of power from all men to one man, or one assembly (Hobbes slightly prefers monarchies to aristocracies and democracies). Many wills are merged or conformed “by plurality of voices, unto one Will”. The final appetites for peace and security of the majority become the ruling appetite of a single sovereign person, the commonwealth or “great Leviathan”, the machine of the body politic. Hobbes has many sound realist instincts. He will have nothing to do with inner souls and wills – or hypostasised concept-entities. The laws of God are the laws of nature, and we must keep them as citizens whether we are

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Christians or not. If we desire salvation the only necessary article of faith is that Jesus is the Son of God; Christian citizens learn this faith from the Bible and the individual ministers of a national church, rather than having it revealed directly by God or indirectly through a universal Church. They should worship God as if he were the all-powerful, all-good but otherwise inconceivable creator of the world (this is a naturalist or proto-Deist position). No anguished inner scrutiny here. Hobbes’s account of stasis looks Thucydidean enough; does he not see language as what makes us human, its breakdown as what makes us worse than animals? But Hobbes has turned the Galilean telescope on the observer as observed rather than as observing. He sees Descartes’ Eye as a gelid blob of material, one desire-cluster merging into all the others, all of them ingesting each other out of pure desire to ingest and not to be ingested. Because they are able to signify their impressions in concepts and definitions, however, and draw conclusions from these, they can perform a single human act, agreeing to surrender all their ingesting power to one of their number. Now each knows that it will live as a smaller but less desperate blob, while the whole mass is more likely to grow. In some respects Descartes’ thinking “I” does have more humanity than this single-minded amoeba. The disjunction between cause and fact, word and object, state of nature and common wealth, is as hard to explain as that between thinking soul and extended matter. The arbitrary act by which language and covenant are created looks disturbingly Augustinian, an act of will saving us from our passions: only in this case, humanistically, the state is a God we make ourselves. That the body thinks, that we think passionally, is unthinkable. Concepts are an agreed system signifying the world (another Augustinian idea), rather than constituents of life, growing with our individual and collective experience. There is no inner – but then there is no life either, beyond its own preservation of itself: no sense of lives. Before the contract we are animals, after it cogs: never Hector, never Coriolanus. Politics is not the perpetual activity of flourishing lives but an oasis of contract in a desert of appetite. There is nothing more to the world than this; seeing ourselves as material parts of a material world has resulted in seeing nothing in the world beyond ourselves. Worship is an Erasmian activity: not a passional celebration of the mystery and limits of life (the limit of life is just death) but a conventional recitation of an agreed formula assuming the single point of faith. Hobbes says of God that “we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is”: and yet what was a mystery in Aquinas is just a premise in Hobbes. The centreless, limitless self desires, chooses, labels, and in the end just is, everything – or nothing. Other seventeenth-century theorists of natural law laid the foundations for modern liberal doctrines of universal human rights and the sovereign nation. In Aquinas, their chief precursor, natural law is a lineament of human nature. It is seen teleologically as human nature experiencing its own unfolding in the fullest accordance with itself, as God has made it. In

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Grotius and Pufendorf, liberal heirs of Erasmus, natural law is something between animal appetite, a system of rules and a series of arbitrary interventions by God. The desires for self-preservation and for society are simply given principles of human nature, alongside the faculty of reason itself (the perception of principles), and the senses of obligation and of sympathy or benevolence. From these desires, faculties and senses all moral duties can be deduced. Either this would all be true even if God did not exist, and we can see good or bad by a kind of universal common sense as well as by reason (Grotius); or this is all true because God exists and His will is the foundation and source of all morality (Pufendorf). In both cases natural law is seen deontologically, which is to say in terms of fundamental human duties and rights, derived by reason or observation from supposed facts about human nature; the distant sources are Cicero and Stoicism, not Aristotle. “Ought” is conjured out of “is”, obligations out of facts.6 Not “as beings fulfilled in society we tend to do this”, but “we are beings who desire society and so we ought to do this”. This is centreless or liberal romanticism.

Leibniz and Spinoza In the work of Descartes’ two great rationalist successors the self is dissolved completely into nature or God, which are seen as identical. A kind of PreSocratic scholasticism resurfaces in the metaphysical cosmologies of the reclusive optician Baruch de Spinoza and the cosmopolitan polymath Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.7 Deprecating Descartes’ picture of a world sundered into lifeless extension and punctual thought they revived the ancient conception of substance as primary being. For Spinoza the world is monist, composed of a single Parmenidean substance; for Leibniz it is pluralist, composed of multiple Democritean or Lucretian substances. Neither of them derided natural science or experimentalism, but both believed that this substance, the underlying vital principle of the world, is a kind of thing perceptible only to reason. All physical or causative laws can be deduced from it; the fundamental question to ask about reality is not how things come about (causes) but why (reasons). Such a rationalism looks more radical than Descartes’, but despite their criticisms of him Spinoza and Leibniz shared his belief – it was also Plato’s – that in non-sensory, nonpassional thinking lies our only certainty and our truest activity: that reality, like geometry, is finally explicable only in the terms of, and so is a matter of, pure intellection. The world fully discloses itself to us as concept. Leibniz derived his model of reality purely as a matter of logic from two principles: that we judge something false if it implies a contradiction, and otherwise true; and that for everything which is the case there is a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise. Fully understanding a subject or thing in the world would involve giving a complete description or list of all its attributes or predicates (usually this is impossible). The totality of all

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subjects describable without contradiction so as to disclose their sufficient reason is the world. These subjects or “simple substances”, known as “monads” (the term is Pythagorean), are the active, autonomous, basic constituents of the world, the infinitesimal points of energy into which the endlessly complex structures-within-structures of the apparent world must be thought of as finally resolvable. Some are conscious; we recognise these as human souls. Most animals, vegetables and minerals have the simplest of perceptions and appetites, no more than the basic vis viva or living force. But each is “a perpetual living mirror of the whole universe”, responsive at greater or lesser levels of consciousness to everything else that happens. There can only be one final reason, one necessary and perfect substance, sufficient to account without contradiction for, or to produce, this myriad substantial reality; this final reason is what we call God, “the greatest geometer”. Only a few conscious monads can begin to share His conception of the universe as harmonious and necessary, His grasp of the infinite number of sufficient reasons why out of all possible or non-contradictory worlds this is the one that we have, that He made. “Freedom” for such monads can be no more than a fuller grasp of why things are as they are. Leibniz’s model is logically and scientifically compelling; chaos theory employs something very like it. But reality in the model is utterly linguistic and propositional. The sensory, passional, deeply textured lives which most of us usually act as if we are living (and so we are) have disappeared. There is a suggestive resemblance between this monadic propositional universe and Hobbes’s world of isolated contractual desire-clusters. In both cases the individuality of lives is leached out into a conceptual desert. Spinoza’s moral philosophy is far richer. His chief work, the Ethics, culminates in the most intricate analysis of passion’s place within the good life since Aquinas. But the work advances from axioms and definitions to proofs, propositions and corollaries, claiming to “consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner” as “lines, planes and solids”. Spinoza was as fascinated as Hobbes by the Euclidean model of thought, by Galilean experimentalism and measurability. Like Leibniz, however, he was dissatisfied with the metaphysic of the New Science. Could we not see thought and extension, mind and body, idea and object, as two aspects of or ways of conceiving a single substance: so that “the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body”? And what if instead of an infinite stream of striving substances with just one source, one transient logical cause, we thought of the stream as one substance with an immanent cause or reasoning aspect and many striving attributes or parts? Spinoza’s model is more Aristotelian and Thomist than Leibniz’s – but no less rationalist and determinist. An idea is “adequate”, he says, its truth can be grasped, regardless of its correspondence to the object which is its other aspect. Our knowledge is of three kinds: the lowest and most confused, which is either sensory or “symbolic” (words suggesting corresponding objects); an intermediate,

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generalising and abstracting kind (we all have notions of horse, dog, thing); and the highest or “intuitive” kind, the perception of geometrical or logical certainty. The more adequate our ideas of the second and third kinds the more clearly we see, as it is in the nature of reason to see, that “nothing in the universe is contingent”. The universal substance which is “God or Nature” must be as it is; God is not the limit of life but life itself. There can be no “free will”; will is the mind striving to be itself, the other aspect of appetite, which is the body striving to be itself. Still, Spinoza wants his metaphysic to account not merely for physics and epistemology, as Leibniz’s did, but more importantly and scholastically for ethics, for passion within the good life. He wants to rethink Hobbes as well as Descartes. To this task he devotes the last two-thirds of his book. Here his two principal theses are, first, that what we essentially are, as attributes and expressions of Being, is a striving or endeavour (conatus) to persist in being; and second, following Descartes, that an emotion or passion (affectus, “affect”) is a modification of the body constituting a “confused idea”. These theses are linked. We persist best in being, we are most ourselves or most virtuous, as our ideas become more adequate, that is, less confused. While a human body is growing more capable of adequate ideas, less dependent on things external to itself, its emotions are “active”; when less capable and more dependent, they are “passive”. Emotions are ameliorated in becoming more active, more conducive to adequate ideas. We do not overcome them by an effort of will, as the Stoics claim; instead we transform them into clearer ideas: we idealise them. Eventually we perfect and transcend them in the “intellectual love” of God, in which virtue or the power to preserve oneself in one’s true being becomes blessedness or the realisation of oneself in true Being. Spinoza’s incidental analysis of the individual passions, virtues and vices (courage, humility, hope, fear, generosity, lust, contempt, wonder, envy, shame, benevolence and so on) is more complete and systematic than Bacon’s, richer and more just than those of Descartes and Hobbes, but inevitably, given his model, it is reductive: the more powerful such an analysis is the more it must deny the full identity of its subjects. A passion, for Spinoza, must either promote or demote activity of mind and adequacy of idea. If the former it is a kind of pleasure, conducive to good, useful; if the latter a kind of pain, conducive to evil, a disutility. And each passion is an expression of our conatus, a kind of desire, a “conscious appetite”. All passion is a variation, no matter how infinite and subtle, on pleasure / pain, and on desire. Read in its entirety this is a wonderfully subtle subversion of scholastic ethics, evoking both Plato and various modern theories of the good as what we desire or what conduces to it. Passions and the body are considered patiently, seriously and without Augustinian revulsion. But the ineluctable tendency of the thought is to see the passions either as imperfect ideas or as bodily states: to dissociate concept and achos, not to integrate them.

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Locke’s liberal self John Locke was the same age as Spinoza.8 Behind them stood the New Philosophy, before them the Enlightenment. Each inherited from his great precursor a certain model, almost an image, of the conscious human life: Spinoza the reclusive, observing and conceptual “I” of Descartes, Locke the sensory, desiring and contractual agent of Hobbes. Each absorbed much of the alternative tradition too. Spinoza constructed an ethics, a theory of the passions: Locke a theory of knowledge with an inner self perceiving the appearances but not the veiled reality of things in themselves. But Locke’s influence has been immeasurably greater. In him a Hobbesian and Epicurean understanding of passions as sensory conditions rather than confused ideas, and of ideas themselves as sensory conditions rather than innate mental formations, was compounded with a Cartesian and Stoic tendency to recoil from the radical implications of this materialism back into unargued, foundational concept-verities. This compounding produced the ethical and political amalgam we know as liberalism, according to which the two fundamental modes of mind are perception, which is passive, and choice, which is active – there being no vital association between the two. This simulacrum of realism, in which passion is just sense and agency just choice, still dazzles us today, especially in America, the Lockean nation. The “human understanding” of Locke’s Essay is a light entering the dark “Presence-room” of the mind, characters appearing on white paper. To perceive is to have an idea, as an inner object of attention. Having ideas happens first and primarily as a transferring into the mind by the organs of sense of the impressions they receive from outer objects, and then secondarily as reflection by the mind upon its own operations. Sensation and reflection are the two aspects of our experience, the twin sources of all our ideas. From sensation we have the simple ideas of coldness, hardness and whiteness, from reflection those of “cold”, “hard” and “white”, and from both together the complex idea of ice. From no amount of reflection could we derive such ideas as coldness or hardness; this is how we can be sure not only that there is a world outside our minds but also that without sensation we would know nothing at all – there can be no “innate” ideas. Our most basic ideas originate in sensation; these are solidity, extension, shape and mobility, which resemble “primary” or “real” qualities in objects themselves. Even so we cannot be said to know the “reality” or “essence” of the objects concerned: only the ideas we have of them. And the vast majority of our sensory ideas, including whiteness and coldness, correspond to but do not resemble so-called “secondary” qualities which themselves do not properly exist, being no more than the effects of the minute “insensible particles” constituting all objects. The material world exists behind a veil, and ideas remain “the boundaries of our thoughts”. Still, we can see either directly (intuitively) or

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by a chain of proof (demonstratively) that two ideas are in fact one, or that they are distinct but associated in some way, or that they are necessarily connected. We know sensorily that the world exists; we know intuitively that we do; we know demonstratively that God does. And we have words, “perfectly arbitrary” sounds and signs, as the “outward marks of our internal Ideas”, their more or less general names. Universal agreement on the correlations between words and ideas is all that is required to clear up most disputes and confusions in epistemology and morals. So even if we do not directly know the world, we know all we need to about it. Locke wanted a self less sharply divided between an active, arbitrary inner and a passive, material outer than Hobbes’s or Descartes’. Spinoza and Locke both saw the dissociative problem as something to be solved, not dissolved, and so both perpetuated it: the rationalist (desiring blobs are the objects of the ideas of thinking souls) solved it more satisfactorily; the empiricist (I am a thinking soul and a desiring blob) perpetuated it more influentially. On Locke’s account sensation both puts us in touch with and disjoins us from outward reality; it is passive, pertaining to the body. But reflection boasts in thinking and willing the “two great and principal actions of the Mind”. Actions, not entities: Locke is as reluctant a reifier as Hobbes. Thinking is having ideas about ideas; it completes and enables knowledge. But willing is the very type of action. In willing we “order the consideration of any Idea” and “prefer the motion of any part of the body”. To will is to prefer, to “do or forebear”, to “chuse”. In their very denials of the freedom of the will Augustine and Luther invented and confirmed the notion of the will itself, and in asserting what they denied their opponents from Pelagius to Erasmus relied on the same notion. Locke, like Hobbes, may appear to belong to the contrary realist tradition, but he does not. For him the will may not be a thing in itself, but the willing mind still is. In Aquinas willing minds move towards real outward goals whose nature informs them; in Locke they just move. In Aquinas to choose is to grasp a means towards a goal; in Locke to choose is just to will. In Aquinas freedom is deliberation about goals and means; in Locke freedom is just choice or will. Aquinas sees human beings as thinking bodies or feeling minds which perceive objects not as purely sensory but as desirable or undesirable. Locke sees them first as bodies and minds passively perceiving sensory objects, and then as minds alone actively willing objects as desirable or undesirable. Nor is desire a realist passion, an appetitive activity informed by a concept, but an “unease”: a pain. All passions are either pains or pleasures; this one is just pain at the lack of something. The passions, like the rest of Lockean experience, are “all of the Mind”, and in that inner cave they press on or determine the active will. So to will a desirable object is not to grasp it as a goal of good action but to be impelled towards it by a simple irreducible wanting. Such a passion has no recognitive capacity, and such a will is both reactive and impenetrable.

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This will is the nuclear core of morality in Locke, and morality is “the proper Science, and Business of Mankind in general”. He refers to our “real Bliss”, “true felicity”, “main end” and “intrinsick good”: to the “unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good”. But this is only the hollow shell of eudaimonia. Locke has a single concept in terms of which he accounts for all these goods: pleasure. Pleasures differ in kind and degree, but all moral activity consists finally in the will’s resisting a lesser present pleasure for the sake of a greater absent one. Pleasure is like a “relish”; people should try to “correct their palates” and develop finer tastes. Finer tastes are for greater goods, and greater goods bring more acute pleasures to more discriminating palates. When this convergence of quality and quantity is properly shown and agreed upon morals becomes like mathematics: becomes, in fact, moral science, with clear definitions, measurements and proofs leading to certain conclusions. No moral rule can ever be proposed “whereof a Man may not justly demand a reason”. This hedonic and calculative activity of the will, this choosing of some actions and not others because of the number and intensity of pleasurable or painful consequences they seem likely to entail, is liberty or freedom. As for the willing “self”, the “conscious thinking thing” which persists through its many sensations, thoughts and choices without being modified by any of them, this is the moral agent proper, and to it Locke gives the forensic title of “person”: a momentous innovation. To be a person is to have a continuous consciousness of a set of ideas and to will or act in accordance with the most pressing of them. To be one of a simple plurality of persons is to be in the “state of nature”, where each has such a consciousness and such a will: that is, where all are equal and free. This state furthermore is governed or informed by a law called “Reason”, which is God’s will. Here Locke decisively parts company with Hobbes, whose contractual desire-clusters know nothing of divine Reason, Locke’s beacon in the relativist ocean: “opposition to Reason . . . is really Madness”. (He remains strikingly close to the languages of communism, rights, contracts and republicanism already used by revolutionary apologists: Gerrard Winstanley, for whom God’s reason is immanent and only to be realised in a nature held equally and in common by all men, so that private property is a sin; Richard Overton, for whom each individual claims by explicit social contract a “natural” right in his person and property; or James Harrington, in whose Platonic, utopian “Oceana” humanity is political only in that it is reasonable, and human reason finally regains in a republic the perfection of divinity.)9 A Lockean person is a rational being perceiving itself as God’s property, specifically as labour for mixing with and adding value to the earth. As a matter of right and duty alike – God’s permission is hardly distinguishable from His command – the law obliges all persons to preserve this property and punish those who endanger it. Some people renounce reason; like “Beasts of Prey” they have “no other Rule, but that of Force and Violence”. Where these are

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concerned an appeal to God’s will must be a declaration of war. To avoid perpetual war reasonable persons consent, expressly or tacitly, to resign their right or duty to preserve God’s property to a “publick” or community. Thus they forge the “bonds” of “Political, or Civil Society”, the greater mass or force of a majority expressed as a mechanism for resolving property disputes in a justice which is but the “colour’d” violence of agreed authority. The legislature of such a community, its “soul”, “will” or “essence”, must not have more power than its constituting persons have jointly resigned to it. Once it has, and will not surrender it, they can only appeal to Heaven and once more go to war. Locke’s liberal choosing person, an active willing self in a passive, sensory-appetitive body, is indemnified not by faith, like its Lutheran and Augustinian ancestors, but by the dead husk of that vital concept: the mere name of “God”. The punctual soul of absolutism and the centreless self of relativism metamorphose into each other. Grounding the constitutional or positive rights legislated for themselves by the persons constituting civil society are the inalienable or natural rights given to them by God. The first set of rights seems to be imbued with a sacredness, and is regarded with a veneration, which properly speaking belong to the second. Amendments become commandments, while God becomes not only the Founding Father of the nation but a constant and determinant voice in its legislature. (The primary text of liberal political philosophy was written to rebut a celebrated patriarchal defence of absolute monarchy. Like Augustine, Locke incorporates and perpetuates in his own thought a pattern or model of thought he wishes to destroy.) Conflicts of rights are disguised appeals to Heaven; between the “right to choose” and the “right to life”, those quintessential Lockean absolutes, there can only be a state of war. A figure in which lives and communities may recognise their limits and their humanity has become a disruptive participant in their diurnal quarrels, retaining through its name alone that sacred and absolute authority which allows no discovery of shared passional understandings. The liberal self is both uncompromising and insecure, invoking a founding concept that no longer fully lives in its passions and a consensual society that its passions can never fully live in. There is a chasm between Locke and Rousseau: the two great social contract theorists of the state, certainly; both heralds of political revolution: but one primarily an Enlightenment theorist of the senses, the other, three generations later, a Romantic explorer of the self. We need a bridge, however fragile. Earlier poets might help us. John Milton, with an imagination as ambitious as any in Europe, was on the cusp of Renaissance and Enlightenment already pinned like a butterfly by that empty central concept, the inscrutable, voluntaristic Lockean God. The great poem published in 1664 sets out to justify that God to us, but actually testifies to His disappearance as a living presence from our sense of life and its limits. For all his Biblical

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learning Milton was less disposed to imagine that medieval or Judaic plenitude than George Herbert had been a decade or two before; the God he confronted was that of Locke, Galileo and Erasmus. His contemporary, the French dramatist Pierre Corneille, was as untroubled as Shakespeare had been by this spiritual dilemma, but his revival of classical themes looks in retrospect more like a turning aside from Cartesian modernity than an argument with it. The nature of Milton’s achievement in Paradise Lost, and of its central dysfunction, shows us a thinker more alive to, more caught up in, the incipient moral and spiritual crisis which later emerged in and as Romanticism than Corneille, or even his successor Jean Racine, or Racine’s own contemporary, Locke. But Alexander Pope, whose poetry assimilated and transcended the Hobbes-Locke criticism of “wit” as mere ornament, avoided the baroque of Donne or Thomas Browne and the magniloquence of Milton, achieving, like Molière, the third great French dramatist of the century before, a Horatian and Ovidian realism about passion, language and modern society as alien to Hobbes and Locke as Blake and Keats were to be. Despite his Enlightenment sense of decorum and his moments of preRomantic sentiment and enthusiasm, Pope, like his fellow-Tory Swift, was deeply hostile to the humanist, progressive, scientific deism of his Whig opponents; Milton fostered it. But Rousseau’s accelerant role in the European change of consciousness was too decisive and creative to account for with reference to earlier poets. He had a more evolved model of the romantic self to work or contend with than Pope or Milton: but also a more discursive one. His thought sprang from essentially philosophical sources: from ideas. Descartes had turned the telescope inward upon the observing eye and seen an observing “I” whose only function was – to observe. The inner “I” of Locke and Hobbes was also a blank receiver of impressions, at most a reflex avoider of painful ones. But Rousseau, still looking inward, saw a feeling “I”, a self not of sense but of sentiment, at whose centre is solicitude for itself and others. Where the self of Rousseau’s Enlightenment predecessors achieves moral status through God’s will or its own, Rousseau’s is born moral. Furthermore where for Descartes to look further in is an epistemological or scientific quest, ever deeper into a timeless and featureless core of perception, for Rousseau it is a historical quest, ever deeper into an ancient core of feeling. To look in is to look back. But history here is no more constitutive than passion in Descartes; it too is something messy that has to be dug through in order to get to the core. Rousseau’s version of the model is moral and historical where Descartes’ is mathematical; but “feeling” has been made the centre of the new conceptual self, rather than the texture of the old extended self. This may appear to reinstate poetry as the only proper mode of moral thought, but in fact it makes poetry, life-thinking, in Rousseau’s hands as in Augustine’s, always and only the autobiographical and archaeological disclosure of the self by itself: and of itself as ideal.

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Vico: realism romanticised Two of the three supplementary philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment, French sensationism and British sentimentalism, fell between Locke and Rousseau. The third, German idealism, was unknown to Rousseau, although its crowning glory, the pinnacle of the German Enlightenment, Kant’s first Critique, was to become a foundation stone of nineteenthcentury Romantic idealism: not the unlikely outcome one might imagine, given the deep connections between the two movements. But while German anti-Enlightenment idealism post-dated Rousseau, himself a powerful influence on it (and accordingly it is not discussed in this book), there was one explicitly anti-Enlightenment philosopher who pre-dated and may even have been read by Rousseau: a Neapolitan who was already in the 1720s anticipating many German ideas of the 1770s and after, developing conceptions of history and philosophy, language and poetry, law and society, directly opposed to the Cartesian. Giambattista Vico was twenty-one when Locke’s Essay was published, but the great work of his own maturity, the Principi di Scienza Nuova, belongs not to the next generation but to an entirely different epoch. The epoch before Locke’s, that is, as much as the one after. Vico was a post-Renaissance humanist just as he was a pre-Romantic historicist. Pico and Lorenzo Valla feel like his contemporaries as well as his countrymen. He is a bridge not just between Locke and Rousseau, but between Erasmus and Hegel: or not a bridge, but an interlocutor. For Erasmus, to recover the Bible was to exhume it, to see it once again fresh and bright, the ancient accretions of scholastic speculation scoured away – and replaced by his own commentary. To see the text as it was in the beginning was to see it as living now, speaking directly to him as he did to it. But what Mark or Paul said to him was not what they said to Luther. Erasmus, after Pico, saw each life, each saint, as alone with his own will, each his own miracle, each an Erasmus: in se omnia cognoscit. From Luther’s point of view, however, the hundreds of lives of the text and its saints had no real connection with each other or with the present without the common, impersonal point of faith. Later German historicism in its relativist form, the view that no era or culture can be understood except in its own terms (whose utterly determinative power for their times the historicist’s work nevertheless demonstrates to his), fractured the old chronicles of history into hundreds of unconnected moments, each supposedly accessible only to the sympathetic historian after prolonged effort. Historicism in its absolute or ultradeterminist form, as in Hegel, could only reconnect these scattered moments, could only save history, as it were, by seeing in them the gradual coming into being (or Being) of the quasi-entity Reason. Vico’s uniqueness lies not just in belonging to both these great modern movements of romantic thought, humanist and historicist, but in eliciting the later from

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the earlier and, most remarkably, given these materials, in finding realism in them.10 Vico’s first and most striking thesis, ultimately derived, he says, from the etymological “convertibility” of the words verum and factum in Latin, is that we can only know as “true” that which we have “made” or “done”. A scholastic commonplace deriving from Augustine and Plato was that God alone made the world so He alone can really be said to know it: God’s will is such that, for Him, to know is to create. Hobbes had recently and tersely observed, after Bacon, that we can “demonstrate” the truths both of geometry and of civil philosophy, seen almost as a set of rules, because we have made them.11 But Vico extended the remit of these epistemological suggestions into the entire realm of human institutions and practices, standing the Cartesian and Platonic accounts of certainty and truth on their heads. We cannot know nature or our own minds as God does Who made them, but we can know what we have made or done: not only mathematics, seen as a human artifact rather than an image of some eternal Truth, but our own history, institutions, laws, languages. The phenomena of nature and our minds are things we can be certain of, admittedly, on the evidence of the senses, in the way of spectators, but we cannot know them as true, or from the inside out, or as our Creator knows us, in the way we know the things we have made or done. Knowledge of the merely certain (including the particular facts of history, language and law) is conscientia (coscienza in Italian). Knowledge of the true, that which we induce from the facts as a principle exemplified by them all, is scientia (scienza). What Descartes and Plato regarded as the contingent and uncertain facts of human history turn out to be the proper material of the only true science, the really new science: while certainty itself turns out to be an inadequate indicator of knowledge. Furthermore the inner self turns out to be less knowable than the outer. The con-scientia Augustine saw as higher knowledge with God of ourselves is now knowledge alongside, but outside, both nature and ourselves. We know what we have done, though not what we are doing: while only God knows what we are. We cannot really be said to know that, being corpus et mens unita. The thinking “I” is both mind and body. This claim that what we have made or done is what we truly know is the chief burden of Vico’s first major work, On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), written in Latin.12 The kind of thing we are said to “make” on this account, notably, is neither hand-made article nor mind-forged idea, but a society or institution: something made primarily by language, but also by conflict, exchange and other kinds of transaction: by all the things we do interactively. Humanity is essentially political and social. Vico’s second claim, the “master key” of the much longer New Science (1725), his vernacular magnum opus, is about how we have made this kind of thing: about the nature of the doing.13 The claim is that society, and especially the language which is its primary agent, are born in poetry and metaphor, but become

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more rational and conceptual as they evolve. Even more radically than its counterpart this claim is “philological” not “philosophical”. It begins with the “certain”, the use and function of words, not with what a Socrates might regard as the “true”, their definitional or conceptual core. For Vico the truth of scienza is reached as the induced outcome of thought, not presumed in axiomatic premises and a deductive method. His far-fetched etymologies (ius / Jove, lex as acorn / law, being as eating), his obscure chronologies and tendentious readings of myth, should be seen not as unconvincing quasi-proofs but as examples of a way of thinking about the world in which each thing’s origin and development, not some changeless core, is what individuates it. If not quite a teleological this is certainly a genetic and evolutionary attitude to the life of things, including of nations, gentes: the nature of a natio being its nascimento. The world’s “first wisdom” was poetic, and its first people were “sublime poets” speaking in “poetic characters”, “imaginative class concepts or universals” (generi o universali fantastici). Unlike the “intelligible” concepts and universals of later reasoners, whose minds were increasingly abstracted from sense as they approached truth, these complex images of animated natural objects, gods and heroes were the products of minds and languages dealing in certainty and submerged in sense, forming passionate “poetic sentences” about “divine or heroic characters”, the “true fables” and original mythoi which disclose the “historical meaning” of the peoples who made them. There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses, says Vico, quoting Aristotle. “Anger” began as “blood-boiling-heart”. Concepts began as metaphors, and every trope was a brief fable. Every etymology can tell us a story about its society. The first peoples were “all robust sense and vigorous . . . corporeal imagination”. They heard the thunder as they wandered in the open, and imagined it as Jove, the first divine character or imaginative universal, a fearsome and shaming check on their houseless bestiality. Religion, born of the fear, and marriage, born of the shame, became the first two universal human institutions, the outcomes and locations of the struggle (conatus) between appetite and check which is the moral life. Later “poetic characters” corresponded to social developments. Solon was the Athenian plebeians demanding their rights. Achilles was heroic valour, Ulysses heroic wisdom. “Homer” himself was the whole Greek people speaking (homeros means “linking together”, like religio). “All ancient Roman law was a serious poem”, principles induced from ancient fables, a fundamentally metaphorical way of understanding social constraint. Even now, if we make a great effort, we can grasp these metaphors, this original poetry. Another Homer is not possible, but human beings can still know what human beings once made. Vico’s sense of language and social thought as radically metaphorical and evolutionary, together with his claim that we know only what we make, suggest that in some ways Romanticism was a realist response to the

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Enlightenment and the seventeenth century. This new self seems organic, interactive, passional, self-recognitive. And yet, at least for Vico, the integrating activity of passion and metaphor could still only be a matter of observation. He saw that Descartes and Hobbes did not take this activity seriously, but he remained Platonist enough to believe that the life of thought took the form of an evolution out of passional metaphor towards rational concept. Philosophy must struggle to recapture its poetic past, a man to recall his early childhood, as if knowledge were something that happens after living. Vico’s universali fantastici also betray him. His Jove is a composite image of thunder, fear, law and shame: his Achilles, of heroic valour: both alike the creations of an entire people. This is certainly a novel account of a god as an image of a passion, but it over-conceptualises the hero, and it assimilates poetry to animism. A poetic character (Homer’s kind, not Vico’s) coming to recognise through his blood-boiling-anger the meaning of his own life is one thing; a man feeling his shame as the thunder and making a god of it is another. One of the commonest of all pseudo-realist manoeuvres, especially in the Romantic period, is to conflate the two, escaping the nuclear core by reifying some supposedly correspondent passion in Nature and dignifying this escape as self-transcendence, instead of attempting genuine self-transformation. A passion is not an outer object any more than an inner one. Finally, subsuming all singular activity in the collective is a historicist way of dealing with (and devaluing) individual experience. Realism, however, sees relationship with others as a necessary but not sufficient condition for self-recognition: and it sees history as an aggregation, not an entity. We know what we have made or done, and how we made or did it; and we know that this is all we can know. But how do we come to know it: how do we find true scienza in certain storia? This is the third of Vico’s key questions. His characteristic answer combines Bacon and Plato: we start with common sense (senso comune) and finally arrive by induction at the knowledge of an “immutable law of rational humanity” (umanità ragionevole) revealing our “true and proper nature”. Common sense, or “judgement without reflection” (“prejudice”, one might say, pace the modern prejudice against prejudice), is shared by an entire class or nation, and is given to us through the providence and grace of God (as a foundation of thought, in other words) as a more reliable basis for certainty in action and reflection than individual free choice (libero arbitrio). Common sense makes us certain of the “substantial unity” (unità sostanziali) but not, as Grotius and Natural Law theory supposed, the immutability, of all human systems of law. So far so good; perhaps this interactive, sensory conception of political wisdom owes something to Machiavelli. But now reason induces from this certain unity an “ideal eternal history” (storia ideal eterna) “traversed in time” by all nations in their spiralling orbits, their corsi e ricorsi (Galileo’s science influencing Vico’s) through the same sequences of awareness and institution.

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Those at the rational end of a spiral, before the plunge back to barbarism, are the true knowers of humanity, narrators who can still understand making, who can see in the universal and eternal principles of “the great city of the human race” a “rational civil theology of divine providence” which can “divine” the hidden “foresight” (pro-videre) in history. Through legislation unruly passion turns into civic virtue; private ambition creates public institutions; families are born out of lust, commonwealths out of fear. Vico insists that this ameliorative evolution is God’s providence; his instinct is to limit the pride of the intellect. But Vico’s provident divinity, insubstantial, even Deist, clears the ground for Hegel’s cunning Reason, the triumph of totalising intellect. Vico’s contemporary Mandeville, who had the same idea but without the divinity, prefigured only Adam Smith’s invisible hand: a less sinister, less conceptual entity.14 Vico’s City of Man is a humanist revision of Augustine’s City of God in which humanity finally understands itself, history finally comes to full self-consciousness, in the person of the intellectual at the end of time. We, now, can understand conscientiously what Homer made, but we cannot make it any more, nor know it as present to us, living for us. We can see humanity in it, but not ourselves. If Vico’s pre-Romanticism has a realist potential, it is partly because of a kind of philosophical nostalgia, a sense of the absence, the unrecoverable poetry, of the past: of the pastness of poetry. Vico’s theory of knowing as making was intended as an answer to philosophical scepticism about the possibility of certainty in human affairs. We can be certain of, even know, what we have made, and our common sense, our prejudices and metaphors, are what we make it with. God Himself made us, gave us this common sense, initiated the mysterious alchemy of social transformation. Vico clearly did not intend this to be a doctrine of self-making. Yet his providential God, his protestations of piety, can all too easily, if unfairly, be dismissed as an Inquisitionary tax; they are not as integral to this science as they would need to be in order to bear the weight placed on them. For without that immanent God already made unimaginable by Locke this is a doctrine of self-making, a true sequel to Pico’s magnum miraculum. After this the only defence against historicism’s dissociation of age from age and life from life, against the unravelling of just that sense of common practices and understandings which makes Vico’s realism so egregious, is mounted by the historicist philosopher himself, claiming that he alone knows humanity, he alone can distinguish between “man makes himself” (where we know what others have made) and “each man makes himself” (where we do not). The philosophical sceptic has been superseded by the historical: the former continues to insist on the nuclear self as the only certain point in human nature; the latter dismisses it in both its religious and secular forms, but has nothing enduringly recognisable to replace it with. We know what we have done – but only the philosopherhistorian really knows. Poets made everything: language, institutions,

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beliefs – but only the philosopher-historian understands it all. We share a common sense of life – but only the philosopher-historian knows its meaning. Working alone, in stony ground, Vico managed to uncap not one but three of the great wellsprings of realist thought – and then turned all three streams into romantic channels. The achievement was both unique and portentous.

France: sensation and sentiment Meanwhile the twin Lockean rivers of sense and sentiment flowed copiously on, the first mainly in France and the second mainly in Britain. The philosophes of the French Enlightenment turned away from Cartesian rationalism towards Lockean empiricism, and made out of it the materialism inherent in both, leaving a moral residue more disquietingly unaccountable than in either. The moral disquiet, though not of course the materialism, had been deeply impressed upon French thought since at least 1669, when Pascal’s Pensées was published. If it is man’s glory and tragedy to be un roseau pensant, and since there is nothing more to the self, ce moi, than thought, then this reed thinks with its heart, in intuiting, perceiving, assenting, as much as with its ever fallible and misleading reason. Only the heart can transcendently receive God’s incarnate grace (mechanistic Deism being a lifeless mockery of Christianity), which is all that can save us from the wretchedness, boredom, inconstancy and anxiety, the merely diversionary activity, of original sin. Pascal’s blend of Augustine and Montaigne with Descartes, a Christian criticism of the new science and philosophy as well as a reformist one of Counter-Reformation complacency, inserted le coeur into the inner space previously occupied in the romantic model of the self by soul, will and reason. Pascal did discredit rationalism, but above all he bequeathed to otherwise unconvinced deists and materialists the sentiment of the trembling reed, as a self-authenticating trace of faith.15 Half of this legacy is obvious in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, a sceptical barrage of fact and demonstrated inconsistency leaving no school of metaphysics, no theological dogma, none of reason’s pretensions undemolished. So energetically does Bayle assert the complete dissociation of faith and reason (including morality) that we are forced to conclude either that “the supreme authority of God” really is our only true guide, which is what he explicitly asserts, or that faith is quite absurd, as his arguments also imply. Voltaire’s better known Dictionnaire Philosophique, and even Diderot’s mighty Encyclopédie, Enlightenment flagship in the battle with Counter-Reformation and ancien régime, were in both conception and tone the successors of this seminal work. But while the unsentimental Bayle did not need the heart in his dialogue of faith and reason his two poet-successors did need it. Voltaire criticised Pascal for inhuman misanthropy and Leibniz for inhuman optimism, but after all his experiences as a chirpy

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mock-Leibnizian disciple in a comically horrifying mock-Pascalian world the hero of Candide can only conclude that one must, like Adam and Eve (and Rousseau), cultiver son jardin. The criticisms and conclusion are practical enough, but the reverse side of this wittiest of all contes shows a kind of life-denial. Their final retreat from an evil world into a prelapsarian community of the good (“nonlapsarian” better conveys the deist vacuum) exposes the lack of a thinking heart in characters and creator alike. Rousseau’s contemporary attempt to remedy this lack in the new Eden of Julie both made Voltaire’s case and revealed its limitations. As for Diderot, si Nature a pétri [moulded] une âme sensible, c’est la mienne, he confessed. He came to regard sensibilité (lively imagination, delicate nerves, trembling, fainting, crying) as the death of creative genius and the enemy of precision: but he always saw it as the soul of sympathy. He was like and unlike Rousseau; it was as a cosmopolitan, not a recluse, that he dramatised the “man of feeling” long before Goethe or Mackenzie, or condemned the decadent and alienating hypocrisy of French religious, sexual and social conventions as perversions of a material but still sensible Nature which we should recognise working in ourselves. Trembling reed, sensitive gene: the old atomism of Epicurus and Democritus is revived by Diderot in a pre-Romantic attempt to restore passion to the mechanistic universe of Locke by ascribing it to corpuscular matter itself. Feeling goes all the way down. But Diderot’s sentimental intentions, derived mainly from Shaftesbury, led him back into a Hobbesian and determinist trap, where passion is demoted below appetite to mere motion, separating it even more profoundly from, rather than implicating it in, human thinking and making. There is an oblique analogy in the way the literary compass-needle of the age jumps straight from unreflective hypersentiment in Manon Lescaut to psychotic anti-sensibilité in Liaisons Dangereuses or Justine.16 The other philosophes, however, were simply philosophers, modifiers of Locke. Vauvenargues’ elevation of passion, the heart, nature and feeling over reason, and of sens over réflexion, exemplifies the tiny but crucial shift of thought, more feasible with sentir than with “feeling”, in which Romantic sentiment splits away from empiricist sens, despite their still-shared hostility to rationalist raison. He insists with Locke that all passion is founded on pleasure and pain, but he defines these states as “attachment to being” and awareness of “imperfect being” respectively. Leibniz’s sentient monads, Spinoza’s idea of life as conatus or striving-to-persist-in-being, are pressing hard on empiricist thought. By introducing affiliative emotion into primary affective states Vauvenargues sentimentalises sensation. When empiricist sense and rationalist concept have become the only imaginable constitutors of the self, or that kernel of the self called the soul, then genuine passional thought has become impossible; sentiment emerges as its spectre. The foremost philosopher of the group, Condillac, sees words, language more generally, not as discrete marks representing ideas and tending to confusion, as Locke

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had assumed, but as systems of signs connecting ideas, by means of which the soul or mind can “extend its powers”. Clarity still matters; he believes, for example, that the “realised abstractions” of rationalism are deplorable, which is sound enough, as is his embryonic view of language as constitutive. But the shift of attention to the operations of the soul or mind presages a new, idealist emphasis on the inner not so different from the old, rationalist Cartesian one. Bringing reflection itself under its sway, Condillac develops the sensationism of Locke, and Hobbes before him, as Hobbes had developed the materialism of Descartes. The soul or mind has no activity that does not originate in sense. And yet it does have activity: indeed strictly it is only the soul “which feels” (qui sente); the body is merely the intermediary. Sensation is a modification of the soul, which is thus the original location of the self (le moi); the self is the sum of all the soul’s sensations. What am I, then? Just a capacity of feeling, of either enjoying ( jouir) or suffering (souffrir). The thinking self of Descartes is becoming the feeling self of Rousseau.17 A still more fundamentalist sensationism was deployed by Helvétius, La Mettrie and Holbach in the same generation, and by Cabanis in the next. Eager, or obliged, to use liberal ethics and epistemology as political tools, the philosophes jettisoned the vestigial (or bracketed) deist divinity, empiricist self and sensible soul, those toeholds of authority, unveiling the true radical picture of human beings as bundles of sensation: incoherent, appetitive, malleable. The adversarial posture of the modern, engagé intellectual was first adopted here: politics is always and only a Manichaean struggle between force and ideas; the arena for these twin gladiators is human nature itself, seen not as dynamic or agential but as a blank page or an impressionable mass. The radical self is seen as without form by its creator and chief protagonist, trying to turn political impotence into ethical omnipotence, installing himself not just as its king but as its deity. Helvétius, for example, insists that all human ideas, behaviour, motives are reducible to feeling: tout se réduit donc à sentir (sensibilité, sensation). Feeling’s two fundamental modes are pleasure and pain. The reflex pursuit of one and avoidance of the other are called amour de soi or self-love, and through this lens we see people, actions, ideas: everything. All valuing is driven by self-interest or utility, and all passions above the basic level reduce to love of power. Benevolence is not sympathy, feeling another’s pain, but avoidance of the pain caused to oneself by the spectacle of suffering. Public or national interest is valuable because it serves private interest better than immediate self-gratification or loyalty to smaller groups (which should be dispersed). The legislator must ruthlessly force self-loving citizens, the educator train them, to understand that this pursuit of the public interest is virtue. In L’Homme machine La Mettrie asserted a view of matter as sentient particles, of life as sentient matter, owing as much to Lucretius as to Descartes or Hobbes. Man is a soulless machine, like a clock, but one which feels or “oscillates”. For Holbach,

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too, the body’s place in the determinist and programmatically godless Système de la Nature is as une machine sensible which has a conscience du moi the moment it receives its first “impression”: the moi becoming no more than the sum of all its impressions. Cabanis rejected Condillac’s sensible but immaterial soul, arguing for a collection of equally sensible but thoroughly material bodily organs instead.18 These philosophical writers are far from intemperate or cynical, and yet their radical sensationism is strikingly similar to the philosophy, or antiphilosophy, of Thrasymachus, Socrates’ most sinister and brutal opponent. Thrasymachus is so fearsome because in the dialectical drama of Plato his position is the negation of Socrates’; Plato in a sense invented his hero as an antidote to the toxic atmosphere of a world he considered essentially appetitive. Plato saw the Socratic concept-certainty (if you can understand what “virtue” means you will be virtuous) as a moral terminus. Hobbes argued that even Thrasymachus will accept that as he is one of many, all behaving as he does, an uncertain and contested satiety has to be traded against a reduced risk of ending up as someone else’s dinner. The philosophes wanted to sentimentalise and intellectualise this picture, seeing the benign outcome as flowing not from appetite itself but from feeling and concept: sentiment and liberty, nature and rights. Human nature, they believed, indeed nature itself, is inherently both appetitive and virtuous; its virtue exists as an essential attribute, a primary trembling, of the appetitive monad. The Enlightenment philosophes were offering humanity a medicine all but identical to the hemlock that the First Philosopher most feared, insisting all the while that his own antidote was preserved in it as a kind of flavouring.

Britain: sympathy and sentiment The liberal self was supplanted in France by a radical self from which Locke’s nuclear, opaque, divine-or-human will was expelled, and in which human interaction was ascribed to the Hobbesian residue in terms not of a single calculated act of appetite-renouncing but of a permanent, intrinsic moral sentience. Matter itself is moral, alive to its own pathos, and since we are all composed of the same matter sympathy is redundant; to feel my own pain is to feel everyone’s. Locke’s more liberal English and Scottish critics took a more altruist approach to the problem of how to insert the moral into the material without invoking an inscrutable will. Sympathy and benevolence, for them the touchstones of morals, were the equivalents of the Gospels’ agapê or caritas, the love that is both for God and for one’s neighbour as oneself. Pauline agapê, on the other hand, is both our love for God and His for us; the conjunction alters the passion. The English Reformation was characteristically disposed towards the first kind of love rather than the second: a kind in which a Platonic-Judaic adoration of Being is amalgamated

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horizontally, so to speak, with philia, rather than vertically with agapê. Loving not just one’s neighbour as oneself but oneself as one’s neighbour, which Aquinas saw as true self-interest, is likewise critical to the thinking of these moralists. Finally their Christian, Neoplatonist roots are exposed in their insistence, against Hobbes and Locke, that moral good is a special kind of thing which we know intuitively, inwardly. One might say, taking into account all three central articles of their ethics – sympathy, interest, intuition – that for the British sentimentalists morality was a matter of souls, whereas for the French sensationists it was the soul of matter. Prominent among the more broad-minded, “latitudinarian” scholars at an otherwise Calvinist Cambridge from before the Civil War until after the Restoration was a loose grouping later known as the Cambridge Platonists. Benjamin Whichcote, their senior representative, thought that “morals may be known by the reason”, but that reason itself is “the candle of the Lord”; the “spirit of God in us is as a living law, informing the soul”. The general position, neither Puritan nor materialist, hostile to both Calvin and Hobbes, is Cartesian in its belief in innate or a priori ideas; the soul, ours and our neighbour’s, is a non-material thing of which we have certain knowledge independent of sensation, but which itself has all sensations. The position is also Platonist, in its view of reason as the perceiving agent of necessary, supersensory but never arbitrary truth; and yet Protestant-Humanist, in its certainty that God is “in us” but that we still have free will. This is a soil in which deist seeds will readily sprout; if we can find God in us we will not need to find Him in the natural world. Closely anticipated by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the position is developed in the treatises of Ralph Cudworth, according to whom “natural, immutable, and eternal justice” exists necessarily, “moral good and evil . . . cannot possibly be arbitrary things” and a soul is “hegemonical over itself”. In a Lockean universe to abolish an arbitrary God is to abolish the only God there is, replacing that entity with a Platonic and Manichaean “moral good and evil”. Richard Cumberland takes as his epigraph one of those moments when Paul approximates, or appropriates, the spirit of the Gospels, collapsing the last eight commandments into the second, and claiming that “love is the fulfilling of the law”. Cumberland then argues that “benevolence” is a more helpful term for this morally pivotal passion than “love” because it more precisely recruits our will to our neighbour’s good. He concludes that the “greatest benevolence of each rational agent towards all forms the happiest state of each and of all”. The school may begin in Plato and the Gospels, instead of Democritus and Paul, but it too seems to end in Bentham and Kant. A “hegemonical” self half-grasps an already remote passional experience: love of God, which did not interest Cumberland as it did Whichcote or Cudworth; or love of one’s neighbour: and then half-rationalises, half-moralises it into a diffused indiscrimate wishing (no more nuclear will) for a featureless “good” towards an unrecognised “all”.19

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Cumberland was Locke’s age; Shaftesbury was Locke’s pupil as a boy, the grandson of his patron. But Shaftesbury became a moralist in the vein of Cumberland and Whichcote. Knowing Pierre Bayle in person, he was influenced by the Frenchman’s idea that faith and goodness need not be connected. Goodness might reside in love, then, not faith. But then the passions must revolve around a love that has taken faith’s place at the centre of the self, and will chiefly be seen as instruments of some good (or evil). They will be less variously and recognitively themselves. A realist speaks not of love but more precisely of friendship, or perhaps pity: passion-concepts with recognitive, specifically relational value; a quasi-realist speaks instead of benevolence or sympathy, wishing well to, feeling with: generalised, moralised concepts, denoting a disposition towards others irrespective of their quality or quantity. Being a friend, coming to recognise one’s relation to another as that relation, is a deepening of life experience, including of one’s understanding of him or her, in a sense in which feeling benevolent towards another, or others in general, is not. This difference is related to the fact that concepts like benevolence and sympathy are morally coded in a way in which friendship and pity are not. They gain currency because it seems wrong a priori (that is, as a matter of ideas, not feelings) to resist them, even in the least deserving of cases. Indeed the hardest case is just that in which we feel most obliged to register sympathy; the harder we have to try the greater the pressure the idea is exerting. But we do not wish to be the bad man’s friend. We are not friends: that is just why we feel we have to try to be sympathetic. Pity and friendship, as “social” or “public” affections, are as essential to humanity, says Shaftesbury, as the “private” or “self” affections such as “love of life”, appetite or indolence. To study the affections, particularly the first kind, rather than our “ideas”, is to know human nature, and that knowledge is “our real self and end”. These insights, as distant from Hobbes as they are close to Hume, rank almost with Vico’s as apparent precursors of realism, bridging the chasm between appetite and concept. But for Shaftesbury “affection” is precisely ad-factus, doing towards others by an already-made self; he does not see them as always already in it. His EnlightenmentSocratic deprecation of enthusiasm metamorphoses into a Longinian encomium: we must “give way to this distemper”, think of it not as ersatz inspiration, false “feeling of the Divine Presence”, but as “the sublime in human passions”, revelatory of truth. Here, as early as 1708, is the archetypal Romantic reversal; a passion fomerly regarded as uncontrolled, volcanic, aberrant, is now seen as vital, oceanic, profound. Is there not a realist instinct at work in this re-imagining of passion as deeper and truer than will or thought? May there not be as Shaftesbury says, after Pascal, a “wisdom of the heart”? Yes: and yet we must “give way”; re-imagining is not re-integrating. We are not to fight the storm any more; we are to surrender to it, trust it, even become it: but there is still the storm on one hand, and on the other

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hand an “us” whose identity is now to be found mainly in awareness of the storm’s beauty. God is now identical with “nature”, the visible beauty of His own mind or self, of which ours are copies; oceans and forests are the fabric of the former, passions and sentiments of the latter; virtue as a quality of passion and sentiment is just as visible, and in just the same way, as beauty is as a quality of ocean or forest. Shaftesbury has replaced Locke’s thin transcendent God, present to us only as the force of His will, with a thin immanent God, present to us only as the beauty of His mind: justice and virtue are outgrowths of our own “nature”, not divine edicts. But surely beauty can be just as inscrutable, as unresponsive, as will? The borders of taste are notoriously hard for deliberation to cross, and for Shaftesbury morality is “a right taste in life and manners”. Conscience, for example, is now simply a “natural sense of the odiousness of crime and injustice”: no more Augustinian “thinking with God”. Virtue is natural affection for, and action on behalf of, the “species or public”: neither Stoic fragment of Being nor Platonic Idea – certainly not habituated, participative disposition to act as part of a polity, since “the public” is not a polity, an affection is not a disposition and nature is not habit. Virtue is now a “social pleasure”, the most abstract, refined and mental, the most pleasurable, of all pleasures (“the pleasures of the mind being . . . superior to those of the body”), entailing a consciousness of the beauty of one’s actions and feelings: an affection for affection itself. Thus “virtue and interest may be found at last to agree”. Both reduce to pleasure: and since interest is necessary to the species it affords virtue more pleasure still.20 Shaftesbury used the expression “moral sense” only in passing; with Francis Hutcheson twenty years later it became the cardinal conception of their school of thought. The Lockean senses, said Hutcheson, were too “external”; we also have an “internal sense” of beauty, harmony, order, and a “moral sense”, the approval of benevolent acts or affections and disapproval of malevolent ones. But the moral sense perceives “beauty in actions and affections”, approves the “lovely action”: to it “benevolent actions appear beautiful”. Moral approval is quasi-aesthetic. Meanwhile the distinction between benevolence and virtue is also blurred. Hutcheson accepts that “abilities” (not actions) are needed to turn one’s disinterested, generalised goodwill for others into their happiness, but so insistent is he that the truly virtuous act must arise from benevolence, the “internal spring of virtue”, that benevolence all but becomes beneficence: will is tantamount to act. Even Hutcheson’s celebrated remonstration of the utility principle, “that action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers”, is actually referring to “actions proposed”, “happiness, expected to proceed from the action”: the tendency is to claim not that the virtuous act is measured by happy consequences but that the virtuous man wills them. Here is the great fault line in romantic ethics between the Kantian, deontological or inner-sense-of-duty school, and the consequentialist,

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teleological, outcome-oriented school of Bentham and his successors. In proposing utility itself as an affection Hutcheson confirms the joint primacy in the Age of Sensibility of aesthetic awareness and the will-to-good. But his uneasy utilitarian premonition is at the same time a dim memory of a less divided ethics, in which a good act is what is performed by a good will informed by a good goal. The more weight we place on pure will, the more we need its consequentialist counterweight, and the harder it is to achieve equilibrium.21 Twenty years later still Richard Price, who at the end of his life was to deliver the sermon on the rights of man which goaded Burke into his Reflections, set out to attack moral sense at the root. Moral perception, he claimed, is a matter not of sense but of “intuition”. Virtue is not “an affair of taste”; it “has a real obligatory power . . . independently of all will”. The “perception of right and wrong does excite to action”; “instinctive benevolence is no principle of virtue”. Indeed “abstract virtue is a quality of the external action or event”, inhering “in the objects themselves”. Thomas Reid, the founder of an influential “common sense”, anti-empiricist system, published his major work at the time of Price’s late sermon, confronting Hume as Price had Hutcheson. “In order to know what is right and what is wrong in human conduct, we need only listen to the dictates of our conscience”; there is “an original power or faculty in man . . . the moral sense, the moral faculty, conscience”; the “truths immediately testified by our moral faculty, are the first principles of moral reasoning”; “reason” is the “principle of action” by which we “seek the good and avoid the ill”. Price wanted to replace moral sense with moral intuition, Reid with moral reason: each argued that his inner “faculty” perceived, grasped, was conformed to, some “real” outer quality of actions and objects. Price was the forerunner of modern “ethical intuitionism”. Reid’s rationalist rebuttal of scepticism, rooted in Plato, was soon marginalised by Kant, but it still influenced later philosophers, including, like Price, some of those working in the first half of last century in the tradition of G. E. Moore. Even Hutcheson had his “emotivist” successors in that era. Since Descartes the practice of philosophical ethics, like that of its master-discipline epistemology, has usually consisted in arguing about whether some form or other of inner knowing does or does not grasp or reflect an outer moral or physical reality. The Unitarian Price and the Presbyterian Reid, devout moralists in the line of Herbert, Whichcote and Cudworth, needed a “real” moral good or natural justice, independent of divine and human will alike, to preserve the reason, the “hegemonical” soul, from the materialism, voluntarism and solipsism of Descartes and Locke. Yet this was an old, polarised, inherently sterile manoeuvre. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson were also heirs of Herbert, but in turning, even reductively, to the passions and the passionalised will as the constituents of virtue they were turning over ground which had been fallow for centuries. Two culminating thinkers in the tradition showed just how fertile its soil could be.22

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Adam Smith’s essay in this field is finer-grained than Hutcheson’s or Shaftesbury’s just because it is a “theory” of “moral sentiments”. The quality of the sentiments, indeed principally of sympathy itself, is the material of the essay and the ground of the theory. Sympathy is still a sentiment, admittedly: morality a matter of sensibility, delicacy, tenderness, taste. The reed still trembles. To “restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections . . . constitutes the perfection of human nature”. The passage from affection to action remains obscure, and still only the former is necessary to virtue; we read of “the sentiment or affection of the heart, from which any action proceeds, and upon which its whole virtue or vice depends”. But Smith is alive to more of the nuances and ramifications of sympathy than his predecessors. “Fellow-feeling”, he prefers to call it: the very expression offers a clue to the deeper tendency of his thought, which is to blend caritas with philia, to account for inner feeling in terms of outer affiliations. “As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour”. An Anglican moral correctness is transforming itself into a much older sense of human passion as affiliative, congenial, specific. The solitary cannot reflect on his passions and hence has no character: “bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted”. As a sentimentalist Smith approves of feelings about feelings, but he approaches a deeper insight into character and passion as reflexively understood. “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons”, a “spectator” and an “agent”: but this spectator is not the inner eye of Augustine or Descartes, watching the struggles of its corporeal agent in a fallen world. Smith’s spectator is the eye of the world, his agent “the person whom I properly call myself”. Even his distinction between “the man without”, God’s “vicegerent”, our “immediate judge”, and the conscience, the “man within the breast”, proposes only praise and “praise-worthiness” as their respective motives. The two are distinct, but not at all in the way that conscience and praise (or blame) usually are. Smith has no time for the single, inner “moral sense”. If we have this “peculiar faculty” or “sentiment”, why are we not better judges of ourselves than of others? Why is there no word for it in any language? We do have “moral faculties” of some kind, but this just means that some actions are widely approved or disapproved. We induce general rules of conduct from this approval or disapproval, but we should not take such rules as original, and deduce right or wrong from them. Again, Smith draws realist conclusions from sentimentalist premises. Virtue is grounded in feeling: but a general feeling. When he comes to build his causeway from moral sentiment to political economy, where he is the master thinker of modernity, he avoids both Vico’s pride of intellect and Mandeville’s cynicism in his portrayal of a “Providence” which leads the “rich and the great” to toil all their lives in pursuit of a mirage of ease and tranquillity, and most people to confuse wealth with its end, utility with happiness. This is nature’s “invisible hand”, the benign “deception”

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which “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind”, persuading the vain and rapacious landlord without intent or knowledge to “advance the interest of the society”, supplying out of his “luxury and caprice” the “necessaries of life” to those whose “real happiness” is “in no respect inferior”. We find, then, the real happiness of public virtue and self-knowledge in the eye of a society whose own material flourishing we unwittingly promote in our pursuit of the inward and illusory happiness of private ease. Smith’s model of the self involves a double denial of the inner core of romanticism. We are as we are seen; we do not see what we are.23

Hume’s realism David Hume created no original, systematic monolith to rank with Locke’s Essay or Hobbes’s Leviathan. His epistemology and his ethics were received as much as made. He wrote two versions of his philosophy and himself pointed out a damaging inconsistency in one of them. Yet to read the first version, A Treatise of Human Nature, is to be in the presence of one of the few truly critical philosophical minds, both refining and dismantling a major canonical tradition in its own terms. The other version, especially in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, is in its elegance and conversibility as much a literary as a philosophical masterpiece. That Hume wished to be judged by the revision tells us something important about him, but the original has struck many as fresher and more profound (the same might be said of Wordsworth and the Prelude). A sinewy coercion of empiricism into experience: a stylish consummation of sentimentalism: each exposes the pretensions of concept-thought, the better to infiltrate it into ordinary life.24 Hume’s version of perception has some Lockean premises, but they are soon left behind. We have primary impressions, the sensations, and secondary impressions, the passions. Sensations and passions alike are either painful or pleasurable; perception of pain and pleasure is “the chief spring” of all our actions. But pleasure is becoming more an aspect of sensation and passion, a family resemblance, than the elemental granular quantum it was in Locke. Some passions (pride, ambition) are indirect, partly mediated by ideas: others are as direct as sensations (joy, fear, desire). We also have ideas, fainter copies or images of impressions found in memory and imagination, where they become the material of reasoning or of further impressions and ideas. The only differentiator of impressions and ideas, or memory and imagination, is their force or vivacity. To believe that something is or will be the case is to have an idea of it which shares the force of a concurrent impression; belief is “sensitive” not “cogitative”. “Probable”, evidential reasoning is also a kind of belief, a sensation; indeed what we refer to as “reason” is often “calm passion”. Even at its purest, its most mathematical, reason is “an assurance arising from the comparison of ideas”, a “wonderful and unintelligible instinct”, a “peculiar manner of conception”. Reason cannot “oppose passion” or motivate

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the will. Conflict between passion and its “slave” is impossible. The central role in the arrangement of our ideas is played by the imagination, less vivid but less constrained than the memory. The imagination’s main operating principle, which Hume calls the “cement of the universe”, is the association of ideas by resemblance, contiguity and supposed causal connection.25 One might call this a feeling mind, or thinking body. The disjunctive perceiver of Descartes or Hobbes has gone. So has the detached perceiver of Descartes or Locke; there is no more problem of connection between inner mind and outer reality. We inhabit a “universe of the imagination”; we “never really advance a step beyond ourselves”. A “mind is nothing but a heap” or “connected mass” of perceptions; we are the perceptions and the thoughts we make of them. Inner entities are unintelligible. The “substance” of the “soul”, “mind” or “self”, “the uniting principle, which constitutes a person”: we can never understand any of this except as the reification of something the imagination just does. Our old friend “the will” is simply the internal impression we are aware of when initiating an activity of body or mind. As for free will, which Hume calls “liberty”, we perceive the constant union of like human actions in like circumstances and infer from one to another – and this is necessity. What we refer to or perceive in ourselves as liberty is in fact necessity, or if not that, then mere chance. Turning outward, the idea of a mysterious “substance” or “matter” inherent in all objects in the world (an “inner of the outer”, so to speak) is idle: nor does the idea of an object’s “existence” add anything to our perception of it. So with causality, our belief that sequences of events have some kind of internal necessity, or that the existence of any object can be inferred from that of another: the idea of necessity itself “is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects”. The imagination simply has, or is the name for, a propensity to associate ideas, to pass from one impression to its usual, immediate or resembling neighbour (although Hume concedes that by his own argument he cannot show what the principle of connection between these impressions actually is). The only reason we believe in the existence of the outer world at all, in fact, is the propensity of the imagination, abetted by memory, to overlook or close up the lapses in our perceptual activity. Philosophers account for our belief in continuing, independent external objects by the bizarre hypothesis of a real but unperceivable world existing beyond the veil of our fallible perceptions. Ordinary people, including philosophers when not thinking philosophically, are bewildered by no such distinction; they simply ignore the problem and identify perception with object. There is no actual contradiction in supposing that objects exist: only in using concepts such as “substance” or “matter” to account for our perceptions of them. Indeed “’tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not”; we do and must simply carry on as if there were. Excessive sceptical doubt is a disabling malady; fortunately it afflicts only philosophers. If more or less forceful perceptions are all we know and are, then we should compare our ideas closely,

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be clear which of them are vividly connected to sensory impressions and which are only the result of repetition, habit, education, the tendency to hypostasise. Perceptions “compose the mind, not belong to it”; to pay the closest attention to them is to know one’s mind, oneself. “ ’Tis impossible for the mind to penetrate farther . . . what remains can only be a dispute of words”. Hume is saving the self from philosophy, or saving philosophy from itself, returning both to ordinary life where, as he says about his own philosophy’s effect on religion, “everything remains precisely as before”. The “true philosophy approaches nearer to the sentiments of the vulgar, than to those of a mistaken knowledge.”26 Hume’s ethics are also grounded in the “sentiments of the vulgar”. Morality cannot be derived from either observation or reason. In no part of human action are virtue or vice actually visible; no amount of “is” yields an “ought”. Morality “is more properly felt than judg’d of”, “determined by sentiment” or an “internal sense or feeling”. Sentiment is a “motion of the mind”, either propense or averse, arising out of pleasure or pain at some character, passion or personal quality signified in an action; we approve a virtuous but inactive character because it appears “fitted to be” virtuous. The pleasure or pain arises when our imagination passes from action as effect to passion as cause, and the resultant idea of the passion in our minds turns into the very passion itself. This transition from another’s action to our own passion is what we call sympathy. We feel the passion, and by extension the character it is part of, as useful or agreeable, utile or dulce, to the person concerned or to others. Utile and dulce are in a fine balance: utility appears to account for the appeal of most if not all virtues, and yet appeals itself to our “softer affections”, humanity, “sympathy with others”. This sentiment of benevolence, love not of “mankind, merely as such”, but of individuals or society as bearing some “relation to ourself”, seems to Hume simpler as a basic explanatory principle than self-interest. But both are important, just as utile and dulce are. Justice, for example, is the most useful social virtue, but we value it not for this alone, but because the welfare of members of our society engages our sympathy. Yet we practise it not for that alone, but because it is in our own interest to do so. This makes justice, like keeping promises, an artificial rather than a natural virtue. Experience of, reflection on, the advantages of “natural” society and civil government will show us its advantages, especially in protecting property, otherwise so vulnerable to the rapacity provoked by contiguity. In a poetic golden age of extreme abundance or perfect equality, or in a converse philosophical state of nature, of extreme necessity and inequality, justice is useless and unthinkable. We do not leap from such states into civil society just by making contracts or promises. First we must learn the advantages of contracts or promises themselves. But our conventions of promise-keeping and propertysecuring are “laws of nature” underlying artificial systems and codes of justice. The duty of obedience, consent to civil government, goes deeper

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than a contract, to an experience of security. When we feel that the magistracy is endangering security more than protecting it, that this danger is greater even than the risk of anarchy in overthrowing the magistracy (which is very rarely the case), then we should rebel.27 Hume dissolves the problem of the romantic inner by reducing to absurdity the idea of an “inward turn”. This self needs no nuclear core observing Being, willing action, through a haze of passion and appearance. It is dispersed through its affections; thought is passional; life is social. Religious faith, of course, “subverts all the principles” of this system; God here is not the limit but a denial of thought (Hume dislikes humility). Pico long before and Lockean voluntarism more recently had come to this: we live entirely within the universe of our own imaginations. So if our passion is all there is, this is all the passion there is. The limit of life is at the boundary of the self. The dark side of Hume, so to speak, is that there is no dark side, no sense of struggle, mortality, weakness, evil, the infinite; no despair – or joy: and yet this is a treatise on human nature, not just an enquiry into human understanding (even in the History the cast of mind is the same). The social is not the relational; each imaginative universe is aware of others but not constituted in them. As moral touchstones benevolence and sympathy have little of the experiential value of philia or agapê. Hume untangled Cartesian epistemology, completed Shaftesbury’s ethical revival of the passions, enabled an Austen, perhaps: but he worked with the philosophical materials he found. He had none of the poet’s sense of life: not even a Machiavelli’s. Still, it is hard to overstate the importance of his achievement in undoing a century of philosophical romanticism. Had Hume and Fielding, or Johnson, who disapproved of him, been one man, then just possibly that man’s realism might have acted as a pan-European counter-argument to the universal romanticism, which appears in some respects to resemble it, of Hume’s contemporary and acquaintance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.28

Rousseau’s romanticism Rousseau is the pre-eminent maker of the modern self, the chief catalyst precipitating 75 years of Romanticism proper and a 150-year sequel. The true comparison is with Augustine, only revived by Luther and Calvin, but reconstituted by Rousseau, first citizen of Calvinist Geneva. Augustine’s intrare in intima mea, deprived since Pico of the God Who for him was that intima, had become a familiar manoeuvre as Descartes nucleated Montaigne’s regarder dedans into an observing moi surrounded by observed passions. Pascal’s trembling mind prefigured the crucial variation. Rousseau combined the moral monads of the philosophes and the sentimentalism of Shaftesbury and Richardson into a new particle, inserting it into that central Augustinian space hitherto reserved for faith, reason or observer. The new nucleus retained its power as will, but was idealised as both all-human and all-loving. God

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was entirely extrinsic, a Stoic-Deist Supreme Being visible and admirable only in the natural world. Virtue was Stoic too. In Plutarch, his favourite reading, Rousseau found not the extended passional lives apparent to a realist like Machiavelli but microcosmic fragments of primary feeling. Yet this original good, from which we have fallen, is still original, retaining Augustine’s Biblical, quasi-historical sense of self in time. (Vico had reached a fuller understanding of historicity a little earlier, but by a road less travelled.) In the same movement of thought Rousseau saw Hobbes’s original state of nature as a golden age and Locke’s tabula rasa as an unspoiled, uninscribed terra nullius. Robinson Crusoe, another favourite, seemed to him (though not Defoe) to be a fable about a return to that land which in fact we can never regain even after wiping clean the social slate and remaking a secular City of God. Rousseau re-imagined the central point of the individual and social self as its moral origin and template; he sentimentalised, historicised and moralised the Cartesian soul. All this came to him in October 1749 as an illumination. He was on the road to Vincennes rather than Damascus; the book was not the Epistle to the Romans but the Mercure de France, announcing an essay competition on whether “the arts and sciences” have “corrupted or purified” mankind. The 37-year-old Rousseau suddenly saw that “man is good by nature and is made wicked [méchant] by institutions alone”; he “beheld another universe, became another man”. To perceive oneself as thus converted is to experience one’s life as ruptured, or discontinuous: and as a life apart. Such a life must contain its own meaning, for there is nowhere else to look. Rousseau tells this life story in his own Confessions, written years after an epiphany which arrives half-way through the book, instead of towards the end. His God is an ideal Man: is, indeed, himself. This life had three phases: the time before; the twelve consummate years just after, of the political Discourses, and then Julie, Emile and Social Contract written almost together; then a long final phase of exile, feelings of persecution, self-justification – the years of Confessions, Dialogues and Reveries. In this multi-faceted oeuvre moral insight finally trumps literary form; all genres lead to autobiography.29 Rousseau’s primary experience was conceptual in form and ethical in material: of the good as basic, original, essential, truthful, real: of the bad as superficial, artificial, dishonest, accidental, apparent. This is an experience of Socratic aretê, complemented for a post-Renaissance thinker by Plutarchan and Stoic encomia for Roman republican or Spartan simplicity, frugality, courage and vigour. Rousseau’s first Discourse, quoting Socrates at length, shows the nations forsaking healthy, happy simplicity for decadent luxury precisely as their arts and sciences attain perfection. Virtue and its simulacrum, talent, win glory and honour disproportionately to their civic value, and a “deathly [funeste] inequality” is introduced into society. It isn’t that talent and virtue should be esteemed equally (they shouldn’t): nor that the inequality should be the other way around (it should): nor that the arts are flowers

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decorating our chains (though they are): but that until we began to esteem appearances we were equals under reality. Equality is Truth. The coming of sin, or inequality, into the world is the subject of the second Discourse: and it was with Rousseau that the idea of inequality as a kind of sin, of equality as a kind of virtue, did come into the world. In the “original condition”, which must be conjectural but is strikingly Spartan, men are never ill, needy or servile, but individually self-sufficient. This state is inherently stable, since there is no need for change, and equitable, since all have, or are, the same. The two basic, balancing passions are self-esteem, amour de soi, desire to preserve oneself; and compassion, desire to preserve the species. Slowly society emerges through proximity and domestication, language out of passion and metaphor into reason and truth (a distinct trace of Vico). People begin to compare themselves with each other through song and dance (talent). But still each one is self-sufficient, and this time of primitive settlements, when nascent morality has not yet been debauched, is the best social epoch. Then there is a disjunctive change. The arts of metallurgy and agriculture “civilise men and ruin the human race”, bringing division of land and labour, and differences (or inequalities) of property, strength and industry. Resultant ambition and jealousy produce Hobbesian anarchy. Those who are still rich think up the cleverest plan yet conceived by human beings: to offer to all the benefit of peace and stability through association, laws, rules. “All ran headlong into their chains”; the rich secured their own wealth and power, everyone else’s labour, servitude and misery. Except in a few who feel for all humanity, compassion disappears, driven out by a cancerous, opinion-driven, self-aggrandising form of amour de soi called amour-propre: essentially a desire for inequality.30 In this fallen, wicked state (méchant and “mischance” derive from the Latin cadere, to fall) we cannot regain our original goodness. Our true equal selves are sundered from our fallen unequal selves by a poetic singularity: a sin, a transgression, a Promethean intervention. The human self (moi humain), individually and collectively, now wills inequality. But perhaps we can redeem ourselves, recover virtue and morality as the reductions of that goodness. The third Discourse and the Social Contract imagine how things might have been otherwise, might still be ameliorated. A political society, first of all, resembles an individual more than a family: one self, moral will, amour de soi, interest: not several. It is not natural but made ex nihilo. A true citizen feels that common interest in himself as he feels his own: even as overriding and subsuming his own. As Augustine’s personal will to sin was finally dissolved in God’s will, which was also in him, so the Rousseauan citizen’s particular amour-propre or even amour de soi is dissolved in the general amour de soi, which is also in him. We can regain at the level of political “grace” that moral identity and equality we lost at the level of ethical “sin”; the Calvin in Geneva’s first citizen is apparent in his quasi-religious sense of a higher governance. Now such a “general will” does not just come into

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being among men; it has to be deliberately created by and in them, as a new thing. This is done in an act of political self-constitution like those imagined by earlier social contract theorists. What is being created or imagined here, however, is not primarily an outward Leviathan or assembly (though the right institutions could exist in small republics like Geneva), but precisely a new will in each person, which is also the same in each person. But this is no singular creation. The struggle must continue for ever within each mind; the general will in it may need help in overcoming, or distinguishing itself from, the particular. We can be “forced to be free”, to undergo a radical self-transformation into a new state of being, in which we will justice, the common interest, the equality of all, as our own true liberty. The will is the engine of morality in Rousseau as in Locke, but now we must politically engineer the will itself. There can be nothing outside this politicised inner. Its religion is a “civil faith” whose dogmas are “sentiments of sociability”: the Supreme Being rewards the just and punishes the méchants; the social contract is sacred; intolerance is intolerable (it sets up one will over others).31 In his ideal republic Rousseau imagines humanity remade, as Plato does in his. A great lawgiver, he says, a Lycurgus for example (Calvin is not mentioned), must feel that he is changing the very constitution of human nature itself, transforming perfect solitary individuals into parts of a greater whole, giving each one strange new powers to replace his own (se sentir en état de changer la nature humaine . . . altérer la constitution de l’homme . . . transformer chaque individu parfait et solitaire, en partie d’un plus grand tout . . . forces étrangères). Thus in a fallen society lives could still be made virtuous even if they could no longer be naturally good. But outside the ideal polity of a Contract no one can be properly “denatured” – or re-natured. In Émile, a treatise on “education”, Rousseau imagines an ethical rather than a political remaking, saving the natural feelings amidst corrupt institutions. Reformist educational tracts were common enough (Locke’s was the model), and this one offers timely advice on clothing, diet, doctors and exercise; indeed the book’s child-centred approach has given it a more lasting influence than others in the genre, as on the Montessori system. But it is really an ideal ethics, which may account for that influence: a treatise of human nature as in a controlled experiment, bracketing extraneous life. A semi-fictional version of Rousseau, the first-person speaker, is tutor, “governor” or ideal father to an orphaned charge on his secluded estate, from birth to fatherhood. What we hear through most of the book is the voice of the philosopher discoursing on infancy, childhood, adolescence or young adulthood; Émile himself has no real presence until the last quarter of the book, when we meet the third character, Sophie, his bride-to-be. The tutor tells us that his guiding principle is to allow his Émile to develop alone in “well-regulated liberty”. As far as possible (and there are limits) this is a Spartan “education according to nature”. Les premiers mouvements de la nature sont toujours droits: il n’y a point de perversité originelle dans le coeur humain. The boy is kept away from

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girls, towns and books – except for Robinson Crusoe, survival manual, model of solitude. Practical knowledge (of sensory weakness, agriculture and woodcraft, property as mixing one’s personne with the earth) is sufficient, and will enable us to live in the fallen world. But we are entering a revolutionary age, as Rousseau says prophetically, when it will be the best knowledge to have. Meanwhile our “real teachers” are expérience and sentiment, and we cannot have these until we have them, so to speak. Until Émile is a man he will be kept “absolutely ignorant” of adult concerns, avoiding all emotional dependence on other people, all ideas of morality – of those corrupted relations between people which turn our amour de soi into amour-propre as we compare ourselves with others, depend on their opinions and désirer la première place. The natural sentiment rélatif is pity, or compassion, which is an extension of amour de soi to others, convertible in the fallen world into virtue and justice. Formal lessons tend to inspire in us precisely those ideas about human relations which they set out to forestall, so a “negative education” should be aimed at keeping the mind empty of such ideas, especially those concerning sexual desire: defer puberty, delay marriage, slow nature down. The master’s “art consists in guiding events”; if need be he must remain with his charge day and night. When the time comes he invents an ideal young woman, based, he tells us, on someone he knew; calls her “Sophie”; and arranges for Émile, who has visited the city and, inevitably, been disappointed, to meet a country girl of that name who resembles the invention. Their courtship, engagement, two-year separation (obligatory exercise in self-control), marriage and first sexual experiences are all supervised by the omniscient tutor. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first to be appalled by Sophie: educated to please and subjugate men, to bear children, to be submissive; never learnedly witty, or a philosopher of human nature, but observant and self-possessed, a reader of it; her greatest assets pudeur (shame, modesty) and chastity. But those who find her objectionable should remember that she is an object. So is Émile: the principal object. She is “natural woman”: he is “natural man”. Rousseau’s ideal of complementarity counters that of convertibility in Plato’s Republic, proposing a differential affective bond as essential to civic sentiment; indeed he is designing men and women with that in mind. As a criticism of Plato this is sound, though Rousseau saw neither its applicability to his own republic, nor that this project is just as “denatured”. His complementary lives are still ideal particles around a conceptual nucleus: whether the idea is “woman in society” or, as in Julie, “love in society”. Rousseau turned the education tract into a quasi-novel; education into systematic personality-formation; the novel into a picture of Human Being, not human beings; and the poet, himself, into an engineer of human souls. Wieland’s Agathon, published four years later, is often thought of as the first bildungsroman, education or self-formation novel: but in Émile, whose central character is the narrator or autobiographical subject, the genre had already been invented as one in which the only builder is the writer, who is always fully formed,

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while his young alter ego is the wax tablet in which by the book’s end he has almost made an image of himself. He likes biography because its subject cannot evade the biographer’s oeil perçant, so he is writing incipient autobiography in which the piercing Cartesian eye feelingly perceives only the universe of itself – naturally feeling itself to be a creator, not just a perceiver. Rousseau’s doctrine of creation, his “natural religion”, is expressed in a long passage inserted into Émile (which has little else to say on religion) but now more often read separately: the Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard. Faith plays an even smaller part in the Vicar’s profession than repentance in Rousseau’s confessions, though both are fervently sincere. The self described here is largely Condillac’s: an immaterial, feeling soul, will or intelligence, whose voice is the conscience, inner judge of all our actions, animates a mechanical body whose voice is passion. The Supreme Being is the benevolent will or intelligence which set the universe in motion: but universe and conscience are our only ideas of it. We need no church to help us revere the one or heed the other. Rousseau is as dismissive of miracles as Hume, and he sees Christ as superior to Socrates only because of his profounder teaching and nobler death. Unlike Hume or Voltaire, Rousseau was no atheist: but his “faith” was really strong sentiment about the starry heavens above and the moral law within, like Kant’s. Emotion is not faith, despite their parallel opposition to reason. But to Rousseau his feelings had the clarity of vision itself, the certainty of knowledge itself, the purity of goodness itself, the authenticity of origin itself. Feeling was his faith. Where Hume had passionalised ideas, Rousseau idealised passion.32 Ne voyant rien d’existant qui fut digne de mon délire, je le nourris dans un monde idéal . . . Oubliant tout à fait la race humaine, je me fis des societés de créatures parfaites . . . tels que je n’en trouvais jamais ici bas. Rousseau is remembering the conception of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, arguably the most celebrated novel of the eighteenth century. This was almost a second epiphany. Thinking of the women he once loved, now unattainable, the 44-year-old became intoxicated, delirious. No reality could deserve such a feeling, so for its sake he forgot the human race and made an ideal world full of perfect creatures. Julie is an epistolary novel on the model of Clarissa (but half its length), although the lovers’ predicament is better indicated by the sub-title; the “old” Heloise (not Abelard) was much admired. This time Rousseau’s tutor, Saint-Preux, is a young commoner, while his pupil, Julie, is the even younger daughter of a baron. Their love is clandestine. They put in writing what they have no chance to say, and these private notes are all we read (this can be absurd, as when he is frenziedly writing down his feelings in her bedroom even as she comes in – on entre! . . . c’est elle!). The letters convey both intimacy and separation: even more vividly when after their love is consummated he is persuaded by his friend Lord Bomston and her cousin Claire, the other chief correspondents, to leave, for her reputation’s sake. But they continue to write, consider eloping,

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until her mother finds the letters: after which the mother’s death, the daughter’s guilt and illness and the father’s anger conduce to an arranged marriage with Wolmar, another baron, of the father’s age. The mid-point of the novel is a long letter from Julie explaining why this is best; she then breaks off the correspondence. Saint-Preux considers suicide but joins a naval expedition to the antipodes. Several years later (no letters) he returns. Julie and Wolmar have two sons. In their country-house utopia Wolmar, a philosophe, sets out to refashion Saint-Preux’s love as he apparently has Julie’s, although she still refuses his atheism and does not seem happy: and as the tutor did Émile’s, though in an opposite direction. Virtue just triumphs on a walk by the lake, but then Julie falls ill in saving her son from drowning. She dies affectingly, but not before confirming to Saint-Preux, in a letter, that she still loves him.33 Sentimentalism has since grown more sophisticated; Julie can seem febrile and sententious, prurient and sanctimonious. It is a masterpiece of pace and tone, however, and no one has dwelt more concentratedly than Rousseau (he disparages Richardson’s plethora of characters and incidents) on the essential constituents of the disposition: passion reduced not just to thrilling sensation, which is mere aestheticism, but to moralised sensation. The first, more conventional half of the book is full of tourment, délire, fièvre, plaisirs, jouissances, transports, genoux tremblants, passion funeste, ardent amour, feu dévorant, voluptueuse langueur, accès de fureur, possession délicieuse, sentiment délicieux: of pudeur, modestie, remords, innocence, repentir, honte, douleur, ignominie, plainte, regrets: of vertu sévère, feu sacré, sentiment pur, tendre amour, veritable amour, unique amour, amour chaste, amour du coeur, amant de l’âme. L’amour is indeed la grande affaire de notre vie, says Julie, and its true philosopher is Plato. Heiress of the roman courtois, she pits modesty, decency, shame and remorse, moralised barriers to experience rather than experiential passions, against the thrilling fevers and languors of eros in both herself and her knightly lover (“Saint-Preux” means “Saint Valiant”), so that they may emerge from this battle of sensation and concept as purified adepts not even of Being or Truth but just of virtuous sentiment, love of one soul for another. The charmant embarras of a father’s palpitant breast against his daughter’s sentimentalises and eroticises filial love, rather than achieving any fuller recognition of erôs and philia. The first Heloise in just two letters turned Dantean and Petrarchan love on its head; her unique circumstances allowed her to see erôs as what her life grew out of: philia, not agapê, as what it grew into. The new Heloise sees erotic passion as delicious feeling and its transformation as moral sentiment. This was what Rousseau wanted. In their provincial ingenuousness the letters (and they may be genuine, he hints) were to do what all romance novels, all poetry, all art, should do: reproach by authentic sentiment and rustic virtue the conventional sentiment, the bienséance or propriety, of corrupt mondain society: remake it as Julie or Émile are remade.34

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What are a mother’s life, a father’s rights, the world itself, beside the lover’s sentiments and droits plus sacrés? asks Saint-Preux frantically (such feelings are rights to Rousseau). But in the novel’s second half, passion as recognised here is set aside for virtue and purer sentiment. Julie turns into Émile, finished a little later: novel-treatise into treatise-novel, sentimental filiality into ethical engineering. Love, sentiment vif, is antipathetic to the married sentiment doux, Mme Wolmar now informs her distraught lover. Marriage is an attachement tendre, a lien sacré, the foundation of civic duty, domestic economy and children’s lives. Chastity and fidelity are social before they are sexual goods. The marriage knot is the model of the social covenant. The Baron, all froideur and observation, is the passionless eye, the utilitarian general will replacing the patriarchal will of the first Baron, remaking its world in its own image; estate management, from landscape design to staff morale, bulks large in this part of the book. Saint-Preux, the living ghost of natural feeling in this regained contractarian paradise, must be “cured”, taught to see his lover as his sister and friend: forced to be free. Yet Julie herself is not free. She is réellement changée, but the changement, her heureuse révolution, was primarily religious, taking place at her wedding under l’oeil éternel of the Supreme Being as much as the cold eye of the Baron: and yet despite this happy revolution elle n’est pas heureuse. The sense of the harmonie des êtres and spectacle de la nature from which it sprang (strengthened by guilt at the adultery she had considered) is as disturbed by Wolmar’s atheist void as her love for her children is by his remoteness. Further, when pressed by Saint-Preux while visiting a place which awakens melancholy memories and renewed tenderness in him, she agrees that “their hearts still hear each other”. Her later declaration that their passion is not stifled but purified, and that this is “the real triumph of virtue”, rings hollow; and in the deathbed letter she confirms that she has been deluding herself, trying precisely to stifle the premier sentiment of her life. She reaches Rousseau’s own conclusion: there is nothing ici-bas worthy of our feelings. In life we can only visit le pays des chimères, but what our souls really seek is la source du sentiment et de l’être: Feeling and Being themselves. Feeling is Being: even that premier sentiment led her to see this. In the fallen world erotic passion is funeste, as Manon, Clarissa and Dido had shown (Freud was to link eros and thanatos); Julie’s pudeur was a better guide to veritable amour, to what the old amour de soi could still be: love for Kantian duty, moral law and social justice on one hand, and for the starry heavens, the spectacle de nature, which is all that remains of Dante and Plato, on the other. Love here is losing the self in vastness, not finding it in society. The volcanic passions of Romanticism had sentimental sources; there are distinct similarities between Heathcliff and Cathy, and Saint-Preux and Julie. But Rousseau foreclosed on Romanticism even as he pre-empted it. If passion (or politics) is just an eruption its energy can be harnessed; a new city can be built in its wake.35

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In that poetry which is plausible thought about possible lives, passion is not like this. But in Julie the characters are chimaeras; it would be dangerous to regard them as exemplary life-thinking, though many have. Rousseau’s literary practice, like Augustine’s, was to explore his own feelings and opinions, not other lives. His greatest, most congenial work was an autobiography, and later he wrote two other autobiographical works. He had fled France after the banning of Émile, and was convinced before Confessions was half-finished that there was a universal plot, led by his closest friends, to persecute and destroy him. In Dialogues, or Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, “Rousseau” attempts to show that the writer “Jean-Jacques” cannot be as monstrous as popularly supposed. The work sheds the intense light of near-mania on Rousseau’s injured sense of his own importance. In Reveries of a Solitary Walker, calmer reflections on himself and his life, he claims that the marks of emotion in others fill him with emotions even stronger than theirs. And in Confessions he writes that his feelings for one woman were “perhaps more lively than anyone has ever felt”; for another “perhaps unique among humankind”; for a childhood friend “perhaps unique among all children”. He is simply “not like anyone else”. It follows that the book itself must be of “unparalleled truthfulness”, possibly the “only truly natural portrait that will ever exist”. “Nothing must remain hidden”. Montaigne was disingenuous; Rousseau will stay “constantly beneath our gaze” in all respects, his “soul transparent to our eyes” in a history of the chaîne des sentiments which is his en dedans, his être, his intérieur. The startling sense of personal singularity and the metaphor of the inward-piercing eye (as of biographer, reader, educator, legislator, Wolmar, God) are jointly intrinsic to this last and greatest mutation of the romantic self. Antigone, Plato, Aeneas, Paul, Augustine, Dante, Luther, Descartes: all were in thrall to a nuclear God-concept of some kind. Piety, Being, Will, Love or Thought were for them emanations of divinity acting as energies within their “souls”, their centres of self. But Rousseau’s soul is the sentiment that is être, the feeling that is being: or, shifting the metaphor slightly, the perceiver of the universe of feeling that is himself, le moi. In this universe there can be no social “outside”, and no trace of God in the perceiving soul. The only natural portrait is of the only truly natural man, the only real man in history. This is all the nature and all the humanity there is, so nothing can be more important than to perceive it truly and entirely: and to perceive it as good, by attending to those episodes which in the fallen world would arouse shame or remorse, and understanding them as either socialised or trivial. This confession is a self-absolution: and we all need it to succeed, for if Jean-Jacques is not good there is no goodness.36 The book is sequential and episodic. Most of its interest is in the first half, roughly up to the illumination. After this it concerns itself more with the writing and reception of the other works, and with the obscur et profond système of spies and treachery, involving the whole of Europe and attempts on his life, in which Rousseau increasingly felt he was trapped.37 The dozen

172 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

or two critical episodes, with attendant reflections, fall into three groups: experiences of love (erôs, philia, agapê); moral experiences (transgression and oppression); and chimères, experiences of paradise or a perfect world. The third group, the smallest, has to do with feeling, nature, dream and books. Rousseau “felt before he thought”, he says; his early reading of romances gave him an emotional intelligence “unique for his age”, but also some strange romanesque – novelistic and romantic – notions about life. Indeed his feelings were too intelligent for l’état reel: only l’état fictif could feed them. He was happiest in dream and reverie, best achieved amongst mountains, torrents, forests and lakes, where he might both contemplate the “author of kindly nature”, “rise towards divinity”: and rise towards, combine with, be “master” of, that same nature. The feeling of perceiving God is hardly distinct from one of being Him, above an état reel so easily comprehended.38 The feeling of comprehension, meanwhile, is moral as well as religious. The illumination was one such feeling, but its first origins lay in the “indignation, rage, despair” provoked by an undeserved childhood punishment, which was then perceived as “injustice”. Meeting a peasant crippled by taxes reawakened this “inextinguishable hatred” of oppression; in so romanesque a mind the thought would follow naturally that it must be the one born to end all such “trickery”. “I had been good”, says Rousseau of the Vincennes moment, “but henceforth I became virtuous, or at least drunk with virtue”. The phrasing is telling; the idea of virtue is what excited him. In Rousseau’s system virtue is what natural goodness mutates into when confronted with oppression in the fallen world. What presents itself to the good mind as outrage will appear to the virtuous one as injustice. But the transition from half-moralised passion to fully political concept is elided. To such an autonomous mind injustice will be whatever outrages it; virtue will be a moral idea which excites it.39 Still, some traces of associated moral life remain to be accounted for, or cleared up, in this closed system of sentiment. They take the form of the shame and remorse provoked by three serious crimes or wrongs. Minor ones, such as petty theft, were bons sentimens mal dirigées; the beatings incurred seemed to square the account – and authorise the behaviour. In a corrupted society punishment causes and sustains the criminality of good people: this is the romantic version of the realist view that transgression and retribution are the two aspects of one event. But persistent shame and remorse cause romanticism trouble, seeming to be generated within a supposedly untroubled heart. Rousseau stole a ribbon from his employer and accused a serving girl; both were dismissed, but he was believed. He still carries an “insupportable weight of remorse”. He was prompted, he explains, not by méchanceté but amitié. He liked the girl and intended to give her the ribbon, so in a moment of faiblesse he accused her of doing for him what he had been planning to do for her. But it was shame alone, invincible honte, fear of public disgrace, that then kept him silent. And now it is the thought of the possible consequences rather than the mal itself which tortures

Romanticism from Descartes to Rousseau 173

him. Shame has become not the enforcer but the preventer of honesty; a deed is shameful in its consequences, not in its well-intentioned, goodhearted genesis. On the second occasion Rousseau summoned help when his choirmaster had an epileptic seizure in the street, but then abandoned him when a crowd collected. After this “painful admission” he says no more; his language has no words for this. The public gaze seems once more to be what he cannot sustain; the shame of running away is less than the shame of being looked at, the vaunted eye of conscience less piercing than the eye of fallen society. In the last and most notorious case Rousseau persuaded Thérèse, mother of his five children, to take each one at birth to the orphanage. It was customary in his circle; they would be cared for better there than in her family or an adoptive one; he was being Citoyen and père, a “member of Plato’s Republic”. It was wrong (mes torts) and he felt deep remord: yet how could a man of such chaleur de coeur, sensibilité vive, innate benevolence for his kind, amour ardent for truth, beauty and justice, vive et douce émotion, be so “hardened”, so depraved? Cela n’est pas possible. Jamais un seul instant de sa vie J. J. n’a pu être un homme sans sentiment . . . un père dénaturé. Mistaken, yes: but never unfeeling, never unnatural. Only a good man can so deeply feel the idea of goodness, and good men cannot do wicked things. Antigone was blinded to filial love by piety, Plato by Good itself, Rousseau by himself as Good.40 Love meant something else entirely to him. He tells us that his “tastes and desires”, his whole self (moi), were decided by the “mixture of pain, shame and sensuality” experienced in boyhood chastisements at the hands of one young woman in whose house he boarded. At eleven he found bonheur suprème with a second who could “play the schoolmistress”. Later he felt greater douceurs inéxprimables in just two minutes kneeling at the feet of a third than in any amount of possession. He “burned with love” of that kind too, but only once, briefly, under an assumed name and with a 44-year-old mother of ten, did he know its douces voluptés and sensualité brûlante as a passion sans délire, without the delirious spice of submission. “Nature had not made him” for sheer pleasure, jouissance. Alone with a delectable, healthy courtesan, contemplating “the sweetest pleasure mortal had ever known”, he wept. She must be “secretly flawed”; Nature could never make so perfect a creature just to end up as a salope receiving him. A malformed nipple confirmed his suspicions; she was “a monster”: but he had already “killed” the pleasure (“stick to mathematics, Johnnie”, said Giulietta). Still, there was another kind of love as keen as the first: not sexual, but beyond mere friendship. At the same time as the “schoolmistress” he loved another girl “like a brother, but with a lover’s jealousy”. This was “complaisance”, rather than obedience. An outing with two more charmantes personnes evoked similar feelings; the memory me touche plus, me charme plus, me revient plus au coeur than that of any other pleasure in his life. His “first and greatest need” was for “the closest possible companionship” (societé, confiance) with

174 Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau

one woman, un ami tout à moi; this was the vide de son coeur, the amour sans objet he eventually created Julie to fill. He found part of what he needed with Louise de Warens, a Swiss baronne twelve years his senior whom he lived with or near to for more than a decade, until his late twenties. He called her Maman (his mother had died giving birth to him, after all – or before all). For her he felt un autre sentiment plus doux que l’amour: not friendship, but plus voluptueux, plus tendre; perfect bien-être, un calme ravissante: but not exactly love either, for there was some desire but no jealousy. When they did become lovers it was without lust (convoiter): indeed it felt like incest, not surprisingly. This was le court bonheur de sa vie, but it was not Julie. Just after creating her, twenty years later, he at last felt that enivrante volupté, met his veritable amour, le premier et l’unique en toute sa vie. But Sophie d’Houdetot already had a lover; besides, “I loved her too much to want to possess her”. And all the time there was Thérèse Levasseur, his compagne or Augustinian concubina for thirty years, first of parfait bonheur domestique and then of the long misère in which she was his seule consolation. His “moral being was fixed” when they met: and yet he “never felt the least spark of love for her”. She was neither “all” nor “nothing”; she was, he says, a supplément.41 When desire or erôs is reduced to mere carnality or appetite it can be sharpened by other passions, such as shame or pain, but at the cost of its own understandings. Conversely its absence forestalls understandings of love, which Rousseau thought belonged exclusively to friendship, philia: friendship which, in his folie romanesque, as he called it, he then persistently tried to turn into the perfect understanding of one soul by another (his version of agapê). How in such a confusion of three kinds of love (to say nothing of an unknown mother) could he recognise this or any passion as those actions which are both knowledge of another self and of oneself as known by that other? To him a real woman, another gaze looking into the reality only he must ever know, is just too real. We began with mênis in Homer, just such a recognitive or realist passion; we end with amour in Rousseau, the culmination of 2000 years of nuclear romanticism, and the source of 200 more of modern folie romanesque, in which poetry has often been a search for some perfect inner self, philosophy for some perfect inner concept: while the self, ethical or political, is seen as the kind of thing which can be searched for in that way.

Notes

See Bibliography for all references.

Preface 1. See Murdoch 1956, 42; Diamond 1988, 262, 276. For other works mentioned in this paragraph and the next two, see Bibliography. 2. Wittgenstein 1978, 325; Diamond 1991, 39–71.1.

1

Homer: Passion in the Iliad

1. Iliad 1.1–2. In this chapter and in much of Chapters 2 and 4 I have used texts with facing translations in the Loeb Classical Library. Translations and paraphrases are my own, although I have leaned heavily on the Loeb and others: details in Bibliography. Schein is most helpful for the non-specialist. The treatments of Homer in two series of Sather Classical Lectures, by Dodds and Williams (1993), are inspiring. Muellner is the exemplary work on this theme. 2. 1.188–244. The poem’s division into “books” is almost certainly not Homer’s, but it has now been standard practice for centuries. 3. 9.182–655. 4. 16.1–100. 5. 19.54–148. 6. Paris speaks to Helen of his erôs for her just once, at 3.437–446. Helen is seen throughout this book, but only this one, as divinely beautiful and thus erôs-inspiring. 7. 18.78–126, 201–238. 8. An attractive behaviourist account of emotion is offered by Ryle, esp. 81–111. “Emotivism”, an ethical theory which has many affiliations with behaviourism, is expounded by Stevenson. Some influential recent thinking about the passions or emotions is to be found in Nussbaum 1986 and Williams 1973. For concepts as constituents of lives, see Diamond 1988, 1991, passim. For “lives” as a critical concept and as the basic constitutency of poetic thought see Goldberg. 9. 18.120, for example. 10. 18.35–147. 11. 18.478–608. 12. 19.309–337, 405–424. 13. 21.134. 14. 21.71–113. 15. 21.100–102. 16. There is a profound division in modern ethics between Enlightenment and especially Kantian rational systems on the one hand (Utilitarian and other consequentialist theories, and duty-based, deontological theories), and an ethics of the self, sometimes called “eudaimonism”, “character ethics” or “virtue ethics”, on the other. For the former see for example Parfitt and Rawls. For the latter see 175

176 Notes

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

especially Taylor 1989 and MacIntyre (the implicit debate between them is highly salient for this book, though its general outlook is much closer to MacIntyre’s), Murdoch, Gaita, Williams 1985, Anscombe, and Haines 1997 and 1998, 47–53. For more on the place of literature within this ethical debate see Parker. It was Milman Parry who first showed, after research into a living oral tradition in Yugoslavia in the 1920s and 1930s, that Homer’s poetry was oral and formulaic. Some of his successors extended this remarkable discovery into claims that the poetry is entirely formulaic, or that it should be regarded as the work of a whole race, not one man. But even if “Homer” were many poets would it make any difference to our reading of the poem we have? 23.1–183, 257–897. See e.g. 22.395, 23.24, 24.19–22. 24.31–76. 24.139–140. The general (religious) notion of “the limits of the world” appears in Wittgenstein, 1971, §§ 6.41, 6.43, 6.45: “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole – a limited whole” (149). Wittgenstein’s conception of “the limits of language”, against which we are constantly running our heads, is foundational to his thought and, in that “language is a form of life”, to his ethics: see e.g. 1992, §§ 19, 119 (8, 48), et passim. 24.503. 24.540. Not an attitude to the Orient given much emphasis in Said, for example. In Marx and Hegel, for example. 22.99. 22.122. See Chapter 2. This is the Cartesian and Kantian conception, though it was originally Plato’s. Two most helpful guides to Greek philosophical concepts are Peters and Urmson 1990. “Realism” is a hot potato of a concept. In ethics it is the name for the Aristotelian view that moral “facts” really exist: traits of character, aspects of human nature or function, features of how we do live as human beings. In epistemology, it is the name for the Platonist view that there are real objects behind the appearances and words of the world. On a Wittgensteinian and Aristotelian account, in which the rich appearances and languages of the world are the world, this seems like a hijacking of the term’s obvious sense. In aesthetics, as for example in accounts of the nineteenth-century French novel, realism is the view that art should or can show social or physical phenomena as the most detailed and exact observation finds them, not as we commonly, superficially or imprecisely see them – although this celebration of ordinary life often shades into the Platonist-Romantic view that through the ordinary things numinous reality gleams forth. See Wellek, 222–255: “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship”. Diamond 1991, 39–72, is profound on the epistemological confusion. Taylor 1989, 430–434 is equally so on the aesthetic issue. This is a Freudian version of the Cartesian-Platonic “soul” in which the “centre” is omitted. What we are left with is “a self which is a tissue of contingencies”; “there is no self distinct from this self-reweaving web”. The words are Rorty’s: 1989, 32, and 1991, 93. The distance from here to the determinist self referred to in note 26 is not very great.

Notes

177

2 Sophocles’ Antigone and Thucydides’ Athens: Romanticism and Realism in Politics 1. Antigone, 1. Chapters 5 and 6 of Winnington-Thomas are helpful. Bowra and Kitto are standard works. Nussbaum has a reading in Fragility, 51–82. Steiner’s great work is almost a reading of Western culture in the light of the play. 2. Versions of the drama by Jean Anouilh (1944) and Bertold Brecht (1948) testify to its continuing appeal. 3. A concise account of the period can be found in Ehrenberg. 4. Hegel saw in the play an attempt at “sublation” or the dialectical resolution of conflict between general social forces. See Nussbaum 1986, 67. 5. 1–99. 6. 162–210. 7. 332–375. 8. 499–525. 9. 583–625. 10. 853. 11. 683–765. 12. 781–800. 13. 1023–1032. 14. 1261–1338, 1183–1245. 15. 817–987. 16. 905–907. 17. 515, 517. 18. This suggestive term is Taylor’s 1989, Chapter 9 et passim. Punctuality sees “the real self” as “ ‘extensionless’; it is nowhere but in this power to fix things as objects”: 172. Punctuality since not Locke but Plato has been a psychological as well as an epistemological condition. 19. Thucydides, 1.22.4. Hornblower’s is a particularly clear and stimulating reading; Connor is also helpful. Also see Chapters 4 and 5 in Luce. 20. Gertrude Himmelfarb refers to such historiographical practice as the “aestheticization” of history (139). 21. 1.1.1. 22. Poetics, 1451a36–b8 (Chapter 9). 23. Perhaps in the last century; at most since Coleridge and the Romantics. 24. This is the Kantian view; see e.g. Critique of Judgement, 313.13–317.13. Whereas for Aristotle the appearances of things are simply the material we live and must deal with, for Kant (and Plato) they are contrasted with what Kant calls the noumena, the transcendent realities we cannot grasp. 25. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1045b28ff. 26. 1.75–76. 27. 1.140–144. 28. 2.35–46. 29. 2.45.2. 30. 2.47–54. 31. 2.53.1, 3. 32. 2.48.4. 33. 3.36–49. 34. 3.82–84. 35. 3.82.2–4.

178 Notes 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

3.82.8. ibid. Weil, 24–55. 3.84.2. 5.89. 7.86.5.

3

Plato and Aristotle: Concept and Passion

1. The two essential works for the amateur of Pre-Socratic philosophy are Kirk et al. and Barnes (1979), 1982. Two classic brief surveys of Greek philosophy are Cornford and Guthrie, 1989. The standard text is the wonderfully readable Guthrie, 1962–1981: of which vols 1–3 cover philosophy before Plato, 4–5 are on Plato and 6 is on Aristotle. Also helpful on Socrates and Plato are Gosling, Hare and Kraut. I have used the Hamilton and Cairns English text, checked against the Loeb for critical concepts (but for this chapter I have not listed all the Loeb texts in the Bibliography). 2. See, for example, Apology 40c, Euthyphro 5c–6e, 10a–11b, Charmides 159a–161a, 163e–164a, 165c, 166d etc., Laches 190c, 191e, 198b, 199e, Lysis 220d. 3. Apology 20e–21a, 33c, 40a, Euthyphro 3b, Phaedo 60e, Phaedrus 242b–c, etc. 4. Askêsis: exercise, training, the practice of. 5. 22c. 6. 6a–c. 7. 530b, 534b. 8. 334b. 9. 339a–d. 10. 340a–347b. 11. 347c–348a. 12. 352a–357e, 358d–e. 13. See e.g. 85d–86b. 14. 64a–68b. 15. 74b–77a. 16. 94c–e. 17. 237d–238c. 18. 244a–252c, 255d. 19. In the best known and most revealingly autobiographical of his epistles: Seventh Letter 341b–342a, 344a–d. 20. Phaedrus 265d–266b. 21. 274b–278e. 22. 198a–d. 23. 200a–211e. 24. 212c–222a. 25. 466d–481b. 26. This is the gist and tone of his many speeches from 481b on. 27. 523a–527e. 28. Thrasymachus puts his position in Book 1; Glaucon and his brother Adimantus put the more sophisticated version of it in 2, culminating in the request for the “view from the inside” at 366–368. 29. 368e–369a. 30. Roughly, the poets are chastised in Bks 2, 3 and 10, while the guardians and their subjects are surveyed at the end of Bks 2 and 3 and in Bks 4 and 5.

Notes 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

179

In 6: 500d–501c. The Cave is in Bk. 7. The constitutions are described in Bks 8 and 9. 811c–812a. Bks 2, 4 and 7 all contain attacks on poetry. Parts of Animals 683a15; Generation of Animals 717a14–15: trans. by W. Ogle and A. Platt respectively in Barnes 1984, i 1065, 1114. I have used Barnes alongside Loeb, as for Plato. Helpful general works on Aristotle include Guthrie, 1962–1981, vol. 6, Ross’s classic introduction, Irwin (heavier going) and Barnes 1982 (short and clear). Three collections of essays raise most of the central issues in his moral philosophy: Amélie Rorty 1980 and 1992, and Nussbaum and Rorty. Four recent examples of work on his ethics are Urmson 1988, Kenny 1992, Sherman and Heinemann. But Aristotelianism, a cast of thought recognisable since the eleventh century and paradigmatic in what now seems an ossified form for several hundred years thereafter, has also shaped the work of many modern philosophers who are not specifically writing books about Aristotle: not least MacIntyre and Nussbaum. For examples to substantiate the following account of Aristotle’s experiential realism, see: Cat. 1a21, 2a11–19; De Int. 17a38-b1; Pr. An. 46a1–26; Post. An. 71a1–11, 72b5–24, 83b38–84a5, 84a32–33, 85a31, 88b29–39; Phys. 192b9–11, 194b16–195a2, 200b32–201a2; De An. 403a3ff., 407a2-b26, 408b12–14, 412a1–413a10, 412b7, 413a22–23, 414b21–23, 415a9ff., 415b9–11, 429a10-b10ff., 433b3; Met. 980b28– 983b19, 987a28–988a16, 990a32–992b19, 996b14, 999a24-b23, 1003a22–32, 1004b5–8, 1005b10–11, 1013a24–35, 1025b19–1026a32, 1029b13–21, 1031a15– 1032a11, 1037a5–6, 1036a8, 1038b1–8, 1042a1–7, 1060a3–26, 1064a10–b12, 1078b29–31, 1079b11, 1086b1–5. See Nicomachean Ethics 1177a12–1178a8 (Bk. 8 Chapter 7). See De An. 415a12, 429a10ff., 429b10ff; Met. 999a24–29, 1011b35, 1060a10. Phys. 259b10–12ff., De An. 430a3–26, Met. 999b5–9, 1071b3–22, 1073a13, 1072b30, 1074b15–35. NE 1141a34–b3. Usually known simply as Ethics, although the Eudemian Ethics has valuable supplementary passages. Key passages informing this summary are: 1094a1–1109b26 (Bks 1–2), passim; 1110b18–1111a2, 1111b4–1113a15, 1113b3–6, 1114a22–31, 1130a9–12, 1139a1– 1143b15, 1145b1–2, 1152b1–1154b30, 1169b17–19, 1170a19, 30–34, 1176a30– 1181b15 (Bk. 10 Chapters 6–9), passim. See also EE 1215a20–b13, 1218b32–1220b20. E.g. NE 1115a7–1138b14, 1145a15–1152a32; EE 1220b35–1221b26, 1228a23– 1234b12; Rhet. 1366b1–2. Rhet. 1378a20–1388b31. NE 1122a19–1125a34; EE 1232a19–1233b14. 1109b23. For key passages informing this paragraph see: 1252a5, b10, 17–18, 28–31, 1253a1–19, 1260b25–1266a30, 1269a29–1274b26, 1274b33–1275b21, 1276b20–30, 1279a9–30, 1280b29–35, 1284a1–2, 1324a21–22. The account of the fundamental varieties of constitution occupies most of Bks 3–5 (1278b6–1316b26). Bk. 6 is a closer study of democracies and how they are organised. The consideration of population, composition, location and so on is in Bk. 7 (1326a5–1331b22). Matters of marriage, education and training occupy the rest of Bk. 7 and all of Bk. 8 (1331b24–1342b34). See 1254a17–1255b39, 1259b18–11260b20.

180 Notes 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Pol. 1341b32–1342b17; Poetics 1449b28. Rhet. 1378a20ff., 1410b12–1413b1; Poet. 1457b7–1458a6, 1459a5–7. This is in the crucial Chapter 9: 1451a36–b32. This is Aristotle’s term for what we translate throughout Poetics as “plot”. 1447a28–29. 1455a32–34. This is the tenor of the discussion of plot and character in tragedy in Chapters 6–18 (1449b22–1456a31).

4

The inheritance of Augustine: Confessions

1. St Augustine, Confessions 1.13. Alaric the Goth sacked Rome ten years after Augustine wrote the Confessions, and the Vandals entered North Africa, where he lived, the year before his death. I refer to the saint hereafter simply as “Augustine”, and generally I have done the same with the other canonised writers mentioned in this chapter. 2. 3.1. 3. The English terms “biography” and “autobiography” are recent, coined in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, although the term biographia, life-writing, did exist in Greek as early as the sixth. Early biography was practised by historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius) as part of their histories. Not until Plutarch (AD 50–120) were the two genres distinct. Encomiastic and hagiographical writing was a literary commonplace long before lives of the saints (e.g. Athanasius’ Life of Antony) began to appear in the fourth century. Aratus (third century BC), and Sulla and Cicero (first), all wrote memoirs of one form or another. Christian confessional writers (Justin Martyr, Cyprian of Carthage), Stoic philosophers (Cicero, Seneca, Marcus) and certain poets (Horace) could all be called “autobiographers” of a kind. The Meditations, or more properly Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, To Himself, is a series of reflections and precepts, of conversations with himself, by the Emperor of Rome (AD 161–180). The book is the greatest work of Stoicism, and it has been particularly influential since the seventeenth century. The “autobiographical” part of Confessions is in Books 1–9; Book 10 is more like a treatise on human understanding, dealing with memory, dreams, the senses and desire for knowledge, as well as Christian virtues and vices. Books 11 and 12 deal with the nature of God and His creation, especially time, and with interpretation. Book 13 is an interpretation of Genesis I. 4. The modern critical term “intertextuality”, meaning the explicit and implicit allusiveness of literary texts to each other, might have been coined with Confessions in mind. 5. Aeneid 12.440: avunculus Hector. 6. 1.273 (gente sub Hectorea); and see Jupiter’s speeches, 1.257–296 and 12.830–840. 7. See Iliad 24.68; 20.299, 347–348; 5.466–468. 8. The visitation by Mercury and Aeneas’ reaction to it are at 259–295. The confrontation between Dido and Aeneas is at 305–396. 9. Two verbs used early in the poem for this passion are chraô and hiêmi, connoting a lack of or need for, and an impulse towards: Odyssey 1.13, 58. The sense is almost of a vacuum’s attractive power: a natural attractive force, rather than a divine propulsive one. 10. 322, 375, 412, 419, 474–475, 499, 531–532, 590–629, 642–665. The parallel with Anna Karenina is well worth exploring. “Anna is the crucial imaginative challenge

Notes

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

181

for the Christian moralist in Tolstoy”, as Parker says (119), and so is Dido for the proto-Christian one in Virgil. It is the moralist in each case who sees crucial imaginative challenges as being like this. The soul-changing passion is the reflex of the soul-consuming mission. But of course besides Anna (who also as it were falls on her sword) Tolstoy has Kitty, and Levin – as Parker shows. His own words, from his poems written in exile: Tristia and Epistolae ex Ponto. Augustine sometimes echoes Ovid’s poems from exile and his more poignant reflections, but not his erotic work: e.g. Conf. 3.3, 4.5, 6. See bibliography for texts. Heroides 7.13, 17–18, 22, 51, 73–78, 147–148, 151–152, 169–180; and passim. 3.1, 5.8. “To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning / O Lord thou pluckest me out”: T. S. Eliot’s rendition, The Waste Land IV 307–308. The City of God (De Civitate Dei) 9.4. Conf. 7.9–10, CG 8.1–13. De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”), esp. Bk. 3:830–842, 894–911, etc. See CG 5.9, 20, 8.7, 9.4, 14.2; Conf. 3.3–4, 6.16. The founders of the Stoic school proper were Zeno of Citium, an exact contemporary of Epicurus; and Chrysippus, a generation later. There are still some distinctly Stoic elements in the philosophy of the modern Enlightenment: Kant and Spinoza, for example. Two helpful short books on Hellenistic philosophy are Long and Rist. Cicero reflected not just Stoic but Sceptical views, as most systematically set out by Sextus Empiricus in the third century. Augustine was influenced by these too. Plotinus, The Enneads, or “nines”: the work contains six treatises of nine books each. See 1.6 (“Beauty”), 5.1 (“The Three Initial Hypostases”), 6.5 (“On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (II)”). Conf. 7.9–10. See Conf. 3.5. Jerome produced his famous “Vulgate” Latin Bible during Augustine’s lifetime, but he had no access to it as a young man. See Chadwick, 40; and also Clark, 9–10. 13.5–11. Chadwick, xxii. 7.9. For Biblical citations I have used Carroll and Prickett. For their notes see the New Testament section, 398–403, 406–408, 410–413, 415–418. Also helpful are the two relevant vols in Black’s New Testament Commentaries: Barrett and Hooker. For the Greek and Vulgate Latin texts I have used Aland, and Wordsworth and White. Conf. 13.26. Romans 1.17, 4.10, 6.15, 7.13, 8.25, 30, 33, 10.4. See e.g. 1.24, 6.12. For these terms see e.g. 1.7, 3.24, 5.15, 11.6 in the Greek and Latin edns. See Hooker, 5–8, Barrett, 3–5. Hooker, 9. Our concern here, as with Homer, is with the text we have, not with controversies (interesting though they may be) over who Mark was, or who wrote this and the other Gospels and when, or what sort of composition the Gospels had: nor, above all, with who, what kind of a man, Jesus was. For the quotations in this paragraph see 1.22, 2.9, 12, 17, 27, 3.28, 4.9, 11, 25, 32, 6.34, 9.23. The quotations are at 8.35–36, 9.7, 12.30, 14.22, 24, 36, 15.34, 39. See e.g. Conf. 3.6, 10, 12, 4.1–3, 15, 5.3–7, 10, 6.5, 7.1, 5–7, 8.9–10; CG 1.20, 5 passim, 11.13, 22, 12 passim.

182 Notes 35. 1.6–18, and for the Bible as figurative 6.5, 13 passim but esp. 7, 24. 36. The pear tree episode is at 2.4–9. Rousseau and Wordsworth both included versions of this story of youthful aberration in their own confessional autobiographies. 37. 2.1–3, 3.1, 4.2, 6.11–16, 9.6, 12. 38. The story of the friend is at 4.4–10. 39. 3.6. 40. Augustine’s story of Monica is especially at 1.11, 2.3, 3.11–12, 5.8–9 (where he gives her the slip more or less on the beach to go to Rome), 6.1–2 (she follows him) and 9.8–13 (her devoted pursuit of his conversion and her death). 41. The opening invocation is at 1.1–5. For God as indefinite substance and then as infinite see 4.15, 5.10, 6.3–4, 7.1–5, 14–15, 10.8, 17. For Aristotle see 4.16–17. 42. 7.17–21, 8.1. 43. Augustine 1993. 44. 7.3. 45. 8.7–10, and (for the original “original sin”) 5.9. 46. 8.12. 47. 1.6. 48. Quotations from the Psalms run at several a page in some passages of the Confessions. “What cries I rendered unto you, my God, in reading the psalms of David”: 9.4. 49. 10.2, and I Corinthians 2.11. 50. 10.3. 51. See Wittgenstein 1992, 1.61e (§459), 2.56e, 63e: “the greatest danger here is wanting to observe oneself”; “only I know what I am thinking actually means nothing else than: only I think my own thoughts”; “it is only when we cannot read the outer that an inner seems to be hidden behind it”.

5

Aquinas and the realist revival

1. Armstrong and Kretzmann et al. are indispensable guides to the long period between the lifetimes of Augustine and Aquinas. Haren offers a concise introduction. Copleston, vol. 2, is still valuable. 2. Boethius: c. 480–524. 3. The heart of Lady Philosophy’s argument is in the second and third of the five books. God as the principle of all things is at 3.10.23–24. Her Timaeus-like hymn to this God of “eternal order” (perpetua ratio) is at 3.9. 4. See 1.2.13, 1.5.39. Quid ipse sis, nosse desisti, she says again at 1.6.40: “you have ceased to recognise your real self”. 5. See Tweedale 154–157. 6. Abelard 1970, ii 614–615. 7. Abelard 1970, ii 614–620. See Haren, 104–111. 8. See Ockham (c. 1300–1349), xvii–xxiii, 96–126. 9. The best edition of the Historia and letters in English is Abelard 1974. For Latin see Abelard 1970, i, 1–236. 10. Two good collections of essays on Aquinas (1224–1274) are Kretzmann and Stump, and Kenny, 1969. Kenny 1980 and Copleston 1991 are also helpful. Perhaps the best single essay on Aquinas is by Geach in Anscombe and Geach. For some modern selections see Bibliography. 11. For full translation of the Summa with Latin text and scholarly apparatus see Aquinas 1963–1975. McDermott (Aquinas 1989) represents about one-sixth of the full version because it has been turned into a modern continuous prose format,

Notes

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

183

with neither Latin nor notes. The account of the Summa that follows is my own general paraphrase and summary of Part II and a portion of Part I, 109–441 in McDermott, checked where necessary against the Latin text. This is known as the “ontological argument”, from the Greek to on, “the real” or “being”. Ousia is from the same root; the verb is einai, “to be”. The five ways are at 1a.2.3. This means that in the conventional format they comprise the third “article” of the second “question” of Part I, or “Prima” (i.e. “Prima Pars”), of the Summa: “1a q.2 a.3”. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists”: Wittgenstein 1971, 6.44 (149). See 1a.75.1–89.5 for the account of the soul. 84.1–88.2 is on our perception of the world. 1a.87.1–88.2. “So our mind knows itself not by its own substance but by its activity”: 87.2 (McDermott trans.). This is known as “Prima Secundae”, 1a2ae or I–II in the conventional notation. This picture of the soul occupies 1a2ae.1–67. This paragraph is chiefly from 1a.79.3–4, 82.3–41a, 83.4, and 1a2ae.1.1–8, 6.1, 8.1–14.6, 18.1–7, 19.1–10, 20.1–5, 75.1. The main sources of this paragraph are in 1a.79.8–12, and 1a2ae.22.1–2, 41.1, 91.1–2, 94.2–3. For the main discussion of natural law see 2a2ae.94. See 1a.81, 1a2ae.22–25. In the former Aquinas is quoting Aristotle on the soul as tyrant and the reason as president. Dispositions are considered at 1a2ae.49–54. Mores as second natures are at 1a2ae.58. Known as “Secunda Secundae” or 2a2ae. Virtue and the virtues occupy 1a2ae.55–67, with the cardinal virtues considered as a set at 61.2–5 and in much more detail at 2a2ae.47–168. The theological virtues (see note below) are at 1a2ae.62–65, and in greater detail at 2a2ae.1–46. Sin and the vices are at 1a2ae.71–89. Beatitudo, often translated as happiness, including by McDermott, is considered at various points in the discussion of the virtues, but also at 1a2ae.2–5. For love, desire, friendship and charity see 1a80, 1a2ae.4.1–2, 26–30, 2a2ae.23–27. Having our ultimate goal (finis ultimus) as our ultimate goal is at 2a2ae.26.1–2. Most of these references to God are to be found as parts, often intrinsic parts, of the various passages just cited on other subjects. For grace see 2a2ae.109–114. For the theological virtues see note above. For natural and eternal law, and also Aquinas’ account of the Old or Mosaic Law and the New Law of Jesus, see 2a2ae.90–94. For being as the first principle and as God as its creator see 1a79.2, 2a2ae.94.2. “Man is not the supreme good, and his fulfilment lies outside himself”: 1a2ae.2.5 (McDermott). Kenny is surely right to see Wittgenstein as the initiator of a new philosophical climate in which Aquinas may once more be generally read as something other and more than a Catholic apologist (Kenny 1980, 28–30). Useful general guides to Chaucer’s life and times, as well as helpful critical essays on his poetry, can be found in Boitani and Mann, and Andrew. See also Wetherbee, and the essays appended to Kolve and Olson. Robertson is an immensely rich evocation of the cultural and aesthetic backgrounds to Chaucer’s thought. See lines 1–34. That is, the tales themselves. For the “condicioun / Of ech of hem, so as it semed me”, see lines 43–714 of the Prologue.

184 Notes 30. The Prologue tells us that each pilgrim will tell four tales; as it is, only the narrator tells more than one, and some pilgrims do not tell one at all. The group never reaches Canterbury, and there are numerous inconsistencies and other signs of incompletion. The poem survived in the form of several manuscript fragments. 31. Most of the tales are preceded by short introductory passages (a dozen or two lines) in which the narrator tells us something about the teller; or the teller says something to his audience about himself or herself; or the Host of “the Tabard”, the inn where the pilgrims are staying, encourages the next teller to speak; or the other guests argue amongst themselves. Only the Wife begins by telling her life story in an 850-line “Prologue”, as long as the average tale and twice as long as the tale she herself then tells. 32. For the quotations from prologue and tale see lines 42, 52, 121–122, 149–152, 615, 622–623, 685, 789, 814, 818, 1038. The edition used here is Robinson’s (see Chaucer). The fable about an ugly old woman who becomes a beautiful young one when her man shows some form of consideration for or loyalty to her is a traditional form of the genre, usually known as the “loathly lady”. 33. The two extreme, opposed versions of this view are: that poetry is a divinely bestowed glimpse of Truth, a form of possession akin to madness and inexplicable by rational means; and that it is a near-meaningless pattern of verbal decoration. 34. For the quotations in this paragraph from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale see lines 1–2, 28, 469–473. For the equivalent passage from Jean de Meun’s discours de la vieille see Roman, lines 12936–12944. 35. G. L. Kittredge first pointed this out: “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage”, 1912, repr. Andrew, 8–35. 36. The Clerk’s Tale, lines 1159–62. Boccaccio also told the tale of Patient Griselda, in the Decameron. Chaucer knew both versions, but followed Petrarch’s more closely. 37. See lines 919, 1199, 1201–1212. 38. The Villon stanza is from the passage known as Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmière, “the lament of the Beautiful Armouress” (a celebrated prostitute of the day), in his long, ribald autobiographical poem Le Testament, dating from the 1450s. Pound, Yeats and Robert Lowell all made versions of these stanzas, Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” being the most successful.

6

Dante and medieval romanticism

1. For Beowulf see Alexander. The standard one-volume selection of Old English literature is Onions. Hamer’s is a useful modern paperback selection. Bede (673–735) presided over a remarkable revival of learning in the north-east of England. Alfred the Great (849–900) was not only a leader and legislator, but a scholar, poet and translator. Cædmon, a monk who died at around the time of Bede’s birth, wrote some of the greatest vernacular poetry of Northumbria in the form of metrical renderings of the Old Testament into Old English, as well as other poems on religious subjects. The Dream of the Rood (probably composed before 750) is the greatest religious poem in Old English, Maldon (after 991) its finest short heroic poem. William Langland (c. 1330–1400) was a poet of the West Midlands; Piers Plowman is a vision of the times, in a slightly old-fashioned alliterative metre, containing both ordinary people and allegorical figures such as Reason and Conscience. Corruption in the Church is a central theme. John Wycliffe or Wyclif, from Yorkshire, a scholar of the fourteenth century working chiefly in Oxford, was a fierce reformist critic of the Church and of the papacy,

Notes

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

185

a zealous advocate of the vernacular, and the driving force behind as well as a contributor to the Bible translation. Lines 90, 107, 144–145, 164. Hamann 1730–1788; Herder 1744–1803. Lines 312–313: Sweet, 120, Hamer, 68. J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1936 British Academy lecture, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, was a watershed in the general appreciation of the poem. The first full English edition appeared in 1833 (Alexander, 1995, vii–viii). For text with modern French trans. see Bédier. Burgess includes the original text as an appendix. Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet: 4002. Roncevaux is “Rencesvals” in the original. For the quotations and other references in this paragraph see 8, 580–595, 1014–1015, 1134–1135, 1212, 2580–2591, 3164, 3554, 3587–3588, 3608–3609, 3644–3647. Quotations and references in this paragraph are from 771–3, 1010, 1051, 1059, 1070, 1088–1092, 1117–1119, 1113–1123, 1693–1752, 1763–1764, 2010–2020, 2375–2396, 3760, 3764, 3815, 3993–4001. 1093. Theocritus, c. 300–250 BC, was the first great pastoral poet in European literature, a writer especially of short poems representing single scenes, called “idylls” (eidullia). Virgil’s Eclogues are in this tradition. The former wrote predominantly love poetry, the latter moral and didactic poetry, in the so-called langue d’oc. This was the southern or Provençal “language of hoc”, as distinct from the northern or French langue d’oeil or “language of ille”, from the Latin words for “yes” adopted by each language. Chrétien de Troyes 1991 and 1994. The quotation is at 5245 and 5249. 711–724; my trans. See 320–377, 1224–1242, 1392–1495, 1910–1914, 3675–3678, 3795–3817, 4583–4736. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1992 and 1995. Ore entendez, loial amant . . . D’amours avroiz art souffisant, 15139–15148. The best and most readable account and defence of medieval allegory is still Lewis, esp. Chapter 1 (“Courtly Love”), 2 (“Allegory”), 3 (“The Romance of the Rose” ), 6 (“Allegory as the Dominant Form”). Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso first appeared in 1516, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in the 1590s, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. The edition used here is Dante 1989–1991. For Inferno I have also consulted Dante 1996. See also Kirkpatrick and the essays in Jacoff, especially Teodolinda Barolini’s “Dante and the lyric past” (14–33) and Robert Hollander’s “Dante and his commentators” (226–236). Namely Convivio (“The Banquet”) in Italian and De Vulgari Eloquentia (“On the Common Speech”) in Latin. Especially in his De Monarchia. See next chapter. Dante 1989–1991. Hollander observes that a long period of intense commentary from 1322 to 1570, in which Boccaccio was the first major figure and the first paid lecturer on Dante, was followed by a somewhat shorter period from 1570 to 1732 during which “not a single major commentary on the Commedia was published” (231). With the rise of Romanticism the poem once again became a focus of commentary and has never ceased to be so since.

186 Notes 23. Vita Nuova ii (Dante, 1992, 4); Paradiso 33.145. 24. Provençal canso, French chanson. 25. Cavalcanti 1992, 20, 92 (nos 9, 35). This pessimistic theme is pervasive in the poetry of Cavalcanti, who unlike Dante looks no further than this life and the body when thinking about love. 26. VN iii. 27. In VN xix Dante makes the distinction between women che sono gentile and those che non sono pure femmine, and this thought spurs him on to write the first canzone and most famous poem of the work, a poem in which the central conception of the Paradiso is already present, and after which the tone of the later work is more and more evident: Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore. In Purgatorio 24 another poet known to Dante, Bonagiunta of Lucca, refers admiringly to the poem. 28. See esp. VN 23–31. 29. Inferno 1.1, Paradise Lost 1.1. 30. At Inf. 16.128 it is la questa comedìa, at 21.2 la mia comedìa. By the end of Paradiso it has become lo sacrato poema (23.62) and il poema sacro (25.1), but still not divina. The full formal title was bestowed by later admirers. 31. Simoniacs traffic in relics and church offices; barrators are their opposite numbers in the secular state, buyers and sellers of public office. See Inf. 19–21. The carnal in their bufero infernale are at 5, the wrathful at 7, the thorns of the violent against self at 13, the thieves at 24, the traitors from 31 to 34. Dis, the City of Hell, is named at 8.68. 32. Ante-Purgatory ocupies Pur. 1–9, Purgatory proper 9–28, Eden 29–33. The theology examination is Par. 24–26. Dante’s great hymn to the Virgin Mary is at Par. 31.79–90, and the even greater prayer to her spoken by St Bernard, Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio, is at 33.1–39. The description of the Heavenly City and the Heavenly Host is at 30–32. 33. Inf. 1.63, Pur. 30.46, 49–51, 55. 34. See Par. 3 for Piccarda, 5.115–7.3 for Justinian, 8.31–9.4 for Charles Martel, 10.82–13.142 for the long and interrupted disquisition of St Thomas, and 31.59–33.50 for St Bernard, who leads Dante’s gaze gradually upward to its final vision. 35. The meeting with Arnaut is at 26.113–148. Dante actually inserts a passage in Provençal into the verse. 36. For Forese see 23.37–24.102; for Oderisi, 11.73–12.9. 37. The Francesca episode is at 5.79–142. 38. Farinata is at 10.22–121. 39. For Ulisse see 26.49–142. The passage quoted is 112–120; my trans. 40. See Pur. 1.1–3 (la navicella del mio ingegno), Par. 2.1–18 (mio legno). 41. Il maestro di color che sanno: Inf. 4.131. 42. tou eidenai oregontai phusei, where oregô connotes “stretching out for”, and eidenai both knowing and seeing (Met. 980a22). What we desire to know is being, the Metaphysics says, and the “being” of a thing is what it is to be that thing. See Chapter 3. 43. “ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”: “Ulysses”, 57, 70. The famous passage represents an abandonment of life, a hollow going forward towards nothing in particular and away from “the sceptre and the isle” (34) – see Haines 1992. 44. For the Ugolino episode and its setting see Inf. 32.1–33.90; his actual story is at 33.1–78. Satan or Lucifer with his dreadful mouthsful is at 33.28–69.

Notes

7

187

Renaissance, reformation and Shakespeare’s realism

1. Dante 1929, in Eliot, 227. 2. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the key figure of Italian Renaissance neoplatonism, was a scholar of and commentator on Plato and Plotinus as well as an Augustinian and Pauline priest. He was a powerful influence on Pico. Yates is an indispensable book on Ficino, Pico and the roots of Renaissance Neoplatonism in gnostic thought. The Utopia (1516) of Thomas More (1478–1535) is a Platonist political satire as distinguished as the Praise of Folly of his friend Erasmus (see below). Schmidt includes useful essays on the relationships between scholasticism and Aristotelianism on the one hand, and Neoplatonism and humanism on the other. The “new science” was that of Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo and Newton, the “new philosophy” that of Descartes, Hobbes and their heirs. 3. The Augustinian St Dominic (c. 1170–1221) and the less doctrinal St Francis (“of Assisi”: 1181–1226) founded the two poverty-based orders of mendicant friars bearing their names. 4. The Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532) of Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), a much-improved continuation of Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1496), recounts again the adventures in love and war of Roland and other legendary heroes of the Carolingian epoch. Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (written 1560s–1570s) is a romance about the First Crusade of 1095, strongly influenced by Ariosto’s poem – as is Spenser’s Faerie Queene (wr. 1580s–1590s). Lope de Vega (1562–1635), a Spanish poet and dramatist whose career was exactly contemporary with Shakespeare’s, wrote hundreds of swashbuckling quasi-historical plays. Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) was also Shakespeare’s contemporary; Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and 1615. François Rabelais (1494–1553) wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel in the 1530s, and the Essais of Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) were written in the 1570s and 1580s. 5. In addition to the main 1929 essay Eliot included shorter pieces on Dante in The Sacred Wood (1920) and To Criticize the Critic (1965). Apart from the brief “Hamlet and His Problems” (also in The Sacred Wood) and notwithstanding his influential essays on other Elizabethan dramatists Eliot wrote no more than brief asides about Shakespeare. 6. For texts see Bibiography. During the period of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) Machiavelli’s works were placed on the Catholic Church’s Index auctorum et librorum prohibitorum: but then so were a great many other apparently (to us) unobjectionable books, including Castiglione’s Courtier and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. The terms “a Machiavel” and “Machiavellian” appear in English from the 1570s onwards, including in the works of Greene, Nash, Marston, Jonson and Shakespeare. “Mine host of the Garter” asks “Am I politicke? Am I subtle? Am I a Machivell?” (Merry Wives of Windsor, 3.1.93–4); and Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III, promises to “set the murderous Machiavel to school” in 3 Henry VI, 3.2.193. But “we are much beholden to Machiavel and others”, wrote Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605), “that write what men do, and not what they ought to do”. The best and most representative of recent works on Machiavelli in English are Berlin 1979, Skinner 1981 and 1978 i and Strauss 1958 and 1987 (“Machiavelli”). Strauss is the one who sees Machiavelli as a teacher of evil, while Berlin is the pluralist and Skinner is the pragmatist. 7. The date of first publication was 1528, Castiglione having done the bulk of the writing between 1508 and 1516. The fourth and final book is the one concerned

188 Notes

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

with politics and the relation between the courtier and his prince. For references see 4.5–18: pp. 354–368 in Castiglione 1908, 284–296 in 1967. The definition of virtue is at 4.13. Cicero 1966. See esp. 2.1.1–2.10.38. Pico (1463–1494) 1942, 104, 106, 124. For Pico’s debts to Hermetism and Cabbalism see Yates, 84–116. References in this paragraph and the next, by book and chapter and by page in Machiavelli 1997, in order of occurrence, are as follows: 1.2 (23–25), 1.9 (45), 1.10 (47), 1.11 (50–53), 1.20 (73), 1.27 (82), 1.38 (105), 1.55 (134–135), 1.58 (142–143), 2.Pref. (150–151), 2.1 (152–154), 2.2 (152–158), 3.1 (249), 3.9 (281–282), 3.21 (307), 3.31 (328), 3.33 (332–333), 3.41 (350), 3.43 (351–352), 3.46 (355–356). References in this paragraph and the next, by chapter and page in Machiavelli 1988, are as follows: 3 (8, 9), 5 (18–19), 6 (19–20), 8 (31, 33), 9 (34), 11 (40), 12 (43), 13 (51), 14 (51–52), 15 (54–55), 16 (56–57), 17 (59–60), 18 (61–63: mantenere lo stato), 19 (63–64, 68), 20 (75), 21 (77), 23 (81), 24 (84), 25 (84–87). Augustine 1993, xii, 19, 24–25, 84. Pelagius (c. 350–425) was an influential figure in Rome in the early fifth century; De lib. dates from 415. He regarded Augustine’s doctrine of grace as Manichaean determinism, as in Conf. 10.29: da quod iubes et iube quod vis; “give what you command and command what you will”. See Grossi. Desiderius Erasmus (1469?–1536) was twice as prolific as Aquinas. The works referred to here are: Antibarbari (“Against the Barbarians”), a Platonic dialogue defending the classics and attacking scholastic theology, written in 1492–1494 but published only in 1520; Adagia (“Adages”), a hugely influential collection of Greek and Roman proverbs and sayings culled from secular literature, a kind of handbook of ancient culture, first printed in 1500 and then greatly enlarged in 1508; Colloquia, expanded from a 1498 guide to Latin style and first published in 1519; Enchiridion Militis Christiani (“The Handbook of the Christian Soldier”), written 1501, published 1503; Moriae Encomium (“The Praise of Folly”), 1511; Institutio principis christiani (“On the Education of a Christian Prince”), written 1515, published 1516; Novum instrumentum (the New Testament in Greek and Latin), 1516; and De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio (“Disputation on Free Choice”), 1524. The definition of free choice in De lib. as vim humanae voluntatis, qua se possit homo applicare ad ea quae perducunt ad aeternam salutem, aut ad iisdem avertere, is to be found in Erasmus, 9.1220–1221. The work is not available in English, but there is a translation into French by Pierre Mesnard, Alger, 1945. McConica is useful, and Faludy contains useful summaries of the major works. According to Loyola (1491–1556) “man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul . . . it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will, choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created”; we must feel the “interior sense of pain which the damned suffer”; man is a “soul imprisoned in a corruptible body”; “I so lower and humble myself . . . that in everything I obey the law of God”: Loyola, 23, 47, 65, 165. The works of Luther (1483–1546) referred to below are the Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, usually known as the Ninety-Five Theses, supposed to have been posted on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517; and De Servo Arbitrio (“On the Subject Will” or “The Bondage of the Will”), written and published in 1525. For the former see Luther 1962, 490 (Jesus “called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence . . . the word cannot properly be

Notes

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

189

understood as referring to the sacrament of penance”: Theses 1 and 2). For the latter and for references below see Luther 1957, 71, 73, 74, 78–82, 87, 99–106, 109, 114, 121, 125, 128, 131–133, 137–142, 147–148, 164, 167, 183–184, 188, 203, 216–217, 220, 222–223, 228, 235–238, 259–262, 267–269, 271, 275, 280–283, 287–290, 292–307, 313–319. For Latin text see Luther 1929, iii 94–293. The definition of free choice as vim qua homo aptus est, etc., is at 105 in 1957 and 127 in 1929. Chadwick and Elton offer concise introductions to this subject. Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543), the founder of modern astronomy, found the cosmological hypotheses of early Greek natural science, and especially of Pythagoras, more satisfactory than that of Ptolemy (c. 90–168), which scholasticism (and Dante) had adopted. From the model of one central sun in a single bounded system to that of many in an unbounded one is a much shorter step than the one Copernicus took, from an earth-centred, God-bounded universe to a non-earthcentred one with no clear boundary. Richard Hooker (1554?–1600), Anglican theologian, author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity; John Donne (1573–1631), poet and divine, Dean of St Paul’s. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577) provided material for Shakespeare’s history plays and several of his tragedies. He also used Samuel Daniel’s Civil Warres (1595) for the histories, and popular versions in English of stories by Ariosto, Boccaccio and others for a number of the comedies and some tragedies. He also drew on plays by older contemporaries, especially Christopher Marlowe. See Antony and Cleopatra 1.1.33–44, 1.4.26, 2.2.239–240, 3.7.69, 4.6.5, 4.8.17–18, 4.14.53–54, 4.15.67–68. Plutarch (50–120) was both a moral philosopher and the first true biographer, a writer of lives (bioi) as independent subjects of study rather than as incidental phenomena in a broader historical narrative, and as studies in character rather than incident. The subjects of his Parallel Lives were famous Roman and Greek soldiers and statesman, arranged in pairs. The translation of the work into French (1559) by Jacques Amyot had an incalculable impact on French thought and manners. Montaigne and Rousseau were both deeply influenced by it, and it was regarded as exemplary by the leading spirits of the French Revolution. North’s translation of Amyot first appeared in 1579; Shakespeare probably used the second edition of 1595. The dating of the play to 1608–1609 is not entirely beyond doubt but it represents the modern scholarly consensus. See Discourses 1.3–4, and above, Chapter 2, n. 3. The text of North’s Plutarch used here (1579 with some 1595, 1603 and 1612 readings) is printed as an appendix to Shakespeare 1990. For quotations and paraphrases above see 313–317, 322–327, 333–335, 338, 342–345. 318–320, 328–332, 335–341, 348–353, 359–363, 367–368. King James published his True Law of Free Monarchies in 1603; Parliament replied with the Apology of the House of Commons, touching their Privileges in 1604. The Earl of Essex campaigned in Ireland and Sir Walter Raleigh advocated war with Spain; there were mutinies in the army. The Midland Uprising of 1607–1608 followed upon poor harvests and steep increases in food prices. See Parker’s introduction in Shakespeare 1994, 33–43. Both quoted in Brockman: 26, 31. The pairing here is rather unfair to Hazlitt, who generally tries to defend poetry as a distinctive mode of thought. The edition used here is Parker’s (Shakespeare 1994). Three of the essays in Brockman are reassuringly congenial with what is said here: those by Una Ellis-Fermor,

190 Notes A. P. Rossiter and Reuben A. Brower. Poole is an excellent reading. Cavell 1987 offers some valuable insights into the play’s attitude to language. A. C. Bradley says of this play that Shakespeare limited himself by his choice of hero, and “closed the door on certain effects, in the absence of which his whole power in tragedy could not be displayed” (1912, quoted in Brockman, 54). What Bradley may have been sensing was that what could not be displayed with this play was his own power in criticism. 29. In this account of the play the usual act-scene-line references have been omitted, on the grounds that those who know the play will not need them while those who do not will not want them; and also to avoid the broken and distracting appearance of a text spattered with parentheses or footnotes. The quotations and paraphrases broadly follow the play’s own order of events. 30. Except for the carbuncle these quotations are from 2.2.80–120.

8

Romanticism from Descartes to Rousseau

1. See Galilei (1564–1642) 1970, 51, 64 and 1957, 196–199; and Seeger, 272. For Einstein see Galilei 1953, xviii–xix. Kuhn’s was an epochal work on Copernicus and his successors. 2. Descartes went to some trouble to dissociate himself from Democritean atomism itself. See e.g. Principles, cci–ccii, in Descartes 1969. 3. What follows is the gist of the four principal philosophical treatises of Descartes (1596–1650): Discourse on the Method (pub. 1637), written in French, a langue vulgaire, as part of an attempt to break the tyranny of Latin scholasticism over the raison naturelle toute pure, independent of all language; Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), his masterpiece, a kind of philosophical monodrama of the soul; The Principles of Philosophy (1644), like the Meditations published in Latin but translated soon after into a French version endorsed by Descartes; and The Passions of the Soul (1649), his last published work, also written in French. See Descartes 1991, 104, 128; 1992, 76, 80, 140, 170, 184; 1996, 110, 121; and 1969, i 101, 104, 110, 118 (Discourse), 148, 150–157, 164–165, 170–171, 174–176, 181, 183, 185, 189–192, 198–199 (Meditations), 221–222, 224–225, 232–234, 249, 255–256, 289–291, 294–295, 297 (Principles), 331–333, 339–341, 343–347, 350, 352–354, 357–358, 361–364, 366, 391–392, 398–399 (Passions). In Cottingham 1992 see especially Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, “Descartes’ life and the development of his philosophy”; Roger Ariew, “Descartes and scholasticism”; Peter Markie, “The Cogito and its importance”; and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Descartes on thinking with the body”. 4. For pilote en son navire or ut nauta adest navigio on the one hand, and conjoint, confondu, unie, coniunctum, permixtum on the other, see Descartes 1969, 128, 190–191. 5. Hobbes (1588–1679) came late to philosophy. He drafted in the early 1640s, while living as a monarchist exile in Paris, a number of works (esp. De Cive, 1642, and the Elements of Law, 1650) anticipating and complementing the thought of Leviathan, Or, The Matter, Forme & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, also written in the 1640s, and published in 1651. The reading here is principally of Parts I and II (the metaphysics, epistemology and politics); Parts III and IV are on religion and were even more controversial. See Hobbes 28, 30, 36, 44, 47, 70, 89, 111, 120. See also Hobbes’s Objections to Descartes’ Meditations, in Descartes 1969, ii, 60–78. Two useful surveys, besides the one in Tuck’s “Introduction”, are Hampsher-Monk, 1–67, and Laurence Berns, “Thomas Hobbes”, in Strauss and Cropsey 396–420. Michael Oakeshott’s “Introduction” to his 1946 ed. of Leviathan,

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reprinted in Oakeshott 1962, 221–294, is itself a classic of political philosophy. The story about Euclid is from John Aubrey’s Brief Lives (pub. 1813), quoted in Hampsher-Monk, 8. 6. The De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625) of the Dutchman Huig de Groot or Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and the less seminal but more widely read De jure naturae et gentium (On the Law of Nature and Nations, 1672) of the German Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1688) were the two principal seventeenth century treatises on natural and international law. They lacked Hobbes’s vernacular originality and wit, but they supported enormous thorough systems on their relatively flimsy conceptual and moral bases. For the extracts used here and for other material and commentary see Schneewind 1990, i, 21–2, 88–110 and 156–182. See also Pufendorf xiv–xliii. 7. Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch Jew of Portuguese extraction who earned his living as a lens-grinder; Leibniz (1646–1716) was a Protestant German from a distinguished academic family. Cottingham 1988 offers a general account of the three principal rationalist philosophies. See also Part One (“Rationalism”) in Scruton 1984. On Leibniz see the editorial introductions in Leibniz 1902, 1973, 1982. The text and trans. used here is Monadology (1714, original in French), Leibniz’s own summary of his system, in 1973, 179–194. See esp. paragraphs 7, 11, 14, 15, 28–34, 38–41, 53, 56 (the “living mirror”), 70, 85, 85–90. For God the geometer see A Specimen of Discoveries (c. 1686), 1973, 76n. Spinoza’s Ethics was written in Latin, mid-1660s to mid-1670s, pub. 1677; the key passages used here, from the trans. in Spinoza 1955, cited by Part and Proposition (with Proof), and with Preface, Corollary, Note, Definition and Appendix as applicable, are: 1.14 and Cor. I and II, 1.15 and N., 1.18, 1.20, 1.29, 1.31, 1.32 and Cor. I and II., 1.33 and N. I and II, 2 Def. IV, 2.22.7 and N., 2.11–13, 2.23, 2.26, 2.28, 2.34–35, 2.40N.II, 2.48–9, 3 Pref. and Def.II–III, 3.1 and Cor., 3.2 and N., 3.3, 3.6–7, 3.9N., 3.11N., 3.39N., 3.56 and N., 3.57 and N., 3.59 and N., 3 “Definitions of the Emotions” I–III, 3 “General Definition of the Emotions”, 4 Pref., 44 Def. I–II, 4.8, 4.18N., 4.20–21, 4.24, 4.26, 4.28, 4.37N.II, 4.57N., 4.59, 4 App. IV, 5 Pref., 5.3, 5.4N., 5.10, 5.20N., 5.25, 5.30, 5.36 and Cor., 5.40, 5.42. Scruton 1986 is a clear brief introduction to the philosopher; Hampshire’s account is fuller and more intricate. Garrett has helpful essays, particularly his own. 8. Locke (1632–1704) was first physician and then political adviser to the first Earl of Shaftesbury, chief founder of the Whig or “exclusionist” party. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, though first published in 1690, were chiefly written before the 1688 Revolution and were thus revolutionary in intent, written in direct confutation of the key contemporary text of absolutist Toryism, Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680). The Essay was only published in 1689. For the account that follows see Locke 1987: 1.1.1, 1.1.7, 1.2.15, 2.1.2–4, 2.1.23, 2.3.1, 2.7.2, 2.11.17, 2.19.1, 2.23.29, 3.4.11, 4.9.2, 4.11.1–3 (light entering the mind’s eye, sensation and reflection, knowledge); 1.1.8, 1.4.20, 2.2.2, 2.6.2, 2.8.1, 2.8.7–15, 2.9.1–2, 2.19.1–2, 2.23.1, 2.23.11, 2.23.29, 2.30.1–4, 3.3.15–17, 3.4.10–14, 3.6.6, 3.6.9, 4.1.2, 4.2.1–3, 4.2.15, 4.3.21, 4.3.25, 4.4.3, 4.9.2 (ideas, perception, primary and secondary qualities, particulate matter, bodies); 1.2.23, 2.9.9, 2.13.27, 2.18.7, 3.1.1–5, 3.2.1, 3.2.4, 3.2.8, 3.3.12, 3.4.10–14, 3.5.8, 3.6.8, 3.10.1–2, 3.10.18, 4.4.9 (names, words); 1.3.4, 1.3.14, 1.3.21, 2.21 passim (understanding, willing and choosing, freedom); 1.4.17, 2.7.2, 2.20.1–18, 2.21 passim, 2.23.34, 2.28.5–15, 3.11.16–17, 4.3.18–20, 4.4.7, 4.4.9, 4.10 passim, 4.12.8, 4.12.11 (passions, desire, pleasure and pain, happiness, the good, virtue, morality, God); 2.27 passim (the person, identity): and An Essay

192 Notes

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government (the second, and incomparably the more influential and important, of the two treatises), in Locke 1988, §§4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 61, 95, 164 (state of nature), 16, 19, 20, 21, 138, 149, 155, 168, 171, 176, 242 (state of war, rebellion), 22–4, 27, 28, 31–40, 45, 58, 61, 85, 123–124, 222 (will, property, God, labour theory of value), 74–76, 105, 107–112, 119, 171 (express and tacit consent, apparent naturalness of patriarchal principle), 87, 89–90, 94–99, 122, 131, 135, 138, 149, 175, 221, 223–227 (civil society, majority rule, legislature). Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652); Richard Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants (1646); James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). Giovanni Battista Vico (1668–1744) spent his life in Naples as an unsuccessful academic. The Counter-Reformation and the New Philosophy were the principal intellectual influences in the city at the time, the repressive activities of the Inquisition conflicting with the eager reception afforded to the new ideas. Vico’s Autobiografia (1725), a vernacular account of his own “development as a man of letters”, is the first work to be given that title. Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) was one of the great humanist translator-commentators and perhaps the greatest philologist of the half-century after Petrarch. Galileo’s Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche interno à due nuove scienze (mechanics and dynamics) was first published in 1638. Useful introductory material is to be found in Vico 1944, 1984, 1988 and in Burke. Berlin 1976 is now a classic. Eugenio Garin’s “Vico and the Heritage of Renaissance Thought” is one several helpful essays in Tagliacozzo. In De Cive (1642), De Corpore (1655) and, most fully, the dedication to “Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematicks” (1656). Vico seems to have drawn the title of De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia from Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum (On the Wisdom of the Ancients), 1609. The English text used here is Vico 1988. Key passages used in the summary above are 45–47, 51–52, 65 (verum / factum), 55–56, 61n (conscientia / scientia), 56 (mens / corpus), 65, 103 (demonstration, externality of physics), 91 (mind cannot know itself, shows itself in the act of thinking). For Latin text see Vico 1972, vol. 1. Vico 1984 was first published in 1725, although the drastically revised third edition of 1744 is the one generally used today. The title recalls Galileo (see above); both title and aphoristic/axiomatic structure also owe much to Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620). Italian text is Vico 1953. The work appears in numbered paragraphs or axioms, cited or paraphrased in my account as follows: 6, 34, 187, 209, 219, 375–376, 384, 429, 431, 456, 460, 808, 816, 819, 821 (poetry, first wisdom, first poets, master key, imaginative universals, passion vs. reason, corporeal imagination); 132, 342, 629–630, 707, 1108, 1111 (divine providence produces virtues out of vices); 136 (free choice and providence); 138–140 (philology and philosophy, the certain and the true, coscienza and scienza); 141–145 (common sense and choice, substantial unity); 147–148 (nascimento); 163, 499 (Baconian induction); 237, 240 (etymology, words “carried over from bodies” to signify mental and spiritual things, acorn / law); 245, 393 (storia ideal eterna); 310, 313, 394, 1109 (Grotius); 331 (the New Science version of the verum / factum: we made civil society so can know it); 333 (religion, marriage and burial: three rites common to all races); 338–350, 504, 689, 696, 1098 (bestial origins of society, conatus); 342 (“rational civil theology”); 363 (“nothing in intellect unless first in sense”); 342, 1107 (great city of the human race); 381, 447 (Jove the first character); 398 (ius/Jove); 404–405, 444 (metaphor); 414 (Solon); 503, 852 (religion, homeros as “binding”); 693 (sum: being as eating); 780–914 (Book 3, “Discovery of the True

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Homer”: the thesis that “Homer” was the whole Greek people); 809 (Achilles as valour, Ulysses as wisdom); 905–1096 (Books 4 and 5: the corsi and ricorsi, three kinds of nature, law, government, era etc.); 973 (law of rational humanity, our true and proper nature); 1037 (Roman law “a serious poem”); 1097–1112 (summary of evolutionary pattern of all societies). 14. The references are to Hegel’s Die Vernunft in Geschichte (“Reason in History”), 1955 (lectures written in the 1820s), quoted in Taylor 1975, 392; Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (Raphael ii 244) and Wealth of Nations IV ii; and Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), The Fable of the Bees (1705, 1725: “Thus every part was full of vice / Yet the whole mass a paradise”), Schneewind 1990, ii, 388ff. 15. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a Jansenist (i.e. quasi-Calvinist, reforming Catholic) mathematician and theologian whose brilliant anonymous polemic against the Jesuits in Lettres provinciales (1657) anticipated Voltaire and the Enlightenment. The pensées referred to above, in the widely used Brunschvicg numbering, are nos 60, 127, 139, 143, 274, 277–278, 282, 323 (qu’est-ce que le moi?, le coeur a ses raisons), 347 (L’homme n’est qu’un roseau . . . mais c’est un roseau pensant), 413, 469 (le moi consiste dans ma pensée), 527, 543, 547, 549, 556 (contra Deism, grace of God in Christ). A good English edition is Pascal 1995: a French, 1960. 16. A good translated selection is Bayle (1647–1706) 1965. The principal edition is Bayle 1740; for the passages used above see III 735, IV 641 (l’Autorité suprême de Dieu), 644–646: these are from articles on Pyrrhonism, the ancient sceptical tradition revived, especially in Montaigne and Descartes, by the rediscovery and translation into Latin of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century. The Dictionnaire Philosophique of François-Marie Arouet, who renamed himself Voltaire (1694–1778), was published in 1764. The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonnée des arts et des métiers, based originally on Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728), was published in 35 volumes, edited from 1751–1757 (1–7) by Diderot and Jean d’Alembert and thereafter (to 1780) by Diderot alone, with contributions from many other philosophes. The short often moralising conte philosophique was a highly successful literary genre in eighteenth-century century France. Candide, the most brilliant example of the genre and the most enduring piece of all Voltaire’s vast corpus, appeared in 1759, as did Dr Johnson’s corresponding Rasselas. Voltaire’s non-fictional attacks on Pascal and Leibniz were in Tout est bien, an entry in the Dictionnaire, and Sur les Pensées de M. Pascal, the twenty-fifth and last of his Lettres philosophiques (1733). Denis Diderot (1713–1784) was dramatist, theorist and novelist as well as encyclopaedist. Specific references above are to Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773) and Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757), in Diderot 1875, vii, 19, 184, viii, 393. The lachrymose comedy (comédie larmoyante) Le Fils naturel, with its melancholy hero transfigured by virtue, appeared in 1757, Goethe’s Werther in 1774, Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling in 1771. Le Père de famille (1758), La Réligieuse (“The Nun”, written 1760), Le Neveu de Rameau (“Rameau’s Nephew”, written 1761), Le rêve de d’Alembert (“d’Alembert’s Dream”, 1769), Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1773–1774), and Jacques le fataliste (“Jacques the Fatalist”, written 1755–1784) reflect the various views outlined above; there are Penguin translations of the works in inverted commas. Where dates of writing are given the works were published posthumously in 1796. Antoine-François Prévost’s masterpiece, Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, published in 1731, is arguably the greatest French literary success of the age, and is still the most reprinted French novel. The now more famous novels by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and

194 Notes

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de Sade (who subtitled his les Malheurs de la Vertu) were published in 1782 and 1791 respectively. Vauvenargues (1715–1747), Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain, 1746, with Réflexions et Maximes, 1747: Vauvenargues 1981, 83–84, 195–196, 200–201. Condillac (1715–1780), Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), Traité des Sensations (1754): see Condillac 2001, 90, 96–98, 115; 1930, 4, 12, 44–45, 59, 75, 82, 86–89, 106, 114, 236; 1947, 47–48, 51–52, 61, 225, 227, 239, 243–245, 251, 254, 256–257, 263–264, 267, 313 (Essai 1.4.26, 1.5.9–11, 2.1.4; Traité 1.2.1, 1.2.22, 1.6.3, 1.7.2, 1.11.1, 2.1.3, 2.4.3, 2.5.3–8, 2.8.14, 2.8.33, 4.9.1). Helvétius (1715–1771) 1968, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.6, 2.13, 3.4, 3.9 (77, 96–102, 126ff.); 1970, 7, 38, 41n, 63, 102–103, 213, 248–251; 1994, 2.7, 4.4, 4.22, Récapitulation Chapter 2 (i, 102ff., 237–239, 298–300, ii, 377); 1969, i, 124ff., 288–290, 360–362, ii, 476–477. La Mettrie (1709–1751) published L’Homme Machine in 1747: see La Mettrie 1996, 3–39; 1970, 275–356. Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) published his notorious work in 1770; see Holbach 1966, Chapter 4, i 196–197; 1889, 78–79. Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808): Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme, 1802. Whichcote (1609–1683) is quoted in Schneewind 1990, i, 276 and Copleston 1985, v 55. Quotations from Cudworth (1617–1688) are from his Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (pub. 1731), 1.1–1.2, and Treatise of Freewill (pub. 1838), X: see Raphael, i, 106, 132. For Cumberland (1631–1718) see De Legibus Naturae (1672), title page and 1.4: Schneewind 1990, i, 138; Raphael, i, 83–84. Quotations in this paragraph from several works in Shaftesbury (1671–1713) 1999. The major work is An Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1699); the others cited are A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), The Moralists and Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), and Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author (1710). See 25, 27, 54–56, 62, 65, 124, 133, 135, 137, 151, 167, 169–178, 181–182, 189, 192–197, 200, 202, 209, 211, 230, 298, 303–304, 308, 315–317, 320, 415. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), of Irish Presbyterian stock, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, published An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in 1725 and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense in 1728. For quotations see Hutcheson, 4, 5, 10, 35–36, 72, 88, 90, 91. Selections from Richard Price (1723–1791), A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (1758) and Thomas Reid (1710–1796), Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788), are to be found in both Raphael and Schneewind 1990. For quotations see Raphael, ii, 132, 142, 162, 189, 196, 268, 272, 274, 275, 282. Reid’s “common sense” was a progenitor of the still-flourishing American school of philosophical pragmatism. Adam Smith (1723–1790), Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow and a close friend of Hume, published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. Quotations are from the Theory in Raphael (Schneewind 1990 has no Smith selections), ii, 202–204, 210, 214, 216, 226–245, 248, 252. Smith uses the famous phrase again in Wealth of Nations IV ii. Disappointed by the failure of his first sustained literary effort, the three-part Treatise (1739–1740), David Hume (1711–1776) reworked it into two Enquiries: Into the Human Understanding (1748) and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751); and a Dissertation on the Passions (1757). Hume was a highly successful historian and essayist as well as a great philosopher; he called the second Enquiry “of all my

Notes

195

writings incomparably the best” (My Own Life, 1776: Hume 1974, 611). Page references marked T are to 1978; those marked E are to 1975. Kemp-Smith is a helpful commentary; there are some good recent essays in Read and Richman. 25. T 1–13, 19, 85, 103, 118, 179, 183, 185, 275–277, 283–284, 296, 413–418, 472, 583, 662. Hume thought the principle of association was his greatest contribution to philosophy (661–662). 26. T 16, 66–68, 73–94, 155–172, 187–190, 197–199, 201, 205–211, 215–217, 220, 222–223, 250–256, 259–262, 399–400, 405–406, 634–636; E 82–83, 92–95, 97. Some might see George Berkeley (1685–1753), not Hume, as the original realist philosopher of the age. His arguments against illusory philosophical entities precede and resemble Hume’s. That “the things I see . . . do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance”. “The general idea of being appeareth to me the most abstract and incomprehensible of all”. To say that something exists means that we perceive it, but this does not mean that it does not exist. But Bishop Berkeley goes on to argue that perception “inheres in” something called Spirit, and ultimately in the mind of God, instead. See Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), in Berkeley, 89–102, 219–224. 27. The Treatise treats sympathy as the basic principle of moral sentiment; the Enquiry tends to regard benevolence (a variant of sympathy) and utility in combination, as given phenomena. T 457, 468–470, 473, 475, 481, 483, 490–493, 516–517, 524, 533, 535, 537, 545–546, 550–555, 574–579, 583–591, 618–619; E 173–174, 179–181, 183, 188–191, 194–195, 201, 214–215, 218–221, 225–227, 230–231, 233, 235, 242–243, 257–258, 260, 268, 271–278, 286, 289, 298, 301. 28. For Hume on religion see for example the chapter “Of Miracles”, E 109–131. His History of England appeared from 1754 to 1762. 29. Chacun regarde devant soi; moi, je regarde dedans moi: Montaigne, ii, 418. Samuel Richardson’s epistolary Clarissa (1747–1748), the 1500-page story of a young woman betrayed, imprisoned, raped and harried to death by an obsessed rake, made as deep an impression in France and on Rousseau as Prévost. The heroine’s “virtue” is identical with her chastity, her very self; the interest lies in its testing, via superfine recapitulations of feeling, to a long-deferred destruction: and in the lachrymose aftermath. Rousseau read and re-read Plutarch all his life, the Moralia perhaps more than the Lives; see the fourth of the Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire, i, 1024 in Rousseau 1956–1959 (all references hereinafter are to this edn, unless otherwise indicated; translations mine). In Robinson Crusoe (1719; Defoe, 113, 128) the hero realises that he can be “happy in this forsaken solitary condition . . . remov’d from all the Wickednesse of the World” at the moment when he opens the Book to the words “ ‘I will never never leave thee, nor forsake thee’ ”. His salvation is in God, not the wilderness. Rousseau (hearing the echo of Crusoe’s name in his own?) sees the wilderness as God. He tells the story of the illumination de Vincennes in the first of the Lettres à Malesherbes and in Book 8 of the Confessions (i, 351, 1135–1136). English versions of most of Rousseau’s major texts (not Julie) are available in Penguin. Jimack, Williams 1984, Howells and France are good introductions to four texts. Wokler is a helpful general introduction. Rousseau 1988 includes good commentaries. Grimsley is still very helpful. 30. References to the first and second Discours, Sur les sciences et les arts (1750) and Sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755): iii, 7, 9–16, 20–23,

196 Notes

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

25, 132–133, 135–139, 142, 145, 154 and n. XV, 155–156, 162, 164–178, 193. For the poetic and passional origins of language, and its reasoning and literal maturity, see Rousseau 1993, 61–64. References to the third Discours, Sur l’économie politique (1755), and Du contrat social; ou, principes du droit politique (1762): iii, 242–251, 258–261, 352, 356–357, 359–365, 368–369, 371–375, 381–383 (the lawgiver passage cited in next paragraph), 432–433, 438, 440–441, 468–469. References to Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Christophe Martin Wieland’s Agathon (1765–1766; Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, 1795–1796, is the classic bildungsroman), the conclusion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) and Émile, ou de l’éducation (1762), iv, 249, 263, 322, 325–326, 328–329, 362, 445, 455–456, 468–469, 482–483, 492–493, 505–506, 523–524, 530, 540, 547, 570–571, 576–586, 592–601, 605–607, 610, 625–627, 656–657, 663, 692–701, 710, 719–720, 734, 736–737, 743, 750, 759, 765, 768–769, 776, 812–813, 821, 863. Confessions Bk. 9 (i, 427–8); Julie i 55 (ii, 147). The novel went through 72 French editions between 1761 and 1800, a dozen more in English (even Candide had only managed 50 by the Revolution). The only complete English translation, long out of print, is Kenrick’s eccentric one done in the year of publication (Rousseau 1803). 1987 is an abridged trans. (see p. 2). References to the novel are by part (there are six) and letter, as well as (parantheses) by page in Oeuvres (Rousseau 1956–1959). “Seconde préface” (15–17); i, 1 (33), 2 (36), 3 (37), 4 (39), 5 (41), 7 (61), 9 (51), 20 (72), 29 (96), 31 (101), 32 (102), 35 (109–110), 50 (138), 53 (176), 55 (148); ii, 6 (176), 11 (223n), 17 (249–250), 21 (277); iii, 3 (312), 18 (364), 19 (369). Rousseau justifies the novel in Confessions Bk. 9, i, 435–436 (405–406), and criticises Richardson in Bk. 11, i, 546–547 (505) (see n. 41). iii, 3 (312), 11 (326), 18 (354–355, 357, 359–360), 20 (372–374 et passim); iv, 6 (424), 12 (491, 495), 15 (513), 17 (518–521); v, 5 (591); vi, 6 (664), 8 (693–695), 12 (740–741). References to Confessions (written 1765–1770) by book (there are 12) and page number in Oeuvres, i, and also (parentheses) by page in 1953: prefatory note, 3 (not in Cohen); i, 5, 14 (17, 24); ii, 59 (65); iv, 175 (169); v, 222 (213); vii, 278 (262); ix, 406, 480 (379, 446); x, 516–517 (478–479). For Rousseau, juge de JeanJaques: Dialogues (1772–1776) see i, 657–992; for Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (1776–1778) see i, 993–1099; quotation 1094. All three works were published posthumously. vii, 279 (263); viii, 385 (359); x, 492 (456); xii, 589, 591 (544–545). i, 8, 41 (19–20, 48); iii, 108 (108); iv, 162 (158); v, 172 (167); vi, 236 (225). i, 19–20 (29–30); iv, 164 (159); ix, 416 (387–388). i, 32, 34 (41, 43); ii, 86–87 (88–89); iii, 129 (127–128); vii, 344–345, 356–357 (322, 332–333); xi, 558 (516); xii, 594 (549). i, 15, 27–28 (25–26, 36–37); ii, 49–52, 76–77 (56–58, 79–80); iv, 138–139 (136); v, 197, 219 (189, 210); vi, 225, 253 (215, 241); vii, 320–322, 331–332 (300–302, 310–311); viii, 353 (330); ix, 413–414, 426, 431, 439–440, 443–444 (385, 396, 402, 408, 410, 413).

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Index

Abelard, Peter, xii, 73–5, 79, 90, 91, 115, 132, 182 Historia Calamitatum, 74–5, 91, 182 Aeschylus, 17, 21, 24 Aland, Kurt, 181 Alexander, Michael, 184, 185 Alfred, King, 90, 184 Amyot, Jacques, 189 Andrew, Malcolm, 183 Anouilh, Jean, 177 Anscombe, G. E. M., 176, 182 Aquinas, Thomas, St, xii, 72, 75–83, 87, 93, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 132, 137, 139, 142, 155, 182–3 Summa Theologiae, 76–83, 182–3; being and the soul, 76–8; God in, 82; love in, 81–2; moral philosophy, 78–82; self in, 83; virtues in, 81; will in, 78–80, 115, 142 Ariew, Roger, 190 Ariosto, Ludovico, 97, 185, 187, 189 Aristotle, x, xii, 16, 32, 42–52, 67, 71, 72, 75, 79, 81, 82, 84, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 131–2, 138, 148, 176, 177, 178, 179–80, 181, 183, 186, 187 ethics, 45–7, 179 logic and natural science, 42–4, 179 poetics, 50–1, 180 politics, 47–9, 179–80 soul and thought, 42–5, 179 Armstrong, A. H., 182 Aubrey, John, 191 Auerbach, Eric, xi Augustine, St, xii, xiii, 38, 53–5, 56, 57, 58–60, 62, 64–70, 75, 82, 86, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 108, 109, 110, 113, 115, 119, 131, 133, 137, 142, 144, 147, 150, 151, 157, 159, 163, 164, 165, 171, 180–2, 187, 188 City of God, 58–9, 181 Confessions, xii, xiii, 53–5, 64–70, 73, 98, 180–2; conscience in, 66;

language in, 65–6, 73; love in, 53, 66–7, 70; will in, 68–9, 115 Austen, Jane, 124, 163 Bacon, Francis, 83, 105, 109, 133, 135, 140, 147, 149, 187, 192 Barnes, Jonathan, 178, 179 Barolini, Teodolinda, 185 Barrett, C. K., 181 Bayle, Pierre, 151, 156, 193 Bede, the Venerable, 90, 184 Bédier, Joseph, 185 Being, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 54, 59, 61, 63, 64, 68, 69, 76–7, 82, 98, 101, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 131, 133, 134, 135, 140, 146, 154, 163, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170 see also God(s), faith, religious sense Bentham, Jeremy, 36, 155, 158 Beowulf, xii, 12, 90–1, 93, 107–8, 132, 184, 185 Berkeley, George, 195 Berlin, Isaiah, 187, 192 Berns, Laurence, 190 Bible, The, 35, 54, 59, 60–4, 65, 68, 69, 70, 84, 93, 98, 99, 102, 103, 119, 131, 137, 144–5, 146, 155, 164, 181, 184–5 Genesis, 60 Gospel of St John, 60 Psalms, 60, 68, 70, 84, 98 see also Mark, St; Paul, St Blake, William, 144 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 85, 108, 109, 184, 185, 189 Boethius, xii, 37, 72–3, 90, 182 Consolation of Philosophy, 72–3, 182 Boiardo, Matteo, 187 Boitani, Piero, 183 Bowra, C. M., 177 Bradley, A. C., 190 Brecht, Bertold, 177 Brockman, B. A., 189, 190 Brower, Reuben A., 190 205

206 Index Browne, Thomas, 145 Bunyan, John, 97, 185 Burgess, Glyn, 185 Burke, Edmund, 158 Burke, Peter, 192 Byron, Lord, xiii, 12 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 12 Cabanis, Pierre, 153, 154, 194 Cædmon, 90, 184 Cairns, Huntington, 178 Calvin, John, 83, 118, 155, 163, 165, 166 Carroll, Robert, 181 Castiglione, Baldesar, 32, 110–11, 112, 132, 187, 188 The Courtier, 110–11 Cavalcanti, Guido, 100, 108, 186 Cavell, Stanley, x, 190 Cervantes, Miguel de, 109, 118, 187 Chadwick, Owen, 181, 189 Chambers, Ephraim, 193 Chanson de Roland, see “Song of Roland” Chaucer, Geoffrey, xii, 84–9, 90, 95, 97, 99, 103, 108, 109, 132, 183–4 The Clerk’s Tale, 88–9, 184 The Wife of Bath’s Tale, xii, 86–8, 184; love in, 86 Chrétien de Troyes, xii, xiii, 94–6, 97, 104, 125, 185 Erec et Enide, 95 Le Chevalier de la Charette, 95–6, 104 Cicero, 59, 60, 67, 111, 115, 116, 119, 131, 138, 180, 181, 188 De Officiis, 111 Clark, Gillian, 181 Coleridge, S. T., 121, 177 concept(s), x, xiii, 4, 7, 10, 14, 15, 18, 23, 25–8, 29, 30, 31, 32–8, 40, 41–5, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 57, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 75–6, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 93, 95, 96, 97–8, 98, 100, 103, 105, 108, 111, 113, 114, 116, 121, 123, 131–2, 133, 136, 137–9, 140, 143, 148, 154, 167, 171, 175 in Abelard, 73 in Antigone, 18, 23, 57, 131 in Aquinas, 71, 75–6, 78, 79 Aristotelian, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47 as absolutes, 42, 71 as metaphors, 23, 28, 148

as signifiers, 137 as souls, 64, 93, 98, 108 as symbols, 23, 42 Augustinian, 54, 57, 67, 68, 71, 75 Cartesian, 133–5 causes as, 45 in Chrétien, 95, 96 clarificatory, 36, 42, 75–6 confrontational, 26–7, 97 in Coriolanus, 121 in Dante, 98, 100, 103 dissociated, 32, 140 dissolving, 29, 31 dogmatic, 23, 93 enacted, 50 functioning, 15 God as, 54, 171 Homeric, 4, 10, 15, 131 and humanism, 33 hypostasised, 38, 44, 76, 83, 136 intellective, 15 in Leibniz, 138 and lives, 15, 33, 38, 46, 47, 63, 71, 97–8, 116, 132, 167, 175 in Locke, 143 Machiavellian, 113–14 moral, x, 7, 33, 35, 97 nuclear, 167, 171 passional, 7, 50–1, 80, 114 Platonic, 37, 41–5, 49, 51, 57, 68, 131 rationalist, 152 realised, 4 romantic, 27, 30, 31, 64, 65, 75, 111, 114, 167 “saving the”, 34 Socratic, 33–6, 40, 44, 51, 131, 148, 154 in Spinoza, 140 states as, 49 Thucydidean, 26, 27, 28, 31, 51, 123, 131 in Vico, 148 Virgilian, 56–7 world as, 138–9 Condillac, Étienne, 152–3, 168 Connor, W. Robert, 177 Copernicus, Nicolas, 112, 132, 187, 189, 190 Copleston, Frederick, 182, 194 Corneille, Pierre, 145

Index 207 Cornford, F. M., 178 Cottingham, John, 190 Cropsey, Joseph, 190 Cudworth, Ralph, 155, 158, 194 Cumberland, Richard, 155, 156, 194 Daniel, Arnaut, 94, 103, 186 Daniel, Samuel, 119, 189 Dante, Alighieri, xi, xiii, 16, 54, 83, 85, 98–108, 109, 118, 119, 123, 131, 169, 170, 171, 185–6 Divine Comedy, xii, 98–108, 185–6 love in, 100–1, 104 Vita Nuova, 100, 186 Darwin, Charles, 83 Defoe, Daniel, 164, 167, 195 Democritus, 34, 59, 77, 138, 152, 155, 190 Descartes, René, x, xii, 69, 70, 75, 83, 130, 133–5, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 158, 159, 161, 163, 168, 171, 176, 187, 190, 193 Diamond, Cora, x, xiii, 175, 176 Diderot, Denis, 151–2, 193 dissociation, xi, 69, 75, 84, 142 Dodds, E. R., xi, 175 Dominic, St, 109, 113, 187 Donne, John, 118, 144, 189 Dream of the Rood, The, 90, 184 Dryden, John, 89 Ehrenberg, Victor, 177 Einstein, Albert, 83, 132, 190 Eliot, T. S., xi, 99, 109–10, 181, 187 Ellis-Fermor, Una, 189 Elton, G. R., 189 Epicurus, 34, 59, 69, 77, 104, 107, 141, 152 Erasmus, Desiderius, xii, xiii, 115, 117, 119, 121, 132, 137, 138, 142, 144, 146, 187, 188 ethics, x, 11, 14, 33, 45–7, 59, 73, 75, 76, 78–82, 99, 109, 113, 116, 124, 130, 139–40, 141, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164, 165, 170, 174, 175, 176 Euripides, 17, 21 faith, see God(s), faith, religious sense Faludy, George, 188

Ficino, Marsilio, 109, 187 Fielding, Henry, 89, 163 Filmer, Robert, 191 France, Peter, 195 Francis, St, 109, 113, 187 Freud, Sigmund, 83, 170, 176 Gaita, Raimond, 176 Galileo, 112, 132, 133, 137, 139, 145, 149, 187, 190, 192 Garin, Eugenio, 192 Garrett, Don, 191 Geach, Peter, 182 Gill, Christopher, xi God(s), faith, religious sense, xiii, 4–5, 10, 11, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 34–5, 41, 45, 55–6, 60–4, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72–3, 76, 82, 83, 86, 88, 93, 96, 100–2, 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 113–14, 117–18, 133–5, 136–7, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143–4, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 171, 172 see also Being Goethe, J. W. von, xiii, 152, 193, 196 Faust, 12 Werther, 12 Goldberg, S. L., 175 Gosling, J. C. B., 178 Grimsley, Ronald, 195 Grotius, Hugo, 138, 191, 192 Guillaume de Lorris, see Romance of the Rose Guthrie, W. K. C., 178, 179 Hamann, J. G., 91, 185 Hamer, Richard, 184, 185 Hamilton, Edith, 178 Hampsher-Monk, Iain, 190, 191 Hampshire, Stuart, 191 Hare, R. M., 178 Haren, Michael, 182 Harrington, James, 143, 192 Hazlitt, William, 121, 189 Hegel, G. W. F., 38, 44, 83, 146, 150, 176, 177, 193 Heidegger, Martin, xii Heinemann, Robert, 179 Heloise, 74–5, 93, 132, 169

208 Index Helvétius, Claude, 153, 194 Heraclitus, 34, 57, 59, 111, 115 Herbert, George, 145 Herder, J. G., 91, 185 Herodotus, 24 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 177 historicism, 24–5, 26, 146–7, 149, 150 history, 11, 17, 24–5, 26, 27, 28, 31, 50, 55, 94, 131, 145, 146, 147, 149, 150–1, 164 Hobbes, Thomas, xii, 75, 135–8, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 187, 190, 192 Holbach, Baron d’, 153–4, 194 Holinshed, Raphael, 119, 189 Hollander, Robert, 185 Homer, xi, xii, 1–16, 23–4, 25, 26, 27, 29, 34, 36, 40, 41, 46, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 83, 85, 88, 90, 91, 94, 97, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 110, 113, 120, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 148, 149, 150, 174, 175–6, 180, 193 Iliad, xii, 1–16, 17, 18, 26, 29, 50, 55, 90–1, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 175–6; anger, shame, honour in, 1–3, 8, 55; love, grief, necessity in, 3, 6–8; passion in, 4, 10, 12, 13; religion in, 4–5 Odyssey, 12, 55, 101, 102, 180 Hooker, Morna D., 181 Hooker, Richard, 118, 189 Horace, 59, 145, 180 Hornblower, Simon, 177 Howells, R. J., 195 Hume, David, xii, 156, 160–3, 168, 194–5 Hutcheson, Francis, 157–8, 159, 194 Irwin, T. H., 179 Jacoff, Rachel, 185 James I., 121, 189 James, Susan, xi Jean de Meun, see Romance of the Rose Jimack, Peter, 195 Johnson, Samuel, 163, 193 Jonson, Ben, 118, 119, 187

Kant, Immanuel, x, 14, 73, 75, 79, 83, 135, 146, 155, 157, 158, 168, 170, 175, 176, 177, 181, 196 Critique of Judgement, 177 Critique of Pure Reason, 146 Keats, John, 144 Kemp-Smith, Norman, 195 Kenny, Anthony, 179, 182, 183 Kenrick, William, 196 Kermode, Frank, xi Kirk, G. S., 178 Kirkpatrick, Robin, 185 Kitto, H. D. F., 177 Kittredge, G. L., 184 Kolve, V. A., 183 Kraut, Richard, 178 Kretzmann, Norman, 182 Kuhn, Thomas, 190 La Mettrie, Julien, 153, 194 Laclos, Pierre C. de, 152, 193 Langland, William, 90, 184 Piers Plowman, 184 Leibniz, G. W. von, 138–9, 151–2, 191, 193 Lewis, C. S., 185 liberalism, 20, 21, 141 “literature”, 25, 26, 38, 50 lives, 6, 8, 10, 11–14, 21, 23, 24, 40, 43, 47, 48, 49–50, 54, 55–6, 58, 60, 63, 64, 67, 76, 83, 104–8, 109, 110, 119, 121, 124, 125, 127, 132, 137, 139, 164 in Antigone, 21, 23, 24 in Aquinas, 76 in Aristotle, 47, 48, 49–50 conceptual, 23, 33–4, 43, 67, 124, 132 in Dante, 104–8, 109 enacted, 6, 10, 11–12, 123 extended, 13, 124 in Hobbes, 137 Homeric, 14, 110 in Leibniz, 139 in Ovid, 58 passional, 8, 124, 131–2 poetry an analogue of, 121 “punctual”, 124, 131–2 in Rousseau, 164 in Shakespeare, 119, 124, 125, 127 in Thucydides, 24

Index 209 Locke, John, xii, 141–4, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 177, 191–2, 196 Essay, Two Treatises, 141–4 “person” in, 143 will in, 142–3 Long, A. A., 181 Lope de Vega, 109, 187 love (amor, agapê, caritas, erôs, philia), 3, 6, 7, 20–1, 37–9, 53–4, 56–9, 61–2, 63, 66–8, 74–5, 81–2, 86–9, 93–8, 100–2, 104, 105, 119, 120, 154–5, 156, 159, 162–3, 165, 167, 168–70, 172, 173–4 in Abelard, 74–5 in Adam Smith, 159 in Antigone, 20–1 in Aquinas, 81–2 as benevolence, 162–3 as sympathy, 154–5, 156 in Augustine, 53–4, 58–9, 66–8 in Chaucer, 86–9 in Chrétien, 94–6 in Dante, 100–2, 104, 105 in Heloise, 74–5 in Homer, 3, 6, 7 in Ovid, 57–8 in Plato, 37–9 in Romance of the Rose, 97 in Rousseau, 165, 167, 168–70, 172, 173–4 in St Mark, 63 in St Paul, 61–2 in the chansons d’amour, 93–4 in Virgil, 56–7 Lowell, Robert, 184 Loyola, Ignatius, 116, 118, 188 Luce, T. J., 177 Lucretius, 34, 59, 138, 153, 181 Luther, Martin, xii, xiii, 62, 83, 109, 116–18, 121, 132, 142, 146, 163, 188–9

The Prince, 110, 113–14; honour, shame in, 113 MacIntyre, Alasdair, x, 176, 179 Mackenzie, Henry, 193 Maldon, The Battle of, 90, 91, 184 Malory, Thomas, 90 Mandeville, Bernard, 150, 159, 193 Mann, Jill, 183 Marcus Aurelius, 53–4, 59, 180 Mark, St, xii, 62–4, 70, 71, 93, 116, 146, 181 Gospel of, xii, 62–4, 181; Christ’s the romantic life, 63, 98 Markie, Peter, 190 Marlowe, Christopher, 189 Marx, Karl, 83, 176 Mesnard, Pierre, 188 Milton, John, xi, 99, 118, 119, 130, 144–5 Molière, 145 Montaigne, Michel de, 109, 118, 151, 163, 187, 193, 195 Montessori, Maria, 166 Moore, G. E., x, 158 More, Thomas, 109, 187 Murdoch, Iris, x, 175, 176

McConica, James, 188 McDermott, Timothy, 182–3 Machiavelli, Niccolò, xii, 99, 110–15, 119, 122, 127, 130, 132, 149, 163, 164, 187–8 Discourses on Livy, 112–13

Parfitt, Derek, 175 Parker, David, 176, 180–1 Parker, R. B., 189 Parmenides, 34, 59, 138 Parry, Milman, 176 Pascal, Blaise, 151–2, 156, 163, 193

natural law, 137–8 Newton, Isaac, 83, 187 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xii, 83, 110 North, Thomas, 120, 189 Nussbaum, Martha, x, 175, 177, 179 Oakeshott, Michael, 190–1 Ockham, William of, xii, 74, 109, 115, 182 Ogle, W., 179 Olson, Glending, 183 Onions, C. T., 184 Overton, Richard, 143, 192 Ovid, xii, 57–8, 59, 71, 75, 85, 87, 88, 94, 97, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 119, 131–2, 144, 181

210 Index passions, x, xi, xii, xiii, 1–15, 18, 21–4, 26, 27, 29–31, 36–42, 43–7, 49–52, 53–4, 56–7, 58, 60, 61–2, 64, 65–6, 68–70, 73, 74–5, 80–1, 85–8, 91, 93–4, 100–5, 107–8, 111, 113–14, 122, 124, 127, 129, 130–1, 135–7, 139–40, 141–2, 144, 148–50, 152, 156, 158, 160, 162, 163, 165, 168–74 in Antigone, 18, 21–3 in Aquinas, 80–1 in Aristotle, 43–7, 49–52 in Augustine, 53–4, 58, 60, 65–6, 68–70 in Beowulf, 91 in Boethius, 73 in Castiglione, 111 and chansons de geste, 93–4 in Chaucer, 85–8 in Dante, 100–5, 107–8 in Diderot, 152 in ethics, x in Heloise, 74–5 in Hobbes, 135–7 in Homer, 1–15 in Hume, 160, 162, 163 in Locke, 141–2, 144 in Machiavelli, 113–14 in Ovid, 58 in Plato, 26, 36–42 in Rousseau, 165, 168–74 in St Mark, 64 in St Paul, 61–2 in Shaftesbury, 156, 158 in Shakespeare, 122, 124, 127, 129, 130 in Spinoza, 139–40 and the self, xi–xiii in Thucydides, 24, 26, 27, 29–31 in Vico, 148–50 in Virgil, 56–7 Paul, St, xiii, 60–2, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 109, 115, 116, 117, 146, 154, 155, 164, 171, 187 Epistle to the Romans, xii, 60–2, 69; love in, 61–2 Pelagius, 115, 117, 142, 188 Peters, F. E., 176 Petrarch, Francesco, 108, 109, 169, 184 philosophy, x–xiii, 14, 16, 18, 24–5, 26, 30–2, 33, 35, 37–9, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46,

48, 50, 72–3, 76, 82, 83–4, 108, 109, 131–2, 149, 150–1, 160, 161–2, 174, 181 Pico Della Mirandola, xii, 109, 111–12, 115, 119, 129, 132, 146, 150, 163, 187, 188 De hominis dignitate, 111–12 Plato, xii, xiii, 14, 16, 25, 30, 32, 33–45, 46, 54, 61, 63, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74, 84, 87, 105, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 115, 116, 123, 131, 138, 147, 149, 154, 155, 157, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 176, 177, 178–9, 187 early dialogues, 35, 178 Gorgias, 39–40, 178 late dialogues, 42, 179 love in, 37–9 Meno, Phaedo, 37, 178 Phaedrus, 37–9, 178 Protagoras, 35–6, 46, 178 Republic, 40–1, 167, 178–9 Symposium, 39, 178 Platt, A., 179 Plotinus, xiii, 59, 60, 67, 71, 111, 181, 187 Plutarch, 119, 120–1, 122, 125, 130, 164, 180, 189, 195 poetry, x–xi, xii, 4–5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 24–5, 27, 31, 35–41, 42, 43, 50–2, 54, 58, 63, 66, 72, 76, 83–4, 87, 94–5, 98, 107, 108, 109, 110, 121–2, 131–2, 136, 145, 147–8, 150–1, 171, 174 politics, 11, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 39–41, 45, 46, 47–9, 76, 82, 83, 91, 98, 110–15, 120, 121, 122–30, 131, 137–8, 143–4, 149, 153, 162–3, 165–7, 172, 174 in Antigone, 19, 21 in Coriolanus, 122–30, 131 in Dante, 98 in Homer, 11 in Hume, 162–3 in Locke, 143–4 in Machiavelli, 110–15, 131 in Plato, 39–41 in Rousseau, 165–7, 172 in Thucydides, 26–31 Pope, Alexander, 89, 103, 145 Porphyry, 59

Index 211 Pound, Ezra, 184 Presocratic philosophy, 34, 55, 59, 138, 178 Prévost, Abbé, 152, 170, 193, 195 Price, Richard, 158, 194 Prickett, Stephen, 181 Pufendorf, Samuel, 138, 191 Pushkin, Alexander, xiii Pythagoras, 34, 57, 59, 115, 132, 139 Rabelais, François, 85, 109, 116, 118, 187 Racine, Jean, 144 Raphael, D. D., 194 Rawls, John, 175 Read, Rupert, 195 “realism” (a view of the self), xiii, 14–16, 22–3, 26–7, 30–1, 42–3, 45–6, 49, 51–2, 58, 64, 71, 73, 79, 85, 89, 91, 93, 95, 101, 109, 110, 112, 114, 119, 125, 130, 131–2, 136–7, 141–2, 147, 148–9, 150–1, 156, 159, 160–3, 174, 176 in Adam Smith, 159 in Antigone, 22–3, 30 in Aquinas, 79, 93 in Aristotle, 42–3, 45–6, 49, 51–2, 101 in Beowulf, 91 in Boccaccio, 109 in Boethius, 73 in Cervantes, 109 in Chaucer, 85, 89, 95, 109 in Dante, 16, 101 in Heloise, 93 in Hobbes, 136–7 in Homer, 14–16, 174 in Hume, 160–3 Locke’s simulacrum of, 141–2 in Machiavelli, 114 in Montaigne, 109 in Ovid, 58, 101, 145 in Petrarch, 109 in Rabelais, 109 in St Francis, 109 in St Mark, 64, 71, 93 Shaftesbury’s quasi-r, 156 in Shakespeare, 110, 119, 125, 130 in Thucydides, 26–7, 30–1 in Vico, 147, 148–9, 150–1 Reid, Thomas, 158, 194 Reiss, Timothy, xi

Richardson, Samuel, 163, 168, 170, 195, 196 Richman, Kenneth, 195 Rist, J. M., 181 Robertson, D. W., 183 Robinson, F. N., 184 Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève, 190 Romance of the Rose, xii, 87, 88, 96–8, 184, 185 “romanticism” (a view of the self), xiii, 16, 17, 23, 30, 31, 39, 41–2, 44–5, 49, 51–2, 53, 57, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 73, 85, 89, 91, 95, 98, 104, 107, 108, 109–10, 111, 114, 115–16, 118, 119, 120, 130, 131–2, 138, 145, 146–7, 149, 151, 156, 157, 160, 163, 171, 172, 174 Adam Smith against, 160 in Antigone, 23, 30, 31 in Aristotle, 44–5 as false realism, 149, 156 in Augustine, 65, 69, 72 in Boethius, 73 in Castiglione, 111 in Chrétien, 95 in Coriolanus (North and Plutarch), 120 in Dante, 98, 104, 107, 108 in Descartes, 130 and ethics, 157 and Humanism, 115–16, 118, 130 Hume against, 163 in Luther, 118 Machiavelli against, 114 in Milton, 130 and natural law, 138 in Plato, 39, 41–2, 44–5, 51–2 in Rousseau, 130, 145, 171, 172, 174 in St Mark, 64, 71, 98 in St Paul, 62 in the Renaissance, 109–10 in The Song of Roland, 91 Thucydides against, 30, 31 in Vico, 146–7, 151 in Virgil, 57 Romanticism (an historical epoch), xiii, 16, 91, 100, 106, 119, 133, 144, 145, 146, 148–9, 150, 152, 156, 163, 170, 176, 177, 185 Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, 179, 190

212 Index Rorty, Richard, x, 176 Ross, David, 179 Rossiter, A. P., 190 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xi, xii, xiii, 116, 130, 132, 144, 145, 146, 152, 163–74, 181, 195–6 Confessions, 171–4 Discourses, 164–6 Émile, 166–8 Julie, 168–71 Social Contract, 165–6 Ryle, Gilbert, 175 Sade, Comte de, 152, 193 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xiii Schein, Seth, 175 Schneewind, J. B., xi, 191, 193, 194 Scruton, Roger, 191 self, x–xiii, 4, 11, 12–16, 18, 22, 23, 30, 37, 40, 41, 54, 57, 60, 62, 70, 71, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 93, 98, 101, 109, 112–13, 114, 115, 117–18, 121, 127, 129, 130, 131–5, 140–5, 149, 151, 152, 153, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 168, 171, 174, 176 in Adam Smith, 160 appetitive, 80 in Aquinas, 77, 81, 82, 83 Aristotelian, 43 as a life, xiii as a soul, xiii, 37, 40, 71, 118, 152, 153 as feeling, 153 as “inner”, xiii, 11 as “person”, 143 as thought, 151, 153 Augustinian, 54, 57, 60, 70, 82, 83, 101, 109 autobiographical, 145 Cartesian, 133–5 centreless, 118, 121 conceptions of, x conceptual, xiii, 22, 71, 145 in Condillac, 168 conflicted, 132 in Coriolanus, 125, 127, 130 empiricist, 153 Enlightenment pictures of, xi, 17 extended, 145 God and the, xii–xiii, 157 Homeric, 4, 11–13, 93, 127, 129

human, 165 in Hume, 161–3 knowing, 135 liberal, 140–5, 154 Lockean, 140–5 in Luther, 117–18 in Machiavelli, 112–15 modern, 174 nuclear, “punctual”, x, xiii, 23, 118, 163, 171 in Pascal, 151 passional, xii–xiii, 13–15, 22, 115, 149 “patterns of personhood”, xi Pauline, 109, 118 in philosophy, xii, 43 in Plato, 37, 41, 84, 109 radical, 153, 154 realist, xiii, 13–16, 23, 30, 70, 115, 131–2 recognitive, 93, 149 relational, xii–xiii Romantic, 149 romantic, xiii, 13–16, 23, 70, 114, 130, 131–2, 145, 151, 160, 171 in Rorty, 176 in Rousseau, 145, 163–74 saving the, 77 sentimental, 152 Shelleyan, xi in Sophocles, 18, 23 substantial, 70 two models of, xiii, 70 in Vico, 149, 150 without qualities, 41 Shaftesbury, 1st Earl, 191 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl, 152, 156–7, 158, 159, 163, 194 Shakespeare, William, xi, 12, 22, 84, 109, 110, 118–30, 132, 187, 189–90 Antony and Cleopatra, 119, 189–90 Coriolanus, xii, 118–30, 189–90 Hamlet, 12, 22 Shelley, P. B., xi, 99 Sherman, Nancy, 179 Skinner, Quentin, 187 Smith, Adam, 150, 159–60, 193, 194 Socrates, xiii, 33–7, 39, 55, 59, 63, 87, 110, 113, 131, 133, 153, 164, 178–9 elenchos, 33, 36

Index 213 “Song of Roland”, xii, xiii, 90, 91–3, 95, 110, 125, 185 Sophocles, xii, 17–23, 30, 33, 34, 41, 51, 56, 61, 64, 67, 70, 93, 119, 131, 171, 172, 177–8 Antigone, 17–23, 30, 56–7, 64, 67, 119, 122, 171, 172, 177–8; love in, 21; piety in, 20, 56–7 Oedipus the King, 21, 22 soul, 6, 13, 21, 23, 30, 32, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 77–8, 79, 81, 88, 93, 96, 97, 98, 108, 112, 113, 118, 119, 131–2, 133–5, 139, 144, 151, 152, 153, 155, 161, 162, 171 of a community, 144 in Aquinas, 77–8, 79 Aristotelian, 44, 45 Augustinian, 54, 60, 66, 93, 112 Cartesian, 133–5, 164, 176 in Chrétien, 96 conceptual, 40, 93, 98, 108 in Condillac, 153 Dantean, 108 Homeric, 13, 32 in Hume, 161 in Leibniz, 139 Neoplatonic, 61 Platonic, 37–8, 40, 49 “punctual”, 30–2, 69, 118, 119, 121, 134 in Rousseau, 171 sensible, 153 Virgilian, 93 Spenser, Edmund, 90, 97, 109, 185 Spinoza, Baruch de, 139–40, 141, 142 Ethics, 139–40, 152, 181, 191 stasis (faction), 26, 28–9, 30, 31, 33, 48, 51, 71, 85, 106, 107, 111, 131, 136, 137 Steiner, George, 177 Stevenson, C. L., 175 Stoicism, 53, 57, 59, 67, 71, 73, 111, 115, 119, 138, 140, 141, 157, 163, 164, 180, 181 Strauss, Leo, 187, 190 Stump, Eleonore, 182 Swift, Jonathan, 145

Tagliacozzo, Giorgio, 192 Tasso, Torquato, 109, 187 Taylor, Charles, x, 176, 177, 193 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, xi, 106, 186 Thales of Miletus, 34 Theocritus, 185 Thucydides, xii, 17, 23–31, 33, 34, 40, 41, 48, 51, 67, 85, 87, 107, 110, 112, 113, 120, 123, 131, 137, 177–8, 180 History of the Peloponnesian War, 17, 23–31, 177–8; stasis in, 28–9, 31 Tolkien, J. R. R., 185 Tolstoy, Leo, 180–1 Anna Karenina, 180–1 Tuck, Richard, 190 Urmson, J. O., 176, 179 Valla, Lorenzo, 192 Vauvenargues, 152, 194 Vico, Giambattista, 83, 146–51, 156, 164, 165, 192–3 Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, The, 147 new science, 147–50 Villon, François, 89, 184 Virgil, xiii, 53, 55–7, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65, 67, 71, 75, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 119, 120, 131, 170, 171, 180, 184 Aeneid IV, xii, 55–7, 64, 98, 119, 120, 171; love in, 56–7; piety in, 55–6, 85 Voltaire, 151–2, 168, 193 Weil, Simone, 29 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 183 Whichcote, Benjamin, 155–6, 158, 194 White, Henry J., 181 Whitman, Walt, xiii Wieland, Christophe, 167, 196 will, 23, 39, 41, 57, 68–9, 70, 74, 78–9, 80, 81, 86, 88, 89, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 131–2, 134–5, 136, 137, 140, 142–4, 147, 151, 154, 155, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 165–6, 168, 170 in Aquinas, 78–80, 115, 142

214 Index will – continued in Augustine, 68–9, 70, 115, 142, 165 in Chaucer, 88, 89 in Descartes, 134–5 in Erasmus, 117, 142 in Hobbes, 135, 136 in Hume, 161–2 in Locke, 142–4, 154 in Luther, 117–18, 142 in Machiavelli, 113 in Pelagius, 115, 142 in Pico, 112, 119 romantic, 119 in Rousseau, 70, 163–6, 168, 170 in Shaftesbury, 157 in Sophocles, 23 in Spinoza, 140

in Vico, 147 in Virgil, 57 Williams, Bernard, x, 175, 176 Williams, David, 195 Winnington-Thomas, R. P., 177 Winstanley, Gerrard, 143, 192 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xii, xiii, 175, 176, 182, 183 Wokler, Robert, 195 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 167, 196 Wordsworth, John, 181 Wordsworth, William, xi, 160, 181 Wuthering Heights, 170 Wycliffe, John, 90, 184 Yates, Frances, 187, 188 Yeats, W. B., xiii, 184