Continuity

A Dialogue

Maguire: The idea of “The Classics” exercising any influence in Europe between the 5th Century AD and the printing press belongs in the same world where Alice discourses with the Red Queen while running against the moving road.

Wintermute: Here we can compare Maguire’s historical acumen against history itself, unless he wishes to argue that copies of the Divine Comedy have all been corrupted and rewritten.

Here is Dante’s first Canto of the Paradiso:

Benign Apollo! this last labour aid; 
And make me such a vessel of thy worth, 
As thy own laurel claims, of me beloved. 
Thus far hath one of steep Parnassus’ brows       15
Sufficed me; henceforth, there is need of both
For my remaining enterprise. Do thou  
Enter into my bosom, and there breathe 
So, as when Marsyas by thy hand was dragg’d
Forth from his limbs, unsheathed. O power divine!      20
If thou to me of thine impart so much, 
That of that happy realm the shadow’d form
Traced in my thoughts I may set forth to view; 
Thou shalt behold me of thy favour’d tree
Come to the foot, and crown myself with leaves:      25
For to that honour thou, and my high theme
Will fit me. If but seldom, mighty Sire!
To grace his triumph, gathers thence a wreath
Cæsar, or bard, (more shame for human wills
Depraved), joy to the Delphic god must spring       30
From the Peneian foliage, when one breast
Is with such thirst inspired. From a small spark
Great flame hath risen: after me, perchance, 
Others with better voice may pray, and gain, 
From the Cyrrhæan city, answer kind.

Here is an odd thing: the supreme poet of Christendom, writing in (the last time I checked) the 13th century, and therefore long prior to printing presses, is praying to a god whose worship is supposed to be long gone, while he sat at the very foot of Paradise itself.

Why no prayer to Jesus?

And, if “the Classics’ are as inconsequential as Maguire claims, then why pray to Apollo at all? Would that not tend to expose oneself to comment in the Magisterium?

Of course, the English have been enjoying Alfred’s translation of Boethius for four centuries at this point, and as has already been pointed out, Dante himself makes frequent allusions to Boethius. The classics seem to have had a very busy afterlife, prior to Maguire’s claimed birthdate with the origin of movable type.

But this is not an isolated incident. The second Canto of the Paradiso has barely begun when:

The sea I sail has never yet been passed;
Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,
And Muses nine point out to me the Bears

Who is Minerva? Who are the Muses? Will his audience understand these strange references to a foreign religion, or is this some private fancy of the poet?

Soon thereafter, Dante is comparing his journey to some fellow named Jason. And, let’s not forget his guide through the underworld, Virgil. Who is he? Dante is so full of these ‘esoteric’ references, we might be permitted to call him a Mason avant la lettre, if not an occultist outright.

All of this is not to mention the Ptolemaic system of the orders of the planets, whereby Dante ascends to the heavens. These continued directly into the mainstream of European tradition, often via astrology, and are extensively used by Shakespeare and other Elizabethans. Their medicine – mostly herbalism and the theory of the humours – descend from Galen, whose temperaments are derived from the classical elements: earth, air, water, fire. These derive from Empedocles via Aristotle.

Dante created nine circles of Hell to mirror the nine orders of angels. From whence do these derive? Are they a Christian invention? No, not at all.

The orders of the angels derive from a very interesting author, now called the Pseudo-Dionysus, who purported to be Paul’s first convert in Athens. His three books, (The Divine Names, Mystical Theology, Celestial Hierarchy) are the bedrock and foundation for Christian mysticism and angelology. His work was examined, and found praiseworthy by another medieval luminary, Thomas Aquinas.

Sometime after the discovery of print, it was discovered that Dionysus was not who he pretended to be. Rather he turned out to be an unknown author, of very late provenance, who had smuggled the work of the late Neoplatonist Proclus into the Christian camp, flying the false flag of “Dionysius the Areopagite”. There are modern scholars who have argued that Proclus himself authored the texts, though even those who deny this are forced to admit that long passages in his writing is simply copied directly out of the works of Proclus, and that even where Proclus words are not present, his ideas certainly are. When did Jesus mention the nine orders of angels? Oh, that’s right: never.

That angels and their orders are a pagan splice into the Christian genome is proved by the rapidity and disgust with which Protestents sought to abandon the whole schema. Catholic and Medieval civilization are quite another thing. They are getting Platonism coming and going.

In the case of Aquinas, this is especially amusing, as the Aristotle he thinks he is replying to in the Book of Causes (an Arabic text attributed to ‘Aristotle’) is actually Proclus, while the foundational text attributed to one of Paul’s earliest converts, is also Proclus. If western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, they are mostly footnoting the work of Proclus, the last successor of the Platonic Academy.

Do you begin to see how ‘the classics’ can transmit themselves, even without widespread literacy? How was the inner life of Europeans altered by the notion of a Great Chain of Being, a primary Platonic idea presented to Christians as the nine orders of Angels?

Did anyone look up to the sky and not see the spheres, each guarded by a planet, which surrounded the earth?

Did anyone do medical diagnosis without recourse to humour theory or treatment without ancient herbalism?

What does it mean that Britons have been imbibing Platonism neat from the time of Alfred the Great, more than a thousand years ago?

Did the common Englishman take anything from the poetry of Chaucer, which is very completely wound up with the ideas and strategies of Boethius?

And what about that odd duck Dante, praying to Apollo in the 13th century, or following Virgil into the underworld? Or the influence of Pseudo-Dionysus on all subsequent Christian mystics? How can all this be going on, when “the Classics” are deader than a doornail?

Epic poems about underworld journeys, called nekyia after the 11th chapter of the Odyssey, occur in Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Pound, each one self consciously building on, and commenting on, his predecessor. I do not think that the continuity of European inner life could have a more powerful real world counterpart or illustration. When one adds that the great mystics were, almost to a person, either indebted to the ancients indirectly through Pseudo-Dionysus or directly, through authors like Plotinus, then you begin to get a real picture of just how widespread and influential “the Classics” are – and how foundational. It is even a bit of a misnomer to claim that “Christianity” is the historical religion of the West, when you start looking at how the sausage of our common religion was actually manufactured, and what sorts of beast were slaughtered to fill its skin.

Think of the Rhineland mystics – Suso, Tauler, Eckhardt. All are dependent for their revolutionary ideas on exposure to late Neoplatonism, either directly, via Plotinus, or indirectly, via Pseudo-Dionysus. You can ‘zoom in’ on any great flowering in the European tradition and find a similar kind of influence at the root of it.

Kathleen Raine compared late Neoplatonism to a ‘hidden spring’ whose movements could be tracked by the sudden outpouring of creative activity left in the wake of one of its unpredictable upwellings in European society, most notably the Renaissance and English Romanticism. So keen was her sight on this issue that she successfully predicted that evidence would later be discovered linking William Blake to Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, which decades later certainly did surface. How was she able to make such an amazing prophecy?

Outside of Dante, who are the major minds or influences of the Medieval period? Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Abelard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus. We’ve already had a peek at the Rhineland mystics, though lines of development for any group of Christian mystics are going to be quite similar. Christian mystics for the most part, are the children and grandchildren of Orpheus, not Abraham. As for Aquinas and Boethius and Dante, we have discussed all of these.

Do you require instruction regarding Augustine, Anselm, Abelard, or Bonaventure? I leave off Scotus because he is understood by moderns as a Neoplatonist proper.

“In retrospect, medieval philosophy shows the decisive influence of two main systems of ancient thought: Neo-Platonism — especially its Augustinian and Pseudo-Dionysian form — and Aristotelianism. Neo-Platonism manifested an irrepressible vigor and persistence in shaping the medieval mind from the Fathers of the Church to Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Though Aristotelianism triumphed in the scholastic age of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to begin a new era in philosophy, both systems mingled freely in the minds of many schoolmen.

In fact, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas synthesized these two philosophies in different ways, the former Neo-Platonizing Aristotelianism and the latter Aristotelianizing Neo-Platonism, to create original systems of thought. In responding to the challenge of Neo-Platonism, Augustine Christianized it, whereas John Scotus Erigena Neo-Platonized Christian ideas.”

C.S. Lewis’ protagonist in The Last Battle, Professor Digory Kirke, exclaims, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato! Dear me, what do they teach them in the schools nowadays?”

I can do no better than to reprint Lewis’ question. What do they teach them in schools nowadays?

I observe in parting, to Maguire, that in this realm, one must run merely to keep one’s place. I trust you did not take the Red Queen’s advice to be mere fantasy simply because it occurs in a fantastical work.

Maguire: They should not be bothered by the fact that Ovid’s Metamorphoses was compiled from three eleventh century manuscripts that were, themselves, based upon fragmentary and repeatedly hand-copied text.

Wintermute: Must we grant, in order to end your tantrum, that the entire Roman Empire was the creation of some eleventh century monks? Even if we did, it is still true that Dante prays to Apollo in the first Canto of the Paradio, and it is likewise true that the passages from Proclus in the Pseudo-Dionysus match perfectly with the Proclus found in the Liber de Causis where they are attributed to Aristotle rather than to Dionysus the Areopagite, and that both versions accord with the Elements of Theology, which was preserved in the Eastern Empire.

Is it your contention that the conspirators who simulated Antiquity were at work simultaneously in Western Europe, in Islam, and in the Byzantine Empire? We are obviously beyond the level at which a few monks in the eleventh century, however poetically gifted they might have been, could operate.

While you are sorting out that conundrum, could you also explain to the gallery why Christians would bother to forge or meddle with Boethius without adding a single mention of Jesus or the Trinity?

I understand and have studied the problems of textual transmission. Interpolation or forgery is first suspected if it serves some interest of the forger, for instance, the Donation of Constantine. Eary Christian forgeries are quite numerous.

Here is Eusebius, our major bottleneck for early Christian history, on the reliability of his own works:

“We shall introduce into this history in general only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and afterwards to posterity.”

Here is John Chrysostom, one of the great Church Fathers:

“Do you see the advantage of deceit? …

For great is the value of deceit, provided it be not introduced with a mischievous intention. In fact action of this kind ought not to be called deceit, but rather a kind of good management, cleverness and skill, capable of finding out ways where resources fail, and making up for the defects of the mind.

And often it is necessary to deceive, and to do the greatest benefits by means of this device, whereas he who has gone by a straight course has done great mischief to the person whom he has not deceived.””

Here is Clement:

“Not all true things are the truth, nor should that truth which merely seems true according to human opinions be preferred to the true truth, that according to the faith.”

Besides the Donation of Constantine, there are The False Decretals, the ‘Thundering Legion’ Decree of Marcus Aurelius, the Letters of Emperor Antoninus Pius to the Greeks, the Clementines, the correspondence between Paul and Seneca, the interpolations in Josephus, the Lentulus letter, the Report of Pilate to Caesar, the Letter of Jesus to the King of Edessa and so forth. This without getting into such phenomena as forged pagan oracles, the most famous of which are the Sibylline Oracles.

You are certainly right to warn us against deceitful Christians. They are very inventive and they are everywhere! It would seem like hunting out Jewish swindles in that mass of lies would be the least of your worries. But, returning to the issue at hand:

What interest of the Church is served by the propagation, all over Europe, of a book that deals with First Things, but has no care for Jesus Christ, or Jews, or Chosen People, or burning bushes, or circumcision, or the procession of the Holy Spirit or any of the other lethal minutiae that still holds Christian minds in thrall? Why would that be?

Can you give us a reason why your erring monks would create such an anti-Christian document? Were they mad at the Pope, do you think?

The absolute gold standard for authenticity, on the other hand, is something called ‘evidence against intent’. If a text or document has materials that are harmful to the interests of the person recording them, we have strong grounds to suspect either that what is being recorded is the truth, or that the recorder thought it was the truth. Is Boethius’ somewhat strenuously non-Christian text in the interests of, or is it working against the interests of, Holy Mother Church? Couldn’t your monks have added one – even just one – reference to the Christian scheme of salvation into Boethius?

Our most reliable texts from antiquity are certainly Homer, Virgil and Ovid, not only because of their massive influence – which early Christians recorded – but because they were composed in dactylic hexameter. I suppose a good forger could put out a few lines in dactylic hexameter, but I doubt that he’d get very far. Possibly you have never tried to write in dactylic hexameter. There is no shame in that. Metered verse is the most resistant to copy errors, precisely because they will be detected instantly by anyone reading the document in question. The more intricately metered it is, the more error resistant. Think of how hard it would be to make a copy error in a limerick, for example. All of which is not to begin to speak to the literary qualities of the works in question. But that is beyond your sphere as a lowly tradesman, so I will refrain.

Maguire: For instance, in this very thread another has seriously put forth the proposition that in post-Roman Europe until the Renaissance a work’s influence is best judged as an inverse function of the number of surviving manuscript examples

Wintermute: Maguire, do you think that is an honest or fair restatement of Rnl’s argument? Since you present yourself as a man interested in textual scholarship, I provide you with a proof text:

” That classical texts were comparatively rare in the Middle Ages only increased the cultural significance of those that were available.”

Why do you not deal with Rnl’s direct questioning of the issues you raise regarding the Septuagint instead? Would that not be more helpful? I can provide a proof text on that if you like.

Also, you are on record as stating that:

“The idea of “The Classics” exercising any influence in Europe between the 5th Century AD and the printing press belongs in the same world where Alice discourses with the Red Queen while running against the moving road.”

That notion, in light of the post you are responding to, seems quite exploded. Do you still maintain that the idea of classical influence in Europe was negligible between 500AD and the arrival of the movable type?

Why did you not answer the questions raised about the origin of the humors, the Angelic orders, the Ptolemaic order of the planets, Dante’s prayer to Apollo at the foot of Paradise, the testaments to the overriding importance of Boethius to the middle ages, Rnl’s accounts of a similar level of influence for Ovid, and the odd case of Pseudo-Dionysus? Evidence is very strong that the text in Pseudo-Dionysus comes from Proclus, and Pseudo-Dionysus is virtually the taproot of Western Mysticism.

You have broken your otherwise informed silence to draw attention away from the inadequacies of your own position by propagating falsehoods about someone else’s.

I am interested if you will maintain a patently false idea once it has been exposed as such. We can never know too much about the character of the people with whom we associate, don’t you think?