Reality and Truth in Literature: From Ancient to Modern European Literary and Critical Discourse 9783737000468, 9783847100461, 9783847000464

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Irena Avsenik Nabergoj

Reality and Truth in Literature From Ancient to Modern European Literary and Critical Discourse

Translated by Dr Jason Blake

V& R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-8471-0046-1 ISBN 978-3-8470-0046-4 (E-Book) Sponsored by Javna agencija za knjigo (JAK) Republike Slovenije, Teolosˇka fakulteta Univerze v Ljubljani, Znanstvenoraziskovalni center Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti. Ó Copyright 2013 by V& R unipress GmbH, D-37079 Goettingen All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany. Printing and binding: CPI Buch Bücher.de GmbH, Birkach

Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

Preliminary Remark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

19

1. Literary Types as a System of Communication, and Art as an Expression of Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Aristotle’s Classification of Literary Genres and his Treatise on Literary Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Horace’s Poetical Treatise on Unity and Harmony in Poetry . . . . 2. Reality in Pre-Modern Philosophical Reflection on Art and in Literary Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Plato’s Bases for Recognising and Expressing Reality and Truth in Philosophy and in Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 The Individual’s and the State’s Path to Justice . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 Criticism of Poets’ Depictions of Nature and Divine and Human Behaviour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.3 The Real World and the World of the Senses as well as the “Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry” . . . . . . 2.2 Thomas Aquinas as an Interpreter of Polysemous Words and Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Art and Truth in Classics of Literary Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Reality in Myth, History and Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Reality in Myths, in Literary Representations of History, and in Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

29 31 37

45 48 49 50 53 56 60 65 69

6

Contents

3.2 Reality in Fiction and in Literary Portrayals of Historical Events . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81 89

4. Reality and Fiction in Biography and Autobiography . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Autobiographical Literature as a Sub-Section of Biographical Literature, and the Problem of Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Some Classic European Biographical and Autobiographical Works 4.3 Seminal Works of Slovenian Autobiography . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5. Presentation of Values in Literature and in Religious Traditions . . . . 5.1 Literature as a Distinct Mode of Thought and Foundational Values 5.2 Methodological Prospects Spanning Ancient and Modern Views . 5.3 Interpretation of Literature in Response to Challenges of Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Representation of Beauty and Love in Literature and in Philosophical Reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Representation and Explication of Beauty and the Relationship between Aesthetics and Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Love and Inspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Love and Justification of Forgiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. Reality and Truth in the Search of Love in France Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Love and Renunciation in Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica . . 7.2 The Motif of Vows and Devotion in Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Dominik Smole’s Contrary Literary Interpretation of The aptism at the Savica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

94 99 109 119 121 131 142

151 153 163 175

189 191 196 198

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

201

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

207

Index of Names and Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

215

Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

219

Acknowledgements

Investigating the issue of reality and truth in literature invites the problem of aesthetic or artistic truth, which, in terms of how all the arts are both expressed and experienced, is based on the role of language, symbols and aesthetic forms. Contemporary literary theory discusses the issue of existential truth from various viewpoints. The aesthetic imagination extends beyond concrete reality and fuses the natural and the spiritual dimensions of human life into an experienced harmony, thus entailing a holistic approach in creating and experiencing art. Truth in literary representations is a category of existential reality as it relates to recognition, believing and behaviour in the ethical sense, and this directs the view from external reality to “inner” truth. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explained the nature of such symbolism in this way : “This is true symbolism, where the particular represents the general, not as dream and shadow, but as a live and immediate revelation of the unfathomable” (Maxim 314). The most important aspects of reality and truth are to be found in the degrees to which living human beings feel and understand them. Drawing from their observations of the life around them, literary creators touch on the theme of human existence and, with that, on actual living in all its actual dimensions. John Keats associates the experience of truth with the experience of beauty, and in a letter he wrote to a friend when he was a student he notes, “I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty” (John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817). This study arose from my various life experiences and personal querying along my paths of searching for truth and beauty. Many individuals cooperated along these paths, each in his or her own way, and I would like to thank them. Thank you to Dr Jason Blake and Alenka Blake for helping to translate this book into English. I am sincerely grateful to Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, its Publishing

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Acknowledgements

Director Susanne Franzkeit, and its Project Manager Ruth Vachek for including my work in the V& R unipress publishing programme. Thank you, also, to Stefanie Füchter and the other employees at V& R unipress Voluntariat 3. I am also grateful to those Slovenian scientific and educational institutions as well as colleagues who supported me in my research work. Many thanks go to the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Theology and to its former dean, Professor Dr Stanko Gerjolj, and its current dean, Professor Dr Christian Gostecˇnik, who made it possible for me to carry out research at the Institute for Biblical Studies, Judaism and Early Christianity ; each was by my side as I travelled along my research paths. I sincerely thank Professor Dr Jozˇe Krasˇovec for including me in the research programme “The History of Forms in Jewish-Christian Sources and Traditions,” which has been underway at the Faculty of Theology since 2004, for it was this inclusion that allowed me to begin my professional research work in the area of literary criticism. This monograph is the result of work carried out in a research project in the area of literary criticism. Entitled “Origins and Transformations of Motives and Symbols in Literature and Languages,” the project ran under my mentorship from 2009 to 2012 at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts’ Section for Interdisciplinary Research, and concurrently within the framework of the research programme “The History of Forms in Jewish-Christian Sources and Traditions” at the Faculty of Theology under the mentorship of Professor Dr Jozˇe Krasˇovec. Both the research project and the research programme were supported by the Slovenian Research Agency under the direction of Dr Franci Demsˇar. My sincere thanks are extended to Professor Dr Oto Luthar, director of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts for welcoming me in 2005 as a colleague and thereby making it possible to for me to conduct research at the main Slovenian research institute. Interdisciplinary cooperation with researchers there significantly broadened and deepened my search interests. I am most thankful to Dean Professor Dr Danilo Zavrtanik of the University of Nova Gorica for including me among the teaching staff at the Faculty of Humanities and thereby allowing me to work with literature students, as well as for always following and encouraging my scholarly work. I extend my sincere thanks to Professor Dr Paul Luzio, St. Edmund’s College Master, as well as to the members of the academic Council of that College for granting me the status of Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge in both 2010 and 2011. They made it possible for me to enjoy ideal conditions for conducting research at that university. Among the Cambridge Library resources I discovered invaluable studies pertaining to reality and truth in literature, and these studies significantly enriched my previous research. I thank, too, Sue Lowdel for providing me with support, care and help while I was staying St.

Acknowledgements

9

Edmund’s College. My research work was encouraged and inspired by discussions with Cambridge Professors Robert P. Gordon, Graham Davies, John Rist, Judith Lieu and Samuel Lieu. The help of Professor Robert P. Gordon, from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, proved invaluable. I thank him most heartily for his careful reading of my manuscript, for his valuable critical comments and for writing the foreword to this book. The Slovenian Book Agency deserves thanks for providing financial support that partially covered the costs of translating this book into English. My sincere thanks go to Professor Dr Zinka Zorko and Professor Dr Jozˇe Krasˇovec for peer reviewing and evaluating my book. Finally, sincere thanks to my family – to my husband Tomazˇ, and my children, David, Jurij and Mirjam – for letting me perceive the world of reality, truth and beauty in dreams and the imagination but also in tiny moments of everyday life.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

That is true Symbolism, where the more particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a shade, but as a vivid, instantaneous revelation of the Inscrutable. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

I wish I was as certain of the end of all your troubles as that of your momentary start about the authenticity of the Imagination. I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination ¢ What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth ¢ whether it existed before or not ¢ for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty. John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (stanza V)

Foreword

Irena Avsenik Nabergoj has already published extensively on literary subjects both in her native Slovene and in English. Her volumes on the Slovenian writer and poet Ivan Cankar (Mirror of Reality and Dreams: Stories and Confessions by Ivan Cankar, 2008; The Power of Love and Guilt: Representations of the Mother and Woman in the Literature of Ivan Cankar, 2013) and on the theme of longing and temptation (Longing, Weakness and Temptation: From Myth to Artistic Creations, 2009) have already secured her well-deserved recognition in the English-reading world. In the former she seeks to make Cankar accessible to a readership outside Slovenia that has been largely unaware of this the greatest of Slovenian writers. In Longing, Weakness and Temptation she explores a major theme intertextually, moving out from the Old Testament narratives about Adam and Eve, Joseph in Egypt, and Samson and Delilah to exploration of the theme as it is represented in the motif of “Fair Vida” in Slovenian literature, this time opening up a major feature of Slovenian writing and tradition to a much wider readership. The present work has intertextual features about it, but here the author sets herself the still more challenging task of bringing biblical and western literature more generally into a fruitful dialogue on the fundamental concepts of reality and truth. Her purpose, as she elegantly puts it near the end of her monograph, is to “disclose literary ways of observing and expressing reality and truth in its most elementary form of life.” Out of the vast ocean that is the western literary canon, she selects both biblical and (mainly) non-biblical texts for close reading and analysis. The recognition, for practical purposes, of a western literary canon becomes the more defensible when it is recognized that the dialogue is especially with elements within the tradition that owe their inspiration to biblical texts and themes. Informing Dr Nabergoj’s work throughout is the conviction that “[t]he universality of literary creation is intrinsically connected with the sense of virtue and value,” and that the truly great thinkers “writing on the basis of their own creative and artistic literary experience” reflect values that are common to them as human beings and as seekers after truth. In that it is also a mark of their

12

Foreword

greatness that they show the greatest interest in observing literary form – as in literary types and genres – they also evince a common concern to imitate “reality.” In the Judeo-Christian tradition crystallised in the Bible, of course, there is, as well as a commitment to the concept of revealed truth (oracularly and directly), the idea that there are basic values that all humans should recognize and should aspire to. This is perhaps most obvious in the Wisdom writings and, perhaps surprisingly, in the prophets who called on their contemporaries to obey the requirements of “righteousness and justice.” At the same time, and as this study of a wider body of literature further illustrates, the interests of the “natural” and the “revealed” coincide and interrelate at many points. An excursion into the world of Islam suggests, too, that even though the conceptuality surrounding the creation of the Koran differs from that of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, Arab literature, both pre-Islamic and Islamic, has been open to the possibilities of narrative fictional creativity as a means of truth-seeking, and this testifies in its own way to the non-ethnic basis of artistic creation. The approach adopted in this study is, therefore, and necessarily, an interdisciplinary one in which literature representing a wide range of languages, periods, cultures and schools is examined in relation to the theme of reality and truth. In the process, Dr Nabergoj sustains an impressive engagement with the great body of western literature from biblical and classical times through to the modern period, and displays an unflagging capacity for philosophical abstraction as she summarizes, synthesises and brings into meaningful relationships the themes and subthemes that ramify through the literature in review. In her theoretical section, Dr Nabergoj revisits Plato and Aristotle and reminds us of essential differences in their thinking about literature and its capacity as truth-bearer, and this especially in relation to the contested virtues of poetry. She writes too of essential differences between the more cognitive Greek conceptualizing of reality and the action-orientated and existential tendency of the Old Testament writings. But her narrative embraces so much more, and engages with a wide representation of other authorities, from Horace to Tolstoy, and from Maimonides to Auerbach. The celebrated observations of the lastnamed on the “multilayeredness” of Hebrew narrative, in which the writers juggle with a complexity of factors in their portrayals of characters and events – somewhat in contrast to their classical counterparts –, are given appropriate airing. Finally, it is in the nature of the topic that writers and texts cannot simply be introduced and then farewelled, since they may become relevant in later phases of the discussion. It therefore requires something analogous to the skill of the orchestral conductor to tame the profusion of diverse elements addressed in this monograph so as to be able to shape the discourse in the manner required, and

Foreword

13

for this reason too Dr Nabergoj is to be warmly congratulated on her achievement. Robert P. Gordon Comberton, Cambridge November 2012

Preliminary Remark

Because the world in its parts and as a whole is conflicted and complex, the very idea of reality and truth, of having any developed theory of truth and any elaborate definition and conception of truth, is equally conflicted and complex. If there is some despair at finding any definition of reality and truth adequate to fit every domain of inquiry, there are good grounds for the hope that after a critical assessment of prevailing domains of inquiry we can use these terms in more satisfactory senses. The aim of this study is to arrive at a fuller sense of the conception of reality and truth in the realm of literature, which is the most influential field of culture and civilisation. This aim bespeaks the first inevitable result of inquiry : the inadequacy and insufficiency of a conceptual and purely rational approach to reality and truth for grasping life in its various manifestations. Far more adequate are those approaches that connect the concepts of reality and truth to basic structures of reality, to being (ontology), and to intellectual intuition. To grasp the difference at play here, a brief survey of philosophical concepts of reality and truth is indispensable. In ancient Greek philosophy, one of the most commonly accepted views is the Aristotelian realist, or “correspondence,” theory of truth. In contrast to this, from Parmenides (ca. 540–after 480 BC) to Plotinus (AD ca. 205 – 270), truth was connected to being and thought, and, for some, to soul or Logos. Plato (427 – 347) viewed Ideas, or Forms, as the basis of being. Augustine (354 – 430) adopted this tradition and identified God as both the ultimate truth and the source of all created truth. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225 – 1274), in turn, combined the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions. In line with Aristotle, he saw truth as “the conformity of thing and intellect” (adaequatio rei et intellectus); in line with Platonic traditions, he argued that God is the first truth and the final end of our striving for truth. The Aristotelian and Platonic traditions are the two main foundations of views about truth in more modern philosophy. Many philosophers defend the “realist” and “propositional” understanding of truth and focus on statements rather than persons, art, or other true things. Another tradition conceives of truth in terms of being and the nature of language. Friedrich

16

Preliminary Remark

Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) rejected the realist approach by emphasizing that all language is metaphorical. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) developed his own theory of the metaphorical role of language, while Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) worked towards a conception of truth as the disclosure of being. More contemporary developments regarding the theory of reality and truth – i. e. philosophical theories based on recognition of the role of existence and the role of language on the one hand, and the development of modern and postmodern models for the practice of interpretation (“New Criticism,” etc.) and the close reading principle on the other – are well grounded in the “timeless” nature of literary representation of reality and truth. This is especially true of biblical literature and its influential hermeneutics, both in Judaism and in Christianity. In biblical tradition, there are three basic terms for “truth”: the Hebrew word ’em¦t, indicating firmness, trustworthiness, constancy, duration, faithfulness, truth; the Greek word al¦theia, indicating being in accord with what is true, truthfulness and uprightness in thought and deed (truth), or an actual event or state (reality); the Latin word veritas, indicating the state of being real, real life, reality, true nature, the real or actual value, the quality or fact of being in accordance with fact, truth, or disposition to speak the truth. In biblical texts and in later Jewish and Christian literature, these terms form an important semantic field in combination with some other words, especially with the uniquely biblical use of the terms Word, Word of God, love, etc. Truth is connected to the Word and the promises of God. It is obvious that various aspects of meaning can be deduced only from linguistic, literary and cultural contexts. When dealing with terms, this study recognizes the importance of the study of a particular language system, literary structure and the whole cultural context. But even more important than the above-mentioned semantic field is the recognition of the role of literary representation of reality and truth. Representation of reality and truth in the Bible and in literature in general typically focuses on true things, especially on persons in all manifestations of their intimate inner life and in their interpersonal relations. The concept of reality and truth in the realm of literature can, therefore, be properly perceived as life experience in ways of relating and responding not only to nature itself but also to one’s own inner nature, to the structure of one’s own mind. Literature can never approach the question of truth in a merely abstract manner. Responding to a system that purports to be “rational,” literature struggles with our irrational side. The most striking experiential grounds of reality and truth in life are longing for happiness, sadness and suffering, passion and apathy, love and hate, compassion and cruelty, solidarity and dissent, hope and despair, etc. Great thinkers and writers, like Augustine from antiquity, and Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) from approximately the time of German Romanticism, help to overcome any formalist ap-

Preliminary Remark

17

proach by their insistence that questing and searching for the truth of life and of being forms the very essence of human lived experience. Schiller’s contribution is important in connection with his distinction between “nave” and “sentimental” poetry. Schiller refers both to poets and poetry in terms of contrasts and psychological types. He analyses modes of perception, ways of being, and ways of living in the world. For Schiller, art was a means of restoring a natural balance in personality, an exposition of the nature of artistic genius that rises above artificial rules and ideas about life. Goethe made his important contribution to the conception of reality and truth in connection with his grasping of “inner” truth in literary representation. Since human existence entails an open questioning of truth at a deep level in our lives, the open horizon of metaphor, rather than being a mere propositional notion of truth, is the fundamental aspect of approaching the foundational texts of our civilisation in linguistic and literary terms. In literary presentations of reality and truth, actions in concrete life situations reveal characters’ natures, and characters advance the plot as a unified whole. The interaction of characters and actions in the plot reveals the concrete identity of the characters. Myths, narratives and poems reveal genuine possibilities for existence and disclose a compelling truth about our lives, in most cases without using the term “truth.” Literary texts refer to a world of existential possibilities that no other way of representation of reality and truth can reveal so persuasively. The aim of this study is to provide a critical survey of views on reality and truth in the realms of philosophy and literary theory in order to show clearly how important it is to focus our critical attention on literature itself – as a way of conveying universal, permanent truths of human possibility within the contrasting and concrete world. Literary texts communicate dimensions of true life that are grounded in the reconciliation of conflicting impulses of acting characters. Literary texts speak directly in their own unaltered form to the circumstances of individuals within communities that shape their common life. Literary characters determine the course of events even as a work of art lays out their intentions, recording in the present moment memories of things past and anticipations of things to come. In this general orientation, literary texts are viewed as a privileged site for shaping and disseminating cultural and universal values. Various literary dialogues entail the reconciliation of opposites or contraries in their attempts to reveal the plain and full truth of the reality of life and the meaning of literary representation. Insistence on the practice of close reading widens the scope of literary interpretation within personal, local, and global life contexts.

Introduction

Foundational values are addressed in various scientific disciplines, but especially in philosophy, literary criticism, theology, psychology, and history. An overview of the history of literary criticism from antiquity to the present shows that literary criticism is very closely connected with philosophy, and particularly with moral philosophy, when concerning itself with values. This unavoidable relationship is, however, not harmonious in every respect. The reason for this lies in the difference of the subject matter for both disciplines. Philosophy is concerned with basic human cognitive capacities and formal training of cognitive skills based on universal laws of reasoning and values. Important in philosophy, thus, is the ability to recognize the contrast between what is approved of and what is disapproved of in any society, even if how the contrast between good and evil is understood differs considerably from one society to another. On the whole, philosophy employs the language of abstract concepts and analytical reasoning. So it is that this question remains ever-open: how do we employ language to make points about human emotions, longing, personal values and persuasive discourses? It seems important to be aware of the main task of both disciplines and of their specific methodological characteristics. In philosophy there are two main realms of reflection: the study of nature and of the world (as Aristotle preferred), and reflection on the human self and identity, as Plato and his immediate and later followers practiced. Plato held that the body and soul are two distinct types of being, while Aristotle insisted on the inner connection between man’s corporeal and incorporeal aspects. Nevertheless, both parties agreed that philosophy was not a mere abstract intellectual discipline but pertained directly to life, to the search for truth and happiness. Classical texts became fundamental sources that have been greatly influential up to the present. They represent original value-laden views and beliefs that throughout the centuries have been exposed to ever new re-evaluation on the bases of sense-perception, practice and experience. In all times we can observe the need to convey sense-experience and to evoke

20

Introduction

ethical reflection by using a more suitable mode of expression, one that has an eye to the larger structures of literary presentation of reality and truth. Literature deals with presentation of life in all its contrasting manifestations in persuasive literary forms and is therefore intrinsically connected with aesthetics. Ethical sensibility, meanwhile, is most effective when dealing with particular individuals in specific contexts. Characters that embody goodness and love can be identified with beauty of soul. Evaluation of characters in specific contexts manifests an inner relationship between foundational values and aesthetics. Works of literature combine the particular and the general in concrete life situations and in individual characters. Acceptance of reality, especially of individual persons, opens the way to love, and yet acceptance and love are not possible without beauty. It is agreed in both philosophy and literary criticism that values like truth, beauty and love are, in their extended semantic field, closely related. It is also agreed that the methodological possibilities in philosophy and literary criticism for grasping and explaining this relationship are not the same as in the realm of literature itself. Literature uses language as a system of metaphors while concerning itself with literary context and literary structures. The power of persuasion and synthetic perception of life has been especially ably evaluated by those great writers of all times who also wrote essays on the nature of literature and proved that their understanding of values and of literary forms seem fitted for one another. The interplay between foundational values and literary style functions in interpenetrating ways. This universally recognized fact calls for new methods and styles in dealing with literary in the totality of its complex and dramatic structure, while devoting full attention to both individual context and to the interaction between character and conduct. Poetry and narratives such as short stories and novels are expressly designed, according to aesthetic criteria, for our delight and exploration. Literary works put not just values but also emotions and models of life on display. Technical analysis of literary texts may begin with simple reflection on common experience and values. Analysis of literary texts hinges on basic human cognitive capacities and a widespread potential for fostering innovation in openness to alternative views. As Colin McGinn states, “One of the reasons we are drawn to fictional works is precisely that they combine the particular and the general in ways we find natural and intelligible. The general is woven into the particular, which gives the particular significance and the general substance” (McGinn 2007: 3). The figurative nature of literary discourse allows us to consider thematic and aesthetic commonalities and interrelations from interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives. Original and aesthetically pleasing literary styles encourage innovative methods, practices and especially doctrines and theories. In dealing with the question of the criteria invoked when judging what is beau-

Introduction

21

tiful in the cross-cultural application of the notion of art, Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd notes: “My argument has been that such ‘commonalities’ as we can discern are to be found at a deeper level. Some recognition of some distinction between the attractive and the ugly, the refined and the coarse, the admirable and the dull, is common, if not universal. That point remains however much we differ in what we admire and in how we might go about explaining our preferences if indeed we think they need some justification” (Lloyd 2009: 109). Since antiquity literature has been considered a particular kind of imitation (m†mesis). Friedrich Schiller distinguished between imitation of nature and imitation of human emotion (Schiller 1981). Imitation of nature is the subject of nave art, whereas imitation of human emotion is the subject of sentimental art. Both types of literature combine an analytical and a synthetic way of presentation, and both tend also to consider tradition while nevertheless remaining open to innovation. This, however, is true of all sciences, cultures and religions. Grasping reality in its totality is therefore the first methodological principle of the study. A “total approach” on existential grounds conveys an awareness of the inner connection of all foundational values, of the inner connection between aesthetics and ethics and of the way to make an educational impact by means of persuasion. A “total approach” also favours an interdisciplinary orientation of research on the basis of analogy between material and spiritual reality. Certain basic themes and forms are present in the literature of all times and cultures. A comparative treatment of literary texts is a path to discovering the contrasting relation of similarities and differences between authors, cultures and periods. Some foundational values were adopted in Europe from ancient Greece and Rome, and some from the ancient Middle East and Israel. One pair of common themes is longing and temptation (Avsenik Nabergoj 2009 and 2010), and in this regard Judaism, Christianity and Islam share a common heritage of biblical sources (Kvam et al. 1999; Volf et al. 2010). Intercultural and interreligious dialogue challenges abstract doctrines and the commandment style of moral discourse, while stoking the imagination, common sense-perception and experience by raising fundamental questions about humans – about men and women – and society. Comparative literary analysis has the potential to effect positive changes in relations between representatives of various cultures and faiths. Shared experience and knowledge can transform engaged individuals from ineffective observers into seekers of truth, beauty and love. Living examples – for instance those timeless icons of nonviolence, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela – emerged from the belief that shared experience and knowledge can create a common ground within the global world and thus make lasting contributions to a glorification of the innate goodness in humans. Only great souls can inspire people of all races, backgrounds and religions to turn anger

22

Introduction

into compassion, hatred into love. Literature shows that throughout history all lasting relationships and all communities have been built on the path of life and on personal relationships embracing truth, beauty and love. Employing a “total approach” in comparative literary research is a means of putting love to work in resolving problems, healing relationships and creating lasting peace. In the final analysis it is clear that the sense of truth, beauty and love is not only inspiration but also a skill in perceiving values on the basis of experience. An examination of contemporary writing on literary theory and especially literary genres reveals great plurality, or even confusion, in both the use of terminology for fundamental classification into literary types and genres and in determining the criteria for describing them. In his Poetics Aristotle provided, without prescribing any rules, the fundamental theory of literary types through his description of the conventions governing individual types or genres. In general, since antiquity literary theorists have offered normative descriptions of literary types and genres in the framework of a system that allows for a relatively reliable classification of types of literature into corresponding literary genres. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spoke of the three main types or “natural forms of poetry” (the epic, the lyric, and the dramatic). This basic division and traditional classificatory system was later questioned as an open system of literary types and genres was put forth. Because the lines between the types and genres are no longer so firmly drawn, there is little certainty when it comes to ascribing texts to a particular category – that is, to knowing where to place texts that have characteristics of more than one type or genre. In both a theoretical and practical perspective it is of fundamental importance that the criteria for classifying literary types and their description be determined. Some critics have attempted to classify literary types and genres, though in so doing they have run into the dilemma of whether to do this according to formal characteristics or according to content. Attempts to answer this question led to the prevailing principle of pluralism in laying out the relevant criteria. Attempts to determine criteria, meanwhile, show that the greatest dynamic exists in reflecting on and searching for an answer to these unanswered questions about the relation between the theory of literary genres and the history of literary genres. The criteria can be worked out only by means of theory, but that necessarily includes critically evaluating the history of creating and defining literary types and genres. Literary types and genres represent different artistic ways of writing about various views of reality in the material world, in society and in life in general, as well as about the truth of even the subtlest shades of the psychological and spiritual state of heroes. It is for this reason that the most important question for the reader of a literary work pertains to the multi-layered relation between form and content. An organic interweaving of form and content occurs already in the very coming-into-being of literary works. Literature is an answer to the chall-

Introduction

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enges of environment, interpersonal relations, social relations, and historical occurrences. Literature is a synthetic and artistic response to the challenges of time and space in the rhythm of life. Literary types and genres, thus, do not merely emerge of themselves. They are, rather, a consequence of expectations that arise in social constellations, in individual life stories, and in the vision and planning of the future. Modern musings on the relation between form and content in literature have seen an increasing awareness of historical memory and of life experience. Both factors occupy such a fundamentally creative and cognitive role in the life of man as an individual and of society as a whole that some literary theorists value literary works as both a collective founding document and recognizable marker of the memory of individuals and entire societies of a culture. One need only consider the role of literary works that have entered the canon of a particular nation or even of the international community. The more important the role a literary work assumes in terms of cultural memory, the more it becomes a part of the context for the production of new texts. In other words, the more it becomes part of an organic process of intertextual communication both within a particular culture and in intercultural dialogue; it even establishes its position in the process of interculturality. This is why literature evidently has a more important role in the cognitive and the educational process at the level of individuals and of society than may seem to be the case given entirely divergent views on the role of literature. Of course we could not speak of “cultural memory” if literature did not grow from impulses of primal human experience that span the polarity between longing and despair, love and hatred, war and peace. If the wisdom writer in the book of Ecclesiastes (3:1 – 8) sets down his experience by noting that “To every thing there is a season” and encompasses all the fundamental experiences, he is speaking while aware of the unfathomable strength of the laws of the universe, the environment of life, and the impulses of human innerness that affect man’s manner of feeling, thinking, his life and his creating. Literary works, with their generic and specific formal elements, are the central elements of our memory because they express the experience of past generations so truthfully that new generations can uncover in them the reality and truth of their life and can identify with their message. It is on the basis of this that literary types and genres represent models of interpretation of life experience and that they can also become a part of the canon of the human community that encodes values and norms on the basis of time-honoured experiences of human history. The first part of this monograph is the fruit of a lengthy search for an answer to the question of where the explanations lie for the widespread and uninterrupted contemporising of literature in various literary genres as well as in folk and artistic representations the world over. In their studies, renowned writers

24

Introduction

who have also contributed to literary theory express – sometimes more, sometimes less overtly – their recognition that ultimately literature is an artistic embodiment of what we have experienced in light of facts (which are also an area of empirical science), and under the impression of the convictions which generally reign in a community and which historical experience also confirms. In Chapter 9 of his Poetics, Aristotle summed up the criteria of poetic reality and truth: “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen – what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity” (1451b). No literary theory could seriously question this statement. The art of writing within a system or “canon” of literary types is thus an echo of the internal necessity or lawfulness of natural phenomena and phenomena of life which is endowed with reason and is inclined to truth. Examining the roots and development of literary types and genres allows for profound insight into the many possibilities that exist for creative literary communication in terms of content. Though the broadest realm is the structure of the universe, which we measure in light years, we also present, in ever contrasting shades, our immediate life surroundings. That is why nature, since the very beginning of human consciousness and imagination, has served as the source of innumerable models for imitation (m†mesis) in all areas of artistic creativity. It was on the basis of this that primal literary forms – that is, literary types – arose, and that the first “collections” in the oral tradition tightly linked family members and the broader human community. Various literary types and forms came into being spontaneously – after the rise of literacy, the first literary theories were born and these theories more or less influenced the continued and lengthy development of the literary process. Observations of nature prompted both artistic creativity and scientific investigation, and analysis and synthesis were determining factors for the rise of various types of arts and sciences. Since nature has always been the basic model for imitation, it has, simultaneously, also been the basis of the criteria for judging truth and, accordingly, objective reality. The human spirit shone also in the searching for a common core within the myriad phenomena in the material world. Already in ancient times people began to unveil the workings of natural law, and so it was that natural law later also entered consciousness as a concept. The poet and the scientist co-existed and co-created in harmony, as each was seeking the common core of the phenomenal world, each in his own way. The polymath Goethe is among the leading spokesmen for the harmony between external and internal order in man’s understanding of truth. The creative imitating of the reality of the material world could not content itself solely with objective reality of the appearance of nature; rather, it necessarily included also subjective experiencing of the world, especially man’s own experiencing of objective reality. Man thus became the focal point for observing

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and imitating. Artists tried the most suitable means of recording the appearance of humans’ characteristics and their countless life situations at both the personal and social levels. All of this occurred of course in natural surroundings, that is, in the surroundings of the material world. For this reason, the concordance between the conceiving of external and internal reality became a crucial issue and the central problem in artistic creation. In Maxim 533, Goethe remarks, “Ordinary viewing, a right conception of earthly matters, is the heritage of general human reason; pure viewing of what is external and internal is very rare.” This statement also corresponds to the organic coalescence between form and content in every artistic type and genre. Of this, Goethe states in Maxim 1351, “Perfect artists are more indebted to teaching than to nature.” Maxim 1119 also points in the same direction: “‘Creating out of oneself ’, as it is called, usually results in false originals and mannerists” (Goethe 1999). And yet all of this is scarcely the beginning of the great history of art in general as well as of the genesis of literary works of various types and genres. As social life increasingly became the focus of art, artists inevitably began to deal with the tremendous range of man’s emotional world, his self-image, and his relation to his fellow man. And thus the realm of conceiving of and expressing reality expanded into the conceiving of and expressing of truth. The discovering of objective truth inevitably acquired a subjective character, and the ethical judgement of man’s personal and social life became central. Thus, in evaluating the nature and role of literature, alongside the concept of reality the essential concept of truth became a central focus. Goethe expresses this in Maxim 382: “The first and last thing demanded of genius is love of truth.” In Maxim 493, meanwhile, Goethe explains the essential quality of truth: “To find and to appreciate goodness everywhere is the sign of a love of truth.” In Maxim 1220, he draws attention to the challenging nature of seeking truth: “Laying hold of the truth demands a much higher approach than what is called for in defence of [error].” Maxim 78 reads, “Wisdom is to be found only in truth.” With this searching the nature of the universal dimension did not lose validity but in fact became more valuable. The increasingly necessary viewpoint of man’s creative world into the internal world of the soul entailed a broadening of possible viewpoints for judging objective reality, and at the same time this reality became an image of or symbol for portraying especially the inexpressible shades of man’s psychology and spirituality. Art and science developed according to the principle of analogy, and in the area of philosophy the concept of the “analogy of being” (analogia entis) appeared. It became all the more obvious that literature is an organic link between objective and subjective truth which could only be expressed by means of a symbol, by analogy. Literary critics speak in theoretical terms of the ambiguity of symbols, words and word chains, and ultimately of hermeneutic theory that examines the literal meaning and the various aspects of

26

Introduction

metaphorical meaning. In this lies also the reason for the tremendous significance of symbol and allegory. The essence of a symbol is that rather than offering an immediate way of representing truth it provides an analogous representation of truth. In Maxims 279 and 314, Goethe offered the following, now seminal, distinction between symbol and allegory : There is a great difference whether a poet is looking for the particular that goes with the general, or sees the general in the particular. The first gives rise to allegory where the particular only counts as an example, an illustration of the particular ; but the latter in fact constitutes the nature of poetry, expressing something particular without any thought of the general, and without indicating it. Now whoever has this living grasp of the particular is at the same time in possession of the general, without realizing it, or else only realizing it later on. (Maxim 279) This is true symbolism, where the particular represents the general, not as dream and shadow, but as a live and immediate revelation of the unfathomable. (Maxim 314)

When the organic and creative linking of objective and subjective reality in art becomes the subject of analytical judgement and philosophical discourse, abstract systems inevitably follow. Systems like idealism, realism, materialism and so on have little to do with reality per se. Abstract constructs, which are fabricated, become constructs that the best creators in the area of the arts as well as the sciences transcend; those who are capable of doing so pour masses of objective reality and subjective impressions into a created whole. Because one cannot speak of truth without ethical awareness and judgement, the terms “reality” and “truth” are not synonymous: whereas the word “reality” implies ethical neutrality, this is not the case for the word “truth.” Thus, the two concepts come simultaneously to the fore and organically supplement each other when a creative and well-meaning intellect is at work; they clash, however, when immaterial judging of one and the other occurs. Literature is the primary realm of creativity, education and scientific clarification of truth at the individual and social levels. Emmanuel Kant’s crucial distinction between “pure” and “practical” reason offered contemporary and later generations of philosophers a holistic model for linking objective reality and personal life experiences that include the moral imperative. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains the means of conceptual understanding in the area of actual or possible empirical experience. When it comes to empirical experience, pure reason is especially cognizant of uniting “the whole” and developing conceptual arguments for communication at both the abstract and systematic levels. This capability, however, in no way suffices or serves man’s experience in the objective world. Here man freely conceives of the moral imperative, sees dramatic ethical challenges as the basic guide for his dignity, and manifests his ethical sense of the beautiful and the

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sublime, as well as, ultimately, his natural inclination for a goal (t¦los), while sensing absolute reality and truth. This area of human understanding and communication was dealt with by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason. The world of nature and the world of man’s freedom are two separate entities, although they are organically interwoven in material life. This distinction makes possible the discovery of the foundation of the traditional theological “negative path” (via negativa) and “negative capability,” which the poet John Keats highlighted in connection with the experience of man’s uncertainty, his doubts, and incapability of bringing his experiences about the mystical, the sublime and the profound into line with conceptual and systematised categories. In his seminal book Myth, Truth and Literature: Toward a True Post-Modernism Colin Falck argues that the modern post-structuralist movement which emerged from the French literary and cultural theorizing of post-Saussureanism met with failure because “with its callow and philosophically incoherent antimetaphysical posturings, [it] has tried to disengage literature from its troublesome spiritual dimension altogether – by simply denying the existence of that dimension. It has thereby threatened to deprive an entire generation of students and intelligent readers a part of their spiritual birthright” (Falck: xi–xii). His evaluation of the consequence of this is students and readers are growing up with no real sense of the spiritual significance of literature and with no invitation to develop their own creative sensibilities in truly literary ways. This near-death of intuitive aesthetic sensibility in the academic world, together with the stifling of critical inquiry by journals with names like Critical Inquiry, the dismantling of the traditional literary canon for almost entirely non-literary reasons, and the virtually total supplanting of literary discussion and criticism by culturalpolitical discussion and criticism in books and articles now written about literature, has meant that there are no longer any places in the world of organized literary education where the value of literature as an open and unprejudiced imaginative enhancement of life can be either acknowledged or cultivated. (Falck 1994: xii)

Falck does not see the solution in searching for “new” methods but in a return to the great wealth of creative literary criticism written by writers and poets of genius. Their insights are convincing because these great minds were writing on the basis of their own creative and artistic literary experience. Though Falck points especially to the great Romantic artists and literary critics, this horizon can be extended to the entirety of literary theory from antiquity to the present. The purpose of this study is thus to present such critics in a broadly diachronic and synchronic perspective.

1. Literary Types as a System of Communication, and Art as an Expression of Reality

Every work of literature belongs to at least one literary type or genre. Though the classification of literary types and genres evokes conventionality of forms, literary works reflect life, which enables communication insofar as literary types function as a system of communication. Literary works accommodate themselves to the basic structure of particular types and genres, but at the same time each literary work changes those genres and every genre is itself prone to constant change. It is precisely in the relation to literary types that literature itself changes and thus transmits literary meaning. In Kinds of Literature, his seminal study on literary genres, Alastair Fowler emphasises the impossibility of circumventing existing literary genres: Writers and readers of certain historical periods have ignored genre. But while doing so, they have unconsciously engaged in generic transactions all the same. In fact, ignoring genre has often meant passively accepting the conventions prescribed by custom and fashion. So medieval readers accommodatingly took allegory for granted – just as we tend to generalize, without much thought, naturalistic presuppositions and criteria appropriate only to a narrow range of novelistic genres. (Fowler 2002: 24)

Because the process of genre transformation is so mercurial, we can assert that no single description or definition of literary types and genres is entirely adequate. Very often there is not even an attempt to construct an overview of individual literary genres. The Middle Ages passed without leaving behind any significant genre criticism; during the Renaissance it developed for the most part only in Italy. And yet even there criticism was limited to a few genres such as tragedy, comedy, pastoral and the romantic epic. The sole exception is Julius Caesar Scaliger, whose Poetices libri septem (Seven Books of Poetics) describes over one hundred literary genres, albeit without considering their types. During the neo-classical era the erroneous view that literary genres were unchanging was prevalent. John Dryden (1631 – 1700) and Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) were the leading proponents of this thesis. This, however, does not mean that today we might speak of literary genres without rules that are to some

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extent binding. For great poets and writers, rules are a call to seek out new paths, and these artists’ abilities allow them to transcend existing genres or to seek variations within related genres. The great poet William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), for example, spoke highly of literary genres or poetic types. Such artists were well-aware of the significance of the stable basis of the rules according to which their predecessors wrote and so with their free and original spirit they tested a basic principle of poetry : imitating reality. The history of world literature indicates that it has been the most original writers who have shown the greatest interest in literary types and genres. It is because literary types and genres are so rich and varied that one searches for criteria by which to classify them. Whereas some attempts have led to an untenable schematic classification according to rubrics, since the 18th century we have seen, with increasing frequency, instances of a more profound understanding of genres as living organisms. Such an understanding provides the basic framework for communicating the inner necessity of events, correctness in content and form into an organic whole that reflects truth about the world and the life it bears. Contemporary literary theory determines literary genre from three possible viewpoints: class, type and family. The first, class, seems least apt. Literary genres are much more than “classes”; their role is primarily identification and the communicating of significance and it is for this reason that criteria of type or typology seem more suitable. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance allows for an even suppler criterion for differentiating between literary genres. Indeed, literary genres function more like families than classes or genres. Fowler sees great advantage in this theory, and notes: In literature, the basis of resemblance lies in literary tradition. What produces generic resemblances, reflection soon shows, is tradition: a sequence of influence and imitation and inherited codes connecting works in the genre. As kinship makes a family, so literary relations of this sort form a genre. Poems are made in part from older poems: each is the child (to use Keats’ metaphor) of an earlier representative of the genre and may yet be the mother of a subsequent representative. Naturally the genetic make-up alters with slow time, so that we may find the genre’s various historical states to be very different from one another. Both historically and within a single period, the family grouping allows for wide variation in the type. In its modified form, the theory of family resemblance also suggests that we should be on the lookout for unexhibited, unobvious, underlying connections between the features (and the works) of a genre. As with heredity, with generic tradition too we have to expect quite unconscious processes to be at work, besides those that readers are aware of. (Fowler 2002: 42 – 43)

The long history and organic growth of literary types and genres necessarily call for an exhaustive assessment of their characteristics and significance on the basis of works of literary criticism that have influenced their development in all

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aspects. The most important position among critics belongs to Aristotle (384 – 322 BC).

1.1

Aristotle’s Classification of Literary Genres and his Treatise on Literary Reality

Only by considering the underlying philosophical principles and scientific methods deduced by Aristotle, the founder of analytical science, can we properly understand the characteristics of literary types and genres as well as poetry’s ability to express truth. The realm of knowledge as a whole is divided into scientific fields and sub-fields, from physics to chemistry, from zoology to biology and botany, from psychology to political science and logic and epistemology, and, not least, literary criticism. Each field of science and the arts systematically examines characteristics of knowledge. In his immensely influential Poetics, Aristotle analytically establishes those for poetry, examining expressive means, the subject and manner of imitating events and life, fortunate and unfortunate individuals. The first to create a systematic discipline of literary criticism and theory, Aristotle sees poetry as an area of general knowledge about the quality and ways of human life. In the twenty-six chapters of Poetics, Aristotle uses the fundamental principle of imitation to establish the common attributes of the visual, musical and poetic arts in order to work out more reliably the criteria for a systematic differentiation and classification of the literary arts. In connection with the principle of m†mesis, he lists all of the types of imitation in colours and forms (visual arts), and in melody and words (music and poetry). In the area of the literary arts, he considers comedy, epic and tragedy to be by far the leading genres. With the systematic classification of ancient literature into genus and species and with the description of the particularity and formal unity of tragic and epic poetry, Aristotle established the foundation for the development of the theory of literary types and genres for all subsequent periods. There is reason to believe that the extant text of the Poetics was only the first half of a whole, and that the second (lost) part dealt with comedy. Aristotle exhibited an extraordinary sensitivity for and attention to the reality of nature and the objects of the material world, and of course also to the lives and actions of individuals. In accordance with the word po†esis, which derives from “to make, to work,” and thus “to poetise,” he understood writing to be a craft and he limits himself in his description of tragic and epic writing to the constituent elements and to the uniform design of their formal structure. In this regard he differs greatly from his student Plato, who explained poetry as a product of

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inspiration and a transferring of emotions. In Chapter 1 of Poetics Aristotle announces the questions he intends to answer, and he defines poetry in terms of the expressive means of imitation: I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first. Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects – the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct. (1447a)

Aristotle thus establishes from the outset that beauty is the fundamental feature on which the quality of literature is to be judged; this is in contrast to Plato, who most highly values the ethical principle of what is good. The principle of the beautiful is of itself essentially linked to the question of the relation to objective nature and life, and therefore to reality and truth. The basic definition of poetry as a manner of imitating natural phenomena, occurrences, and actions is in harmony with this starting point. In elegiac, epic, dithyrambic, and gnomic poetry, in tragedy, in comedy, in flute and lyre music, poetry imitates the actions of individuals through verbal, rhythmic, melodic, and metrical means. There are three differentiating criteria in poetry : the expressive means, the subject, and the means of imitation. In Chapter 1, Aristotle considers expressive means, and in Chapter 2, he examines poetry as the object of imitation as he clearly establishes the criteria for the classification of character : Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life. (1448a)

Though characters differ according to their virtues or weaknesses, it seems that the opposition between “noble” and “less noble” also implies assessment according to class (Gantar 2005: 149). In Chapter 3, Aristotle discusses the narrative (epic) and dramatic manner of m†mesis, which he links to the roots of the word “drama”: Hence, some say, the name of “drama” is given to such poems, as representing action. For the same reason the Dorians claim the invention both of Tragedy and Comedy. The claim to Comedy is put forward by the Megarians – not only by those of Greece proper, who allege that it originated under their democracy, but also by the Megarians of Sicily,

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for the poet Epicharmus, who is much earlier than Chionides and Magnes, belonged to that country. Tragedy too is claimed by certain Dorians of the Peloponnese. (1448a)

In Chapters 4 and 5, Aristotle discusses poetry in terms of its historical development, stating that “poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature” (1448b). The first is imitating, which man knows already from childhood, while the second innate cause is the joy felt at melody and rhythm. “Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry” (1448b), and the poetic arts as a whole and each individual poetic genre works as an organism that develops until it has “found its natural form” (Gantar 2005: 153). Chapter 6 is key to understanding Aristotle’s concept of poetry. He leads off with his famous definition of tragedy : Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play ; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity [¦leos] and fear [phûbos] effecting the proper purgation [k‚tharsis] of these emotions. (1449b)

Though Aristotle refers to the first and second purposes of tragedy (evoking pity and fear) in several other places in Poetics (1452a; 1452a; 1452b, 1453a; 1453b; 1456b), the third (purgation or catharsis), mentioned but once, has remained a central focus of literary theory to the present and has been interpreted from myriad viewpoints. In Chapter 7, Aristotle discusses the necessary structure of events in tragedy : “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole […]. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end” (1450a). He speaks of the structure in aesthetic terms: “a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order” (1450a). A comparison between a literary work and a living being in terms of the relation between the whole and its parts can already be seen in Plato’s Phaedrus, in which he writes that “every discourse [lûgos] ought to be a living creature, having a body of its own and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one another and to the whole” (264C). For Aristotle, unity is of further importance because “the plot, being an imitation of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole…” (1451a). Especially famous is Aristotle’s description of the difference between poetry and history, from Chapter 9: It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen – what is possible according to the law

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of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history : for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion will speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity ; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. The particular is – for example – what Alcibiades did or suffered. In Comedy this is already apparent: for here the poet first constructs the plot on the lines of probability, and then inserts characteristic names – unlike the lampooners who write about particular individuals. It clearly follows that the poet or “maker” should be the maker of plots rather than of verses; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates are actions. And even if he chances to take an historical subject, he is none the less a poet; for there is no reason why some events that have actually happened should not conform to the law of the probable and possible, and in virtue of that quality in them he is their poet or maker. (1451b)

The assertion that poetry “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” exhibits a very profound understanding of poetry’s essence, albeit one that is limited to antiquity’s chronological and “factographic” concept of history. Today the ranges of history and literature are so broad that they have in fact come to share many traits. If Aristotle states that literature depicts events and actions as something general, clearly he has in mind the most profound essence of a living organism, not the reflection of its inner necessity or lawfulness. However, modern conceptions in the most resonant historical works contain, as a focal point, the discovery of causal relations between events on the basis of the principles of necessity and probability. Such works thus evoke literary works that contemplate historical events – such as Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace: it is through historical events and the various types of acting characters, or agents, that the author lays bare the causal and organic link between the external and internal forces of the tides of history. In Aristotle the laws of necessity and probability are the fundamental criteria of reality and truth. This is a pre-condition for both the structure of events and character depiction: As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability ; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina… (1454a)

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In light of this, it is surprising that Aristotle recommends that the poet depict human characteristics more beautifully than they in fact are: Again, since Tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level, the example of good portrait painters should be followed. They, while reproducing the distinctive form of the original, make a likeness which is true to life and yet more beautiful. So too the poet, in representing men who are irascible or indolent, or have other defects of character, should preserve the type and yet ennoble it. In this way Achilles is portrayed by Agathon and Homer. (1454b)

The important principle of reality manifests itself in the manner of recognizing actions and characteristics. In Chapter 16, Aristotle mentions “recognition by signs”; sudden and unexpected recognition; recognition “invented at will by the poet”; recognition on the basis of memory ; recognition according to logical deduction or reasoning; recognition according to the incorrect conclusion of the public. The chapter concludes: But, of all recognitions, the best is that which arises from the incidents themselves, where the startling discovery is made by natural means. Such is that in the Oedipus of Sophocles, and in the Iphigenia; for it was natural that Iphigenia should wish to dispatch a letter. These recognitions alone dispense with the artificial aid of tokens or amulets. Next come the recognitions by process of reasoning. (1455a)

When Aristotle gives advice to poets about the content of stories, he opens a perspective on reality in staging human passions: Again, the poet should work out his play, to the best of his power, with appropriate gestures; for those who feel emotion are most convincing through natural sympathy with the characters they represent; and one who is agitated storms, one who is angry rages, with the most lifelike reality. Hence poetry implies either a happy gift of nature or a strain of madness. In the one case a man can take the mould of any character ; in the other, he is lifted out of his proper self. (1455a)

In Chapter 18, Aristotle states that every tragedy has a “tying up” or complication and denouement. In terms of the element that dominates in a tragedy, he explains four types: the complex tragedy, the tragedy of suffering, the tragedy of character, and the straightforward tragedy or tragedy of spectacle: In his Reversals of the Situation, however, [the poet] shows a marvellous skill in the effort to hit the popular taste – to produce a tragic effect that satisfies the moral sense. This effect is produced when the clever rogue, like Sisyphus, is outwitted, or the brave villain defeated. Such an event is probable in Agathon’s sense of the word: “it is probable,” he says, “that many things should happen contrary to probability.” (1456a)

Aristotle also touches on the issue of reality in Chapters 20 – 22, when he speaks of elements, of forms, and of the characteristics of poetic diction. The critical yardsticks are proper measure, proper place and proper manner. The passage on

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Literary Types as a System of Communication, and Art as an Expression of Reality

the use of expressions that are not used in everyday speech deserves our attention: It is a great matter to observe propriety in these several modes of expression, as also in compound words, strange (or rare) words, and so forth. But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another ; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. (1459a)

In Chapters 23 and 24, Aristotle speaks of epic poetry. Of crucial importance here is his description of the difference between epic poetry and historical works: As to that poetic imitation which is narrative in form and employs a single meter, the plot manifestly ought, as in a tragedy, to be constructed on dramatic principles. It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be. For as the sea-fight at Salamis and the battle with the Carthaginians in Sicily took place at the same time, but did not tend to any one result, so in the sequence of events, one thing sometimes follows another, and yet no single result is thereby produced. Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets. Here again, then, as has been already observed, the transcendent excellence of Homer is manifest. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem, though that war had a beginning and an end. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view. If, again, he had kept it within moderate limits, it must have been over-complicated by the variety of the incidents. As it is, he detaches a single portion, and admits as episodes many events from the general story of the war – such as the Catalogue of the ships and others – thus diversifying the poem. (1459a)

In Chapter 25, Aristotle lists, on the basis of the laws of imitation, the essentials of literary criticism. It is necessary for the poet to imitate from one of three viewpoints: “things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be” (1460b). If the poet is not up to his task as an imitator, it is a sin against art, and the ensuing criticism may attack according to five types of un-reality or un-truth: “Things are censured either as impossible, or irrational, or morally hurtful, or contradictory, or contrary to artistic correctness” (1461b). The second work by Aristotle that is important for the development of literary criticism and theory is Rhetoric. Here rhetoric is not to be understood merely as the study of speech but also as the ability to ascertain the natural givens of language and communication. Aristotle was interested in the possibilities that our conceptual and linguistic structures have for persuading and convincing, which is the main purpose of speech. In Book I, he cites the three elements for

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convincing public speaking: the argument employed by the speaker ; the character (¦thos) of the speaker ; the disposition of the audience. With the emphasis on argument, Aristotle indirectly responds to the insincere habits of the sophists, who cultivated rhetoric that was devoid of true arguments. Aristotle differentiates among three means of public speech: deliberative speech, which is bound to future events (such as in politics); legal speech, which is linked to past events (such as in court); ceremonial (epideictic) speech, which pertains to the present, when the speaker praises or rebukes an individual. In Book II, Aristotle focuses on the emotions that speeches provoke in the listeners. Here we have the first systematic study of the emotions and their classification into types of feeling: anger, calm, fear, confidence, shame, compassion, indignation, envy, and competition. In Book III, Aristotle discusses the question of style (l¦xis). The most important aspect in Rhetoric is the expression t¦los, with which he describes the speaker’s final rationality, goal, and purpose of convincing – that is, what the speaker accomplishes through his arguments, his emotions, and his style. With this Aristotle established the foundation for later theories about interaction between speaker and listener, or, in literature, between writer and reader. Here we also have the basis for developing awareness of and attention to the personal, historical and social effects of literary works. Finally, Aristotle inspires sensitivity to conceiving and experiencing the reality of life in all its variations.

1.2

Horace’s Poetical Treatise on Unity and Harmony in Poetry

Between 39 and 10 BC, the great Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 – 8 BC), or Horace, wrote a number of works in various literary genres, including epodes or lyric poems, odes, satires, and versified epistles. A number of his letters discuss the characteristics of poetry, and of these the most important are Ad Avgustum, Ad Florum, and Ad Pisones; the Roman orator Quintillius (c. 30 – 100 AD) called the last of these Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) or liber de arte poetica (Book on the Art of Poetry). Ars Poetica is a 476-line verse discussion of poetry. Horace’s opting for a verse presentation of his ideas has the consequence that structurally the work “is often dictated less by logical argumentation than by verbal association and rhetorical tone” (Leitch et al. 2010: 120); many translators have decided to render the text in prose.1 The main premise of Horace’s approach is in accordance with Aristotle’s thesis that poetry is a skill – an art, which demands learning and practice, 1 The verse translation used here is by A. S. Kline, who has kindly granted copyright. His translation is available at: http://www.poetryintranslation.com/

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theoretical and technical knowledge, as well as the capacity for objective selfcriticism. In the first lines (1 – 37), he outlines the laws of unity and harmony in art by saying: If a painter had chosen to set a human head On a horse’s neck, covered a melding of limbs, Everywhere, with multi-coloured plumage, so That what was a lovely woman, at the top, Ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish: Asked to a viewing, could you stifle laughter, my friends? Believe me, a book would be like such a picture, Dear Pisos, if its idle fancies were so conceived That neither its head nor foot could be related To a unified form. ‘But painters and poets Have always shared the right to dare anything.’ I know it: I claim that licence, and grant it in turn: But not so the wild and tame should ever mate, Or snakes couple with birds, or lambs with tigers. Weighty openings and grand declarations often Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam Far and wide, when Diana’s grove and her altar, The winding stream hastening through lovely fields, Or the river Rhine, or the rainbow’s being described. There’s no place for them here. Perhaps you know how To draw a cypress tree: so what, if you’ve been given Money to paint a sailor plunging from a shipwreck In despair? It started out as a wine-jar : then why, As the wheel turns round does it end up a pitcher? In short let it be what you wish, but whole and natural. Most poets (dear sir, and you sons worthy of your sire), Are beguiled by accepted form. I try to be brief And become obscure: aiming at smoothness I fail In strength and spirit: claiming grandeur he’s turgid: Too cautious, fearing the blast, he crawls on the ground: But the man who wants to distort something unnaturally Paints a dolphin among the trees, a boar in the waves. Avoiding faults leads to error, if art is lacking. The humblest craftsman, down by Aemilius’ School, Who moulds finger-nails in bronze, imitates wavy hair, Is unhappy with the result, because he’s unable To create a whole. Now if I wished to cast something, I’d no more wish to be him, than live with a crooked Nose, though admired for my jet-black eyes and black hair.

Horace’s literary theory accords with Aristotle’s belief that the poet, like the painter, is an imitator who attempts to appropriately reflect and capture reality.

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It is a basic principle that each part of a poetic creation must conform to the whole, and that content must find its proper literary form, diction and expressive means on the basis of character and circumstances. In other words, at work here is an aesthetic understanding of reality. Like a painter or other visual artist, the poet also creates under the dual influences of reality and imagination. How well a work imitates reality hinges on how well the artist, from start to finish, has established a perfectly organic link and unity. A poem is a success if all of its parts are harmonically combined into a whole of content and form. Though free, the painter and the poet are not free to sin against nature and artistic harmony, as this would indicate a capricious relationship to the valid and existing aesthetic rules. A good epic distinguishes itself by means of a strictly adhered-to style, images from the external world, and elevated language and diction, and for that reason it will not take on inorganic accoutrements like modish descriptions of natural objects, animals, and people. Like everything, a work of art also has its place and limits. Horace’s example of the painter who creates an original painting of a tree but places it in the most unlikely surroundings – such as on a sinking ship at sea – emphasises the aspects of an artwork’s balance and harmony in terms of the relation between the part and the whole. He draws attention to the environment, which has an important role in the broader perspective of the whole. In lines 24 – 36, Horace expresses the dangerous tendency artists have of avoiding sameness by employing a wide variety of figures. When they wilfully exaggerate in this regard they may, in spite of a successful portrayal of details, transgress against proper measure and thus fail to achieve a unified whole. As he writes, lovely eyes do not compensate for a “crooked nose.” In lines 38 – 43, Horace advises choosing the appropriate subject and construction for poetry : You who write, choose a subject that’s matched by Your powers, consider deeply what your shoulders Can and cannot bear. Whoever chooses rightly Eloquence, and clear construction, won’t fail him. Charm and excellence in construction, if I’m right, Is to say here and now, what’s to be said here and now, Retaining, and omitting, much, for the present.

Experience is the poet’s point of departure: only when he chooses a suitable subject can the author find the right expressions, the right choice of subject matter, and viewpoints according to what is contemporary ; only then can he write in a clear, organic and transparent manner. In lines 44 – 71, Horace advocates seeking out and choosing fecund words that have productive strength so that the poet, through skilful word combinations,

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can find new meanings, as “It’s been our right, ever / Will be our right, to issue words that are fresh-stamped” (59). Of themselves, words are not eternal: some disappear, later to arise anew, and long-dormant words awaken from their slumber : “As the forests shed their leaves, as the year declines / And the oldest fall, so perish those former generations / Of words, while the latest, like infants, are born and thrive” (70 – 71). In lines 72 – 87, Horace points to the need for the proper meter, while in lines 88 – 117 he emphasises the ideal balance between form and content in conjunction with the chosen metre. This is dictated to the poet by the truth about the condition of the human soul and about the formal rules that have been delineated by the historical development of poetry : […] Comedy can’t be played in tragic mode. Likewise Thyestes’ feast scorns being related In everyday terms suited to the comic sock. Let each thing keep to the proper place, allotted. Yet Comedy may sometimes elevate its voice, When an angry Chremes storms in swelling phrase: And often in tragedy, Peleus and Telephus, One exiled, one a beggar, lament in common prose, Eschewing bombast, and sesquipedalian words, When they want their moaning to touch the listener’s heart. It’s not enough for poems to have beauty : they must have Charm, leading their hearer’s heart wherever they wish. As the human face smiles at a smile, so it echoes Those who weep: if you want to move me to tears You must first grieve yourself: then Peleus or Telephus Your troubles might pain me: speak inappropriately And I’ll laugh or fall asleep. Sad words suit a face Full of sorrow, threats fit the face full of anger, Jests suit the playful, serious speech the solemn. Nature first alters us within, to respond to each Situation: brings delight or goads us to anger, Or weighs us to the ground, tormented by grief: Then, with tongue interpreting, shows heart’s emotion. If the speaker’s words don’t harmonise with his state, The Romans will bellow with laughter, knights and all. Much depends on whether a god or man is speaking, A mature old man, or one still flush with first youth, A powerful lady, or perhaps a diligent nurse, A wandering merchant, or tiller of fertile fields, Colchian or Assyrian, from Argos or Thebes.

This passage is of great importance because it pertains to the deepest essence of human life and because it reflects the awareness that all linguistic and poetic means must correspond to what the spectator himself feels – the “innerness”

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(intus) of human experience, which is the most spontaneous and poetic revelation of the truth to man. Aristotle discusses this in Chapter 17 of Poetics when he states that the most convincing hero will be one whose author has experienced similar emotions: “those who feel emotion are most convincing through natural sympathy with the characters they represent; and one who is agitated storms, one who is angry rages, with the most lifelike reality” (1455a). In other words, only the artist who feels a “natural sympathy” and who has felt something similar will have the necessary ability for finding suitable words and poetic expressive means for an authentic rendering of inner life. In lines 118 – 151, Horace touches on a dilemma in discussing this theme and the epic subject: should the poet adhere to traditional literary figures? or should he risk an attempt at portraying new characters? Either follow tradition, or invent consistently. If you happen to portray Achilles, honoured, Pen him as energetic, irascible, ruthless, Fierce, above the law, never downing weapons. Make Medea wild, untameable, Ino tearful, Ixion treacherous, Io wandering, Orestes sad. If you’re staging something untried, and dare To attempt fresh characters, keep them as first Introduced, from start to end self-consistent. It’s hard to make the universal specific: It’s better to weave a play from the poem of Troy, Than be first to offer something unknown, unsung. You’ll win private rights to public themes, if you Don’t keep slowly circling the broad beaten track, Or, pedantic translator, render them word for word, Or following an idea, leap like the goat into the well From which shame, or the work’s logic, denies escape. And don’t start like the old writer of epic cycles: “Of Priam’s fate I’ll sing, and the greatest of Wars.” What could he produce to match his opening promise? Mountains will labour: what’s born? A ridiculous mouse! How much better the man who doesn’t struggle, ineptly : “Tell me, Muse, of that man, who after the fall of Troy Had sight of the manners and cities of many peoples.” He intends not smoke from flame, but light from smoke, So as then to reveal striking and marvellous things, Antiphates, Charybdis and Scylla, the Cyclops. He doesn’t start Diomede’s return from Troy with his Uncle Meleager’s death, or the War with two eggs: He always hastens the outcome, and snatches the reader Into the midst of the action, as if all were known, Leaves what he despairs of improving by handling,

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Yet so deceptive, in blending fact with fiction, The middle agrees with the start, the end with the middle.

Horace counsels the poet to be modest in his relation to great figures from mythology or figures already rendered by predecessors, because he is aware that it is risky to test one’s own talent and to create new fables and characteristics. It can happen that the poet fails to create a hero who is interesting in human terms, and who, though he personifies living reality, is but an echo of typical figures. Anton SovrÀ links Horace’s advice with the fact that “Roman poetry was almost entirely dependent on Greek, not only as regards form but also to a great extent with regard to content” (SovrÀ 1934: 56). In lines 152 – 218, Horace instructs poets in the technical ingredients of drama, and even though he is focussing on a specific literary genre, he begins with guidelines that are of general significance: the poet should draw characters in accordance with the development of the four traditional stages of life, in order to make the figures true to life. In lines 219 – 249, Horace provides specific instructions for classical dramatic satire. In lines 250 – 273, he provides a detailed analysis of dialogue verse, while in lines 274 – 293 he critically evaluates the transition from the older generation of Roman poets, who imitated all types of Greek poetry, to the young generation, who began to work thematically with subjects from domestic history and from the life their own nation. In lines 284 – 293, he again emphasises the need for a wellwrought work of art: Our own poets have left nothing unexplored, And have not won least honour by daring to leave The paths of the Greeks and celebrate things at home, Whether in Roman tragedies or domestic comedies. And Latium would be no less supreme in letters Than in courage and force of arms, if all her poets Weren’t deterred by revision’s time and effort. O scions of Numa, condemn that work that many A day, and many erasures, have not corrected, Improving it ten times over, smoothed to the touch.

In part two of Ars poetica (294 – 475), Horace again writes of the pre-conditions required for a great poet. Of equal importance are an ability to recognize the world and a proclivity for moral perfection. Moral strength enables the poet to penetrate to the depths of the human emotions and to avoid forms that, though beautiful, are hollow. In lines 332 – 345, Horace describes the ideal balance between edifying and entertaining purposes of art, which is successfully encapsulated in line 343: “Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci” (“Who can blend usefulness and sweetness wins every / Vote”). The balance of the passage reads:

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Poets wish to benefit or to please, or to speak What is both enjoyable and helpful to living. When you give instruction, be brief, what’s quickly Said the spirit grasps easily, faithfully retains: Everything superfluous flows out of a full mind. Fictions meant to amuse should be close to reality, So your play shouldn’t ask for belief in whatever It chooses: no living child from the Lamia’s full belly! The ranks of our elders drive out what lacks virtue, The Ramnes, the young knights, reject dry poetry : Who can blend usefulness and sweetness wins every Vote, at once delighting and teaching the reader. That’s the book that earns the Sosii money, crosses The seas, and wins its author fame throughout the ages.

The subject a poet selects must be as true or likely (proxima veris) as possible. Thus the poet again touches on the essence of his poetics: the affinity for harmony with reality in mediating contents and in searching for appropriate forms. In lines 346 – 389, the poet acknowledges that even a carefully-crafted work of art might not be flawless. If there is a weakness in form, the reader will not condemn the work too harshly as long as the subject matter is polished, credible or realistic, and as long as it is a reflection of the poet’s recognising of the world and life. And yet even if it finds approval from experienced critics, the work should nevertheless be withheld from publication “till the ninth year” (nonumque permatur in annum). In lines 390 – 406 Horace sings of the roots and irreplaceable value of poetry for all areas of human endeavour. The poet is the creator of human culture and civilisation. From this point to the conclusion of the poem he mercilessly scourges the importunity of self-proclaimed, self-confident and extremely intrusive individuals prone to “reciting” superficial verse. Lines 407 – 410 are noteworthy, for it is here that Horace establishes his view of the relation between natural gifts and true effort in creating poetry : Whether a praiseworthy poem is due to nature Or art is the question: I’ve never seen the benefit Of study lacking a wealth of talent, or of untrained Ability : each needs the other’s friendly assistance.

Throughout the centuries Horace’s literary theory in verse form has been extremely well-received, and Ars Poetica was particularly esteemed during the Renaissance. Horace also indirectly contemporised Aristotle and Plato’s views, which had been more valued and discussed in philosophical than in literary circles. Since the Middle Ages, Horace’s views have been systematically taken up, interpreted, and developed by poets and grammarians – among others, by Ge-

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offrey of Vinsauf (12th century.), Pierre de Ronsard (16th century), Nicolas Boileau (17th century), Alexander Pope (18th century), Lord Byron (19th century) and Wallace Stevens (20th century). Boileau (1636 – 1711), who was known as the “French Horace,” was particularly indebted to the Roman when he wrote his influential L’art po¦tique. Horace’s poem about poetry also influenced Slovenian poets, such as France Presˇeren and his poem “Nova pisarija” (The New Writing).

2. Reality in Pre-Modern Philosophical Reflection on Art and in Literary Theory

The first great author of literary theory is Plato (c. 427–c.347 BC), whose dialogues present insights on topics fundamental to human existence: the nature of being; epistemology ; the proper ordering of human society ; the nature of justice, truth, good, love and beauty. Though there are grounds for believing that at least some of the viewpoints on these issues had been cultivated long before Plato, it was he that developed them fully and thereby founded a tradition that would greatly influence all later periods up to the present. Among all ancient authors it was Plato that most radically and universally discussed the power and powerlessness of expressing reality and truth in the arts and especially in literature. Because he judged poetry negatively in terms of its ability to mediate truth and its educational roles, authors from Aristotle, to Philip Sidney, to Aphra Behn, to Percy Bysshe Shelley have written defences of poetry. Among contemporary philosophers who confronted Plato’s position, Jacques Derrida in particular should be mentioned. Given the extensive reach and influence of Plato’s views on art and especially literature, a fair amount of attention is devoted to it here and there are many quotations from crucial passages of Books II, III, VII, and X of his Republic. In Writing and Difference (1967), Jacques Derrida points out the difference between Greek and Hebrew thinking in terms of textual interpretation. Characteristic of Greek philosophy is a search for a rational explanation of the universe in searching for universal, general, unambiguous, and thus concrete and stable principles. For this reason, the main issue of Greek philosophy is explaining the relation between the ideal world and the concrete, material, objective world. For Hebrew-Jewish thought, it is the comprehension of material in its ambiguity and opposites that is characteristic, which is why interpreters promote interpretations of literature that have several meanings. This principle allows for a positive evaluation of the tradition of interpretation in the search for truth as mediated by texts. Thus, in Judaism – in addition to the canonical texts themselves – the tradition of text interpretation plays a very important role. A tendency of Jewish hermeneutics is for the interpreter to see in the text and in its interpretation a

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single approach to searching for various significant viewpoints. In the broader Christianity of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the mixed Greek and Jewish influence was felt in all areas of science and art. Saint Jerome was among the first to acknowledge clearly the advantage of the Jewish interpretative approach. In his translation of and commentaries to the Bible, he advocates the principle of “Hebrew truth” (Hebraica veritas). Jewish interpreters of the Bible, who in France and in Spain had written a number of commentaries on the Biblical books, developed a particular hermeneutical method and saw in the literal meaning (pesh‚t) various viewpoints of figurative meaning. With this, the Jewish tradition of literary criticism came very close to the Christian tradition, which reaches back to the 4th century, when John Cassian (360 – 435) became the first to develop a system of interpretation on the basis of the four meanings of the Bible. Augustine (354 – 430) established the foundations for a system of biblical exegesis with his theory of signs in connection with a theory of language that differentiates between natural and conventional signs. It is on the basis of the literal meaning that a system for the various viewpoints of allegorical interpretation rests. In the 12th century, this system reached the peak of its popularity through a work by Hugh of St. Victor (1096 – 1141) entitled Didascalicon. Hugh established a leading school in Paris which for explaining of all fundamental questions combined the external and internal experience of human recognition (Kamin 1991: 12 – 26). Adherents of the system of allegorical explanation on the basis of the literal meaning (sensus litteralis) also included the philosopher Thomas Aquinas and the poet Dante, two of the system’s most prominent proponents. In the 12th century, Jewish thought was most significantly marked in all regards, and for many years, by the leading Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, 1135 – 1204). He was born in Muslim Cordoba in Spain near the end of the convivencia period among Christianity, Judaism and Islam that had characterised the period from the 8th to the 12th centuries. When Maimonides was thirteen years old, Cordoba was overtaken by a fundamentalist Muslim sect (Almohads), and he and his family had to go into exile. They went first to Fez in Morocco, later to Palestine, and then to Egypt; Maimonides died in Cairo and found his final resting place in Palestine. The great thinker strove to harmonise faith with philosophical rationality, and Judaism with the Aristotelianism which was experiencing a resurgence at that time. He wanted to show that Judaism was in accordance with physics and mathematics as understood by Aristotle’s 12th-century adherents. Direct contact with Jews, with Christians, and with Muslims was what accounted for Maimonides’ general erudition and education, and his ideas had a tremendous influence on all three groups. A great proponent and supporter of a revival of Aristotle’s philosophy and literary

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theory in Europe, he also greatly influenced scholastic philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274). Like Augustine, Maimonides used allegorical interpretation of the Bible and developed both theoretical and practical interpretation on the basis of selected biblical texts, which he employed as models for explaining his literary theories. He selected a series of ambiguous “termini” and “parables” and “figurative uses, exaggerations and hyperboles” and included them as examples in his philosophical explanations. In this way he wished to respond to the challenge of the era in which he lived, when the popularity of neo-Aristotelian philosophy gave the impression that Aristotelian philosophy and literal exegeses of biblical texts were at odds or even contradictory. He wished to prove that a harmony existed between philosophy and biblical truth. Maimonides took into consideration the degrees of education among the populace and used the method of the dual role of interpretation of selected texts: to the masses, who lacked adequate knowledge for understanding the content in the linguistic and literary forms of the text, he concealed that content; to those who were capable of understanding texts, he unveiled it. Through interpretation he did not intend to mediate a complete and clear explanation of words or entire biblical passages, but merely to intimate their hidden meaning. On the basis of these intimations, the reader had to complete the interpretative process and arrive at the recognition that the inner meanings of texts were of a philosophical nature. Maimonides’ stance was that the meaning of biblical texts could only be grasped by a complete, virtuous individual who, having been led by various apparent contradictions into a state of confusion, sought an exit from this confusion. Mishneh Torah or Repetition of the Torah, his first great work, was a discussion of interpretation; this was to be a complete statement of Rabbinical law. It was his experiences of perplexity on account of the contradictions in biblical texts that gave rise to his second fundamental work, A Guide for the Perplexed (1190). Originally written in Arabic, this work was soon translated into Hebrew and Latin. In this work, Maimonides discusses original biblical texts and their interpretations as two viewpoints of a single revelation that remains open to multiple meanings. In the introduction to the first part of A Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides elucidates his method of interpretation. He departs from the observation that even educated individuals well-versed in the traditions of both the Jewish faith and philosophy find themselves in a state of “perplexity” because they do not take into account the ambiguity of biblical language and the biblical use of perplexing parables. His thesis is that a profound understanding of the meaning of the Bible and the Talmud requires an elaborate method of interpretation. The author differentiates between “natural science” (physics) and “divine science” (metaphysics), and finds that the “inner” meaning of the text sometimes pertains to one (for example in the description of the world’s beginnings in Ge-

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nesis), and sometimes the other (for example the description of the Chariot of Ezekiel). He explains the obscure aspects of parables and termini that we find in the “books of the Prophets.” The most important biblical texts contain words that are difficult to comprehend on account of their multiplicity of meaning. In addition to that the meaning is extended by other words; we find also examples of texts that have now one, now another meaning. At the conclusion of the introduction he explains the seven causes of contradictions, showing that they are only apparent contradictions.2 Maimonides’ thought and method of interpreting are in many ways a continuation of the interpretative principles and practices of his illustrious predecessor Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040 – 1105), who commented in Hebrew on the entire Old Testament Talmud. Both strongly influenced the development of Jewish and Christian medieval exegetical methods, including those of Thomas Aquinas, who in his magnum opus Summa Theologica (I, 1, 9 – 10) develops an argument on the use of metaphor and ambiguous words in the Bible (a section of this study is devoted to Aquinas, and his work is also quoted at some length). Modern criticism by Sigmund Freud, Erich Auerbach, Harold Bloom, and Jacques Derrida, among others, has indicated familiarity with and appreciation of Maimonides’ theories and interpretative methods.

2.1

Plato’s Bases for Recognising and Expressing Reality and Truth in Philosophy and in Literature

Unlike Aristotle in his Poetics, Plato did not write a systematic literary theory. He dealt with poetry in the broader framework of discussion on the fundamental philosophical questions. Characteristic of Plato’s views on poetics is that they are a logical consequence of his philosophy’s idealistic starting points, which is why he is not favourable to the imitation or m†mesis which was the basis of Aristotle’s literary theory as well as his yardstick for evaluating reality and truth. Plato’s starting point is a statement on the existence of eternal and universal ideas, which he calls forms. Poetry, with its linguistic and symbolic structures, is a mere copy of the material, physical world, and thus a mere copy of a copy of ideas, which is why it cannot lead one to truth; rather, it distances the individual from truth. Forms are unchanging entities, to which the world of individual, changeable objects are subordinate. Because forms are eternal and unchanging, they are more real than the material world, which is mutable. Above all forms or ideas Plato placed the form of the good, which is the divine cause of the world 2 For an exhaustive presentation of Maimonides’ literary theory in the broader academic and cultural context of his time, see Sara Klein-Braslavy 2000: 302 – 320.

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and which is characteristic for being and allows for an understanding of the world as a whole. In accordance with this highest truth and value, Plato demands that literature have an edifying function, that it serve a moral and social role, and that it teach goodness and grace.

2.1.1 The Individual’s and the State’s Path to Justice Plato’s dialogues are not constructed in a manner that leads the argument to an unambiguously expressed conclusion. There are, however, passages that summarise a topic in concentrated form, and at the appropriate moment Plato encompasses a dialogue in concentrated definitions or explanations. Book II of Republic is an attempt to illustrate the path to truth and justice for the individual and the state. In accordance with his premise that the good is truly good – that is, since the good is truly good, we love it for its own sake – Plato shows in the dialogue between Adeimantus and Socrates the tragic contradiction between the just, who live genuinely and in accordance with good that we desire for its own sake, and the unjust, “who practise justice […] involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust will best appear if we imagine something of this kind” (359b). In 360a – 361a, he states: Now, if we are to form a real judgement of the life of the just and unjust, we must isolate them; there is no other way ; and how is the isolation to be effected? I answer : Let the unjust man be entirely unjust, and the just man entirely just; nothing is to be taken away from either of them, and both are to be perfectly furnished for the work of their respective lives. First, let the unjust be like other distinguished masters of craft; like the skilful pilot or physician, who knows intuitively his own powers and keeps within their limits, and who, if he fails at any point, is able to recover himself. So let the unjust make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he means to be great in his injustice (he who is found out is nobody): for the highest reach of injustice is, to be deemed just when you are not. Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest reputation for justice. If he have taken a false step he must be able to recover himself; he must be one who can speak with effect, if any of his deeds come to light, and who can force his way where force is required by his courage and strength, and command of money and friends. And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity, wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death;

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being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgement be given which of them is the happier of the two.

Plato then finds fault with poets, actors and prophets who depict justice according to the whims of public opinion and present as just that which is only apparently or seemingly just. Plato, in the persona of Socrates, responds to this error by transferring the weight of the investigation of justice and the explanation of the meaning of life from external criteria into human innerness and lays bare the essence of his discourse: Now as you have admitted that justice is one of that highest class of goods which are desired indeed for their results, but in a far greater degree for their own sakes – like sight or hearing or knowledge or health, or any other real and natural and not merely conventional good – I would ask you in your praise of justice to regard one point only : I mean the essential good and evil which justice and injustice work in the possessors of them. Let others praise justice and censure injustice, magnifying the rewards and honours of the one and abusing the other… (367c – 367d)

In Books II, III and X of Republic, Plato looks critically at the role of poets. And yet this critical evaluation does not mean that Plato, as a matter of principle, put into opposition nature and the role of philosophy versus poetry and that he, as a matter of principle, denied poetry any legitimacy. A close reading reveals that Plato admitted the positive nature and potentially positive educational role of all types and genres of art, even as he refused to allow artists unlimited freedom in their presenting of the fundamental reality and truth about the world, life, the gods and people. If Plato, in connection with art, cites various errant ways, it cannot be overlooked that he also points out many errors among philosophers. His concern is the good of the state as a whole and it is in the interest of this good that he declares that artists’ freedom must be limited (377b – 383c).

2.1.2 Criticism of Poets’ Depictions of Nature and Divine and Human Behaviour In Book III of Republic Plato continues his critique of how poets depict the nature and actions of both divine heroes and of human heroes who appear also as demigods. At times he sums up his stance by means of synthetic explanation. For example, in 387b, after having furnished examples of the underworld and slavery, he states, “And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are un-poetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be

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free, and who should fear slavery more than death.” In 388c, after providing some questionable literary examples, he concludes, “But if [the poet] must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods” by having him pronounce unseemly words. In 389b, he states, “Again, truth should be highly valued.” He then takes up the cause of demigods, writing: And let us equally refuse to believe, or allow to be repeated, the tale of Theseus son of Poseidon, or of Peirithous son of Zeus, going forth as they did to perpetrate a horrid rape; or of any other hero or son of a god daring to do such impious and dreadful things as they falsely ascribe to them in our day : and let us further compel the poets to declare either that these acts were not done by them, or that they were not the sons of gods; – both in the same breath they shall not be permitted to affirm. We will not have them trying to persuade our youth that the gods are the authors of evil, and that heroes are no better than men – sentiments which, as we were saying, are neither pious nor true, for we have already proved that evil cannot come from the gods. (391c – 391d)

From 386a Plato provides guidelines regarding content and the question of forms that are appropriate for portraying characteristics of the gods and humans. The principle of probability of imitation dictates to him the conclusion that the literary genres of tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry call for different ways of imitating; the actor cannot effectively imitate reality if he attempts to do so according to the demands of two or more literary genres. The dialogue in section 395a – 395b reads: “Then the same person will hardly be able to play a serious part in life, and at the same time to be an imitator and imitate many other parts as well; for even when two species of imitation are nearly allied, the same persons cannot succeed in both, as, for example, the writers of tragedy and comedy – did you not just now call them imitations?” “Yes, I did; and you are right in thinking that the same persons cannot succeed in both.” “Any more than they can be rhapsodists and actors at once?” “True.” “Neither are comic and tragic actors the same; yet all these things are but imitations.” “They are so.” “And human nature, Adeimantus, appears to have been coined into yet smaller pieces, and to be as incapable of imitating many things well, as of performing well the actions of which the imitations are copies.” “Quite true, he replied.”

In the subsequent passage, Plato substantiates his belief that artists should avoid imitating ignoble characters such as slaves, and especially avoid base or lowly characteristics – “Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?” (395d). The poet should refrain from portraying negative characteristics, as he “will disdain such a person”

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(396d). Of those who are opposed to the need to imitate only good characters, he says there are unscrupulous types who embrace that which is unworthy and base (397a). Plato then introduces his interlocutor to the basic three ingredients of any song or poem – the words, the melody and the rhythm – and to the important educational role of art in general. In 401b – 402a, he states: “But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the poets only to be required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from our State? Or is the same control to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be prohibited from exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and intemperance and meanness and indecency in sculpture and building and the other creative arts; and is he who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be prevented from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our citizens be corrupted by him? We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.” “There can be no nobler training than that,” he replied. “And therefore,” I said, “Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why ; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.”

Universal harmony is the ultimate and highest ideal for humanity. Halfway through Book III, Plato asks rhetorically, “And when a beautiful soul harmonises with a beautiful form, and the two are cast in one mould, that will be the fairest of sights to him who has an eye to see it?” (402d) The most beautiful is also the most deserving of love, and “true love is a love of beauty and order – temperate and harmonious” (402e). Everything that is musical must culminate in the love of beauty, even as, in connection with the relation between a healthy body and a healthy mind, he states, “not that the good body by any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, on the contrary, that the good soul, by her own excellence, improves the body as far as this may be

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possible” (403d). The power of the mind is also a necessary condition for the good doctor : Now the most skilful physicians are those who, from their youth upwards, have combined with the knowledge of their art the greatest experience of disease; they had better not be robust in health, and should have had all manner of diseases in their own persons. For the body, as I conceive, is not the instrument with which they cure the body ; in that case we could not allow them ever to be or to have been sickly ; but they cure the body with the mind, and the mind which has become and is sick can cure nothing. (408d)

2.1.3 The Real World and the World of the Senses as well as the “Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry” At the outset of Book VII of Republic, Plato uses his allegory of the cave or “underground den” to illustrate his doctrine of the opposition between the world of the senses, or shadows of reality, and the world of ideas or real things, among which the good is the most illuminated. In this context Plato also emphasises the educational intent of arts and sciences. In Book X of Republic, Plato elucidates his understanding of the opposition between the world of ideas, which represent real things, and the world of the senses, which are only shadows of the real world of ideas or forms. This is the basis for his exhaustive explanation of artistic genres and means of imitation reality, which is necessarily beyond reach. He begins by speaking of the “rule about poetry” (595a) and in the conversation with Glaucon he articulates his profound distrust of poets: “Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe – but I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them.” “Explain the purport of your remark.” “Well, I will tell you, although I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Homer, which even now makes the words falter on my lips, for he is the great captain and teacher of the whole of that charming tragic company ; but a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out.” (595b)

Plato then leads his interlocutor to the essence of his argument, namely that no work of art, whatever its genre, can express reality and truth, as it is only a third degree imitation. Plato departs from the ideal form of individual objects and infers that God, as a true creator, makes everything according to a single fundamental form, and for this reason created things are not real but only appearances of reality. This makes it all the more clear that a carpenter, a painter, or a

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poet cannot create works that are real and true or that represent reality and truth: “Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot make true existence, but only some semblance of existence; and if any one were to say that the work of the maker of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth.” “At any rate,” he replied, “philosophers would say that he was not speaking the truth.” “No wonder, then, that his work too is an indistinct expression of truth. […] Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?” “Yes, there are three of them.” “God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only ; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.” “Why is that?” “Because even if He had made but two, a third would still appear behind them which both of them would have for their idea, and that would be the ideal bed and the two others. […] And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth?” “That appears to be so.[…]” “Now let me ask you another question: Which is the art of painting designed to be – an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear – of appearance or of reality?” “Of appearance.” “Then the imitator,” I said, “is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image.” (597a – 598b)

Plato now turns to “the tragedians, and Homer, who is at their head” and emphasises that their works are “but imitations thrice removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth, because they are appearances only and not realities” (599a). His musings on the efforts of poets leads him to “infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.” “Quite so.” “In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well – such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.” (600e – 601b)

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The discussion of the impossibility that the work of artisans and artists might accurately represent reality is especially problematic when Plato touches on the most difficult problem of human life: the secrets of the human soul. He departs from the experience of contradictions in man’s soul in relation to reason and says, “painting or drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their own proper work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason, and that they have no true or healthy aim” (603a – 603b). The essence of poetry is that it “imitates the actions of men, whether voluntary or involuntary, on which, as they imagine, a good or bad result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly” – and Plato then asks rhetorically, “Is there anything more?” Plato believes that for the “the just man […] even when he is in poverty or sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death” (613a). Hard strokes of fate are, for every person, fundamental experiences of control through reason, because even though the “principle of law and reason […] bids him resist,” there is a simultaneous “feeling of his misfortune which is forcing him to indulge his sorrow” (604b). From this it follows logically that there must be “two distinct principles” at work in the human soul (604c). The passage about the dramatic struggle in the human soul is thus a unique contribution to the concept of the human soul. Plato clearly states his reservations about poetry and its limits. He believes that a painter, whose work is a mere copy of nature, is unable to say anything essential or anything akin to what is real. For this reason, the painter submits to the visible appearance if, for example, he paints a chair in perspective. In Section 6 of Book X, Plato says that what poets put forth “is very far removed from the truth” (605c). Plato’s negative judgement of poetry in Book X of Republic leads him to the conclusion that poetry should be banished by law on account of “the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and there are very few who are not harmed)” (605c). Nevertheless, Plato differentiates between the positive and negative views of imitation in literature, saying with regard to the negative viewpoints, “let this our defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgement in sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described;” he does, however, state that poetry may “be allowed to return from exile” on condition “that she make a defence of herself in lyrical or some other metre” (607d). Especially in modern society this stance gives rise to wonder and exasperation. It also disturbed Leo Tolstoy, who in any case had a negative view of literature created after the Renaissance. Tolstoy, too, believes that morally corrupt literature can do great harm; this harm is, in his view, much greater than the harm that banishing literature could cause. The basis of his stance is his fundamental principle that the essential quality of art is not an

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imitation of the beautiful and transmitting “a certain kind of pleasure,” but the experiencing and mediating of emotions. In Chapter 5 of What Is Art?, he concludes: Some teachers of mankind – as Plato in his Republic and people such as the primitive Christians, the strict Mohammedans, and the Buddhists – have gone so far as to repudiate all art. People viewing art in this way (in contradiction to the prevalent view of today which regards any art as good if only it affords pleasure) considered, and consider, that art (as contrasted with speech, which need not be listened to) is so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art. Evidently such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied – one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. But not less wrong are the people of civilized European society of our class and day in favoring any art if it but serves beauty, i. e., gives people pleasure. Formerly people feared lest among the works of art there might chance to be some causing corruption, and they prohibited art altogether. Now they only fear lest they should be deprived of any enjoyment art can afford, and patronize any art. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful. (Tolstoy 1996: 53 – 54)

2.2

Thomas Aquinas as an Interpreter of Polysemous Words and Symbols

In his numerous wide-ranging philosophical writings Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) pursued a primary important goal: to recognize reality and truth through reasoned reflection. Because he used biblical anthropology, philosophy and theology as his starting points, he necessarily had to wrestle with fundamental questions on the nature of language and literature. He was very well-versed in the system of allegorical interpretation that dominated during the Middle Ages, in Plato’s negative evaluation of artistic products as means of imitating reality, and in Aristotle’s realism. His neo-Platonist contemporaries loyally followed Plato in relegating the material world to the transcendent world of ideas and forms. Interpreters of the Bible analogically placed the literal meaning of the Bible below the allegorical meaning. Through the new discovery of Aristotle in the 13th century, however, the manner of conceiving of and explaining religious and worldly texts changed. Thomas Aquinas was closer to Aristotle’s realism than to Plato’s idealism, which is why in his biblical exegeses he expressly emphasises the advantage of the literal meaning, which corresponds to the author’s intention; all viewpoints of allegorical or metaphorical meaning acquire their direction of pointing at the deeper meaning only on the basis of the text in its

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literal, linguistic, and literary embodiment. In his commentaries to many biblical books (Job, The Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah and in his Catena Aurea on the Four Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul), Aquinas also takes into consideration the individual style of the writer. In his philosophical principles, Aquinas examines how the indefiniteness of figurative language, such as poetic metaphors, accords with the conviction that language reliably allows for access to reality and truth. He solves the problem by acknowledging both the referential stability of linguistic and literary elements in the relation to reality and to truth, and the ambiguity of these elements, which already Augustine had addressed. Because he wished to interpret also the more nebulous and polysemous biblical passages, his explanation is essentially in harmony with the medieval hermeneutic system, which defended the four semantic levels of a text: 1) the historical or literal meaning (sensus litteralis); 2) the allegorical meaning, which contains a hidden spiritual significance, while in the Old Testament it entails, among other things, a pre-figuring of New Testament truth; 3) the tropological meaning, which transmits a moral message; 4) the anagogical meaning, which refers to eschatology. He explains these four levels systematically in his main work Summa Theologica I, Question 1, in Articles 9 and 10: Article 9. WHETHER HOLY SCRIPTURE SHOULD USE METAPHORS? Objection 1. It seems that Holy Scripture should not use metaphors. For that which is proper to the lowest science seems not to befit this science, which holds the highest place of all. But to proceed by the aid of various similitudes and figures is proper to poetry, the least of all the sciences. Therefore it is not fitting that this science should make use of such similitudes. Obj. 2. Further, this doctrine seems to be intended to make truth clear. Hence a reward is held out to those who manifest it: They that explain me shall have life everlasting (Sirach 24: 31). But by such similitudes truth is obscured. Therefore to put forward divine truths by likening them to corporeal things does not befit this science. Obj. 3. Further, the higher creatures are, the nearer they approach to the divine likeness. If therefore any creature be taken to represent God, this representation ought chiefly to be taken from the higher creatures, and not from the lower ; yet this is often found in Scriptures. On the contrary, it is written (Hosea 12: 10): I have multiplied visions, and I have used similitudes by the ministry of the prophets. But to put forward anything by means of similitudes is to use metaphors. Therefore this sacred science may use metaphors. I answer that, it is befitting Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Writ, spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things. This is what Dionysius says: We cannot be enlightened by the divine rays except they be hidden within the covering of many sacred veils (Celestial Hierarchy 1). It is also be-

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fitting Holy Writ, which is proposed to all without distinction of persons – To the wise and to the unwise I am a debtor (Romans 1: 14) – that spiritual truths be expounded by means of figures taken from corporeal things, in order that thereby even the simple who are unable by themselves to grasp intellectual things may be able to understand it. Reply Obj. 1. Poetry makes use of metaphors to produce a representation, for it is natural to man to be pleased with representations. But sacred doctrine makes use of metaphors as both necessary and useful. Reply Obj. 2. The ray of divine revelation is not extinguished by the sensible imagery wherewith it is veiled, as Dionysius says (Celestial Hierarchy 1); and its truth so far remains that it does not allow the minds of those to whom the revelation has been made, to rest in the metaphors, but raises them to the knowledge of truths; and through those to whom the revelation has been made others also may receive instruction in these matters. Hence those things that are taught metaphorically in one part of Scripture, in other parts are taught more openly. The very hiding of truth in figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds and as a defense against the ridicule of the impious, according to the words Give not that which is holy to dogs (Matthew 7: 6). Reply Obj. 3. As Dionysius says (Celestial Hierarchy 1), it is more fitting that divine truths should be expounded under the figure of less noble than of nobler bodies, and this for three reasons. Firstly, because thereby men’s minds are the better preserved from error. For then it is clear that these things are not literal descriptions of divine truths, which might have been open to doubt had they been expressed under the figure of nobler bodies, especially for those who could think of nothing nobler than bodies. Secondly, because this is more befitting the knowledge of God that we have in this life. For what He is not is clearer to us than what He is. Therefore similitudes drawn from things farthest away from God form within us a truer estimate that God is above whatsoever we may say or think of Him. Thirdly, because thereby divine truths are the better hidden from the unworthy. Article 10. WHETHER IN HOLY SCRIPTURE A WORD MAY HAVE SEVERAL SENSES? Objection 1. It seems that in Holy Writ a word cannot have several senses, historical or literal, allegorical, tropological or moral, and anagogical. For many different senses in one text produce confusion and deception and destroy all force of argument. Hence no argument, but only fallacies, can be deduced from a multiplicity of propositions. But Holy Writ ought to be able to state the truth without any fallacy. Therefore in it there cannot be several senses to a word. Obj. 2. Further, Augustine says that the Old Testament has a fourfold division as to history, etiology, analogy and allegory (On the Usefulness of Belief 3). Now these four seem altogether different from the four divisions mentioned in the first objection. Therefore it does not seem fitting to explain the same word of Holy Writ according to the four different senses mentioned above. Obj. 3. Further, besides these senses, there is the parabolical, which is not one of these four. On the contrary, Gregory says: Holy Writ by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery (Moralia in Job 20.1).

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I answer that, the author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it. Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division. For as the Apostle says the Old Law is a figure of the New Law (Hebrews 10: 1), and Dionysius says the New Law itself is a figure of future glory (Celestial Hierarchy 1). Again, in the New Law, whatever our Head has done is a type of what we ought to do. Therefore, so far as the things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the things done in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what we ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify what relates to eternal glory, there is the anagogical sense. Since the literal sense is that which the author intends, and since the author of Holy Writ is God, who by one act comprehends all things by His intellect, it is not unfitting, as Augustine says if, even according to the literal sense, one word in Holy Writ should have several senses. (Confessions XII.31.42) Reply Obj. 1. The multiplicity of these senses does not produce equivocation or any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one word signifies several things, but because the things signified by the words can be themselves types of other things. Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are founded on one – the literal – from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says (Epistles 93.8.42). Nevertheless, nothing of Holy Scripture perishes on account of this, since nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture in its literal sense. Reply Obj. 2. These three – history, etiology, analogy – are grouped under the literal sense. For it is called history, as Augustine expounds (Epis. 48), whenever anything is simply related; it is called etiology when its cause is assigned, as when Our Lord gave the reason why Moses allowed the putting away of wives – namely, on account of the hardness of men’s hearts; it is called analogy whenever the truth of one text of Scripture is shown not to contradict the truth of another. Of these four, allegory alone stands for the three spiritual senses. Thus Hugh of St. Victor (De Sacramentis, IV.4, prologue) includes the anagogical under the allegorical sense, laying down three senses only – the historical, the allegorical, and the tropological. Reply Obj. 3. The parabolical sense is contained in the literal, for by words things are signified properly and figuratively. Nor is the figure itself, but that which is figured, the literal sense. When Scripture speaks of God’s arm, the literal sense is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely operative power. Hence it is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ. (Qtd. in Leitch et al. 2010: 181 – 184)

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2.3

Art and Truth in Classics of Literary Theory

Plato’s and Aristotle’s insights into literature and other arts have almost with interruption influenced the development of literature and literary theory to the present. Plato’s fundamental differentiation of reality as a whole into the universal and eternal world of ideas or forms and the material world (which is only an imitation and thus a copy of the world of ideas that is only an apparent reflection of reality and truth) was extended by Aristotle in his theory of knowledge. It was later taken up by many others who wrote defences of language, poetry and art in general: Horace (65 – 86 BC), Maimonides (1135 – 1204), Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375), Joachim du Bellay (c. 1522 – 1560), Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586), John Dryden (1631 – 1700), Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822).3 As a starting point, we should consider Dante, who presented his views on literary theory in two works: the philosophical Il Convivio (The Banquet, 1306 – 1309), and the last of the thirteen Latin letters, in which Dante turns to his benefactor Cangrande I della Scala in dedicating the final part of the Divine Comedy to him. In the first chapter of Book II of Il Convivio, Dante, very much like Thomas Aquinas, speaks for the ambiguous (polysemous) role of words and figures of speech in literary texts. The following four-tiered semantic viewpoint was universally accepted in the Middle Ages: The first is called the literal, and this is the sense that does not go beyond the surface of the letter, as in the fables of the poets. The next is called the allegorical, and this is the one that is hidden beneath the cloak of these fables, and is a truth hidden beneath a beautiful fiction. […] Indeed the theologians take this sense otherwise than do the poets; but since it is my intention here to follow the method of the poets, I shall take the allegorical sense according to the usage of the poets. The third sense is called moral, and this is the sense that teachers should intently seek to discover throughout the scriptures, for their own profit and that of their pupils […]. The fourth sense is called anagogical, that is to say, beyond the senses; and this occurs when a scripture is expounded in a spiritual sense which, although it is true also in the literal sense, signifies by means of the things signified a part of the supernal things of eternal glory, as may be seen in the song of the Prophet which says that when the people of Israel went out of Egypt, Judea was made whole and free. For although it is manifestly true according to the letter, that which is spiritually intended is no less true, namely, that when the soul departs from sin it is made whole and free in its power. In this kind of explication, the literal should always come first, as being the sense in whose meaning the others are enclosed, and without which it would be impossible and illogical to 3 Many of their works of literary theory are presented in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Leitch et al. 2010: 2010).

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attend to the other senses, and especially the allegorical. It would be impossible because in everything that has an inside and an outside it is impossible to arrive at the inside without first arriving at the outside; consequently, since in what is written down the literal meaning is always the outside, it is impossible to arrive at the other senses, especially the allegorical, without first arriving at the literal. (Qtd. in Leitch et al. 2010: 187 – 188)4

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375), who, in addition to the Decamerone (1348 – 1353) wrote the extensive Latin encyclopaedic catalogue on pagan mythology Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (1348 – 1353), ranks among the most influential medieval literary theorists. In Books I – XIII, the author offers an allegorical explanation of Greek mythology, while Books XIVand XV consist of a passionate and stylistically engaging defence of poets, who after Plato’s negative evaluation of their manner of imitating reality in Republic had endured everything from shallow and often boorish barbs to aggressive attacks on their livelihood. Boccaccio became, alongside Plato writing on poetry and alongside the Aristotle of the Poetics, the most influential literary theorist of the Renaissance. In Book XIV, Chapter 5, he speaks of the mockery, the accusations and denunciations suffered by poets. As he observes, poets are accused of being “seducers of the mind, prompters of crime,” and thus in his defence of poetry he “cannot look for a milder sentence from them than in their rage they thunder down upon poets” (qtd. in Leitch et al. 2010: 195).5 In Chapter 7, the author explains the nature, source, and role of poetry, stating that it stems from Divine inspiration and that “true poets have always been the rarest of men.” His definition of poetry is: This fervor of poesy is sublime in its effects: it impels the soul to a longing for utterance; it brings forth strange and unheard-of creations of the mind; it arranges these meditations in a fixed order, adorns the whole composition with unusual interweaving of words and thoughts; and thus it veils truth in a fair and fitting garment of fiction. Further, if in any case the invention so requires, it can arm kings, marshal them for war, launch whole fleets from their docks, nay, counterfeit sky, land, sea, adorn young maidens with flowery garlands, portray human character in its various phases, awake the idle, stimulate the dull, restrain the rash, subdue the criminal, and distinguish excellent men with their proper meed of praise: these, and many other such, are the effects of poetry. (Leitch et al. 2010: 195 – 196)

In Chapter 12, Boccaccio addresses the common criticism that poetry is often obscure and thus not understandable. He does not deny this, but points out that there are also many such passages in Plato and Aristotle’s philosophical writings, 4 Leitch et al. quote extensively from Richard H. Lansing’s translation of Il Convivio. 5 Leitch et al. reproduce three chapters of Book 14 of Genealogy of the Gentile Gods: “Other Cavillers at the Poets and Their Imputations,” “The Definition of Poetry, Its Origin, and Function,” and “The Obscurity of Poetry Is Not Just Cause for Condemning It” (in Charles Osgood’s translation).

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as well as in the Bible. Lack of clarity probably does not stem from the author’s thirst to give the works the stamp of imaginative art, as “if He were not the sublime Artificer of the universe” (Leitch et al. 2010: 198). He explains obscure passages through a straightforward message: “Some things are naturally so profound that not without difficulty can the most exceptional keenness in intellect sound their depths” (Leitch et al. 2010: 198). The second reason for expressing things in an elevated and unclear style is to protect “matters truly solemn and memorable” from disrespectful individuals, so that they may not deal lightly with such things. Halfway through the chapter he states: Wherefore I again grant that poets are at times obscure, but invariably explicable if approached by a sane mind; for these cavillers view them with owl eyes, not human. Surely no one can believe that poets invidiously veil the truth with fiction, either to deprive the reader of the hidden sense, or to appear the more clever; but rather to make truths which would otherwise cheapen by exposure the object of strong intellectual effort and various interpretation, that in ultimate discovery they shall be more precious. (Leitch et al. 2010: 199)

Boccaccio supports this principle viewpoint through Augustine’s arguments in his various works on the advantages of the obscurity of the Divine word, as well as through those of the Italian poet and humanist Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374): “In poetic narrative above all, the poets maintain majesty of style and corresponding dignity” (Leitch et al. 2010: 200). The chapter ends with a reference to Jesus’ warning in Mt 7:6: “For we are forbidden by divine command to give that which is holy to dogs, or to cast pearls before swine.” In the 19th century, literary theory experienced quite a shift in direction in terms of judgements on expressing reality and truth, aesthetic value, and the educational role of literature. In France and in England, some writers and critics began to turn away from the traditional moral viewpoint of art in general and literature in particular – a view which stemmed from the Greco-Roman tradition – in favour of the autonomy of the principle of the beautiful and of independence from moral concerns. Th¦ophile Gautier (1811 – 1872) writes in the forward to his work Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) “Objects are beautiful in inverse proportion to their utility” (“Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir — rien”), and herein lies the principle of art that exists for itself – l’art pour l’art. Continuing on this new artistic path were Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848 – 1907), Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867), Walter Pater (1839 – 1894) and Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900), while in philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) developed similarly new ideas. Oscar Wilde was particularly influential for the development of modern literary theory. In his last dialogue work, “The Decay of Lying: An Observation” (1889), he opines that art is an expression only of itself. His thesis is that life is

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more an imitation of art than art an imitation of life. In The Critic as Artist (1890, 1891), he develops a dialogue about nature and about the relation between art and criticism, emphasizing his reverence for style and form. In contrast to the Romantics, Wilde denies the role of artistic inspiration. To his mind, literary criticism is a type of autobiography and impressionism that opposes history because history limits its freedom of individual expression. His view of art is formulated with particular clarity and concentration in the Preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

3. Reality in Myth, History and Fiction

Myth, history and fiction are naturally interwoven in various ways and throughout the ages they have been of rival importance. The Liddell-Scott-Jones GreekEnglish Lexicon cites two important semantic aspects of the word “myth”: 1. word, speech; 2. tale, story, narrative. The Greek-based “myth” is often equated with the Latin word “fabula,” for which the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary provides two main entries: 1. a narration, narrative, account, story ; the subject of common talk; 2. a fictitious narrative, a tale, story. A definition from literary theory supplements the basic definition with fundamental elements linked to the place and role of myth in literature. John Anthony Cuddon’s 1998 Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory contains a crucial definition with regard to content: Nowadays a myth tends to signify a fiction, but a fiction which conveys a psychological truth. In general a myth is a story which is not “true” and which involves (as a rule) supernatural beings – or at any rate supra-human beings. Myth is always concerned with creation. Myth explains how something came to exist. Myth embodies feeling and concept – hence the Promethean or Herculean figure, or the idea of Diana, or the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Many myths or quasi-myths are primitive explanations of the natural order and cosmic forces. (Cuddon 1998: 526)

Chris Baldick’s 2004 Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms refers to the multiple meanings of myth: myth, a kind of story or rudimentary narrative sequence, normally traditional and anonymous, through which a given culture ratifies its social customs or accounts for the origins of human and natural phenomena, usually in supernatural or boldly imaginative terms. The term has a wide range of meanings, which can be divided roughly into “rationalist” and “romantic” versions: in the first, a myth is a false or unreliable story or belief (adjective: mythical), while in the second, “myth” is a superior intuitive mode of cosmic understanding (adjective: mythic). In most literary contexts, the second kind of usage prevails, and myths are regarded as fictional stories containing deeper truths, expressing collective attitudes to fundamental matters of life, death, divinity, and existence (sometimes deemed to be “universal”). Myths are usually

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distinguished from legends in that they have less of an historical basis, although they seem to have a similar mode of existence in oral transmission, re-telling, literary adaptation, and allusion. (Baldick 2004: 163 – 164)

The phenomenon of myth in all its forms of course essentially influences the relation between history and literature. The viewpoints of reality in history writing and in literature are, as mentioned, defined by Aristotle at the beginning of Chapter 9 of Poetics: It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen – what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history : for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. (1451b)

It is not clear from this statement what aspect of reality Aristotle is thinking of when he speaks of the poet’s expression of reality. In general, interpretations rest on his using m†mesis as a conceptual departure point and his use and elucidation of the same throughout Poetics. Aristotle speaks of imitating acts and characteristics and thus of showing things without raising moral dilemmas in terms of conscience and personal innocence or heroes’ wrongdoings. Aristotle even advocates freedom when it comes to creating characters (1454 b). In her seminal studies The Logic of Fiction (1957) and Truth and Aesthetic Truth (Wahrheit und ästhetische Wahrheit, 1979), Käte Hamburger (1896 – 1992) analyses with exacting scholarly rigour the starting points and various viewpoints of the directions of philosophical explanations of the concept of truth in famous studies of aesthetics from antiquity to the modern era. She examines the main theoretical philosophies on reality and truth, those of: Plato (427 – 347 BC), Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), Augustine (354 – 430), Thomas Aquinas (1224 – 1274), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), Max Liebermann (1847 – 1935), Gottlob Frege (1848 – 1925), Gerhart Hauptmann (1862 – 1946), Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) and Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940). She respects the fact that the concept of “truth” or “reality” in literary theory unites the triumvirate of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Pointing to an example of authors like Frege who emphasise the “uniqueness” of the word truth, she states, “Here it suffices to state that the dominant sense of truth is of the very high, I dare say, the highest concept of values regulating human life and setting a standard for it” (Hamburger 1979: 17). She ties herself to the ontological principle of truth and the most valid theory of correspondence, which appears in two places in Aristotle’s

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Metaphysics: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (1011 b). The author quotes another passage, one which expresses the same idea even more directly and concretely : “It is not because we think truly that you are pale, that you are pale, but because you are pale we who say this have the truth” (1051 b). It is in line with this starting point that she chooses words from Augustine as the motto of her study : “It seems to me that truth is, what is (Verum mihi videtur esse id quod est).” She also adds the following explanation: Even if we, in the sense of correspondence theory, preserve the expression “true statement,” already with the word “true” we are referring not to something that merely is, but to something that has the character of events, circumstances, ways of behaving, and situations, that, in short, is a case. And linked to the basic meaning of “true” is the fact that […] calling a statement a true statement is not accurate; rather, only the correspondence or equivalent of that statement with the stated whose negation is “false” can be called “correct.” Wittgenstein, in one of the definitions of truth in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, employed the attribute “compares with”; “To understand a proposition means to know what is the case, if it is true.”6 Here the truthattribute is ascribed to the sentence; but the formulation, regardless, evokes more the definition of truth with “compares to.” Truth is not what is, but what is the case. The “est” of Augustine’s formula makes sense only through this broadening. (Hamburger 1979: 28)

Hamburger ascertains that dominant in the concept of truth is a demand that it be ethical in the broadest sense. When it is used in the sense of spiritual life, it obtains an absolute validity and is thus freed from the fetters of historical fact. As Hamburger points out, Goethe ably expresses this absolute demand for truth in the following Maxims and Reflections: 78. Wisdom is to be found only in truth. 150. Truth belongs to man, error to time. 619. Truth is god-like: it is not immediately perceptible; we are obliged to guess it from its manifestations. 236. Truth is a torch, but a monstrously huge one; 1220. Laying hold of the truth demands a much higher approach than what is called for in defence of [error]. 466. Truth need not always take corporeal form; [it is] enough for it to be around in spiritual form, bringing about harmony as it floats on the breeze as a spiritual presence like the solemn-friendly sound of bells. 198. Knowing my attitude to myself and to the world outside me is what I call truth. And so everyone can have his own truth and yet it remains the self-same truth. 562. Everything we call invention, discovery in a higher sense, is the significant practice, activation of an original instinct for truth… (Hamburger 1979: 33 – 34) 6 The Wittgenstein quotation is from Charles K. Ogden’s translation (Wittgenstein 2009).

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When Hamburger compares statements by philosophers, poets and writers (such as Goethe) she lays bare an important methodological principle, namely that the concept of truth must be understood broadly. This is why she poses the question of whether philosophical definitions of truth are appropriate for definitions of “historical” or “religious” truth: Reality is to be understood in the broadest and yet precise sense in which we use it in the natural attitude of awareness: first as the natural life reality in terms of both time and space and history and society, which is always contemporary but also past, in the narrower sense of having become “historical.” Historical reality is not limited in the narrower sense to the empirical or merely theoretically recognizable reality. It encompasses also the realm of the religious, a “higher” transcendental reality, which belongs to the concept of reality because, though it is not known or recognized as existing, it is believed, and as believed it had and has an effect in the relevant period of belief. Here it must be emphasised that already the function of belief, unlike the function of thought, can constitute transcendental reality, which is thus solely a religious reality, be it the reality of the gods or God that maintains acceptance in a cult. The merely metaphysical and as such philosophical thinking of transcendence of reality cannot be constituted, which is also why it cannot establish a concept of truth that refers to it. As an existing world it is possible to constitute a believed transcendent world, but it is not possible to constitute a transcendent world that is only thought, since only belief can take the place of knowledge and experience; indeed, belief is just a form of knowledge and experience or is understood as such. (Hamburger 1979: 43)

In this way the author concludes her analysis of conceptual definitions of truth. When she moves on to discuss the concept of aesthetic truth and the special position of poetic truth, her analysis leads her to aporias and the realisation that “the concept and sense of philosophical truth remains unexplained and does not properly submit to historically – and culturally – and socially-conditioned truth contents” (Hamburger 1979: 86). When, for example, poets and writers speak of “internal truth” (Herder and Goethe’s “innere Wahrheit”) or “profound truth” (Schiller’s “tiefe Wahrheit”), the author runs into the problem of fictive truth, which ultimately allows her to conclude that in art in general and in literature in particular one cannot arrive at the essence of “aesthetic truth” by means of a philosophical concept of truth. However, the author pulls up short. Had she considered the principles and practices of the Romantics, of Leo Tolstoy and some modern writers, she may have been motivated to continue on the path into the essence of the problem in the area of literature. In the first three chapters of What Is Art? Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) writes, in a more penetrating manner than Käte Hamburger does, of the negative result of his lifelong struggle with the problem of truth and of studying a great number of philosophers and theorists of aesthetics. His affirmation: “The opinions on beauty and on art here mentioned are far from exhausting what has been written

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on the subject. And every day fresh writers on aesthetics arise in whose disquisitions appear the same enchanted confusion and contradictoriness in defining beauty” (Tolstoy 1996: 40). This summation is so negative because Tolstoy found also an emotional key to judging art, which brings to a boil the “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and literature mentioned by Plato in his Republic (607b). Tolstoy does not take as the basis of his aesthetic judgements the principle of the beautiful but the indisputable fact that feeling is the driving force of all art. In this principle Tolstoy also reveals the key for explaining truth in various literary types of fiction and in written history. The existential fact of man’s general sense for differentiating between good and bad, along with his forces of emotions and compassion, is in truth the most useful reality for judging reality and truth in literature.

3.1

Reality in Myths, in Literary Representations of History, and in Poetry

Plato considers myths in connection with art, especially with poetry, and thus comes to a negative judgement of it (Republic Book III, 376d – 403c; Book X, 595a – 608b). He has two reasons for this assessment. The first is the principle of imitation, which for him means that no artist can properly express reality itself by imitating reality. That Plato recognizes only that which is eternal, transcendent, unified and complete as true is evident from his use of the words “gods” or “God.” Though he generally uses the plural form, when he speaks of truth in the absolute sense he reverts to the singular. In harmony with his idealist departure point in defining reality and truth, Plato authors of poetry and myths when he regards their moral inclinations. He does accept positively-inclined poets – in spite of his scepticism at their ability to express reality and truth – but he all the more rebukes authors who allow themselves morally dubious inventions; he even suggests that they be banned by law. Various forms of such thinking are characteristic for Platonists of all later ages. There are many passages in both the Old and the New Testament that correspond to Plato’s stance on judging myths in ethical terms. Especially the prophetic literature of the Old Testament is replete with negative judgements about creators of divine figures in neighbouring countries who disseminate distorted images of God and people. As an illustration of this the prophet Jeremiah can be quoted: Hear the word that the Lord speaks to you, O house of Israel. Thus says the Lord: Do not learn the way of the nations, or be dismayed at the signs of the heavens;

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for the nations are dismayed at them. For the customs of the peoples are false: a tree from the forest is cut down, and worked with an ax by the hands of an artisan; people deck it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move. Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, nor is it in them to do good. There is none like you O Lord; you are great, and your name is great in might. Who would not fear you, O King of the nations? For that is your due; among all the wise ones of the nations and in all their kingdoms there is no one like you. They are both stupid and foolish; the instruction given by idols is no better than wood! Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz. They are the work of the artisan and of the hands of the goldsmith; their clothing is blue and purple; they are all the product of skilled workers. But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. At his wrath the earth quakes, and the nations cannot endure his indignation. Thus shall you say to them: The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens. (Jer 10:1 – 11; trans. from NRSV)

The Israelites’ sense of the unsuitability of images for expressing their faith in the transcendental nature of God was so evident that they articulated it as the very first of the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:2 – 4; cf. Deut 5:6 – 8): I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery ; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

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If we compare this passage with the numerous pronounced poetical descriptions of God, man, and natural phenomena, we can easily determine that this is not a poetic description of some reality or truth but a synthetic judgement of the fundamental tenet of Jewish monotheism, which can be recognized in its entirety and with all its consequences only from the biblical texts as a whole and from Israelite tradition. A completely different challenge in determining reality and truth, however, is presented by the Bible’s truly literary narratives and poetic texts. In the literary texts a brief message of profound meaning cannot be too unambiguous and clear. Longer literary texts, meanwhile, are full of lacunae and allow for several interpretations. Because of the doctrine of the unity, oneness and sacredness of God in Israel, also texts which the Israelites took from other cultures work in the entire context of the Bible differently than they did in the original polytheistic co-texts, even though the Hebrews, generally speaking, were not overly purist in their relation to the mythical tradition of the Near East. Recognition of this explains why in Judaism and Christianity there is such a universally-developed method of interpretation linking the “literal” and the “metaphorical” meaning, one which has concerned all of the more earnest writers, literary theoreticians and philosophers from Augustine to authors of the High Middle Ages. Profound Jewish and Christian hermeneutics enabled Jewish and Christian poets, writers, literary theorists, and philosophers to discover myths anew and to re-form them in a manner that allowed these myths to acquire the valuable status of a universal symbol of expressing a hidden reality through visible means. This occurred by means of allegory, through typology and through the principle of analogy in all areas of man’s cultural and spiritual practices.7 Plato’s negative view of myths and of art in general gave rise already during the Renaissance to debate. In 1579, the Puritan minister Stephen Gosson published, on the basis of Plato’s stance as expressed in Republic, an attack on the theatre entitled The School of Abuse. Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586) responded to this attack with his An Apology for Poetry (1580 – 1581; also known as The Defence of Poesy), which rests on Aristotle’s Poetics and on Horace’s Ars Poetica. John Dryden (1631 – 1700), Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689), and Samuel Johnson 7 Also in contemporary times many works have been based on myths, which are “timeless stories” reflecting life and at the same time forming and sounding our desires, fears, and longing. Among the leading stories with mythological bases is also the literary, psychological, and anthropologically penetrating novel Lion’s Honey : The Myth of Samson by the Israeli author David Grossman, which speaks of the biography of Samson, a “lonely and turbulent soul who never found, anywhere, a true home in the world, whose very body was a harsh place of exile” (Grossman 2006: 2). Other contemporary authors who have dealt similarly with myths include: Karen Armstrong, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Viktor Pelevin, Alexander McCall Smith, Su Tong, Antonia Susan Duffy, Chinua Achebe, Milton Hatoum, Donna Tart, Drago Jancˇar, and Feri Lainsˇcˇek.

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(1709 – 1784) found in Sidney’s essay a solid foundation for their own defences of poetry. Active in Italy at that time was the humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484 – 1558), who in 1561 published the influential Poetices, in which Aristotle’s theses became the basis for a return to ancient sources. Among philosophers in the 17th century the eminent Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677), who opposed the “sacred letter” as the criterion of reality and truth, highlighted the moral credibility of the testimonies of prophets and of biblical writers in general. Sidney informs those who reject poetry in the name of philosophy, by means of comparative judgement, why he regards poetry to be more convincing than philosophy and history in reporting truth. In his discussion of a number of literary genres, including pastoral, elegy, satire, comedy, tragedy and epic, he refutes the thesis that the poet is a liar and emphasises that poetry transmits a moral message through artistic means that provide a sense of joy. The criterion for reality is primarily a message that is in relation to the givens of the material world and to the ethical quality of the individuals in the literary work. This allows the poet degrees of harmony with reality and truth in imitating and expressing reality in all its varieties, from the most sublime allusions to God and His justice in the Bible, to the gods and demigods in Greco-Roman culture, to the simplest truths in various types of myths describing nature and human characteristics. Because myths are literary creations and portray the most varied viewpoints on values in connection with the gods and man it is indisputable that through his artistic presentations the artist reports most alluringly. Through this picturesqueness and the integral figure of reality he mediates reality and truth much more understandably than do philosophy, history and law, which have their own specific intentions within a specific field of activity.8 At the start of An Apology for Poetry, Sidney cites the original Latin designation for poetic types of literary works: the poet was a vates, “a diviner, foreseer, or prophet,” while vaticinium was a “prophecy.” The very expression states that poets were thought to be mediators of divine messages, and Sidney sees a substantiation of this especially in the “divine poem” of David’s Psalms. This divine poetry besings “unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith” (qtd. in Leitch et al. 2010: 256). The Greek word “poet” is derived from the verb poie„n, meaning “to make, create” in the finest sense of the words. Like all the sciences, poetry has also art as a creative nature for its main object, which is why in essence it cannot err. The poet recreates nature but also creates forms of being that have never been: “the heroes, demigods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like” (Leitch at al. 2010: 257). In presenting examples of true love, constant and lasting friendship, and the courageous and exemplary man, the poet creates on the basis of an idea that 8 For a presentation of Philip Sydney, cf. Leitch et al. 2010: 251 – 254.

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transcends visible nature. On the basis of the Greco-Roman explanation that art is mimetic, Sidney emphasises the possibility of metaphorical use of nature in the service of two goals: to teach and to delight. Here he points out those poets who “did imitate the unconceivable excellencies of God. Such were David in his Psalms, Solomon in his Song of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, Moses and Deborah in their Hymns, and the writer of Job” (Leitch et al. 2010: 258). The poets most worthy of the name are those who “most properly do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been or shall be, but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be” (Leitch et al. 2010: 259). All representations of heroes and demigods are like figures of virtue and vice so that auditors and readers would be moved to strive for perfection and would raise themselves up from the prison of the body and towards enjoyment of their own divine being. It is precisely this elevated moral goal of literature that provides Sidney with a solid foundation for raising the poet above the moralist philosopher, the historian and the lawyer. The philosopher ruminates “obscurely” about virtue, the historian seeks truth in individual details, the lawyer makes judgements about good and evil under constraints, while the poet leads to virtue by encompassing lived reality as a whole; it is for this reason that “the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher” (Leitch et al. 2010: 263). In the second half of his essay, Sidney rebuts the criticism that poets’ manner of imitating reality does not serve truth. The foundation of his argument is that since poets do not assert anything, they never lie, for to lie means to claim that something false is true. Because of the nebulousness of human knowledge, other artists – especially the historian – have difficulty avoiding lies in their claims about a number of things. However, because the poet cannot lie, he never urges the reader to take his writing as truth, and it is for this reason that he does not even lie when he tells of things that are not real. The poet’s characters and actions depicted are mere pictures of what could be rather than stories about what was, which is why he can transmit truth also in literary fiction. With this, Sidney defends Plato, whom he cherishes above all other philosophers, “since of all philosophers he is the most poetical” (Leitch et al. 2010: 274). In his view, Plato unjustly accuses the poets of his time of having filled the world with wrongful conceptions of gods and of having created frivolous stories about their integrity, as he writes that “the poets did not induce such opinions, but did imitate those opinions already induced” (Leitch et al. 2010: 275). It follows from this that Plato is justified in his attempt to banish such poets; when we understand his true intent, we see that he is not our opponent but our advocate. The very title of Chapter 12 of Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise announces the theme: Of the true original of the Divine Law. In what respect Scripture is called holy and the Word of God It is shown that Scripture, in so far as

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it contains the Word of God, has come down to us uncorrupted. Spinoza has difficulty acknowledging the integrity of the original Bible in written form, but in spite of that he speaks all the more for the reality of its content: “for not only reason itself, but the assertions of the prophets and the Apostles clearly proclaim that God’s eternal Word and covenant and true religious faith are divinely inscribed in men’s hearts – that is, in men’s minds – and that this is the true handwriting of God which he has sealed with his own seal, this seal being the idea of himself, the image of his own divinity, as it were” (Spinoza 1991: 205). The inner bond of expressing love for God and man led to other fundamental truths of the Bible: “that God exists, that He provides for all things, that He is omnipotent, that by His decrees the good prosper and the wicked are cast down, and that our salvation depends solely on His grace.” Spinoza concludes: “We may therefore accept without reservation that the universal Divine law, as taught by Scripture, has reached us uncorrupted” (Spinoza 1991: 212). This inner bond establishes love as the sole reliable criterion for judging truth in the individual books of the Bible. Philip Sidney, Baruch Spinoza, along with others who have perceived reality in the deep, existential and ethical sense, offer a valuable basis for insight into the stances of a more contemporary author of note who provided his judgement of literary critics from antiquity to those of his own times. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) notes in the end of Chapter 4 of What Is Art?: “Strange as it is to say, despite the mountains of books written on art, no precise definition of art has yet been made. The reason for this is that the concept of beauty has been placed at the foundation of the concept of art” (Tolstoy 1996: 36). By replacing the principle of beauty with that of the emotions, Tolstoy essentially opens up the possibility of speaking about reality and truth. If, through his works of art, the artist gives rise to the emotions that are a fundamental fact of life, it is clear that art transmits at least as much truth about life as rational reflection does. Tolstoy’s famous definition of art in Chapter 5 reads: Feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good, if only they infect the reader, the spectator, the listener, constitute the subject of art. The feeling of self-denial and submission to fate or god portrayed in a drama, the raptures of lovers described in a novel, a feeling of sensuousness depicted in a painting, the briskness conveyed by a triumphal march in music; the gaiety evoked by a dance; the comicality caused by a funny anecdote; the feeling of peace conveyed by an evening landscape or a lulling song – all this is art. Once the spectators or listeners are infected by the same feeling the author has experienced, this is art. To call up in oneself a feeling once experienced and, having called it up, to convey it by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, images expressed in words, so that others experience the same feeling – in this consists the activity of art. Art is that human activity

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which consists in one man’s consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them. (Tolstoy 1995: 39 – 40)

Tolstoy’s conclusion is entirely logical: the most important role of art is to awaken a feeling and to transfer that feeling to spectators, listeners and readers, under the expectation that art is comprehensible to all. Because art affects human emotions, which have remained unchanged through the ages, Tolstoy believes that, unlike acts of reason, the emotions function independently of the degree of individuals’ development and education. Towards the end of Chapter 10 he explains: … art affects people independently of their degree of development and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, of images infects any man on whatever level of development he may stand. The business of art consists precisely in making understandable and accessible that which might be incomprehensible and inaccessible in the form of reasoning. Usually, when a person receives a truly artistic impression, it seems to him that he knew it all along, only he was unable to express it. And the best, the highest art has always been so: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the stories of Jacob, Isaac, and Joseph, the Hebrew prophets, the Psalms, the Gospel parables, and the story of Shakya-muni, and the Vedic hymns – all convey very lofty feelings, and in spite of that are fully understandable to us now, to the educated and the uneducated, and were understood by people of their own time, who were still less educated than our own working people. They talk of incomprehensibility. But if art is the conveying of feelings that arise from a people’s religious consciousness, how can a feeling based on religion – that is, on man’s relation to God – be incomprehensible? Such art must be, and indeed has always been, understandable to everyone, because each man’s relation to God is always the same. And therefore temples, and the images and singing in them, have always been understandable to everyone. The obstacle to understanding the best and highest feelings as is also said in the Gospel, by no means lies in an absence of development and education, but, on the contrary, in false development and false education. A good and lofty artistic work may indeed be incomprehensible, only not to simple, unperverted working people (they understand all that is lofty) – no, but a true artistic work may be and often is incomprehensible to highly educated, perverted, religiondeprived people as constantly occurs in our society, where people find the highest religious feelings simply incomprehensible. (Tolstoy 1995: 81 – 82)

Tolstoy’s position that feelings are the fundamental criterion of quality art helps us to understand why Erich Auerbach (1892 – 1957), in his seminal Mimesis, exemplarily underlines the uniqueness of biblical narratives. A comparison between Greek mimetic literature and Hebrew poetic sallying into the unfathomable depths of the human soul leads him to judge that Greek literature is entirely comprehensible because the poets remain on the surface, whereas Hebrew literature – because it penetrates into the depths, into what lies beneath

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external events – demands interpretation. Whereas Greek literature is without gaps, gaps are characteristic of Hebrew literature and these gaps must be filled by means of appropriate interpretation. Auerbach clearly illustrates his recognition of the special nature of biblical narratives with his insight into the unambiguous reality of human emotions and faith through his analysis of the biblical story of the trial of Abraham (Gen 22:1 – 19), which he compares to Homer’s epic: It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity ; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.” […] It shows that even the separate personages can be represented as possessing “background”; God is always so represented in the Bible, for he is not comprehensible in his presence, as is Zeus; it is always only “something” of him that appears, he always extends into depths. But even the human beings in the biblical stories have greater depths of time, fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in Homer ; although they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their faculties, they are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts and feelings have more layers, are more entangled. Abraham’s actions are explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his character (as Achilles’ actions by his courage and his pride, and Odysseus’ by his versatility and foresightedness), but by his previous history ; he remembers, he is constantly conscious of, what God has promised him and what God has already accomplished for him – his soul is torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation; his silent obedience is multilayered, has background. Such a problematic psychological situation as this is impossible for any of the Homeric heroes, whose destiny is clearly defined and who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly. How fraught with background, in comparison, are characters like Saul and David! How entangled and stratified are such human relations as those between David and Absalom, between David and Joab! Any such “background” quality of the psychological situation as that which the story of Absalom’s death and its sequel (II Samuel 18 and 19, by the so-called Jahvist) rather suggests than expresses, is unthinkable in Homer. Here we are confronted not merely with the psychological processes of characters whose depth of background is veritably abysmal, but with a purely geographical background

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too. For David is absent from the battlefield; but the influence of his will and his feelings continues to operate, they affect even Joab in his rebellion and disregard for the consequences of his actions; in the magnificent scene with the two messengers, both the physical and psychological background is fully manifest, though the latter is never expressed. With this, compare, for example, how Achilles, who sends Patroclus first to scout and then into battle, loses almost all “presentness” so long as he is not physically present. But the most important thing is the “multilayeredness” of the individual character ; this is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at most in the form of a conscious hesitation between two possible courses of action; otherwise, in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them. The Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactical culture appears to be so much more highly developed, are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings; and no less so in their relation to the real life which they describe in general. Delight in physical existence is everything to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us. Between battles and passions, adventures and perils, they show us hunts, banquets, palaces and shepherds’ cots, athletic contests and washing days – in order that we may see the heroes in their ordinary life, and seeing them so, may take pleasure in their manner of enjoying their savory present, a present which sends strong roots down into social usages, landscape, and daily life. And thus they bewitch us and ingratiate themselves to us until we live with them in the reality of their lives; so long as we are reading or hearing the poems, it does not matter whether we know that all this is only legend, “make-believe.” The oftrepeated reproach that Homer is a liar takes nothing from his effectiveness, he does not need to base his story on historical reality, his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, weaving its web around us, and that suffices him. And this “real” world into which we are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing but itself; the Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analysed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted. Later allegorizing trends have tried their arts of interpretation upon him, but to no avail. He resists any such treatment; the interpretations are forced and foreign, they do not crystallize into a unified doctrine. The general considerations which occasionally occur (in our episode, for example, in. 360: that in misfortune men age quickly) reveal a calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate impulse either to rebel against them or to embrace them in an ecstasy of submission. It is all very different in the biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch the senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is only because the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their sole concern are made concrete in the sensible matter of life. But their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and Euryclea; both are legendary. But the biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice – the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately ; or else (as many rationalistic interpreters

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believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a conscious liar – no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a political liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to absolute authority. To me, the rationalistic interpretation seems psychologically absurd; but even if we take it into consideration, the relation of the Elohist to the truth of his story still remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer’s relation. The biblical narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in the truth of the tradition (or, from the rationalistic standpoint, his interest in the truth of it) demanded of him – in either case, his freedom in creative or representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition. What he produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward “realism” (if he succeeded in being realistic, it was merely a means, not an end); it was oriented toward truth. Woe to the man who did not believe it! One can perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War or of Odysseus’ wanderings, and still, when reading Homer, feel precisely the effects he sought to produce; but without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to put the narrative of it to the use for which it was written. Indeed, we must go even further. The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical – it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be an historically true reality – it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us – they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels. Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious doctrine, raises the claim to absolute authority ; because the stories are not, like Homer’s, simply narrated “reality.” Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with “background” and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon. Doctrine and the search for enlightenment are inextricably connected with the physical side of the narrative – the latter being more than simple “reality”; indeed they are in constant danger of losing their own reality, as very soon happened when interpretation reached such proportions that the real vanished. (Auerbach 1998: 11 – 15)

Auerbach’s judgement completely concurs with that of the majority of interpreters who accept the premises of the Bible and who have a commensurate aesthetic education. When this twofold pre-condition is lacking, disparate interpretative directions are put forth, including those which are completely

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contradictory to the fundamental message of the text. The more art in general and literature in particular extends this realm of its ideas and forms into the breadth and depth of reality and truth, the clearer it is that works of art cannot be adequately evaluated through rationalistic – or merely philosophical – approaches. Aesthetics and poetics have solid reasons for methodological specificity. This fact is clearly evident from a more contemporary in-depth attempt at a philosophical explanation of myth. Kurt Hübner speaks of this in his study Die Wahrheit des Mythos (The Truth of Myth), while substantiating his understanding of myth and the purpose of his study in his Forward: Although I have developed a specific theory of myth, my intention is less cultural and historical than philosophical and systematic. An historical overview and reconstruction of myth are required merely as pre-conditions for verifying […] prejudices, which in the end are all, to put it briefly, nothing but the judgement that myth contains no truth or that they should be rejected for moral reasons. (Hübner 985: 16)

Hübner’s systematic philosophical approach allows him to reject as insufficient all previous analytical-scientific approaches in judging the origins and meaning of myth as being one-sided or even to find them completely unfounded; and yet in spite of this he finds no possibility of convincingly interpreting the phenomenon of myth in its figurative-artistic and artistic execution, although he is always well aware that for visual or literary embodiments of myth “holistic thinking” (“ganzheitliches Denken”) is required (Hübner 1985: 48). The author also deals with the role of myth in modern painting under the influence of the split between art and reality on account of the severing of the link between the world of ideas and the material world (293 – 323). Modern art, in Hübner’s view, sees a division between art and reality : “Art is appearance, illusion, a copy” (294). He discusses the place of myth in Christianity in an individual chapter, summing up his recognition at the conclusion of that chapter : First: The Christian religion exhibits, to a great extent, mythic structures. Second: The attempt, in the interest of a scientifically- and philosophically- determined world view of modern man, to remove them leads to irresolvable contradictions with the Bible and at the same time undermines the foundations on which the Christian faith rests. Third: It also leads to internal contradictions, since on the one hand the mythical, which insists on the unity of the material-sensory and the ideal, cannot be avoided, while on the other hand, in the eschatological regard it is again robbed of its sensory content. Fourth: It is precisely on account of this that living faith can only be experienced mythically. Fifth: There is no theoretically compelling reason referring to science or philosophy for rejecting the mythical primal elements of the Christian religion, since science and philosophy represent only one particular historically-imparted explanation of truth, which cannot claim to be the sole possible one. Sixth: But there is also no practically compelling reason referring to current consciousness for this – firstly, because mythical experience is never entirely foreign to this consciousness, and se-

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condly, because the bare fact of this consciousness does not represent an unchangeable destiny. These six points express realizations. That is why they contain no demand that one should believe in the mythical elements in the Christian religion; rather, they merely point out that it is possible to believe in them, without committing a sacrificium intellectus. As has already been shown, in spite of this there are decisive differences between the Christian religion and myth. These must ultimately be shown, although it is not the intention here to enumerate them exhaustively. The Christian religion is monotheistic, which demands the absolute primacy of one God; in contrast, myth is polytheistic. This God is at the same time the Creator. Myth cannot even ask about such [a God] because the idea of a uniform cosmos for which also the one God must be responsible is foreign to it in its polytheistic constitution. Hesiod, for example, may have everything arising out of chaos, but it is precisely [chaos] in which much is a priori there as disorder and from this that the spectrum of the polytheistic cosmos then unfolds. Most mythical teachings regarding the genesis of the world are of the same sort (cf. the Indian idea of the world egg), if their subject is not at all merely the origins of the social world order. Whereas in the mythical world there are many individuals through which a god becomes a visible figure, in the Christian religion there is only one, and only one Being in which God became Flesh. And with this, simultaneously within profane time, the period in which the man lived is absolutely marked – while in polytheistic myth such a determination is not known – and every place and everything is infused by the Holy Flesh and this emerges from a single One. It is precisely because of this that the Christian religion is not, like myth, a sort of explanation of the world (a system of experience) but only a referring to the true life, precisely to the one with God. Finally – as has already been mentioned – for the Christian religion the miracle is of fundamental importance; for myth it is not. It refers to the miracle especially when it is taken on faith, whereas when from the man who thought mythically it is not necessary to demand faith; myth was for him regardless only a sort of everyday experience. Through partial analogy, these decisive differences allow for generalizations about the relations of the other world religions to myth. To summarise: Myth and religion are not the same thing, but even while it is possible to divide myth from religion, there is no religion without myth. (Hübner 1985: 343 – 344)

If it is true that myth can be separated from religion, then we can perhaps claim that myth in the narrower sense of the word can be separated from poetry and from literature in general. Even so, at the same time it holds true that without myth there is no literature. If philosophical rationality can arrive at only differentiation between the fields in the world of reality, in science and in art, then by means of rational methods it surely cannot suitably show reality and truth in art in general and in literature in particular. For this a holistic approach and discourse which transcend analysis through synthetic artistic expression are needed. Such experts are to be found among leading literary theorists who have also made a name for themselves as poets and writers of fiction. This is evident from

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the works of virtually all creative authors who have also written works of literary criticism.

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Reality in Fiction and in Literary Portrayals of Historical Events

Among those writers and poets that have had especially advocated the truth of literature, Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) and Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) had particularly resonant ideas. In his essay On Fiction, Johnson explains the inherent quality of the fictional and artistic splendour of Shakespeare’s history plays. In his account, works of fiction show life in its “true state,” while truth does not manifest itself solely through the imitative nature of its appearance, but primarily through the appropriate portrayal of the moral state of the main characters in those literary works. He is against an ethically-neutral standpoint, and in his view it is necessary to constantly instil “that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness; and that vice is the natural consequence of narrow thoughts, that it begins in mistake, and ends in ignominy” (qtd. in Leitch et al. 2010: 371). In the Preface to the 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s works, Johnson expresses his certainty about how successfully Shakespeare showed reality or truth in works that are essentially literary fiction, even if they are often based on historical events. Shakespeare created “a faithful mirror of manners and of life” (Leitch et al. 2010: 374) in accordance with the true needs of the action; he adapted his own emotions to real life, his observations contain “general and predominant truth,” his characters are natural and consistent in behaviour, and in his works he preserved unity of action (Leitch et al. 2010: 379). In light of these essential characteristics of the quality of a literary work, Johnson does not regard Shakespeare’s various deficiencies, most notably the frequent disharmony in the portrayal of chronology and the selection of historical events, as fatal flaws. In evaluating Shakespeare, Goethe states that he always addresses “the inner sense” (“der innere Sinn”) and that when reading his poems we “experience the truth of life – how, we do not know!” (Goethe 1986: 167) Though Goethe often spoke of “poetic” and “fictional” truth in the form of maxims and aphorisms, he did so most markedly in dialogue form in “On Truth and Probability in Works of Art,” a discussion between an “Agent of the Artist” and a “Spectator.” This discussion is so convincing and clear in a methodological regard that it is cited here in its entirety : In a certain German theatre there was represented a sort of oval amphitheatrical structure, with boxes filled with painted spectators, seemingly occupied with what was

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being transacted below. Many of the real spectators in the pit and boxes were dissatisfied with this, and took it amiss that anything so untrue and improbable was put upon them. Whereupon the conversation took place of which we here give the general purport. The Agent of the Artist: Let us see if we cannot by some means agree more nearly. The Spectator: I do not see how such a representation can be defended. Agent: Tell me, when you go into a theatre, do you not expect all you see to be true and real? Spectator: By no means! I only ask that what I see shall appear true and real. Agent: Pardon me if I contradict even your inmost conviction and maintain this is by no means the thing you demand. Spectator: That is singular! If I did not require this, why should the scene painter take so much pains to draw each line in the most perfect manner, according to the rules of perspective, and represent every object according to its own peculiar perfection? Why waste so much study on the costume? Why spend so much to insure its truth, so that I may be carried back into those times? Why is that player most highly praised who most truly expresses the sentiment, who in speech, gesture, delivery, comes nearest the truth, who persuades me that I behold not an imitation, but the thing itself ? Agent: You express your feelings admirably well, but it is harder than you may think to have a right comprehension of our feelings. What would you say if I reply that theatrical representations by no means seem really true to you, but rather to have only an appearance of truth? Spectator: I should say that you have advanced a subtlety that is little more than a play upon words. Agent: And I maintain that when we are speaking of the operations of the soul, no words can be delicate and subtle enough; and that this sort of play upon words indicates a need of the soul, which, not being able adequately to express what passes within us, seeks to work by way of antithesis, to give an answer to each side of the question, and thus, as it were, to find the mean between them. Spectator: Very good. Only explain yourself more fully, and, if you will oblige me, by examples. Agent: I shall be glad to avail myself of them. For instance, when you are at an opera, do you not experience a lively and complete satisfaction? Spectator: Yes, when everything is in harmony, one of the most complete I know. Agent: But when the good people there meet and compliment each other with a song, sing from billets that they hold in their hands, sing you their love, their hatred, and all their passions, fight singing, and die singing, can you say that the whole representation, or even any part of it, is true? or, I may say, has even an appearance of truth? Spectator: In fact, when I consider, I could not say it had. None of these things seems true. Agent: And yet you are completely pleased and satisfied with the exhibition? Spectator: Beyond question. I still remember how the opera used to be ridiculed on account of this gross improbability, and how I always received the greatest satisfaction from it, in spite of this, and find more and more pleasure the richer and more complete it becomes. Agent: And you do not then at the opera experience a complete deception?

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Spectator: Deception, that is not the proper word, – and yet, yes ! – But no – Agent: Here you are in a complete contradiction, which is far worse than a quibble. Spectator: Let us proceed quietly ; we shall soon see light. Agent: As soon as we come into the light, we shall agree. Having reached this point, will you allow me to ask you some questions? Spectator: It is your duty, having questioned me into this dilemma, to question me out again. Agent: The feeling you have at the exhibition of an opera cannot be rightly called deception? Spectator: I agree. Still it is a sort of deception; something nearly allied to it. Agent: Tell me, do you not almost forget yourself ? Spectator: Not almost, but quite, when the whole or some part is excellent. Agent: You are enchanted? Spectator: It has happened more than once. Agent: Can you explain under what circumstances? Spectator: Under so many, it would be hard to tell. Agent: Yet you have already told when it is most apt to happen, namely, when all is in harmony. Spectator: Undoubtedly. Agent: Did this complete representation harmonize with itself or some other natural product? Spectator: With itself, certainly. Agent: And this harmony was a work of art? Spectator: It must have been. Agent: We have denied to the opera the possession of a certain sort of truth. We have maintained that it is by no means faithful to what it professes to represent. But can we deny to it a certain interior truth, which arises from its completeness as a work of art? Spectator: When the opera is good, it creates a little world of its own, in which all proceeds according to fixed laws, which must be judged by its own laws, felt according to its own spirit. Agent: Does it not follow from this, that truth of nature and truth of art are two distinct things, and that the artist neither should nor may endeavor to give his work the air of a work of nature? Spectator: But yet it has so often the air of a work of nature. Agent: That I cannot deny. But may I on the other hand be equally frank? Spectator: Why not? our business is not now with compliments. Agent: I will then venture to affirm, that a work of art can seem to be a work of nature only to a wholly uncultivated spectator ; such a one the artist appreciates and values indeed, though he stands on the lowest step. But, unfortunately, he can only be satisfied when the artist descends to his level; he will never rise with him, when, prompted by his genius, the true artist must take wing in order to complete the whole circle of his work. Spectator: Your remark is curious; but proceed. Agent: You would not let it pass unless you had yourself attained a higher step. Spectator: Let me now make trial, and take the place of questioner, in order to arrange and advance our subject. Agent: I shall like that better still.

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Spectator: You say that a work of art could appear as a work of nature only to an uncultivated person? Agent: Certainly. You remember the birds that tried to eat the painted cherries of the great master? Spectator: Now does not that show that the cherries were admirably painted? Agent: By no means. It rather convinces me that these connoisseurs were true sparrows. Spectator: I cannot, however, for this reason concede that this work could have been other than excellent. Agent: Shall I tell you a more modern story? Spectator: I would rather listen to stories than arguments. Agent: A certain great naturalist, among other domesticated animals, possessed an ape, which he missed one day, and found after a long search in the library. There sat the beast on the ground, with the plates of an unbound work of Natural History scattered about him. Astonished at this zealous fit of study on the part of his familiar, the gentleman approached, and found, to his wonder and vexation, that the dainty ape had been making his dinner of the beetles that were pictured in various places. Spectator: It is a droll story. Agent: And seasonable, I hope. You would not compare these colored copperplates with the work of so great an artist? Spectator: No, indeed. Agent: But you would reckon the ape among the uncultivated amateurs? Spectator: Yes, and among the greedy ones! You awaken in me a singular idea. Does not the uncultivated amateur, just in the same way, desire a work to be natural, that he may be able to enjoy it in a natural, which is often a vulgar and common way? Agent: I am entirely of that opinion. Spectator: And you maintain, therefore, that an artist lowers himself when he tries to produce this effect? Agent: Such is my firm conviction. Spectator: But here again I feel a contradiction. You did me just now the honor to number me, at least, among the half-cultivated spectators. Agent: Among those who are on the way to become true connoisseurs. Spectator: Then explain to me, Why does a perfect work of art appear like a work of nature to me also? Agent: Because it harmonizes with your better nature. Because it is above natural, yet not unnatural. A perfect work of art is a work of the human soul, and in this sense, also, a work of nature. But because it collects together the scattered objects, of which it displays even the most minute in all their significance and value, it is above nature. It is comprehensible only by a mind that is harmoniously formed and developed, and such a one, in proportion to its depth, discovers that what is perfect and complete in itself is also in harmony with himself. The common spectator, on the contrary, has no idea of it; he treats a work of art as he would any object he meets with in the market. But the true connoisseur sees not only the truth of the imitation but also the excellence of the selection, the refinement of the composition, the superiority of the little world of art; he feels that he must rise to the level of the artist, in order to enjoy his work; he feels that he must collect himself out of his scattered life, must live with the work of art, see it again and again, and through it receive a higher existence.

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Spectator: Well said, my friend, I have often made similar reflections upon pictures, the drama, and other species of poetry, and had an instinct of those things you require. I will in future give more heed both to myself and to works of art. But if I am not mistaken, we have left the subject of our dispute quite behind. You wished to persuade me that the painted spectators at our opera are admissible, and I do not yet see, though we have come to an agreement, by what arguments you mean to support this license, and under what rubric I am to admit these painted lookers-on. Agent: Fortunately, the opera is repeated to-night; I trust you will not miss it. Spectator: On no account. Agent: And the painted men? Spectator: Shall not drive me away, for I think myself something more than a sparrow. Agent: I hope that a mutual interest may soon bring us together again. (Goethe 1980: 25 – 31).

Also among the classic writers who spoke of the relation between history and literature is Leo Tolstoy, who articulated his viewpoint in the Epilogue to his novel War and Peace (1865 – 1869). The Epilogue consists of two parts and pertains to the historical context that became the framework for his literary creation. In the novel and in the Epilogue he repeatedly returns to his guiding thought that historical heroes are not invented but are living people with passions and an inclination to the good, to beauty and to truth. To the fundamental question of why things happened in a certain way, “and not otherwise,” he responds simply : “Because they did so happen” (Tolstoy 1978: 1342). He cannot provide a more concrete answer because he acknowledges that the final intention of history is inconceivable: It is only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, that we shall see a logical connexion in the lives of historical personages, and perceive the why and wherefore in what they do which so transcends the ordinary powers of humanity. We shall then find that the words chance and genius have become superfluous. (Tolstoy 1978: 1343)

Immersing oneself further into historical reality as a whole does not lead to increased clarity in recognizing the intentions that make up the whole, but merely confirms the impression of the inconceivability of the final purpose: “The higher the human intellect soars in the discovery of possible purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension” (Tolstoy 1978: 1350). Through the admission of the final purpose of history and its unfathomability Tolstoy includes himself in the fundamental principle of a biblical vision of universal history, which is the main theme especially of the Jewish apocalypse. Among Slovenian writers, Ivan Cankar’s perceptions on truth are especially profound. He addresses this issue in many places in his writing, especially at the conclusion of his autobiography My Life. His statement regarding the bond of

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truth from “Bela Krizantema” (The White Chrysanthemum, 1910) is particularly insightful: There is pride in my heart; despite all moral teachings, reprimands, accusations, despite the gibes, the insults and the slandering, my entire life has unceasingly served the highest ideal: truth! What I have seen with my eyes, my heart, my mind, I have not denied; and I would not have denied the golden stars in the heavens. Truth is the receptacle of everything else: beauty, freedom, eternal life. (Cankar 1975: 267)

The inner link binding the recognition of the final purpose of world history and the history of nations, a fundamental point of view, and the inner moral obligation to truth, is evident also from various interpreters of Judeo-Christian civilisation in their attempts to substantiate reality and truth. In his most important work, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1918) departs from the conviction that the belief in one God, as manifested in the literary sources of Judaism, entails the ethical foundation of individual and social life and enables recognition of uniqueness and the inconceivable purpose of universal history. From the very beginning Cohen’s status quaestionis is this: “There are many customs, many codes, many states, and therefore the question arises whether all these different cultural phenomena have something in common, which, despite their differences, would make it possible to recognize a unifying concept of all of them” (Cohen 2008: 1). His direction of searching is based on the recognition of the internal bond between the postulation of a single God and of the ethical founding of the world: “Thus, the principle of reason has led us to the unity of religion and morality” (Cohen 2008: 34). In The Art of Biblical History, V. Phillips Long, basing his arguments essentially on the same premise, ascertains that it is perhaps sensible to consider reality and truth in both the Old and New Testaments by determining the “inner” and “external” consistency of the witnessing of the people who appear in them (Long 1994: 186 – 195). The Bible is based on the testimony of various individuals, as well as on intrinsic duties to truth in the relation to God, whom they experience as an incontestable authority. This fact utterly convinced Baruch Spinoza, to the extent that he placed the moral credibility of the witnessing writers in the centre of his presentation of the characteristics of biblical literature. It is, of course, also true that we may intuitively differentiate between truth and untruth, but how can this difference be analysed? In general it is probably valid that the recognition of truth or untruth in literary works is more a matter of a synthesis of emotions than analytical method. Meir Sternberg, among others, changed perceptions in this regard when he – first in Hebrew – highlighted through meticulous analysis of numerous biblical narratives the relation “bet-

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ween truth and the whole truth” in the Bible (his monumental The Poetics of Biblical Narrative was published in English in 1987). Recent academic research has seen more and more publications dealing with the question of truth in art, particularly in literature, in history, and in philosophy. In the 1970s the American philosopher David Lewis, among others, reflected on the issue of truth in fiction (Lewis 1983: 261 – 280). The concept of fiction is semantically limited by two types of material background: 1) the background of known facts; 2) the background convictions that generally prevail in the community in which the fiction arose. The first is conditioned by the content of the fiction, while the second is a matter of collective convictions in a particular group. In harmony with philosophical logic, thus, Lewis rejects the loose concept that fiction consists of fanciful stories about bizarre worlds that are fundamentally different from our actual world. Without meaning, fictions with “empty reality” are impossible because this reality is not in accordance with facts or relates something for which it is not possible to know whether it is true: “Most of us are content to read a fiction against a background of well-known fact, ‘reading into’ the fiction content that is not there explicitly but that comes jointly from the explicit content and the factual background” (Lewis 1983: 62). Lewis also rejects deriving conclusions about truth in fiction from a mixture of truth in reality and truth in fiction, for fiction must correspond to readers’ worlds: “What is true throughout them is true in the stories; what is false throughout them is false in the stories; what is true at some and false at others is neither true nor false in the stories” (Lewis 1983: 64). From this “realistic” concept of reality and truth it follows that psychoanalysing fictional figures is a very risky undertaking, because from psychology of humans one derives everything but generally known facts. That is why it is understandable that the psychoanalysis of fictional characters undertaken by psychoanalytical literary critics is fraught with various concerns. This fact helps us understand why in all times those characters whose embodiment is limited to the most generally known characteristics and generally accepted ideals of humans as personalities are esteemed. Lewis considers the relation between original fictions and fictions derived from those original fictions thus: “What is true in a fiction when it was first told is true in it forevermore. It is our knowledge of what is true in the fiction that may wax or wane” (Lewis 1983: 66). Lewis also touches on the cognitive value of literature when he determines that some people value fiction as a means of discovering or reporting reality. His stance is that the “truth of fiction” has nothing to say about fiction as a means of achieving reality, as fiction can also disseminate lies: “If we have plenty of misleading evidence stored up, there may well be falsehoods that need only be stated to be believed” (Lewis 1983: 74). The background of the generally prevailing convictions of a particular group

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can be meddlesome not only in literary fiction in the strictest sense of the word but also in writing based on real historical fact. Hayden White draws attention to this and other problems in “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth” (White 1997: 392 – 396). The heart of the problem lies in the fact that “narrative accounts do not consist only of factual statements (singular existential propositions) and arguments; they consist as well of poetic and rhetorical elements by which what would otherwise be a list of facts is transformed into a story” (White 1997: 393). Narratives, thus, are by nature more an interpretation of facts than a synthetic statement about them. It is because every interpretation is unavoidably subjective that traditional history writing and interpretation of literary texts favoured “facts” over every interpretation. In the Judeo-Christian tradition of interpretation the celebrated system of four levels of meaning of the Bible arose; the essence of this system was always to give preference to the so-called “literal” meaning (sensus litteralis) over all viewpoints on metaphorical meaning.9 Though White does not explicitly mention this hermeneutical system, he approaches its essence when in the context of various interpretations of stories from the Holocaust he points out a dilemma that is of prime importance for literary theory : For unless an historical story is presented as a literal representation of real events, we cannot criticize it as being either true or untrue to the facts of the matter. If it were presented as a figurative representation of real events, then the question of its truthfulness would fall under the principles governing our assessment of the truth of fictions. And if it did not suggest that the plot type chosen to render the facts into a story of a specific kind had been found to inhere in the facts themselves, then we would have no basis for comparing this particular account to other kinds of narrative account, informed by other kinds of plot type, and for assessing their relative adequacy to the representation, not so much of the facts as of what the facts mean. (White 1997: 394 – 395)

The problems associated with writing stories on the basis of life stories that did in fact occur is the basic theme of a new collection of essays by American writers, the majority of whom are also literature professors at universities. Editor David Lazar chose the title Truth in Nonfiction as the title of his 2008 book. David Shields, in his essay, “Reality, Persona,” provides a list of statements that express reality in the universal sense: “All the best stories are true.” “A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.” “What is true for you in your private heart is true for all men.” “Every man has within himself the entire human condition” (Shields 2008: 77 – 88). For her contribution, the writer Judith Ortiz Cofer, a professor of creative writing at the University of Georgia, opted for a motto by 9 Cf. Krasˇovec 1996: 37 – 38: “Hermenevticˇna nacˇela do novega veka” (The Hermeneutic Principle up to the New Age).

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Philip Sidney : “Look into Thy Heart and Write.” Her essay is a convincing look at the aspects of truth in poetry and in autobiography. The role of the poet is to use language to present the roughness of human experience, what Czeslaw Milosz called “the only homeland”; herein lies the reality of poetry : Poems are always true. You can feel their truth; it resonates within you like the sound of pure crystal. And when you hear good poems, the question, did this really happen?, which we often hear from inexperienced readers, is of no consequence because it does not matter. The truth of poetry is like quantum physics. One should accept it even if one does not quite grasp it. Es la pura verdad. (Cofer 2008: 27)

The author emphasises that in writing life stories she takes particular care to ensure accuracy in narrating historical facts, though she realises that the reality of art differs from that of history. When she asks her relatives individually about particular events, their stories differ “dramatically.” The nature of memory is such that in the stream of life various versions of the same story emerge. That is how definitions of truth in writing from memory came into being, as Virginia Woolf observed, as “personal impressions, the tracks you follow back to your moments of being.” Attempts to investigate the truth of one’s life and to express this in artistic form entailed that she “had to find the universal in the particular,” and in so doing she saw that in certain points we are all strangers in our home environment (Cofer 2008: 29 – 30). Among contemporary theorists especially H. Porter Abbot is important. To the second edition of his The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative he added the chapter “Narrative and Truth.” Abbot, citing views on the differences among genres that are based on historical events and fiction, draws attention to the fact that authors who base themselves on historical events use them selectively according to their meaning and allow various lacunae. The reader of literature is more in search of truth of meaning than truth of fact, and this meaning is judged according to the reader’s own experiences of reality. The work will be convincing if the story is “a little too good to be true,” less so if the story is false.

Conclusion Literature refers to myths and fiction and to non-fiction, memoirs, biography and other works that are factual in scope. The task and scope of literature is to convey reality and truth that is momentary yet eternal. Myths allow for embellishment, personal beliefs, current conceptions and also false representations of past events. History unconditionally aims at faithful representation of facts and events that really happened. But modern views of history have brought about a radical revision of the scope of history. The natural tendency of story-

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telling is not only to find out what happened but also the meaning of the past for the present time. Consequently, actual occurrence of facts and events is embellished by present experiences of the writer of history. The most conspicuous aim of the search for historical facts and events is to glorify an ideal or value for the present. History may reflect more the time in which it is written than the time in which events occurred, and it may manifest some natural sympathy between the past and the present. In the final analysis, there is a general agreement among critical scholars that all history is subjective. The important role of myth and history in literary imagination and the specific scope of literature are good reasons for dealing with the aspects of truth that literary works convey to the reader. It seems normal that writers want to bring about by their works a general view of the totality of things, with special attention to ineffable feelings and ideas, to human life and death, to effort and suffering, to success and frustration. Awork of literature characterizes interest in the ways facts relate to the universe and the ways individual characters respond to the reality of their environment and their experience. In contrast to the study of history, writers of literature are free to depict events – both those that happened and those that never occurred. They are not, however, free in reference to the observation of human conduct. The perennial subject of literature is humans as they live and act. In their seeking out behaviour of individual characters writers in fact disclose their own mind and reveal their inmost soul. The aim of this study is to disclose the views of recognized writers and philosophers on commonalities and differences in the nature and scope of myth, history and fiction. The views of the writers highlighted and examined here show that there are important differences in presenting reality and truth in myth, history and literature as regards the relationship between cosmic and historical facts in their particulars and in the totality of things. But the most important distinction is in dealing with humans as individuals in their inexpressible feelings and ideas. Philosophy tries to build a comprehensive worldview upon the foundations laid by reason, science and experience. A work of literature and art, however, does not characterize experience and knowledge as such, but rather the response of concrete characters to the problems of human existence and fate. Literature and art are concerned with specific understanding of human valuations. What about the relationship between the study of history and literature? In principle, history is the search for facts and events that really happened. The primary concerns of history are events based on knowledge concerning the human mind in reaction to the challenge of the natural and social environment of groups of individuals that “create” history and manifest their character and decisions, or defend their thoughts and views of the universe as a whole and affect groups of individuals. History is therefore open to typology. In any case,

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the expectation remains that the historian’s work is bound to external facts and events. On the other hand, the writer of fiction is always concerned with the individual as such, with his innermost soul, no matter what the influence on other people. This is true also for the genre of historical fiction. The goal of literary historical fiction is not to divulge the historical setting of an historical time period. Authors of literary history are concerned with characters who manage to transcend time, speak to us from their own perspective and help us to better understand the commonalities and differences between their time and ours. It has been asserted that there is more truth in fiction than in history. And yet, it is even more true that interdisciplinary approaches help us best to understand the parallels and differences between the representation of reality and truth in myth and literature on the one hand and the study of natural sciences, and the study of philosophy, the study of psychology and the study of history on the other.

4. Reality and Fiction in Biography and Autobiography

Biographical and autobiographical literature has a double foundation. Many of these literary works arise on the basis of first-hand experience of personal contact with others and personal experiences of events. The second type of biographical literature is based on the study of sources. A crucial difference between history and biography, including autobiography, is that whereas history aims at general statements about a period, individuals and the events with which it deals, biography focuses on individuals and perceives them with utter specificity, often dealing in details from a person’s life. In all literary types and genres that emerge from general or personal history, questions of truth, probability and the significance for the personal life and that of the society are important. The question of truth or probability in biographical or autobiographical writing encompasses the question of the relation between objective and subjective truth and the question of the aims of biographical or autobiographical writing. Biographical and autobiographical writing is a tapestry woven of historical testimony and literary creativity. Because in autobiography the narrating subject and narrated object are one and the same, the possible period of events related are limited to the lifespan of the author. Thus, the tension between the presentation of objective reality and subjective creativity in autobiography is more explicit than in traditional forms of literature. This chapter deals primarily with the characteristics of autobiographical writing and examines the problem of truth in certain classic biographical and autobiographical works from antiquity to the present. The presentation of various stances in literary criticism regarding the role of biographical and autobiographical writing, and regarding the originality of individual authors’ manners of presenting reality and past events, sheds light on the criteria for judging authenticity or truth in literature. The very nature of autobiographical writing indicates why the question of reality and truth in these literary types appears as a central question to which authors, each in his or her own manner, respond both directly and indirectly.

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4.1

Autobiographical Literature as a Sub-Section of Biographical Literature, and the Problem of Reality

Rather than establishing rules for autobiographical narratives as a genre or form, the definition of autobiographical narrative understands such telling as an historically-inserted instance of self-presentation. In autobiography the narrators selectively present their life story through a personal narrative. Inserted into specific times and places, autobiography is simultaneously in dialogue with individual processes and archives of memory. Because the history of such selfreferential literary models is so rich and varied, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson differentiate among three types: life writing, life narrative, and autobiography. Life writing is a general term for writing that focuses on an individual life as a subject: “Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical. We understand life narrative as a somewhat narrower term that includes many kinds of self-referential writing, including autobiography” (Smith and Watson 2001: 3). Running parallel to a natural inclination to discover the truth is the human tendency to search for historical “facts,” and for this reason it is not self-understood that the reader of an autobiographical tale will assiduously and consciously differentiate between “aesthetic” and “historical” truth. Writers of autobiography must find their own way of harmonizing the two principles. Man than “factual” truth, autobiographers present subjective “truth” (Smith and Watson 2001: 10). A number of questions arise when we attempt to confirm what is specific in expressing truth in autobiographical writing as opposed to biography, the novel, or history writing: What is the truth status of autobiographical disclosure? How do we know whether and when a narrator is telling the truth or lying? And what difference would that difference make? […] What is it that we expect life narrators to tell the truth about? Are we expecting fidelity to the facts of their biographies, to experience, to themselves, to the historical moment, to social community, to prevailing beliefs about diverse identities, to the norms of autobiography as a literary genre itself ? And truth for whom and for what? Other readers, the life narrator, or ourselves? (Smith and Watson 2001: 12)

Biographical and autobiographical writing are so varied in their forms that Smith and Watson’s recent work on autobiography lists no less than 52 types of life stories: apology, autobiographics, auto/biography, or a/b, autobiography in the third person, autoethnography, autofiction, autography, autogynography, autopathography, autothanatography, autotopography, Bildungsroman, biomythography, captivity narrative, case study, chronicle, collaborative life narrative, conversion narrative, diary, ecobiography, ethnic life narrative, ethnocriticism, genealogy, heterobiography, journal, letters, life writing, life narrative,

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meditation, memoir, oral history, otobiography, aughtabiography, periautography, personal essay, poetic autobiography, prison narratives, relational autobiography, scriptotherapy, self-help narrative, self-portrait, serial autobiography, slave narrative, spiritual life narrative, survivor narrative, testimonio, trauma narrative, travel narrative, witnessing (Smith and Watson 2001: 183 – 207). Two additional types of autobiographical writing, each of which is important in the Bible, can be added to this list: biographical and autobiographical descriptions of the prophets’ visions, and, in apocalyptic literature, the description of dreams (Eissfeldt 1964: 69 – 75; Engl. 1965: 52 – 56). Biographical and autobiographical literature came fully into its stride during the 19th and 20th centuries, a time that saw an increased awareness of individuality and the individual’s relation to history and society. As a consequence of this, the historical novel ceded to “memoirs, autobiographical writing, which preferred individual reality, and a psychological approach to the apparent objective reality of the social world” (Hladnik 2009: 30). A significant characteristic of biographical and autobiographical writing is an intimate relationship with the past. Autobiographical writing exists as an echo of events which the author has personally experienced and which he remembers personally. Neva Sˇlibar sees a minor difference between the function of biographical and autobiographical writing, and notes, “since biography is already historical (through exemplary accounts in lives [i.e. vitae] and legends) an increase in ethical/didactic and ‘factographic’ knowledge is conferred, whereas autobiography can be more strongly psychological and social in orientation, for instance in the form of literature about the experience of life [Lebenserfahrungliteratur] that is apprehended as life-help” (Sˇlibar 1995: 392). In connection with traditional writing of “objective” biography and “subjective” autobiography, Sˇlibar draws considered attention to the fact that both types interweave a searching for objectivity and subjective judgement; as she states: “If a biographical text can systematically exhibit ‘autobiographical’ parts, the reverse is equally true: even descriptions of the self that are focused to the extreme on that self – such as Thomas Bernhard’s five autobiographical books from Die Ursache to Ein Kind [gathered in the English translation Gathering Evidence] – contain penetrating portraits of relatives, friends, and enemies” (Sˇlibar 1995: 393). The presentation of reality includes a number of viewpoints. These viewpoints express concepts such as (objective) reality, (objective and subjective) truth, true experiences, probability, and authenticity, which is why we also encounter the question of reality in autobiographical writing. The essential qualities of autobiography are the following: for the most part, it is a prose narrative that is a portrayal of an individual life story in which the author and the protagonist are one and the same, and in which the narrative

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perspective is retrospective (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005: 1 – 6). The most important principle for autobiography is that the writer senses an obligation to the truth and strives to the greatest possible degree for a credible portrayal of events. Augustine, the author of the first classic autobiography, describes such a reliving of truthful personal history. In Confessions (XI, xviii) he states: If future and past events exist, I want to know where they are. If I have not the strength to discover the answer, at least I know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if there also they are future, they will not yet be there. If there also they are past, they are no longer there. Therefore, wherever they are, whatever they are, they do not exist except in the present. When a true narrative of the past is related, the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them which they fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses. Thus my boyhood, which is no longer, lies in past time which is no longer. But when I am recollecting and telling my story, I am looking on its image in present time, since it is still in my memory. Whether a similar cause is operative in predictions of the future in the sense that images of realities which do not yet exist are presented as already in existence, I confess, my God, I do not know. At least I know this much: we frequently think out in advance our future actions, and that premeditation is in the present; but the action which we premeditate is not yet in being because it lies in the future. But when we have embarked on the action and what we were premeditating begins to be put into effect, then that action will have existence, since then it will be not future but present. (Augustine 2008: 233 – 234)

Judging reality or probability is not just a matter of scientific reason but also of creative spirit. Details of content in autobiographical writing are not objectively verifiable, and neither are there clear reasons for minor discrepancies in content. Great temporal distance in conjunction with the role of memory is among the least of the many possible causes for such divergences in detail, and Sˇlibar provides a clear division between biographical and autobiographical writing in terms of reality. If biographical writing is more “natural” in literary form, autobiographical writing is much more scrutinised – both among general readers and within scholarly circles. Sˇlibar provides a solid explanation for this: “The causes for this preference lie in the fact that autobiographical texts, much more immediately than biographical ones, serve the drive for authenticity and unforged life experiences. […] In an aesthetic sense, they are more stimulating because they allow for far more creative treatment of the material” (Sˇlibar 1995: ˇ eh addresses this issue of authenticity or reality in her essay 394). Jozˇica C “Between Fiction and Reality in Autobiographical Prose,” which investigates the relation between the two in literature in general, while focussing particularly on ˇ eh, in accordance with traditional literary theory, argues Ivan Cankar’s My Life. C that the demarcation line between literary and non-literary types is precisely the ˇ eh 2008: 23). line between fiction and reality (C

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Ivan Cankar draws attention to the significance of truth at the end of My Life, when he comments on his reactions as a reader of Rousseau’s Confessions: “He burdened his poor youth with sins as various as he could imagine and finally with deep learning explained and justified all these sins. When we read his confessions we are seized by the feeling which is the most terrible sentence on a writer : we do not believe him” (Cankar 1988: 39). Cankar’s ear for questions of reality or truth is also evident in his evaluation of Janez Trdina’s confessions. Cankar praises him in My Life: “He has been appallingly just to himself, mercifully just to others.” In spite of this, however, Cankar adds that the figure of Trdina as a youth is not entirely realistic because he “cannot suppress the oldfashioned schoolmaster” (Cankar 1988: 50). Cankar emphasises the reasons for doubting the credibility of autobiographical writing. He believes that contradictions exist already in human existence, in the opposition between his urge to seek and his urge to flee; it is precisely on account of these contradictions that self-depiction will, according to his conviction, be “too bright” or “too sombre, but true it will never and never can be” (Cankar 1988: 39). Man’s internal division also leads to disharmony in his statements about the self, as Cankar notes: “The artist is a child singing in the forest so as not to succumb to fear” (Cankar 1988: 39). He concludes: “If you want to be so openhearted as not to lower your eyes before God himself you will be writing of that one day until you die. And you will reveal such horrors that people will stone first you and then each other. And if one survives he will be consumed by the supreme joy of those unheard – of beauties which you have revealed” (Cankar 1988: 40). Cankar himself was deeply divided over such writing about the self, asking, “Why write [auto]biography?” (Cankar 1988: 39). And yet in spite of the judgement of some that he was writing “obituary,” and in spite of the opinion of others that he was “singing [his] own praise while still alive,” he believes that there is sense to autobiography. One writes it “Not by any means to put himself on show like a prostitute nor to edify or entertain but only so that he may survey the vast fields of his own soul, to reach with pain and trembling from one gulf of his soul to another, to seek the light of day” (Cankar 1988: 40). The Slovenian poet and author Ciril Zlobec begins the first part of his autobiographical novel Spomin kot zgodba (Memory as a Story) with these words: Is it possible for a man to vividly recall something that never happened? Or that perhaps did in fact happen, but in such a remote period of childhood that even the earliest memories cannot access it? Can something happen to the person in his first, still unconscious years and only later awaken as memory? Or is it that we simply believe in something that stirs with all the characteristics of memory? In something bewildering that came to us, suddenly, as a drop from the pathless ways of time and remained in us as knowledge that belongs to us and is a part, perhaps even an important part, of our personality? Is it possible, I ask, for there to be some sort of form of primal

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memory, perhaps a sort of subsequent uncovering of that time before our memory had been born? […] I read Tolstoy’s memoirs and I was surprised to see that I almost believe some of the moments he ripped out of memories of earliest childhood, when he, tightly swaddled, could not stretch out his arms and he cried and shouted because nobody understood him to help him. His biographer Henri Troyat did not solve this riddle, but left it open: “Leo Tolstoy … did remember – or thought he did …” (Zlobec 1988: 9 – 10)

Similarly, in Otrosˇke stvari (Things of Childhood) Lojze Kovacˇicˇ (1928 – 2004) writes of his youngest years, even of his birth. But in the published notes to this work, which he added a year before his death in 2003, Kovacˇicˇ, interestingly, concludes his autobiographical memories with the period of his old age and writes, “I mention all of this so that the reader will know that this book continues to this very moment. Old age provides man with the sense that he has become the majority shareholder of his own life. And yet it can always end more poorly than it began” (Kovacˇicˇ 2003: 331). Marjan Rozˇanc (1930 – 1990) also speaks of remembering and reality at the outset of his autobiographical novel Ljubezen (Love): Now I must really tell it. Pregnancy usually last nine months, in rare, exceptional cases it can last two decades, but probably never longer than thirty years. By that time love simply must yield its fruit. It is probably only memories that have the special characteristic of cowering like fruitful seeds in man for years and years, and then suddenly waking from slumber and all of the sudden swelling into ripe fruit to which we simply must – regardless of the circumstances – allow its own, independent life. […] At times I am deeply grateful to blind fate that I was still a child during those times of war and that my lack of ripeness spared me in some regards, that I never had to make any truly important decisions, simply because nobody demanded this of me, neither with their hypocritical words nor with a pistol in the dark. All of this is true. And yet it is also true that at that time also my childhood world, my childhood view of people, and my childhood judgement of events were just as true, and for that reason I cannot simply erase all of it. For, ultimately, aren’t children also part of human reality? (Rozˇanc 1986: 9 – 10)

Here Rozˇanc asks about reality and truth: what is objective truth? Is that truly the truth of adults or perhaps only of certain adults? Is truth “in people and their behaviour at all, or [is it] perhaps in something else?” (Rozˇanc 1986: 10) Rozˇanc himself was “chosen, without [his] knowledge, for something fateful.” During the years of World War II he was between eleven and fifteen and he was unable to write in a manner that differed from his personal and youthful memory of those years. He recalls that he wrote sketches about the crafty teenagers in what he calls a tragicomic war, though he was not satisfied with them, because he later wrote, “with manly, elevated, and haughty wisdom, somewhere from afar, removed temporally and spatially, when a man can already securely smile at all of the

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horrific events and all of the destructive passions that once ruled him, as they are no longer events and passions. Lies and deception” (Rozˇanc 1986: 10 – 11). It is by means of the novel Ljubezen that Rozˇanc wishes to transcend his earlier autobiographical attempts, although he does not envision a work of art in a high style, one with a plot, dramatic climax and denouement, and not even one with beauty and charm lent by the written word. He wanted to write “a tale about love” – about everybody he loved in those childhood years, in the years in which he had the “wide open, unrestrained heart” of a child (Rozˇanc 1986: 12). At the same time, he claims that he hated no one, though he did perhaps fear or feel disinclined to this or that individual. The autobiographical tales of the Slovenian writer Marjan Tomsˇicˇ stem from the same War period as those described by Rozˇanc, for it was then that Tomsˇicˇ (born 1939) lived through his childhood. Although his mother died during the World War II, when he was barely four years old (from then on he lived with his “second mother”), he still remembers his birth mother : I have two mothers. I know it sounds odd, but it is true. The first mother was the one who gave birth to me and died during the war, when I was four years old. The second mother is the one who took mercy on the poor child; four boys and the widower who was my father. […] Today, after so many years, I have only a few scant memories of my real mother. One of them occupies a special place, I could even say, a place of honour… (Tomsˇicˇ 1988: 6)

Marjan Tomsˇicˇ recalls the day his mother brought him tin soldiers from Maribor, “Hitler’s of course, since at the time the Germans occupied Maribor and had renamed it Marburg” (Tomsˇicˇ 1988: 7). Too young to be political, Marjan was delighted at the toys, enthusiastically placing them on the table and playing with them while his mother cooked a mutton roast in the oven. He was surprised that she cried as she worked, and then he learned that she was crying because she was on her way to the hospital, and sensed that she would never return; her intuition turned out to be true. Lojze Kovacˇicˇ wrote significantly of childhood that: “We have never crawled away from childhood things, we’ve always just given them another name” (Kovacˇicˇ 2003: 7).

4.2

Some Classic European Biographical and Autobiographical Works

Certain literary documents from and before antiquity can be considered partly autobiographical and partly biographical. Already from Egyptian graves we know of epithets in the form of personal narratives. From Classical Greek culture there is Plato’s Apology of Socrates (c. 427 – 347 BC). Defence speeches at court

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also contain overtly biographical and autobiographical elements. The Apology of Socrates had a central position also in the period of Hellenism, from which documents in the form of political autobiography, known as Hypomnemata – reminders, memoranda – are preserved (Wagner-Egelhaaf 2005: 105 – 118). Both the Old and New Testaments contain a specific type of biographical and autobiographical writing. In biographical and autobiographical accounts, the words and acts of charismatic individuals (such as Abraham, Moses, Joseph of Egypt, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Job, Jesus and Paul) play a very important role, while Moses’ vision of the burning bush makes for a classic example of a prototypical biographical vision narrative (Ex 3 – 4). One sees a similar experience of being called into prophetic service in the autobiographical descriptions in the reports of the prophets Isaiah (Isa 6:1 – 13) and Ezekiel (Ezek 1:1 – 3, 15). Isaiah states (6:1 – 8), In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty ; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched our lips your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” (Trans. NRSV)

The canonical and apocryphal writings contain many more vision narratives, such as those of Daniel in the Old Testament, Revelation in the New Testament, and a number of Apocrypha of the apocalypse. The biblical apocalypse has greatly influenced European literature to the modern era. Dreams are among the central motifs of the biography of Joseph (Gen 37 – 50), and in Confessions (III, xi), Augustine gives symbolic significance to dreams when he recalls his mother’s dream of the redemption of her son. Similarly, Jeremiah expresses the dichotomy of his nature in autobiographical terms – caught as he is between his sense of conviction and his disappointment on account of the opposition of his contemporaries. The passages in which he avows his inner struggles are celebrated (Jer 12:1 – 6; 15:10 – 21; 20:7 – 18). The most important writings in the New Testament are those of the four Evangelists, which are biographies pertaining to the teachings and acts of Jesus in His role as the Messiah (Vorster 1992: 1077 – 1079). Also the apostolic works are primarily a biographical presentation

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of the first Christian community, with Paul’s three missionary journeys being in the forefront. However, biographical description often becomes an autobiographical account of the apostles’ personal experiences. In this regard, Paul’s letters to various Christian groups are salient, as they contain many autobiographical passages. Paul’s conversion – which is primarily in the form of biography (Acts 9:1 – 19), and secondarily in the form of autobiography (Acts 22:6 – 16; 26:12 – 18) – warrants particular attention. The autobiographical account (Acts 22:6 – 16) reads: While I was on my way and approaching Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” I answered, “Who are you, Lord?” Then he said to me, “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.” Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. I asked, “What am I to do, Lord?” The Lord said to me, “Get up and go to Damascus; there you will be told everything that has been assigned to you to do.” Since I would not see because of the brightness of that light, those who were with me took my hand and led me to Damascus. A certain Ananias, who was a devout man according to the law and well spoken of by all the Jews living there, came to me; and standing beside me, he said, “Brother Saul, regain your sight!” In that very hour I regained my sight and saw him. Then he said, “The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear his own voice, for you will be his witness to all the world of what you have seen and heard. And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name. (Trans. NRSV)

Interesting is the lively discussion of the literary form of the four canonical and numerous apocryphal gospels. A comparative study of the canonical Gospels reveals that the intention of the apostles, the writers of the Gospels, was not the act of writing itself but the oral account of their own experiencing of Jesus’ words and acts in the community of the first Christians. In their origins the Gospels are thus oral rather than written documents. This so-called kerygmatic background of the Gospels is the reason why the Gospels – in spite of their similarity with Greco-Roman biographies in terms of their basic aim of describing an individual’s words and actions – are a unique literary creation and can be compared only in the most general of terms with other biographies. The authors of Greco-Roman biographies wished to present the ethos and manner of life of the people they were describing, whereas the Evangelists gave accounts of Jesus with a mind to realising His messianic role in the framework of the universal intention of history, which is determined by the so-called eschatological. The messianic and eschatological regard of history is characteristic of the Jewish, but not of the Greco-Roman, world of philosophy and religion, and that is why it is only in Judaism that we find the idea of the Messiah. Literature was thus part of the plan

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announced in the Old Testament and found in the Gospels. The fulfilling of this intention occurs in an extremely ironical sense: Jesus appears denuded of the grandeur lent by external appearance and strength. He comes to his people, in his own homeland, only to be rejected, tried, and crucified. But against all expectations he rises from the dead and in an opposite ironical sense he becomes the mediator of eschatological redemption in the universal sense. (Vorster 1992: 1077 – 1079) Among the best-known authors of biography and autobiography from antiquity to modern times are Augustine (354 – 430), Teresa of Avila (1515 – 1582), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, 1804 – 1876) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948). In Augustine’s Confessions, memories and recognition of God are intertwined. Specific to these confessions is that they are written in the form of a dialogue with God, to whom Augustine confesses his errant ways of youth and before whom he glorifies the new life he commences after having repented. For him, God is the personification of truth and it is according to this truth that he judges everything that he has experienced in his spirited life. In Book II of the Confessions (II, iii), Augustine recalls himself as a sixteen-year-old, spending his youth in the company of “fellow sinners.” He describes the diametrically opposed ways of his mother and father: Yet I went deeper into vice to avoid being despised, and when there was no act by admitting to which I could rival my depraved companions, I used to pretend I had done things I had not done at all, so that my innocence should not lead my companions to scorn my lack of courage, and lest my chastity be taken as a mark of inferiority. Such were the companions with whom I made ma way through the streets of Babylon. With them I rolled in its dung as if rolling in spices and precious ointments. To tie me down the more tenaciously to Babylon’s bell, the invisible enemy trampled on me (Ps. 55: 3) and seduced me because I was in the mood to be seduced. The mother of my flesh already had fled from the centre of Babylon (Jer. 51: 6), but still lingered in the outskirts of the city. Although she had warned me to guard my virginity, she did not seriously pay heed to what her husband had told her about me, and which she felt to hold danger for the future: for she did not seek to restrain my sexual drive within the limit of the marriage bond, if it could not be cut back to the quick. The reason why she showed no such concern was that she was afraid that the hope she placed in me could be impeded by a wife. This was not the hope which my mother placed in you for the life to come, but the hope which my parents entertained for my career that I might do well out of the study of literature. Both of them, as I realized, were very ambitious for me: my father because he hardly gave a thought to you at all, and his ambitions for me were concerned with mere vanities; my mother because she thought it would do no harm and would be a help to set me on the way toward you, if I studied the traditional pattern of a literary education. That at least is my conjecture as I try to recall the characters of my parents.

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The reins were relaxed to allow me to amuse myself. There was no strict discipline to keep me in check, which led to an unbridled dissoluteness in many different directions. In all of this there was a thick mist shutting me off from the brightness of your face, my God, and my iniquity as it were “burst out from my fatness” (Ps. 72:7). (Augustine 2008: 27 – 28)

Teresa of Avila also left behind a masterpiece of literary history ; her biography recounts her conversion from a worldly life to one of reflection and harmony and thus evokes Augustine’s path from his vanity of youth to saintliness. The simple style of her autobiography bears witness to the purity of her relation to God and others after having struggled against her nature in the environment in which she lived. Teresa, like John of the Cross and Ignatius of Loyola, carried the medieval tradition of mysticism into the 16th century and enriched it through her freshness, purity and conviction; in so doing, she ranks among the beginners of modern spirituality. Teresa called her autobiography The Life of the Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus by Herself (known simply as Libro de la Vida – “The Book of Life” in specialist studies). The first part, from 1562, has gone missing; the second was begun in 1563, and completed in 1565. The first part of Chapter I reads: I had a father and mother, who were devout and feared God. Our Lord also helped me with His grace. All this would have been enough to make me good, if I had not been so wicked. My father was very much given to the reading of good books; and so he had them in Spanish, that his children might read them. These books, with my mother’s carefulness to make us say our prayers, and to bring us up devout to our Lady and to certain Saints, began to make me think seriously when I was, I believe, six or seven years old. It helped me, too, that I never saw my father and mother respect anything but goodness. They were very good themselves. My father was a man of great charity toward the poor, and compassion for the sick, and also for servants; so much so, that he never could be persuaded to keep slaves, for he pitied them so much: and a slave belonging to one of his brothers being once in his house, was treated by him with as much tenderness as his own children. He used to say that he could not endure the pain of seeing that she was not free. He was a man of great truthfulness; nobody ever heard him swear or speak ill of any one; his life was most pure. My mother also was a woman of great goodness, and her life was spent in great infirmities. She was singularly pure in all her ways. Though possessing great beauty, yet was it never known that she gave reason to suspect that she made any account whatever of it; for, though she was only three-and-thirty years of age when she died, her apparel was already that of a woman advanced in years. She was very calm, and had great sense. The sufferings she went through during her life were grievous, her death most Christian. We were three sisters and nine brothers. All, by the mercy of God, resembled their parents in goodness except myself, though I was the most cherished of my father. And, before I began to offend God, I think he had some reason, – for I am filled with sorrow whenever I think of the good desires with which our Lord inspired me, and what a wretched use I made of them. Besides, my brothers never in any way hindered me in the service of God. (Teresa of Avila 2006: 40)

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau borrowed from Augustine the title for his pioneering autobiography Confessions, which consists of two parts, each containing six books. The work was completed in 1769, though it was not published until after his death in 1782. Rousseau’s Confessions contain a mode of thinking that is markedly anthropological in orientation. His confession begins with the proclamation: “I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself” (Rousseau 2000: 5). The writer turns to the reader expecting compassion and understanding for his unworthiness and anguish; he both informs readers and lets them sense that he is incapable of describing the particulars of his character. For him, credibility is important, and he directly substantiates this standpoint. At the end of Book IV he states his conditions for establishing credibility : “It is to this end that I have so far devoted all my efforts. […] there is only one thing that I need fear in this whole undertaking, which is, not that I might say too much or tell lies, but that I might not say everything and so conceal some truths” (Rousseau 2000: 170 – 171). In spite of this, he remains silent about certain things, as is seen in the concluding commentary to Book VI: Such were the faults and the errors of my youth. I have told their story with a fidelity with which my heart is content. If later, in maturer years I won honour for certain virtues, I would have related these too with equal frankness, for such as my design. But I must stop here. If my memoirs reach posterity, perhaps one day my readers will discover what it was I had still to say. Then they will know why I am silent. (Rousseau 2000: 266)

George Sand wrote her autobiography The Story of my Life (1855) with an altogether different relation to the life stories of her acquaintances. Her guiding rudder was the preservation of privacy, which is why she writes of Rousseau’s Confessions: “I suffer mortally when I see the great Rousseau humiliate himself this way and imagine that by exaggerating or even inventing such sins he clears himself of the vices of the heart which his enemies ascribe to him” (Sand 1991: 297). Very much in line with Sand, Nancy K. Miller criticizes Rousseau for failing to respect the privacy of the individuals he includes in his autobiography. Miller draws attention to the autobiographer’s ethical responsibility in providing accounts of intimate relations with other people, and she admits her own crisis of conscience in connection with her own writing – by unveiling the truth about relations to her parents and to other people, she “betrayed” them. The experiences of the people who were hurt to find themselves in autobiographies demand recognition that in life stories we are all in fact “vulnerable subjects.” She asks herself how the autobiographer can tell a story without impinging upon the personal rights of other people: “Faithfully recorded or maliciously distorted, your story circulates, utterly outside your control. Can such publication ever be

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fair? Can ethics share the side of power? Can we imagine – would we want to – an ethics of betrayal? An ethical betrayal?” (Miller 2008: 47) Between 1808 and 1831, the Weimer classic author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote Truth and Fiction Relating to my Life (Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit); in this autobiography and artistic confession which encompasses the period only up to Goethe’s twenty-fifth year, he incorporates the memory of his life into the universal idea of a history that develops towards a goal. His main intention was not to look into the relations, works, and acts of individuals from his time but to create a work of art about his own success story and present it as a model that would have an edifying effect on the reader. In his work he states that it is not possible to recognize the true facts of our life by recalling past events, but that it is by means of reflecting on their importance for life that we do so. His writing is an attempt to use material or passages from his life, to “elevate” us to that “higher,” inexpressible, something that moves us closer to the “higher truth.” In his writing Goethe is not only precise in his analysis of the movements of his soul, not only extremely alive in portraying his times, but also self-ironic, which is precisely what lends his work its particular charm. The goal of his autobiography, which refers to concrete events from his life, is to arrive at that which is most true, at that which Goethe’s literary genius renders a symbol of poetical truth that creates a tension between assertions about what has been achieved and the idea of what is achievable (Trunz 1998: 625 – 634). Goethe’s autobiography begins: On the 28th of August, 1749, at midday, as the clock struck twelve, I came into the world, at Frankfort-on-the-Main. My horoscope was propitious: the sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the day ; Jupiter and Venus looked on him with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely ; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more, as she had then reached her planetary hoed. She opposed herself, therefore, to my birth, which could not be accomplished until this hour was passed. These good aspects, which the astrologers managed subsequently to reckon very auspicious for me, may have been the causes of my preservation; for, through the unskilfulness of the midwife, I came into the world as dead; and only after various efforts was I enabled to see the light. This event, which had put our household into sore straits, turned to the advantage of my fellow-citizens, inasmuch as my grandfather, the Schultheiss [chief magistrate of the town], John Wolfgang Textor, took occasion from it to have a [man-midwife] appointed, and to introduce, or revive, the tuition of midwives, which may have done some good to those who were born after me. When we desire to recall what happened to us in the earliest period of youth, it often happens that we confound what we have heard from others with that which we really possess from our own direct experience. Without, therefore, instituting a very close investigation into the point, which, after all, could lead to nothing, I am conscious that we lived in an old house, which, in fact, consisted of two adjoining houses, that had

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been opened into each other. A winding staircase led to rooms on different levels, and the unevenness of the stories was remedied by steps. For us children, – a younger sister and myself, – the favorite resort was a spacious floor below, near the door of which was a large wooden lattice that allowed us direct communication with the street and open air. A bird-cage of this sort, with which many houses were provided, was called a frame. The women sat in it to sew and knit; the cook picked her salad there; female neighbors chatted with each other ; and the streets consequently, in the fine season, wore a southern aspect. One felt at ease while in communication with the public. We children, too, by means of these frames, were brought into contact with our neighbors, of whom three brothers Von Ochsenstein, the surviving sons of the deceased Schultheiss, living on the other side of the way, won my love, and occupied and diverted themselves with me in many ways. (Goethe 2009: 1 – 2)

Of those 20th century autobiographies written by especially influential individuals, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Story of my Experiments with Truth deserves particular attention. In the introduction, Gandhi notes that the only true reason for deciding to write an autobiography is an awareness of the necessity of seeking truth. On 26 November, 1925 Gandhi wrote a compelling explanation for his autobiography, which evocatively expresses why he was given the name Mahatma (“Great Soul”): Four or five years ago, at the instance of some of my nearest co-workers, I agreed to write my autobiography. I made the start, but scarcely had I turned over the first sheet when riots broke out in Bombay and the work remained at a standstill… A God-fearing friend had his doubts, which he shared with me on my day of silence. ‘What has set you on this adventure,’ he asked. ‘Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the East having written one, except amongst those who have come under Western influence. And what will you write? Supposing you reject tomorrow the things you hold as principles today, or supposing you revise in the future your plans of today, is it not likely that the men who shape their conduct on the authority of your word, spoken or written, may be misled? Don’t you think it would be better not to write anything like an autobiography, at any rate just yet?’ This argument had some effect on me. But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But I shall not mind, if every page of it speaks only of my experiments I believe, or at any rate flatter myself with the belief, that a connected account of all these experiments will not be without benefit to the reader. My experiments in the political field are now known, not only in India, but to a certain extent to the ‘civilized’ world. For me, they have not much value; and the title of Mahatma that they have won for me has, therefore, even less. Often the title has deeply pained me; and there is not a moment I can recall when it may be said to have tickled me. But I should certainly like to narrate my experiments in the spiritual field which are known only to myself; and from which I have derived such power as I possess for working in the political field. If the experiments are really spiritual, then there can be no room for self-praise. They can only add to my humility. The more I reflect and look back on the past, the more vividly do I feel my limitations.

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What I want to achieve – what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years – is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha. I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal. All that I do by way of speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field, are directed to this same end. But as I have all along believed that what is possible for one is possible for all, my experiments have not been conducted in the closet, but in the open; and I do not think that this fact detracts from their spiritual value. There are some things which are known only to oneself and one’s Maker. These are clearly incommunicable. The experiments I am about to relate are not such. But they are spiritual, or rather moral; for the essence of religion is morality. Only those matters of religion that can be comprehended as much by children, as by older people, will be included in this story. If I can narrate them in a dispassionate and humble spirit, many other experimenters will find in them provision for their onward march. Far be it for me to claim any degree of perfection for these experiments. I claim for them nothing more than does a scientist who, though he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them. I have gone through deep selfintrospection, searched myself through and through, and examined and analyzed every psychological situation. Yet I am far from claiming any finality or infallibility about my conclusions. One claim I do indeed make and it is this. For me they appear to be absolutely correct, and seem for the time being to be final. For if they were not, I should base no action on them. But at every step I have carried out the process of acceptance or rejection and acted accordingly. And so long as my acts satisfy my reason and my heart, I must firmly adhere to my original conclusions. If I had only to discuss academic principles, I should clearly not attempt an autobiography. But my purpose being to give an account of various practical applications of these principles, I have given the chapters I propose to write the title of The Story of My Experiments with Truth. These will of course include experiments with non-violence, celibacy and other principles of conduct believed to be distinct from truth. But for me, truth is the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles. This truth is not only truthfulness in word but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God. There are innumerable definitions of God, because His manifestations are innumerable. They overwhelm me with wonder and awe and for a moment stun me. But I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him. I am prepared to sacrifice the things dearest to me in pursuit of this quest. Even if the sacrifice demanded be my very life, I hope I may be prepared to give it. But as long as I have not realized this Absolute Truth, so long must I hold by the relative truth as I have conceived it. That relative truth must, meanwhile, be my beacon, my shield and buckler. Though this path is straight and narrow and sharp as the razor’s edge, for me it has been the quickest and easiest. Even my Himalayan blunders have seemed trifling to me because I have kept strictly to this path. For the path has saved me from coming to grief; and I have gone forward according to my light. Often in my progress I have had faint glimpses of the Absolute Truth, God, and daily the conviction is growing upon me that He alone is real and all else is unreal. Let those, who wish, realize how the conviction has grown upon me; let them share my experiments and share also my conviction if they can. The further conviction has been growing upon

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me that whatever is possible for me is possible even for a child, and I have sound reasons for saying so. The instruments for the quest of truth are as simple as they are difficult. They may appear quite impossible to an arrogant person, and quite impossible to an innocent child. The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth… If anything that I write in these pages should strike the reader as being touched with pride, then he must take it that there is something wrong with my quest, and that my glimpses are no more than a mirage. Let hundreds like me perish, but let truth prevail. Let us not reduce the standards of truth even by a hair’s breadth for judging erring mortals like myself. I hope and pray that no one will regard the advice interspersed in the following chapters as authoritative. The experiments narrated should be regarded as illustrations, in the light of which everyone may carry on his own experiments according to his own inclination and capacity. I trust that to this limited extent the illustrations will be really helpful; because I am not going either to conceal or understate any ugly things that must be told. I hope to acquaint the reader fully with all my faults and errors. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of Satyagraha, not to say how good I am. In judging myself, I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be. Measuring myself by that standard, I must exclaim with Surdas: Where is there a wretch So wicked and loathsome as I; I have forsaken my Maker ; So faithless have I been. For it is an unbroken torture to me that I am still so far from Him, who, as I fully know, governs every breath of my life, and whose offspring I am. I know that it is the evil passions within that keep me so far from Him, and yet I cannot get away from them. But I must close. I can only take up the actual story in the next chapter. (Gandhi 1993: xxv-xxix)

In “Farewell,” the concluding section, Gandhi again explains in detail his understanding of truth, and does so in relation to self-realisation in life. He speaks of the need for self-cleansing in all areas of life, and is thus aware that he must free himself of passions in thinking, speaking, and actions, for “To conquer the subtle passions seems to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms” (Gandhi 1993: 505).

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Over the past two centuries many world and Slovenian literary authors have written autobiographical works.10 These are of course in addition to the many politicians, scientists, visual artists and others who have written autobiographies. Judging every work of biographical or autobiographical writing inevitably brings up the question of truth or of the relation between fact and fiction, all the more so if the writer pledges that he will form an “truthful account” and presents himself as a witness to events. Among Slovenian writers, important autobiographies have been written by Janez Trdina (1830 – 1905), Ivan Cankar (1876 – 1918), Fran Salesˇki Finzˇgar (1871 – 1962), and Lojze Kovacˇicˇ (1928 – 2004). In 1904, Trdina wrote the autobiography Moje zˇivljenje (My Life), stating at the end: “And so I have now finished my biography. I did not think it would be so long, nor that the material would pile up so much that I would not be able to be briefer. I wanted to give you a proper picture of my life, not a nebulous, fleeting image” (Trdina 1951: 567). The opening sentences read: I was born 29 May, 1830 in Mengesˇ na Gorenjskem. I stayed in the home village until I was ten years old. I was a very lazy boy. All work was repugnant to me, and I preferred just to loaf around, get into scraps, tease the dogs, shake the fruit from the trees, hunt birds, sneak about in the bushes, in summer, go swimming, in winter, go skating and get into snowball fights, and so on. I was the cause of much sorrow and concern for my dear mother. I did, however, have the good trait of enjoying school and I studied hard. From birth I had been blessed with an excellent memory. Within three months I had learned how to read fluently and I had memorised all of the prayers after having heard them only twice. Our school was more German than Slovenian. But Slovenian was pushing out German and by 1848 had driven it out completely. Janez Kuralt deserves the credit for this; he was a very ambitious yet sensible man, and a good patriot. My household gave me plenty of opportunities to learn to read. In the evening and on Sundays I read to my family from Christ’s Suffering, Genovefa, stories by the Svetina brothers, The Life of the Indians in Heathen America (by [Slovenian-American missionary Frederic] Bar10 To cite just a few examples of literary autobiographies among German authors, and in addition to Goethe: Gottfried Benn, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Klaus Mann, Heinrich Böll, Theodor Fontane, Peter Härtling, and Christa Wolf. Among Austrian authors the Jewish writer Elias Canetti comes to mind. In English there are a number of autobiographies from North America, including the politician and scientist Benjamin Franklin, John Steinbeck, the poet Sylvia Plath, the former slave Booker T. Washington, Henry Miller ; the Native American Natachee Scott Momaday also wrote an autobiography. In Australia there is Geoffrey Piers Henry Dutton; in England George Gordon Byron and William Somerset Maugham; in Ireland William Butler Yeats, among others. Among French authors, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, George Sand, Jean D’Ormesson, Andr¦ Gide, etc. The Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson also wrote an autobiography, as well as the Russian writers Viacheslav Shishkov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Maxim Gorki. Also well-known is the Columbian writer Gabriela Garc†a M‚rquez’s autobiography.

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aga), and so on. And so I very soon learned also our literary language. In Mengesˇ, even before 1840 great joy was to be found in reading. Books were always being purchased, leant, and read. There were also a number of autodidacts, and still more female autodidacts, in the parish. At home I had one more spiritual delight, which was even dearer to me than reading: I absolutely adored listening to folk tales and legends told by the girls, especially by my former nanny Nezˇa. At that time folk literature was still very much alive, and nobody laughed at it or mocked it like they do today. (Trdina 1951: 481)

Ivan Cankar obviously paid much attention to Trdina’s My Life, and the work likely influenced his decision of summer or early fall 1913 to write a cycle of sketches also entitled My Life. The sketches appeared in the magazine Slovenski narod (Slovenian Nation) before mid-1914, though they did not appear in book form until 1920. My Life is a valuable example of an original literary creation that contains an especially large number of autobiographical elements. Throughout the fourteen sketches, Cankar describes experiences and figures from his youth, with his mother playing a particularly central role. He returns in memory to his early childhood days, to his student years in Ljubljana, and to his first instances as a university student in Vienna. In the final sketch, Cankar expresses his view of autobiographical writing. The individual sketches from his childhood are ordered chronologically, but same time each text functions as a self-contained unit that can be read in isolation from the other works, and it is for this reason that we ˇ eh argues that can regard My Life as a cycle of autobiographical sketches. Jozˇica C in Cankar’s autobiography “there are, as important fictive signals, auto-citation, auto-thematizing, lyrically meditative type of sketches, characteristic symbolˇ eh 2008: 31). The very title of Marko Juvan’s 2009 ism, metaphoricism, etc.” (C essay “Autobiography and the Problematic of Typological Definition: My Life between Text and Genre” clearly indicates the focal point of his study of Cankar’s autobiography. A comparison of Cankar’s work with Augustine and Rousseau’s Confessions, and partly also with Janez Trdina’s My Life, led Juvan to the conclusion that Cankar’s text is “an excellent example of how autobiography falls out of the genre classification of discourse (literary/non-literary, personal/ public, etc.) and in [the sketches] indecisiveness circulates as a type of sui generis monad” (Juvan 2009: 329). In the concluding (fourteenth) sketch, Cankar establishes the antitheses child/old person and emphasises that the young and the old will judge wisdom in opposite ways; it is through this polarity that he also unveils the means for judging the credibility of autobiographical writing: the ethical yardstick that is childhood purity and honesty. He states that “Respect will tolerate no lie, no envy, not even exaggeration. The worst is that it tolerates no concealment” (Cankar 1988: 38). Cankar also judges the credibility of Rousseau’s Confessions according to this principle. His autobiography concludes with a lengthy passage

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on the merits and definition of autobiographical writing, one which is worthy of our renewed attention: Jean Jacques Rousseau had the honest intention of showing the world his youth as he himself saw it. In this intention, however, he acted like an unthinking father who in sudden anger grabs his child by the hair, flings him to the ground and then picking him up embraces him, kisses him and sobs with him. He burdened his poor youth with sins as various as he could imagine and finally with deep learning explained and justified all these sins. When we read his confessions we are seized by the feeling which is the most terrible sentence on a writer : we do not believe him. The other day I read the bulky manuscript of Janez Trdina’s confession. That man is raised above us all by that great and beautiful virtue which no-one has ever had in such measure as he, that virtue which is the true standard for man and artist, its name is openheartedness. He has been appallingly just to himself, mercifully just to others. No writer has ever had so strong a call, such a talent, for displaying his whole life. But his fault is that he cannot suppress the old-fashioned schoolmaster who walks the world offering fine moral lessons like a Ribnicˇan peddling sieves. In his biography he gives wise and very severe moral lessons to his own youth, sometimes even shaking the rod at it. This is why I feel that the image of his youth is not quite accurate, that it has been warped by the schoolmaster. If the hand of such men trembled when drawing their own likeness, how should mine stay firm? When I scanned these chapters I was not a little surprised – Who was this? Was I really myself ? Was it not poor Jure who used to go gather firewood in Blatni dol? Wasn’t it frail little Marko who used to carry the cross in the procession? Wasn’t it the miserable idealist Peter Novljan from the house of death? If from me were born all these miserable, pensive, prematurely old children – are not their features then my very own? Why write biography? The answer to that question is easy but not cheerful. A writer is incapable of writing about his own life. If he is of any worth, each and every story is a piece of himself, a drop of his blood, a feature of his own image. There is no such thing as objective art, nor can there be until art is the work and the breath of life of man. Every artist carves his own image throughout. And he is convinced that he has been carving the image of Venus or of Moses. But if you order him “Carve your own image!” his hand will tremble, the image will not be true. It may be too bright, it may be too sombre, but true it will never and never can be, for man fears himself and this fear is the chief source of any art. The artist is a child singing in the forest so as not to succumb to fear. He is not seeking himself – he wants to escape. Even if one had the strength and courage to plumb the depths of one’s own being, one could not reach the bottom, for there is no bottom. Gulfs open into gulfs without end. Every thought is a lightning flash from eternity, daughter and mother of legions. If you have somehow hammered it into a word, you must hammer legions! Otherwise the image will be incomplete and the truth will be a lie. With honest eyes you view your life, you would like to survey it and travel its road to the last stop. Suddenly you realize that there is no last stop, that you are travelling in an eternal circle. Confess as conscientiously and faithfully as you may, there will remain smarting in your heart the bitter reproach that something important has been left out,

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not merely something important, but the most important of all, the vital reason for confession. Ah! and when you confess even this sin, you feel anew that this too was not the chief sin; behind it towers another, mountain-high. Write in all good faith how you have lived, what you have seen, what you have thought and spoken for the space of a single day. If you want to be so openhearted as not to lower your eyes before God himself you will be writing of that one day until you die. And you will reveal such horrors that people will stone first you and then each other. And if one survives he will be consumed by the supreme joy of those unheard – of beauties which you have revealed. Such reflections and worse have embittered this work for me till at last they have dragged the pen from my hand. One thing only still weighs upon my heart. I was told by one person that I was writing my own obituary, by another I was reproached for singing my own praise while still alive. I have not as yet thought of another obituary, nor will I until the day when I am revolted by women and have no stomach for wine, and I have always preferred to sing the praises of others rather than my own. It seems to me that it would be a good thing for every man to tell openly everything about his life that he can. Not by any means to put himself on show like a prostitute nor to edify or entertain but only so that he may survey the vast fields of his own soul, to reach with pain and trembling from one gulf of his soul to another, to seek the light of day. It is for this reason that despite all these doubts and scruples I shall in time continue these recollections of my youth. Perhaps soon, perhaps in twenty years, if God grants me so much time. (Cankar 1988: 38 – 40)

In endeavouring to transmit the truth about himself and his life Cankar employs contrastive figures. In the fifth sketch (Cankar 1988: 20 – 23), he describes how he disappointed both himself and his mother when he, as an altar boy, was given a groschen in honour of a priest’s first mass. Having money of his own for the first time, he went to buy dates at the first opportunity, even though he was aware that this expense was wasteful, given his family’s impoverished circumstances: “At that time we were living on maize gruel. I had clear eyes full of longing for beauty and I had marvellous dreams.” His dreams called out to him: “You’ve got a groschen, haven’t you? It’s yours, it’s in your hand!” (Cankar 1988: 20) When a “fat woman” asked how much he had to spend, he replied, “A groschen’s worth – a whole new groschen!” But Cankar the writer recalls, “As I gave this answer it seemed to me that someone else was speaking behind my back with a strange, deep, harsh voice” (Cankar 1988: 21). As soon as he began to enjoy the sweet dates, his dreams gave way to a sense of guilt; the oily clump of dates suddenly so disgusted him that he threw them into a stream and washed his hands. He remembered the daily reality of his family : “Mother is eating maize gruel, day after day, week after week. Perhaps she has even forgotten that there is any such thing in the world as white bread. And I am eating dates! A whole groschen’s worth of those sugary yellow dates. A stone lay on my heart, heavy and terrible. Shame ever kept the tears from my eyes” (Cankar 1988: 21). In the eighth sketch,

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he praises Ljubljana above all of the cities that he knows. But the pleasant dreams of Ljubljana fade into their opposite when he finds out that he has been sent there to school. Cankar experiences with bitterness the opposition between memories of his former “innocence” and his later, inferior, self-image. The themes of the writer’s contrastive experiencing of and expressing of reality are in existential opposition: truth/lies, benevolence/violence, life/death, power/powerlessness, the spoken word/silence, the body/the soul, formal authority/the law of conscience, joy/sadness, longing for the inexpressible/the cruelty of immediate reality. In spite of everything Cankar, in the concluding portion of My Life, admits that autobiography is never utterly true, because the secretive depths of the soul can never be fully plumbed. Some writers of autobiography have clearly outlined their main intentions. At the beginning of his Confessions, Rousseau says that he wants to show a man in all of his reality – “and this man is to be myself.” Goethe presents his life as the greatest of artworks. Cankar, at the end of My Life, concludes that the purpose of the writer who writes of his own life is, as quoted previously, “only so that he may survey the vast fields of his own soul, to reach with pain and trembling from one gulf of his soul to another, to seek the light of day.” From these and other examples we can conclude that life relations can essentially determine the fundamental intention of writing. Writers of autobiography have various viewpoints on reality with regard to content and aesthetics. The literary uniqueness of Ivan Cankar is that he experiences the truth of his life and describes it through the portrayal of contrasts, and it is precisely in the experiencing of life reality that he defines his view of the problem of truth in literature with such clarity. In his autobiographical writings, Fran Salesˇki Finzˇgar voices critical perspectives on the genre that are not to be found in the works of others; Finzˇgar associates the writer’s vocation with that of a priest. That some people expect from such an author also a “spiritual” direction in judging truth in awakening memories is evident from even a cursory consideration of Finzˇgar’s autobiography. From Finzˇgar’s works published in the magazine Dom in svet (Home and the World) – entitled “Razodetje” (Revelation, 1923), “Mati in sin” (Mother and Son, 1926) and “Krst pri Savici” (Baptism at the Savica, 1926) – it is clear that the author already early had the earnest intention of writing an “utterly sincere” biographical novel in which he would show “the fortune and misfortune of a Slovenian priest.” However, he devoted himself systematically to writing his biography only during the occupation during the Second World War. He added the following note to the galley prints at the end of the manuscript of his extensive autobiography Leta mojega popotovanja (The Years of my Journeying): “I began to describe my journey through life towards the end of 1941, and continued in the years 1942 and 1943. In the first two months of 1944, I finished writing. Everything, with the exception of the work in Trnovo, I wrote from

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memory, as I was unable to access the chronicles in Zˇelimlje and in Sora. The manuscript was transcribed properly by 23 February 1945” (Finzˇgar 1992: 461). After the War, Finzˇgar added this conclusion to his autobiographical writings: After 1946 I added to the earlier work a short description of my journey through the Second World War. I will not write of how after the war the economic and political events in our narrower homeland [i.e. lovenia] and throughout the united Yugoslavia developed. Because my hearing was almost entirely destroyed by a bomb, I retired from public work. In 1951, I continued only to edit publications for the St. Mohor Publishing House until 1952. Because I had not received from anywhere useful texts for vespers, I myself had to hastily write the educational tale “Mirna pota” [Quiet Paths]. Then I, after thirty years as secretary and editor of Mohor, handed over this most responsible care to younger hands (at the board meeting on 24 June, 1952). If this rather lengthy work ever sees the light of day, I do not know how readers will receive it. Probably in line with Presˇeren’s quip: “This one praises it, the second one finds it useless.” What of it. I know for myself that this biography of a student from Dolencˇe, a son of the Emperor from the village Doslovcˇe 9 is written straightforwardly and according to truth. I myself do not censure or praise this work. Nemo iudex in propria causa. I do estimate, however, that these tiny pictures, as far as they concern religious, cultural and political life, will be a useful witness for the serious historian concerning the goings on in our narrower homeland over the past seven decades. I end and conclude with father Jacob who, when asked in Egypt by the pharaoh how old he was, answered, “few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.” Ljubljana, 1952. (Finzˇgar 1992: 458)

On 5 June, 1955, the editor-in-chief of the St. Mohor Publishing House, Jozˇe Kroflicˇ, wrote his opinion about certain problematic passages in Finzˇgar’s work: “Sincerity does not oblige a man to go so far as to tell everything he knows about himself. It is enough that everything he writes be true. This is valid also for your Years, even if [the book] will not contain these episodes” (Finzˇgar 1992: 466). Lojze Kovacˇicˇ (1928 – 2004), assumes a special place among more contemporary writers who opted for autobiography, since almost all of his oeuvre is autobiographical. In Things of Childhood, he writes about his earliest childhood, including his birth (Kovacˇicˇ 2003: 9 – 18). As revealed previously, in the 2003 notes to his work, he concludes his memoirs with his old age, writing: “I mention all of this so that the reader will know that this book continues to this very moment. Old age provides man with the sense that he has become the majority shareholder of his own life. And yet it can always end more poorly that it began.” Of his childhood, which for him continues far into adulthood, he writes, “We have never crawled away from childhood things, we’ve always just given them another name” (Kovacˇicˇ 2003: 7). He describes his understanding of auto-

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biography as an attempt to supplement his life as a whole (Kovacˇicˇ 2003: 325 – 326). Kovacˇicˇ, whose stories are one of the high points of Slovenian post-War prose, was born the son of a Slovenian immigrant in Basel, Switzerland. His father was Slovenian, and his mother German. Although the household language was German, and in spite of his early familial and social surroundings, he ultimately decided for Slovenian, a language he did not encounter until his family moved to Slovenia. From early childhood his life was marked by foreignness. In Switzerland, others looked askance at his family as “suspicious Yugoslavs”; when his father rejected his Swiss citizenship, the family was sent to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where in Slovenia they were often taken for “miserable krauts.” Lojze was ten years old when his family had to leave Switzerland. This constant moving entailed that he felt already as a child and adolescent the bitterness of banishment. In Slovenia he first experienced poverty, family misfortune and the struggle for bare survival. In spite of the difficult circumstances in which his family lived, he was fascinated by Slovenia. As he states in a 2003 interview with the newspaper Delo, “not until I arrived in Dolenjska had I seen apples on the tree. In Switzerland, where I lived as a child, they polished them before putting them on display.” The feelings of foreignness, being a newcomer and emigration were decisive for his search of his “true self” as he followed “continuously his own tracks.” While travelling his path in search of his existence and own personality, he placed great importance on memory, for he felt that memory was where he had his true home. In his first creative period he was still describing his home environment in an utterly realistic style, whereas later he moved towards a modernist, subjective style. From his intimate and immediate world he always moved into the historical world of the middle decades of the 20th century and created an evocative image of the times. This is not only the case in his The Newcomers but also other stories in which he speaks of his life and the life of his family, for example in the stories “Decˇek in smrt” (The Boy and Death), “Resnicˇnost” (Reality) and “Pet fragmentov” (Five Fragments). He fleshed out the autobiographical material with profound reflections on fundamental moral and existential dilemmas, on death, on the sense or senselessness of life, on artistic creating and on eroticism. The reflections also essentially complete the writer’s memories of growing up during the Second World War, which is the subject of The Newcomers, the second work of his trilogy.11 This work holds a special place not only in the context of other autobiographical Slovenian War narratives but

11 The time span encompassed the period just before the Second World War, the War itself, and the post-War years – all of which were trying circumstances in Slovenian history.

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also among the great European historical narratives and novels of the 20th century. The second part of The Newcomers describes the external historical events and the writer’s personal experiences during the Second World War in Dolenjska and in Ljubljana. Kovacˇicˇ garnered the material for this part of The Newcomers from the years 1941 – 1945. Central attention is given to his understanding of the world through the eyes of a child growing up in times of war, and this understanding is marked by an experience of foreignness, as well as of being a newcomer in ethnic, ethical, and psychological terms. The introduction into this narrative segment begins in the conclusion of the first part of the trilogy, in which the author describes how on 25 March, 1941 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite pact in Vienna, thus allying themselves to the fascist forces. As a twelve-year-old boy he felt that “Germany was coming […] on a hundred thousand motorcycles … horrible and black…” (Kovacˇicˇ 1984: 225). As he recalls, two days later demonstrations broke out in Belgrade after the decision to unite with the fascists, and a group of pro-English officers and bourgeois politicians, with the support of the protesting Yugoslav nations, carried out a coup d’¦tat. Prince Paul was deposed and the 17-year-old Peter II officially assumed his role as king. The country left the fascist camp. But on 6 April 1941, without declaring war, Germany attacked both the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Greece. This meant the beginning of the Second World War in these lands, a war that was to last four years. The first-person narrator recalls how it was precisely on Palm Sunday, when he was travelling to the village of Sˇentjakob for the blessing, that the German planes bombed Belgrade. The army began to carry out a blitzkrieg operation, while Italian and Hungarian units also penetrated into Yugoslav territory (Kovacˇicˇ 1984: 227 – 228). Kovacˇicˇ was twelve years old at the time and after the initial feelings of horror he more or less waited with curiosity for the next events, not feeling any great sadness or joy – as he writes, he “knew too little” of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia “to be joyous or sad” at its fall (Kovacˇicˇ 1984: 232). And so he mainly observed how the Italians, Germans, Hungarians and Bulgarians penetrated into the country from all directions with tanks and motorised infantry units; he felt the lack of authority and thought, “the people are thus free and can do with each other as they wish” (Kovacˇicˇ 1984: 230). Interesting is the writer’s perception of the various thought-worlds of his father, called Vati (Father) in the novel, who, though a Slovenian, opted for the Germans, as well as of his anti-Hitler mother, who was half-German and halfFrench by birth. The portrayal of the events of the war is through the eyes of a growing boy, a boy who is unburdened by an absolute desire to take a particular stance on the political ideologies of the time and who is just as unburdened by the inclination to value his mother’s or his father’s stance. This accounts for the

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great immediacy and sincerity in the narrative. His inner world was primarily occupied by the usual concerns of a twelve-year-old boy : more than war, the first experience of love; more than poverty and the humiliation of relatives, his peers and what they experienced together. He maintained a critical and distanced relation to his father and his mother, as is common at that age; he did not, however, hide the fact that he preferred his father over his mother. In the second part of The Newcomers, Kovacˇicˇ portrays many important segments from his life. Among the characteristic themes and motifs are: his father, mother and other members of his family, events from the life of the invalid niece Gisela; memories of his experiences on the school bench; his memory of the murder of the priest Dr Lambert Ehrlich; dalliances between Slovenian girls and Italian soldiers; the experience of his first love for a certain Tatjana; memory of a theft committed in youth, and his enthusiasm for drawing and reading; poverty in the family and searching for a way out; descriptions of soldiers and events of the war ; and memories of his father’s sickness and death. In the autobiographical novel it cannot be overlooked that the growing “Bubi” (or “boy,” as Kovacˇicˇ was called in youth) was hampered by a negative selfimage. This self-image was influenced by the difficulties he had at school, though through no fault of his own. This was partly on account of his poor health, and partly as a result of having emigrated from Switzerland and his resulting difficulties with the Slovenian language. It was due to these factors that he, as a growing boy, underestimated his intellectual capabilities. He was not apathetic about his poor school results, and neither did he seek excuses for them. On the contrary, he suffered so much on account of them that he even thought of suicide. After having spent two years in hospital and at a sanatorium in Switzerland, he finished first grade in Basel. However, he had to repeat it in Cegelnica, and he failed third grade. Because he barely passed school in the village of Graben, he could not contemplate any promising future; only the vocational school in Prule, where he could devote himself to becoming a salesperson or learning a trade, was deemed appropriate for him. The writer well recalls how poorly he felt at the time: Whenever I reflected on my life, I felt ill… Two years of the hospital and a sanatorium in Switzerland because of my lungs, first grade in Basel, which I had to repeat in Cegelnica, third grade, which I failed… “Der Bubi hat überhaupt kein Köpfchen oder keine Ambition für das Studium oder eine höhere Laufbahn,”12 said mother. I was an unhappy Pinocchio. It would have been best if I had not even existed in this world… if I had killed myself, like that fourteen-year-old Gregor from Slovenj Gradec; it was written in the newspaper that he hanged himself in one of the abandoned shepherd’s huts on account 12 English translation: “The boy has no head or ambition for study or for any higher goal in life.”

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of the poor grades he had received in school and that he dared not show his father. If I had dared to do something like that to myself! (Kovacˇicˇ 1984: 241)

The construction of Kovacˇicˇ’s work The Newcomers is a “double-layered narrative,” in which the “experiencing and the narrative self are contrapuntally interwoven, while the focal point is on the narrating subject, who represents also the identification of the narrative and its autobiographical message” (Bernik 1988: 147). Kovacˇicˇ’s autobiography is enriched by a subjective view of events and people and the painful contrast between the apparently unlimited possibilities of the world at large and the writer’s hidden internal anguish at the suffering endured by the members of his family, who were victims of a hidden and pervasive nationalism. The particularity of this book lies primarily in the exact and detailed descriptions of events and the experiencing of the consequences these events had on him, his family, and his surroundings. The writer focuses on the significance of both ethnic and ethical alienation. He remembers many seemingly trifling, and yet nevertheless significant, events. Kovacˇicˇ was possessed of an exceptional ability to feel as he recognized the nature of interpersonal relations and experiences in difficult times. His style is realistic and manifests the author’s great sensitivity for the reality of the concrete, objective and intimate world. A mosaic of fragments, his autobiography is at the same time an organic portrait of a real life in trying times and circumstances.

5. Presentation of Values in Literature and in Religious Traditions

Reflecting on foundational values gives rise to an important means of restoring a natural balance between the personal and the social because it takes into account the human instinct for harmony, longing for happiness and perfection, as well as the predisposition to the morality common to all. The rational faculty of the human soul, along with issues concerning foundational values, is a common concern to all individuals and all cultures, and it is crucial to daily life and all sciences. It is clear from the outset that only an inter-disciplinary approach can properly and efficiently deal with the issue of values. In a broader sense, both natural and humanistic sciences must be considered, and within the humanities the human being as a totality must be taken into account. This utterly crucial principle is, by nature, best realised in the world of sacred and secular literature, because literary creation is an organic interaction between reason and feeling. Close reading of literary texts and the exposition of their nature rises above artificial rules and ideas on morality and helps the reader to feel free from civilisation, to re-enact his or her personal experiences, and to regain wholeness, harmony, and unity with the self and with the entire human community. Scholarly treatments of literature inevitably include interest in all humanistic sciences, including history, psychology, philosophy, theology, aesthetics, and so on. The basic presuppositions of such a critical project are contained in the plurality of subject matters in literature. Recognition of this fact allows for total openness with regard to comparative methodology. Literary works of all kinds and modes are composed as organic unities, which results in the unifying nature of literary creation. Literary works show the human capacity for morality and how issues of values and of morality were deeply imbued in the mind and heart of poets and writers, as well as how they succeeded in expressing the reality of the world and of human life as a single complex whole. From this principle follows the recognition that the unifying cognitive and emotional experience of reality and truth as expressed in literature is by nature trans-cultural, bearing witness to the fact that, in spite of cultural differences, all people think in the same way and

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act in accordance with an inner necessity. Here, memory and consequently history plays an important role. The fundamental themes of literature reflect those of everyday experience: longing for happiness, love, compassion, suffering, empathy, envy, hatred, violence, etc. This common existential ground is the most realistic basis for restoring a natural balance in intercultural and interreligious dialogue. The important goal of cross-cultural comparative research and communication can be achieved through the present endeavours and the efforts of successive generations inspired by the common experience of our existence. The search for unifying elements of shared humanity encompasses the need to consider the most important literary critics from antiquity to modern times. Many influential literary critics have reflected on how to present in literature that which is unspeakable and beyond the possibility of adequate representation. An historical discourse on foundational values within the realm of theories of art in general and of literature in particular leads to recognition of the “compare and contrast” methodology as the most adequate approach in dealing with literature. For most art critics the humanisation of mankind was not an abstract intellectual ideal but an intuitive introspective examination of a personal state of mind and spirit and an active involvement in social life and values. The following leading thinkers invite close readings on both intellectual and poetic bases: Plato (c. 429 – 347 BC), Aristotle (384 – 322 BC), Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC–c. 50 CE), Augustine (354 – 430), Maimonides (1135 – 1204), Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805), FranÅois-Ren¦ de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848), John Keats (1795 – 1821), Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873 – 1934), Paul Val¦ry (1871 – 1945), and some others. The method of close reading of literary works in their structural wholeness within the tradition of a poet, writer and literary critic entails an often explicit, or sometimes more implicit, agreement that foundational values are existential and ontological in nature rather than culturally conditioned and determined. Therefore, any literary presentation of values means mingling doubts and certainties, and yet, the striving for love, happiness, harmonious unity and perfection overcomes many doubts; it implies interaction between cognitive and sentimental faculties, predisposition to morality and a unifying mode of contemplation which is common to all humans; the guiding rule is an integrated mode of vision which comprises both the perceptual and the subjective or spiritual realms of the human; important is the distinction between experiencing the self and experiencing the phenomena of the world of appearances, for synthetic aesthetic imagination reaches beyond ordinary human experience; the poetic spirit feeds on the flame of the inner necessity of deep-seated instincts and emotions, and therefore abstract philosophical concepts and systems are not

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adequate for understanding and interpreting literature; the interaction of cognitive and sentimental faculties points to the necessity of “total interpretation” for considering semiotic, rhetorical, stylistic and other properties of literary structures in their organic whole. In this connection mention may be made of biblical literary presentations personifying Wisdom, Logos and Love with the result that biblical ontological assumptions imply the convergence of inner unity and intertwined foundational values – such as generosity, beauty, friendship, faith, faithfulness, goodness, righteousness and justice, loyalty, love, peace, truth and wisdom. Masterful and versatile biblical literature reflects a striving for unity and repose by avoiding uniformity through the most sublime forms of mystery. Biblical poems and narratives could not deal in abstractions; their exquisite sense of both natural beauty and purity of heart inspired in them so many characters, peculiarities of human emotion and of the human spirit, and universal themes that these creations attracted many poets and writers. These creators, in turn, transmitted them to new generations, also transforming them in new historical and social situations. This was the path to “reception” of the Bible in culture and literature.

5.1

Literature as a Distinct Mode of Thought and Foundational Values

Since antiquity, values representing the foundation of both individual and communal human life have been expressed in different ways in Greek and JudeoChristian cultures. Whereas the sources dealing with values in ancient Greece belong to various genres, from literary modes of expression to philosophical discourses, the ancient Hebrew sources are predominantly literary in nature. In the Greek view of foundational values the cognitive element predominates; in the Hebrew view – as attested to in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible – values have an ontological and existential foundation and designate the whole field of religious and moral life in accordance with God’s will. Greek philosophers speak of values as having been established by means of demonstration and proper thinking. In contrast, biblical standards of personal, moral and transcendental values are not found in philosophical, sociological, political or ethical principles, but in God’s manner of dealing with humans and in how they approach God and their fellow man in concrete historical and life situations. One of the most conspicuous consequences of biblical ontological and existential values foundations is the fact that all higher spiritual values – such as generosity, beauty, friendship, faith, faithfulness, goodness, righteousness and justice, loyalty, love, peace, truth and wisdom – come together and blend into one

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another. They have a shared, common meaning, regardless of how much they may differ in particular aspects. Values are not only expressions of cognition but also emotionalised truths that allow for the greatest positive results for the individual, a collective, or society as a whole. Presentation of values in literature reflects two contrasting origins of literary creation: the human mind, including feelings, and the tradition of cultures and religions. The first speaks for independence and artistic integrity of literary works, while the second confronts us with sometimes difficult cultural differences, especially linguistic differences and those that relate to values. Consequently, physical, biological, neurophysiological, and cultural factors at work in human life imply challenges regarding “what the belief systems are beliefs about” (Lloyd 2009: 174). This question corroborates the awareness of a contrasting frame for our knowledge and life; there are certain biological universals but also evident cultural diversities. The essence of the challenge is whether influence of culture, language, and ideology determines our thinking and feeling. If so, does it add something to our knowledge and feelings and constrain us to revised basic values, or does it just comply with deep-seated ontological assumptions? Historically speaking, struggling to solve this dilemma has inspired some poets, writers, literary critics and philosophers to accept and defend absolute values from tradition, while others have been inspired to seek their own synthesis of physical and spiritual existence. Truth is central to foundational values. It is, however, especially complex because the word “truth” has a very large range of meanings. Research into values is concerned with the fundamental structure of thought in two main ways of perceiving and interpreting: 1) a literary aesthetic way that asserts facts; 2) intellectual modes of thought and argument in terms of disputation on the character of rules in nature, social order and personal life. Biblical historical narratives, parables, poetry, prayer, proverbial wisdom, allegories, prophetic messages, etc. are not composed as general propositions expressing arguments concerning truth or falsity ; rather, they seem to make constant and serious truth claims, meaning that literary forms transcend linguistic and literary modes of expression. It is this truth claim that lends them their solemn tone. Biblical sources are the collective product of an oral, collaborative tradition encompassing various styles, points of view and messages. Biblical writers give expression to a subject through the medium of language, metaphors and symbols; in these compositions, too, the normal literary processes of selection, emphasis, phrasing and organisation are at work. Very often they express more than one subject from more than one perspective. As carefully structured literary compositions, biblical texts are encumbered by the question of whether they are to be believed as factual records. More important than factuality, however, is whether the characters are portrayed with psychological realism. Biblical writers wanted

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to erase their individuality, even though they often speak from profound personal feelings, from a personal crisis. The Bible grew to its final canonical form through an organic process of intrabiblical interpretation as individual texts were composed, compiled, shaped, added and edited. This holds true also for the growth of the New Testament on the religious and literary bases of the Old Testament. Old Testament texts foreshadow the revelation, the substance of truth in the person of Jesus. Before Jesus were types of this truth. Jesus represents an extreme paradox because he is not the substance of truth only in the light of the glory of resurrection but also in the conditions of his physical life of limitations and passion. Herein lies the basis for the ontological and existential significance of Jesus as the supreme truth, as Neusner and Chilton explain, What shows the truth about Jesus in Hebrews and in the Gospels is not any ordered sequence of consequential events, but the revelation of divine purpose and salvation within human affairs. Typology, that is, involves a view of past events which sees them as consequential, but not as essentially sequential. Time is not a vital consideration, because what determines one’s faith is atemporal: the types of Israel, Jesus in the flesh, and the eternal Christ. (Neusner and Chilton 1997: 156)

Translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, Greek, Latin and other languages became the most important international and intercultural means of transmission of values on cognitive and ontological-existential levels. The Bible is not a document of systematic Jewish doctrines but a literary means of presenting reality and truths on all levels. Consequently, the translation of foundational concepts expressing foundational values of Judeo-Christian civilisation is not unified but varied. Hebrew concepts expressing higher spiritual values are not always translated by the same word in the vernacular. The ontological aspect of reality and truth in the Bible induced translators of the Hebrew Bible to combine the cognitive and literary-aesthetic aspects of presentation of reality and truth. The multiplicity of these renditions is an indication of the complexity of the reality to which they refer. The complexity of spiritual values and of the truth of all possible aspects explains why in translations of the Hebrew Bible the word “truth” is used for the noun ’em¦t and several other Hebrew words. On the other hand, the noun ’em¦t is, depending on the context, translated and interpreted with the words “steadiness” “unchangeableness,” “stability,” “soundness,”, “faithfulness,” “constancy,” “truth,” “loyalty,” or “justice.” The oldest translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Greek Septuagint, narrowed down the meaning of the word considerably by rendering it in four-fifths of all passages as al¦theia and congeners meaning “truth,” and twelve times by dikaiosy´ne or “righteousness.” The word “truth” normally occurs in conjunction with another word or words, especially in the stylistic devices of parallelismus membrorum. Such

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collocations help to establish the semantic “profile” of the words concerned. Fundamental Hebrew concepts, as well as a wealth of Hebrew phrases, were transferred first from Hebrew into Greek and Latin, and then from Greek and Latin into modern languages. The crucial dilemma of translators into Greek and Latin pertained to the following question: at what point should they forgo the standard equation by replacing it with semantically, but not formally, suitable substitutes? We find that the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate display in this respect an extreme variability that is evident first of all in lexical variety. A wellknown stylistic tendency to be observed in the Septuagint and in the Vulgate is the habit of translating the same Hebrew word by different Greek or Latin equivalents. The culture of ancient Greece was almost contemporary to the rise of the Hebrew Bible, though its culture was generally much more philosophical than literary in nature. The primacy of philosophy is evident from Plato’s view that “there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic X, 607b). This attitude seems strange, because Plato’s style (c. 429 – 347 BC) manifests, from his earliest works to his final works, the power, beauty and flexibility of Greek prose. His thought is a combination of artistic and philosophic excellence, one often deeply tinged with poetry and packed with metaphors. In a dialogue of Plato we are liable to find metaphysics and ethics, psychology and politics, simultaneously present. Nevertheless, Plato developed an extensive critical approach to art in general and especially to poetry. The point of departure of his philosophy is his theory of eternal “Forms” or “Ideas,” which in his view are real, independent of all else, unchanging, divine. Since they are not visible, they are grasped through thought and not through the senses. The visual world was an imitation of the ideal forms, which alone were real. Consequently, art was no more than an imitation of an imitation; it was of value only insofar as it directed the soul towards the truth, beauty, or the highest Good. The “form” of the Good has a unique status among them, and yet it is not identical with God. The things we see remind us of the “forms” they imitate. In Symposium, Plato develops his view on the nature of eros, true beauty, and a life of contemplation. The love of a beautiful person can lead us to the love of wisdom and of the “form” of beauty itself. It is, thus, evident that knowledge is by nature practical and commanding. Plato’s literary criticism was, despite remaining basically rationalistic, resolutely ethical. His interest in art was not motivated by its intrinsic and formal qualities but by his concern of its effects on social attitudes. In Phaedrus, Ion, and especially in Books II, III, and X of the Republic Plato developed his vision of the nature of rightful conduct and the ideal political state. The object of the moral quest is no longer a particular ethical Form but the Form of the Good as such. For Plato any attempt at presenting universal truths by

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means of imitation of changing and particular facts in the world was problematic. Though Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) began his philosophical path in the Athenian Academy of Plato (367), he developed an organic and concrete critical investigation of literature that is opposed to the theoretical and abstract social and ethical approach inherent in Platonic extrinsic and ideal values. Unlike Plato, Aristotle did not assert that the separation of Ideas sufficed to account for the facts of change and motion. His thinking was buttressed by his solid common sense, which makes him avoid any sort of extremes. In his theory of knowledge he is neither a rationalist nor an empiricist; he recognizes the roles played both by the senses and by the intellect. It is by virtue of his good judgement that he rarely writes anything one would regard as obviously untrue. Sensation, for him, is of particulars, and knowledge is of universals; but sensation is of particulars as characterized by universals, and knowledge is of universals as exemplified in particulars. This view is clearly expressed in Aristotle’s description of the difference between poetry and history in Chapter 9 of his Poetics (1451b). The assertion that poetry “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history” exhibits a very profound understanding of poetry’s essence, albeit one that is limited to antiquity’s chronological and “factographic” concept of history. Until at least the second century CE we find in Judaism and Christianity nothing comparable to Greek philosophical discourse – no analytical inquiry that includes objection and counter-argument. Given the literary nature of the Bible, biblical texts were studied and interpreted as literary compositions expressing various life situations, and not as general propositions expressing arguments. The writing of the New Testament is an imitation of the Old Testament with the experiencing of Jesus. Other major works of imitation of the Old Testament include the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Hebrew Scriptures, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The New Testament soon became a source of imitation of Scriptural modes of thought and expression. In later periods intellectuals saw the origins of the cultural system as deriving from three ancient peoples: the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans. The emergence of cultures between the eighth century BCE and the first century CE was arguably unsurpassable in that it saw a cultural style that encompassed religion, morality, art, and law. The response to encountering ancient models was one of imitation, culminating in the imitation of heroes, the saints and especially of Christ, since these individuals embody heroic, and sometimes perfect, virtue. Writers, philosophers and theologians claimed that new literature and new models of social order should be based on the ancient canon. New books had to echo and imitate stories, characters, or ideas that were familiar from the ideal truth codified in the canonical corpus. The Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–c. 50 CE) was influential in

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interweaving Greek and Jewish elements in his theological ideas and in developing the allegorical interpretation of Scriptures – a method practised in the Palestinian Rabbinical schools and later widely used among the Church Fathers. Some Church Fathers were brilliant interpreters of literary features of the Bible, especially St. Jerome (345 – 419/20) and Augustine (354 – 430). But in parallel with the literary way of dealing with the Bible and with the growth of sacred and secular literature on biblical models in Judaism, Christianity and later in Islam, many Judaic sages, Christian theologians and, later, Islamic scholars developed their own Greek philosophical modes of confronting conflict and devising arguments to show that one is right, the other wrong. As Neusner and Chilton state, That is why the theology of Christianity and the norm-setting law of Judaism alike (and, as a matter of fact, of Islam) have been to begin with conducted in accord with the rules of rationality set forth by Greek philosophy. Conflict between principles is recognized, reasoned argument in behalf of the one and against the other is set forth, decisions are reached within the concordant conviction that opposites conflict, and conflict must be resolved through reasoned argument, relevant evidence, and rational inquiry. (Neusner and Chilton 1997: xii)

In this context the paradigmatic thinking in Augustine is all the more important. His education was almost entirely a literary one, with great emphasis placed on rhetoric. His initial interest was in imitating the great literary masterpieces of the past. In his time the Neo-Platonist thinkers inspired pagans and Christians alike, and these thinkers prepared his path to Christianity. For Augustine, faith or belief was an act of rational thinking and was therefore to be realised by means of understanding. The dominant factor in Augustine’s mind was the belief in divine providence. This providence was visible in the mathematical order and coherence of the world, a fact that pointed to the existence of the perfect and necessary Being, the foundation of all existence. Plotinus provided Augustine with a model and a vocabulary for a mystical quest directed towards the union of the soul with God in a beatific vision. The most relevant of Augustine’s reflections on intuitive grasping of foundational values, grounded in truth, are sublimely expressed in his works Confessions (X, viii-xxiii), On Free Choice of the Will (II, 6, 8 – 15) and City of God. In accordance with biblical beliefs Augustine defended the Christian faith in the resurrection of the flesh and insisted, in opposition to Platonic thought, that no division between soul and flesh could be made (City of God XXII, 12). Human life resides in the interplay of soul and flesh which determines the existence of every person; therefore the eschatological reality cannot change this structure of human existence: “The flesh shall then be spiritual, and subject to the spirit, but still flesh, not spirit, as the spirit itself, when subject to the flesh, was fleshly, but still spirit and not flesh” (City of God XXII, 21). However, Augustine argued that

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the ability to make true judgements can never enter the mind externally. Human perception of reality and truth is never more than an intuitive judgement of reality that man already knows, albeit without being aware of it. So it is that propositions of mathematics and the appreciation of moral values are not constructions of the individual mind but discoveries of realities that already exist in the realm of the ordered structure of the cosmos, where the degrees of being are at the same time degrees of value. The intuitive judgement of reality manifests itself especially intensively in memory. Augustine praises the power and sublimity of memory : This power of memory is great, very great my God. It is a vast and infinite profundity. Who has plumbed its bottom? This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. […] I could see inwardly with dimensions just as great as if I were actually looking at them outside my mind. Yet when I was seeing them, I was not absorbing them in the act of seeing with my eyes. Nor are the actual objects present to me, but only their images. And I know by which bodily sense a thing became imprinted on my mind. (Confessions X, viii)

The one universal desire of humanity is happiness as the ultimate end, on which the heart is set. In this way Augustine widened the scope of truth considerably beyond the necessary truths of mathematics and logic. He accepts the basic assumption of the ancient ethical theory that moral judgements and judgements of fundamental kinds of values also share the character of truth. Morality itself belonged to its substance more than the discussion and analysis of moral concepts and judgements. Augustine argues, If I put the question to anyone whether he prefers to find joy in the truth or in falsehood, he does not hesitate to say that he prefers the truth, just as he does not hesitate to say he wants to be happy. The happy life is joy based on the truth. This is joy grounded in you, O God, who are the truth ‘my illumination the salvation of my face, my God’ (Ps. 26:1; 41:12). This happy life everyone desires; joy in the truth everyone wants. I have met with many people who wished to deceive, none who wished to be deceived. How then did they know about this happy life unless in the same way that they knew about the truth? They love the truth because they have no wish to be deceived, and when they love the happy life (which is none other than joy grounded in truth) they are unquestionably loving the truth. And they would have no love for it unless there were some knowledge of it in their memory. (Confessions X, xxiii)

Man’s personal sense experience is made real only after it has been recognized in some way by the mind. Behind the world’s order stands its author and sovereign ruler, God. All things testify to His presence; the world is full of his “traces” (vestigia). The human mind participates in the Word of God as God’s interior presence to the mind, teaching it from within about moral and other values, about all truths of reason, about ourselves, and about God. God is always intimately present to the mind, whether this presence is acknowledged or not. This

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underlying divine presence explains why amor is the highest of all values, for amor impels humans to action. In accordance with his view on free will Augustine differentiates between two kinds of love: charity (caritas) and cupidity (cupiditas). The basic distinction is between upright, well-ordered, and Godcentred love and perverse, disordered, and self-centred love. The philosophers of the Middle Ages sought a way to combine cognitive and literary means of presenting reality and truth. In the context of predominantly allegorical interpretation of the Bible, Maimonides (1135 – 1204) tried to address this challenge in his attempt to solve the contradictions between the literal and spiritual meaning of biblical texts. His principal treatise The Guide for the Perplexed (1190) is an attempt to reconcile faith with philosophical reason, to reconcile Judaism with a newly recovered Aristotelianism, and he insists on the need for allegorical interpretation of the Torah. He aims to help those intellectuals who were firm in their religious beliefs and practices, but were perplexed by the literal meaning of biblical anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms and obscure biblical parables. Maimonides demonstrates that in addition to their literal meaning biblical texts have a spiritual meaning that applies to God. His work had a profound influence on the Christian thought of the Middle Ages, especially on Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274). Aquinas, however, goes further in searching for a synthesis of faith and reason, of Platonism and Aristotelianism, of Hellenistic and Christian thought. In relation to biblical texts, Aquinas wrestles with the question of whether language and poetic metaphors can guarantee stable references and access to truth and reality. He insists that all interpretations of biblical texts must proceed solely from the literal sense, but instead of defending an allegorical sense he endorses the possibility that the Bible contains multiple meanings (Summa Theologica I, q. 1, a. 9 – 10; Leitch et al. 2010: 181 – 184). Aquinas’ insistence on literal over allegorical sense and on multiplicity and complexity of meaning strongly influenced later theorists of the polysemous nature of poetic language, among others Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321). Among later theorists mention may be made especially of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805), FranÅois-Ren¦ de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848), John Keats (1795 – 1821), Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), and Paul Val¦ry (1871 – 1945), because they provide the key to modern methodological assessments of literature. Goethe is important for his telling explication of “the inner sense” (der innere Sinn) and of “the inner truth” (die innere Wahrheit) in his work in dialogue form On Truth and Probability in Works of Art. Goethe was not interested in a systematic theory of literature; rather, all his works manifest his particular sense of design and of integrating literary elements within the whole structure of literary works. He sees the only touchstone of great art in true “feeling.” The artist who can create the “inner form” that bears such

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feeling is a genius. His deliberations on symbol and allegory provide a theoretical basis for his promotion of “feeling” and they had a direct influence on the subsequent history of literary criticism and theory. Goethe privileges symbols as having highest poetic power and explains the distinction between “symbol” and “allegory” most clearly in number Maxim 751: It makes all the difference whether the poet seeks the particular for the universal or sees the universal in the particular. Out of the former mode arises allegory, where the particular serves only as an instance, an example of the universal; the latter, however, is really the nature of poetry : it speaks forth a particular, without thinking of the universal or pointing to it. (Goethe 1998, Werke 12: 471)

The German dramatist and poet Friedrich Schiller is a major representative of German classicism. His aesthetic essays make reference to Kant’s Critique of Judgement, in which Kant considers judgement of taste to be essentially subjective, unlike the objectivity of cognitive and ethical judgements. Schiller treats the aesthetic impulse as an indispensable condition of human nature and assumes an objective concept of beauty. In his first aesthetic essay, “On Grace and Dignity” (1793), Schiller argues that beauty is a function of the harmony of the physical and moral sense, of duty and inclination. Inner harmony culminates in “the beautiful soul.” In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794 – 1795) Schiller argues that beauty must precede freedom and he believes that humankind can, through aesthetic experience, reconcile the antagonism between sense and intellect, nature and reason, and progress from the physical through the aesthetic to the moral. His celebrated essay on the distinction between two types of poetic creativity, “On Nave and Sentimental Poetry” (1795), marks a turning point in poetics and genre theory with its position on the dispute over the superiority of ancient or modern poetry. Schiller ascribes to the writers of antiquity a nave and spontaneous expression of inner harmony and unity with nature that is devoid of poetic self-consciousness. In modern poetry, on the other hand, he recognizes a sentimental, self-reflective, and psychologically grounded outlook. The nave in poetry is merged with an objective style that imitates reality, whereas the sentimental is fused with a subjective style that aspires to present the ideal in a distinctly psychological typology of literature. The two radically opposed ways of viewing the world reflect a conflict in human nature. The ideal of beautiful humanity is realised through a fusion of nave and sentimental characters. Neither of these opposing world views can claim objective validity. In Part I Schiller summarises his explanation, writing: As long as man consists of pure, not of course of crude, nature, then he gives the impression of an undivided sensual unit and of a harmonious whole. The senses and the reason, the receptive and the spontaneous capacity, have not yet separated in their function, much less are they in opposition to each other. His emotions are not the

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formless play of accident, his thoughts are not the meaningless play of the imagination; the former proceed from the law of necessity, the latter from reality. If man has entered into a state of culture and if art has placed her hand on him, then that sensual harmony has been removed from him and he can only express himself as a moral unit, i. e., as someone striving for unity. The correspondence between his feeling and his thinking which existed in reality in the first state, now only exists as an ideal; it is no longer in him but outside of him, as an idea which must first be realised, no longer as a fact of his life. If one now applies the concept of poetry, which means nothing else than to give humanity its most complete expression possible, to both of these states, then in the state of natural simplicity, where man still functions together with all his powers as a harmonious unit, where the whole of his nature expresses itself completely in reality, the result is that the most complete possible imitation of the real must constitute the poet – that, on the other hand, here in the state of culture where that harmonious cooperation of his whole nature is merely an idea, it is the elevation of reality to the ideal or, what comes to the same thing, the representation of the ideal which must make the poet. And these are the two sole possible ways in which the poetic spirit can ever express itself. They are, as one can see, extremely different from each other, but there is a higher concept which subsumes both of them and it should not surprise us when this concept coincides with the idea of humanity. (Schiller 1981: 39 – 40)

In his essay “On the Sublime” (1795 or 1801) Schiller advises us to take the unfathomability of nature as a principle of explanation. He maintains that freedom is the most essential human quality and that it enables humans to transcend their finite experience in their striving to invent frames of knowledge that are compatible with the limitations of the world. In terms of the Bible and literature inspired by biblical themes and modes of expression the French Romantic writer FranÅois-Ren¦ de Chateaubriand (1768 – 1848) is of greater interest, especially his work G¦nie du christianisme, ou beaut¦s de la religion chr¦tienne (The Genius of Christianity ; 1802). The work aims to extol traditional religious culture by highlighting its aesthetic perfection. In response to the conflict between religion and the rationalism of his time Chateaubriand sought to transfer the debate from the plane of reason to that of feeling, arguing that the Christian faith, which is based on the ideals of charity and friendship, was the main source for art and civilisation in Europe. To avoid abstract arguments he focuses on poetic reasoning and on sentiment as the domain of literature. The main emphasis is on the importance of passions and variety of styles in literature. Chateaubriand finds beauty in all fields of Christian religion and culture, also in the grandeur of the dogmatic system, but especially in its unsurpassed literature – a literature that begins with the Bible and continues to be written up to the present. A similar awareness of presentation of real life in its fullness inspired also the English poet John Keats’ vivid imagery and great appeal to the senses. Both his poetry and his profound series of letters testify to Keats’ deep emotional commitment to the meaning of literature. The focus of his introspection and of his intense creative

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activity was on the relationship between beauty and truth, fact and fiction, art and life, poetry and history. He expresses his poetic credo in a simple statement in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819): “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In contrast to John Keats, Leo Tolstoy argued that art cannot be the search for beauty, because beauty is a selfish, subjective pleasure and because there is no common standard for beauty. Tolstoy sees art’s proper role in transferring or communicating moral feelings and emotions. In recent times, Tolstoy’s belief in the simple religious virtues and the sound artistic taste of the common people has, with reason, been questioned. The conflict of moral values even within religious traditions, the criteria of moral evaluation, the concept of goodness and general problems about moral philosophy were, in Tolstoy’s view, not subjects for genuine philosophical discussion or criticism. With Augustine, the human being in historical experience was invented as the interplay of two forces – the material (carnal) and the spiritual – that determine the existence of every person and every society. Some inferences can be verified, whereas others cannot. Personal and global history attest to both outward-working and inward-working power and are therefore dedicated to struggle; humankind is continually confronted with linguistic ambiguity.

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Methodological Prospects Spanning Ancient and Modern Views

An historical overview of literary criticism makes it clear that dealing with literature solely in its structural modes of expression by means of rationalist and systematic philosophical method does not suffice. In this regard we are well aware of Plato’s statement that “there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic X, 607b). Plato’s view is a logical consequence of his theory of transcendental Forms or Ideas that cannot be grasped by any type of imitation from the world of appearances. Plato’s perception of poetry is very limited, because it is reduced to various modes of imitation of the world’s external reality. All the more important for methodological issues concerning interpretation of artworks, including literature, are Friedrich Schiller’s views. The indispensable conditions of extrinsic reality and incomprehensible human nature gave Schiller the impulse to pen his celebrated essay on “Nave and Sentimental Poetry,” in which he explains the Querelle des anciens et des modernes (about the superiority of ancient or modern poetry) on the basis of the existence and equal validity of different modes of perception and two distinct and incompatible modes of writing: the nave and the sentimental. The nave

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mode of writing is predominant in antiquity but is not restricted to that era. The sentimental mode of expression, meanwhile, is predominant in modern times but there is also nave writing. Schiller presents himself as a sentimental poet and vindicates his own viewpoint in relation to three possible genres: the satiric, the elegiac, or the idyllic. In his essay “On the Sublime” Schiller points to the differing roles the philosopher on the one hand and that of a poet on the other. He argues that the philosopher is a caricature in comparison with the poet, for the philosopher seeks only to make explicit and justify what he already believes, while the poet seeks nature and life. In her seminal studies The Logic of Fiction (1957) and Truth and Aesthetic Truth (Wahrheit und ästhetische Wahrheit, 1979), Käte Hamburger (1896 – 1992) comes to the same conclusion. She compares statements by philosophers, poets and writers (such as Goethe), and lays bare an important methodological principle – namely that the concept of truth must be understood broadly. This is why she poses the question of whether philosophical definitions of truth are appropriate for definitions of “historical” or “religious” truth. Recently, Colin Falck raised the same question in the Preface to the first edition of his influential study Myth, Truth and Literature: “Philosophers, when they have concerned themselves with literature at all, have – with certain exceptions to whom I am overwhelmingly indebted – usually concerned themselves only with very specific and rather spiritually undemanding aspects of it” (Falck 1995: xv). The conclusion of celebrated literary critics that philosophical discourse is not adequate for interpretation of literary texts signals justification, great possibilities – but also difficulties – in searching for the appropriate method. This does not, however, mean that philosophy is of no bearing for understanding the meaning of literature. On the contrary, philosophy testifies to a very wide range of engagement in everything from a literary approach to a clearly synthetic and systematic explanation. Suzanne Nash points to one of greatest and best known essays by Paul Val¦ry (1871 – 1945), “Po¦sie et pens¦e abstraite” (“Poetry and Abstract Thought,” 1939), in which he rightly acknowledges the indispensable role of abstract thinking in the creation and interpretation of poetry. Because the poet, in an act of intense observing and with the help of analogy, uses the totalizing power of the intellect to transform concrete impressions into abstract ensembles or figura, poetry is not opposed to but is more than abstract thought; it is “both body and mind, voice and image, presence and absence” (Groden 2005: 917). The history of literary criticism testifies to the great tendency of writers to explain literature in philosophical terms, and writers manifest their attempts to express a philosophy through literary forms. Neusner and Chilton address this issue indirectly :

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How did the earliest intellectuals of Christianity and Judaism shape and give voice and form to a tradition of articulated conflict and reasoned argument in the search for religious truth that was to be shared through reasoned argument with others? What we do not know is where the theologians and sages learned to think like philosophers; all we know is that they did. Ours is not an account of cultural history, origins and borrowing and influences and contracts. From the way in which people set forth their thought we work our way back to how they thought, why they presented their ideas in one way, rather than in another, and what rationality dictated for them the natural way of thinking. So we center our interest on the written evidence of processes of thought that have come to full exposure in completed writings. We focus especially on the solid evidence afforded in literary media of adaptation and reform. Precisely where and how do we identify in the foundation-writings of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism the new modes of articulated conflict on the one side, and the new media of reasoned argument on the other, which through Christianity and Judaism (and Islam) Greek philosophy and science would hand on to the West? (Neusner and Chilton 1997: xiii)

Our necessarily limited perception of reality and truth means that we cannot know why authors writing in particular historical circumstances express their ideas and values in one way rather than another. Awareness of the evident limits of philosophy concerning the inner thematic and literary structure of literary texts draws our attention to the real possibilities of literary interpretation. Great poets and writers everywhere have been critical of rationalist and empiricist attempts to reduce truth to reason or fact. Literature’s rights begin with the natural relationship between literature and life in its full reality, which is more real, more intense, and more transformative than the quotidian. Characteristic for literature are intensity, primacy and authenticity of imagination, presentation of real life in its inner tension, and sentiment. These properties are not accessible to philosophy in the proper sense. Any mode of literary criticism that lacks such an understanding of literary works is a direct consequence of a lack of understanding of the nature of literature. The first methodological principle seems to be awareness of the holiness of affection and imagination in literary texts. As John Keats puts it, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not” (Letters 1: 184). In his letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817, the poet mentions “Negative Capability,” explaining: “When a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason … with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration or rather obliterates all consideration” (Letters 1: 192). Consequently, Keats sees a loss of self in the intensity of imaginative experience and the impersonality of the artist in the act of creation. An awareness of wholeness when interpreting literary texts entails on the one

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hand the interplay of the roles of the human body and spirit, and on the other personal and historical experiences. Augustine’s ontological and anthropological grounding of his epistemology is of utmost importance to both aspects of wholeness. Influenced by Jewish biblical anthropology, Augustine insisted after his conversion to Christianity – and in contradiction to Platonic thought – that no division between soul and flesh could be made (City of God XXII, 21). Some passages of Augustine are especially relevant for assessing methods for interpreting realities presented by images and those realities that lie beyond: On this theme of notions where we do not draw images through our senses, but discern them inwardly not through images but as they really are and through the concepts themselves, we find that the process of learning is simply this: by thinking we as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neglected. (Confessions X, xi (18): 189)

Augustine maintains a perfect balance in articulating the power of intuition and the role that signs and language in general have in the processing of knowledge. Signs do not of themselves provide knowledge but represent an occasion for remembering what one already knows. The ontological and existential way of perceiving reality and truth provides a proper foundation for recognizing the significance of oneself, of the world, of historical events, and of the social order. Human memory is an inner act of knowledge that unites analytical and intuitivesynthetic processes of perception in a world that contains innumerable things and actions: “These actions are inward, in the vast hall of my memory. There sky, land, and sea are available to me together with all the sensations I have been able to experience in them, except for those which I have forgotten” (Confessions X, viii (14): 186). The power of memory self-consciously unites knowledge of the meaning of historical events within time: If future and past events exist, I want to know where they are. If I have not the strength to discover the answer, at least I know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if there also they are future, they will not yet be there. If there also they are past, they are no longer there. Therefore, wherever they are, whatever they are, they do not exist except in the present. When a true narrative of the past is related, the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which the fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses. Thus my boyhood, which is no longer, lies in past time which is no longer. But when I am recollecting and telling my story, I am looking on its image in present time, sine it is still in my memory. (Confessions XI, xviii (23): 233 – 234)

In reference to the first biblical account of creation (Gen 1:1 – 21) Augustine argues:

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It does not mention a day as the time when you did this. My provisional interpretation of that is that “heaven” means the “heaven of heaven”, the intellectual, non-physical heaven where the intelligence’s knowing is a matter of simultaneity–not in part, not in an enigma, not through a mirror, but complete, in total openness, “face to face.” (Confessions XII, xiii (16): 253)

Augustine’s yearning to have a complete knowledge of reality and truth, and to know them in “total openness” without the mediation of external facts and of language, is reflective of man’s critical consciousness. In his work On Christian Doctrine Augustine emphasises the fact that humankind is continually confronted with linguistic ambiguity – and this ambiguity arises from the nature of natural and conventional signs that point towards something beyond the individual and thus demand interpretation. Any interpretation is confronted with the binary categories of reality : words and things, the figural and the literal, the temporal and the eternal. Tolstoy, in his perception of life, history and art, similarly emphasises emotional need (especially yearning for happiness) as well as the search for meaning in life. His concept of art as communication of emotions determines also his concept of education and history. In his view, which is comprehensively presented in his novel War and Peace, the flow of history is not the result of large projects, plans and decisions of people in power. The flow of historical events is made up of an infinite number of individual actions, of the vast interplay of small, specific personal actions and emotions which take place almost or entirely unconsciously. Under the influence of his emotional need and his claim that art is the transfer or communication of feelings, Tolstoy created many great literary characters that testify to the foundational values of the human community. However, psychological analysis as a tool for understanding human behaviour can, in spite of its predominance, hardly inspire “complete” presentation of human life in “total openness.” As Donna Tussing Orwin states: Turgenev could justifiably accuse Tolstoy, and most especially Dostoevsky, of distorting the truth about the human situation just because they give too much weight to human subjectivity. As a result, they helped grow individualism beyond the point where it fits comfortably into the broader world of human beings and nature. Turgenev might say it was literature that put individuals on the psychiatrist’s couch complaining about the fact that nobody loves them. In fact, as all the great Russian writers demonstrate, nobody loves us as much as we do ourselves; this is an inescapable fact of life. But those egos have grown overweight partly because of their validation through psychology, which undermines traditional morality based on laws that limit free expression. (Orwin 2007: 180)

Any attempt to grasp life and values involves engaging oneself with life’s spiritual and ethical dimensions. In Myth, Truth and Literature Colin Falck expresses his criticism of the implications of the French-based literary-cultural theorizing of

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post-Saussurianism: “The essence of post-Saussurian theory is to reject, or to annihilate, the aesthetic or spiritual dimension of art – and of life – entirely, and thereby to reduce art or literature to something merely cultural or political” (Falck 1994: xiii). Falck also offers a way out of this situation: Our most urgent current need in literary theory seems to me to be for a “paradigmshift” which will enable us to restore the concepts of truth or of vision to our discussions of literature. The aim of the present book is to suggest something of the philosophical basis on which such a kind of paradigm-shift might begin to be made. Literature, the book’s argument proposes, in fact gives us our purest and most essential way of grasping reality or truth. Since this is also what religion has traditionally claimed to do, it follows that literature and literary criticism may need to be prepared to embrace, and to subsume, religion and theology if they are to discover or to rediscover their own spiritual meanings. In so far as religions themselves – and in particular Christianity – have increasingly tended to “internalize” or to “de-mythologize” themselves and to abandon their claims to be descriptive forms of truth about the world, a way is in fact conveniently open whereby our spiritual awareness can begin to be “re-mythologized” through the imaginative insights of poetry or literature. The only religious “scriptures” that can now be authentic for us may be the poetry or literature to which our own culture gives us access. (Falck 1994: xvi)

Falck develops his argument for a “paradigm-shift” mainly on the basis of views of literary critics, theorists and writers from the time of romanticism and concludes, “Both Goethe and Keats, disgusted by the vulgar superstitions of Christianity, looked forward to a time when art would replace religion altogether as our most original and essential source of spiritual nourishment” (Falck 1994: 3). Falck’s subjective understanding of the nature and the role of religion invites this question: What might the essence of a “complete” and “open” interpretation of literature be? Martin Buber coined the expression “Total Interpretation” in relation to “totality” in philosophy (Weiss 1984: 27). The presuppositions of total interpretation are: figurative language and textual unity ; consideration of the text as a unique construct; consideration of literature as an integral part of life; interdependence of imaginative literature and thought; literature as a distinct mode of thought; the interpreter’s unwillingness to separate thought, feeling, language, and image; understanding of all the formal elements which work together to create the unified work; and the interpreter’s unwillingness to declare any type of self-willed ideologies, because ideologies are in opposition to the very essence of literature. The impact that most Greco-Roman and biblical literatures have had, since antiquity, on Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other religions, as well as on secularized and atheistic communities, shows very clearly how cautious we must be when defining methodological perspectives for interpreting literary texts. The same holds true for dealing with modern literature.

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The “completeness” and “openness” of literary interpretation presupposes also a comparative approach that includes the techniques of close philological and stylistic analysis of literary texts in their historical cultural contexts. Erich Auerbach (1892 – 1957) underlined in his works, especially in Mimesis (1946), the interrelatedness of poetry, philology, history and philosophy. His greatest contribution to the theory of historical understanding and the conception of style itself is in his representation of reality in Western literature on the basis of figural understanding and changing patterns of literary reality at work in biblical narrative and Christian thought. His comparative analysis of ancient Greek, biblical and Christian literary texts from antiquity to modern times forms the basis of his concept of the separation of styles. Equally attentive to ancient Greek, biblical and patristic ways of understanding and presentation of reality and truth, Auerbach sees the synthesis of the humble (sermo humilis) and the sublime as the Christian response to classical literary style. In his examination of Dante he emphasises his closeness to the actual in the realm of the sublime: This is not surprising. For nowhere could one find so clear an instance of the antagonism of the two traditions – that of antiquity, with the principle of the separation of styles, and that of the Christian era, with its mingling of styles – as in Dante’s powerful temperament, which is conscious of both because its aspiration toward the tradition of antiquity does not imply for it the possibility of abandoning the other ; nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style. (Auerbach 1998: 185)

A comparative research principle must proceed by considering literary and cultural parallels which, though perhaps similar in one way, nevertheless remain dissimilar or distant in another. The study of parallels allows us to identify what is common in order to be more certain about what is distinct. One methodological principle requires paying attention to the interaction between expressions reflecting experience of reality and synthetic thinking, as expressed in individual and self-existing literary structures and in their place within a particular cultural tradition. When dealing with certain selected biblical texts it is necessary to cope with parallels in themes and literary structures within the literature of the ancient Near East in recognition of the distinction between a historical and a purely literary treatment. The literature of the Bible calls for a special type of morphological inquiry into the fundamental forms of literature and into the modes of composition of individual texts in the spirit of approaches used in comparative literature. Within the realm of biblical literature two texts frequently selected for literary analysis belong simultaneously to the realm of historical narrative and to poetry, and each of these texts raises the question of the understanding of reality and truth in dramatic challenges concerning values, merits and beliefs. The first category includes two shorter texts dealing with an experiential attitude towards the issue of temptation: the narrative of the Cre-

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ation and Fall (Gen 1 – 3), and the story of Joseph (Gen 37 – 50). The second category includes two different poetic books as wholes, one raising the problem of undeserved and extreme suffering, the other the delicacy of love in a vulgar environment: Job, and the Song of Songs. Within the narrative of the Creation and the Fall, the relationship between the literary modes of expression of the second Creation narrative (Gen 2) and the account of the Fall (Gen 3) are of special interest. Their semantic richness and wealth of allusions bring forth multiple metaphorical meanings for the narratives’ key themes, while discouraging simplistic attempts at interpretation (Gordon 2010: 11 – 33). The story of Joseph and his Brothers (Gen 38 – 50) is the longest and most homogeneous biographical and artistic creation in the Bible. Focussing on the conflict between character and circumstances in the figure of the young Joseph, the story is a manifestation of hidden spiritual power and of the victory of moral values in the face of changing events and fleeting opportunities. The Book of Job asks the most profound question of human existence, and yet the author was not trained in the methods of conceptual thinking and nor did he think in abstractions. The Book’s poetic eloquence, majesty and the profundity of speeches that refute uncritical acceptance of dogmatic positions on personal retribution, as well as the exploration of human existence in a situation of extreme distress make the Book of Job the finest of the wisdom literature. The literary medium of dialogue transforms a treatise into a living drama with swelling intensity. Job’s friends hold that there is a fundamental order to natural events, and they tend to impose an order on experience, while presenting conclusions drawn from superficial observation. The greater part of the Book is a collection of poems dealing with the meaning of life and religion. Joban poems deal with a single theme and they pay little heed to the common view that had been formed by sages of the ancient Near East and were evident in international folklore when it comes to conformity with order in the world and the value of merits. Job’s anxiety derives more from the deepest depths of his existence than from his observation of human misery. In the end it is clear that the sole purpose of the book is to show that Job’s maintained righteousness is for nought. With great stylistic versatility, the poet masterfully and expressively develops an abstract theme through a wealth of concrete illustrations. His versatility of style is coupled with an exquisite sense of the beauty of nature, and it is from nature that he derives his imagery. In the end he faced the dark riddle of existence and was taken beyond the wisdom of humans to attain a state of mind in which there is no desire to ask for the answer to the riddle. Any attempt to analyse the poetic structure of Song of Songs is faced from the outset with contrasting interpretations of its literary genre and purpose. But for our purpose the most important matter is that the theme of Song of Songs is

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youthful and passionate love, and the text as a whole is a poem in praise of love. The language of love provides us, then, with an emotional experience. Goethe’s distinction between allegory and symbol expresses the preference of symbolic to allegoric interpretation. The unavoidable question, however, is this: how does poetry embodying imagination and spiritual sensitivity differ from allegory? When love is the subject of allegory or poetry, words, symbols, images and figures mean something other than what they say. Since “love is strong as death” (8:6) and is a dynamic energy expressing itself in unselfish service, love poetry unlocks the human heart so that it can apprehend what it already knows. However, the immediate consequence is an extended sensitivity for grasping the significance of the soul’s relation to nature, indeed, to the whole world; and this acts as a symbol of beauty, happiness and harmony. So it is that the Song of Songs can be aptly interpreted only as a living, organic whole; as part of the biblical canon it reflects the total biblical conception of love. The Song of Songs is so impressionistic and elusive that no other book has ever been such a great source of inspiration for poets, writers and interpreters. Until early-modern times, the intellectual elite of the West saw the origins of the cultural system in terms of life’s essential institutions, patterns, and beliefs as deriving from three ancient peoples: the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans. The proper response upon encountering the ancient canon was imitation of ancient characters. To be relevant, a new book somehow had to echo and imitate certain stories, characters, or ideas manifesting the ideal truth codified in that body of works. Themes, characters and literary forms from antiquity have many echoes in later literature and often combine the Greco-Roman and biblical heritage. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, biblical literary tradition developed new forms, thus leaving its mark on many forms of literature: folklore, poetry, novels, stage plays, sermons, and learned commentaries. Writers often echo not only the biblical text but also those later traditions which they exploit for details, embellishments, and names. Leo Tolstoy defends these qualities of literature explicitly in Chapter 16 of his What is Art? In his view, all art has in itself the property of uniting people with God and with each other. However, all culturally determined forms of art unite “some people only in order to separate them still more sharply from other people and even to place them in an attitude of hostility toward other people” (Tolstoy 1995: 129 – 130). In contrast to many works of modern literature that divide people “by the exclusiveness of the feelings they convey, by the superfluity of specific details of time and place, and above all by the poverty of their content as compared with examples of universal ancient art,” Tolstoy finds the example of art that unites all people in biblical narrative of Joseph:

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That Joseph’s brothers, being jealous over their father, sold him into slavery ; that Potiphar’s wife wanted to seduce the youth; that the youth attained a high position, felt sorry for his brothers, for his favourite, Benjamin, and all the rest – these are all feelings accessible to a Russian peasant, to a Chinese, to an African, to a child, to an old man, to an educated man or an uneducated; and it is all written with such restraint, is so free of superfluous details, that the story can be transferred to any other milieu you like and still be as understandable and moving for everyone. […] In the narrative of Joseph there was no need to describe in detail, as is done nowadays, Joseph’s blood-stained clothes, Jacob’s dwelling and clothes, and the pose and attire of Potiphar’s wife when, straightening a bracelet on her left arm, she said, “come to me,” and so on, because the feeling contained in this story is so strong that all details except the most necessary ones – for instance, that Joseph went into the next room to weep – all details are superfluous and would only hinder the conveying of the feeling, and therefore this story is accessible to all people, it touches people of all nations, ranks, ages, has come down to our time, and will live on for thousands of years. But take the details from the best novels of our time and what will remain? (Tolstoy 1995: 133 – 134)

The attitude of generosity and love unites people not on the basis of neutral aesthetic effects but through the force of purity of heart, simplicity and therefore total vulnerability. This fact is very well recognized by John Rawls in his influential book A Theory of Justice, even though his theory is not expressly based on “moral ontologies” but belongs to the social contract tradition. Near the end of the book (Chapter 86) he speaks of “the good of the sense of justice” recognising that a person endowed with such sense “in the face of evil circumstances […] may decide to chance death rather than to act unjustly.” The unity of the self is best manifested in a total human identity that is created by love and a sense of justice: Friends and lovers take great chances to help each other, and members of families willingly do the same. Their being so disposed belongs to their attachments as much as any other inclination. Once we love we are vulnerable, there is no such thing as loving while being ready to consider whether to love, just like that. And the loves that man hurt the least are not the best loves. When we love we accept the dangers of injury and loss. In view of our general knowledge of the likely course of life, we do not think these risks so great as to cause us to cease loving. Should evils occur, they are the object of our aversion, and we resist those whose machinations bring them about. If we are loving we do not regret our love. Now if these things are true of love as the world is, or very often is, then a fortiori they would appear to be true of loves in a well-ordered society, and so of the sense of justice too. For in a society where others are just our loves expose us mainly to the accidents of nature and the contingency of circumstances. And similarly for the sentiment of justice which is connected to these affections. Taking as a bench mark the balance of reasons that leads us to affirm our loves as things are, it seems that we should be ready once we come of age to maintain our sense of justice in the more favourable conditions of a just society. (Rawls 1988: 573 – 574)

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It is by means of investigating exemplary literary texts, by reading works that stand side by side as cultural zeniths, that are taste in literatures are established. The highest aim is to peacefully conserve the sense of universal order and the passion for righteousness, goodness and charity in the face of the imminent danger that foundational values might be degraded to the lowest level of humanity, to various forms of fundamentalism that are the sources of various kinds of prejudices causing not only jealousy of the chosen people and rabid antiSemitism but also general hostility towards strangers, ethnocentrism, and intolerance of even minor differences. Research into the sources of our civilisations, as expressed in literature – which is perhaps the most influential art form – requires, however, someone who is willing to become involved with more than one relevant discipline. It calls for the study of literature with a focus on aesthetics and ethics, the study of biblical languages and hermeneutics, the study of cultural history in a broader sense, and still more fields. In the Postscript to his book Joseph in Egypt: A Cultural Icon from Grotius to Goethe, Bernard Lang argues: In contemporary literary studies one is confronted with two basic options: that of studying a literary work as an aesthetic object to be understood and enjoyed in itself, and that of considering it as being rooted in a particular historical, social, and cultural context. In this respect, I happen to belong to those who insist that, with regard to a work of literature, the cultural context forms the primary interpretative framework. […] What I, as the explorer, eventually came to know is both the work analyzed and its surroundings. Accordingly, I found myself in the well-known circular situation: documents of literature and art shed light on the cultural situation in which they originated; yet these documents echo, and can only be understood in the light of, that very situation. (Lang 2009: 337)

Too much attention to a particular historical, social, and cultural context in literary analysis of literary texts is likely to cause one to miss the main point: the universality of content and form. Grasping works of literature as an organic structural whole suggests “total interpretation.” Studies of this kind are very rare. This situation necessitates establishment of a new field of comparative biblical studies alongside more traditional biblical research on the one hand and of literature in general on the other, both according to established methodologies. The long-running battle between the arts and sciences helps one to recognize the interdependence of imaginative literature and thought. Through the process of close reading, literary texts can be analysed rationally in consideration of all major fields dealing with literature: literary semiotics, especially semantics, rhetoric and stylistics. In this context rhetoric and stylistics require some comment. It seems reasonable to remain open to all easily recognized components of rhetoric that have been used in interpretation of literature since an-

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tiquity. The same is true for the use of stylistics dealing with the structure of language and the properties of discourse and its functions. The main attraction for stylistics remains the formal descriptive power of a web of relations among the elements of the text itself. Instead of striving for linguistic and stylistic formalism the greater concern must be with the function and context of literary texts. Since foundational values in various religious traditions have formed the basis, if not the very essence, of our cultures, there are good grounds for believing in the regenerative force of existential ideals and values also in times of great moral crisis. Rediscovering the aesthetic and ethical qualities of biblical and other literary texts represents a very real opportunity for strengthening a sense of love and charity, truth and beauty, respect of human rights, freedom, and peace among people of all races, cultures and religions.

5.3

Interpretation of Literature in Response to Challenges of Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue

Presentation of foundational values in literature in terms of general methods of literary criticism implies the question of possible responses to challenges of intercultural and interreligious dialogue. For consideration of this issue two factors are of utmost importance: the attitude of the main authorities and of the people in general toward the role of literary sources, and “dogmatic” philosophical modes of conducting argument and confronting propositions, inconsistency and conflict between cultures and religions. We begin with the attitude to the Hebrew Scriptures and faith within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Theologians and philosophers have always faced a dual task, namely that of validating or disproving defended positions in both intellectual and aesthetic terms. Jews and Christians had the same Bible, but their focuses of interest were quite different. On the Christian side, the prophetic books attracted particular interest, whereas on the Jewish side the central part of the Bible was the Torah (Pentateuch). This explains the predominance of the Torah in the midrashic activity of the Rabbis. Another difference between Jewish and Christian tradition is seen in the use of different biblical texts. Jews remained bound to the Hebrew and Aramaic originals, and Christians depended on the Septuagint. Consequently, Christian exegetical tradition developed more on the basis of Hellenistic Judaism, mainly Philo, than in relation to the living rabbinic tradition of their own time. The intellectual and aesthetic task of interpreters is characteristic already of early Jewish post-biblical sources: Mishnah, the Babylonian and the Jerusalem

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Talmud, Midrash, etc. The Talmud included the Mishnah with commentary, composed of two basic related elements: the body of the derived law called Halakhah, and the body of legend called Aggadah. The Jerusalem Talmud was rich in legal, ethical, and legendary writings, and the Babylonian Talmud encompassed the communal and social life of the various Jewish communities for many centuries. The more literary corpus of the Talmud, Aggadah, harkens back to biblical times and includes many literary forms, such as parable and allegory, personification and metaphor, lyric poetry and song, lament and prayer, satire and polemic, idyllic narrative and dramatic colloquy. Midrash, originally a form of oral exposition of a biblical text, consists almost entirely of Aggadah, composed with the skill of creative imagination and used by teachers to shape the illustrative parables and poetic interpretations. As a folk source of lush imagery, Midrash enriched all of later Hebrew poetry. The genre of “midrash” means “interpretation” in relation to the Bible. Daniel Boyarin claims: “The interpretations found in these several works are manifold in nature, but all of them are more or less different from the commentary of the European traditions in that they do not seem to involve the privileged pairing of a signifier with a specific set of signifieds. It is perhaps this characteristic that has rendered Midrash so fascinating to some recent literary critics” (Boyarin 1994: viii). Midrash dwells on national, religious and theological issues. Tzvee Zahavy explains the similarities and dissimilarities between biblical and midrashic texts: In contrast to the biblical text it seeks to illuminate, it contains few of the major themes of literature and verse: it is rarely interested in human stories of love or hate, war or peace, loyalty or duplicity, or in the personal struggles of individuals in a society of open choices. It is a theological genre; nearly all the messages of rabbinic Midrash are rigorously controlled within structured religious schemata. Consequently, scholars have yet to apply extensively the general methods of literary criticism to the corpus of Midrash texts. More groundwork is now under way employing current literary theory to illuminate the meanings of Midrash. (Groden 2005: 114)

Classical rabbinic Bible interpretation developed three streams in searching for the meaning in biblical texts: exegetical, propositional, and narrative. During the Middle Ages, Jewish scholars developed several different types of Bible criticism. Modern criticism examining the Bible as literature has gained greatly from general literary criticism. More recent views have contributed very much also to scholarly dialogue and cooperation between Jewish and Christian scholars. Nevertheless, biblical scholars are never independent of the long tradition of Jewish and Christian exegetical commentary : the Talmud, the Midrash, the Kabbalah, rabbinic writing, texts of the Church Fathers, etc. This phenomenon is

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expressed by some new terms, such as “inner” Hebraic teaching or instruction, “inner-biblical” interpretation, the “Judeo-Christian” method of defining the relationship between the “literal” and metaphorical meaning of biblical texts. Paradoxically, the energy currently devoted to biblical study in literary-critical practice, the question of close reading of the text itself and the concept of aesthetic unity of literary texts implies the need to extend the interest of research to neighbouring disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, archaeology, linguistics, the history of ancient near Eastern religions, and so on. There are also signals of a new turn to the religious and to ethics, to more prophetic reading of the Bible of the Old and New Testaments as a whole – in Christianity an increased interest in Judaism, and vice-versa. Beneficiary for the changing status of biblical study were contributions of some modern philosophers, among others Emmanuel Levinas (1906 – 1995) and his influential books and essays on the radical otherness or alterity of transcendence. Mention may be made especially of his works Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. In any new situation there is a certain conflict between the awareness of the internalised style of biblical literary texts and between the old-fashioned humanist and historicist patterns of interpretation and a formalist literary approach. Sandor Goodhart points out the complexity of the relationship between biblical literature and literature in general: The affinity between biblical scripture and literature will be apprehensible less by means of the cognitive, aesthetic, or structural models by which we currently pursue that affinity than through the inner critical reading or commentary common to both domains, a commentary whose subject matter is ironically such misreading itself and the witness that misreading bears to our encounter of the infinite within the finite, an encounter we commonly repudiate and then reenact. (Groden 2005:123)

The recent movement towards more intensive dialogue among world religions – within the Judeo-Christian culture, especially between Jews and Christians – is beneficial for Christians both in strengthening the sense of a more existential, ontological approach to the Bible and in considering the role of tradition. This is true not only in a purely scholarly domain but especially within the wealth of literature. Jewish literature was always bound to tradition. Modern Jewish, and especially modern Hebrew poetry, did not change this fact, as Ruth P. Mintz states, For all its rationalism and universal aspirations, modern Hebrew literature was rooted in the forms of an age-old religious civilization. Although it championed the Europeanization of Jewish life against the opposition of the most adamant orthodox elements, both Rabbinic and Hassidic, it was concerned with harmonizing secular ideology with the spirit of tradition in order to assure the continuity of Jewish identity and creativity in a modern world. (Mintz 1975: xxiii)

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Modern Hebrew poetry struggles to comprehend the entire three thousand years of Jewish history so powerfully presented in the Hebrew Bible. Biblical narratives and songs are studied in Jewish communities as lyric and epic sources of a living language. It is humanistic in intention, although it is not entirely secular in character. Ruth P. Mintz states: From its earliest beginning Hebrew poetry extended its unique creative scope and native individual forms through an awareness of the literary genres of the larger environments of which it was a part. Biblical forms and newly developed Hebraic forms were later merged by modern Hebrew poets with those of European poetry. However, without a knowledge of the Bible it is still hardly possible to read modern Hebrew poetry with a complete awareness of its associations in language, imagery, and themes. (Mintz 1975: xxiv)

Coexistence and clashes between sacred and secular Hebrew poetry began to develop in the tenth century CE. Ruth P. Mintz summarizes this development: Adopting the conventions of Arabic literature, Hebrew poets approached the secular mode through its popular themes. However, the outstanding Hebrew poet-philosophers who lived in Moslem Spain from the tenth through twelfth centuries went beyond a merely conventional style; they not only were gifted in structuring language and developing ideas but also in evoking the imagery of human emotions and the tensions of human existence. Their wide scope and variety of forms influenced Hebrew poetry for four hundred years. While they sang of the beauty of nature, the nobility of love, friendship, and valor, their religious conscience could not abide a peaceful existence at a time when Europe was filled with Jewish persecution. A dominant theme in their poetry was a personal longing for Zion which often spoke with nationalistic intensity. The lyric, philosophic, and liturgical poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Yehuda Halevi – indeed the entire body of poetry of this great Spanish period – was considered an important legacy for modern poets by both Bialik and Tchernichovsky. (Mintz 1975: xxix–xxx)

Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873 – 1934) was born in the tsarist Russia and lived in Odessa until 1921 when, through the intervention of Maxim Gorki, he was given permission by the Soviet government to leave the country. After living and working in Berlin he arrived in Tel Aviv in 1924. In 1933 he became head of the Hebrew Writers Union, and came to be recognized as Israel’s national poet. Though Bialik had been educated according to the conventions of Talmudic tradition, he also explored European literature. Ruth F. Mintz summarizes his important role in reviving the Hebrew literary tradition in the modern situation: Bialik’s personal interests and studies enabled him to draw on all the levels of Hebrew language and literature in order to construct and refine a flexible medium for contemporary use. he demonstrated how much Hebrew could express, and returned to Hebrew poetry the whole perspective of a long literary tradition. “The function of the poet,” Bialik told Yakov Fichman, “is to revitalize dead words, to renew primary

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meanings that perish in men.” He pointed out the differences between the language of prose and poetry in his critical essays. Beyond the denotative language of prose, which rested upon parallel analogies in imagery and words, the language of poetry was connotative. It was weighted not only with implication but even mystery, pursuing the secret of organicism which as a unifying factor created a wholeness of the fragmentations of meaning. (Mintz 1975: xl)

Like Bialik, many modern Hebrew poets and writers combine and complement both intensely Jewish and European literature. Modern Hebrew writers are therefore eloquent living examples of the fusion of tradition into cohesive literary structures. Their larger cultural frame of reference, committed to uninterrupted poetic tradition and to memory, their multi-layered formation, and their capacity to combine extreme complexity and great simplicity in creating literary characters and modes of expression helps them to avoid the schism that characterizes most other European literatures in relation to history and tradition. The great advantage of modern academic life lies in its unconstrained striving for cooperation between scholars and students coming from various realms. Some of the most exciting developments have been in interdisciplinary movements that have appeared between the university and other institutions. Scholarly associations of biblical, Jewish, Christian and general humanistic studies within various disciplines on the one hand and university pluralism on the other make it possible to apply the same principles of literary criticism in research into the Bible as into later sources of our pluralistic culture. Attempts to define common values are no longer bound to the question of religious engagement but reflect the sense and unconstrained interest of individual scholars in the sources of foundational values of our society. One consequence of modern pluralism is also a more intensive endeavouring to define the relationship between religious and secular groups of society and in the end between religion and states at large. In this endeavour the contribution of more coordinated research into the basic religious sources of our civilisation is perhaps more important and also more promising than is generally recognized. The search for appropriate methods in researching values contained in religious literary sources is not only a matter of the nature of literature but also a matter of strengthening common sense through active and concrete cooperation between scholars on both human and academic levels. This new reality helps most efficiently to extend academic and living dialogue to other world religions. In this respect the example of Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy is particularly relevant. True social Christianity, as Tolstoy saw it, rested positively on love as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5 – 7). Since Tolstoy took the commandments of the Gospel to mean absolute nonviolence, his views influenced Gandhi, with whom Tolstoy

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corresponded. So it is that both Tolstoy and Gandhi transcend the dogmatic structures of their religions in the existential core of experience with foundational values. It is significant that Gandhi emphasised the importance of combining absolute belief in values with life experience by writing the two volumes of An Autobiography : The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927 and 1929). The vast majority of spiritual practices, whether among Buddhist, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Taoists or Zoroastrians, have been centred on written scriptures or holy books of one kind or another. Certainly the spiritual status of the Bible is, as it always has been, inescapably bound to its material textuality. Understanding God and the principle of “the people of the Book” keeps Jews, Christians and Islamic communities together in cooperation on the basis of monotheism, which is inapplicable to Buddhism, Hinduism Taoism or Zoroastrianism. However, understanding of the role of the Kur’an in Islam as compared with the role of the Bible in Judaism and Christianity is a major limitation of the possibility of joint interpretation on traditional religious grounds. For the orthodox school of Islam, the Kur’an is not a sacred book in the usual sense but the faithful reproduction of the original scripture in heaven. The Kur’an is identical in being and in reality with the uncreated and eternal word of God. Because historical experience, however, it is nevertheless true that Islam has acquired both the toughness and flexibility necessary for creative adjustments. Throughout history, there have been many waves of reform in theology, politics, and social institutions. Against medieval doctrine the role of reason and science was given prominence. From the existential experience it is, in the final analysis, clear that the concept of poetry is the strongest unifying force of three religious origins and traditions. From early Arabic times poetry has been a source of great pride in terms of expressing values, wisdom, and artists’ emotional attachments. Islam fused the orally-inherited traditions of the ancient poetry into a homogeneous spiritualaesthetic complex construct. The Kur’an and early poetry contained in themselves the seeds of a normative and prescriptive attitude. What was previously an exclusively oral literary tradition was, increasingly, transformed into a written one. In accordance with the assumption that God is the sole author of life and that a person who produces a likeness of a living being seeks to rival God, Islam introduced the religious prohibition of images and representation of living creatures (aniconism). However, just as in ancient Greece the views of Plato and Plotinus remained open to new ideas, so too has the principle of aniconism in Islam undergone modifications. This principle meant that drama and pure fiction were not allowed. Various pious stories, hyperboles and poetry developed to an ever-greater extent and proved to be an effective haven for thinly veiled deviations from the literalist religion of the orthodox tradition. As a form of effective expression, its poetry is eminently characteristic of the East.

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In early times there was a strong Greek, Persian and Syrian impact on Arabic literature. But the themes and modes of thought from other languages and cultures became at home in the Islamic world of Arabic literature through adaptation to the Islamic experience and the Arabic idiom. Even though Muslims regard the Kur’an as the authentic Word of God in the most literal sense, it was read and interpreted in a variety of ways. Prose and poetic literary creations throughout the centuries evidently contributed very much to flexibility in dealing with the canon and tradition. Literary modes and genres in prose include especially folklore, fables and legends. Arabic civilisation in fact remained open to fictional creations in all periods. The contact of the Arabic world with Western culture in the second half of the twentieth century turned many Arabic writers to the rich world of modern fiction. In her book Modern Arabic Fiction the wellknown Palestinian poet, critic, translator, and anthologist Salma Khadra Jayyusi explains: Research into the literature of the past immediately finds that Arab literary history has never been poor in fictional creations, which were circulations perhaps several centuries before the advent of Islam in 622 A.D. By then, various fictional genres had been nurtured. A comparative examination of the remote background of fiction in Arabic corresponds in several aspects to the remote background of other literatures, proving the unity of human creativity everywhere. It is witness to the nonethnic basis of artistic creation that humanity has shown only the smallest differences in the principal literary genres adopted by various cultures and in the way the verbal arts have usually developed over the centuries. (Jayyusi 2005: 4)

Recognition of the “nonethnic” character of literature points to the fundamental psychic unity of humans, the uniformity of their cognitive capacities, and the human capacity for morality. The universality of literary creation is intrinsically connected with the sense of virtue and value. In spite of the diversity of human cultures we recognize the transcultural characteristics of a generic human mind. Literary creations prove that we all think, feel and perceive the reality of life in the same way. In Cognitive Variations, his recent cross-disciplinary analysis of the human mind, Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd points to popular discussion in all modern sciences about the contrasting relationship between “biological” unity of humans and their “cultural diversity.” By comparing ancient Greek and Chinese concepts of man and values he concludes: We are all aware of the amazing diversity of human talents. Some people are superb musicians, others not, some good navigators, others not, and so on through the entire gamut of our intellectual and artistic skills. Without such diversity, there would be far less of the creativity that we naturally prize and celebrate. At the same time our basic membership of the same human species, a matter of our genetic make-up, is undeniable, and we also all importantly share the experience of acculturation in general and of language acquisition in particular, however much the cultures, and languages, in

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question differ. The relativist must make room for those latter common factors, just as the universalist cannot afford to ignore diversity. (Lloyd 2009: 175)

Even though Lloyd finds the unity of the human mind in our “genetic make-up” rather than in culture he does not find suggestive “proofs” for his reflections in the natural sciences but in the realm of literature, which is able to appeal to human intuition. For his concluding statements he chose the argument by Shylock from Shakespeare’s drama Merchant of Venice (Act III Scene i): Shylock: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (Qtd. in Lloyd 2009: 171)

Such a combination of committed scientific research and literary texts exhibiting common sense, good will, and solidarity in suffering can prove fruitful for the entire human community as we strive for a better world. Moreover, such a combination entails a mutually corrective criticism: academic research into the structure of texts and their cultural context invites us to see common points in the core of our existence. On the other hand, the natural feeling for common values inspires us to engage ourselves with the classical sources of our civilisations, since this will serve mutual enrichment. This engagement is both the mark of and path towards mutual corrective criticism. Corrective criticism can be found also in other humanistic fields, fields which have a bearing also on interpretation of literature. John Rawls is similarly “intuitive” in his rational concept of justice as the foundational value of personal and social life. Nevertheless, he avoids extremes and points in the end to the fundamental question of ethics, which is perfectly compatible with our shared humanity : It is a desire to conduct oneself in a certain way above all else, a striving that contains within itself its own priority. Other aims can be achieved by a plan that allows a place for each, their satisfaction being possible independent of their place in the ordering. But this is not the case with the sense of right and justice; and therefore acting wrongly is always liable to arouse feelings of guilt and shame, the emotions aroused by the defeat of our regulative moral sentiments. Of course, this does not mean that the realization of our nature as a free and rational being is itself an all or nothing affair. To the contrary, how far we succeed in expressing our nature depends upon how consistently we act from our sense of justice as finally regulative. What we cannot do is express our nature by following a plan that views the sense of justice as but one desire to be weighed against others. For this sentiment reveals what the person is, and to compromise it is not to achieve for the self free reign but to give way to the contingencies and accidents of the world. (Rawls 1988: 573 – 575)

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The best path to comprehension of foundational values in literary texts is carrying out analyses of selected texts following the principle of close reading by developing the skill to relate form to content. The tentative expression “total interpretation” relates both to the relation to literary structure and style of literary texts and to a holistic perception of a long literary tradition, common world history and shared humanity. Valuation of images as primary intuitions implies an organic understanding of dialogue between cultures and religions. Dialogue is not based on external determinants of society, culture and religion but on the identity of the human being as such. The struggle to comprehend identity leads us to literary heritage as a whole, to literature as the medium of lived experience of shared humanity. Following the experience of human life in all its elementary properties, this comparative method earnestly takes into consideration the personal, cultural and religious conflict between the sacred and the secular, defiance and piety, innovation and tradition with a conscious endeavouring to escape conflict as a principle of personal and collective identity. The first step towards cooperating to bridle passions in intercultural and interreligious conflict is being able to bridle one’s own destructive passions. As humans, we understand that there is a normal tension between everyday speech and the undertones and overtones of a shared literary heritage. We further understand that cultural entities throughout history have given rise not only to different cultural and stylistic prejudices, even leading to persecution, but that they have also inspired rich artistic, musical and literary creations – the creations that form the most important and precious common ground for dialogue between all nations, cultures and religions on the level of everyday life, education, and in terms of social stimulation for the regional and global environments. This is not limited to the sense of love, the security of identity and belonging, compassion for all who suffer, empathy for the past and compassion for the present and the future. In splendorous language, St. Paul points to the guilt of humankind as a whole (Rom 1:18 – 32) in order to emphasise that there is no righteous one in the world. Humans are capable of the most dreadful wickedness, wickedness that suppresses truth and manifests itself in degrading passions. Inner conflict is the most common property of world literature. Literature therefore attests to a genuine mixture of a common fate and solidarity among individuals and peoples – a solidarity that occurs in happiness but even more so in misery.

6. Representation of Beauty and Love in Literature and in Philosophical Reflections

The greatest creators in Western civilisation within the Greco-Roman, HebrewJewish and Christian religions and cultures were sometimes elevated to the status of wise men, seers, moral and religious teachers, or national symbols because they raised fundamental questions and framed varied and profound arguments about foundational values – such as beauty, love, wisdoms and righteousness – in religious literary texts and in distinct fields like metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. They offered detailed definitions of beauty, love and all other values naturally connected with them, they created literary presentations of their qualities, and came up with many varied and profound explications. So the issue of foundational values has always been central to literary criticism, philosophy and psychology. The values of beauty, love and truth articulate deep human reality as a spiritual endeavour to transcend the fundamental conditions of life. In the background of both is the deep longing for happiness and the feeling that a lost original condition, a lost unity, must be restored. The longing for harmony and lost unity inspires the human mind and soul to ascend from physical desire to spiritual understanding, from the finite to the infinite, from the contingent to absolute Beauty, Love and Truth. Love tends to rise beyond physical union and it is a power capable of uniting people in a common bond. The highest aim of love is the experience of beauty, goodness and truth. Love as a concept appears first in religion as the belief that the Creator loves His creation in whole or in part and attracts the human race by awakening the power of love in man. The Creator is therefore the first natural object of love in the human race, and this implies ethical concerns. The Bible offers all the conditions for a refinement of desire that directs us from physical beauty and love for divine Beauty, Love and Truth. Specific to biblical literature is the belief that the reality of the world represents the Creator’s splendour and glory ; humans were created in God’s very image (Gen 1:27). God is ultimate reality and truth, the basis of everything that is real, the ultimate unity of all values and virtues and the ultimate point of reference for all created things. It follows from this that the relation to ourselves and to our fellow man is a function of our relation to God.

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Theology of Creation implies that God is almighty and transcends every special power infinitely and yet acts at the same time as its creative ground. Since God transcends and affirms everything infinitely, the way to speak about God is through analogy and symbolic language. The material and finite reality is often applied to that which transcends our life infinitely in being and meaning. Nevertheless, physical beauties are part of the real Beauty of God, who is immaterial and plays a fundamental inspirational role. God is presented as the absolute and ultimate value, the ultimate unity in love which embraces the whole of creation and opens humanity up for its own work. God does not prevent estrangement but takes it upon himself and justifies those who act against love in order to reunite the estranged humanity in love. The consequence of the classical Christian account of beauty is a negative attitude to artistic representation of humanity in the secular sphere. Characteristic of the secularisation movement of the last centuries is the move away from a transcendent foundation of aesthetics towards supreme confidence in the artistic genius of authors. In view of this situation Leo Tolstoy expressed his objections against the centrality of the principle of beauty in modern aesthetics. At the end of chapter 4 of his work What is Art? he claims: “Strange as it is to say, despite the mountains of books written on art, no precise definition of art has yet been made. The reason for this is that the concept of beauty has been placed at the foundation of the concept of art” (Tolstoy 1995: 36). Tolstoy places feeling at the foundation of the concept of art, which is also questionable when it comes to a coherent theory of the concept of art. It is therefore important to understand art in its most comprehensive sense, which leads Tolstoy to this conclusion: “Art, all art, has in itself the property of uniting people” (Tolstoy 1995: 129). This is possible precisely because of the universal characteristics of a generic human mind, which longs for happiness and perfection, and also because of the poetical spirit of human beings. It would be too much to expect that the theory of art could ever resolve the problem of diversity of human beings concerning perceptions of good and bad or beauty and ugliness, which is unresolved in all levels of our life. The survey of views on beauty, love, aesthetics and ethics represented in outstanding writers and philosophers through the centuries from Plato up to modern times raises methodological questions throughout. It is clear that the most convincing views have been those expressed by literary critics and philosophers who are also authors of literary texts. In literature, our ethical knowledge is aesthetically mediated. Moral philosophers have been so strongly influenced by the commandment paradigm that they have ignored the role of literary texts in ethical understanding. Colin McGinn concludes his attempt to clarify the difference between moral philosophy and literary presentation of reality with this methodological appeal: “We need new methods and styles with

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which to discuss stories and morals. Our discussions will be less abstract and more immediate, since we are now closer to lived ethical experience. The ethical will be seen to be inextricably bound up with other concerns, particularly aesthetic ones, but also with specific details of character and context” (McGinn 2007: 175). In addition to some other literary genres, McGinn points to the biblical style of imparting ethical education by means of the parable: “The parable is a small work of art that invites aesthetic evaluation as well as moral attention. It exploits the power of the story form in order to teach a moral lesson” (McGinn 2007: 172). Our discussion in this study is in fact an introduction to literary analysis of selected biblical texts and the texts from Slovenian and world literature from various periods. Among Slovenian writers, Ivan Cankar (1876 – 1918), who is recognized as the greatest Slovenian writer, is particular important. His works in many literary genres are based on ancient Greco-Roman, biblical and later literary traditions.

6.1

Representation and Explication of Beauty and the Relationship between Aesthetics and Ethics

Robert E. Norton addresses historical questions about the relationship between, beauty, aesthetics and ethics in his book The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (1995). He traces the origins and transformation of the idea of moral beauty in the works of Plato, Plotinus, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Kant, Schiller, Goethe and Hegel, albeit without venturing to offer an independent explication of the question of how beauty relates to aesthetics and ethics. This unexplained question prompted Colin McGinn to explain that without connection in his recent book Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, in which Chapter 5, “Beauty of Soul,” has a prominent place (pp. 92 – 122). He begins with a discussion of the methodological limitations of moral philosophy : “My general position is that the human ethical sensibility works best when dealing with particular persons in specific contexts; abstract generalities are not the natural modus operandi of the moral sense” (McGinn 2007: 3). McGinn’s aim is to enrich moral discourse by showing the value of literary forms as a vehicle of moral thought: “One of the reasons we are drawn to fictional works is precisely that they combine the particular and the general in ways we find natural and intelligible. The general is woven into the particular, which gives the particular significance and the general substance” (McGinn 2007: 3). His conviction that fiction and philosophy must be considered in a mutual and complementary relation is the guiding principle also of our approach. The concept of beauty and its opposite, what is ugly, are the subject of aes-

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thetics, which has often been defined as the science of the beautiful. Plato (427 – 347 BC) is the first important author to have endeavoured to understand, explain and evaluate beauty and the conditions under which beauty can be embodied in an object and, finally, in visual, literary and mixed musical arts. His evaluation of the fundamental aesthetic problems distinguishes between production of actual objects and of “images” of god, humans and objects. The key to his discussion of “images” is the concept of imitation (m†mesis). Plato divides reality into two fundamentally different realms: eternal “ideas” or “forms” and the created objects of the world which are defective imitations and only temporal embodiments of their eternal archetypes. In accordance with this fundamental division of reality Plato recognizes an eternal and absolute form of beauty and various degrees of embodiment of the quality of beauty in the created world and in artistic creation. Imitation of eternal forms is in a sense both true and untrue (Sophist 240C). Inevitably, this kind of understanding of reality in itself and in its embodiments raises the question of moral values, for the concept of beauty depends upon beneficial and pleasing effects of subjects, objects and artworks. Plato knows that “the whole of man’s life requires the graces of rhythm and harmony” (Protagoras 326B). One of his statements concerning the interaction of beauty, pleasure, and inspiration reads: “It is the duty of every man and child – bond and free, male and female, – and the duty of the whole State, to charm themselves unceasingly with the chants we have described, constantly changing them and securing variety in every way possible, so as to inspire the singers with an insatiable appetite for the hymns and with pleasure therein” (Laws 665C).13 According to Plato beauty is closely allied to goodness and virtue. In the context of evaluating the effects of music, Plato argues: “To avoid a tediously long disquisition, let us sum up the whole matter by saying that the postures and tunes which attach to goodness of soul or body, or to some image thereof, are universally good, while those which attach to badness are exactly the reverse” (Laws 655B).14 Human institutions must take into consideration also the age of the people when considering their capacity to grasp reality and truth: What I state is this, – that in children the first childish sensations are pleasure and pain, and that it is in these first that goodness and badness come to the soul; but as to wisdom and settled true opinions, a man is lucky if they come to him even in old age and; he that is possessed of these blessings, and all that they comprise, is indeed a perfect man. I term, then, the goodness that first comes to children “education.” When pleasure and love, and pain and hatred, spring up rightly in the souls of those who are unable as yet to grasp a rational account; and when, after grasping the rational account they consent 13 The translation is taken from Plato in Twelve Volumes, X – XI: Laws. Trans. by R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library 187, 192; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: W. Heinemann, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 130 – 131. 14 See vol. 1, pp. 96 – 97.

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thereunto through having been rightly trained in fitting practices: – this consent, viewed as a whole, is goodness, while the part of it that is rightly trained in respect of pleasures and pains, so as to hate what ought to be hated, right from the beginning up to the very end, and to love what ought to be loved, – if you were to mark this part off in your definition and call it “education,” you would be giving it, in my opinion, its right name. (Laws 653 A-C)15

Plato was greatly concerned with the truth of human nature and with the social responsibility of creative artists. He was aware of the fact that authors follow their conscious and unconscious motives and intentions. Paul Guyer states: “Plato was also aware of the spell of beauty, especially beauty in our own kind, and attempted to channel our love of earthly beauty into love of a higher kind of beauty, something not otherwise accessible to the senses, the beauties of the Forms themselves, especially, of course, the Form of the Good or Justice” (Guyer 2005: ix–x). The first issue for Plato was to discover what effects the arts have on people and on the entire social order. He calls for censorship over tales in such cases as “when anyone images badly in his speech the true nature of gods and heroes” (Republic 377E), or for example: “The tale of the teeth that were sown, and how armed men sprang out of them. Here, indeed, the lawgiver has a notable example of how one can, if he tries, persuade the souls of the young of anything, so that the only question he has to consider in his inventing is what would do most good to the State, if it were believed; and then he must devise all possible means to ensure that the whole of the community constantly, so long as they live, use exactly the same language, so far as possible, about these matters, alike in their songs, their tales, and their discourses” (Laws 664 A).16 Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) moved away from Plato’s idealistic account of reality in favour of the structural qualities of artistic creation. The pleasure of beauty is on the one hand connected with the quality of imitation itself, and on the other, in the unifying structure of artworks. In Poetics he developed his theory of the beauty of tragedy as a natural effect of “imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude” (1450a). An indispensable condition for the pleasure of beauty is proportion: “a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order” (1450a). Unity of a complete action in poetic representation of reality is what marks the difference between poetry and history : “As to that poetic imitation which is narrative in form and employs a single meter, the plot manifestly ought, as in a tragedy, to be constructed on dramatic principles. It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a 15 See vol. 1, pp. 90 – 93. 16 See vol. 1, pp. 124 – 127.

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beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period” (1459a). Aristotle’s concept of poetry as imitation of nature, human action and characters exerted great influence on Renaissance as well as more modern poetics. In ancient Israel the concept of beauty was by definition bound to the concept of God as Creator of the world and humankind. The unity of all realities and values in the realm of God’s transcendent ultimate reality and relation inspires a great variety of symbolic presentation of God’s power, splendour, love and beauty. God cannot reveal his beauty directly. The Bible emphasises the luminous revelation of God’s splendour and glory (Heb. kabûd, Gr. dûxa, Lat. gloria; and synonyms) through Creation and Salvation. This explains why God’s own beauty is a rare theme in the Bible. Paradigmatic in this respect is Psalm 8, in which the author praises the glory of God as manifested in the wonders of the heavens and in turn reflects on the unique place of humans in the scheme of creation. The psalm begins with simple and sublime words of praise which are repeated at its close (vv. 1 and 9): “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” In Psalm 45 (Vg 44) we find a conventional reference to the physical beauty of the king (v. 3): “You are the most handsome of men; grace is poured upon your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever.” In the second part of the psalm, the author turns to the queen and proclaims: “and the king will desire your beauty” (v. 12). In Psalm 48 the author refers to Zion as the luminous revelation of God’s splendour. The psalm begins, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth.” Ezekiel refers to beauty as God’s gift in the allegory of the abandoned girl (vv. 1 – 43), used to present the problematic relation between God and his people; the allegory is depicted in terms of a husband-wife relationship. In verses 13 – 15 the author describes the beauty of a girl, whose parents had abandoned her, in terms of the gift of God’s splendour. This gift, however, was misused by the ungrateful girl: “You had choice flour and honey and oil for food. You grew exceedingly beautiful, fit to be a queen. Your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, for it was perfect because of my splendour that I had bestowed on you, says the Lord God. But you trusted in your beauty, and played the whore because of your fame, and lavished your whorings on any passer-by.” In the Song of Songs, in a few instances the bridegroom praises the beauty of the bride (1:8, 10; 4:7; 6:10). Allegorical understanding of the song in later periods connects this beauty with a divine gift. The inner connection between the created world and the Creator is poetically presented in Sir 43:9 – 12:

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The glory of the stars is the beauty of heaven, a glittering array in the heights of the Lord. On the orders of the Holy One they stand in their appointed places; they never relax in their watches look at the rainbow, and praise him who made it; it is exceedingly beautiful in its brightness It encircles the sky with its glorious arc; the hands of the Most High have stretched it out.

The book of Wisdom uses the same theme to express criticism of the incapacity to perceive God’s splendour on the basis of the beauty of the created world (13:1 – 5): For all people who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know the one who exists, nor did they recognize the artisan while paying heed to his works; but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world. If through delight in the beauty of these things people assume them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them. And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the one who formed them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.

The book of Proverbs refers to the theme of beauty in the context of instruction. In 6:25 there is a direct warning for the young man to be wary of the prostitute who enticed men with her lustful looks: “Do not desire the beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes.” In 11:22 one reads, “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without good sense.” At the end of the book, the ode to a capable wife presents the key to understanding the warning (31:30): “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” In the New Testament, there are two places that refer to the luminous revelation of God’s glory and majesty. In the introduction to the letter to the Hebrews, the author states that Jesus Christ is “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” In the vision of the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation, the author proclaims in 21:10 – 11: “And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven

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from God. It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal.” Confronted with external enemies and heretical deviations, Augustine and other early Church Fathers developed a method of interpretation of biblical sources by following the method of allegorical exposition in practice in Rabbinical tradition. Origen (185 – 254) inherited allegorical interpretation of Scripture from Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BC–c. AD 50) and recognized Scripture’s triple sense – the literal, the moral and the spiritual or mystical (see De Principiis IV, I, 16, 18, 20). The Spiritual or mystical, called allegorical, sense is based on the faith in the unity of God, who is transcendent and invisible, and on the contention that the whole universe is pervaded with symbols and types of the invisible world. This fact implies that all things had a double aspect – one corporeal and sensible, the other spiritual and mystical. True knowledge was the participation of the purified soul in the Wisdom of the Word. The theory of three levels of meaning in Scripture became a standard that lasted throughout the medieval period. At this point we notice that there is a common ground of perceiving the relationship between the transcendent God and the visible reality in biblical and Platonic perceptions of reality. John Rist states: “As Plato expressed it in the Phaedrus, of all the transcendent Forms, Beauty is the most accessible because presented to our sight, the keenest and most perceptive of our senses. The shining splendour of beauty is the clearest link between the sensible and nonsensible worlds: it is ‘reality’ in visible form” (Rist 2008: 147). In the third century the Neo-Platonist philosopher and mystic Plotinus (203 – 270) prompted a revival of Platonism in the Roman Empire. His main concern was the question of relations between unity and multiplicity that resulted in the Plotinian Triad: The first principle and the ultimate reality of the One (to hen) or the Good; the hypostasis of intellect or mind (nous); the hypostasis of Soul (psyche). Three of the tractates in his six Enneads deal with aesthetics: “On Beauty” (I, vi) “On the Intellectual Beauty” (V, viii); and “How the Multiplicity of the IdealForms Came into Being; and on the Good” (VI, vii). According to Plotinus experience of beauty comprises sensuous beauty, beautiful deeds (good character and conduct), moral beauty. No wonder then that Augustine found so much inspiration for his philosophical reflections on beauty both in the Bible and in Platonism. Both sources provide a solid basis for perception of the beauty of art, nature and intelligible reality in terms of participation in the higher or highest Beauty and for the awareness that inspiration for love is the primary effect of beauty. Augustine is especially important, as this early Christian philosopher organically assimilated Christianity and Neo-Platonism. Augustine adopted fully the biblical account of beauty as the splendour of God: the material world reflects the splendour of the

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Creator ; every human being is created in the image of God; Christ is both the perfect image of the Father and in the fullest sense his splendour. In Soliloquies 1.4, he presents a synthetic account of the inner unity of God’s existence – truth, wisdom, splendour and life are the source of life, reality, intelligibility and the splendour of the created world: Thee I invoke, O God, the Truth, in whom and from whom and through whom all things are true which anywhere are true. God, the Wisdom, in whom and from whom and through whom all things are wise which anywhere are wise. God, the true and crowning Life, in whom and from whom and through whom all things live, which truly and supremely live. God, the Blessedness, in whom and from whom and through whom all things are blessed, which anywhere are blessed. God, the Good and Fair, in whom and from whom and through whom all things are good and fair, which anywhere are good and fair. God, the intelligible Light, in whom and from whom and through whom all things intelligibly shine, which anywhere intelligibly shine. God, whose kingdom is that whole world of which sense has no ken. God, from whose kingdom a law is even derived down upon these lower realms. God, from whom to be turned away, is to fall: to whom to be turned back, is to rise again: in whom to abide, is to stand firm.

In Confessions 10.27.38 Augustine expresses his regrets: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you.” In On Music 6.13.38 he claims: “We cannot love what is not beautiful.” Biblical foundations of symbolical, typological and allegorical interpretation of nature as the symbol of something beyond were not accepted by all later writers and philosophers of aesthetics and literature. Nevertheless, they were of great significance to later reflections on the nature of metaphor and symbol, to the theory of contemplation in artistic creation, to the experience of beauty that is grasped by the intellectual faculties, to the question of the relationship of art to beauty and truth and to the ethical responsibility of art, as well as to the search for common aesthetic norms. In the eighteenth century, two philosophers influenced the development of more modern aesthetic theory : Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714 – 1762) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). Baumgarten developed a theory of beauty and of the nature of art with emphasis on the importance of feeling, thus modifying the traditional claim that art imitates nature. Baumgarten coined the term “aesthetics” and established this discipline as a distinct field of philosophical enquiry in his most significant work, the two-volume Aesthetica (1750 – 1758). He derived the term from the Greek word aisthanomai – “perceive, apprehend by the sense” – and pointed to shared habits, tastes and sentiments in the interpretation and evaluation of artworks. Consideration of feeling leads to a synthetic linking together of “confused” ideas into an artistic structure, as opposed to what is clearly known through concepts. Kant is known as both an empirical realist and as a transcendental idealist. He recognizes the universality of taste but

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he understands it from a transcendental point of view rather than an empirical or historical one. The “noumenon,” the thing-in-itself, exists beyond the limit of rational cognition. It follows that the work of art represents the supersensible substrate of things-in-themselves, but in the reality of human perception of the sensible world there is a gulf between the subjectivity of human imagination regarding the beautiful and the sublime. Kant’s best example of the beautiful is a flower, of the sublime, an iceberg, while perception of them represents the coincidence or harmony of the imagination and sense impression. Kant treats genius as a power for the creation of aesthetic value and recognizes “exemplary originality.” Emphasis on feeling in more recent times has stimulated investigation into the psychological effects of art and aesthetic experience. In addition to explanation of basic aesthetic qualities – such as the beautiful and the sublime, awareness of artistic intuition, the immediacy of our impression of beauty, the harmony perceived as beauty, aesthetic enjoyment and the problem of taste – the concept of the organic whole became crucial. Consideration of these and other aspects brought about the romantic revolution in feeling and taste in terms of the artist’s experience and expression of his personal emotions. Works of art were perceived as an organic whole bound together by deep and subtle unity. Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) accepted fully new views and argued in his work What is art? that art is essentially a form of communication by transmission of emotion. At the heart of aesthetics remained such questions as: “What is the nature and value of beauty? what is the connection between art and knowledge? what is the connection between aesthetics and morality? and what is genius, the source of artistic inspiration?” (Guyer 2005: x) The English Romantic poet John Keats (1795 – 1821) is noted for sensual imagery expressing longing for beauty and happiness. The main tenor of his poems is a dynamic relationship between beauty and truth, fact and fiction, poetry and history, art and life. In response to rationalist attempts to reduce truth to reason, Keats manifests great imaginative genius and makes personal discovery about the nature of poetry to be a distinct mode of grasping the reality of life. A work of art yields a special sort of satisfaction not to be found except in an organic whole. Keats reflected on the relationship between literature and life; in a letter to his brother George (1819) he extols the beauty of poetry in terms of internal or aesthetic satisfaction: “The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting.” In another letter he writes: “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not” (Letters 1: 184). His long verse romance Endymion begins with his poetic faith in beauty (I, 1. 1):

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A Thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. (Keats 2001: 61)

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (stanza V), Keats extols that which is “human passion far above,” while his central faith in beauty is expressed in the concluding aphorism: O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity : Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Keats 2001: 222)

Lines 202 – 217 of the poem Hyperion read: Now comes the pain of truth, to whom ’tis pain: O folly! for to bear all naked truth, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty. Mark well! As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs: And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. (Keats 2001: 249)

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John Keats possessed an innate poetic sensibility and developed a style heavily laden with sensualities in the positive sense. His principle concern was what it means to be a poet. He explained his understanding of the creative power of poetry both in his poems and in his letters. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, Saturday 22 November 1817, he writes: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” The existential background and his unwillingness to separate thought, feeling, language, and image explain his original embodiment of his poetic sense in the composition of his poetry. The wholeness of his approach could not satisfy his contemporaries. Thus, his influence on perception of literature as a distinct mode of thought and expression exerts an increasing influence on literary theory and practice in more modern times. The history of literary criticism from the beginning of eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century is characterized by the awareness of the complexity of our aesthetic experience of both nature and art. Characteristic of modern aesthetics is the view that the embodiment of the Idea in sensuous form never succeeds, because no form is adequate to the absolute, whereas the life of humans and of society is always full of contradictions. Nicholas Brown thus reasonably concludes: “Symbolism must henceforth be the conscious and finite symbolism of fable, allegory, metaphor, and so on” (Groden 2005: 8). In spite of the difficult experience of contradictions in personal and social life, the beautiful offers us a symbolic representation of freedom and experience of something that is beyond the symbol. Pleasure in perception of both natural and artistic beauty is in itself positive, and yet it is enhanced by all responsible creators of art. Paul Guyer suggests “that there are inescapable connections between aesthetic and moral values, for that we make our aesthetic recommendations responsibly is itself a moral responsibility” (Guyer 2005: xviii). Simone Weil (1909 – 1943), the uncompromising seeker of truth and social justice, “the best spiritual writer” of the twentieth century, in Andr¦ Gide’s assessment (Weil 2008: inner cover), was able to harmonize the concepts of beauty, love and truth in a genuine scientific and mystical experience. Therefore we conclude this section with some of her thoughts on beauty. Her understanding of the human individual links social and metaphysical realities, natural necessity at work in the world, and the inner human expectation of goodness and happiness. Her experience of the frailty of the human condition and her positive duality of discursive reason and intuition in contemplation also inspired her perception of beauty. She begins her comments on beauty by saying,

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Beauty is the harmony of chance and the good. Beauty is necessity which, while remaining in conformity with its own law and with that alone, is obedient to the good. The subject of science is the beautiful (that is to say order, proportion, harmony) in so far as it is suprasensible and necessary. The subject of art is sensible and contingent beauty discerned through the network of chance and evil. The beautiful in nature is a union of the sensible impression and of the sense of necessity. Things must be like that (in the first place), and, precisely, there are like that. Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul. (Weil 2008: 148)

Simone Weil is concerned also with the question of the role of author in art. While modern literary critics, such as Roland Barthes and Michael Foucault, argue that the meaning of literary texts is not determined by the author but by words and language, Simone Weil goes beyond words and language to a supreme reality that is a matter of belief: A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it. It imitates the anonymity of divine art. In the same way the beauty of the world proves there to be a God who is personal and impersonal at the same time and is neither the one nor the other separately. […] In everything which gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty there really is the presence of God. There is as it were an incarnation of God in the world and it is indicated by beauty. The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible. (Weil 2008: 149 – 150)

Her definitions of and explanations for beauty reflect her unswerving insistence on the inner connection between the cognitive and moral authenticity of the style of authors. Creation of real art requires a high level of spirituality and purity of heart; authentic art is the perfect expression of the naked truth of the soul.

6.2

Love and Inspiration

Modern scholarship considers the value of love primarily as a matter of behaviour and deals with it in terms of psychology, sociology and ethnology. There are many aspects to this value: sexual love, the relation of the parent to the child, the relation of the child to the parent, sibling relations, self-love, etc. Ancient Greek mythology reflects observations about human nature and human behaviour. Basic models of love have been personalised in deities and institutionalised. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Eros is presented as one of the three primordial gods, alongside Chaos and Earth. Eros and Himeros (desire, longing, lust) accompany Aphrodite, born from the sperm of Uranus (Heaven) into the

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council of the gods. The cosmic background of the concept of love is well expressed by Empedocles (c. 492–c. 432 BC) as he imagines the course cosmic history takes. He recognizes two universal forces, Love and Strife; they are external and act alternatingly in reigns of Love and Strife. Empedocles believed that Love accounts for elemental conjunction, Strife for elemental separation: Now by Love all coming together into one, now again each carried apart by the enmity of Strife. (Barnes 1982: 419)

Ancient Greek culture recognized several forms of love: parental, filial, and conjugal affection; fraternal affinity ; friendship; love of country ; and the love of wisdom. Both heterosexual and homosexual passion were also admitted. Greek philosophy was the first systematic attempt to find a common concept of love. Plato (427 – 347 BC) developed a synthetic and abstract process of thought and ethical process of purification by using the concept of eros as a drive or longing for the perfect, which is beauty and good, both being bridges between the realms of the material and the ideal. Love is always seeking beautiful things and persons, and, beyond them, the beautiful in itself. Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) made the common concept of love even more abstract as a cosmic and universal form of perfection. Though love in its perfect form is a divine Unmoved Mover, in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle treated also the ethical and psychological aspects of love in relation between humans; here he developed the concept of friendship (philia) as more important, more constant and ultimately more ethical than sexual love. In contrast to the idea of a continuous interchange of Love and Strife, there is the experience of the intense attraction of love and the idea that love makes humans whole. Love is in essence the love of beauty that is not material but an ideal. Plato presents love as the main theme in various speeches in his Symposium. Love makes real what humans have always been yearning for, “namely, to be so joined and fused with his beloved that the two might be made one.” Eros supplies also “this excellent hope for the future, that if we will supply the gods with reverent duty he will restore us to our ancient life and heal and help us into the happiness of the blest” (192E–193 A). The most influential passage of Symposium is the presentation of the ladder of beauty, progressing from that of bodies through that of forms, thoughts, minds, institutions and laws, the sciences, “so that in the end he comes to know the very essence of beauty” (210 A–212 A). At this point, the question is asked: But tell me, what would happen if one of you had the fortune to look upon essential beauty entire, pure and unalloyed; not infected with the flesh and colour of humanity, and ever so much more of mortal trash? What if he could behold the divine beauty itself, in its unique form […] So when he has begotten a true virtue and has reared it up

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he is destined to win the friendship of Heaven; he, above all men, is immortal. (211E–212 A)

In the Platonic tradition love existed in both the material and the ideal worlds. God is the ultimate object of love and identical with the concept of goodness. Aristotle comes to the same conclusion in connection with his idea of God as Unmoved Mover. Plato’s view of transcendent and unchangeable Idea or Form and Aristotle’s identification of God with the Unmoved Mover remain, however, abstract concepts. Plato and Aristotle did not come to the conclusion that God is the Creator of the world and a person with feeling and emotions. The concept of the Unmoved Mover serves as a metaphor for the ultimate reality, without faculties of a person who attracts humans to love him, and he cannot return the love of the persons who are below him. The belief in God as Person, the ultimate Righteousness, Goodness, Love, Mercy and Beauty is the unique novelty of the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament. In Judaism, Christianity (and Islam as the heir of biblical monotheism), the essential tenet of faith is recognition of the inter-personal relationship between God the Creator and the created personal being. The principle of analogia entis is, meanwhile, the key to the conclusion that the Creator attracts all created beings, because He is ontologically bound to the reason and the purpose of Creation. God unites all possible faculties, qualities and values in his own being. Therefore it seems self-evident that beauty and goodness are the luminous revelation of God’s beauty, goodness and love. This belief is also fully in accordance with the human experience of longing for the ultimate truth and love. This longing constitutes the realistic foundation for the belief that love does not manifest itself as an involuntary reaction at the sight of a beautiful being or things but turns out to be subject to volition. Herein lies the justification of religion in terms of a personal relationship between God and humans, which in its very nature implies personal and social responsibility ; in its very essence it is also ethical. The ideal of love is the greatest ethical challenge and is based on the concept of believing in order to understand the meaning of life in the fuller sense. The longing for a pure relationship to God induces appropriate emotions and unifying sentiments as fruits of common belief in God and humans and enriches the concept of love (¦ros) with the characteristic biblical concept of love as charity (ag‚pe). Filial love for the divine Father and fraternal love in relation to all people is the ultimate ideal and purpose of charity. And finally, the belief in God as Creator and Father is the clearest link also between the sensible and non-sensible worlds. To recognize God as the ultimate beauty and goodness means to recognize also the beauty and goodness of the created world and to cherish the invitation to love all people and the whole world. In Judaism and Christianity, a new rela-

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tionship to divinity was established. In Deuteronomy 6: 4 – 5 we find the greatest commandment of the Old Testament: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” The majority of Jewish rabbis hold the view that there was no greater and no lesser commandment, though it is Hillel, the greatest first-century rabbi, who is credited with the authorship (in its negative form) of the so-called Golden Rule summarising the essence of human righteousness: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour, this is the whole Torah, all else is interpretation” (Shabat 31a). Jesus accepted the Golden Rule but used it in a positive form: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets” (Mt 7:12; cf. Lk 6:31). The dispute about the issue of resurrection gives Jesus an opportunity to go a step further and to sum up the heart of biblical religion. Jewish scribes challenge him in connection with what is the first commandment. The presumably oldest Gospel version, given by Mark, reads: One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher ; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself,’ – this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of Go.” After that no one dared to ask him any question. (Mr 12:28 – 34; cf. Mt 22:34 – 40; Lk 10:25 – 28)

This version clearly shows that at this point Jesus and the Pharisees stand on common ground. Both parallels omit the repetition by the scribe, but Matthew’s version adds instead the sentence: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Mt 22:40). On the other hand, in Luke’s version the dispute continues, because the scribe asks Jesus: “And who is my neighbour?” (Lk 10:29) Jesus responds by means of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 12:30 – 37). The message of this illustrative narrative is simple and very clear : love must know no limits of racial or national heritage, of class or culture. The most important point in this universality is the sense of solidarity. The inner connection of the two commandments is based on the theology of the first Creation narrative: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). The theology of Incarnation and Cross added to this principle the entirely personal ground of mutual love. Johannite theology offers some explicit statements em-

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phasizing the inner connection between the love for God and for humans. The Gospel of John states: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). The First Letter of John has an especially significant exhortation with a theological argument 4:7 – 12: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way : God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

The biblical foundation of love-based theology and of new humanism inspired the Church Fathers to reflection on love of God and of neighbour both at the philosophical and at the personal level. Augustine was particularly significant in combining both levels, because his genius shone both in its capacity for profound feeling, contemplation and synthetic philosophical explication. He relates to the common ancient thought that all men seek happiness and to the conclusion that happiness depends on a return to the One God. (Rist 1997: 148 – 202) Augustine’s intensive engagement in reading biblical texts led him to find also the way to achieve happiness in union with God and neighbour alike, and especially what it means to have a sublime experience of love. In On the Gospel of St. John (26.4), Augustine speaks of the pleasures of the heart drawn to Christ, the fountain of life, “when he delights in blessedness, delights in righteousness, delights in everlasting life,” and argues: “Give me a man that loves, and he feels what I say. Give me one that longs, one that hungers, one that is travelling in this wilderness, and thirsting and panting after the fountain of his eternal home; give such, and he knows what I say. But if I speak to the cold and indifferent, he knows not what I say.” Augustine acknowledges, however, more than anybody else the experience of inner struggle for true love. His nature was determined by a very strong longing for the pure core of the self, happiness in enjoying the perfect divine Beauty, and by the reality of the world which tempts him by its external beauty. In Confessions (10.27.38) he describes an inner struggle caused by the attraction of “created things”: Late have I loved (amavi) you beauty (pulchritudo) so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you I

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tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

The contrasting experience of longing for happiness helped Augustine to become attentive to biblical emphasis on grace as the last explanation for the human capacity to love in the proper sense and to gain constancy and faithfulness in communion with God and neighbour. In Confessions he acknowledges: My entire hope is exclusively in your very great mercy. Grant what you command, and command what you will. You require continence. A certain writer has said (Wisd. 8:21): “As I knew that no one can be continent except God grants it, and this very thing is part of wisdom, to know whose gift this is.” By continence we are collected together and brought to the unity from which we disintegrated into multiplicity. He loves you less who together with you loves something which he does not love for your sake. O love (o amor), you ever burn and are never extinguished. O charity (caritas), my God, set me on fire. You command continence, grant what you command, and command what you will. (10.29.40: 202)

We notice that Augustine uses in relation to God the words amor and caritas, thus expressing the inner unity of love. In his work The Happy Life (4.35) he states that the good man is driven by “blazing love” (flagrante caritate). “Blazing love” inspires by nature the sense of truth. In his work On Human Responsibility (2.13.35) and in Confessions (10.23.33), Augustine points to the natural connection between happiness and truth. By the gift of the supreme and true God, creator and maker of every soul and of every body, “all are happy who are happy through verity and not through vanity” (City of God 5.11). Augustine thinks that most people do not love what they should love, but this is also his experience with his own life. His longing for truth in a life of uncompromising love inspires him to express all the more his inner struggle in Soliloquies (1.22): Now let us inquire concerning this, what sort of lover of wisdom thou art, whom thou desirest to behold with most chaste view and embrace, and to grasp her unveiled charms in such wise as she affords herself to no one, except to her few and choicest votaries. For assuredly a beautiful woman, who had kindled thee to ardent love, would never surrender herself to thee, if she had discovered that thou hadst in thy heart another object of affection; and shall that most chaste beauty of Wisdom exhibit itself to thee, unless thou art kindled for it alone? Why then am I still made to hang in wretchedness, and put off with miserable pining? Assuredly I have already made it plain that I love nothing else, since what is not loved for itself is not loved. Now I at least love Wisdom for herself alone, while as to other things, it is for her sake that I desire their things, it is for her sake that I desire their presence or absence, such as life, ease, friends. But what measure can the love of that beauty have in which I not only do not envy others, but even long for as many as possible to seek it, gaze upon it, grasp it and

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enjoy it with me; knowing that our friendship will be the closer, the more thoroughly conjoined we are in the object of our love?

Augustine’s natural sense of grasping the inner unity of love and truth and his devoted reading of Scripture inspired in him the awareness of the inner connection between the commandment of love of God and the commandment of love of the neighbour. His awareness of the importance of love of God and of neighbour in Christianity explains the way Augustine replaced the Stoic principle of right reason by love in his understanding of virtue. As John Rist states: “For while according to the Stoics all forms of virtue are modes of right reason, for Augustine they have become modes of love. As a result of their love for God, says Augustine, men are able to react morally to whatever situation may arise in the course of their lives” (Rist 1997: 161). In his work The Life-Style of the Catholic Church, published in 389, he states (1.26.48): “We can find no surer step toward the love of God than the love of man for man.” From the inner connection between the two commandments it follows that there is no surer step towards the love of man for man than the love of God, for love of God gives reality to all human moral conduct. The inner connection of the two commandments explains why Augustine and other Church Fathers are consistent in explaining love as the common essential core of values and virtues. In City of God (11.28), Augustine explains very clearly the consequences of the inner unity of the two commandments, of love and of virtue: We have yet to speak of the love wherewith they are loved, to determine whether this love itself is loved. And doubtless it is; and this is the proof. Because in men who are justly loved, it is rather love itself that is loved; for he is not justly called a good man who knows what is good, but who loves it. Is it not then obvious that we love in ourselves the very love wherewith we love whatever good we love? For there is also a love wherewith we love that which we ought not to love; and this love is hated by him who loves that wherewith he loves what ought to be loved. For it is quite possible for both to exist in one man. And this co-existence is good for a man, to the end that this love which conduces to our loving well may grow, and the other, which leads us to evil may decrease, until our whole life be perfectly healed and transmuted into good.

The views of Plato and Aristotle and other ancient Greek writers and philosophers, along with the beliefs of the Bible and explications of the Church Fathers jointly influenced the attitude to love in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, the focus of philosophical and theological dispute was on the relative primacy of God’s reason and will. Especially influential was the greatest and most popular dialectician of the age, Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142). To oppose rationalistic influence, some spiritual geniuses focused on the faculties of sentiment and affection. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091 – 1153) vigorously denounced dialectical Scholasticism as a degradation of God’s mysteries and defended the way of

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charity against abstract philosophical methods. He argued that possession of love is the first condition of the knowledge of God. Bernard’s profound and intense love experience and godly wisdom inspired his great reflections on the nature of love in terms of charity. One of most influential works consists of his eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs which are the fruit of his most mature years. These sermons are a treatise on charity and present a synthesis of the whole of his spiritual teaching about God and the relationship between God and humans. In Sermon 50.6 – 7 Bernard points to the ordering of affective love from the first to the last subjects, according to their ontological and moral position: “The higher the nature the more perfect the love it evokes; the lower evokes less, the lowest nothing.” In a second personal address, Bernhard mentions the effect of practising the first commandment: “Then God is indeed experienced, although not as he truly is, a thing impossible for any creature, but rather in relation to your power to enjoy. Then you will experience as well your own true self, since you perceive that you possess nothing at all for which you love yourself, except insofar as you belong to God: you pour out upon him your whole power of loving. I repeat: you experience yourself as you are.” The same principle applies to the second commandment, which concerns love for the neighbour: “If you are to experience him as he is, you will actually experience him only as you do yourself: he is what you are.” At this point, Bernard explains also the way to “love” the enemy : “You who love God cannot love as yourself a human enemy, for he is nothing in that as he does not love God; yet you will love him so that he may love. […] But when it becomes clear that he will not return to the love of God, it is essential that you regard him, not as almost nothing but as totally nothing, in that he will be eternally nothing.” Such exceptional cases can, however, not change the natural openness of love: “The love that is open does not permit the refusal of some feeling, however small, to any man, even to one’s greatest enemy. Who is wise enough to understand these things?” (Bernard 1979, Volume III: 35 – 36) Bernard adorns his doctrinal message about the nature of God with the experience of love: “Even above the stars he loved because he who is love can never anywhere do other than love” (Sermon 70.2; Bernard 1980, Volume IV: 37). Finally, he explains the nature of love from various aspects: Love is sufficient for itself; it gives pleasure to itself, and for its own sake. It is its own merit and own reward. Love needs no cause beyond itself, nor does it demand fruits; it is its own purpose. I love because I love; I love that I may love. Love is a great reality, and if it returns to its beginning and goes back to its origin, seeking its source again, it will always draw afresh from it, and thereby flow freely. Love is the only one of the motions of the soul, of its senses and affections, in which the creature can respond to its Creator, even if not as an equal, and repay his favour in some similar way. […] Now you see how

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different love is, for when God loves, he desires nothing but to be loved, since he loves us for no other reason than to be loved, for he knows that those who love him are blessed in their very love. (Sermon 83.4; Bernard 1980, Volume IV: 184)

No wonder that Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321) refers to Bernard in his Divine Comedy, for his understanding of love is very much the same, even though his vision of love focuses on the figure of Beatrice, the daughter of a Florentine citizen he met in 1274. He loved her from afar, and this was not requited love. The fact that Beatrice remained inaccessible to him both during her life and after her early death might have served as an inspiration to create an allegory of the power and the degree of a love beyond imagination. The experience of love in its most sublime manifestation leads the poet to the direct sight of God, the so-called Beatific Vision. After the death of Beatrice in 1290, Dante wrote the story of his intense and idealistic love for Beatrice, Vita nuova, in which he promised her a poem that “hath not before been written of any woman.” In a dream vision and in the final “wonderful vision” the poet praises her spiritual beauty. This means that he discovered love as self-rewarding and the greatest happiness. Dante’s promise of a full poetic glorification of Beatrice was accomplished in his masterpiece the Divine Comedy, which is generally regarded as the supreme poetic achievement of Christian civilisation. This sublime work of allegorical poetry, and its greatness of conception and construction, is inspired by the poetry of the Bible, even though it is modelled on Virgil’s Aeneid.17 The literal subject of the work is the poet’s journey beyond the grave to meet once more his beloved Beatrice and his ascent to the supreme vision of the divine grace and love. Virgil, sent by the Virgin Mary, St. Lucy, and Beatrice, guides him in his mystical contemplation through the Inferno and the mountain of Purgatorio to the summit from which Beatrice conducts him from heaven to heaven by means of her luminous love. The poet finds the fullest satisfaction of that love in the vision of God. Beatrice is divine illumination and occupies a symbolic role as the light of revealed truth. In his conversation with Virgil on the efficacy of intercessionary prayer, the poet envisions Beatrice as the bridge between the natural

17 See the statement by David H. Higgins in Introduction to Dante 2008: 21: “Already by c. 1304 he had formulated a doctrine of imitatio of the classical poets in his De Vulgari Eloquentia; ‘The more closely we copy the great poets, the more correct is the poetry we write.’ It is not unlikely that by c. 1308, when beginning to write The Divine Comedy, Dante had already formulated an analogous theory with respect to the Bible. The proximity of The Divine Comedy to the Bible has been too often overlooked, and by the Bible I do not mean simply doctrine and imagery, with which The Divine Comedy is replete. We know from the pioneering work of E. H. Moore that the Bible, as a text, is used or referred to by Dante as many times as Aristotle and Virgil put together, but the deeper correspondences are only just becoming apparent as Dante scholarship progresses.”

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and the divine wisdom and grace. This is the way to the inner unity of beauty, love and the uncorrupted truth: But certainly you should not make up your mind On so profound a doubt unless you have it From her who lights the intellect to truth: I do not know whether you understand; I mean Beatrice: you will see her above, At the top of this mountain, smiling and happy. (Purgatorio VI.43 – 48)

In contrast to philosophers who endeavoured to derive knowledge and truth from logic or a dialectic, Bernard of Clairvaux believed that human instruction cannot content the human mind and heart. Personal experience of God makes possible spontaneous acquisition of knowledge as a penetration of God’s light that leads to a mystical union with God. Dante gives Bernard the role of one who commands the poet: And let us turn our eyes to the primal love So that, looking toward him, you may penetrate As far as possible through his refulgence. In truth, in case you should fall back When you move your wings, thinking to go forwards, It is proper that you should seek grace in prayer ; Grace from her who is able to assist you; And you will follow me with your love So that your heart does not stray from my words. (Paradiso XXXII.142 – 150)

The Divine Comedy rests on the belief that one must lose oneself in order to find oneself. Dante does not expect life fulfilment in a union with Beatrice. Her role is to strengthen the driving power of the soul and to guide him through paradise to an ultimate fulfilment of desires. The sincerity of this movement of love touches upon that which sense can never know, supposes all the virtues, and unifies one’s moral life. Realizing one’s insufficiency means abnegation of the self that opens the mind and the heart for discovery of human dignity in its very nature – the indestructible image of God, the union with Him who “moves the sun und the other stars.” Dante concludes his work with “this new vision”: So was I faced with this new vision: I wanted to see how the image could fit the circle And how it could be that that was where it was; But that was not a flight for my wings: Except that my mind was struck by a flash In which what it desired came to it.

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At this point high imagination failed; But already my desire and my will Were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed, By the love which moves the sun and the other stars. (Paradiso XXXIII.136 – 145)

The French novelist Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle: 1783 – 1842) is one of the most compulsive writers about love in more modern times. He followed the lead of senses, instincts and amorous excitement, and was disrespectful of convention. His literary works reflect his personality, determined by fantasies and sentiments, desires for intimacy and friendship, and most of all by conflicts and failures in every respect, especially in matters of love. His search for happiness followed the dictates of self-interest. He dreamed of love and pursued the image of happiness as full sensual enjoyment of life, but in contrast to Bernard and Dante he had no interest in spiritual aspects of love and mysticism. In 1822 he wrote in Paris the book De l’amour (On Love) in which he relived his own emotional life in relation to one woman, Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski, with whom he fell in love in 1818 in Milan. Though he did not speak of his passionate love for her to anybody, she was the key to this book.18 Mathilde died at the age of thirty-five. From accounts of her friends it is known that she was a great personality of most sublime sensibility and actions. Hypersensitive as she was, she neither loved nor understood Stendhal in his obsession with her. He kept her nevertheless throughout the rest of his live in his heart and referred to her in various ways. In Fragments 106 and 115 of this book he expressed the views of Mathilde on her own authority : “In a highly civilized society passionate love is just as natural as physical love among savages”; “The only unions which are legitimate for ever are those ruled by a genuine passion” (Stendhal 2004: 246, 248). In the first attempt at a preface, the writer explains: “Although it deals with love, this little book is not a novel, and above all it is not entertaining like novel. It is simply an exact and scientific description of a brand of madness very rare in France” (Stendhal 2004: 25).19 The book starts by establishing its purpose: “I 18 Jean Stewart and B. C. J. G. Knight write in the Introduction: “He wrote this strange and profoundly perceptive book partly to explain his feelings to her, partly in an attempt to exorcise, by dissecting, a hopeless passion. It thus displays the two conflicting sides of his nature – the deeply sensitive and the coolly analytical. These aspects are indeed present in everything he wrote, but in the great novels they are fused miraculously, whereas in De l’Amour they are in somewhat uneasy juxtaposition” (Stendhal 2004: 16). 19 In footnote 1 to Chapter 3 Stendhal uses the word “ideology” in connection with his presentation of love: “I have called this essay a book of ideology. I intended to convey that although it was about love, it was not a novel, and was not entertaining in the way that a novel is. I beg the forgiveness of the philosophers for having chosen the word ideology ; I certainly had no intention of stealing a title that by rights should belong to someone else. If ideology be

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want to try and establish exactly what this passion is, whose every genuine manifestation is characterized by beauty.” Stendhal then explains four kinds of love and (in Chap. 2) seven stages of falling in love. The kinds of love are: passionate love, mannered love, physical love, vanity-love. In this context he states: “Although physical pleasure, being natural, is known to all it is only of secondary importance to sensitive, passionate people. […] Some virtuous and sensitive women are almost unaware of the idea of physical pleasure. […] Every variety of love mentioned henceforth is born, lives, dies, or attains immortality in accordance with the same law.” In Chapter 2 Stendhal adduces seven steps of love: admiration, awareness of desire, hope, love is born, the first crystallisation begins, doubt creeps in, the second crystallisation (Stendhal 2004: 43 – 47). Love, happiness, beauty, and truth are the key terms for Stendhal. He was more interested in personal relations than in social matters. His capability to love and to find happiness even in unrequited love explains the power of his personal feelings and experience over analytical descriptions and dry observations. In Chapter 9, for instance, he wrote just two sentences of confession: “I am trying extremely hard to be dry. My heart thinks it has so much to say, but try to keep it quiet. I am continually beset by the fear that I may have expressed only a sigh when I thought I was stating a truth” (Stendhal 2004: 57). And most of all, this explains why he cannot agree with those who reduce the concept of beauty to “physical love” and “passionate love”; he knows that they will not agree with his understanding of beauty.20 His answer to the question of “what is beauty” is, “The crystallization about your mistress, that is to say her beauty, is nothing but the sum of the fulfilment of all the desires you have been able to formulate about her” (Stendhal 2004: 59). Stendhal’s sensitive understanding of the foundational values of our civilisation explains, finally, his ironical statement, in Fragment 101, relating to insensitive Discussion between the man of good faith and the man from the Academy : “I have ever observed this kind of argument taking place between such people, where one (the man of good faith) is but seeking truth and yet more truth, while the other seeks the favour of his master or part and the glory of eloquence. And I hold it a great deception and waste of time for the man of good faith to stop and talk with the aforesaid academicians” (Stendhal 2004: 245). In more modern times, Simone Weil (1909 – 1943), a woman of genius, created a relevant definition and explanation of love. Her point of departure is her belief in the all-loving God who is the reason for humans to love themselves and their a detailed description of ideas and of all the parts into which those ideas can be analysed, this book is a detailed and painstaking description of all the feelings which make up the passion called love.” 20 In the note he explains further, “Beauty, as I intend it here, means the promise of a quality useful to my soul, and transcends physical attraction, the latter is only one particular kind.”

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fellow man. She proved the authenticity of her understanding of love through her living love in a living testimony of her consistent solidarity with suffering people, and this determines her understanding of love in terms of the second commandment: “Pure love of creatures is not love in God, but love which has passed through God as through fire” (Weil 2008: 64). Her revolutionary activity in defending pacifism reflects her spirit’s hungering for the eternal principle of God’s love and solidarity with suffering humankind. The editor of her major writings, Gustave Thibon, points to her mystical approach, which explains her emphases in dealing with love: “Apart from the Gospel which was her daily spiritual food, she had a deep veneration for the great Hindu and Taoistic writings, for Homer, the Greek tragedies and above all for Plato, whom she interpreted in a fundamentally Christian manner. On the other hand she hated Aristotle, whom she regarded as the first to prepare a grave for the mystical tradition” (Weil 2008: xi). Her way of perceiving reality, truth, beauty and love inspires her awareness of the contrast between the mind and the heart that requires total purity : The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, scepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical. […] Everything which is vile or second-rate in us revolts against purity and needs, in order to save its own life, to soil this purity. To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil. To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. (Weil 2008: 64)

Simone Weil points to distance and solitude more than to anything else in her explication of beauty, love and friendship: “To desire friendship is a great fault. […] Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue). […] Friendship cannot be separated from reality any more than the beautiful. It is a miracle, like the beautiful. And the miracle consists simply in the fact that it exists” (Weil 2008: 67).

6.3

Love and Justification of Forgiveness

Nowhere are the personal and social implications of a holistic perception of reality as far-reaching as in relation to the challenge of forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation. Within a cosmological or pantheistic world-view of any kind

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there is no foundation for forgiveness. Forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation are possible only between beings as persons. Classical writers and philosophers only recognize notions like excusing, pardon, compassion, lenience, sympathy, but not the concept of forgiveness in the Judeo-Christian and modern sense (Griswold 2007: 2 – 19). Forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation are central to both Testaments of the Bible. The Bible is based on the belief that forgiveness is a sign of love, tantamount to love – or, better, the supreme, the most sublime and redemptive sign of divine and human love. The Bible of the Old and New Testaments is replete with moving narratives and statements about the greatness of divine and human forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation (see Krasˇovec 1999). In the Old Testament, the most well-known and popular is the narrative of Joseph in Egypt (Gen 37 – 50); in the New Testament, the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11 – 32). Some biblical texts explicitly express the causal connection between the divine commandment of the practice of forgiving and human behaviour. In the book of Sirach, there is an example of this in the warning about anger and vengeance in 27:30 – 28:7: Anger and wrath, these also are abominations, yet a sinner holds on to them. The vengeful will face the Lord’s vengeance, for he keeps a strict account of their sins. Forgive your neighbour the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray. Does anyone harbour anger against another, and expect healing from the Lord? If one has no mercy toward another like himself, can he then seek pardon for his own sins? If a mere mortal harbours wrath, who will make an atoning sacrifice for his sins? Remember the end of your life, and set enmity aside; remember corruption and death, and be true to the commandments. Remember the commandments, and do not be angry with your neighbour; remember the covenant of the Most High, and overlook faults.

Within the New Testament, the most important textual example is the Lord’s Prayer (Mt 6:9 – 13; Lk 11:2 – 4), the crucial part being the segment: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Reminiscent of the warning in Sirach is the parable of the unforgiving servant (Mt 18:23 – 35), in which the generous Lord turns into a severe judge declaring his justice: “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?” (Mt 18:32 – 33) Jean Hampton is one of very few modern philosophers capable of penetrating

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into the last possibilities of the biblical implications for the greatness of forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation. In the Introduction to the book she edited in cooperation with Jeffrie G. Murphy she explains, “Jeffrie Murphy is a philosopher of law and I am a political philosopher. Hence, as his portion of this Introduction indicates, the discussions that follow are primarily informed by the theories and methodology of modern moral, political and legal philosophy. However, my interest in these topics also has a religious source, and this source provides another focus for the present book.” She was faced with the contrast between the logic of the mind and that of the heart: “Why, I wondered, do people accept with their heads, but not believe in their hearts, the Christian message of forgiveness?” This kind of disappointment leads her to find out whether she can “follow – or at least try to follow – the commandment to forgive them if, but only if, the commandment was right”; moreover, “to come to grips with the Christian teachings and texts from outside the tradition of theological reflections on these subjects” (Hampton 1988: 10 – 13). Hampton searches for the answer to the issue of forgiveness on the basis of the question of human worth: “The forgiver does not wait for the wrongdoer to prove himself to be morally reborn in order to reassociate with him. Instead, the forgiver trusts that, although he has undergone no rebirth, he is still ‘good enough’ despite what he has done. Forgiveness is thus the decision to see a wrongdoer in a new, more favorable light” (Hampton 1988: 84). Such a trust might seem, psychologically speaking, impossible, but exactly this is the essence of the biblical belief in the human being as the pinnacle of Creation: “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them” (Gen 1:27). This principle is behind such statements as those in the book of Ezekiel declaring that God did not and will not act according to human evils: “Then I thought I would pour out my wrath upon them and spend my anger against them in the midst of the land of Egypt. But I acted for the sake of my name” (Ezek 20:8 – 9; also vv. 13 – 14, 21 – 22, 44). The literal meaning of the phrase “for my name’s sake” (see also 36:22; 1 Sam 12:22; 1 Kings 8:41; Jer 14:7, 21; Ps 106:8; etc.) implies the doctrine that God, against whose all-righteousness men have sinned, nevertheless acts mercifully towards them. In human terms, there is no explanation for this logic; we can only recognize that God is so. The reason God forbears and forgives is to be found in Him, in His transcendent greatness and the universal purpose with his Creation. He is a God who characteristically has mercy and leads the world to completion. In spite of all abominations of Israel, God always finds a core of dignity in sinners and declares his faithfulness to them in order to save them. The exclusively positive purpose of Creation offers a proper foundation for understanding punishment and forgiveness. Forgiveness is possible only when the offended party is able to see the wrongdoer in a favourable light in terms of

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the belief that human beings are “treasures beyond price.” This implies change of heart in the offended person, i. e., warmer feelings and compassion towards the wrongdoer that open up the way to forgiveness and reconciliation. Once the offended party is capable of recognizing an intrinsic worth in the wrongdoer, she/he must be able also to understand the role of punishment in the right sense. Punishment or retribution should not be a reaction of hatred towards the wrongdoer but an asserting of moral truth regarding the intrinsic value and equality of all human beings. When the essence of wrongdoing is an erroneous claim to elevation over the victim, punishment must be in essence a declaration of infliction of a defeat that annuls the wrongdoer’s incorrect claim to superiority, with the purpose of restoring equality of rank and value (Hampton 1988: 11 – 161). The probable reason for refusing forgiveness and forgoing reconciliation is “moral hatred” with an explicit or implicit desire to damage the wrongdoer and to degrade him. Hampton has good reasons to argue that “It is no more right when the victim tries to degrade or falsely diminish the wrongdoer than when the wrongdoer originally degraded or falsely diminished the victim” (145). There is general agreement in the view that wrongdoers do not have a right to be forgiven by their victims. Forgiveness is not considered an act of duty but an undeserved gift or grace. We have, however, sufficient reasons to consider forgiveness our duty, because we are not perfect and we all need compassion and forgiveness on many occasions. In the final analysis, the grace of forgiveness stems from love and represents probably the most sublime quality of love. The inner connection between love and forgiveness explains why the Bible assures in many ways that God’s love for us is unconditional. Nearly twenty years after Hampton and Murphy’s volume, Charles L. Griswold published at the same publishing house his study Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. How can an expressly philosophical account of the issue of forgiveness come to terms with the literary presentations of love, forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation characteristic of biblical poetry, narratives and parables and of literature in general? An in-depth analysis of extant texts, along with common sense, makes it clear that purely rational philosophical arguments are not sufficient when it comes to the most important points. But in contrast to Hampton, Griswold limits the scope by declaring in the Prologue: “In the present book I offer an analysis of forgiveness as a secular virtue (that is, as not dependent on any notion of the divine), although I will also make reference to theological discussion as appropriate, both by way of contrast and because the touchstone of modern philosophical discussion of the topic is to be found in Bishop Butler” (Griswold 2007: xv, cf. xvii). Griswold explains that his sense of forgiveness is limited to the secular understanding of “interpersonal forgiveness,” but for the sake of clarity he distinguishes five other meanings related to

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the term of forgiveness: political apology, economic forgiveness, political pardon, judicial pardon and metaphysical forgiveness. For the term metaphysical forgiveness he says, “This may be characterized as the effort to give up ressentiment caused by the manifold imperfections of the world. It comes to forgiving the world for being the sort of place that brings with it a spectrum of natural and moral evils, from death, illness, physical decay, and the unstoppable flow of the future into the past, to our limited control over fortune, to the brute fact of the all too familiar range of wrongs people do to each other and to themselves” (Griswold 2007: xix). Griswold recognizes that “A moment’s reflection reveals that forgiveness is a surprisingly complex and elusive notion. It is easier to say what it is not, than what it is” (Griswold 2007: xiv), and explains: “A fundamental thesis of this book is that forgiveness is a concept that comes with conditions attached. It is governed by norms. Forgiveness has not been given, or received, simply because one believes or feels that it has been” (Griswold 2007: xv). Griswold’s self-limitation results in limitations in the possibility of defending human dignity, to be aware of mutual vulnerability and to make reciprocal moral claims in the human community. This runs contrary to the traditional belief that forgiveness is a specific Judeo-Christian tenet of faith that opposes pagan ways of perceiving the world. He is not sufficiently aware that classical and many modern philosophers, for various reasons, do not possess the appropriate conditions for considering forgiveness a genuine virtue and value. The “logical” consequence of Griswold’s general approach to the topic lies in his assumption that forgiveness is conditional in nature. In Chapter 3, while dealing with “imperfect forgiveness,” he states that forgiveness can be granted on condition that three “baseline conditions” are fulfilled: 1) the willingness of the victim to try to diminish her level of resentment, as well as her ability to do so to some minimal degree, and to forswear revenge; 2) the willingness of the offender to take minimal steps to qualify for forgiveness; 3) that the injury be humanly forgivable. His conclusion is: “Only when all three are met does forgiveness come off at all” (Griswold 2007: 115). His insistence that forgiveness must be conditional brings him to the difficulty of how to cope with the view of those who encourage forgiving the unrepentant: One could argue that an excellent way to encourage the offender to repent is precisely to forgive her even if she is unrepentant; bestowing this “gift” opens a moral door for the offender and leads the way through it. Now, it is possible that the offender will see the light streaming in through that door, and that the conditions for true forgiveness will be enacted backwards, as it were. One can imagine conditions under which “prospective forgiving” is based on a reasonable hunch about the person’s ability to change, if shown the way. My claim is that whatever it is that the injured party is doing proleptically, it is

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not forgiving, but something else that seeks to become forgiveness but has not yet crossed the threshold as defined at the start of this chapter. (Griswold 2007: 121 – 122)

Griswold’s view that forgiveness is “governed by norms” precludes him from the admission that forgiveness could in the final analysis be unconditional. The assumption that forgiveness is governed by norms causes conceptual confusion especially when one tries to explain the relationship between the personal and the non-personal and between the normative and the non-normative, and especially how forgiveness relates to love. Interpersonal relationships are based first of all on trust; therefore they cannot be reduced to norms. Forgiveness has to do with love, but true love is of the true self, so it is clear that true forgiveness comes from the true self. Unconditional love means love without condition and by its very nature it stretches beyond reciprocal love to love of everyone and everything. In relation to humans true love separates individuals from their behaviour and allows for treating all people as equals who in their inner core are worthy of redemption in spite of questionable acts they have committed. Experience of unconditional love has little to do with personal views, societies and religions, which tend to become a system of norms. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his Acceptance Speech on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1964: Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. […] I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. […] I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. […] I still believe that We Shall overcome!

David Konstan’s recent monograph Before Forgiveness follows Griswold’s interest in pointing to the development of “the modern concept of forgiveness” on an interpersonal human level. He argues that the modern notion of interpersonal forgiveness is absent from the Greco-Roman world and not fully developed in the Bible, ancient Judaism, Patristic and mediaeval authors. Konstan argues that this modern notion developed in the framework of Kant’s moral philosophy, namely of his notion of “a change of the self” in the process of repentance. There is a tendency in this book to point to “missing” notions and definitions of interpersonal forgiveness instead of understanding the reasons for lack of interest in such notions and definitions. The analytical method of the book shows that there is a great difference between the organic and interrelated aspects of forgiveness in Judeo-Christian sources of belief, knowledge and life and the more modern tendency to analyse everything, even the mysteries of life. But this is

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probably not the path to the ideal of a profound moral and spiritual transformation of the human heart as reflected in the Judeo-Christian organic interconnection between Divine and human forgiveness. The common point between the coldness of the cosmological and social orientation of the classical Greco-Roman civilisation and the more modern normative attitude to reality, truth, love and forgiveness is giving preference to social norms instead of promoting radical moral transformation of human persons in a roundabout existential manner, but it is obvious that the inspiration of forgiveness that reaches beyond norms can contribute something real to reconciliation within society as a whole. A critical presentation of approaches to the topic of forgiveness and implications for understanding of conditions and reasons for granting forgiveness is an appropriate foundation for presenting literary works that deal with this topic. In this limited framework, a presentation of the play The Tempest, the last play that William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) wrote alone, seems a most suitable example. The play centres on the story of Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, who came to a remote island after his brother Antonio removed him, with the complicity of King Alonso of Naples, and put him to sea to die with his threeyear-old daughter Miranda. Prospero and Miranda appear on a remote island, which they have inhabited for twelve years. After a lapse of some time, Prospero recounts to Miranda the dreadful crime of his brother. To Miranda’s question “How came we ashore?” (1.2.159), Prospero answers: “By providence divine” (1.2.160). The underlying call for justice dictates to Prospero that he should conjure up a storm when Alonso, Antonio, Sebastian and his son Ferdinand, and Antonio’s counsellor Gonzalo were sailing home from Africa to Italy, thus bringing them to the same island. Alonso’s son Ferdinand wanders around the island and meets Prospero and Miranda. At this point the play reaches the first happy high-point. When Miranda sees Ferdinand she exclaims (1.2.418 – 419): “A thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble.” Ferdinand is equally filled with admiration of Miranda (1.2.420 – 426): Most sure the goddess On whom these airs attend. Vouchsafe my prayer May know if you remain upon this island, And that you will some good instruction give How I may bear me here. My prime request, Which I do last pronounce, is – O you wonder – If you be maid, or no?

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Miranda replies (1.2.426 – 427): “No wonder, sir, but certainly a maid.” Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love. After some hesitation, Prospero ultimately consents to their union, but provides some instructions for Ferdinand (4.1.13 – 23): Then, as my gift, and thine own acquisition Worthily purchased, take my daughter. But If thou dost break her virgin-knot before All sanctiomious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be ministered, No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall To make this contract grow, but barren hate, Sour-eyed disdain and discord shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed, As Hymen’s lamps shall light you.

In the final act, Prospero reveals his identity to Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian. He forgives them, and Alonso in turn restores Prospero’s dukedom; Prospero promises to have them all return safely to Italy. In the conclusion, all the main characters are brought together before Prospero, who forgives Alonso. At this point, the main themes of the play become fully apparent: guilt, punishment, friendship, love, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation based on restoration. Ariel, a spirit whom Prospero had rescued from a tree, disguises himself and reveals to the guilty men the causal link between their wickedness and the work of Destiny that rules the world under God. He recalls both the crime of usurpation and their subsequent cruelty in abandoning Prospero and Miranda to the sea. Ariel proclaims in 3.3.53 – 82 that sinful deeds will always torment the impenitent sinner and that God’s justice will ultimately prevail. Ariel’s speech is a plea for repentance summoning up all elements of the process of contrition – awareness of the crime committed, repentance and renewal of “a clear life” (3.3.53 – 80): You are three men of sin, whom Destiny – that hath to instrument this lower world, And what is in’t, the never-surfeited se Hath caused to belch up you, and on this island, Where man doth not inhabit – you ’mongst men Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad; And even with suchlike valour men hang and drown Their proper selves. [Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio draw their swords] You fools! I and my fellows Are ministers of Fate. The elements Of whom your swords are tempered m as well

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Wound the loud winds, or with bemocked-at stabs Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish One dowl that’s in my plume. My fellow ministers Are like invulnerable. If you could hurt, Your swords are now too massy for your strengths, And will not be uplifted. But remember – For that’s my business to you – that you three From Milan did supplant good Prospero; Exposed unto the sea – which hat requite it – Him, and his innocent child; for which foul deed, The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have Incensed the seas and shores, yea, all the creatures Against your peace. Thee of thy son, Alonso, They have bereft; and do pronounce by me Ling’ring perdition – worse than any death Can be at once – shall step by step attend You, and your ways, whose wraths to guard you from – Which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls Upon your heads – is nothing but heart’s sorrow, And a clear life ensuing.

The sin of fratricide evokes the biblical figure of Cain, who murdered his brother Abel and later became aware of his punishment: “I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me” (Gen 4:14). The action of drawing swords by the three guilty men is a physical reflection of their insane reaction – instead of confessing their guilt they manifest stubbornness. Prospero approves of Ariel’s request and expresses his satisfaction that they are in his “power” (3.3.90). In a moment of self-examination, Alonso reflects on his sin, confesses it and recognizes the causal link between his guilt and the assumed loss of his son (3.3.95 – 102): O, it is monstrous: monstrous! Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper. It did bass my trespass; Therefore my son i’ th’ ooze is bedded; and I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded And with him there lie mudded.

Gonzalo expresses the inward pangs of guild regarding Prospero’s brother Antonio, the complicit Alonso and his brother Sebastian (3.3.115 – 110): All three of them are desperate. Their great guilt, like poison given to work a great time after, Now ’gins to bite the spirits. I do beseech you,

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That are of suppler joints, follow them swiftly, And hinder them from what this ecstasy May now provoke them to.

Act 4 concludes with Prospero’s expression of satisfaction (4.1.256 – 260) Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour Lies at my mercy all mine enemies. Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou Shalt have the air at freedom. For a little Follow, and to me service.

In Act 5 Prospero reveals his view of the nature of the three men’s guilt and of his decision to forgive them under the condition that his dukedom be restored to him. In conversation with the spirit Ariel Prospero declares that, in the final analysis, he is prepared to forgive even the impenitent Antonio and Sebastian in order to help them to regain their personal moral identity so that “they shall be themselves” (5.1.21 – 32): Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their kind, that relish all as sharply Passion as they, be kindlier than thou art? Though with their high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick, Yet, with my nobler reason, ’gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue, than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. Go, release them, Ariel. My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore, And they shall be themselves.

David Lindley argues: “The formula Prospero uses recalls the priest’s words in the absolution at Morning and Evening Prayer: ‘Almighty God … hath given power and commandment to his ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins’” (Shakespeare 2007: 200, note). At this point, Ariel brings Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian and Antonio, attended by Adrian and Francisco, to Prospero. When they stand “charmed” before him, Prospero announces (5.1.58 – 87) the following: A solemn air, and the best comforter To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains, Now useless, boiled within the skull. There stand, For you are spell-stopped. Holy Gonzalo, honourable man, Mine eyes, ev’n sociable to the show of thine, Fall fellowly drops. The charm dissolves apace,

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And as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason. O good Gonzalo, My true preserver, and a loyal sir To him thou follow’st, I will pay thy graces Home both in word and deed. Most cruelly Didst thou, Alonso, use me, and my daughter. Thy brother was a furtherer in the act – Thou art pinched for’t now, Sebastian! Flesh and blood, You, brother mine, that entertained ambition, Expelled remorse and nature, who, with Sebastian – Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong – would here have killed your king; I do forgive thee, Unnatural though thou art. – Their understanding Begins to swell, and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shore That now lies foul and muddy. Not one of them That yet looks on me, or would know me. Ariel, Fetch me the hat and rapier in my cell. [Exit Ariel] I will discase me, and myself present As I was sometime Milan Quickly, spirit, Thou shalt ere long be free.

Commentators do not generally recognize that Prospero’s instruction to Ariel that he will “present” himself before the lords evokes the story of Joseph of Egypt (Gen 37 – 50), who presents himself before his guilty brothers in the position of his power in the Egyptian court (45:1 – 15). In fact, there are many similarities between the story of Joseph and of Prospero: both were stripped of their original position by “brother(s)”; both were guided by God’s Providence through many vicissitudes; both organize a solemn occasion when they present themselves to their “brothers” who are so “charmed” that they are not able to recognize them;21 and most chiefly : both forgive their “brother(s)” when they are in the hand of Joseph/Prospero in order to restore their families. When Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers, he presents his philosophy of history : “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father 21 David Lindley comments thus on the moment of presentation of Prospero before the lords: “The lords would not recognise him because he is not wearing appropriate dress, rather than simply because they have not seen him for twelve years. It is dramatic convention that changes of clothes make a character unrecognisable” (Shakespeare 2007: 203, notes). That said, Shakespeare might have had his own reasons for preparing a total surprise for the wicked lords.

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to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt” (45:7 – 8). He believes that being sold to the Ishmaelites was an unwitting carrying-out of God’s will. In Shakespeare’s play, on the other hand, Prospero teaches the same philosophy of history to his daughter Miranda when he reveals to her what transpired twelve years previously. When she asked “How came we ashore?” he answered, “By providence divine” (1.2.158 – 159). In both stories, sinners are driven to confession of their guilt by extreme distress. In such a situation Joseph’s brothers confess: “Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother ; we saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen. That is why this anguish has come upon us” (42:21). Similarly, Alonso confesses his guilt once he finds himself totally helpless after the shipwreck on the remote island (3.3.95 – 102). The sinners in distress became aware that retribution was deserved. Now they were facing the final exposure of their own souls to themselves, and they found that the inward repression was worse than the overwhelming punishment itself. In total surprise, Alonso manifests a sign of true penitence by performing an act of reparation; he “resigns” Prospero’s dukedom and entreats his pardon for his wrongs (5.1.111 – 119). Prospero treats, however, the “traitors” Sebastian and Antonio more harshly (5.1.130 – 134). His brother Antonio did not show any sign of repentance. Nevertheless, he forgives his “rankest fault”: For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive Thy rankest fault – all of them – and require My dukedom of thee, which perforce I know Thou must restore.

In his Introduction, David Lindley explains Prospero’s difficulty in forgiving his unrepentant brother Antonio by referring to the priestly words of the absolution in the Morning and Evening Prayer and comments: “But the forgiveness there offered to a congregation ‘being penitent’ is not in the priest’s power to command or bestow, but only for God to lend. Prospero finally accepts that he, likewise, cannot set conditions on forgiveness, recognising instead that he is bound by another biblical imperative – to forgive a brother, not seven times, but seventy times seven (Mt 18:21 – 22). With gritted teeth and in grudging words Prospero acknowledges that his human (or humane) ‘virtue’ is to be found in forgiveness which is unconditional” (Shakespeare 2007: 52). The twenty-line Epilogue brings the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation to a fitting conclusion. Happy at having regained his dukedom “and pardoned the deceiver,” Prospero affirms complete restoration (lines 14 – 20): And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer

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Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.

In considering The Tempest we may conclude that Shakespeare created in this play an especially open text because its main themes reach beyond the issue of human power. We cannot expect assertive guidance in questions of interpretation and coherence. Existential experience opens, however, unlimited new horizons for our intuitive longing for coherence and harmony in the interaction between our mind and the reasons of the heart. Stephen Orgel argues in the Introduction to one edition of the play that “all interpretations are essentially arbitrary” and he therefore tries to be faithful to “the characteristic openness of the text that has come down to us, and to the variety and complexity of its contexts and their implications” (Shakespeare 2008: 12). Shakespeare referred quite extensively to the Bible and the Prayer Book, but not so much in terms of letters as in terms of the supernatural orientation of philosophy of history. Destiny (3.3.53 – 54) under God rules the world; God’s providence saved Prospero and his little daughter (1.2.159), and twelve years later it caused the shipwreck on the sea to avenge a crime against nature and family bonds. Solitary life on the remote isle transformed Prospero to the extent that he discovered the weakness of power and the strength of generosity. Only in the end was he able to imitate the long-suffering nature of God who anxiously desires wicked people to return to him. The concern with repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation reflect his maturity, which is the great fruit of his suffering over twelve years. His new experience of the limit of power inspires him with the confidence in God’s power that manifests itself in the strength of forgiveness. Prospero’s will to forgive and his concern with restoration are reminiscent of the divine declaration in the context of the “utopian” promise of the “new covenant” from Jeremiah 31:34, quoted in the Epistle to the Hebrews (8:12): “I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” In the context of Shakespeare’s character pondering theological and philosophical questions the meeting between Alonso’s son Ferdinand and Prospero’s daughter Miranda cannot be regarded as mere incident but as an instance of God’s Providence pointing to the possibility of reconciliation and regeneration through the harmony of marriage of innocent young people who, though apparently having met by accident, in reality met strictly in accordance with the hidden divine plan that rules the world from the realms lying beyond good and evil.22 22 David Lindley is certainly right when he interprets the role of “the language of religion” in The Tempest: “The language of religion, necessarily implicated in the representation of

magic, cannot be neglected in any comprehensive account of the play. This is not, emphatically not, to claim that The Tempest is a religious allegory ; but rather to observe that its engagement with religious paradigms of repentance and forgiveness, power and its limitations, animates yet another ‘discursive field’ that must be taken as seriously as all the other contexts we have so far discussed” (Shakespeare 2007: 53).

7. Reality and Truth in the Search of Love in France Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica

ˇ rtomir, This section examines the presentation of love between Bogomila and C the main characters in The Baptism at the Savica by France Presˇeren (1800 – 1849). Written by the foremost Slovenian poet, The Baptism at the Savica was the first attempt at a Slovenian epic or Romantic poem of nation-forming scope (Zupan Sosicˇ 2002: 267). More than on the national perspective of the 8th Christianization of Slovenians, the focus here is on the realm of the personal, on the intimate experience of love that makes a transition from desire to sacrifice. Though Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica is primarily a verse epic, in an artistic and aesthetic sense there is also much moral and ethical drama to be seen. In the national context, drama first appears in the poet’s evocation of an historical battle – the violent early Medieval Christianization of the community of Alpine and Pannonian Slavs that were the predecessors of today’s Slovenians. ˇ rtomir and The Christian Valjhun and his army violently quell the rebellious C ˇ rtomir his forces. As Presˇeren relates in the 26 tercets of the “Introduction,” C enters into battle with the stronger Christian army and suffers defeat.23 The struggle between opposing passions is not limited to external events. The poem’s dramatic nature manifests itself primarily through the dramatic characters and especially through dramatic dialogues between opposites.24 Such oppositions are depicted most clearly in the second part of the poem, when Presˇeren moves 23 This conceiving of the dramatic, which derives from the idea of a dramatic act being a willful act that gives rise to discord, disagreements and struggles, along with the existence of some will, some volition that causes conflict (Kralj 1964: 5), is in keeping with Aristotle’s description of Greek tragedy as well as with classic and classicist European theatre practice: “Antique Greek, Elizabethan, Shakespearean Theatre and French and German theatre of classicism as the struggle between passions” (Kralj 1964: 5). The conversational and conceptual drama that arose in the 19th century was also characterised as “a conflict of ideas, opposing opinions and views” (Kralj 1964: 5). 24 Although that which is dramatic is based on oppositions, not every opposition is in itself a conflict (Kralj 1964); drama remains the literary genre that most lucidly depicts the world in its oppositions and contrasts, but also in its conflicts. Especially in modern drama the share of oppositions is undoubtedly greater than that of external struggles.

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from the national and societal level, which deals collectively and objectively with the external historical truth,25 to a personal, intimate and subjective level. There are three parts to the poem: at the beginning is an elegiac sonnet ˇ op (1797 – 1835), a Slovenian linguist, dedicated to Presˇeren’s mentor Matija C literary historian and critic, who died too young; the first part of the poem proper, “Introduction,” consists of 26 three-line stanzas in tercet form that ˇ rtomir’s pagan warriors and describe the heroic 8th-century battle between C Valjhun’s mighty Christian army ; “The Baptism,” the second, and longer, part ˇ rtomir’s tragic individual destiny after the has over 50 stanzas and describes C battle. The narrative description of the epic events evokes a South Slav folk epic (Osolnik 2002: 113). Although some literary critics see view The Baptism at the Savica as a “national epic,” Presˇeren employed a Romance poetic form in order to infuse the material with the spirit of “high” art (Novak 2002: 55). As agonizing as this Christianization through force was, it was in fact necessary for the continued existence of the Slovenians and for their inclusion into the European faith system. As well, it took some thousand years for the Slovenians to adopt high European culture and the eminent literary forms that would rank them as equals of other European nations (Hladnik 2002: 196 – 197).26 For the “Introduction,” Presˇeren imported into Slovenian the rhymes and rhythms of the Dantesque tercet,27 one of the most important Italian stanza forms. In this he was influenced by the Brothers Schlegel, who promoted the use of Romance verse forms, arguing that such non-Germanic forms were most conducive to expressing Romantic emotions. Dante’s realisation of this form in The Divine Comedy resulted in a canonical work of world literature (Novak 2002: 52). Presˇeren also transplanted the ottava rima stanza that was mostly likely created by Boccaccio and was the primary stanza from of the Renaissance epic, as exemplified in Ariosto’s epic Orlando furioso. The form was welcomed during Romanticism, as evidenced by such works as Byron’s satirical epic Don Juan28 and Presˇeren’s own “The Baptism” portion of The Baptism at the Savica.

25 Vladimir Osolnik points out parallels between the epic aspect of the narrative and the South Slavic folk epic, which focuses primarily on “four events: the birth or lineage of the hero, which highlights his exceptional character ; the hero’s youth and many battles or exploits; his marriage and conflicts and other trials connected with that; the death of the hero, usually in a heroic battle or in uncommon, exceptional circumstances” (Osolnik 2002: 113). 26 By introducing the most recognised and noble European poetic forms into Slovenian lands, along with complex literary themes, Presˇeren showed that Slovenian is no less capable than other languages, and that the “Slovenian nation had a right to an independent existence” (Hladnik 2002: 196 – 197). 27 “Terza rima” is Italian for “third rhyme.” 28 Originally used for long poems that were heroic in subject matter, “ottava rima” was later

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Throughout the poem oppositions and contradictions provide for dramatic impetus, and this is reflected at the levels of form and content. Presˇeren is more interested in existential discord and dissonance than in peace and harmony. The poem, however, is not limited to dramatic elements, as there are also epic and lyrical elements. Most of the poem is in fact devoted to the epic narrative so vibrantly transmitted to the reader; but this epic tale is dramatically discordant, unsettled, agitated. A similar drama also resides in the lyrical elements, as can be seen in the subjective and emotional meeting of the heroes Bogomila and ˇ rtomir and in the subjective confessions to which their emotional states lead C them.

7.1

Love and Renunciation in Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica

In their studies of Presˇeren’s Baptism at the Savica, Janko Kos, Boris Paternu, Taras Kermauner, Janez Vrecˇko, Alojzija Zupan Sosicˇ and others have written about the theme of love. All of them have inevitably touched on the issue of love in general. Alojzija Zupan Sosicˇ sees an “important convergence of two concepts of love, romantic and Christian” in the harmonious image of patriotic and erotic love, though this is followed by “romantic love resignation” (Zupan Sosicˇ 2002: 267). In her view Presˇeren successfully and “harmonically united all three types of Romantic love: Romantic love (as a medieval heritage), love for the nation (the homeland) and love of art (literature).” Added to these in The Baptism at the Savica is the Christian idea of spiritual love. This section aims to shed light on matters of love in Presˇeren from perspectives that have not yet been given much treatment – it considers love from the viewpoints of the relation between desire and sacrifice, the main heroes’ renunciation of love, while also considering sacrifice thematically and in terms of religious anthropology and ethics. It is from these various viewpoints that it examines the love between Bogomila and ˇ rtomir. C ˇ rtomir and Bogomila Stanzas 8 and 9 of The Baptism at the Savica relate how C are smitten with each other from their first meeting and how, over the course of a year, this attraction grows into a pure love that is as powerful as death. Already ˇ rtomir, due to the Christian Valjhun’s attack, the next two stanzas tells of how C had to separate himself from Bogomila in the service of defending the pagan ˇ rtomir decides to enter into battle against Valjhun’s faith of his ancestors. C

used in many mock-heroic poems. Giovanni Boccaccio is believed to be the first to have used this form.

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mighty army, even if this is “without a hope” (Presˇeren 1999: 125). The rest of the poem is dedicated to the theme of love. After suffering defeat on the battlefield and despairing at the death of all of his ˇ rtomir wants to take his life, but when he thinks of Bogomila, “his comrades, C wish for living is restored” (Presˇeren 1999: 125). The subsequent seven stanzas are dedicated to his search for Bogomila. Helped by a “friendly fisherman” his burning desire is fulfilled in stanzas 16 through 22. During his meeting with Bogomila, which is played out in a long dialogue between the two (beginning in ˇ rtomir. Bogomila, however, stanza 23), immense happiness and passion befalls C tries to tell him why separation is inevitable for them – the reason for this necessity lies in her conversion to the Christian faith and her conviction that it ˇ rtomir alive in the battle that killed all of his was a Christian God that kept C comrades. At the conclusion of her speech, Bogomila asks that he too convert to the Christian faith. ˇ rtomir thanks her for her love, suffering and care; in stanzas 36 and 37, he C professes his love and unwavering devotion for her, and states he is ready to “wholly cede” his life and that she may “Command its faith, its thoughts, its ev’ry deed!” (Presˇeren 1999: 136).29 Although the Christian God, whom Bogomila calls ˇ rtomir to be a “God of wrath” – after all, so “a God of love,” initially seems to C ˇ rtomir decides much blood has been spilled in the fight for the Christian faith – C to let himself be baptised as proof of his devotion to his loved one; afterwards, he plans to marry her as soon as possible (stanza 39). But Bogomila has to disappoint his hopes once again. She explains the reason for her rejecting his marriage proposal: she has promised God that she will remain eternally chaste in ˇ rtomir in the battle. exchange for His having saved C Bogomila experiences the Christian God as love incarnate, as “That God the God of love they truly call” (Presˇeren 1999: 133), as is written in several places in ˇ rtomir’s valour the Bible, including the chapter “God Is Love” (1 John 4:7 – 21). C and courage, seen from the start of the poem, fades as he realizes that he will remain alone also in love. Bogomila states: You speak the truth; for me no joys await; They are, will be unknown to me always; My father ne’er achieved a vict’ry great. (Stanza 46; Presˇeren 1999: 141) So flight’s my hope, the woods a refuge near. To join with me is most unwise to choose, Whom dire misfortune constantly pursues. (Stanza 47; Presˇeren 1999: 141)

29 This is similar to the so-called courtly devotion seen also in the myth of Tristan and Isolde. The brave knight’s loyalty to the law of courtly love entails a renunciation of complete fulfilment through physical love – for that would no longer be love.

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ˇ rtomir’s distress and comforts him by promising him a love Bogomila senses C that nothing can extinguish and that will be revealed “when we come to bid this world adieu” (Presˇeren 1999: 143), when she will wait in Heaven as a virgin bride. In a state of distress, he has a vision of eternal union with her. The nature surrounding him begins to shiver with light – a rainbow appears and pours its pure gleaming beauty over Bogomila’s pale, gentle face. The unusual scene of ˇ rtomir and unsettles him: unimaginable and inexpressible beauty seizes C Now out between the clouds appears sunlight, Whose rays the pureness of their beauty shed; On Bogomila pale a rainbow bright, A heav’nly glow o’er her dear face is spread. He cannot hide the tears which dim his sight; He thinks the heav’ns have opened overhead, And that he stands no more in this world’s realm, So does this vision him quite overwhelm. (stanza 50; Presˇeren 1999: 143)

ˇ rtomir is struck dumb by the sudden appearance of the rainbow. The poet does C ˇ rtomir, not reveal what is going on inside the hero; he only describes that C moved, decides to carry out Bogomila’s wish in the service of his love for her. He promises her a loyalty based solely on love rather than the legality of marriage. Material worth is no longer of any importance to him, and he renounces his gold, asking Bogomila to give it to the poor. Bogomila’s words provoke a severe shock ˇ rtomir, but before taking leave of her he silently consents to baptism and in C thereby makes her happy one last time (“And joy illuminates the maiden’s eyes” – Presˇeren 1999: 145). ˇ rtomir and Bogomila’s pain is most intense when they say farewell, when C love shows itself to be “the most violent” of passions (Irvine 2006: 14). In this context the motif of sacrifice as a “specific kind of gift” moves into the foreground (Halbertal 2012: 3), as they renounce their will in exchange for eternal love beyond earthly existence. Whereas at the beginning of the poem Bogomila ˇ rtomir make offerings to the pagan goddess Zˇiva on the Island of Bled, and and C ˇ Crtomir and his soldiers sacrifice themselves for their country, after the battles and conversion to Christianity the sacrifice of the young couple is linked to love and to the practices of atonement and expiation. The two also renounce each other. ˇ rtomir was absent, Bogomila traded her reverence for the pagan When C ˇ goddess Ziva, whom Presˇeren equates with Aphrodite or Venus in a footnote of sorts (“Zˇiva, the goddess of love, the Slavic Venus”) (Presˇeren 1999: 147), in favour of the Virgin Mary and the new “God of love” (Vrecˇko 2002: 284). Bogomila is described in the poem as beautiful, innocent, modest, ethereal and gentle by nature, but at the same time steadfast and consistent in her decisions. It

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appears that her character is the very opposite of the lovely but bold Julija Primic who inspired Presˇeren’s poetic oeuvre for so long – for unlike the beautiful but essentially hollow Julija, Bogomila is possessed of an inner beauty, and a rich inner world. ˇ rtomir we are witness to transformation of In the story of Bogomila and C sacrifice: this is first seen as the more elemental and basic form of ritual, as a harvest offering to the goddess Zˇiva on Bled Island, while with the arrival of Christianity self-sacrifice replaces such sacrifice. Especially Bogomila appears to be following the example of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, for she informs ˇ rtomir that only suffering can cleanse man of his sins, and she repeats the C priest’s words: “How all of Eve’s and Adam’s sins of old / By Christ’s blood on the Cross were purified” (Presˇeren 1999: 133). ˇ rtomir and Bogomila The capacity to sacrifice oneself for another that C embody is present in Kant’s moral philosophy, as well as in other moral phiˇ rtomir passes a moral test when, losophies, namely, as a key to an ethical life. C given the choice between love of the self and self-transcendence, he renounces his will and opts for the latter. But it seems that saying farewell is more difficult for him than it is for Bogomila, as only “his eyes with teardrops swell” (Presˇeren 1999: 145), whereas Bogomila remains resolute, as if she were no longer connected to the sensual world. ˇ rtomir’s sacrifice one must distinguish beTo understand Bogomila’s and C tween the term “sacrifice”, which derives from the Latin “sacrificium” (from: caser – sacred; facere – to do”), and the term “devotion,” which derives from the Latin word “devotio.” As German anthropologist Joseph Henninger (1906 – 1991) explains, the term sacrificium connotes “the religious act in the highest, or fullest senses; it can also be understood as the act of sanctifying or consecrating an object” (Henninger 1987: 544 – 557) and the word is most often used in the sense of ritual sacrifice of animals, or even humans, as a gift to a deity. “Devotion,” meanwhile, is explained by religious studies scholar David Kinsley (1939 – 2000) as indicating self-sacrifice, and understood as a burning, passionate affection, devotion, and loyalty ; as reverence and fidelity, as a deep respect, care, loyalty or love for a person, soul or deity, or for God (Kinsley 1987: 321 – 326). Kinsley notes that “devotion” is often linked to asceticism and devoting oneself to a spiritual or monastic calling (Kinsley 1987: 325). It is in this sense ˇ rtomir and Bogomila’s sacrifice in that we understand the significance of C Presˇeren’s poem, where sacrificial love is described in terms of the protagonists’ renunciation of physical love or in opting for asceticism and a monastic life. Especially Bogomila’s opting for sacrifice, thus, must be understood in the context of the religious sphere of offering or dedication, of giving up the self to ˇ rtomir’s being saved from a certain death. While there are God in exchange for C many ways of accounting for asceticism or monasticism, according to Kinsley

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such decisions are often linked to devotion and self-sacrifice (especially in the theistic traditions of believing in God or in gods as well as in the Buddhist traditions of East Asia). The eternal covenant that Bogomila has made with God is firmer and more binding than the relative fleetingness of marital union would be, and she thus states: He does not know true love who thinks its flame By dire misfortune can extinguished be; For it will flicker pure, for e’er the same As now, when from my body I’ll be free; I am denied by th’ stronger heave’nly claim From tasting of its sweetness nuptially. But when we come to bid this world adieu Then you will see how pure my love, how true. (Presˇeren 1999:143)

ˇ rtomir to lead an ascetic life and adds that he should travel She also convinces C throughout Slovenian lands and speak of “God’s promises”: So that God’s promises be testified Go preach them now to all the lands Slovene; To God and you my faith will fast abide For all the days on earth for me foreseen. Then with the Father I, your virgin bride Shall wait for you on high in heav’n serene Until your flocks their pastor’s death lament, Till you up to the realms of light are sent. (Presˇeren 1999:143)

ˇ rtomir falls silent. It appears that his future life After agreeing to be baptised, C will be dedicated to Bogomila and to carrying out the mission he has committed himself to, and the poem concludes: ˇ rtomir soon learned In Aquileia C The Holy Word, the truthful testament; Ordained, his youthful hopes he spurned; He went amidst those of Slovene descent, And further too, all error overturned Until his death. And Bogomila went Home to her father’s house, her place of birth; They never met again upon this earth. (Presˇeren 1999: 145)

ˇ rtomir opts for asceticism primarily out of devotion and By all appearances, C love for Bogomila. The transition from sensual excitement at Bogomila to his decision for asceticism is indeed sudden and rapid, and he feels the emotional ˇ rtomir’s renuntransformation in a very painful manner. Also speaking for C ciation of a worldly life is his gesture of giving all of his possessions to the poor.

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ˇ rtomir’s baptism and his life after The poet’s taciturnity when describing both C separating forever from Bogomila is telling, and it provides a hint of the tragic. The future fates of both protagonists is related in the poem by means of a report – ˇ rtomir and Bogomila’s the silent baptismal scene and the sparse narration of C future destinies are very dramatic in effect precisely because the poet passes over them in silence.

7.2

The Motif of Vows and Devotion in Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica

In Presˇeren’s poem the themes of devotion, piety and dedication are most prominently linked with the figure of Bogomila, who wholeheartedly accepts the new Christian faith. Bogomila experiences longing for God as a natural longing for peace, as a longing for death in the sense of a longing for home; this is in stark contrast to the turmoil of the world as a place of trials. In the poem she calls God ˇ rtomir that she will wait for him in heaven “with the Father,” a father, telling C while calling heaven her home and establishing it as a positive contrast to the ˇ rtomir she says: turbulent earthly life of suffering and sickness. To C That God the God of love they truly call, Who loves all creatures, us who are His own, That earth, beset with angry storm and squall Is but a place of testing, for home Is really heav’n; that suff ’ring, pain withal With joy, are gifts His hands have shown; That His dear children He to heaven will lead, That none should perish, thus has He decreed. (Presˇeren 1999: 133)

The idea that man has a natural propensity for devotion is advocated in many religions and religious movements, including Hinduism and Sufism. In those religions’ teachings, all human beings long for a loving God and for as long as they do not surrender to this love, they remain frustrated, incomplete, lonely and lost. Such religions explain dedication or devotion to be a nurturing of this natural human instinct – to serve and to love the Creator, who filled man with a longing for reunification with his source. Many Sufi concepts argue that he who is not devoted to God is like a fish out of water, a camel that is far away from a watering hole, or a bird that is isolated from its partner. In the mystical sense, to seek God means a return home, to seek the known and the comforting, and to heed man’s natural longing. A similar idea is expressed in Augustine (354 – 430), who at the beginning of his Confessions says: “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless

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until it rests in you” (Augustine 2008: 3). J. W. Curran very precisely defines the essence of devotion: Devotion is the first act of the virtue of religion and is defined as: promptness or readiness of will in the service of God. Concretely, this means the perfect offering of the will itself to God, for readiness of the will in the service of God is the will offered to God in worship. Just as by adoration the body of man is offered to God, so by devotion the will of man is offered to God. Devotion, besides being the first, is also the principal act of the virtue of religion. Religion is a virtue of the will, so its first and principal act is the offering of the will itself. Since devotion is the first and principal act of the virtue of religion, it must appear in every other act of religion. Devotion is in this respect like the first and principal act of the virtue of charity, which is love. Almsgiving, a secondary act of charity, must flow from love or it is not an act of charity at all. So also every other act of religion must flow from devotion, or it fails to be an act of religion. It is in this sense that prayer, sacrifice, adoration, and all the rest must be devout to be 0truly acts of religion. (Curran 2003: 708 – 709)

ˇ rtomir’s greatest sacrifice is connected to the In The Baptism at the Savica, C renunciation of sexual love – though this is also Bogomila’s sacrifice, for also Bogomila has chosen virginity according to the model of the Virgin Mary. The lovers’ renouncing of sexuality in favour of abstinence, celibacy and life-long virginity reflects the practice of renouncing sexuality that developed between men and women in Christian circles already in a period pre-dating St Paul’s missionary journeys, that is, some 40 – 50 years after Christ. Christianity adopted from its Jewish origins a particular understanding of the human individual who endeavours to see past the body – that restless reminder of man’s lasting kinship with the animal world – and into the heart. Also in connection to sexuality Christianity emphasised the concept of the weakness of human will, which distances man from the sacred and on account of which human flesh appears as a “quivering thing” vulnerable “to temptation, to death, even to delight” (Brown 2007: 434). Images of love unto death have been disturbing yet beautiful in works ranging from those in the Tristan and Isolde tradition to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The prototypical text on love, however, remains the biblical Songs of Songs. The dynamic approaching and withdrawing in Song of Songs evokes a number of poetic discourses on love, such as Presˇeren’s “Baptism on the Savica,” Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Joseph B¦dier’s Roman de Tristan et Iseut, among others. The dialogue between the two lovers in the Song of Songs occurs in the spirit of a dialogue with the world, which is represented by natural metaphors in the literary form of a poem. Love is shown in all the dimensions of its reality, from longing to seeking, from fulfilment to alienation, and renewed seeking. The literary form of a poem expresses the existential possibilities in a manner sur-

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passing those of any other potential form of presentation. Rabbi Akiva calls the Song of Songs the “the Holy of Holies,” and Goethe notes in his West-östlicher Diwan that is “the most gentle and inimitable account of passionate and comely love we have been provided with” (Goethe 1998: 128 – 129). The longing for fulfilment, which is in the forefront of the poem, is accompanied by the change of mood and a love that is in motion, so to speak – this is seen in the lovers’ distancing, approaching and renewed distancing. In the fifth chapter, this is intensified to the extent that the woman is made sick when her beloved departs. The oscillation between proximity and distance, as well as the metaphors of the two marvelling lovers, is escalated in the moments of mutual commitment that are merely suggested in the Song. Although the longing is never fulfilled, because the irrational lovers alternately approach and then move away from one another, the denouement of the Song expresses the female beloved’s profound faith in the power of love: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame” (Song of Solomon 8:6). Presˇeren’s Bogomila expresses a similar faith in love’s power to transcend ˇ rtomir and Bogomila must each travel a death. In “The Baptism at the Savica,” C solitary path through life, but this path, as Bogomila senses, will last only a short time (as a literal translation of the Slovenian “majhen cˇas” reads) (Presˇeren 2001: 67). Each initially deifies loving desire and seeks to find sustenance in that desire. Not until the point of trial brought about by the battle and with it acceptance of a different religion does the authenticity, or rather inauthenticity, of such emotions become evident. When Bogomila first recognizes Christian ag‚pe, she ˇ rtomir towards an eternal love by speaking to him about the wishes to guide C nature of religion; the reader senses that their love is, in spite of the suffering that it causes, stronger than death.

7.3

Dominik Smole’s Contrary Literary Interpretation of The aptism at the Savica

Among Slovenian literary critics, Presˇeren’s poem is seen as an “open work” in Eco’s sense (Paternu 1977: 86), because it allows each reader to unlock the text in his own manner. As Janez Vrecˇko notes, individual interpretations as well as the text itself have experienced offences and “attacks,” primarily because the main ˇ rtomir “did not seem appropriately Slovenian in character, in his protagonist C inner essence” (Vrecˇko 2002: 281). The poet Oton Zˇupancˇicˇ even dubbed him a “werewolf,” and at one point France Kidricˇ, similarly, understood the poem not as an expression of Presˇeren’s world view, “but as a compromise in his world

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view through which Presˇeren betrayed his own freethinking” – though he later distanced himself from this argument (Vrecˇko 2002: 281). The poem “remains one of the most controversial texts of Slovenian literature” (Vrecˇko 2002: 281). A particularly striking manner of interpreting Presˇeren’s “Baptism” is offered by the Slovenian dramatist Dominik Smole (1929 – 1992) in The Baptism at the Savica. Smole’s play is a “religious drama that transforms into a political one in Act II” (Borovnik 2005: 70). It begins where Presˇeren’s poem ends – between the ˇ rtomir does not feel fulfilment in his new walls of the monastery at Aquileia. C ˇ rtomir remains sifaith; he feels betrayed and deceived. Whereas Presˇeren’s C ˇ rtomir’s internal religious experience and relent, Smole’s drama articulates C ˇ rtomir allowed himself to be baptised despite feeling no faith in his lates that C heart. Unlike Presˇeren’s Bogomila, Smole’s Bogomila is stamped by a false piety, by empty splendour. The nun Anunciata points out the inner emptiness concealed by a respectable appearance when she says, “Your face, sister Bogomila, is as thin and vast as a cathedral, dazzling, luxurious, prepared and horrifyingly empty” ˇ rtomir recognises her hypocrisy, he begins to hate (Smole 2009: 12 – 13). When C the woman on whose account he was baptised and for whom he took on a faith he cannot feel. In a conversation he accuses her of false faith, of betrayal, though Bogomila defends herself against allegations of infidelity, asking how she could not remain faithful to him “among a handful of defeated pagans […] and in constant flight, like a beast?” She admits that she is inclined “neither to the gods, nor to God” and states, “it would be twice foolish if I were to strive for that which is not in me” (Smole 2009: 32 – 33). Not strong enough to renounce love, Smole’s Bogomila takes refuge in a lie. She is therefore the complete opposite of Presˇeren’s Bogomila, whose love is as ˇ rtomir is struck by her words, and in a tortuous silence he strong as death. C remains “with his hands over his face” (Smole 2009: 33). From that moment anarchy and authoritarianism become stronger and stronger in him, and his desire for love is driven out. His passion seeks a new realm of activity and he finds it in a controlling morality and in the masses of downtrodden people. In the dialogue with the Patriarch he states plainly that the Patriarch does not believe in ˇ rtomir God and that he let himself be baptised because he was afraid of death. C feels spiritually crippled and wishes to seek true faith, to experience a true baptism; under the name of Christianity he heeds his own, resolute and merciless truth, one which, in the name of Divine justice, destroys everything that is hypocritical, insincere, or false. Act II of Smole’s drama takes place in Slovenian lands, at Gospa Sveta, whence ˇ rtomir has been forced and where he travels together with the nuns Bogomila, C Pia and Vincencija. There he fanatically, maniacally slaughters people who in his

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view do not carry God in the heart –who gave false oath and who remain pagans. He believes he is the “hand of God” (Smole 2009: 60), and in his view God knows no mercy and strikes with a firm hand. He fanatically claims to Bogomila that the “God of revenge” is the only and true God. “There is no other” (Smole 2009: 58). Bogomila flees from him as if from a madman, and the Patriarch elevates her to ˇ rtomir. His God, he Mother Superior. This promotion is incomprehensible for C says, “who is not afraid of dog’s blood, has decided differently” (Smole 2009: 81). He murders Bogomila with a knife. Each becomes a victim of a time in history that curtails and then kills their freedom, as well as them. It seems that they find redemption in death. We may conclude the section stating that love is a central theme of Presˇeren’s The Baptism at the Savica, because the entire lives of the main heroes Bogomila ˇ rtomir play themselves out in the service of love as the highest value; it is and C ˇ rtomir to fight, and still more significant are love for the homeland that moves C the internal struggles that are ignited by his love for Bogomila and that culminate in his self-sacrifice. At the heart of Presˇeren’s poem are the lyrical dialogues ˇ rtomir and Bogomila that grew into an exabout the emerging love between C perience of love marked by immortality. Presˇeren describes “fruitful” suffering – ˇ rtomir in return for the promise of the self-sacrifice agreed to by Bogomila and C eternal love in the hereafter. When Presˇeren’s Bogomila first recognises Chrisˇ rtomir to let her lead him from natural religion tian ag‚pe, she also convinces C to longing for eternal love. It is on the same basis that other timeless literary depictions of love rest: the biblical Song of Songs, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the tradition of Tristan and Isolde, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and so on. There is, however, another, more radical and contrary explanation. In Dominik Smole’s more contemporary Slovenian play Baptism at the Savica, ˇ rtomir and Bogomila do not know how to love; their love is “wild,” deC personalized, violent, devoid of pure desire and too weak for self-sacrifice; they deny and finally destroy each other through egotistical behaviour. Smole paints Bogomila in mocking tones, deriding her not only as an opportunist but also as a woman. His play presents a world in which men dominate, and women cannot fight that world differently than the way Bogomila does, for otherwise she would “buckle as if shot at” (Smole 2009: 32 – 33).

Conclusion

This critical survey of views of art in general and especially literature as they pertain to the question of reality and truth has shown that this question has assumed a central position in every detailed discussion of art from antiquity to the present. Immersing oneself in the essence and purpose of literature shows that all writers try, in the most varied of ways, to depict reality when they choose their subject matter, themes and motifs from their material, cultural, and spiritual environments and from history, and when they endeavour to show humans in their intellectual and spiritual state and in their relations with others. Historical themes, which are at the very centre of the literary types of the epic, biography, autobiography, the novel and other forms, are at the same time bound to the question of reality and truth because living individuals are pressed into a sometimes narrow, sometimes broad, existential, social and historical context. The views of the writers outlined and examined here show that a philosophical approach is not entirely useful for making judgements about reality and truth in literature. The specific domain of philosophical reflection is to clarify concepts through deductive methods or from a purely rational viewpoint, whereas literature is based on the experience of life stories in concrete circumstances. History as a field of knowledge that has as its first task the uncovering of historical facts is equally limited in its possibilities for unveiling reality and truth because it judges historical events on the basis of a limited range of sources, while historians analyse events and individuals that helped to form them according to their subjective judgements. This increases rather than decreases the responsibility of historians in their quest for truth. In Maxim 295, Goethe notes, “The historian’s duty : to distinguish truth from falsehood, certainty from uncertainty, doubtful matters from those which are to be rejected.” The historian’s responsibility to respect objective facts in the available historical sources and the inevitable subjectivity of judgements about the significance of historical events necessarily brings historiography closer to literature. A particular role is assumed by “historical memory,” which is conditioned by the cultural and ideological surroundings in which the historian lives and

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writes. Historical memory has, in general, the stamp of subjective experiencing of historical relations and events. Because of the synthetic and subjective nature of judging historical sources, the step forward from academic history writing to the historical novel and other literary types that emerge from history is not as great as it may initially seem. All writers who have sought exactness in referring to historical facts must acknowledge that their views and assessments are nevertheless conditioned by subjectivity. And so we arrive at the primary form of literature: the story. All genres of literature are born on the basis of some sort of life story. This story can be personal, but it can also be a story about a nation, mankind, or the universe as a whole. It is through stories that poets and writers show the reality and truth of man’s self-conception and his relations to the world, to mankind and to the transcendental. They are guided by the desire to recognize the truth, and often they state directly that they are internally, and also unconditionally, subject to truth. This is especially true for those who believe in the existence of absolute truth in the sense of Gandhi’s statement in the Introduction to his Autobiography : “for me, truth is the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles. This truth is not only truthfulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth of our conception, but the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God” (Gandhi 1993: xxvii). With this insight he zeroes in on the most difficult and perhaps the most personally conditioned view of reality and truth: the question of ethics. Whenever the test of truth is not a neutral consideration at the conceptual and systematic level, it plays itself out in the conflicting situations of personal and social life, thereby becoming a story which is true in all its criteria. The intensiveness of the experiencing of specific life stories, however, provides countless possibilities for literary creation through imitation, searching for an analogy or for a typology, and is indelibly linked to the surpassing of pre-existing models. Literary creativity is by nature a process of reconciling “idealism,” “realism,” “materialism” and “existentialism.” This is how the significance of poetry and any fictional literature makes itself evident. Poetry as well as prose fiction can show reality and truth so convincingly that considerations which have appeared throughout the history of human culture cannot harm them, as their identity is constantly affirmed by life itself – and life itself cannot bear that which is corrupt. Man’s passions, desires, and longings are constantly put to the test in the battle between good and evil, while man’s spirit cannot be at ease until justice, benevolence, compassion and solidarity triumph. Reality and the truth of a fictional narrative are judged by means of the life experience that has enriched the life of each reader regardless of his level and type of formal education. Literary fiction is often not commended into being but arises spontaneously under the influence of real life stories which leave

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such profound traces in man’s emotional world and in his awareness that he must give form to them. These stories arise as a message to people who long in equal degrees and similar ways, who experience certainty and uncertainty, high points and humiliations, temptation and responsibility, who fall and then get up again, who suffer immensely and are soothed. A written story is not anonymous, and for that reason it has its role as a message; in that way it achieves its aim, even if the effects are in contradiction with the expectations of the author. A written story helps the reader to observe more easily the reality and truth that he has intuitively experienced without finding an expression for it. That is how life destinies meet in the experiencing of personal identity and in solitary engagement for the future of one’s own nation, one’s own culture and humanity as a whole. Stories about life such as those written in narratives belonging to various literary types and genres are often simple and understandable to all, and the “ending” of the story is also often clear. In spite of this, we read them carefully. This is surely not so much on account of their clear “ending” as on account of the fact that the story as a whole shows critical life situations which awaken a sense of identity in the reader for handling life’s challenges and trials. In reading life stories the reader sees his own experiences – stories which he has likely experienced over and over again. Each experience is nevertheless new in some ways because his life situation and expectations are brought into a new synthesis. Reading vivid stories confirms a sense of order in the structure of the world and in its historical rhythm, in the psychological and spiritual state of the individual and of society. Some life stories that have cogently depicted man’s dignity, his passionate awareness of love, and the value of justice and solidarity among individuals have become local or universal symbols that have an important role as criteria for experiencing and judging man’s own crises and solutions to those crises. Literary symbols offer great support to the reader in the face of new challenges. They strengthen the reader’s awareness that he is not alone in the world but is linked to the stories of all people who seek to find their own image and to clarify their relation to the world, to man and to the very question of the meaning of life. Literary symbols are part of our personal life reality and our life surroundings; they are part of our real world and aid us greatly in interpersonal relations, indeed even in intercultural dialogue. Literary symbols help us to reflect on and contemplate how it is that all people in the world are bound together in common desires, longing and goals. In our consciousness they affirm the sense of moral order in human life, the means and manners of rewarding justice and punishing injustice. Everything that functions as a theory in the fields of science, philosophy and theology, everything that addresses reason, is

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“made human” in literature, and addresses the human heart which, especially when encountering life’s dramas, passionately seeks the truth. Human natural inclination for reality and truth in justice, solidarity and love is understood by some philosophers, theologians, poets and writers as the unconditional inner law that determines human existence. The unconditional connection to sense, truth, and love is the driving force of all art and it is therefore logical that it is also the only true explanation for the fact that art, especially literature, is always contemporary. We read literary works because we are moved by a hidden need to recognize truth. The reader’s interest is also enkindled through myths and fantasy stories, through everything that transcends the determinism of the immediate circumstances and serves man’s expectations – expectations which are usually not clear. The reading of literature can parallel a crisis we encounter in the “hard reality” of life, which is not in accordance with our expectations. Simone Weil warns: “What is real in perception and distinguishes it from dreams is not the sensations, but the necessity enshrined in these sensations” (Weil 2008: 53). She explains her spiritual experience: Morality and literature. Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life. Rare indeed are the true contacts with good and evil. […] If we except the highest forms of sanctity and genius, that which gives the impression of being true in man is almost bound to be false, and that which is true is almost bound to give the impression of being false. Work is needed to express what is true: also to receive what is true. We can express and receive what is false, or at least what is superficial, without any work. When truth appears at least as true as falsehood it is a triumph of sanctity or of genius. (Weil 2008: 56 – 57)

Works that are based on truth in the fullest sense of the word, therefore, will not appeal to someone unless he is in the proper spiritual state. For this reason, it is understandable that reading literature implies, among other things, a communion or coming-together of souls. A succession of life experiences, meanwhile, allows for a more reliable answer to the question “What is truth?” than at the beginning of one’s life path. Imagination cedes to true recognition. Literature has the power to break down stable notions of truth by testing them through immediate comparison with the real world, which man’s spirit, in its limitations, is never able to conceive of completely and which he experiences all the more as a world of infinite possibilities. For the poet and the writer, the world, taken as a whole, is home to myriad symbols that can be shown as transcendent reality. As Goethe writes in Maxim 1113, “Symbolism transforms an object of perception into an idea, the idea into an image, and does it in such a way that the idea always remains infinitely operative and unattainable so that even if it is put into words in all languages, it still remains inexpressible.” Herein

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lies the explanation for the natural bond between art and religion that has existed in all eras since the distant past. Goethe illustrates this fact in Maxim 1107: “Art is based on a kind of religious sense, on a deep and unassailable seriousness, which is why it’s so much inclined to a link with religion. Religion has no need of a sense for art, it rests on its own seriousness; but neither does it impart a sense for, nor any degree of taste for, art.” It is along these lines that Goethe arrives at his explanation for the difference between true religiosity and idolatry. In Maxim 667, he states: “There are only two true religions: one where the numinous in and all around us is acknowledged and worshipped without any form, the other where the form is of the greatest beauty. Everything intermediate is idolatry.” The writer and reader in the sense of Aristotle’s and Goethe’s representations of reality and probability write and read literary works as referential art in the circle of countless possibilities for the realisation of man’s uncovering of and depicting of reality. In the writer of genius, stories that are faithful to life’s reality and truth arise of themselves. When humans endeavour to discover and recognize the “deeper meaning,” they are more aware of the reality of the material world, the norms of tradition and culture that make up their surroundings in real life, marked as it is in its ranging between the lowliest and the loftiest, the concrete and the abstract, and especially between the material and the spiritual. Like music, good poems and prose literature spontaneously create a link between the material and the spiritual because they are the embodiment of real life stories, real history and real life. It is because of man’s instinctual seeking of deeper truth that literature aids the reader in discovering new worlds, new possibilities. Even the impossible is sometimes made possible. The prospect of our dealing with sacred and secular literary texts is to disclose literary ways of observing and expressing reality and truth in its most elementary form of life, to communicate with both scholars and laypeople about the basis of the richer knowledge of life in its inner truth and consequences for society, and to lead young scholars to the realm of literature with inner consciousness of how important values are for our personal lives and for our communities. The struggle to comprehend our personal identity implies by its very nature the importance of the growing knowledge for the totality of our communities and humankind. Persuasion cannot be rendered effective by purely theoretical means of expression but also by means of a life of genuine solidarity. The “compare and contrast” method is definitely conservative, because it is based on the conviction that there is a unity of great literature and therefore it is also based on respect and consideration of the finest elements of the multicultural European tradition. On the other hand, it is postmodern, because the methodological aim is close reading of every text as a unique artistic creation by a unique literary genius in a particular space and time. This combined method is, furthermore, not exposed to great competition, because his-

206

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torical experience with research in art and literature shows that the main problem with most literary analyses is consistency and constancy in balancing opposites and combining constituent parts into an organic whole.

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Index of Names and Authors

Abel 183 Abelard, Peter 169 Abraham 76 – 78, 100 Absalom 76 Achebe, Chinua 71 Achilles 35, 41, 76, 77 Adam 11, 194 Aeschylus 49 Agathon 35 Alcibiades 34 Ananias 101 Anderson, Hans Christian 109 Aquinas, Thomas 15, 46 – 48, 56, 60, 66, 120, 128 Ariosto 190 Aristotle 12, 15, 19, 22, 24, 31 – 37, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 56, 60, 61, 66, 71, 72, 120, 125, 155, 156, 164, 165, 169, 171, 175, 189, 205 Armstrong, Karen 71 Atwood, Margaret 71 Auerbach, Erich 12, 48, 75, 76, 78, 137 Augustine 15, 16, 46, 47, 57 – 59, 62, 66, 67, 71, 96, 100, 102 – 104, 110, 120, 126 – 128, 131, 134, 135, 158, 159, 167 – 169, 196, 197 Avsenik Nabergoj, Irena 11 – 13 Bailey, Benjamin 7, 10, 162 Baldick, Chris 65 Barthes, Roland 163 Baudelaire, Charles 62 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 159

Bedier, Joseph 197 Behn, Aphra 45, 71 Bellay, Joachim du 60 Benjamin, Walter 66 Benn, Gottfried 109 Bernard of Clairvaux 141, 169 – 173 Bernhard, Nicolas Thomas 95 Bialik, Hayim Nahman 120, 145, 146 Blake, Alenka 7 Blake, Jason 3, 7 Bloom, Harold 48 Boccaccio, Giovanni 60 – 62, 190 Boileau, Nicolas 44 Böll, Heinrich 109 Boyarin, Daniel 143 Brown, Nicholas 162 Buber, Martin 136 Byron, George Gordon 44, 109, 190 Cain 183 Canetti, Elias 109 Cangrande I della Scala 60 Cankar, Ivan 11, 85, 96, 97, 109, 110, 113, 153 Cassian, John 46 Chateaubriand, Ren¦ 120, 128, 130 Cohen, Hermann 86 Cuddon, John Anthony 65 Curran, J. W. 197 ˇ eh, Jozˇica 96 C ˇ op, Matija 190 C Daniel 100, 143

216 Dante, Aligheri 46, 60, 128, 137, 171 – 173, 190, 200 David 72, 73, 76, 77, 100 Davies, Graham 9 Deborah 73 Dembowski, Mathilde Viscontini 173 Demsˇar, Franci 8 Derrida, Jacques 45, 48 Dionysius 32, 57, 58, 59 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 109 Dryden, John 29, 60, 71 Duffy, Antonia Susan 71 Dutton, Geoffrey Piers Henry 109 Ehrlich, Lambert 117 Empedocles 164 Euryclea 77 Eve 11, 194 Ezekiel 48, 100, 156, 177 Falck, Colin 27, 132, 135 Fichman, Yakov 145 Fontane, Theodor 109 Foucault, Michael 163 Fowler, Alastair 29 Franklin, Benjamin 109 Frege, Gottlob 66 Freud, Sigmund 48 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 21, 102, 106, 108, 146, 147, 202 Gautier, Theophile 62 Gerjolj, Stanko 8 Gide, Andr¦ 162 Glaucon 52, 53 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 7, 10, 16, 17, 22, 24 – 26, 66 – 68, 81, 85, 102, 105, 106, 109, 113, 120, 128, 129, 132, 136, 139, 141, 153, 198, 201, 204, 205 Goodhart, Sandor 144 Gordon, Robert P. 9, 13 Gorki, Maxim 109, 145 Gostecˇnik, Christian 8 Griswold, Charles L. 176, 178 – 180 Guyer, Paul 155, 162

Index of Names and Authors

Hamburger, Kate 66 – 68, 132 Hampton, Jean 176, 177, 178 Hatoum, Milton 71 Hauptmann, Gerhart 66 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 66, 153 Heidegger, Martin 16, 66 Herder, Johann Gottfried 68 Herodotus 34, 66 Hesiod 80, 163 Higgins, David H. 171 Hillel 166 Homer 35, 36, 50, 53, 54, 76 – 78, 175 Horace 12, 37, 39 – 44, 60, 71 Hubner, Kurt 79 Hugh of St. Victor 46, 59 Hutcheson, Francis 153 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 62 Ignatius of Loyola 103 Isaac 75, 77, 78 Isaiah 57, 100 Jancˇar, Drago 71 Jayyusi, Salma Khadra 148 Jeremiah 57, 69, 100, 187 Jerome, saint 46, 126 Jesus Christ 62, 100 – 102, 123, 125, 157, 166 Joab 76, 77 Job 57, 58, 73, 100, 138 John of the Cross 103 Johnson, Samuel 29, 71, 81 Joseph of Egypt 11, 100, 141, 176, 185 Juvan, Marko 110 Kant, Emmanuel 26, 27, 129, 153, 159, 160, 180, 194 Keats, Thomas 133 Keats, George 102, 104, 109, 133, 160 Keats, John 7, 10, 27, 30, 120, 128, 130, 131, 133, 136, 160 – 162 Kermauner, Taras 191 Kidricˇ, France 198 King, Martin Luther 21, 180 Kinsley, David 194 Knight, B. C. J. G. 173

217

Index of Names and Authors

Kos, Janko 191 Kovacˇicˇ, Lojze 98, 99, 109, 114 – 118 Krasˇovec, Jozˇe 8, 9, 176 Kroflicˇ, Jozˇe 114 Kuralt, Janez 109 Lainsˇcˇek, Feri 71 Lang, Bernard 141 Lazar, David 88 Leitch, Vincent B. 37, 59, 61, 62, 72, 73, 81, 128 Levinas, Emmanuel 144 Lewis, David 87 Liebermann, Max 66 Lieu, Judith 9 Lieu, Samuel 9 Lindley, David 184, 185, 186 Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard 21, 148 Long, V. Phillips 86 Lowdel, Sue 8 Lucy, saint 171 Luthar, Oto 8 Luzio, Paul 8 Maimonides = Maimon, Rabbi Moses ben 12, 46 – 48, 60, 120, 128 Mandela, Nelson 21 Mann, Klaus 109 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 109 Maugham, William Somerset 109 McCall Smith, Alexander 71 McGinn, Colin 20, 152, 153 Miller, Henry 109 Miller, Nancy K. 104 Milosz, Czeslaw 89 Mintz, Ruth P. 144, 145 Momaday Scott, Natachee 109 Moore, E. H. 171 Moses 46, 59, 73, 100, 111 Murphy, Jeffrie G. 177, 178 Nabergoj, David 9 Nabergoj, Jurij 9 Nabergoj, Mirjam 9 Nabergoj, Tomazˇ 9 Nash, Suzanne 132

Neusner, Jacob 123, 126, 132, 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich 16, 62, 66 Norton, Robert E. 153 Odysseus 76, 77, 78 Origen 158 Ortiz Cofer, Judith 88 Osolnik, Vladimir 190 Parmenides 15 Pater, Walter Horacio 62 Paternu, Boris 191 Patroclus 77 Paul, saint 57, 100, 101, 150, 197 Peirithous 51 Pelevin, Viktor 71 Penelope 77 Peter II. 116 Petrarch, Francesco 62 Philo of Alexandria 120, 125, 142, 158 Plath, Sylvia 109 Plato 12, 15, 19, 31 – 33, 43, 45, 48 – 56, 60, 61, 66, 69, 71, 73, 99, 120, 124 – 126, 131, 147, 152 – 155, 158, 164, 165, 169, 175 Plotinus 15, 126, 147, 153, 158 Polygnotus 32 Pope, Alexander 44, 60 Porter, Abbot H. 89 Poseidon 51 Presˇeren, France 44, 114, 189 – 200 Priam 41 Primic, Julija 194 Quintillius 37 Quintus Horatius Flaccus 37 Rabbi Akiva 198 Rashi, Shlomo Yitzhaki 48 Rawls, John 140, 149 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel 109 Rist, John 9, 158, 169 Ronsard, Pierre de 44 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 97, 102, 104, 110, 111, 113 Rozˇanc, Marjan 99

218 Samson and Delilah 11 Samuel 100 Sand, George 102, 104, 109 Saul 76, 101 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 29, 72 Schiller, Friedrich 16, 17, 21, 66, 68, 120, 128 – 132, 153 Schopenhauer, Arthur 66 Shaftesbury, Earl of 153 Shakespeare, William 81, 149, 181, 184 – 188, 197, 200 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 45, 60 Shields, David 88 Shishkov, Viacheslav 109 Sidney, Philip 45, 60, 71, 74, 89 Sisyphus 35 Smith, Sidonie 94 Smole, Dominik 198 – 200 Socrates 49, 50, 99, 100 Solomon 73, 145, 198 Sovre, Anton 42 Spinoza, Baruch 72 – 74, 86 Steinbeck, John 109 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 173, 174 Sternberg, Meir 86 Stevens, Wallace 44 Stewart, Jean 173 Su Tong 71 Sydney, Philip 72 Sˇlibar, Neva 95, 96 Tart, Donna 71 Tchernichovsky, Shaul 145 Teresa of Avila 102, 103 Textor, John Wolfgang 105 Theseus 51 Tolstoy, Leo 12, 34, 55, 56, 68, 69, 74, 75,

Index of Names and Authors

81, 85, 98, 120, 128, 131, 135, 139, 140, 146, 147, 152, 160 Tomsˇicˇ, Marjan 99 Trdina, Janez 97, 109 – 111 Troyat, Henri 98 Tussing Orwin, Donna 135 Uzziah 100 Valery, Paul 120, 128, 132 Valjhun 189, 190, 191 Virgil 171 Virgin Mary 171, 193, 197 Volf, Miroslav 21 Vrecˇko, Janez 191, 198 Washington, Booker, T. 109 Watson, Julia 94 Weil, Simone 162, 163, 174, 175, 204 White, Hayden 88 Wilde, Oscar 62 Winterson, Jeanette 71 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 16, 30, 67 Wolf, Christa 109 Woolf, Virginia 89 Wordsworth, William 30, 60 Yeats, William Butler 109 Zahavy, Tzvee 143 Zavrtanik, Danilo 8 Zeus 51, 76 Zlobec, Ciril 97, 98 Zorko, Zinka 9 Zupan Sosicˇ, Alojzija 191 Zˇiva 193, 194 Zˇupancˇicˇ, Oton 198

Index of Subjects

Abstract 16, 19, 21, 26, 120, 125, 130, 132, 138, 153, 164, 165, 170, 205 Account 47, 48, 55, 59, 65, 79, 81, 82, 85, 88, 97, 100, 101, 103, 106, 107, 109, 117, 119, 125, 133, 138, 152, 154 – 156, 158, 159, 176, 178, 188, 197 – 99, 203 Action 17, 31, 32, 34, 35, 50, 51, 55, 73, 76, 77, 96, 101, 108, 134, 135, 173 Aesthetics 7, 20, 21, 27, 33, 39, 62, 66, 68, 69, 78, 79, 94, 96, 113, 119, 120, 122, 123, 129, 130, 136, 140 – 142, 144, 147, 151 – 154, 158 – 160, 162, 189 Agent 81 – 85 Allegory 26, 29, 46, 47, 53, 56 – 61, 71, 88, 126, 128, 129, 139, 143, 156, 158, 159, 162, 171, 188 Analogy 21, 25, 58, 59, 71, 80, 132, 152, 202 Analysis 11, 20 – 22, 24, 42, 68, 76, 80, 86, 90, 105, 127, 135, 137, 141, 147, 148, 153, 178, 180, 184 Ancient 15, 21, 24, 31, 45, 69, 72, 76, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 137 – 139, 144, 147, 148, 153, 156, 164, 167, 169, 180 Antiquity 16, 19, 21, 22, 27, 34, 46, 66, 74, 93, 99, 102, 120, 121, 125, 129, 132, 136, 137, 139, 201 Approach 7, 12, 15, 16, 21, 22, 25, 37, 46, 57, 67, 79, 80, 95, 119 – 121, 124, 125, 132, 137, 144, 153, 162, 175, 179, 198, 201 Argument 21, 37, 48, 49, 53, 58, 59, 73, 106, 122, 125, 126, 133, 136, 142, 149, 167, 174, 199

Art 7, 11, 12, 15, 17, 21 – 27, 29 – 31, 33, 3639, 41 – 46, 50 – 56, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69, 71 – 75, 77, 79 – 81, 83 – 87, 89, 90, 97, 99, 105, 109, 111, 115, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 147, 148, 150, 152 – 155, 158 – 160, 162, 163, 168, 184, 185, 189 – 191, 201, 204 – 206 Asceticism 194, 195 Aspect 7, 16, 19, 25, 31, 39, 48, 65, 89, 90, 105, 122, 123, 132, 134, 148, 160, 163, 164, 170, 173, 180 Attention 17, 20, 25, 31, 36, 37, 39, 45, 88 – 90, 95, 97, 101, 104, 106, 110, 111, 116, 133, 134, 137, 141, 153 Authentic 41, 136, 148, 163 Author 11, 21, 34, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 51, 56, 59, 61, 62, 66 – 69, 71, 74, 79, 81, 89, 93, 95 – 97, 101, 102, 105, 109, 113, 116, 118, 127, 133, 138, 147, 152, 154 – 157, 163, 180, 203 Autobiography 63, 85, 89, 93 – 107, 109 – 111, 113 – 115, 117, 118, 147, 201, 202 Awareness 21, 23, 26, 37, 40, 68, 95, 106, 122, 130, 133, 136, 144, 145, 158, 160, 162, 169, 174, 175, 182, 203 Baptism 113, 189 – 191, 196 – 200 Beauty 7, 9, 10, 20 – 22, 26, 32, 33, 35, 40, 42, 45, 52, 56, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 72, 74, 85, 86, 99, 103, 111, 112, 121, 124, 129 – 131, 133, 138, 139, 142, 145, 151 –

220 165, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 193, 194, 197, 205 Belief 21, 43, 51, 65, 68, 78, 86, 106, 122, 126, 131, 147, 151, 163, 165, 172, 174, 176 – 180 Bible 12, 16, 46 – 48, 56, 62, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 79, 86 – 88, 95, 121, 123 – 126, 128, 130, 137, 138, 142 – 147, 151, 156, 158, 169, 171, 176, 178, 180, 187, 192 Biblical 8, 11, 12, 16, 21, 46 – 48, 56, 57, 71, 72, 75 – 78, 85 – 87, 100, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128, 130, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141 – 146, 151, 153, 158, 159, 165 – 168, 176 – 178, 183, 186, 197, 200 Biography 71, 89, 93 – 97, 99 – 103, 109, 111, 113 – 115, 138, 201 Celestial hierarchy 57 – 59 Character 12, 17, 20, 25, 32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 51, 52, 61, 66, 67, 73, 76, 77, 81, 87, 90, 91, 102, 104, 121, 122, 125, 127, 129, 135, 138, 139, 145, 146, 148, 153, 156, 158, 182, 185, 187, 189, 190, 194, 198 Charity 103, 128, 130, 141, 142, 165, 168, 170, 197 Christianity 8, 16, 21, 46, 56, 71, 79, 101, 125, 126, 130, 133, 134, 136, 139, 142, 144, 146, 147, 158, 165, 169, 193, 194, 197, 199 Church fathers 126, 143, 158, 167, 169 Classical 19, 99, 143, 154, 176 Comedy 29, 31, 32, 34, 40, 51, 60, 72, 171, 172, 190, 200 Comparative 21, 22, 72, 101, 119, 120, 137, 141, 148, 150 Confession 11, 59, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 110, 113, 126, 127, 134, 135, 159, 167, 168, 196 Conflict 77, 126, 129 – 131, 133, 138, 142, 144, 150, 180, 189 Contrast 12, 15, 19, 32, 63, 80, 90, 118, 120, 121, 131, 139, 143, 164, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 196, 205 Creation 11, 12, 25, 39, 65, 85, 101, 110, 119, 122, 132, 133, 138, 148, 151, 152,

Index of Subjects

154 – 156, 159, 160, 163, 165, 166, 177, 202, 205 Creator 43, 53, 63, 80, 151, 156, 157, 159, 165, 168, 170, 196 Criteria 20, 22, 24, 29 – 32, 34, 50, 93, 131, 202, 203 Critical 9, 15, 17, 27, 35, 50, 90, 113, 117, 119, 124, 125, 133, 135, 144, 146, 181, 201, 203 Criticism 8, 16, 19, 20, 27, 29 – 31, 36, 38, 46, 48, 50, 61, 63, 73, 81, 93, 124, 129, 131 – 133, 135, 136, 142, 143, 146, 149, 151, 157, 162 Critics 22, 25 – 27, 31, 43, 62, 63, 74, 87, 120, 122, 129, 132, 136, 143, 152, 163, 190, 198 Culture 12, 15 – 17, 21, 23, 27, 43, 65, 71, 72, 77, 79, 86, 99, 114, 119 – 122, 124, 125, 130, 133, 135 – 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148 – 151, 164, 166, 190, 201 – 203, 205 Definition 15, 29, 32, 33, 49, 61, 65, 67, 68, 74, 89, 94, 107, 111, 132, 151, 152, 155, 156, 163, 174, 180 Desire 49, 84, 105, 116, 127, 138, 149, 151, 156, 157, 163, 168, 173 – 175, 178, 189, 191, 192, 198 – 200, 202 Despair 15, 16, 23, 38, 186 Destiny 182, 187 Devotion 194, 196, 197 Dialogue 11, 21, 23, 42, 49, 51, 62, 63, 81, 94, 102, 120, 124, 128, 138, 142 – 144, 146, 150, 192, 197, 199, 203 Discipline 19, 31, 102, 141, 159 Discourse 12, 19 – 21, 26, 33, 50, 80, 110, 120, 121, 125, 132, 142, 153, 155, 197 Discussion 12, 27, 37, 47, 48, 55, 72, 81, 101, 127, 131, 148, 153, 154, 178, 201 Diversity 148, 149, 152 Divine 47, 48, 50, 57, 58, 60 – 62, 65, 69, 72 – 74, 123, 124, 126, 128, 151, 156, 163 – 167, 171, 172, 176, 178, 181, 186, 187, 190, 199, 200 Doctrine 20, 21, 123 Dogmatic 130, 138, 142, 147

Index of Subjects

Doubt 58, 172, 174 Dramatic 20, 22, 26, 32, 36, 42, 55, 99, 137, 143, 155, 185, 189, 191, 196 Education 26, 27, 46, 47, 52, 75, 78, 102, 126, 135, 150, 153 – 155, 202 Elegy 32, 132, 190 Elevation 130, 156, 178 Emotion 19 – 21, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40 – 42, 56, 69, 74 – 77, 81, 86, 120, 121, 129, 131, 135, 145, 149, 160, 165, 190, 198 Enemy 95, 104, 158, 184 Engagement 12, 132, 146, 149, 167, 188, 203 Epic 22, 29, 31, 32, 36, 39, 41, 51, 72, 76, 145, 189 – 191, 201 Eternal 40, 48, 59, 60, 69, 74, 86, 89, 111, 123, 124, 135, 147, 154, 167, 175, 193, 195, 198, 200 Ethics 7, 20, 21, 25, 26, 32, 63, 67, 69, 72, 74, 86, 95, 104, 105, 110, 116, 118, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 135, 141 – 144, 149, 151 – 153, 159, 164, 165, 189, 191, 194, 202 Ethnic 12, 94, 116, 118 Etiology 58, 59 Event 12, 17, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 67, 76, 81, 88 – 91, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 105, 109, 114, 116 – 118, 123, 134, 135, 138, 189, 190, 201, 202 Evil 140, 177, 179 Existence 7, 16, 17, 27, 45, 48, 54, 65, 66, 77, 84, 90, 96, 97, 115, 120, 122, 126, 131, 138, 145, 149, 159, 167, 169, 175, 189, 190, 193, 202, 204 Experience 7, 11, 16, 17, 19 – 24, 26, 27, 41, 46, 47, 53, 55, 68, 74, 79 – 82, 86, 89, 90, 93 – 96, 100, 101, 104, 105, 110, 113, 116 – 120, 127, 129 – 131, 133, 134, 137 – 139, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 158 – 160, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170 – 172, 174, 187, 189, 192, 196, 199 – 204, 206 Exploration 11, 20, 138 Exposure 62, 133, 186 Expression 20, 36, 37, 54, 62, 63, 66, 67, 72, 76, 80, 121, 122, 125, 129 – 132, 136, 138,

221 146, 147, 150, 160, 162, 163, 184, 198, 203, 205 Fable 42, 60, 148 Fact 16, 20, 25, 26, 29, 34, 35, 42, 58, 66, 67, 69, 74, 79, 80, 82, 86 – 90, 95 – 97, 104, 105, 107, 109, 117, 119, 121, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 140, 144, 148, 153, 155, 158, 160, 171, 175, 179, 185, 190, 191, 203 – 205 Faith 46, 47, 59, 70, 72, 74, 76, 79, 80, 112, 121, 123, 126, 128, 130, 142, 158, 160, 161, 165, 174, 179, 190 – 192, 195, 196, 198, 199 Falsehood 127, 201, 204 Fame 43, 156 Family 9, 24, 30, 46, 109, 112, 115, 117, 118, 140, 185, 187 Fate 41, 55, 74, 76, 90, 98, 150 Father 99, 102, 103, 111, 114 – 118, 140, 185, 192, 195, 196 Fear 33, 37, 49, 51, 56, 70, 71, 97, 99, 104, 111, 157, 174 Feeling 23, 37, 55, 63, 65, 69, 74 – 77, 82, 83, 90, 97, 111, 115, 116, 119, 122, 123, 128 – 131, 135, 136, 139, 140, 149, 151, 152, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167, 170, 173, 174, 178, 184, 199 Fiction 42, 60 – 62, 65, 66, 69, 73, 80, 81, 87 – 91, 93, 96, 105, 109, 131, 147, 148, 153, 160, 202, 204 Fidelity 94, 104, 194 Flame 41, 120, 195, 198 Folklore 138, 139, 148 Forgiveness 173, 175 – 182, 186 – 188 Form 7, 17, 20 – 22, 24, 29, 31, 32, 35, 42, 43, 47, 48, 51 – 53, 56, 60, 63, 66, 69, 72, 79, 93, 94, 121, 122, 124, 132, 136, 137, 139, 141, 143 – 145, 153, 154, 164, 169, 190, 201, 204 Fortune 113, 164, 179 Foundation 27, 31, 37, 72 – 74, 86, 93, 121, 126, 133, 134, 152, 165, 167, 176, 177, 180, 181 Freedom 27, 50, 63, 66, 78, 86, 129, 130, 142, 162, 184, 200

222 Friendship 72, 121, 130, 145, 164, 165, 169, 173, 175, 182 Fundamental 11, 17, 19, 21 – 23, 31, 32, 34, 45 – 48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 60, 65, 71, 74, 75, 79, 80, 85, 86, 113, 115, 120, 122, 127, 137, 138, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 179 Future 23, 37, 85, 96, 102, 106, 117, 134, 150, 164, 179, 195, 196, 203 Genetic 30, 148, 149 Genre 12, 22 – 25, 29 – 31, 33, 37, 42, 50, 51, 53, 72, 89, 91, 93, 94, 110, 113, 121, 129, 132, 138, 143, 145, 148, 153, 189, 202, 203 God 15, 16, 20, 21, 25, 32, 40, 49 – 51, 53, 54, 57 – 59, 67 – 76, 78, 80, 86, 96, 97, 101 – 103, 106, 107, 112, 121, 124, 126 – 128, 131, 134, 139, 141, 147, 148, 151, 152, 154 – 159, 162 – 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184 – 187, 192 – 197, 199, 200, 202 Gospel 57, 75, 101, 102, 123, 146, 166, 167, 175 Guilt 182, 183, 185 Happiness 16, 19, 119, 120, 127, 135, 139, 150 – 152, 160, 162, 164, 167, 168, 171, 173, 174, 192 Harmony 7, 24, 32, 38, 39, 43, 47, 52, 54, 57, 67, 69, 72, 82 – 84, 87, 103, 119, 129, 130, 139, 151, 154, 160, 163, 187, 191 Heart 40, 59, 74, 86, 88, 99, 104, 107, 111, 112, 119, 121, 127, 139, 140, 157, 160, 163, 166 – 168, 172 – 175, 177, 178, 181, 183, 187, 196 – 200, 204 Hermeneutics 16, 45, 71, 141 History 8, 19, 22 – 25, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40, 42, 57 – 59, 63, 65 – 69, 72, 76 – 79, 81, 84 – 91, 93 – 96, 101, 103, 105, 115, 116, 119 – 122, 125, 129, 131 – 135, 137, 141, 144 – 148, 150, 153, 155, 156, 160, 162, 164, 185 – 187, 189, 190, 200 – 203, 205 Human 7, 11, 17, 19 – 21, 23 – 25, 27, 31, 35, 38, 40 – 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 55, 61, 62, 65, 66, 72 – 77, 84, 85, 88 – 90, 94, 97, 98, 119 – 123, 126, 127, 129 – 131, 134, 135,

Index of Subjects

138 – 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148 – 156, 159 – 163, 165, 166, 168 – 170, 172, 175 – 181, 186, 187, 196, 197, 202 – 205 Humanism 62, 72, 119, 144 – 146, 149 Humanity 52, 85, 120, 127, 129, 130, 141, 148 – 150, 152, 164, 203 Humankind 21, 24, 39, 50, 54, 56, 60, 69, 70, 75, 78, 82, 85 – 87, 91, 97, 98, 100 – 102, 104, 107, 112, 113, 116, 118 – 120, 127, 131, 133, 135, 139 – 142, 147, 148, 151, 152, 154 – 157, 165, 168, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 184, 187, 199, 202, 203 Humble 107, 108, 137 Husband 9, 102, 156 Idea 116, 136, 162, 165 Idealism 26, 48, 56, 69, 87, 111, 130, 142, 155, 159, 171, 175, 202 Imagination 7, 9, 10, 21, 24, 39, 78, 90, 120, 130, 133, 139, 143, 160, 162, 171, 173 Imitation 21, 24, 30 – 33, 35, 36, 48, 51, 53 – 56, 60, 63, 69, 82, 84, 124, 125, 130, 131, 139, 154 – 156, 202 Implication 135, 175, 177, 181, 187 Importance 7, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 31, 35 – 37, 39, 45, 48, 52, 56, 65, 68, 75, 77, 86, 89, 90, 93, 95 – 98, 100, 104, 109 – 112, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126, 128, 131, 132, 138, 145, 146, 150, 152 – 154, 158, 164, 166, 176, 178, 190, 191, 203, 205 Impression 26, 89, 132 Impulse 77, 129, 131 Independance 75, 78 Individual 7, 17, 20 – 23, 26, 29, 31 – 34, 37, 43, 47 – 49, 53, 54, 57, 62, 63, 72 – 75, 77, 79, 80, 86, 90, 91, 93 – 95, 99 – 101, 104 – 106, 110, 119, 121 – 123, 125, 127, 135, 137, 143, 145, 146, 150, 162, 180, 190, 197, 198, 201, 203 Inner 7, 16, 17, 19 – 21, 30, 34, 41, 47, 52, 74, 81, 86, 100, 117, 120, 121, 128, 129, 133, 134, 144, 156, 159, 162, 163, 166 – 169, 172, 178, 180, 194, 198, 199, 204, 205 Innovation 20, 21, 150 Instrument 52, 53, 182

Index of Subjects

Integrity 73, 74, 122 Intercultural 21, 142 Interest 12, 30, 50, 78, 79, 85, 90, 119, 124, 126, 130, 133, 138, 142, 144, 146, 173, 177, 180, 204 International 23, 123, 138 Interpretation 16, 17, 23, 45 – 47, 56, 62, 71, 76 – 78, 88, 121, 123, 126, 128, 131 – 133, 135 – 139, 141, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150, 158, 159, 166, 187 Invention 32, 61, 67 Invisible 102, 158 Islam 12, 21, 46, 126, 133, 136, 139, 142, 147, 148, 165 Journey 113, 114, 171 Judaism 8, 16, 21, 45, 46, 71, 86, 101, 125, 126, 128, 133, 136, 139, 142, 144, 147, 165, 180 Judge 102, 110, 201 Judgement 25, 26, 49, 50, 55, 69, 71, 72, 74, 78, 79, 95, 97, 98, 125, 127, 129 Justice 12, 45, 49, 50, 72, 121, 123, 140, 149, 162, 176, 181, 182, 199, 202 – 204 King 54, 116, 156, 185 Kingdom 115, 116, 159, 166 Knowledge 21, 31, 38, 47, 50, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 68, 73, 87, 90, 95, 97, 98, 122, 124, 125, 127, 130, 134, 135, 140, 145, 152, 158, 160, 170, 172, 180, 201, 205 Lament 40, 143, 195 Language 7, 15, 16, 19, 20, 33, 36, 39, 46, 47, 56, 57, 60, 63, 89, 110, 115, 117, 122, 128, 134 – 136, 139, 142, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 155, 162, 163 Law 24, 33, 34, 37, 41, 47, 55, 66, 69, 72, 74, 101, 113, 125, 126, 130, 143, 154, 155, 159, 163, 166, 174, 177, 192, 204 Legend 66, 95, 110, 148 Life 7, 9, 11, 15 – 17, 19, 20, 22 – 27, 29 – 32, 35, 37, 40 – 43, 49 – 51, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63, 65 – 68, 71, 74, 77, 80, 81, 84 – 86, 88 – 90, 93 – 98, 101 – 115, 117 – 127, 130 – 133, 135, 136, 138 – 140, 143, 144, 146 – 152,

223 154, 159 – 162, 164, 165, 167 – 169, 171 – 173, 175, 176, 180, 182, 183, 187, 192, 194 – 198, 201 – 205 Literature 7, 8, 11, 12, 15 – 17, 20 – 27, 29 – 32, 34, 37, 45 – 49, 55 – 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 76, 79 – 81, 85 – 91, 93 – 96, 100 – 102, 110, 113, 119 – 122, 125, 126, 128 – 133, 135 – 139, 141 – 146, 148 – 153, 158 – 160, 162, 171, 177, 178, 190, 191, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204 – 206 Love 7, 10, 11, 16, 20 – 23, 25, 45, 49, 52, 53, 72, 74, 82, 98, 99, 106, 117, 120, 121, 124, 127, 128, 138 – 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 150 – 152, 154 – 156, 158, 159, 162 – 176, 178, 180 – 182, 189, 191 – 200, 203, 204 Loyalty 121, 123, 143, 192, 193, 194 Lyric 22, 37, 143, 145 Majesty 62, 138, 157 Manifestation 138, 171, 174 Manuscript 9, 111, 113, 114 Marriage 102, 187, 190, 192, 193 Material 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 31, 45, 48, 56, 57, 60, 63, 72, 79, 87, 96, 105, 109, 115, 116, 131, 147, 152, 158, 164, 165, 190, 201, 205 Mathematics 46, 127 Matter 19, 36, 39, 43, 50, 63, 77, 86 – 89, 91, 96, 126, 135, 138, 144, 146, 148, 154, 163, 190, 201 Meaning 16, 17, 25, 26, 29, 46 – 48, 50, 56, 57, 59 – 61, 67, 71, 72, 77 – 79, 87 – 90, 122, 123, 128, 130, 132, 134, 135, 138, 143, 144, 146, 152, 158, 163, 165, 177, 203, 205 Medieval 29, 48, 57, 61, 103, 147, 158, 191 Melody 31, 33, 52, 54 Memory 23, 35, 89, 94, 96 – 98, 105, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117, 120, 127, 134, 146, 201, 202 Merit 111, 137, 138 Metaphor 17, 20, 30, 36, 48, 57, 58, 122, 124, 128, 143, 159, 162, 165, 197, 198 Metaphysics 47, 124, 151 Method 20, 27, 31, 46 – 48, 60, 71, 80, 86, 119, 120, 126, 131, 132, 134, 138, 142 –

224 144, 146, 150, 152, 158, 170, 177, 180, 201, 205 Middle Ages 29, 43, 46, 56, 60, 71, 128, 143, 169 Mimesis 75, 137 Mind 16, 34, 43, 51 – 53, 61 – 63, 72, 84, 86, 90, 96, 101, 106, 107, 109, 119, 120, 122, 126, 127, 132, 134, 138, 148, 149, 151, 152, 158, 166, 172, 175, 177, 187 Minister 182, 183, 184 Missionary 101, 109, 197 Modern 12, 15, 16, 23, 27, 34, 45, 48, 55, 62, 66, 68, 79, 84, 89, 100, 102, 103, 120, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 136, 137, 139, 143 – 146, 148, 152, 156, 159, 162, 163, 173, 174, 176 – 181, 189 Moment 9, 89, 98, 198 Moral 19, 21, 26, 32, 35, 42, 49, 52, 57 – 60, 62, 63, 66, 69, 72, 73, 77, 79, 81, 86, 107, 111, 115, 121, 124, 127, 129 – 131, 138, 140, 142, 149, 151 – 154, 158, 162, 163, 169, 170, 172, 177 – 181, 184, 189, 194, 203 Mother 30, 99, 100, 102, 103, 109 – 112, 115 – 117 Motif 100, 117, 201 Movement 74, 105, 146, 196 Muslim 46, 147, 148 Mystery 58, 76, 78, 121, 146 Mythology 11, 17, 27, 42, 61, 65, 66, 69, 71, 79, 80, 89 – 91, 132, 135, 163, 192 Name 99, 114, 177 Narrative 11, 12, 17, 20, 32, 33, 36, 62, 65, 71, 75, 76, 78, 86, 88, 94 – 96, 99, 100, 115 – 118, 121, 122, 134, 137 – 140, 143, 145, 155, 166, 176, 178, 190, 191, 202, 203 Nation 23, 42, 189, 190, 191, 202, 203 Nature 7, 12, 15 – 17, 19 – 22, 24 – 27, 31 – 33, 35, 36, 38 – 41, 43, 45 – 47, 50 – 58, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70 – 73, 76, 81, 83, 84, 88 – 91, 93, 94, 96, 100, 103, 104, 118 – 122,124, 125, 127 – 133, 135, 136, 138 – 140, 143, 145, 146, 149, 151, 153, 155 – 160, 162, 163, 165, 167 – 174, 179 – 181, 184, 185,

Index of Subjects

187, 189, 193, 196 – 198, 200, 202, 204, 205 Neutral 81, 140, 202 Normal 90, 122, 150 Novel 34, 63, 71, 74, 85, 94, 95, 97 – 99, 113, 116, 117, 135, 173, 201, 202 Obituary 97, 112 Ode 10, 131, 161 Old Testament 11, 12, 48, 57, 58, 69, 100, 102, 123, 125, 166, 176 Ontology 66, 120 – 123, 134, 144, 170 Order 17, 24, 31 – 33, 42, 52, 58, 61, 65, 77, 80, 83, 84, 111, 122, 125 – 127, 134, 137 – 139, 141, 144, 145, 150, 152, 153, 155, 163, 165, 172, 175, 177, 184, 185, 190, 203 Orthodox 144, 147 Pagan 126, 199, 200 Paradigm 136, 152 Party 177, 178, 179 Patriarch 199, 200 Pattern 137, 139, 144 Peace 22, 23, 34, 74, 85, 121, 135, 142, 143, 168, 180, 183, 191, 196 Perception 17, 19 – 21, 85, 86, 116, 127, 131, 133 – 135, 150, 152, 157, 158, 160, 162, 175, 204 Period 12, 30, 36, 46, 68, 80, 91, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 115, 145, 156, 158, 197 Permission, 145, 163 Personage 34, 76, 85 Personal 7, 17, 19, 22, 25, 26, 37, 66, 89, 93 – 96, 98, 99, 101, 104, 110, 116, 119 – 123, 127, 134, 135, 138, 143, 145, 149, 150, 160, 162, 163, 165 – 167, 170, 174, 175, 180, 184, 189, 190, 202, 203, 205 Perspective 20, 113, 136, 191 Phenomena 24, 32, 65, 71, 76, 77, 86, 120 Philosophy 12, 15 – 17, 19, 20, 25, 26, 31, 34, 43, 45 – 48, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60 – 62, 66, 68, 69, 71 – 73, 79, 80, 87, 90, 91, 101, 119 – 122, 124 – 126, 128, 131 – 133, 136, 137, 142, 144, 145, 151 – 153, 158, 159,

Index of Subjects

164, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175 – 180, 185 – 187, 194, 201, 203, 204 Physical 48, 77, 78, 108, 122, 123, 129, 135, 151, 152, 156, 173, 174, 179, 183, 192, 194 Piety 150, 196, 199 Pious 51, 78, 147 Platonic 15, 56, 125, 126, 134, 158, 165 Pleasure 36, 56, 77, 78, 82, 131, 154 – 156, 170, 174, 196 Pluralism 22, 146 Poem 17, 30, 32, 36, 37, 39 – 41, 43, 44, 52, 72, 77, 81, 89, 121, 138, 139, 160 – 162, 171, 189 – 200, 205 Poet 11, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33 – 37, 39 – 43, 46, 51, 54, 62, 66, 72, 73, 89, 97, 109, 120, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138, 145, 148, 160, 162, 171, 172, 189, 193, 196, 198, 204 Poetry 12, 17, 20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29 – 45, 48, 50 – 55, 57, 58, 60 – 62, 66, 68, 69, 71 – 73, 75, 80, 81, 85, 87 – 89, 95, 105, 119 – 122, 124, 125, 128 – 133, 136 – 139, 143 – 148, 152, 155, 156, 160, 162, 171, 178, 190, 194, 197, 202, 204 Politics 27, 31, 37, 78, 99, 100, 106, 107, 114, 116, 121, 124, 136, 147, 177, 179, 199 Polysemous 57, 60, 128 Portrait 34, 35, 95, 118 Potential 20, 21, 198 Poverty 55, 115, 117, 139 Power 20, 35, 39, 45, 49, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 85, 105, 106, 113, 124, 127, 129 – 132, 134, 135, 138, 142, 151 – 153, 156, 157, 160 – 162, 170 – 172, 174, 175, 183 – 188, 198, 204 Predecessor 30, 42, 189 Preface 63, 81, 132 Prejudice 79, 141, 150 Premise 37, 49, 86 Present 11, 17, 19, 21, 24, 27, 33, 36, 37, 39, 45, 50, 60, 76, 77, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 101, 105, 120, 124, 127, 129, 130, 134, 136, 150, 156, 170, 173, 177, 178, 185, 194, 201 Presentation 20, 21, 37, 72, 86, 93 – 95, 100,

225 119, 120, 122, 123, 130, 133, 135, 137, 142, 152, 156, 164, 173, 181, 185, 189, 198 Principle 16, 21, 22, 25, 30 – 32, 34 – 36, 39, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 55, 57, 62, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 85, 86, 88, 90, 94, 96, 106, 107, 110, 119, 121, 126, 130, 132, 133, 137, 146, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158, 162, 165, 166, 169, 170, 175, 177, 202 Probability 81, 128 Proclaim 156, 157, 182 Prostitute 97, 112, 157 Psychology 17, 19, 22, 25, 31, 65, 71, 76 – 78, 87, 91, 95, 107, 116, 119, 122, 124, 129, 135, 151, 160, 163, 164, 177, 203 Publication 11, 43, 71, 72, 87, 98, 104, 113, 169, 178 Punishment 177, 178, 182, 183, 186 Question 16, 19, 20, 22 – 24, 32, 37, 43, 51, 54, 68, 82, 83, 85 – 89, 93, 95, 109, 111, 122, 124, 127, 128, 132, 136 – 139, 142, 144, 146, 149, 153 – 155, 158, 159, 163, 164, 166, 174, 177, 181, 201 – 204 Reality 7 – 9, 11, 12, 15 – 17, 20 – 27, 29 – 32, 34 – 37, 39, 41 – 43, 45, 48 – 51, 53 – 57, 60 – 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71 – 74, 76 – 82, 85 – 91, 93 – 99, 106, 107, 112, 113, 115, 118, 119, 123, 124, 126 – 131, 133 – 137, 142, 146 – 148, 151, 152, 154 – 156, 158 – 160, 163 – 165, 167, 169, 170, 175, 180, 181, 187, 189, 197, 201 – 205 Reason 13, 19, 22, 24 – 26, 30 – 32, 34, 39, 45, 52, 53, 55, 59, 62, 73 – 75, 78, 79, 84, 86, 90, 94, 96, 98, 101 – 103, 106, 107, 110, 112, 119, 127 – 131, 133, 147, 152, 160, 162, 165, 169, 171, 174, 177, 178, 184, 185, 192, 203, 204 Recognition 7, 11, 16, 21, 24, 35, 46, 47, 76, 79, 86, 102, 104, 119, 120, 137, 165, 204 Reconcile 128, 129 Relation 12, 16, 21 – 23, 25, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 39, 42, 43, 45, 52, 55, 57, 63, 66, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 85 – 87, 93, 95, 96, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 113, 117, 118,

226 128, 132, 136, 139, 142, 143, 146, 150, 151, 153, 156, 158, 163 – 165, 168, 170, 173, 174, 175, 180, 191, 201 – 203 Relationship 19, 20, 39, 90, 95, 131, 133, 138, 144, 146, 148, 153, 156, 158 – 160, 165, 170, 180 Relative 89, 95, 117 Religion 21, 56, 68, 74, 75, 77 – 80, 86, 101, 107, 114, 120 – 123, 125, 128, 130 – 133, 136, 138, 142 – 147, 150, 151, 165, 166, 177, 180, 188, 191, 194, 196 – 200, 205 Renaissance 29, 43, 55, 61, 71, 156, 190 Renunciation 85, 191, 197 Representation 12, 16, 17, 26, 57, 58, 82, 83, 88, 89, 91, 120, 130, 137, 147, 151 – 153, 155, 162 Republic 45, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 61, 69, 71, 124, 131, 155 Research 8, 9, 21, 22, 87, 120, 122, 137, 141, 144, 146, 148, 149, 206 Resurrection 123, 126, 166 Revelation 100, 113, 157 Revenge 149, 179, 180, 200 Reverence 63, 193, 194 Rhetoric 37, 88, 121 Riddle 98, 138 Right 25, 38 – 40, 49, 51, 73, 78, 82, 126, 149, 155, 163, 166, 169, 177, 178, 180, 190 Rival 65, 102, 147 Role 7, 16, 23, 25, 30, 39, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 60 – 63, 65, 75, 79, 89, 90, 93, 96, 100, 101, 110, 116, 120, 131, 132, 134, 136, 142, 144, 145, 147, 152, 163, 171, 172, 178, 201, 203 Romantic 27, 130, 160, 189 – 191 Room 106, 140, 149 Sacrifice 77, 78, 107, 167, 176, 189, 191, 193 – 195, 197, 200 Sadness 16, 113, 116 Sage 126, 133, 138 Salvation 74, 123, 127 Satire 42, 72, 143 Science 21, 24 – 26, 31, 46, 47, 53, 57 – 59,

Index of Subjects

72, 79, 80, 90, 91, 107 – 109, 119, 133, 141, 147 – 149, 154, 163, 164, 203 Scribe 166 Scripture 57 – 60, 73, 74, 78, 144, 147, 158, 165, 169 Seeker 108, 162 Self 19, 25, 35, 38, 41, 43, 67, 74, 94, 95, 97, 105 – 108, 110, 113, 115, 117 – 120, 128, 129, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 149, 163, 165, 167, 170 – 173, 179, 180, 182, 183, 194, 195, 200, 202 Sense 7, 11, 15, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 35, 46, 57, 59, 60, 62, 66 – 70, 72, 74, 77, 79 – 81, 84, 88, 96 – 98, 100, 102 – 104, 112, 114, 115, 119, 121, 125, 127 – 129, 133, 134, 138, 140 – 142, 144, 146 – 150, 152 – 154, 157 – 160, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 178, 189, 194, 196 – 198, 202 – 205 Sermon 146, 170, 171 Setting 66, 91, 126 Severe 111, 176, 193 Sexuality 197 Shade 22, 24, 25 Shame 37, 41, 149 Sickness 53, 55, 103, 117, 196, 198 Signal 110, 132, 144 Similarity 21, 143, 185 Sin 36, 39, 60, 100, 112, 113, 182, 183 Sky 61, 134, 157 Society 19, 21 – 23, 25, 26, 37, 45, 49, 55, 56, 65, 68, 75, 77, 80, 86, 90, 93 – 95, 115, 119 – 122, 124, 125, 131, 134, 140, 141, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 155, 162, 165, 173 – 175, 181, 201 – 203, 205 Son 113, 167, 176 Song 52, 60, 73, 74, 82, 138, 139, 143, 156, 170, 197, 198, 200 Soul 15, 19, 20, 25, 40, 52, 55, 60, 61, 71, 75, 76, 82, 84, 90, 91, 97, 105, 112, 113, 119, 124, 126, 129, 134, 139, 151, 154, 158, 163, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 194 Sovereign 107, 127, 202 Spectator 81, 82, 83, 84, 85 Spirit 24, 30, 38, 43, 83, 96, 107, 120, 121,

Index of Subjects

126, 130, 134, 137, 144, 152, 157, 175, 182, 184, 185, 190, 197, 202, 204 Spirituality 7, 21, 22, 25, 27, 57 – 60, 67, 71, 95, 103, 106, 107, 110, 113, 120 – 123, 126, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139, 147, 151, 158, 162, 163, 169 – 171, 173, 175, 181, 191, 194, 199, 201, 203 – 205 Standard 66, 108, 111, 124, 131, 158 Standpoint 78, 81, 104 State 20, 25, 30, 34, 35, 41, 49 – 52, 55, 62, 66, 72, 81, 86, 95, 96, 100, 104, 105, 110, 115, 130, 135, 144 – 146, 154, 155, 157, 158, 167 – 169, 174, 179, 191, 192, 195, 199, 205 Stone 97, 112 Storm, 35, 40, 41 Story 11, 20, 23, 35, 36, 65, 71, 73, 75 – 78, 84, 87 – 89, 94 – 97, 104 – 109, 111, 115, 125, 134, 138 – 140, 143, 147, 153, 171, 181, 185, 186, 194, 201 – 205 Stream 38, 89, 112 Structure 16, 20, 24, 29, 31 – 34, 36, 122, 126 – 128, 133, 138, 142, 149, 150, 155, 156, 159, 203 Study 7, 12, 15 – 17, 19, 21, 27, 29, 36, 37, 43, 48, 67, 79, 82, 84, 90, 91, 93, 94, 101, 102, 110, 132, 137, 141, 144, 153, 178 Subject 19, 21, 26, 31, 32, 34, 36, 39, 41, 43, 63, 65, 69, 74, 78, 80, 83, 85, 90, 93, 94, 115, 118, 119, 122, 126, 139, 144, 153, 155, 163, 165, 171, 190, 201, 202 Substance 20, 123, 127, 153 Success 39, 42, 51, 81, 90, 105, 149, 191 Summer 109, 110, 149 Sun 105, 172, 173 Superficial 43, 138, 204 Superiority 84, 129, 131, 178 Supernatural 65, 187 Surprise 98, 99, 111, 130, 185, 186 Sweetness 42, 43, 195 Swelling 40, 98, 138 Sword 182, 183 Symbol 7, 8, 25, 26, 56, 63, 71, 105, 122, 129, 139, 151, 158, 159, 162, 203, 204 Symbolism 10, 162, 204

227 System 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 46, 56, 57, 80, 88, 120, 122, 125, 130, 139, 180, 190 Talent 42, 43, 111 Tear 40, 112, 193 Temporal 96, 135, 154 Tenet 71, 165, 179 Term 7, 15 – 17, 23 – 26, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40, 42, 45, 62, 65, 66, 68, 69, 96, 100, 101, 116, 122, 128, 130, 132, 139, 142, 144, 147, 150, 156, 158, 160, 163, 165, 170, 174, 175, 177, 178, 187, 191, 194 Testimony 12, 86, 93, 127, 130, 132, 135, 175 Text 11, 12, 16, 17, 19 – 23, 45, 47, 48, 56, 60, 71, 76, 88, 96, 114, 119, 122, 123, 125, 128, 132, 133, 136, 137, 141 – 144, 149 – 153, 163, 167, 176 – 178, 199, 205 Theatre 71, 82, 189 Theme 11, 12, 21, 41, 113, 117, 120, 121, 130, 137, 138, 143, 145, 148, 182, 187, 190, 196, 201 Theology 8, 152 Theory 7, 15 – 17, 22, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 33, 36, 43, 45 – 48, 60, 62, 65 – 67, 79, 88, 96, 124, 125, 127 – 129, 131, 136, 137, 140, 143, 152, 155, 158, 159, 162, 171, 203 Thesis 29, 37, 47, 62, 72, 179 Time 10 – 12, 16, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 36, 42, 46, 51, 67, 68, 71 – 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 90, 91, 95 – 99, 105, 107, 110, 112, 116 – 118, 126, 127, 130, 134 – 136, 139, 140, 142, 145, 148, 152, 163, 174, 181, 183, 193, 198, 200, 201, 205 Timeless 16, 21, 71, 200 Tradition 11, 12, 15, 16, 21, 24, 30, 41, 45, 46, 62, 71, 78, 88, 103, 120, 122, 133, 137, 139, 140, 142 – 148, 150, 158, 165, 175, 177, 197, 200, 205 Tragedy 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 51, 72, 155, 189 Training 19, 52, 138, 155 Transfer 32, 50, 75, 130, 131, 135 Transformation 21, 29, 88, 132, 138, 147, 153, 180, 181, 187, 194, 195, 199, 204 Transition 42, 189, 195

228 Translate 37, 47, 123, 124 Trial 76, 83, 190, 196, 198, 203 Tropological 57, 58, 59 Trouble 7, 10, 27, 40 Truth 7 – 12, 15 – 17, 19 – 27, 30 – 32, 34 – 37, 40 – 43, 45 – 63, 65 – 75, 77 – 91, 93 – 99, 102, 104 – 109, 111 – 115, 119, 121 – 128, 131 – 137, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 147, 150, 151, 154, 155, 158 – 165, 167 – 172, 174 – 176, 178 – 181, 185, 186, 189, 190, 192, 195, 199 – 205 Turbulence 71, 157, 196 Type 12, 17, 19, 21 – 25, 29 – 31, 34 – 37, 42, 50, 52, 59, 69, 72, 87, 93 – 96, 123, 129, 143, 158, 191, 201 – 203 Uncertainty 27, 201, 203 Unconsciousness 30, 97, 155 Understanding 15, 20, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 34, 39, 47, 49, 53, 54, 65, 75, 79, 81, 90, 104, 108, 114, 116, 121, 125, 126, 132, 133, 135 – 137, 147, 150 – 152, 154, 156, 157, 162, 166, 169, 171, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 185, 197 Uniqueness 66, 75, 86, 113 Unity 31, 33, 36 – 39, 71, 76, 79, 81, 86, 119 – 121, 129, 130, 136, 140, 144, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158 – 160, 168, 169, 172, 205 Universal 17, 19, 21, 25, 34, 41, 45, 48, 60, 65, 66, 71, 74, 85, 86, 88, 89, 101, 102, 105, 121, 124, 127, 129, 139, 141, 144, 152, 164, 177, 203 University 8, 9, 88, 154 Unlimited 50, 118, 187 Unrepentant 179, 186 Unwillingness 136, 162 Value 11, 12, 16, 17, 19 – 23, 27, 32, 43, 49, 62, 66, 72, 83, 84, 87, 90, 106, 107, 116, 119 – 128, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 146 – 154, 156, 160, 162, 163, 165, 169,174, 178, 179, 200, 203, 205 Vengeance 176, 184 Versatility 76, 138 View 7, 29, 36, 43, 55, 56, 62, 63, 71, 73, 78,

Index of Subjects

79, 81, 86, 90, 98, 110, 111, 113, 118, 121 – 125, 128, 131, 135, 138 – 140, 152, 160, 162, 165, 166, 168, 175, 178 – 180, 184, 190, 191, 198 – 200, 202 Virgin 182, 193, 195 Virginity 102, 197 Virtue 11, 34, 43, 54, 63, 73, 81, 111, 125, 148, 154, 164, 169, 175, 178, 179, 184, 186, 197 Vulgar 84, 136, 138 Vulnerable 104, 140, 197 Wahrheit 66, 68, 79, 105, 128, 132 War 23, 34, 36, 41, 61, 78, 85, 98, 99, 113 – 117, 135, 143 Waste 82, 161, 174 Water 70, 157, 196 Weakness 11, 43, 187, 197 Wickedness 150, 182 Wild 38, 41, 200 Wisdom 12, 23, 25, 67, 98, 110, 121, 122, 124, 138, 147, 154, 157 – 159, 164, 168, 170, 172 Wish 99, 198, 199 Word 16, 23, 25, 31, 36, 39 – 41, 47, 48, 51 – 54, 58 – 61, 67, 69, 72, 74, 82, 85, 96 – 98, 100, 101, 123, 124, 134, 135, 139, 145, 146, 156, 163, 168, 172, 184, 186, 193, 194, 199, 204 Work 8, 9, 11, 17, 22, 23, 26, 29 – 31, 33 – 37, 39, 41 – 43, 46 – 50, 53 – 55, 57, 62, 63, 66, 70 – 72, 75, 81 – 84, 86, 89 – 91, 94, 98, 99, 104 – 106, 109 – 115, 118, 122, 128, 130, 133, 135 – 137, 141, 152, 153, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168, 169, 171, 172, 182, 183, 190, 198, 204 World 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21 – 27, 30, 31, 39, 42, 43, 45, 47 – 50, 53, 56, 60, 67, 68, 71 – 73, 77 – 80, 83, 84, 86, 87, 95, 98, 99, 101, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111 – 120, 124 – 127, 129 – 131, 134 – 136, 138 – 140, 144, 146, 148 – 151, 153, 154, 156 – 160, 162, 163, 165, 167, 175, 177, 179, 180, 182, 187, 189, 190, 193 – 198, 200, 202 – 205 Writer 11, 12, 16, 20, 23, 27, 30, 37, 41, 51, 57, 62, 68, 69, 71 – 73, 77, 80, 81, 85, 86,

Index of Subjects

88, 90, 91, 96, 97, 99, 101, 104, 109, 111 – 122, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139, 146, 148, 152, 153, 159, 162, 168, 169, 173, 176, 201, 202, 204, 205 Writing 9, 11, 22, 24, 27, 31, 45 – 47, 51, 57, 61, 63, 66, 68, 69, 73, 74, 78, 81, 85, 88 – 90, 93 – 97, 99 – 102, 104 – 107, 109 – 114,

229 117, 125, 129 – 133, 140, 143, 147, 152, 171, 191, 192, 202, 203 Year 24, 46, 52, 97 – 99, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112 – 117, 140, 145, 170, 178, 181, 185 – 187, 190, 197 Youth 40, 51 – 53, 97, 102 – 105, 110 – 112, 117, 140, 190