The Artificiality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Monasticism 0804745242, 9780804745246

Table of contents :
Introduction 1
1. The Artifice of Eternity 17
2. Monastic Cruelty: Bernard of Clairvaux's Staging of the Past 39
3. André Malraux, Charles de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux on Action and Contemplation 59
4.Violent Embraces: Monastic Representations of the Old Testament 69
5. Killing Time: Some Remarks about the Monastic Conception of Speed 84
6. Anselm of Canterbury and the Art of Despair 107
7. The Mirror of Dialectics: Reason, Image, Word 136
8. Anselm's Brevity 151
9. Reading Anselm 162
10. Death and Pleasure: The Poetics of Cur deus homo 177
11. Narrative Superiority: Peter the Venerable and the Miracle of the Bees 199
12. Text and Soul: Calvin, Ignatius, Eckhart 212
13. The Scholastic Lyricism of John of the Cross
14. Baroque Devotion: Aspects of Perspective and Constraint in the Work of Pierre de Bérulle
15. Images of Iron: Ignatius of Loyola and Joyce 278
Notes 297
Bibliography 323

Citation preview

THE ARTIFICIALITY OF CHRISTIANITY ESSAYS OF

ON THE

POETICS

MONASTICISM

M. B. Pranger

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California 2003

Publication was made possible in pan by the suppon of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)

Stanford University Press Stanford. California © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

Pranger. XL B. The anindality of Christianity: essays on the poetics of monasticism / XL B. Pranger. p. cm. — (Figurae) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 0-8047-4524-2 (alk paper) 1. Monastic and religious life. 2. Christianity and literature. I. Title. II. Series: Figurae (Stanford, Calif.. BX2435.P635

2002 2002012602

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Typeset at Stanford University Press in n/14 Garamond

Original printing 2003 Last figure below indicates the year of this printing: 12

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TO PETER CRAMER GENTLEMAN, SCHOLAR

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Acknowledgments

Chapter 5, “Killing Time: Some Remarks about the Monastic Concept of Speed,” is reproduced by permission of Brill NV from Carolyn Muessig, ed., Medieval Monastic Preaching, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 90 (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Dialectics: Reason, Image, Word,” is reproduced by permission of Sheffield University Press from D. E. Luscombe and G. R. Evans, eds., Anselm: Aosta, Bee and Canterbury: Papers in Commemoration of the Nine-Hundredth Anniversary ofAnselm’s Enthronement as Archbishop (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Chapter 12, “Text and Soul,” is a revised version of the article “Normative Centering as a Textual Process: Calvin, Ignatius, Eckhart,” in R. Suntrup and J. Veenstra, eds., Medieval to Early Modem Culture, vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2002).

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Contents

Preface xiii

Introduction 1 Parti: VIOLENCE

I. The Artifice of Eternity 17

. Monastic Cruelty: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Staging of the Past 39 3. Andre Malraux, Charles de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux on Action and Contemplation 39 4. Violent Embraces: Monastic Representations of the Old Testament 69

5. Killing Time: Some Remarks about the Monastic Concept of Speed 84

Part II: DENSITY

6. Anselm of Canterbury and the Art of Despair 107 7. The Mirror of Dialectics: Reason, Image, Word 136 8. Anselms Brevity 151 9. Reading Anselm 162

10. Death and Pleasure: The Poetics of Cur deus homo 177

Contents xii

Part III: EXILE

11. Narrative Superiority: Peter the Venerable and the Miracle of the Bees 199 11. Text and Soul: Calvin, Ignatius, Eckhart 212

13. The Scholastic Lyricism of John of the Cross 233

14. Baroque Devouon: Aspects of Perspective and Constraint in the Work of Pierre de Berulle 261 15. Images of Iron: Ignatius of Loyola and Joyce 278

Notes 297 Bibliography 323

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Preface

The monastic soul is governed by hope and despair. In order to achieve the first, one has to specialize in the second; thus also the author who aims to give an account of his reading of monastic texts. Ever since I wrote my doc­ toral thesis on Anselm of Canterbury many years ago, I have been fasci­ nated by the sheer genius, hovering between desperation and joy, with which he succeeded in blending beauty of style with rigor of argumenta­ tion. Just as one rereads and rediscovers the great narratives of civilization without ever striking rock bottom, so the basic moods of joy and despair, artfully manipulated by Anselm and other great medieval thinkers, appear to be inexhaustible in eloquence and expressiveness. From a more modern point of view, talking about “moods” would seem to be mainly about feeling and experience. And indeed it must be ac­ knowledged that much of the directness and authenticity of the stirrings of the modern psyche derives from the way in which Western devotion has developed since the late Middle Ages. As the core of my book, which deals with an earlier period (the flourishing of monastic literature between 1000 and 1200), demonstrates, it is clear that, instead of being concerned with authentic emotions, the monastic author focuses on the artificiality of a technical process in which emotions are being established and handled as part of performative exercises rather than as feelings that are present and accessible as such. One of the ways to write about this complex body of literature is to turn to the rhetorical techniques at hand and analyze their historical func­ tion in medieval (monastic) sources. This is the approach of the great Swiss scholar Peter von Moos, to whose immensely learned work I owe much. In

Preface xiv

my effort to read and represent monastic writings in their entirety—in the unity of their technical and emotive aspects—my inspiration has always been drawn from modernist literature, in particular Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. His focus on Genauigkeit und die Seele (precision and the soul) seems eminently applicable to Anselm and to other monastic thinkers, as does his playful and ironic use of technical, scientific language. The subde shades that can be discovered in Romanesque literary “sculp­ ture with the help of Musil and others are, in my view, proofs of the fact that the discipline of (literary) history could profit from more recent specimens of literature if only to break the great chain of (deceitful) his­ torical continuity. It was not, therefore, fear of anachronism that kept Musil and the likes of him out of my earlier writings on Anselm, but the economy of focus: Genauigkeit/precision. Both aspects, the economy of focus and the possibility of a historical assessment of intensity and preci­ sion, are expressed most wonderfully in Ernst Bloch’s Musil-like character­ ization of his friend, the conductor Otto Klemperer: nirgends brennen u>ir genauer (“nowhere do we burn with greater precision”). Bloch’s adage seems quite suitable for describing Klemperer’s career, haunted and almost destroyed by recurring periods of manic depressive moods. It was not the great man’s moodiness in itself that made his conducting so intense and precise; rather, moodiness, however aggressive and unsettling, was to be seen as the side effect of the focus, precision, and intensity of his art. This, to my mind, is exacdy the way the monastic mind operates. Joy and de­ spair do not cease to be linked to a burning place, the paradisus claustralis, whose depths, both horrible and blissful, are unfathomable. In the course of years I have built up a considerable debt to a number of scholars and friends. Ever since our first meeting in 1974, Arjo Vanderjagt has been my loyal companion in matters Anselmian and beyond. The sec­ retary of the International Anselm Committee, Helmut Kohlenberger, has been indefatigable in organizing Anselm conferences all over the globe, from which many chapters in this book have sprung. I appreciate his friendship over the years and our conversations about academia, religion, and culture. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jules Vuillemin, whose rigor of argumentation, stylistic elegance, and wit are not without Anselmian overtones.

Preface xv

John Ashton, Mette Bruun, Michael Clanchy, Bram Kempers, Helmut Kohlenberger, Frans-Willem Korsten, Willemien Otten, Rob Pauls, and Ineke van’t Spijker have read the manuscript, or parts of it, and provided me with illuminating comments. As always, my colleague and friend Alas­ tair Hamilton has taken care of my English in his customary efficient way. I would like to thank Willemien Otten and Hent de Vries for their continuous support and Bram Kempers, not only for his accurate and sym­ pathetic reading of the manuscript, but also for our friendly conversations originating in our shared method of exercising our administrative duties in the service of our university by wandering around the streets of Amster­ dam. It is my pleasure to dedicate this book to Peter Cramer of Winchester College, England. Not only has he furnished me with countless ideas that have gone into the conception of this book, but he also is the most stub­ bornly leisurely reader—and person—I know. A master of procrastination, he has positioned himself outside the production-driven culture of present academia. Yet, as far as I am concerned, for any future studies of the hu­ manities to make sense, the slowing down for reflection and meditation is a prerequisite. If, from a historical perspective, this book takes as its point of departure a period of transition from the slow place of monastic culture to the outburst of mental energy in towns and universities, it may also be a reminder of the beauty of intellectual rumination once practiced and now almost forgotten but for the Cramers of this world.

University ofAmsterdam

M. B. Pranger

THE ARTIFICIALITY OF CHRISTIANITY

1

Introduction The Poetics ofMonasticism

he argument that lends this collection of essays its coherence is based on two simple premises. First, I take it for a fact that, up to the twelfth century and beyond, the liberal arts have been underlying Christianity’s each and every literary expression. Second, in my view it is monasticism that has both incorporated and transformed the liberal arts into a reading culture, the poetical nature of which has been hitherto in­ sufficiently appreciated. From a professional, historical point of view both assumptions are truisms. Or rather they should be. Ever since Henri-Irenee Matron's seminal book, Saint Augustine and the End of Classical Culture, each historian of late antiquity and the Middle Ages has known that he is denied direct access to the texts of Augustine and, by implication, of his patristic predecessors and medieval successors. Whatever religious treasures those texts—as indeed the text that conditioned all others, the Bible— might have in store, they were not just for the taking. Jealously guarded by their custodians, the liberal arts, they had first to be mastered before they could be enjoyed. With a stroke of genius Augustine had blended the tech­ nical requirements of the liberal arts—the educational process of learning how to speak and read—with the concept of mental training. Thus the mastering of language turned into a religious exercise if not a fight. Like Ja­ cob’s fight with the angel, the struggle for the word, from the learning of the ABC’s to the spiritual understanding of the Bible, was the one and only way in which incarnation—the central concept of Christianity—could materialize. Of course, if He had so wished, God could have acted in a less laborious manner as, for instance, through the offices of an angel. How­ ever, “if He had seemed to reject the opportunity of communicating his

Introduction 2 Word through men to men, the human condition would have been by­ passed. 1 Always on its wav out, the Word had to be confronted with vio­ lent reading in order to be “kept down,” preserved, and understood. Time and again two desperate cries can be heard in Christian—monastic—liter­ ature reflecting the urgency of understanding a text: “I will not let you go unless you bless me," and “abide with us, for soon evening will fall. This study is not primarily historical, or, more precisely, it is not histor­ ical in a conventional way. As I shall point out in more detail below, it is my foremost ambition to distill from monastic literature a poetical tool that can be used to decipher the literary structure of religious texts. Yet it goes with­

out saying that such a procedure cannot be ahistorical. The very technique of monastic reading, focused on leisure and immobility, is part and parcel

of history. I will take this leisure and immobility as my point of departure, and thence forge my poetical key. This key will have the shape of circularity and manifest itself in its most perfect guise the one moment in the history of Christianity at which monastic reading is characterized by a perfect blend of rationality’ and affection. Of course, so bold an assumption with regard to “moments in history” is a partipris on my part. As such it is rather arbi­ trary. 1 am quite willing to admit that the same point can be made in many other, different ways. Far from being a highlight, this “one moment,” from a linear viewpoint of history in search of a chain of historical causality, is nothing but one moment. Only in that shape can it have the power and strength it arguably has and reveal other moments in history as counter­ points. Thus, although I shall discuss this particular manifestation of

monastic poetics (in the work of Anselm of Canterbury) in the second, cen­ tral part of the book, its sheer force permeates the other parts as well. Taking this monastico-historiographical point of departure into ac­ count, the historical underpinning of my literary activities centers on one or two basic concerns. First, in spite of an overwhelming increase in the number of studies into the formal aspects of medieval literature, monasti­ cism tends to be systematically ignored, as if the realm of religion should stay untouched as far as its technical structure is concerned. This neglect is all the more interesting because to make another sweeping statement— theological studies proper from the second half of the twelfth century up to the present day tend to take their formal, “scholastic,” that is, argumen­ tative, structure for granted.2 Second, in my view it is indeed the shape of

Introduction 3

later “scholastic” theology and the fact that, in the course of the later Mid­ dle Ages, scholastic theology and devotion parted ways that have prevented historians from reading the—older—corpus of monastic literature prop­ erly. Third, the combined forces of doctrinal theology and devotion (as an anachronistic rereading and reuse of older devotional texts) have denied lit­ erary historians, as indeed all lovers of literature, the benefit of appreciat­ ing monasticism as one of the constitutive elements of Western literature. For once, it would not be altogether anachronistic if notions common in modern literature, such as the artificial versus the psychological nature of the human subject in art works or the nonlinearity of narrative, were to be traced back in earlier, monastic sources.3

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Like the site of a monastic building complex the artifice of eternity breathes an air of peace and innocence. If we look, for example, at the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey of Senanque in Provence, we are struck by the peace and calm that seem to bring rest and control to the wildness of the environment. Languishing in the Mediterranean sun at midday it seems to be “such stuff as dreams are made on” and its life “is rounded with a sleep.” All the outsider can observe is the calm of the place, which gives the distinct impression of uneventfulness. Yet there is “death in the after­ noon”; indeed, a drama is going on that is all the more dramatic because it is invisible.4 The early monks who withdrew to the deserts of Egypt and Syria, for example, were known and admired for their spectacular battles against the incessant attacks of demons. Interestingly, underneath this demonology— which, anachronistically, may seem naive to the modern mind—there was an early warning system based on a sophisticated psychology. Thus the selfsame monk who can be seen battling at night against the devil dressed in his traditional outfit of black monstrosity does not cease to exercise his mind so as to be able to recognize the devil’s tricks. Disguised as “the angel of midday” (that is, the angel of light), the demon tries to manifest himself sub forma boni. Only a well-trained eye is able to distinguish between de­ ceitful appearance and reality. As for this invisible night side of the monastery, a story about Macarius, one of the desert fathers, illustrates the point.5 In the middle of the night the devil, in the disguise of a monk, knocks on the door of Macarius’s cell, inviting Macarius to join him and

Introduction 4

inspect the place where the fellow monks celebrate the vigils. Macarius’s perspicacity prevents him from being tricked. He recognizes the devil for what he is and refuses to accept the latter’s invitation, arguing that the so­ ciety of the demons and that of the monks have nothing in common. However, Macarius’s perspicacity turns out to be only partial. For the devil cynically retons, “don’t you realize that no meeting of monks takes place without our presence?” In order to prove his point the devil now takes Macarius to the meeting. The scene is utterly shocking. The monks are there all right, praying and chanting. But there are also black, Ethiopian bet’s, running around, dancing, and sitting on the monks’ heads, distract­ ing the quiet company from their official business and lulling them to sleep. Meanwhile, the boys use this splendid opportunity to infuse dark thoughts into those pious minds. The next morning the monks look un­ changed. But when asked by Macarius if any dark thought had entered their minds during the vigils, they realize—and admit—that they had been distracted. So the sleep and dreams that round the monastery’s peaceful existence are not as unproblematic as they seem. But even the invisible intrusion of demons into the enclosed space and time of liturgy, chant, and prayer is not all there is to the story. Underneath this invisibility of demonic pres­ ence lurks another, more serious presence in the shape of sadness, melan­ choly, aridity, desolation, and tepidness. In short, it is death in the after­ noon. The very invisibility of the demonic assaults in Macarius s story seems to produce a kind of double dramatic effect. Admittedly, together with Macanus we are witnesses to the nocturnal scene of dancing demons. But in reality all we see is praying and chanting monks. They are not really distracted. They still sing and pray. Yet deep down, invisible to both them­ selves and the eye of the beholder, the threat of indifference and aridity eats away at the stability of the well-protected life within the walls of the monastery. Another way this “death in the afternoon” manifests itself is through the sudden reversal of religious experience into despair. Like a manic-de­ pressive patient the monk can suddenly turn from ecstatic joy about the pleasures of the divine pipresence to a sense of utter sadness and desolation. The father of Western, ascetic monasticism, John Cassian, has expressed this aridity of the soul as follows:

Introduction 5 And next [after the experience of divine presence] we are suddenly and without any preceding cause filled with anxiety and depressed because of an irrational feeling of sadness. This feeling is so strong that we do not only have an increasing sense of aridity. We also hate being in our cell. Reading [scripture] fills us with repulsion. Our prayer turns into an unstable, waver­ ing utterance as if spoken by someone who is drunk. As a result, in spite of our sighs and frantic efforts, our mind is not able to redirect itself to its pre­ vious course. And the more intently we focus our attention on contemplat­ ing God, the more vehemently it is forced through a slippery side path to its unstable course. Thus all spiritual fruits are made worthless. Consequently, neither a desire for the kingdom of heaven nor a fear of hell is capable of rousing the mind out of this lethal sleep.6 So much, then, for the safe haven of the monastery. Exactly what is hiding behind this “demon of midday,” trying to lull the happy, monastic soul asleep? In psychological terms, it is the intensity of the experience of hap­ piness. Such intensity just cannot last. Just as the soul is lifted up into an excessive feeling of bliss, so desolation strikes back and brings the soul down to earth. Interestingly, when Cassian describes this downfall of the soul, he uses phrases that are traditionally applied to mystical experience, such as raptus and excessus-, the difference with mysticism is that, unlike the brief moment of bliss, the violent attack of sadness and despondency cap­ tures as well as freezes the soul into lethality. Describing our monk as potentially depressed is not enough, however, and psychology is not all that counts. The monk’s melancholia does not re­ sult from the general tribulations of life. His is not a despondency about lost parents or broken relationships. Rather, it is the artificial nature of his “splendid isolation” that makes him unhappy. The mechanics of the monastic existence, the unending cycle of prayer and chant, the iron rhythm of the daily schedule, the lofty ideal of taking one’s brethren to have the faces of angels—however ugly they may appear to the gaze of the weary observer—the treadmill of meditation and reading without ever be­ ing distracted and free—for even the free moments are part of the rule that regulates the free life, the “holiday” of the vacare deo—all this constitutes the life without a shadow that is threatened by the death in the afternoon. Consequently, using words such as “despondency,” “desolation,” or “sad­ ness” to describe the monk’s state of mind is inadequate to the extent that

Introduction 6

it suggests a certain visibility’. But we do not see monks who are melancholv and depressed. Far more dangerous than such public symptoms and, in fact, underlying all monastic sadness is the most untheatrical of all temptations, tepidness. As an invisible drawback in the routine of daily life, an undramatic bend rather than total despair, tepidness is the real threat to the stability of monastic life. It is the ultimate manifestation of the demon of midday. Its effect is that of someone holding a match rather than actually setting fire to the powder (to use an anachronistic metaphor). True, explosions do occur: witness the sudden stroke of aridity and despair as described by Cassian. But they originate in the aevum and the longue duree suggested by the artificial monastic context and the art-full way of life. Improbable though it may seem from the viewpoint of the weak struc­ tures of general society, it is indeed this nature of aevum that both opens up and reinforces the verticality, that is, the real drama of monastic despair.

When taken literally, the technique of the contemptus mundi seems to func­ tion as the means through which the monk withdraws from the world, both the world at large and the world within himself. Yet its real focus alerts us to a problem that is more serious than the status of what is sup­ posedly left behind when fleeing the world. It is the fullness of the divine presence itself that is problematic. As a result, the monastic claim of a real and intense life versus the weakness of the world is under the permanent threat of falling short. Should this threat materialize, things would be turned upside down—or, from the perspective of normal, worldly life, be reduced to their normal state—leaving the monastery behind as the empty artifice it is. Here the “death in the afternoon” and the technique of monas­ tic despair meet. The monastery and its rituals represent divine presence. But the divine is not for the taking; it is not even there. As far as visibility is concerned, the divine is no less concealed than the Ethiopian boys in Macarius’s story. Languishing in the midday sun, the monastery that is supposed to contain and preserve the divine presence is as much to be ac­ tivated and “run” by its inhabitants as the nocturnal activities of the demon are to be discerned by the well-trained eye. On the other hand, the divine is overwhelmingly present in the same way as the midday sun, through its sheer intensity blinding the eye of the beholder. In order to hold those dis­ parate elements of presence and absence together, the monastic mind keeps exercising through prayer, chant, and meditation. Technically speaking, the

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Introduction 7

contempt™ mundi meditation, that is, the exercise in despair about oneself and the world, sets the pattern of the monastic life, thereby preventing the self from dissolving into the vagueness and diffusion of the world and preparing it for “living the way one reads.” No wonder that so intense and focused a way of living is by definition on the brink of falling short, not as a dramatic collapse with a concomitant display of despair, but through the subtle offices of tepidness: death in the afternoon. Out of its well-hidden position of slumber, tepidness, in turn, may “suddenly and without any preceding cause” take on the shape of utter aridity and desolation. If we now turn to the design of a poetical tool that may help us to “read” the picture thus evoked, the simplest way seems to call on the concept of circularity. Just as, on the face of it, narrative prose is characterized by its sequential structure, so monastic literature is shaped by circularity and rep­ etition. In facing monastic circularity we no doubt confront the problem of time. Now, it is a given fact that classical culture had furnished early and early medieval Christianity with a fixed set of literary genres, thereby lend­ ing it the same air of timelessness as suggested by its own stable forms of epic, drama, and lyricism. Considered from the perspective of literary gen­ res, most monastic texts seem to focus on the ongoing process of exegetical rumination, as if the monks were doing their very best to exclude all traces of a culture that—from the monastic viewpoint at least—is marked by a competing stability of literary forms. Yet this should not lead us to be­ lieve that the art of rhetoric was forgotten.7 Far from it. For the monastic lifestyle, reflecting as it did the leisure (ptium) of the Hellenistic literatus, would seem ideally suited to incorporate the “timeless” nature of classical literature.8 Yet the surface of calm and rest so characteristic of monastic literary production may well be deceptive. The very circularity of its shape intro­ duces the possibility of sudden contractions into the seemingly uninter­ rupted flow of contemplation and rumination. Thus we are witness to sud­ den flashes of bliss and damnation, of hope and despair. These are in fact the result of time making its entrance in the guise of eternity’s shadow. The intensity of time is such as to break and shorten the permanence and fixity of literary expression and, conversely, to lengthen and extend its own flashlike appearance into a protracted suggestion of suspense. This is what I mean when I speak of the hold of eternity over time.

Introduction 8 Through the use of my poetical key I intend to unveil this hold not only in monastic literature, but also, by way of contrast, in other literary works as well. It is my conviction that between the fixed genres of classical and clas­ sicist literature and the outburst into free expression of Romanticism and (posflmodernism a mode of reading and writing existed that was rooted in the immobility of a ritual lifestyle. Yet the basically temporal nature and fragility of human existence caused that same mode of reading permanendy to be hovering on the generic edge. Admittedly, the average interpretation of medieval, and particularly monastic, texts does not pay attention to this fragility. Ever since the pub­ lication of Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Culture and the Latin Middle Ages, the general idea about medieval literature has tended, in one way or another, to be associated with the fixity of genres and literary cliches.9 Meanwhile, one of the ironies of the historiographical trade has been that both theologically orientated interpreters and historians of mentality— undisturbed, it seems, by the barriers of formal expression—carry on the business of distilling their own meaning, cultural as well as spiritual, from the sources at hand. However, neither approach does justice to the special status of monastic texts. As for those texts, the hold of eternity over time that seems to result from reading them is intrinsically present inside them. Due to the very embrace of eternity and time inside the text, time reveals its true and fragile nature. In contrast to the pity and fear raised by tragedy, the laughter raised by comedy, the emotions over war and peace brought on by epics, and the af­ fective mood of passion inspired by lyricism, the fragile nature of the hu­ man existence dwells inside the monastic texts themselves. For this reason they demand to be handled with care by the reader. The reader, in turn, does not himself dwell outside the text. He is at its very core, not as an im­ plied reader, but as its very soul. This is what the ultimate structure of monastic poetics is about. The Bible, writings by the Church Fathers, ser­ mons or meditations by the father abbot, all this is the source material for reading, rumination, and contemplation. But this does not make the texts themselves soulless. They are “memorials,” living products of the authors’ memories that, in turn, memorize other texts that had been revolving around the same source material as that of their readers.10 As a result, the act of reading is nothing but one memory meeting and absorbing another one, a memoria memoriae, a memory of memory.

Introduction 9

Precisely at this meeting point we see the fragility of time and the na­ ture of temporality itself come to the fore. As the genres of epic, drama, and lyricism in a sense externalize time and events by the sheer force of their (formal) power as handled by the reader, they maintain a delicate bal­ ance of suspense and relief, distance and proximity. In one way or another, the reader experiences width and breadth. In contrast, the experience of monastic reading is based on sheer verticality, the timeless extension of the reading process notwithstanding. Precisely at the point where the gaze of the reader touches the text, time and eternity meet, grasping the reader and forcing him to turn inward, to memorize, to construe and reconstrue time and history in their vertical guise. Consequently, the routine of reading (and praying and singing), rather than representing uninterrupted conti­ nuity, consists of repetition. It may create the suggestion of wholeness and continuity if seen from a distance. But on closer inspection the technicali­ ties of the composition are revealed. It is the ever-repeated act of turning inward, of activating memory, that constitutes the so-called calm and con­ tinuity of monastic rumination and contemplation. In the repetition lies the truth. So, from the monastic viewpoint, to read a text is neither an arbitrary nor a harmless act. To touch it means not only to be caught but also to be drawn into it, and into the abyss of one’s own memorial self. At the same time, as I have pointed out, like the Word that is at the source of all lan­ guage and understanding, the text itself remains inaccessible, resisting any appropriation. It can only be conquered in a slow and sustained fight. The result of this fight is a vertical version of epic, drama, and lyricism. The same ingredients that constitute the usual stories of war and peace, happi­ ness and doom, love and hate also go into the making of monastic mem­ ory. Yet in a striking difference from the conventional genres, they are all being contracted into the punctum or puncta of the monastic “narrative,” while at the same time expanding into the ever-streaming flow of rumina­ tion and meditation. As a result of time’s special manifestation inside the monastic text, the notion of otium changes face. Having mastered the liberal arts, the Hel­ lenistic literatus was supposed to apply his skills at leisure anywhere and at any time. Now there is no denying that our eleventh- or twelfth-century Benedictine saw himself as the proud successor of a culture in which edu­ cation in the liberal arts was the key to a successful career, either sacred or profane. But, although monastic schools such as Le Bee were to remain the

Introduction

io

training centers in which the applicability of the arts “anytime and any­

where" were still being taught, here too the hold of eternity over time can be seen to have struck relentlessly." To get a better grip on this matter, let

us have a look at Anselm’s introductory remarks to his Prayers or Medita­

tions?'The Prayers or Mediations have been written to excite the mind of the reader to love or fear God or to analyze one’s own mind. Therefore, they are not to be read in turmoil but in quiet, not cursorily or in a hurry but slowly, with an intent and scrupulous meditation. Nor should it be the reader’s am­ bition to read them in their entirety, but to the degree that he feels himself capable, with the help of God, of igniting the feeling of prayer or to the de­ gree that it pleases him. Nor is it necessary always to begin at the beginning. The reader is free to begin wherever he likes. For that purpose the text of the prayers and meditations is divided into different parts with the help of paragraphs so as to enable the reader to begin and to stop where he likes. Thus neither the prolixity nor the frequent repetition of the same subject matter generates a feeling of boredom. Rather, the reader manages to ac­ quire some of the devotional affectivity for the purpose of which those prayers were made.

It is tempting to jump to conclusions and focus all our attention on the last remark in this passage, as it highlights the process of monastic read­

ing as one bent on achieving devotional affectivity. However, such an in­ terpretation would be quite anachronistic. This interpretation would apply to the later Middle Ages and beyond, as indeed one of the characteristics of late medieval and early modern religious imagery is to externalize devo­

tional feelings. To do so effectively the imagery had to be tough and, in a sense, unambiguous. This means that late medieval texts, rather than be­ ing the meeting point of their own (fathomless) mnemonic structure and

the memory of the reader—a memory of memory—are designed to help the reader, through the very toughness of their imagery, to sharpen his

mind and to arouse affectivity and devotion. What is conspicuously absent in those later ways of reading is the subtle poetical attitude Anselm requires here from his reader, symbolized as it is by the highly paradoxical notion of otium. At first glance, those reading instructions do not seem paradoxical at all. Non in tumultu sed in quiete, “not in turmoil but in quiet”: that is the

Introduction n proper situation for reading and meditation. Still, after all that we have said about the simultaneous presence of hope and despair, the notion of monas­ tic leisure takes on a quite deceptive ring. Far from representing aristocratic leisure that grants the reader freedom of movement and an even more ba­ sic freedom of choice whether to read or not to read, the monastic reader, wherever he is, is not at liberty not to read (to paraphrase Augustine’s dic­ tum that man is not at liberty to ignore that he is living). It is true, on the one hand, that the leisure, the slow pace and the quiet required for monas­ tic reading, have to be taken quite literally. It is also true that the intro­ ductory remarks in which the author expresses his concern with regard to his possibly boring the reader is an integral part of the very complex of leisure that was underlying classical and early Christian culture for ages. On the surface of it, Anselm’s language, with its use of turns and topoi (such as the modesty topos'), displays beauty and a formalism as elegant as that of his predecessors, both pagan and Christian. But unseen by the ex­ ternal eye is the true shape of this leisure, slowness, and calm, its being tied up, at any point on the circumference of the circle, to the fathomless depths of memory present inside the text. Thus the reader is indeed free to start or stop wherever he chooses. But, as soon as his ear is touched by a single word, hope or despair, life or terror, he becomes drawn into the abyss of his own memory, as the place where all is said and done. The re­ sult of this internalized reading is supposed to yield devotional affectivity. However, the desired state of sweetness and joy is not reached outside the text by the soul’s encounter with imagery and words that batter it into happiness. On hearing the words, whether sweet or harsh, the monastic soul becomes inevitably drawn into a reading game in which it recognizes those external words to be part of a memory shared by the text (author) and reader alike, a memory that is ever remote and ever close. In this way it becomes the object of continuous rumination. How could it be other­ wise? How could this process be interrupted without the reading monk falling prey to the vicissitudes of extramural time, to the turmoil of the world outside in which reading, like anything else, is bound to be “super­ ficial” and restless, to be lacking in otiumf Be that as it may, the price the monk pays for his own rest and leisure is high. Not at liberty not to read, his is a violent life. Like Jacob fighting with the angel at night, the reading monk will not let his opponent go unless he is blessed by him. But what

Introduction 12 about the angel? Does he, for his part, ever contemplate the possibility of giving up? Does the hold of eternity over time ever, for a single moment, flag? Does Venus, tout entftre h sa proie attachie, ever loosen her grip?13

The first two parts of the present study, “Violence” and “Density,” focus on the practice of monastic poetics as outlined in this introduction. In the first seaion 1 explore the different ways in which the concept of monastic leisure, once it is recognized for what it really is, that is, the slow and con­ tinuous realization of divine perfection, is full of violence both intrinsically and extrinsically. The driving force behind all this is a technical principle. It is the underlying linkage between divine and human realities that is brought out, or, rather, forced to be brought out by technicalities of lan­ guage and thought. I deal with rhetoric as a means of tackling the (monas­ tic) problems of absence and presence, turmoil and rest, war and peace, all ofwhich result from the hold of eternity over time. In part two, “Density, I draw the logical conclusion from this stance with the help of the most ''logical” monastic thinker ever, Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). This seaion is entirely devoted to his work as both the most artificial and most elegant expression of monastic poetics. Tracing the way in which Anselm plays with dialectics (logic) and rhetoric—reinforcing the one with the help of the other—I discuss the poetical implications of his famous single argument (unum argumentum). In a sense his use of dialectic can be seen as a refined application of rhetoric. Together those two artes are supposed to establish once and for all, in an “artificial” manner, the link with divine perfection. The stakes thus having been raised by the introduction of di­ alectics as a means to achieve greater transparency, problems of violence, failure, and fragility will emerge ever more dramatically. Once, with the help of irrefutable logic, perfection is established, blackness and destruc­ tion will not be slow to follow suit. Ultimately, in terms of the arts, it is the lightness and elegance of Anselm’s Benedictine Latin (in which the argu­ ment is wrapped) that forces evil to come out of its hiding place in order next to reveal its shape of utter nothingness. It will come as no surprise that this particular monastic way of reading was not destined to survive. In need of protective living conditions symbolized by the walls of the monastery, monastic reading lost its specific flavor once devotional language became the business of an urban society that emerged

1

Introduction 13

in the course of the twelfth century. In that society devotion was still to be found in a book, but the book no longer had a soul of its own. For that it needed a coherence and density, a “simultaneousness” no longer provided by the new circumstances. Rather than being part and parcel of that process, books (of prayer and meditation) increasingly became the vehi­ cles—however precious in themselves—to bring out despair and joy in the reader.14 Like the increasingly important capital and money, books became the means to a goal rather than functioning as an extension of a living memory. Now the title of part three, “Exile,” might suggest that I consider the development from monastic to other, less densely composed forms of (de­ votional) literature as a decline from grace. From the viewpoint of monas­ tic poetics this would indeed seem to be the case, although from that same viewpoint decline is as indifferent a notion as growth. In my overall ap­ proach to the matter I stick to indifference. My main concern is to intro­ duce the reader to a neglected chapter in the history of literature, not, as I have pointed out, for historical but for poetical reasons. In order to bring out the full impact of monastic poetics I confront it with later develop­ ments that, historiographically speaking, have tended to absorb it, turning the history of devotion into one uninterrupted and intimate story of the faithful soul. This way of dealing with the matter has the additional ad­ vantage of revealing the newness and harshness of an imagery that was no longer part of the monastic setting and that has traditionally been labeled as sweet (dulcis) by Catholics and Protestants alike. From a historical point of view we may be rightly said to witness here the transition from an oral society to the world of the written record. But then again, I should like to point to history’s indifference. If, on the one hand, the modern world is governed by the written record and its soulless status that is the condition for its effectiveness and success, on the other hand, “texts with a soul” reemerge as, I suppose, they have never ceased to do. To drive this point home, a spectacular example of the combined pres­ ence of textual soul and soullessness is presented in the last chapter of this book, dealing with Joyce and Ignatius of Loyola. If Joyce’s A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man can be read as the epitome of externalized imagery and its Ignatian application to life (and the reader), his Finnegans Wake abounds with “soul.” So, in one way or another, what I have coined here as the poetics of

Introduction 14

monasticism and the artificiality of Christianity has lived on, not only in the shape of literature but also in the high-tech guise of popular culture. In the British television sitcom The Royle Family, a working-class family sits as languidly and ritually before the TV set as the monastic community was gathered around the persons or objects that constituted its memory: the preaching abbot, the books of prayer and meditation, the church altar. The ruminations of the family, whose frank use of “vulgar” language would not have displeased Joyce, are no less structureless, nonlinear, non-narrative, and repetitive than the incidents that happen on the circumference of the monastic circle. As for the television, it is never switched off. Like the monastic book, it is part of the community game. If the monk is not at libertv not to read, the Royle family and its visitors are not at liberty not to watch. Haphazard images and sounds from the screen trigger the family conversation. And although the individual mind may seem to escape the monastic fate of being driven inward on seeing, however remotely, the im­ age or hearing the word, even that may be misleading. The television pic­ ture itself may suggest superficiality, but that does not necessarily apply to the viewers experience. Once the viewer’s eye and ear touch the languid­ ness of the scene they are drawn in and down. What they hear and see is time being killed in slow motion, hovering, like the monastery, between boredom, cruelty, and bliss.

PART I

Violence

CHAPTER I

The Artifice of Eternity

n the summer of 1993, at the height of the Bosnian war, the Ameri­ can author Susan Sontag came to the beleaguered city of Sarajevo to stage, together with the inhabitants and for their benefit, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. By some this was seen as an act of courage and solidarity. Oth­ ers criticized Sontag for using the victims of an atrocious war as tokens of Western frustration with its own reluctance, or impotence, to intervene on the battlefield. Interestingly, no one dared criticize the performance itself. No one, except one critic, himself a refugee from Sarajevo. Entitled to speak his mind, he pointed out one basic flaw in Sontag’s direction of the play.1 In his view she suffered from the burden of her good intentions. For sheer fear of appearing too frivolous amidst the hardship of Bosnian real­ ity, she had deprived Becketts play of its comic aspects. But it was precisely comedy—or tragicomedy—so abundantly present in Waiting for Godot, that, under the circumstances, could have lent the event the touch of the­ atrical relaxation for which actors and audience alike were craving so des­ perately. As things stood, the performance was too statically focused on equating the “waiting for Godot” with the gloomy outlook of the extra­ mural reality. Sontag’s literal-mindedness seems to be part of a general trend. Ad­ mittedly, in postmodernism “il n’y a pas de hors texte.” True, the “nega­ tive” figures prominently in the postmodern debate. Yet it turns out hard to resist the temptation to establish a one-to-one relationship between text—and art, for that matter—and reality, once decentralization, disor­ der, chaos, and destruction are involved. It is not only the popular, or, rather, populist, interpretation of “modern art” as expressing the tormented

The Artifice of Eternity

18

nature of our age: "Picasso, Creator and Destroyer.”2 Also, on a more seri­

ous level, philosophical and theological readers of a poet like T. S. Eliot

tend to take the artist literally when he describes his Wasteland as “a heap of broken images.’ -' Thus the serious reader associates Eliot’s desert with the death of God and the disappearance of cohesion and structure from modem life and society. As for Eliot, the aloofness he displays when look-

ins; back on The Wastelands telling enough. “Various critics have done me

the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism.

To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse

against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”4 Of course, one should not be misled by the literary cliche and pose in this quote. Nor

should one ignore the fact that the relativization of the personal “grouse against life" looks highly ambiguous in the light of Eliot’s serious private problems at the time of his writing The Wasteland? But so much is clear. Just like Sontag’s literalization of Waiting for Godot, so the broadly philo­ sophical extension of Eliot’s poetry spoils the original lightness of the poem.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?6

Those are the serious questions of life and death the poet faces. Identifying

those questions as the problem of the death of God in the twentieth cen­ tury, of the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz, of the end of Judeo-Christian civilization or the end of history as such, is quite a differ­

ent matter. This tendency to look for the literal and historical in literature is some­

how rooted in Christianity. Ever since its introduction in the Hellenistic world Christianity has distinguished itself by its claim of historicity and re­ alism. Thanks to the work of Erich Auerbach, attention has been drawn to the revolutionary nature of the so-called sermo humilis, the low style sym­ bolized by the topos of the simple fishermen writing the Gospels.7 Unedu­ cated and unspoiled by the requirements of formal ornamentation of style, they—and their successors—wrote down what they had seen and heard. For Auerbach this sense of reality is most brilliantly expressed in the work

of the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours. In his History ofthe Franks

The Artifice of Eternity 19 Gregory has given an eyewitness account of the petty, though extremely bloody, fights between the Frankish warlords. The bishop himself acts as a go-between for the different parties. Thus the reader can watch him in his frantic and tireless efforts to maintain a minimum of order and peace. There are plenty of intrigues and much manipulation on all sides; no great and glorious battles here, no heroes, just victims, scoundrels, and disorder. By any standard, this is not the stuff of which classical history writing is made. To return to my opening image of the Bosnian war, the region of Tours, with its feuding German tribes, somehow reminds one of the chaotic Bosnian situation, during which attempts at mediation and peace­ making depended on bluff and double bluff and lasted no longer than it took the warriors to reload their guns. Gregory—the bishop in those days and in those circumstances being the last symbol and guarantee of Roman order and authority—moved with as much cunning and improvisation as possible just to discover the next day that all his efforts had been to no avail. It is, by the way, Gregory’s extremely vivid style and the improvisation-like panache with which he writes down what he has seen happening, in other words, the lack of classical brevity and sublimity and even the grammatical deficiencies, that look like imitations of the fragmented real­ ity being described. Thus a literary masterwork displaying a strong sense of the contingent and the absurd emerges. Accordingly, it should be noted that fiction and the fantastic are more prominent than Auerbach’s “realis­ tic” interpretation would have it. Or, to put it once more in terms of our opening image, there is more Beckett and less Sontag in Gregory than a su­ perficial reading would allow for. In spite of the Christian focus on historicity, Gregory of Tours has re­ mained an exception to the rule of the predominance of form and style. Its realistic ambitions notwithstanding, Christian historiography was molded into literary genres whose given status dictated its contents. Another ele­ ment that constituted the static nature of Christian historical writing was the survival of the Aristotelian, and more generally the classical, concept of history as a “heap” of particular elements unfit to contribute to intellectual knowledge in which the universal was favored over the particular. Further, the requirement of rhetorical efficiency as well as the Christian preference for the spiritual over the literal and historical—analogous to the classical

The Artifice of Eternity 20

I

preference for the universal over the particular—resulted in the disappear­ ance of notions of temporality and historical authenticity and reliability be­ hind the screen of literary’ form.8 Yet throughout ancient Christianity and the Middle Ages a sense of the literal remains all-pervasive, although in many respects it is not to historical writings that one should turn for sup­ port of this new. For some medieval authors the literal does indeed figure exclusively as a source for higher, spiritual knowledge. Others, such as the twelfth-century Victorines, tried to take the letter seriously before moving on to higher knowledge. No one, however, claimed to be able to do en­ tirely without the senstis litteralis sive historian. And even in the most spir­ itual contemplation historicity keeps the sublime down to earth, a fact that is apdy illustrated by the tide of another book by Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World? But let us now return to the dire beginning of this chapter. Sontag’s re­ alism and the extension of Eliot’s poetry somehow echo Christian notions of history, that is, history as a grand design. In this macroconcept of his­ tory a permanent tension makes itself felt between fulfillment and delay. We have on the one hand the prudence of Augustine’s philosophy of his­ tory, and on the other the optimism of the apocalyptic movements regard­ ing the hour and place of the rapidly approaching end. What those differ­ ent concepts have in common is their conviction that small and local events are extended, so to speak, so as to become part of the grand course of history. Admittedly, the professional historian cannot operate effectively with­ out grand concepts, though not necessarily apocalyptic ones, unless he is willing to rephrase each and every broad statement he makes in terms of its origin from a unique source. However that may be, imprecision, to a greater or lesser degree, is the price the historian has to pay for his profes­ sional behavior. Now in this chapter I am not so much concerned with those grand, inaccurate concepts. I rather want to raise the following question. Granted the fact that any form of history writing, or, for that matter, any form of writing about past sources whether historical or fic­ tional, historicizes, that is, flattens the original source material in the process of squeezing a literal historical account out of it, is there a way back to the microlevel----of th< -le literary artifacts (that is, the sources) from which it springs? In other words, —, can we imagine a situation in which

The Artifice of Eternity 21

Beckett and Eliot are part of the historical source material? If so, can the lightness and tragicomical nature of their texts be maintained—or re­ stored—while staying part of history? Or, to put it differently, is it possible for the historian, by applying “vertical” notions such as tragedy, comedy, and, religiously speaking, conversion to his material, to handle it in such a manner as to have time move backwards rather than forwards, to have it shrink rather than extend, to have it curve and follow a serpentine rather than a straight path? If so, the consequences for the combined forces of history and narrativity would be considerable. Time would no longer be what it seemed to be at first sight: the intrinsic regulator of progress and the guarantee of linearity and plot. The question may even arise whether, under those conditions, the notion of time will survive at all. Like man himself in Yeats’s poem The Four Ages ofMan, time also runs the risk of succumbing in its fight against God: “Now his wars on God begin/At stroke of midnight God shall win.” The notion of time will be a leitmotif in this book. It will not, how­ ever, be examined primarily in its most obvious disguise of speed. In order to meet the requirement just formulated to produce an alternative concept of time, my focus will rather be on slowing down, on retardation verging on immobility, and, indeed, on eternity. As I will point out in what follows, my preoccupation with time arises from my interest in the monastic literature from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. What is of particular importance here is the fragile status of no­ tions such as time and history seen from the monastic perspective of contemptus mtmdi. These notions deserve further assessment. Before doing so, it should be noted that, generally speaking, the historian of antiquity and the Middle Ages faces the problem of literary immobility. Often he feels himself trapped in the fixity of his sources. On the one hand, he tries to de­ velop speed by distilling from those sources the dynamism of historical movement and time. On the other hand, he gets stuck in the fixity of his sources, which tends to slow down and even absorb the element of time— and, consequently, of “historical reality.” Take, for example, a classic like Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pub­ lished in 1948. In it Curtius convincingly demonstrates to what degree me­ dieval literature (including historiography) was topos-dominated. Let us next compare that work to Peter von Moos’s recent Geschichte als Topik.w

The Artifice of Eternity 22

Like Curtius, but in a much more subtle way, von Moos deals with the ex­ emplars- nature of medieval literature. The result is not a greater optimism with regard to the possibility of history writing. If there is one thing to be learned from this book, it is that a more correct typology of the medieval sources makes them increasingly inaccessible. This inaccessibility obtains for medieval literature in its entirety. But nowhere is fixity so omnipresent as in the monastery. From the patristicera sources of medieval literature until the high Middle Ages (twelfth cen­ tury), the slowest movement imaginable of life, language, and thought is to be found. In the enclosed space of the monastery and the circularity of its rites there seems to be no room for the adventures of the epic, the ex­ citement of lyricism, the spontaneous, disorderly outburst of laughing in comedy, or the black denouement of tragedy. The monastery’s is a triple fixity: the fixity of classical genres as part of the monk’s basic training, a more extensive fixity of the sermon (collatio) and the rumination on Scrip­ ture reflecting a continuity and uneventfulness unknown to the world in which the monk had been living previously, and, finally, the all-embracing fixity of his lifestyle. Within this enclosed space the progressive concept of time is bent, so to speak, and made curvilinear, so that it obeys the patterns and rituals of retardation and repetition. Yet underlying this fixity of art and life there is a deep sense of insta­ bility and disorder. In fact, this feeling is so intense that it could easily compete with the modern preference for the “negative.” In the monastic concept the big and evil extramural world contracts to tiny proportions. Technically speaking, this process is brought about by contemptus mundi. In a general sense, this concept indicates contempt for the world. It is a state of mind required of the monk who has left the world behind. More

man condition, the broken images” of both the world and the individual soul. Whatever happens in the outside world is characterized by mutabil­ ity, vicissitude, and lack of structure. Of course, there is no denying that the course of history in its entirety is governed by divine providence. As such it moves with iron certitude toward a happy end. For the time being, however, it is mostly instability and chaos that reign. Authentic description of history therefore deserves to be labeled in tragic rather than in opti-

The Artifice of Eternity 23

mistic, let alone comical, terms. Thus the historian Otto of Freising (twelfth century) proposes to write his history in modum tragedie." Inter­ estingly, here, as in Sontag’s use of Beckett, the literary genre—in this case the contemptus mundi—touches upon historical reality. For Otto, though living the remote life of a Cistercian monk, had every reason to worry about the political turmoil of his days on the basis of his kinship with the German emperor. As far as politics were concerned, he was entitled to characterize his life and times a “ Verfall einer Familie," “the decline of a family.” Now the difference between the monastic concept of contemptus mttndi and the reality of the uncertainties and the often bitter and even apocalyptic course of extramural events lies in the different degrees of in­ tensity. The monastery, for its part, is purposely artificial. As such it is small and intense. The world, on the other hand, seen from the monastic view­ point, belongs to the diffuse area of weak structures and the insignificance of everything. And so we are back at the problem of poetic density versus historical reality. This difference in intensity is embodied in an exemplary fashion by the figure of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). In his position as the ab­ bot of the monastery of Le Bee in Normandy he was a happy person using the leisure of the monastic life to write beautiful little treatises about the existence of God and other delightful subjects. Each of those early treatises has a distinct ring of high density and intensity. Next Anselm was ap­ pointed to the see of Canterbury, needless to say against his will. And here his Calvary began. Even though he had been quite successful in managing the extensive possessions of Le Bee in Normandy and England, he felt ut­ terly out of place in the world of big politics. An alien to political compro­ mise, he ran into trouble with two successive English kings. As a result, he had to go into exile twice, to France and to Italy. And even though his monastic stubbornness—which embarrassed even the pope and his corps diplomatique—ultimately produced a settlement of a kind, he never lost his nostalgic feelings for the happy times of the stabilitas loci in Le Bee. In his case, the monastic concept of contemptus mundi, once isolated from its ritual context, almost coincided with real contempt for the weak structures of the extramural world.

The Artifice of Eternity 24

1 will return to Anselm at the end of this chapter. But that does not mean that 1 will leave the realm of monasticism. What are we to think of the de­ gree of intensity of the following example? In a treatise called "About the Four Degrees of Violent Love” the monk Richard of St. Victor gives an extraordinary account of the stages of spiritual love.12 At the first stage one is wounded by love like the bride in the Song of Songs. No longer can one resist its fatal attraction. At the sec­ ond stage one cannot get out of it anymore. Unable to think of anything else, one has become the prisoner of one’s own desire. At the third stage even’ other affection is banished as one focuses exclusively on the one and onlv object of desire. The last stage is marked by immoderation and the impossibility of satisfying one’s desire: “qui bibit adhuc sitietl who has drunk will still be thirsty.” Drunk with love, one suffers from the furor of an incurable disease that may bring one on the brink of insanity: insatiabilitasl insatiability. As a result of this vehemence and this insatiability of desire, love may easily turn into hatred and vice versa. How often do we see lovers who simultaneously love and hate one another, who make life impossible for one another out of sheer passion because they are caught in a web in which “neither the fire of desire can melt down the ice of hatred nor the intensity of hatred can extinguish the fire of burning desire. It is beyond measure, beyond nature that this fire keeps burning in water be­ cause the fire of love gains more force from this mutual opposition than from the two living peacefully apart.” Reading this passage without any knowledge about the religious status and aims of its author, one might be under the impression that Richard here is singing the praise of worldly passion. In fact, the opposite is the case. In a remarkable corollary to this passage Richard warns the reader not to confuse worldly and spiritual love, thus bringing about a spectacular re­ versal of things. Violent love applies exclusively to the latter, that is, to the monk who has left worldly passion behind. For what would society look like if lovers were permanently absorbed by one another and so forgot their duty to keep society going? Further, how bitter would love turn out to be if it banished all other affections? And finally, could one think of anything worse than love that incessantly turns hot and cold? To live such a life dri­ ven by a desire of burning ice and ice-cold fire” would be but a foretaste

The Artifice of Eternity 25

of hell (guaedam forma futurae damnationis). Violent love, then, should be reserved for an object proportionate to it, that is, an object without mea­ sure that really is insatiable—God—and to an environment that can bear the intensity of this passion—the enclosed garden of the monastic site. Just as in the case of Anselm, so with Richard, the intensity of the spir­ itual, monastic existence is contrasted with the weak structures of society. From a more modern point of view one might say that Richard is willing to appreciate passionate love as literature. However, the very literary nature of this love turns it into something too artificial to be able to defend its

claim to—extramural—reality. Yet things are more complicated than that. The monk wants to “live the way he reads,” to use Musil’s phrase.13 The

dense structure of his existence is reminiscent of the compactness of a

book: And how do you do it [read a great deal]? I can give you the answer at once: your preconceptions leave out whatever doesn’t suit you. The same thing has already been done by the author. In the same way you leave things out in dreams and in your imaginations. So I offer you my conclusion that beauty and excitement comes into the world as a result of things having been left out. Obviously our behaviour in the midst of reality is a compromise, a me­ dial condition in which the emotions prevent each other from developing to their full passionate intensity, blurring slightly into the grey. Children, who have nor yet acquired this attitude, are for that reason happier and also un­ happier than adults. And 1 will at once add this: stupid people also leave things out. Stupidity is, after all, something that makes for happiness. I therefore suggest that we begin as follows—that we should try to love each other as though you and I were figures created by a poet and meeting in the pages of a book. In any case, however, let us leave out all the upholstery of fatty tissue that is what makes reality look round and plump.14

That which, for the extramural reader, is bound to remain a matter of imagination has become reality for the monk. In the compact, “curved” world of the monastery he becomes identical with the rhythm and density of his linguistic corpus. Of course, as a kind of realized eschatology this ar­

tificial way of life raises questions regarding the exact nature of the Chris­ tian concept of history. What is the relation between the macroconcept of

history versus the monastic claim that in the curved and circular mi­ croworld of the monastery history has come to its fulfillment? Within this

The Artifice of Eternity 26 dense artificial world, what is left of the contemptus mundi, or, from a broader point of view, what is left of evil or of love, both of which the monastery claims to contain in their “full passionate intensity”?

Following the monastic pattern I once more slow down the pace of the ar­ gument by inserting yet another digression. So let us return—return being a basic device of the monastic narrative—to modernity. There is no doubt that modem and postmodern thought can be characterized as contemptus mundi-like. The weak structure of the world as observed above from the strong position of the monastery constitutes the context of the modern view of life (of course, without the monastic connotation). The big, unify­ ing concepts and narratives have gone; fragmentation and decentralization are everywhere. Those are the key words with which thinkers and artists— but, in particular, thinkers about artists—tackle reality. Just as, at the be­ ginning of this chapter, we saw how a play by Beckett or a poem by Eliot could be extended into representations of historical events or modern life, so theologians and cultural philosophers tend to translate, often not with­ out a touch of self-pity, the shocking cruelties of life into allegories of their own religious embarrassment. “Speaking of God after Auschwitz” is just such a popular phrase that functions as a modern form of contemptus mundi. Here a historical fact is transformed into a ritualized planctus. This lament expresses not only the fact that God’s coming into this world suf­ fers considerable delay, as in the case of Godot. Rather, it represents his ut­ ter disappearance. Clearly, Christian notions of fulfillment and the end of history, though in a reversed, negative fashion, are in play here. In fact, it sometimes looks as if we here have one of the last Christian notions to be universally accepted. This universality makes it difficult even to criticize a phrase like the impossibility of speaking of God after Auschwitz,” as if the critic is too frivolous and lighthearted, ready to minimize the seriousness of the worst crime in the history of mankind. Yet, as far as Auschwitz is concerned, I sometimes wonder whether the medieval concept of history, with its hesitancy to explain the unique and the caprices offortuna, might not be helpful here. Yet another objection can be made against an interpretation of reality from a one-dimensionally somber point of view. It is the risk one runs of picturing the past as a monolithic era of harmony and order. And even the

The Artifice of Eternity 27

increasing awareness of “otherness” in the past as it manifests itself in the historians’ preoccupation with critical alternatives within the old order, such as heresy, magic, negative theology, mysticism, and dissent, only re­ inforces the idea, as if the past were held together by stronger, often more repressive, structures than the present.

Many postmodern thinkers appreciate the disappearance of cultural and metaphysical coherence as opening up new perspectives on the multiplic­ ity of meaning. However, for the sake of argument, I want to stick to the pessimists and the defenders of the real presence of the contemptus mundi. As I have pointed out, echoes of this Judeo-Christian view, however indi­ rect and secularized, still resound today. An example: At the end of his The Death ofTragedy George Steiner tells how, some time after the war, he was taking a train journey through southern Poland.15 In the course of the con­ versation that arose with his fellow travelers in the compartment, every one of them had a story of atrocities and suffering to tell. The very reality of those horrors marks, for Steiner, the end of tragedy. In fact, what we have here is to be called “absolute tragedy,” which is not dissimilar to the afore­ mentioned impossibility of talking about God after Auschwitz. In Steiners perception, at a given moment of time, the first half of the twentieth cen­ tury, tragedy as an art form has been overtaken by reality. Of course, Steiners cannot and should not be called a Christian view. Yet however negative and diabolical, fulfillment, preventing tragedy from flourishing, reminds one of the Christian criticism of the unrealistic nature of art versus the realism practiced by simple “fishermen and sinners” {piscatores, peccatores). But things are even worse than that. The reality of evil wipes out reality as such. For Steiner the reality and intensity of evil as it materialized in Auschwitz have provided us with at least one absolute cri­ terion for measuring reality. It can be seen as a negative proof of the exis­ tence of God. This brings us back to Anselm, whose fame rests on the so-called on­ tological proof of God. As Anselm proves the existence of God with the help of the formula that God is that greater than which nothing can be thought {id quo mains nihil cogitaripotest—notice the nihil'), Steiner takes the recent evil of history to be that worse than which nothing can be thought. Thus the definite disappearance of God is proven. With it West-

The Artifice of Eternity 28

em civilization has come to its end. With it, the secular version of the contemptus mundi, tragedy, has run its course, too, overtaken by the atrocities of reality. Here there is no more one-to-one relationship between art and reality, as was the case in Sontag’s staging of Waitingfor Godot. Rather, art has been absorbed by the horrors of historical reality. Steiner writes, “But tragedy is that form of art which requires the in­ tolerable burden of God’s presence. It is now dead because His shadow no longer falls upon us as it fell on Agamemnon or Macbeth or Athalie.”'6 In my view Steiner should be contradicted.171 think this can be done with­ out minimizing the horrors of war and destruction, then and now. In what follows I shall argue that tragedy can and should do without the “burden of God’s presence.” I will take that most Christian of playwrights, Racine, as an example of someone over whose plays, contrary to what Steiner thinks, the shadow of God does not fall. That will, I hope, clear the way for a presentation of the most intense expression of God’s presence and ab­ sence ever given: Anselm’s ontological argument. But for Anselm to be able to compete with Racine, first the razor of intensity and simplicity has to be applied to Steiner’s concept of tragedy. Racine’s tragedies fully meet the demands of “artificiality” as formulated by Richard of St. Victor. Unbridled passion rages within a space from which real life is banned, in a period of time that lacks extension and is shaped by a density of language without the possibility of escape. Hate and love are inextricably intertwined, and so are guilt and innocence, vision and blind­ ness. Although Richard characterized the practice of violent love within the weak structures of the extramural world as “a foretaste of the future damnation, Racines plays are without “future.” They are actualizations of the impossibilities of life. So far so good. The least that can be said is that Racine was obviously an homme de metier. He was indeed the undisputed master of the genre. Precisely the genre, however, has become the object of debate. In a famous study of Racine and Pascal, Le dieu cache, Lucien Goldmann proposed to apply the notion of tragedy not only to Racines work, but also to his life.18 In so doing, his reading of Racine resembles Steiners “intolerable burden of Gods presence. As in Steiner’s account of modernity, in Goldmann’s version God appears to be on his way out. In order to get that picture right

The Artifice of Eternity

29

Goldmann had to break down and reinterpret the fixity, that is, the sym­

biosis between form and content, of the tragic genre. Goldmann appar­ ently did not share the view of Racine’s friend Boileau that if Racine had chosen to write comedy or satire, it would have been devastatingly effec­ tive. For Goldmann, Racines tragedies, like the somber pensees of Pascal, are to be seen as extensions of their respective lives. Now one of the strik­ ing features of Goldmann’s concept of tragedy is its strong monastic over­ tones. Thus we face a situation in which Anselm’s contempt™ mundi and Richard’s monastic passion have fused, as it were, and turned into a work of art that, its secular-classical shape notwithstanding, should be called ba­ sically Christian. It is a well-known fact that Racine was educated in the milieu of PortRoyal, that is, the circle of men (laymen) and women (nuns) living in and

near the monastery of Port-Royal in the valley of the Chevreuse. In the im­ mediate environment of that monastery a group of men had settled down, the so-called solitaires, with the intention of living a semimonastic life.

Among those men, the classe de robe, many related to the nuns and almost all belonging to the professional class of civil servants and lawyers, were the teachers of Racine. They came to represent a theologico-political move­

ment called Jansenism, which dominated French politics until the Revolu­ tion. They were no intellectual weaklings. Self-consciously, they refused to take monastic vows. Yet they withdrew into solitude as ifthey were living a monastic life. They were no less self-conscious with regard to their own intellectual superiority, as is illustrated by the following story. At the insti­

gation of the ecclesiastical authorities the Parisian prosecutor de Laubardemont went to Port-Royal to investigate what the solitary gentlemen were up to. There he ran into Antoine le Maitre—later to become Racine’s

teacher of Greek—who had recently given up a brilliant career as a lawyer and withdrawn to the farm of Port-Royal. He was dressed in a black gown indicating semimonastic mourning and penance. “The magistrate,” so the story runs, felt himself obliged to ask if he, M. le Maitre, happened to have visions, to which Le Maitre replied: yes. Yes, he had indeed visions. When he opened one of the windows of his room—which he demonstrated with a gesture— he saw the village of Vaumurier. And when he opened the other window— which he demonstrated with another gesture—he saw the village of SaintLambert. Those were all the visions he had.15

The Artifice of Eternity 30

Here we have the satire Boileau believed and feared Racine could have written. The clarity—but also the poker-faced nature—of this statement is no less intense than the transparency of Racines language. What, then, are the implications of this transparency? First, there is the strong Augustinian belief—Augustine being the hero of Port-Royal—in the utter corruption of human nature. This conviction produced a contemptus mundi-YiVe. view of life from which it took only one step, as it indeed happened in the case of le Maitre and the solitaires, actu­ ally to leave the world. At the same time another Augustinian notion per­ meated the thought of Port-Royal: the power of reason. Here we touch once more upon the theme of density. For a Jansenist thinker like Pascal reason kept exercising its razorlike functions amidst the total corruption of human nature. In contrast to the Thomist tradition, this task of reason was not broadly to uphold, as far as possible, the natural powers of the human mind in order to have them next supplemented with divine grace. Pascal’s reason cuts too deep for that. For him, it is the very intensity of reason that unmasks man and reduces him to the object of self-deception he is bound to be in the present life. Out of this labyrinth there is no escape. All that is left for man is to have reason unveil his weakness—including the weakness of reason itself—before his passions. Now Goldmann argues that Racine’s plays reflect the Augustinian, pessimist view of life as described above, culminating in a withdrawal from the world. Next Goldmann proceeds to underpin this Augustinian pes­ simism with a sociological explanation—the loss of influence of the classe de robe which is a part of his thesis that has provoked some controversy. It has, however, no bearing upon my argument. Of all Racines tragedies his Phaedra (Phedre) stands out as the best illus­ tration of Goldmanns view. Phaedra is, according to Goldmann, “the tragedy of the hope of being able to live in the world without being forced to compromise. At the same time, it is the acknowledgment of the fact that this hope is idle. 20 In Phaedra the heroine, daughter of Minos and Phaeton, hell and heaven, is married to Theseus and in love with her step­ son Hippolytus. Her unbridled and incestuous passion is blocked by Hippolytuss rejection and by the return of her husband, thought to be dead. In Goldmanns terms this means that passion as a token of hope and an al-

The Artifice of Eternity 31 ternative way of life is blocked by the restoration of the old order, the laws of the world. For Goldmann this drama is marked by the burden of God’s presence. Presence: that means in this case full repression and cruel ab­ sence. It is a hidden God that strikes out. Take, for instance, the god Venus. She indeed inspires the fatal passion in Phaedra, as is poignantly ex­ pressed by one of the most famous lines from this play: “C’est Vinus tout entiere a sa proie attacheeIXt is Venus motionless upon her prey.”21 How­ ever, when all is said and done, the gods remain silent. For Goldmann there is no doubt as to the identity of this absent, repressive God. It is the God of Jansenism, le Christ noirj1 the certainty of whose existence runs parallel to the uncertainty, or, to put it in tragic terms, the impossibility of intensity and structured passion within the law and order of human exis­ tence. However weak and low life under those laws may be compared to Phaedra’s passion, in the end the cruel law will win and reign. This repressive, absent God, Goldmann further argues, corresponds to the Augustinian-Jansenist view of man as utterly corrupt. As for Phaedra, her case would be that of the so-called “good sinner.”23 Unlike the hero in Greek tragedy, this good sinner does not perish blinded by fate. Phaedra, by contrast, is conscious of her unforgivable guilt. She suffers from her guilt and breaks down under its burden. As Voltaire put it, “she is a right­ eous person from whom grace has been withheld / c’est tin juste a qui la grace a manque."1* Why then do I disagree with Goldmann’s—and, by implication, Steiner’s—view that the shadow of God falls upon Phaedra? Certainly not because I hold that the ancient-mythological form of Racine’s tragedy can­ not absorb Augustinian-Jansenist influence. Nor do I believe Goldmann’s view to be corroborated by the fact that after Phaedra Racine turned to writing biblical dramas exclusively {Esther and Athalie).25 In this context it may be useful to point to the fact that Jansenism, however diffuse as a his­ torical phenomenon, was all-pervasive both in the life of Racine and in sev­ enteenth- and eighteenth-century France. As Robert Darnton has argued, even the pornographic literature of that period cannot be properly under­ stood without some knowledge of Jansenism.26 What I criticize in Goldmann and Steiner is their lack of interest in the fact that in Racine’s tragedies, and in Phaedra in particular, a strong factor of density and condensation makes itself felt.

■

The Artifice of Eternity

32

But what do I mean by that? On two important occasions Racine has

Phaedra fuse images of gods and man so cleverly as to bring out with a sin­ gle stroke the inevitability of her (human) loneliness and her destruction. She is married to Theseus; she loves his son Hippolytus. When she at last declares her love to the latter, she does so by projecting the image of The­

seus onto Hippolytus:

Yes, prince, I pine, I burn for Theseus. I love him, not as in the underworld, The fickle admirer of a thousand objects, He travels to dishonour even the dead; But as he was once, loyal and proud, Even a little shy, charming and young And drawing everybody’s hearts to him, As gods are said to be, as you are. He had your bearing, eyes, your way of talking; He even showed noble diffidence That time he came across our Cretan waves; Minos’ daughters well might love him then. What were you doing then? Why did he gather All the best men of Greece, and not Hippolytus? Why were you then too young to be in that ship Which set him down upon the shores of Greece? The Minotaur would have died at your hands In spite of all the turnings of his maze. It would have been you my sister gave the thread to, To find the way through these uncertainties. But no: for I should have been there before her; Love would have put the thought into my head. I should have been the one to help you, prince, And shown you all the turnings of the labyrinth; What would I not have done for that charming head? A thread would not have been enough for me: I should have accompanied you in your danger, Loving, I should have wanted to go first; If Phaedra had been with you in the labyrinth She would either have stayed with you or perished.27 Is this condensation or is it not? Self-deceit through self-enchantment. Once the enchantment is broken because of Hippolytus’s refusal to re-

The Artifice of Eternity 33

spond positively to his stepmothers proposals and her subsequent plan to have him perish, the next condensation is even more effective. As daughter of Minos with the Sun as her ancestor, Phaedra realizes the prisonlike na­ ture of her present existence and the extent of her solitude: I am lost! And I live! I can bear the eye Of this sacred Sun from which I am descended! My ancestor is the father of all the gods; The heavens, the universe is full of my ancestors; Where can I hide? Let it be in infernal night. What do I say? My father holds the urn there.28

Phaedra’s bitter cry to her father, Minos, with which she concludes this passage, “a cruel god breaks your family,” at first sight looks like a Job-like protest. As such it would seem to favor Steiner’s idea of tragedy as well as Goldmann’s concept of the repressive Jansenist God. In either view the hidden God would be the main actor in the play. However, a simpler solu­ tion can be found. Is it not the case that the essence of Racine’s literary condensation is that divine repression is concentrated in Phaedra herself? Her parentage goes back to both heaven and hell. But the literary effect of that fact turns her world upside down. It narrows the spaciousness of her origins. Every attempt to escape confronts her with her own crime and guilt. Whether she is on her way to heaven or hell, there is no place where she is no longer confronted with her own self.

In my view the extreme density of Racine’s Phaedra makes the ques­ tion whether we have a pagan-mythological or an Augustinian discourse

here irrelevant. This irrelevance and indifference presupposes in turn a considerable degree of control over form and genre on Racine’s part. Do­ ing a balancing act on the edge of the tragic genre, Racine, before his in­

terpreters, does not give away more about God and man than Antoine le Maitre did to M. de Laubardemont with regard to the nature and clarity of

his visions. In order to achieve such clarity and to maintain it throughout, both Racine and le Maitre practiced contemptus mundi of a kind. Whether this was of a Stoic or an Augustinian-Christian nature is indifferent, too. Considering the poker face-like remoteness one wonders whether Gold­ mann’s idea of tragedy does not conceal the fact that there is more Beckett

than Sontag in Racine, more broken images in Eliot’s vein than shadows of

the divine.

The Artifice of Eternity

34

So Racines is an almost monastic density. Unity of time, place, and action focuses on the verticality of human passion and bondage. Admittedly, we are not dealing here with the macroconcepts of (Christian) history, although thev have dominated and still tend to dominate the—modern—interest in historv. Apocalvptic views have always had a broader appeal to the “gen­ eral public" than the uneventful calm of monastic history. Yet, apart from the fact that much apocalyptic thought originates with the Cistercian ab­

bot Joachim of Flore, even there elements of condensation are not lacking. As Karl Morrison has pointed out, there is a remarkable sense of timeless­ ness, symbolized by the static figiira of Christ, to be found in some of the

medieval commentaries on the Apocalypse.29 When, in the concluding re­ marks of this chapter, I turn once more to monasticism and in particular to the thought of Anselm of Canterbury, it is presupposed that the tensions between small and large, condensation and extension, rest and movement are somehow linked to the monastic idea of contemptus mundi. However, first, in order to establish the link between the notions of historicity and the artifice of writing and art I discussed in the earlier part of this chapter, I want to pause a bit at yet another reference to modern lit­ erature. In his novel Doktor Faustus Thomas Mann, for one, has linked macro- to microhistory. In it he describes the apocalyptic denouement of

the Third Reich in the disguise of a composer’s quest for the ultimate, that is, the ultimately dense, work of art. The price to be paid for this perfection is indeed apocalyptic: the selling of the soul, the destruction of history. The

diabolic nature of this quest is illustrated in the following passage, a dia­

logue between the devil and the composer—and here the devil speaks:

The musical work of art shrinks in time, it rejects extension in that part of time that constitutes the space of the musical work and leaves it empty. This does not happen out of an inability to lend shape to the work of art. But a se­ vere imperative of density that rejects the superfluous and beautiful phrase and destroys ornamentation attacks the very form of life of the work of art: temporal extension. Work, time, and appearance: those three are one and the same. Together they should be criticized. This criticism no longer tolerates ap­ pearances and playfulness, or fiction, or the independent right of existence of that form that censures passions and human suffering, divides them into dif­ ferent roles, and translates them into images. Acceptable is only the nonfictional, authentic, and nonboastful expression of suffering in its actual reality.30

The Artifice of Eternity 35 Is this the voice of Steiner, who has seen and heard that worse than which cannot be thought? Or a cultural critic who has read The Wasteland? Rather Richard of St. Victor, I would say, or Racine. In any case, we have here a “form that translates passion into images” denser even than Richard’s vio­ lent love and Racine’s contracted passions. It is indeed so dense as to be self-destructive and to identify with the apocalyptic fulfillment of history. As such it—in Mann’s case, that is, the work of art—loses its fictional char­ acter. With it goes its power of distance and remoteness, of contemptus mundi, in short, its extension in time. Here the end of art and artificiality coincides with the end of history itself.

Talking about the ultimate in terms of ultimate density, Anselm can never be far off. His unum argumentum, the ultimate proof of the existence of God with the help of the formula “that greater than which cannot be thought,” also brings history to an end. Quite some time ago the historian of medieval philosophy Maurice de Wulf rightly pointed to the fact that the “ontological” proof should be seen as a form of theodicy.31 Lukdcs has suggested something similar.32 For him the tragic, in terms of medieval philosophy, springs from the fact that the ensperfectissimum and the ens realissimum are identical. What, then, are the implications of all this for my argument in this chapter? In his little treatise Proslogion Anselm has proved the existence of God sola ratione, by reason alone, and with the help of a single argument. The density of his argumentation is matched by the density and beauty of his style and is somehow reminiscent of the clarity and intensity of Racine. The outcome of the argument is not without consequence for the reverse side of divine being: the devil. His power is as definitely broken as the hold of God’s shadow over Phaedra. While in the older, Christian tradition the devil’s mythological power over man was complete until Christ came to re­ deem him from his captivity, Anselm’s man is solely responsible for his own sin and failure. Consequently, if God is that greater than which noth­ ing can be thought, that is, if the ensperfectissimum is identical with the ens realissimum, evil has lost its right to exist independently. As for man, if he and his reason succumb under the force of passion, the responsibility is his and his alone. It is obvious that this argument, taken out of its performative context,

The Artifice of Eternity 36 is empty and meaningless. However, within the literary structure of the

Prvdogion it makes plenty of sense. It is intrinsically dramatic. Thus it is in

accordance with Mann’s “imperative of density,” lacking temporal exten­ sion and operating on the borderline of the “form that censures passions, dividing them into different roles and translating them into images.”

Needless to say, it is also close to the demonic and the apocalyptic. How then does Anselm shape the drama of the Proslogioni Not unex­ pectedly, it is contemptus mundi that sets the tone. The opening sentence, with its call for reflective intimacy, seems still to strike a confident note: Come now, little man, flee a bit your busy life, take a bit of distance from the turmoil of your busy mind----- enter into the inner room of your mind and set aside everything besides God or that which may help you to look for Him. And, when you have closed the door, search Him.33

Next the author’s mood changes rapidly into desperation about the fact

that the God whose presence the monastery is supposed to represent is nowhere in sight. Your servant wishes to see you, but your face is averted. He wishes to come near to you, but your inhabitancy is inaccessible... . You have made me and you have made me new and you have given me all that is good in order to see you and yet I have never seen him for the contemplation of whom I was made.

The lament that follows tries to penetrate the heart of this darkness. The

more surprising is the turn-about when, in the next chapter, with one stroke of argument (the id quo mains), the existence of God is proven. Next there follows intense joy, the gaudium plenum, evoked in an almost en­ chanting manner as the emotional result of the successful, intellectual op­ eration. I ask you, Lord, to grant me that which you have promised through your truth, that is, that “my joy will be complete.” God of truth, I ask you that I receive that “my joy will be complete.” Obviously, there is no real reason to take a work with so happy an ending

for a tragedy. On the contrary. Although at the beginning of this chapter we observed a tendency to constitute a one-to-one relationship between art and reality from a broadly tragic viewpoint, here the opposite seems to

The Artifice of Eternity 37

hold true. Reality is enforced, or rather enforces itself, in its most perfect form, as ensperfectissimum culminating in boundless joy. Evidently, so per­ fect a reality cannot be lived by anybody anywhere, no more than one can experience the full passionate intensity of Richard’s violent love. It cannot be lived anywhere, that is, except within strong and condensed structures. In Anselm’s case, it was the robust walls of his Romanesque monastery that could bear the intensity of this presence. The monastic “imperative of den­ sity” had enabled him to establish the category of that which is greatest (God) with the help of the category of that which is smallest (the single ar­ gument). In the process the instrument that had been responsible for exe­ cuting this operation, reason, was squeezed in between complete despera­ tion and complete joy. Thus all constitutive elements of Christianity are brought together and condensed into a single picture. They can almost be said to implode within one dense little space: contemptus mundi and des­ peration, hope of a happy ending of history, boundless joy. Considering their lack of extension, none of those elements stands on its own. They all are in the grip of the divine presence that s’attache d sa proie. We have traveled quite a long way from the bleak beginning of this chap­ ter to end up with the opposite situation, the ineluctable presence of per­ fect reality. But has evil really vanished out of sight, pushed aside, it seems, by the full force of the ensperfectissimum! Once more we should pay attention to the imperative of density. The enormous concentration gone into the single argument, including the typ­ ically Christian claim of its nonfictional nature and effect as well as the subsequent fictional nature of evil, derive from an artifice. Through this ar­ tifice the artificer does indeed produce intense sadness and intense joy about the absence and presence of God. However, as Anselm was to learn to his bitter disappointment, there is no resemblance between this artifice and the weak structures of the extramural world. In other words, the scope of Anselm’s reason may be deep, but it is severely lacking in width. Need­ less to say, we find no trace here of Steiner’s “shadow of God falling upon” the solitary thinker. Perhaps this is not the general impression we have of medieval theology. Do we not first and foremost consider the Middle Ages a period that was characterized by a broad and universal belief in God? It does, however, allow room for thought about the real presence of evil and

The Artifice of Eternity 38

suffering, subtly expressed by Anselm in his Proslogion', “for it is better to be just than not to be just, better to be happy than not to be happy.” No tragedy here. But the claim that this happy life rests upon nonfiction has a remarkable implication. It introduces a fissure into Anselms “golden bowl” that reminds us of Beckett’s Godot and Eliot’s “little grouse against life” rather than of Sontag’s literal-mindedness, of le Maitre’s visions and Racines poker play rather than of Steiner’s and Goldmann’s longing for the hidden and vanished God.

CHAPTER 2

Monastic Cruelty

Bernard ofClairvauxs Staging ofthe Past

E

n chapter 11 argued that the materialization of tragedy—or, for that matter, any literary account of the blackness of life—into reality may echo Christian notions of fulfillment, albeit prematurely and in re­ verse order. However, it did not work out. Between Eliots “heap of broken images” and reality stood the poet and his poetry. Between Richards insa­ tiability of true love and the possibility of its realization stood the artifice of monasticism, whose privilege it was both to formulate and execute full passionate intensity. Between “the shadows of God falling upon Phaedra” and the tragic density stood the inscrutable Racine, who with equal ease could have written comedy or satire. This aporia was reason to shift our focus from the negative to the pos­ itive. Thus the densest expression ever of perfect being was examined, Anselms “single argument” for the existence of God. But here we ended up at the other extreme. For Anselm the ineluctable presence of God’s being caused happiness and joy in the heart and head of the monastic contemplator. But it did not work outside the protective walls of his monastery. What is more, through the forcefulness of its being, it turned out to be so dense as to obey Mann’s “imperative of density.” In the process it became indistinguishable from the apocalyptic and diabolic. In terms of Mann’s Doktor Faustus, the ultimately dense work of art results in a double death: it kills the artist’s (Romantic) longing to express his innermost feelings as vehicles to shape the world and the universe, and at the same time it de­ stroys genres and form. Epic or lyric, tragedy or comedy, symphony or song, they are all deprived of extension, that is, of the breath of life. How­ ever, this process itself is no narrative. No story is being told of decay and

Monastic Cruelty 40 decline, nor of the process of civilization turning into a “heap of broken images." Any extension in time, whether historical or narrative, linear or figurative, is absorbed in the single, almost nuclear moment in which the

artist inserts life into his work of art and, as in Faustus’s case, fails.

Does Anselm fail as well? The least that can be said is that his success was limited. He failed not only historically, insofar as his single argument never had a follow-up in Christian theology (it did have an afterlife in the safer area of philosophy). Anselm also “fails”—but what does it matter?— in his effort to have the moment of discovery of the single argument, the gatidium plenum 1 full joy, materialize outside the frame of his remoteness

from the world at large. Admittedly, the full joy resulting from the discov­ ery of the single argument can be repeated by way of litany within the en­ closed monastic community, but, like Faustus’s ultimate composition, it

cannot be reinvented, ornamented, or extended. In that respect Anselms enchanting repetition of his relief and joy is somehow reminiscent of Faustuss lament, his Apokalypsis cum figuris. Indeed, in the repetition of joy the lament of the contemptus mundi is never forgotten. How could it be, since “in the end is my beginning”? To illustrate the radical nature of this stance, let us turn to Yeats, who in his Second Coming” speaks the language of “decenteredness” and pes­

simism. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” “The best lack all con­ viction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity.”1 These are no de­

scriptions of reality—although, interestingly, Yeats’s poetry often took as its point of departure a welding of the political turmoil of his days, Irish sources, and speculative, visionary thought. But in the process of creation the poet has transformed his material into an artifice, a poem, that is, that holds, knows, and transcends the disorder and violence of reality. Nowhere has Yeats expressed the conception of violence and the problem of knowl­ edge and wisdom more concisely and dramatically than in “Leda and the Swan. Just as Phaedras Venus “rattache a saprole," so Zeus, in the disguise of a swan, overpowers Leda and engenders Helen (of Troy) and, through Helen, death and destruction: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.2

Monastic Cruelty

41

This poem superbly succeeds in doing what a poem is supposed to do: it compresses time in the nutshell of the poetic form. In so doing it enables the reader to extend the poem into an epic (the Trojan War: “the broken wall, the burning roof and tower”) and to stage it as a tragedy (Agamem­

non’s bloody homecoming). But, with regard to the problem of form, genre, and content, Yeats, de­ spite the apocalyptic overtones of his work, stops where the problems for Anselm and Mann begin. Yeats’s lyricism, for all its density, is the lyricism of decay, violence, control, and wisdom. As Ellmann puts it in his com­ ment on “Leda and the Swan,” “in the act which included all these [antin­ omies] Yeats had the violent symbol for the transcendence of opposites

which he needed.”3 Anselm and Mann, on the other hand, can be said to take the problem of compression and extension—that is, the problem of time—one step further. Their imperative of density turns their respective works of art (in Mann’s case, the work within the work, that is, the ulti­ mate composition of his Doktor Faustus) into little atoms, suppressing, it seems, the element of time altogether. And with time lyricism goes, as do

all other “fixed” forms of expression. Failure and success—or rather their very indifference—-do not mean war and pursuit of happiness but apoca­ lypse in the shape of total destruction or total bliss. The complexities of time confront us with a quintessentially Christian problem with which Christianity itself has never fully come to terms. It is the fact that the notion of time—the complex, so cherished by Auerbach, of temporality, historicity, and realism—is basically an illusory and shaky one, once it falls into the hands of language and thought. But, then, when does it not? It is shaky because, by nature of its being contingent, it lacks

stability, “eternity”; it is illusory because it cannot be adequately expressed

in its very shakiness. In fact, as Frank Kermode has pointed out in his The Sense ofan Ending, it is incessantly overtaken by the fixity of narrative and

plot—or any other literary form, for that matter.4 Once the process of writing has started it is hard for an author “to assert the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot”; to avoid being crushed by what Kermode calls the aevtim, and what Yeats called the “arti­ fice of eternity.”

In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time;

Monastic Cruelty 42

henceforth “time shall be no more.” In tragedy the cry of woe does not end succession; the great crises and ends of human life do not stop time. And if

we want them to sene our needs as we stand in the middest we must give them patterns, understood relations as Macbeth calls them, that defy time. The concords of past, present, and future toward which the soul extends it­ self are out of time, and belong to the duration that was invented for angels when it seemed difficult to deny that the world in which men suffer their ends is dissonant in being eternal. To close that great gap we use fictions of complementarity. They may now be novels or philosophical poems, as they once were tragedies, and before that, angels.5 All this is undeniably true. But here, too, we have to take the argu­ ment one step further. What we have seen in Mann is not the literary rep­ resentation of apocalypse. It is apocalypse intrinsically present in a work of art that is in the process of shrinking to the point of explosion. So time

does not come to a halt here with the broad gesture of wild symbolism as in the case of Joachim of Flore, Blake, and Yeats (however disciplined and

condensed their symbolism may be in its own way). In Mann’s Faustus— and in Anselm—a new work of art is created in which all former structure and imagery are destroyed and absorbed in the naked density of the single and ultimate “argument.” As a result, we are not left with a “spacious” ae-

vum or an artifice of eternity that has to be relinked to time. In fact, in my view, the entire notion of time has to be reconsidered whether in its gen­ eral, historical appearance or within the work of art or as the intermediary between the artifice and the historical. In other words, the question raised

in chapter 1 gains urgency: is it possible to use tragedy, comedy, conversion, and meditation as literary devices through which time can be made to move backwards rather than forwards, to make it shrink rather than ex­ pand, to make it curve and follow a serpentine rather than a straight path? If this effort to create an alternative notion of time were to succeed, “the concords of past, present, and future towards which the soul extends itself” would no longer be “out of time.”6 On the contrary. The same Augustine from whom this quotation (“the extension of the soul”) is borrowed might help us to establish an artifice that is intrinsically temporal.7 If there is one thing that is not for the taking it is time. “What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I Know. If I want to explain it to an in-

I

Monastic Cruelty 43

»

quirer, I do not know,” so Augustine famously defined the evanescent na­ ture of time.8 Consequently, our approach to the intrinsic presence of time in the work of art can only be circuitous, once more in accordance with the monastic principle of slowing down the pace of the argument. Let us there­ fore begin at the opposite side, the—seeming—timelessness of myth. Writing about fiction, Kermode fears its regress into myth, understandably so in view of the appearance of arbitrariness inherent to fiction. “How can apocalypse or tragedy make sense, or more sense than any arbitrary non­ sense can be made to make sense? If King Lear is an image of the promised

end, so is Buchenwald.”9 Basically this is the same question raised by Mann—in a more condensed manner—as to the apocalyptic and diabolic potential of the ultimate work of art and to my suggestion that Anselm’s argument too is potentially diabolic.10 Kermode proceeds to underpin his distinction between myth and fiction as follows, and for the sake of my own argument I quote the passage in full:

We have to distinguish between myth and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myth whenever they are not consciously held to be Active. In this sense anti-Semitism is degenerate Action, a myth; and Lear is a Action. Myth op­ erates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically un­ changeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, Actions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, Actions for conditional assent. Myth makes sense in terms of lost time, Hind tempusas Eliade calls it; Ac­ tions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus. It may be that treating literary Actions as myths sounds good just now, but as Mari­ anne Moore so rightly said of poems, “these things are important not be­ cause a / high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are / useful.”11 I do not think the fragility of fiction has much to gain from being pro­ tected by a condescending notion of myth as being on the receiving end of degeneration. Besides, is the borderline between “interpretation” and “use”

that clear-cut? I suspect that what Kermode really wants to protect is his view of fiction as defying time, creating concordance, and turning into the “artifice of eternity.” For him this “artificial” notion of fiction has to be un­ like myth since its function is precisely to articulate temporality, historic-

Monastic Cruelty 44 itv, and change. But in fiction myth abounds. What is fiction without rep­ etition, ritual, and gestures, unchangeable though they may be or seem to be! Further, what is the point in assigning myth to the past and fiction to the present? Is there a present without repetition, without simultaneously being past? And, as Kermode gives pride of place to fiction over myth, what unchangeable absolute is myth supposed to represent but a leftover from the dynamics of fiction? Applying too rigid a distinction between myth and fiction runs the risk of creating unnecessary problems. As a re­ sult he starts worrying, for example, about Ulysses being fictional and Finnegans Wake a regress into myth, because the latter lacks time and plot while the former still obeys the laws of a daylight schedule. No wonder then that Kermode praises Ulysses for “its lack of mythologizing,” carefully omitting any mention of Finnegans Wake.'1 Of course, this is not to say that I am in favor of blurring all distinctions between myth and fiction. I do not think, however, that an inaccurate opposition between the two is of much help in our search for a poetical criterion that clearly marks time and life within a textual artifice so as to solve the aporia not only of a flexible use of the timeless artifice of eternity,” but also of time and history being thrown out of the ultimate work of art altogether.

Let us now recall the horrors of history as discussed in the previous chap­ ter. the Bosnian war, George Steiner and his fellow travelers in the Polish train haunted by the ghosts of the past, Thomas Mann’s account of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Let us also keep in mind the points and counterpoints inserted into history and reality by the “artifices of eternity”: Becketts Godot, Eliots grouse against life,” Richards violent passion, Racines shaping of Phaedras doom, Anselm’s desperation and joy, and Manns and Anselms ultimately dense work of art. How do they come together without the one giving way to the other? Now I would like to proceed as follows. I want to pursue my search for a poetical principle that keeps dimensions of time alive both in history and in the work of art. In the process I intend to test what I have been saying ar a out, and, partly in criticism of, Kermode’s view of the relation be­ tween iction and myth. For that purpose I start out with what, in terms of ermo e, wou d seem to be a worst-case scenario: the twelfth-century Cis­ tercian, monastic ideal as it was shaped by its main spokesman, Bernard of

Monastic Cruelty 45 Clairvaux. His seems to be a world of myth. Yet, as I intend to show, time—and, in its company, violence—is far from absent, nor do we have “a paradigm here from which all reality has been pumped.”13 Or is myth so absolute as to swallow up extramural time and reality?

Monastic Peace: The Jerusalem of Clairvaux First a few introductory remarks about Bernard of Clairvaux. The main biographical facts of Bernard’s life are well known. He was born in 1090 or 1091 in Fontaines near Dijon and educated with the canons of SaintVorles in Chatillon-sur-Seine. In 1112 he became a monk in Citeaux, to­ gether with thirty companions, most of them relatives. In 1115 he founded the monastery of Clairvaux. From this remote corner of the civilized world he intervened in matters both political and ecclesiastical. In 1130 he sup­ ported Innocent II against Anacletus II, and, a few years later, in the con­ flict with Arnold of Brescia. His pupil Eugenius III was elected pope in 1145. Besides continuing to mediate in all kinds of conflicts, Bernard ener­ getically preached the Second Crusade. He lived to witness the latter’s ut­ ter failure in 1148 and died in 1153. During his lifetime Bernard presided over the enormous expansion of the Cistercian order. The first houses of Citeaux, La Fertee, Morimond, and Clairvaux became centers from which hundreds of monasteries spread over all of western Europe. Bernard, abbot of an obscure Cistercian settle­ ment on the border of Burgundy and Champagne, traveled around, not only advising bishops and princes, but also expressing his views on delicate doctrinal issues. At the council of Sens in 1140 his intervention decided the fate of Abelard. His fierce rejection of the latter’s passion for logical argu­ mentation considerably contributed to his antirational reputation. Bernard’s fame as a writer is due mainly to his enormous output of sermons on the Song of Songs—eighty-six altogether—and to many other works, including sermons, treatises, and letters.

If we now ask ourselves how accurately the goings-on inside Bernards monastery—in the shape of his literary reflections on it—can be called the­ atrical, we face the following situation.14 Let us imagine ourselves to be traveling in one of the abundantly green woods of Burgundy and Cham­ pagne or in the more arid hills of Provence. All of a sudden we discern the

Monastic Cruelty 46

contours of austere monastic buildings such as Fontenay, Senanque or, for that matter, Clairvaux (Clairvaux, by the way, being a prison complex nowadays). Upon arrival we may feel tempted to do our cultural duty and visit the site and admire a splendid specimen of twelfth-century Ro­ manesque architecture before continuing our journey. What we do not do, however, is recognize this site to be the place of death and destruction it pretends to be. We can discern no postwar Polish landscape in this monas­ tic site to remind us of recent horrors. Nor does this place seem suitable for staging Waitingfor Godot. Yet in the monks’ experience, entering this place, even though it is called “the house of God and the gate to heaven,” is en­ tering a place of darkness, death, and destruction. If, on the one hand, the litde rivulets that stream through the monastery symbolize the rivers of par­ adise, on the other the wildness of the surrounding forest, as in Fontenay, or the aridity of the surrounding hills, as in Provence, symbolize Ur-chaos and the desert. If the Claravallis—the bright valley—of Clairvaux expresses the idyll of paradise, the notion of darkness and death sounds in the names of early Cistercian monasteries such as Morimundus (“to die before the world”), which express the penitential somberness of the monastic life. Exacdy what does the monastic experience look like? What story is the monastic site supposed to tell? If it expresses fear, terror, and the idyll of paradise all at the same time, how is it structured? Some remarks with re­ gard to the problem of interpretation are in order here. Generally speaking, we do not seem to have much trouble in appreciating a Romanesque church or cloister, and even if our biblical knowledge is scarce, we are somehow capable of guessing what the scenes on the capitals are supposed to express. If we see, for example, high up on one of the columns a capital representing Jacob fighting with the angel, we are not wide off the mark if we take this to mean—besides representing the Bible story itself—the monk, or the faithful, fighting to keep faith. In other words, the referential system underlying this piece of sculpture is not really a complicated one. In a wider perspective we may rightly assume that the entire complex of capitals, the church, and the cloister express a certain kind of order, con­ sisting, in literary terms, of a well-organized set of biblical images. Those images, being actualized in stone and writing, serve as markers that struc­ ture the life of the monk. They help him to fill in the “regularity” of his ex-

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47

istence as it is divided and subdivided—all according to the Rule—by the set hours for prayer, singing, work, eating, and sleeping. Walking in his cloister with his prayer book in his hand, he has his contemplative imagi­

nation stimulated and his silent or mumbling prayer illustrated, so to speak, when he looks up and stares in the face of a biblical scene on one of the cloister arches. If we return to the site of the Cistercian monastery, the situation is far more complex. Images—and, consequently, figurative capitals—are ban­ ished from the church and cloister. The walls are completely barren and empty, thus considerably hampering referential traffic from form to mean­ ing. If, generally speaking, figurative Romanesque art consisting of biblical scenes still suggests there to be a referential link between the original past of the Bible, however actualized, and the present reinterpretation, the ab­ stract nature of the Cistercian church and cloister cuts off such links. Para­ doxical and even impossible though it may seem, in the church and clois­ ter there no longer is an Ur-model consisting of biblical images underlying the visual life of the monastery. Rather, those biblical images have become disfigured, so to speak, and absorbed in an empty space. The monk who is praying and singing in that space does not relate his inner thoughts to outer images. There simply are none. As a consequence he has to produce single-handedly a language, both liturgical and devotional, that can stand

up to the emptiness of the place. Even greater creativity is demanded from

an author such as Bernard, who takes it upon himself to give a literary ac­ count of what is going on inside that empty monastery. Because he has lost the support of visual images, the literary images he uses to fill up that space are bound to look like a performance on an empty stage.15 Thus forced to stand on their own feet, these images become intensely theatrical.

All this sounds rather abstract, and abstract it is. Let me therefore give an example of what I mean by this notion of monastic theatricality on an empty stage. In 1129 a young canon from Lincoln by the name of Philip interrupted his journey to Jerusalem to pause in Clairvaux. On the spot he decided to stay. In reply to questions by the young man’s bishop, Alexander, with re­ gard to the legal details of the transaction, Bernard, eloquent as ever, de­

fended Philip’s decision to enter the monastic profession.

Monastic Cruelty 48

Your Philip has taken a shortcut on his way to Jerusalem. Thus he arrived quickly at the place of his destination. In no time [in brevi\ he crossed this vast and spacious sea and, sailing successfully, he has already landed on the shore of his destination and arrived in the harbor of salvation. Right now his feet are standing in the courts of Jerusalem, and “he willingly adores on the spot His feet have touched the one whom he has heard tidings of in Ephrata and found in the woodland plains.” He has entered the holy city, he has chosen his heritage with those of whom it is rightly said, “You are no longer exiles or aliens; the saints are your fellow citizens, you belong to God’s household.” With those he is going in and out, having become one of them, and with them he glorifies, saying, “Our dwelling is in heaven.” Therefore, rather than a curious spectator, he is a devout inhabitant and an enrolled cit­ izen ofJerusalem, not of this earthly Jerusalem to which mount Sinai in Arabia is related, which is in bondage with her children, but of that free Jerusalem, which is above and the mother of us all. And if you insist on knowing, this is no other than Clairvaux. She herself is Jerusalem, affiliated to the Jerusalem, which is in heaven, by the complete devotion of the mind, by the imitative way of life, and by a spiritual affinity. His promise to stay implies that it is here that his rest will be for evermore. He has chosen this spot for his dwelling because there can be found, if not yet the vision, then certainly the expectation of that peace of which it is said, “The peace of God, which surpasses all our understanding.”16 For various reasons this passage is quite spectacular. First, there is the supreme monastic arrogance. By implication the bishop of Lincoln is pic­ tured as intellectually and spiritually inferior and naive, and someone to be looked down upon if he assumes the real Jerusalem in Palestine to be

worth going to. Next one is struck by the equally arrogant claim that the real Jerusalem is identical to Clairvaux. Now in medieval religious litera­ ture the word Jerusalem had all kinds of connotations. In a famous verse it was used, for example, to illustrate the referential nature of the fourfold meaning of Scripture:

secundum historiam civitas Judaeorum secundum allegoriam ecclesia Christi secundum anagogen civitas dei ilia caelestis quae mater omnium nostrum secundum tropologiam anima hominis

Monastic Cruelty 49

historically, it means a city of the Jews allegorically, it means the church of Christ mystically, it means that heavenly city which is the mother of us all morally, it means the human soul17

I do not want to deny, of course, that, when Bernard speaks of Jerusalem, he somehow uses this fourfold scheme. “The free Jerusalem which is above and mother of us all”—a quotation from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians—does indeed denote the spiritual meaning of the word. For

Bernard, too, the Jerusalem of Clairvaux will be superseded by the heav­ enly Jerusalem at the end of history. That city brings, as he says, “the peace of God that surpasses all our understanding,” and in that respect the cor­ respondence between the identity of the Jerusalem of Clairvaux and the ul­ timate Jerusalem is not really an exact one. But that is not what counts. It would have been in the spirit of that medieval, referential system of inter­ pretation—and certainly in the spirit of Benedictine humility—if Bernard had been less arrogant, acknowledging that the bishop of Lincoln had a point. In that case his reply would have run somewhat like this: “I am sorry to have kept here your Philip who was on his way to that most im­ portant of historical sites, Jerusalem in Palestine. But, as you very well know, Jerusalem means more than just history and geography. In a wider context, it symbolizes all places both physical and spiritual that are para­ disiacal whether present, past, or future. And in view of such a wealth of meaning, we in Clairvaux claim our share of that utopian concept, doing our utmost to shape our humble monastic lives according to the contours of so ideal an existence.” As it is, however, things look quite different. Philip appears—at least, from Bernards literary point of view—to have taken a shortcut. In that

contraction he has cut off all references to the outside world, including the Jerusalem in Palestine. He has become oblivious to all the distractions of time, place, and action outside the place he is now living. With a deft stroke he has telescoped all that is external to the monastery into a single location: Clairvaux. His has become the life of uninterrupted rituals of

prayer and chant. This means that on a semantic level also a shortcut has been taken and an enormous concentration has been introduced. For the time being, all there is, is the Jerusalem of Clairvaux: Ipsa Claravallis est.

Monastic Cruelty 50 There the young man Philip has laid down his soul to rest for evermore. By implication, further references to extramural affairs are out of the question. That world, including the real Jerusalem, has evaporated into thin air. It will be obvious that I am not talking now about historical facts, but rather about the way Bernard stylizes those facts and turns them into liter­ ature, or, rather, into theatricality. Perhaps I might best explain what I mean by that by referring to medieval painting. It is a well-known fact that medieval representations of biblical Jerusalem usually take on the shape of towns familiar to the painter and his public. However, if we try to imagine what Bernard s Jerusalem alias Clairvaux really looked like, he in no way appears to adapt an Ur-model to a contemporary medieval town. The Jerusalem of Clairvaux does not take on any shape at all, or, more precisely, it does not take on any shape other than the combination of buildings and landscape that constitute the monastic site and that are already there. The realization of that city, so the passage just quoted suggests, is left to the imagination of its inhabitants, in this case the monks who, through their ritual behavior, their singing and praying, turn that site into a celestial place. If we now recall Anselms proof of the existence of God, which some­ how forced perfection upon reality, and look at its representation in the aevum of monasticism, we have an interesting situation here. In fact, rather than drama/tragedy being overtaken by reality, which is what Steiner thinks has happened in modern times, it is the other way around. Reality, that is, the extramural world of time and history, is overtaken and absorbed by the drama of ritual. Put in Anselms terms, the real presence of divine perfection, established through the exercise of reason alone, would be part and parcel of this drama of ritual. As a result, life in the monastery proves to be conspicuously artificial, to the point of uneventfulness and timeless­ ness. At the same time it is claimed by Bernard {Ipsa Claravallis est)—and Anselm—to be conspicuously real. So far I have been trying to describe what is going on, from Bernard’s lit­ erary point of view, in the monastic site of Clairvaux. That site, so it ap­ peared, though empty and barren when we first came upon it, served as the backdrop against which the rite of monastic singing and praying was per­ formed. Theatrical it could be called in that the monks, in Bernards view,

Monastic Cruelty 51 were acting as though they were living in Jerusalem, staging, so to speak, the life of the angels. Now the blending of ritual with theatricality within the monastic model may raise some questions. What is so theatrical about singing and praying monks who pretend somehow to represent and imitate a celestial lifestyle? Is there anything comical or tragic to be detected in a way of life that knows no interruptions of the contingent and unexpected? If there is any theater here, it is bound to be extremely dull. Moreover, I have not lived up to my promise to tell of the horrors of the monastic site. Instead I only managed to picture Bernard’s view of the monastery as a place of un­ interrupted peace and calm. Of course, there would be no reason at all to discuss Bernard if, in his writings, he had done no more than mirror or reflect the ritual of the monastic life. However, as we might already have guessed from the “arro­ gance” of his reply to the bishop of Lincoln, it is his subtle play with the monastic ritual that deserves our attention. Precisely in this display of bravura with which he declares that ritual to be better—that is, more eco­ nomical and more comprehensive—than reality, or, rather, to be reality, we can observe Bernard, the author, going beyond the ritual, taking a little step aside (bravura itself being far from ritual). To get a better grip on the real theatricality of Bernard of Clairvaux, we ought to realize that his liter­ ary claims—such as the one with regard to the Jerusalem of Clairvaux— are not to be called bluffs but double bluffs. Not only is Bernard content with living in his ritual environment that, through its claim to represent Jerusalem, is itself to be called a matter of bluff. He also appeals to his read­ ers’ knowledge that in reality the monastery is nothing but an artificial af­ fair. Using that knowledge in order to re-create with ingenuous playfulness a new dramatic situation that comprises both the ritual and its falling short of reality can be called a double bluff. In the process Bernard, besides be­ ing aloof and arrogant, will prove to be cruel and violent as well.

Monastic Violence: Bernard’s Reading of the Second Crusade To illustrate my thesis I now turn to Bernard’s preaching of the Second Crusade (1146) and to his handling of the latter’s subsequent failure. It is a

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52

well-known feet that Bernard was actively involved in the preaching of that

crusade. In feet, his feme for his eloquence in preaching the crusade, ac­ companied by rumors about the performance of miracles, spread all over Europe. It is equally known, however, that there were those who ques­ tioned the wisdom and effects of his preaching after the whole enterprise

had miserably failed. Before going into the matter of failure, we might raise some other questions. What reason did Bernard have to break the Benedictine vow of the stabilitas loci by leaving the monastery in order to preach abroad? Was the Jerusalem of Clairvaux not good enough, or not real enough, after all?

What is left of the tone of superiority in the face of the bishop of Lincoln and his primitive ideas about traveling to the Holy Land? What are we to think of the crude literalism underlying Bernard’s Eliminations against the Muslims’ violations of Jerusalem and other holy places that had been touched by the feet of the Lord? This is a complicated matter that has kept scholars busy. But so much is indisputably clear. In the same way that for Bernard, as indeed for all medieval Christians, Jerusalem was the symbol of

eternal life still to come, so he somehow shared the general belief that Jerusalem in Palestine, being the cradle of Christendom, was to be held in high esteem. What is more important for us now is that Bernard’s attitude toward the victims of the Second Crusade—and of his preaching—far from displaying compassion, is marked by an extraordinary degree of re­ moteness. He is quite willing to accept the tragic nature of the event and to ponder, together with the other mourners, the cruel sight of the cru­ saders lying slain in the desert, and the even crueler absence of God, on whose orders the crusade had been undertaken and whose failure to deliver success is bound to reflect negatively on his prophet.

We said Peace," but there is no peace. We promised good things and, lo and behold, there is confusion, as if we have been too bold and lighthearted in this matter. Clearly, we have embarked on this matter not as on some­ thing uncertain, but ordered by you, yea through you by God. Why have we fasted while He refused to look upon us, and why have we humiliated ourselves while He ignored us? “For in all this His fury has not been averted but His hand has been stretched out”?... But who does not know that Gods judgments are true? And his verdict is such an abyss that in my view that person is rightly pronounced blessed who is not scandalized by it.18

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In the next passage, however, rather than consoling the bereaved relatives

of the crusaders by trying to lend meaning to the horrors of history, Bernard turns the attention toward himself. Subtly identifying himself with Old Testament heroes such as Moses, with God as the supreme com­ mander of the army of Israel, and even identifying himself with Christ, he laments the fate of the failed prophet in both the past and the present.

How then does human temerity dare to be apprehensive with regard to what is beyond comprehension? Let us recall past judgments of old. They may offer some consolation. For someone has said, “I remembered your judgments of old, o Lord, and have been comforted.” I talk of something known to all, yet at present known to no one. For that is how we mortals behave: what we know when there is no need for it, we do not know when necessary. Moses, when about to lead his people out of the land of Egypt, promised them a better country. For what reason would there be for the people to follow him if they only knew their own country? He led them out. But those whom he had led out he did nor introduce into the land he had promised. Yet this sad and unexpected event is not due to any temerity of the leader. In all he did, he acted on the order of the Lord while the Lord cooperated and confirmed his work, and signs occurred. “But these people,” he said, “are obdurate, always plotting against the Lord and his servant Moses.” So be it. The people of Israel lacked faith and were rebellious. But what about the crusaders? You must ask them. Why must I tell that which they themselves demonstrate by their behavior? I say one thing. How could they ever make progress when they turned around when on their way? Had they not, in their hearts, gone all the way back to Egypt! And if these peo­ ple of old fell and were killed because of their iniquities, should we be sur­ prised that modern-day people suffered the same fate when behaving simi­ larly? But you do not think, do you, that their downfall at that time went against the promises of God? Nor does their downfall. For never is God’s justice overruled by his promises. But listen to something else. Benjamin had sinned. The other tribes run to arms in order to take re­ venge, not without the expressed will of God. He had even assigned their commander. They fight, relying on their superior strength and their better case, and, what is most important, on divine favor. But how horrible is God in his treatment of the children of men! The avengers of crime had to turn their backs on the criminals, those who were greater in number on those who were less so. However, they return to God, and God to them. “Attack,” He says. Once more they attack, and once more they suffer a shattering de-

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feat. That is how the righteous embark on the just fight, the first time under God's favor, the second time by His command, only to succumb. But the weaker they are in battle, the more superior they prove to be in faith. What, then, would have been the reaction of the crusaders if I had encouraged them once more to attack, and if they had succumbed once more? What if they had heard me tell them for a third time to embark again on the journey and on the work in which they had failed time and again? And yet the Is­ raelites, ignoring the two earlier failures, prepare for a third barde, and are victorious. However, some may say, “How do we know that the word has come from God? What signs do you perform that we may trust you?” To those questions I do not answer: may my timidity be spared. You must an­ swer for me and for yourself, according to what you have seen and heard, or, surely, according to what God will suggest to you. On first reading this passage looks like an exceedingly clever attempt by

Bernard not only to exonerate himself, but also to turn the accusers into the accused. And that is indeed what happens. Yet I want to try to go be­ yond that and examine whether this passage, in which horror admittedly abounds, contains the elements I have been mentioning so far. What about tragedy, theatricality, and the real horrors of history? What about the monastic site in which death and destruction are supposed to take place? What about ritual, and what about the disturbance and fragmentation of ritual through literary arrogance and cruelty? The first layer of this text is indeed crudely historical: corpses of cru­

saders in the desert. Bernards next move, however, produces tragedy rather than religious consolation. The ways of the Lord, so he says, are in­ scrutable, and he is blessed who is not scandalized by it. This may sound like a pious statement, but it is not. Perhaps I can make this clear by refer­ ring once more to Steiners Polish journey, as referred to in chapter 1. If for Steiner the crude reality of the horrors of our age mark the death of God, the end of tragedy, for Bernard the cruel historicity of recent events marks

the beginning of a still more cruel display of theatricality, as cruel—in my view—as the plays of Racine, the love games of Richard of St.Victor, or, for that matter, a novel such as Flauberts Salammbo. Where, then, does he

find this harsh cruelty? For Steiner all that remains after Auschwitz is si­ lence, the silence of the death of God. Bernard, on the other hand, does

not hesitate to identify himself somehow, not with the silence of the death

Monastic Cruelty 55 of God, but with the very voice of Him on whose orders he had acted, even though that voice has become a silent and inscrutable abyss. In doing so he leaves the crusaders where they are, slain in the desert. Whoever wants to say more, trying to lend more meaning and consolation to extramural his­ torical events, is ridiculed by Bernard as someone who argues cheaply ex eventu {ex eventu aestimare), that is, as someone who is so silly as to take re­ ality as a point of departure for causal explanation, as someone who is no less of a fool than the bishop of Lincoln. As far as Bernard is concerned, af­ ter his excursion into the world of action, he withdraws to the Jerusalem of Clairvaux. Am I reading too much into the text? Should it not rather be under­ stood as Bernard just referring to the inscrutable judgment of God? Does the text really imply that Bernard identifies himself with the voice of God? In my opinion he does so indeed, albeit not with God’s successful inter­ ventions in history but with His failures and those of His prophets. As a re­ sult it is not only God’s judgments that have become inscrutable, but also the preaching of his prophets, including Bernard himself. In the next passage we can see Bernard evoke the Old Testament story of Moses and the people of Israel in the desert. In a very subtle way his ar­ gument moves on two levels. On the surface level he compares the unbe­ lief of the Israelites to the lack of faith on the part of the crusaders. Here an explanation of a kind of the tragic events is offered. Had the crusaders been firmer in their faith, their defeat would not have happened. But at the same time we can observe Bernard add a deeper dimension to this story. Ultimately, it is not the sufferings of the Israelites in the desert, or, for that matter, the cruel fate of the crusaders, that is to be pitied. We are rather in­ vited to save our compassion for the divine prophet, for Moses alias Bernard, who seems to have preached in vain and whose sad and unex­ pected fate it was—and is—not to enter the Holy Land. Bernard’s sudden transition from the comparison between the Israelites in the desert and the crusaders to the image of the solitary prophet Moses—whose fate is echoed by Bernard himself—left behind on a mountain with no other ex­ pectancy than death, is exceedingly theatrical, if not pathetic. What Bernard does here can be seen as related to the (sometimes-serious) playfulness of the Archpoet and the sometimes-shocking irreverence of the Carmina Burana. If ever Christian, religious language was freely

Monastic Cruelty 56

used in both a comical and melancholy way, it is in the poetry of the wan­ dering scholars. In Bernards case, his theatrical handling of the biblical storv is even more daring since his freedom to interpret the language and logic of the Bible, unlike that of the wandering scholars whose mobility somehow reflects the audacity of their verse, is bound by the stability loci of the monastery, that is, by the ritual dullness of his Ur-model. However that may be, he makes the most of it, performing, so to speak on an empty stage. The next example, the story from the book of Judges, is, in a sense, even more theatrical; indeed, it is tragicomical. As so often, Bernard pre­ supposes his audience to know the story, summarizing it, through a liter­ ary' “imperative of density,” as follows: “Benjamin has sinned I Benjamin peccavit” His summary is telling, not so much about the biblical knowl­ edge of Bernard’s audience—I am not sure each of them really knew the story'—as about the literary skills he projected onto his hypothetical reader. “Benjamin has sinned” means that the listener should ideally be able, first, to remember a complicated story, and then to contract it into a single memorial image. As the preacher (speaker, writer) moves on, he and his au­ dience are accompanied by the basso continue of the Old Testament drama. As for the—untold—story itself, it reads like an utterly archaic one. A man is traveling with his concubine. Evening falls and they arrive in a city of the Benjaminites. Since no one offers them hospitality, they sit down on the open square of the town. Eventually, an old man returning from his work in the fields invites them home. In the evening fellow Benjaminites, apparendy with evil intentions, knock on the door and ask to see the man. The host refuses but gives them the woman instead. She is beaten up and raped. The following morning her “husband” finds her dead. He cuts her into twelve pieces and sends them to the tribes of Israel. They assemble to avenge this unheard-ofcrime. They go into battle with divine blessing but are defeated. They' ask the Lord what to do next, and the answer is “Go up against them. Once again they are defeated, but they receive the divine or­ der to go out and attack once more. It is only at the third attempt that vic­ tory is won. Now Bernards rendering of the story. Here it is the divine voice itself whose failure to deliver is highlighted. If the story of Moses and the Is­ raelites already contained the seeds of ambiguity that might be of use for a

Monastic Cruelty 57 creative interpreter such as Bernard, the story from Judges does so to an even higher degree. Admittedly the Israelites do achieve victory, if only af­ ter two shattering defeats. Obviously, being unable to reverse events and to resurrect the corpses lying slain in the desert, Bernard cannot apply in full the story from Judges to the present-day events. He has to leave the facts as they are, to accept the tragedy of defeat, and, implicitly, the meaningless­ ness of history. However, from a literary point of view he can be said to make the most of this handicap. Amidst those tragic events a touch—ad­ mittedly, a very cruel one—of almost comical, and certainly sarcastic, lightness makes itself felt. The crusaders—the handful of survivors, that is—should be glad that Bernard, unlike his Ur-model, the divine voice in the story of the Bible, has refrained from preaching the crusade for a sec­ ond and third time. Indeed, the poor survivors ought to be happy not to be sent back upon their return from disaster. In fact, they ought to be happy to have in Bernard a prophet who is a bit more merciful than his Urmodel, God. What we seem to have here is tragedy made worse by a sense of the comical. It comes as no surprise that Bernard, in the third example, identifies himself with Christ. The latter, only becoming victorious later in life through an act of supranatural resurrection, is here still pictured as a prophet, delivering—like Bernard at the time of his preaching the second crusade—miracles, but failing to be believed upon the strength of his deeds and words. The passage ends with a spectacular act of withdrawal that somehow reflects the solitary and dying Moses withdrawn on the mountaintop, and indeed the silent abyss of God’s judgments. When asked about the legiti­ macy and efficiency of his preaching, Bernard, referring to his bashfulness, just refuses to answer. “May my timidity be spared.” The pope, who is in charge of both the world and the church, let him speak out. As for Bernard himself, professionally speaking, he is after all but the abbot of a silent community, aloof and remote, far removed from the vicissitudes of the world. In my view, this act of literary withdrawal is to be called basically monastic. As such it is cruel and violent. Can we ever contemplate taking part in the game of so radical a move, or do we, like Steiner, have to admit that there comes a time when the cruelty of what has happened no longer

Monastic Cruelty 58

allows for this kind of theatrical withdrawal, or this kind of comment? I can only try to answer this question for myself by referring once more to the staging of Becketts Waitingfor Godot in Sarajevo. For me the critics de­ sire for a touch of lightness, that is, of theatricality, which would result from the dissimilarity between the play and the reality in which it is per­ formed, is not unlike Bernards bold claim that Clairvaux is the real Jerusalem. That claim in turn accounts for his equally bold withdrawal from the tragic failure of the Second Crusade. Of course, this claim, like the monastic ideal itself, is wholly artificial and untrue, and, therefore, theatrical. Yet such is the shape of monastic thought. For once the emotions involved do not blur into the grey. For once, they develop into their full passionate intensity. For once, in spite of—or, rather, thanks to—their cruel and violent nature, they bring relief and consolation.

CHAPTER 3

Andre Malraux, Charles de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux on Action and Contemplation

hpfl i

heatricality,” as we discussed it in the last chapter, offered us a view of the abbot Bernard, the embodiment of monastic stabil­ ity, leaving his monastery, only to return to it after having marked the ex­ tramural world as the incoherent and inconclusive set of violence and nonevents it was bound to be from a superior, spiritual point of view. In the process theatricality’s special nature came to the fore. In it the elements of fiction and reality—so neatly distinguished in the “real” theater—and those of myth and fiction, so neatly distinguished by Kermode, meet. No longer does myth exclusively “operate within the diagrams of ritual, which supposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were.” Rather, the monastery appears as the tiny little place from whose dense ex­ istence its inhabitant is ejected into the world of action, in order to with­ draw to his base after completing his mission or—what may come down to the same—when the going gets rough. Thus it is not only the extra­ mural world that is both electrified and revealed in its basic shape of tem­ porality. The monastic world itself—that is, the point of departure and re­ turn—cannot fail to be touched by time as well. In one way or another its “unchangeable gestures” start moving. And that is not all. Conditioning the world of action and history, it necessarily contains, in however atomic a shape, the seeds of time, that is, the seeds of change, disorder, and vio­ lence. Before dealing with time, passion, and violence within the walls of the monastery proper, I propose to turn once more to the world of action as dealt with from a superior, monasticlike point of view. Making an enor­ mous leap in time, we have in General de Gaulle someone who viewed his

Malraux, de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux

60

involvement in politics as an excursion out of the enclosed and professional life as an intellectual soldier. Not unlike Bernard—in his way an intellec­ tual soldier too—he practiced, in a highly dramatic fashion, the art of de­ parture from, and return to, the calm of his lofty existence. Not unlike Bernard again, in this very act of involvement and withdrawal he loved both to fictionalize and mythologize his own action, thus lending a touch of aevum to the transient world of politics.

i ■

No one familiar with twentieth-century history would deny the impor­ tance of the role played by General de Gaulle during both the Second World War and the decennium of his presidency, from 1958 until 1969. That period is certainly known for its great political leaders, powerful men who succeeded in rallying their peoples behind the causes of war and peace. Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and, in his way, Stalin all are widely remembered as the architects of a victory that determined the shape and fate of the postwar era. Further, in the field of scholarship, their per­ sonalities and their achievements have been assessed in an unending stream of publications. The books on Churchill by Martin Gilbert almost match the size of his hero’s deeds and writings. Eisenhower at war has been analyzed in detail by his grandson, and the reputation of dullness generally associated with his presidency is waning in favor of appreciation of his strategic realism. Stalin is fully known to us as the eastern despot he was, and as biographical studies about Roosevelt pour out, he lives on as the pa­ trician designer of the New Deal and as the Moses who died before entering the peace of a new world order. None of those eminent soldiers and statesmen, however, is remembered for having been or, for that matter, for still being a myth. It is de Gaulle who, both during his lifetime and after, has lived on as a mythical figure, ever since his famous call for resistance on June 18,1940. It is precisely this mythical aspect that makes it difficult to assess the importance of this extraordinary man. The existence, in France, of a polit­ ical movement named after him tends further to complicate a nonpartisan approach. This would be of little interest if our only concern in this chap­ ter were political history. The fact, however, that French intellectuals have or a long time banished the General from their company, assigning him to a more or less conservative, political, that is, unintellectual, position, has in

Malraux, de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux 61

my view obscured several important aspects that went into the “making” of de Gaulle. I would here like to mention two important features. First, de Gaulle’s emotional appeal to his fellow Frenchmen in June 1940 was based on a scientific analysis of the past.1 Second, the gradual buildup of his mythical image during the war years was part of a cunningly devised strat­ egy to reorganize France along patterns thought out over a long period be­ tween the First and Second World Wars. As far as this crafting of his myth­ ical image is concerned, de Gaulle’s Memoires de guerre make astonishing reading. Whether reading his passionate address of June 1940, or tri­ umphantly walking down the Champs-Elysees as in 1944, or basking in the warmth of an enthusiastic African crowd, de Gaulle never loses sight of the intellectual design and purpose of what he is doing at that particular mo­ ment. His every action and thought is permeated by an element of cun­ ning. Paradoxically, the mythical effect has been no less strong and effec­ tive for all that. It is only recently that French intellectuals have turned to de Gaulle as a thinker in his own right.2 Andre Glucksmann, for instance, in a passion­ ate essay called De Gaulle, oil es tu? taking as his point of departure the in­ ability of European powers to deal with the Yugoslavian crisis and the gen­ eral emergence, or threat of emergence, of wars all over Europe, opposed de Gaulle’s prewar analyses of the phenomenon of war itself to the more re­ assuring view of history adopted by the still-reigning school of history, the Annales. In a vivid description Glucksmann evokes two prisoners of war. First there is de Gaulle in captivity in World War I, reflecting on the nature and apparent inevitability of war. Next there is Fernand Braudel, held cap­ tive by the Germans during World War II, reflecting on his thesis, on the verge of completion when he was drafted for the army. This thesis dealt with a grand concept: the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, La MAliterrauee} In it Braudel replaces the focus of past historians on the brevity of events by tracing the longue dtire'e, the long conjectural develop­ ment of history, whose slow rhythms reduce violence and cruelty to minor incidents within the grand course of civilization. As a result, war becomes a “supreme phantasm” (54), as does the view that the fate of Europe was al­ ways decided on the battlefield. Almost scornfully Glucksmann quotes the (beautiful) closing pages of La Mediterranee, in which Braudel, after his lengthy analyses of slow movements of geography, demography, and econ-

Malraux, de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux

6z

omy, describes the death of Philip II as a completely insignificant event. This king, who stubbornly stuck to political detail in governing his enor­ mous empire, can be seen to disappear, just like Thomas Mann’s little boy in Death in Venice, into the waves of the Mediterranean: “I do not believe that the word Mediterranean,” so Braudel closes his book, “ever crossed his mind in the way it does ours nor did it evoke in him the images so famil­ iar to us of light and blue water.”4 Glucksmann, for his part, wants noth­ ing of this. To this reconciling notion of the “waves” as expressing the in­ significance of events he opposes de Gaulles view of war as real and destructive. He [de Gaulle] does not confer on ‘war’ any of the balsamic virtues of the magic lance: it does not heal the wounds it inflicts.” For Glucksmann there is no room for a romantic or long-ranging view of war: whether one likes it or not, history is full of it: “Not a century has gone by in which the world has not received the horrible visitation of war. No na­ tion has ever been able to emerge, to grow, to age, to die in peace. Alas! The history of men is that of their weapons” (57).

let us turn once more to Bernard and his monastery, Clairvaux in ampagne, situated in a dark forest in the valley of the Aube, and recapiru ate the situation in which we left him at the end of the last chapter. As ne ctine abbot he was supposed to uphold the principle of the stabilstaying where he was and taking care of his monastic community. v • • ’ We SaW *n 'a51 chapter, he traveled all over Europe, intern °f matters that, strictly speaking, were none of his busithe w lc|S f treSPasSet^ a8a*nst the Benedictine Rule, which considered e wor of action insignificant and participation in it improper for a pra ’ C°n^In'ng c^e monks to a contemplative life of meditation, earned h' S*n®*n®’ ®ernar^s powerful and sometimes violent behavior dealin enem'es’ w^° criticized him for his warriorlike way of c l j °PPonenK' Interpretations of the Christian faith that he war war ° °j deP'cted by him as armed robbery. And as far as Second ’be ln ^act called western Europe to arms, launching the tian blue 'f r 7? t0 liberate the Ho‘y Land and restore che Chris" body of religious Meanwhile> he managed to produce a vast

which he X

re~writtcn in the most beaucifui Latin-in

e sweetness of the contemplative life, on the

Malraux, de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux 63 unimportance of action, and on the wretched fate of the abbot who was called upon time and again to intervene in conflicts, both religious and sec­ ular, in the world outside the monastery. His reputation acquired mythical proportions. Apart from the inevitable miracles reported even before his life was written in standard hagiographic terms, his eloquence made him famous and feared. In the emerging academic circles on Paris’s Left Bank, with their penchant for logic and science, he was considered a conservative anti-intellectual. But, as the fate of the brilliant philosopher Abelard proved, it was not advisable to enter recklessly into debate with Bernard, even if you had the better argument and the sharper mind. Nor did the crusaders resist the magic spell of his eloquent call to arms, little reason though they—or, rather, those of them who survived and returned—had afterwards to be grateful after the complete failure of the enterprise. But even Bernard’s apology for that failure, the literary subtleties of which I discussed in the last chapter, was so irresistible as to prevent his reputation from being seriously harmed by his brilliantly proclaimed but ill-fated call for action. All things considered, in Bernard of Clairvaux the twelfth cen­ tury witnessed someone whose overwhelming power of language was a major factor in shaping the course of events. At the same time, this same man prided himself on being an abbot, living a remote and solitary life far from the madding crowd.

On December n, 1969, a few months after his sudden retirement as presi­ dent of the French Republic, General de Gaulle sat down in the study of his country house, La boiserie, in the village Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, and had a lengthy conversation with one of the few people granted per­ mission to interrupt his solitary confinement: Andre Malraux.5 Malraux, a professional writer amongst many other things, duly recorded this conver­ sation, interspersing it, according to his idiosyncratic way of writing about others, with many reflections about himself. The main theme running through this conversation is the way in which Malraux’s friend and hero remembers things with an aloofness and a touch of literary lightness that, although characteristic of de Gaulle’s earlier behavior and writings—and so admired by Malraux for that very reason—cannot fail to be reinforced by his present self-imposed solitude. It is at this point that Bernard of Clairvaux makes his appearance. Right at the beginning the conversation

Malraux, de Gaulle, and Bernard of Clairvaux

64

is set against the backdrop of the snowy landscape. This reminds Malraux of earlier remarks by de Gaulle about the fact that La boiserie overlooks the n alley of the Aube populated until the fifth century but now bereft of vil­ lages and towns. It is in this solitude, so Malraux goes on ruminating, that Bernard lived: la cellule de saint Bernard, ouverte sur la neige des siecles et la solitude. It is, in other words, the solitude of Clairvaux, down in the valley of the Aube, that meets the eye of de Gaulle when he sits behind his desk in his study, thinking about the past and writing his memoirs. Further on Malraux comes back to this image of the “wintry desert.” “Perhaps Saint Bernard has crossed this immense wintry desert: Clairvaux is beneath us.” But this time Malraux adds an important observation with regard to Bernard made by de Gaulle himself that, so he guesses, might express one of the latters domaines secrets-. No doubt, Saint Bernard was a monumen­ tal man [un colosse], but was he a man with a heart [etait-il un homme de coeur]. However that may be, de Gaulles question does not prevent Mal­ raux from extending the parallel between the two men even further. Flat­ tering his hero by explaining to him the uniqueness of his, that is, de Gaulles, eloquence, he counters his own observation that all writers in one way or another are linked to their predecessors by admitting one exception to this rule. Your speeches [allocutions] are without precedent,” he says to e Gaulle, only to add the next moment, “except one. You know Vezelay: °" would the knights standing at the foot of the hill have been able to ®ernar so it is also marked by a splendid rationality beyond the intellectual grasp of man. For that reason I fear that, by writing in a poor style, I may be accused of the same bad taste I use to blame bad painters for because of the shapeless pictures they make of the Lord.5

Besides being a statement of literary modesty, this passage reveals other di­ mensions of the argument as well. The beauty of the incarnation has to be accounted for, regardless of the beauty of the author’s style. As a matter of fact, the former’s consistency is such as to wipe out the latters scruples. As for those scruples, all that remains is Boso’s irony: “I do not think your re­ luctance is justified, since in the same way as you will not prevent someone who is capable of doing so from writing better, you will force no one to write in a poorer style for the benefit of the person who happens to dislike

your way of writing.”6 Playful though those remarks may be, they also reflect, on a stylistic level, the outcome of Cur deus homo. When in Book II, chapter 17, the ne­ cessity of the incarnation, that is, its beauty, is proven through the

application to God’s potentia of the opposite pair of force and prevention (coactio and prohibition, the argument is based upon an “indifferent mo­ ment between those two extremes. This very “indifference that allows God’s beauty to shine through is somehow reminiscent of Bosos remark al­ lowing for the best possible style.

Let us now have a closer look at the “inexpressible beauty of our redemp­

tion.” This beauty consists, as we have seen, of the hidden dimensions in the god-man whose suffering comprises and transforms the misery of hu-

V

The Mirror of Dialectics

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man history, turning sin into redemption, woman into Woman, wood into Wood. But does this beauty hold out against the attacks of the unbelievers, or is it to be called just beauty?

All these things are beautiful and should somehow be seen as pictures. However, unless they rest upon a solid foundation, they will not convince the infidels of the necessity of our belief that God has wanted to suffer the things we mentioned. For whosoever wants to make a picture, takes some­ thing solid upon which to paint to make his painting permanent. For no one paints in the water or in the air, because no traces of his picture could be contained there. Hence the infidels think that we paint on a cloud when we show them the fittingness [of the incarnation] you just mentioned as cer­ tain pictures of reality. They, however, do not think that to be reality but fic­ tion. For that reason the first task ahead is to show the solidity of the ratio­ nal truth, that is, the necessity that proves that God should or could be humiliated into suffering the things we tell about Him. Next, for this very body of truth, so to speak, to shine more brilliantly, those arguments of fit­ tingness must be expounded as pictures of this body.7 Now the necessity of proving that God’s humiliation in the incarnation makes sense can be summarized as follows. God’s perfect plan, which does not allow for a breach to be permanent, demands satisfaction, which should be given by man, the trespasser, but can only be given by God. Hence the necessity of a god-man who, next, is proven to have wanted to become incarnate because it was necessary and vice versa. Ultimately, all

possible frictions with regard to will and necessity are being solved in the perfect freedom of God, who makes necessity an intrinsic affair (sequens) rather than extrinsically imposed (praecedens). So much for the solidity of rational truth, that is, its necessity. But what about the pictures? What has happened to them in the process? To get a better grip on the problem let us once more recall the two rid­

dles. The first one, the believers’ one, concerns the image of the suffering God whose humiliation makes sense when seen as a manifestation of God’s beauty. The second riddle, raising the problems of divine will and neces­

sity, is meant to underpin the first one. But moving from the first to the second riddle, Anselm seems to have done away with the former’s pictorial outlook. For how else are we to interpret his famous motto in the preface to Cur deus homo, that he will prove by necessary reasons Christo remote (Christ being removed from the process) that it is impossible to find salva-

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tion without Him? True, Anselm does not apply here the method of nega­ tive theology to the presence of the divine as Eriugena does. However, sus­ pending the beautiful-ugly image of the suffering Christ, he somehow di­ vests it and faces nature in its nakedness. As a result, we have a third riddle on our hands. If the first riddle raised the question how ugliness—God’s suffering—could be beautiful, the second how necessity could be the same as freedom of will, the third riddle asks us to solve the problem of reading back the second into the first. How can necessity restore the outlook of a once-beautiful image? The solution of the third riddle looks like a typically Anselmian para­ dox. But then it should be realized that for Anselm, arguing from the so­ lidity of rational truth, what we call a paradox is but a proof of our incor­ rect use of language. It should rather be called pure logic. At the end of Cur deus homo the tautological necessitas sequent—de­ rived from Aristotle’s “you speak by necessity because you speak”—which

proves that the faith of the prophets in the future death of Christ was true, obliging Christ to die because he wanted to do so, is so logically cogent as to leave no room to move out of the picture of the suffering Christ. Yet that is precisely what Anselm seems to have done. Hence the paradox of Christ having been removed from the picture at the beginning of Cur deus

homo, only to return in his ineluctable presence at the end. Here the objections of the infidels are crushed. Their demand for a solid foundation underlying the vulgar imagery of Christianity is more than met. It is ridiculed. Proposing, for argument’s sake, momentarily to abandon that imagery in search of a proper foundation, Anselm applies his razor. Doing so, he cuts off all superfluous talk of solid underpinning and

shows it to be mistakenly imposing the concept of extrinsic necessity (ne­ cessitas praecedens) on a fragile but self-sufficient imagery, so self-sufficient, indeed, that it can bear temporary suspension. The effect is similar to that of Eriugena’s naked nature. Natura, though

temporarily divested, does not lose its grip. On the contrary. In its absence

the picture of Christ makes itself felt in its all-embracing power:

C’est V

whatever level of expression is to be understood as being in the supreme truth rather than belonging to the expression or to that which is expressed

itself. But what does all this tell us about cogency? So much can be said at present: unlike Augustine’s concept of divine illumination as the guarantee of true knowledge, Anselm holds that truth is intrinsically present in the utterances of the human mind, not as the truth of “this or that,” but as rectitudo mente sola perceptibilis, that is, as independent truth. So, there cer­ tainly is a greater degree of density here than in Augustine. Now, the hu­ man mind being the ultimate vehicle able to perceive the (supreme) truth, the question arises as to its status vis-«i-vis this truth. If the latter is without beginning or end, what about the mind itself, which is supposed to catch truth’s undivided and all-pervasive presence? To find an answer to this question, we must return to the problems of

textuality and cogency. If Anselm, in the preface to the three treatises De

veritate, De libertate arbitrii, and De casu diaboli, describes their content as pertinentes ad studium sacrae scripturae, he keeps the reader puzzled with re­ gard to the shape this textual study is supposed to have taken. Nowhere in the treatises—apart from some scarce scriptural references—do we find a discussion of biblical texts proper. Is this scriptural study with a lack of scriptural language itself to be seen as the principle of cogency at work in its most effective form? In reducing our everyday language to its true struc­ ture, thus laying the foundation for the presence of intrinsic truth, Anselm simultaneously reads Scripture. Even though the student’s conclusion with

regard to the Malebranche-like presence of God in language may be a bridge too far, the human mind, in whatever activity, linguistic or empiri­

cal, is bound to perceive that presence. So, whether reading Augustine or Scripture, Anselm discovers one and the same truth mente sola perceptibilis. In so doing his principle of cogency is effective to such a degree as to reveal that one and the same truth dominates both reading and thinking. It is that undivided presence of truth that blurs the distinction between Scrip­ ture and the Fathers as external authorities on the one hand and the in­ trinsic degree of cogency on the other. Yet even so, textuality does not dis­ appear: the search for cogency turns out to be the very study of Scripture

itself. Now that the student in the dialogue has been silenced, it is the

Reading Anselm

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reader’s rum to object. For, although it is evident that the presence of the supreme truth is not to be understood as God being contained by, or iden­ tical with, a proposition, Anselm so far has failed fully to live up to his claim of cogency in that he left the relationship between the supreme truth without beginning and end, and the proposition—or, for that matter, other means of expression—stating that fact unaccounted for. All we know from the Monologion and De veritate is that the supreme truth is without beginning or end since nnllo claudipotest veritasprincipio velfine. What we as yet remain ignorant about is exactly how “changeful truth is incorpo­ rated into the changefulness of time.” There is a further problem resulting from the first one. Truth being without beginning or end, we do not know exactly what it looks like. In other words, the principle of cogency, al­ though producing the presence of truth, does not reveal its face, unless, of course, one would duplicate the present studium sacrae scripturae and ap­ peal to the text of Scripture as an external source of information. It is in the Proslogion that Anselm offers the final solution to our ques­ tions. As mentioned before, that treatise too is characterized by Anselm, in one of the most moving prefaces ever written, as a rereading of an earlier work, the Monologion. The untim argimentum by which Anselm proves the existence of God—id quo maius nihil cogitari potest—is well known. This argument is so self-supporting that it can do without a further reference to the fact that the God thus proven is without beginning and end. Only when criticized by Gaunilo, who defends the possibility that id quo maius nihil cogitaripotest does not exist, does Anselm demonstrate the absurdity of that thesis by pointing to the fact that, if that were to be the case, “it could be thought to have a beginning and an end,” just to add, “That, however, is impossible. For if someone says that id quo maius nihil cogitari potest does not exist, I [Anselm] maintain that, so thinking, he either thinks or does not think id quo maius nihil cogitaripotest. If not, he does not think that what he does not think does not exist. However, if he does think the id quo maius, he thinks something that cannot be thought not to be.”'2 Here we can observe Anselm’s principle of cogency in full swing. Complicated though his argumentation against Gaunilo may seem, the ar­ gument reduced to its bare self is amazingly simple. In reply to another ob­ jection by Gaunilo, who had read the id quo maius as maius omnibus, “thus

Reading Anselm 173

allowing room for thinking something greater than maius omnibus, even if that does not exist,” Anselm boasts that id quo maius utterly excludes so evasive a flight into thought. By implication, the appeal to id quo maius as having neither beginning nor end is to be seen as a result of rather than as an indispensable part of the argument. The latter is self-sufficient. All one needs is to hear it being spoken-. “The maius omnibus is in need of another argument than itself. In the case of id quo maius, however, all that is re­ quired is that quo maius cogitari nonpossit sounds.”13 Here Anselm hits the linguistic nail on its head. Although Augustine’s concept of language and reading, like Anselms, has its point of departure in the sound of language, the former moves beyond language in search for changeless truth both un­ derlying and transcending it where the latter finds it in the performative sound of language itself. Now for Anselm cogency is indeed the instrument that does the trick. Correcting and redirecting the ever-widening perspective of the maius om­ nibus, cogency makes the formula id quo maius self-performative: it speaks and proves itself. Thus changeless truth, at once being introduced and kept at bay, is established in language as an auto-pronunciation. That auto-pronunciation is, of course, performed by the image of the changeless truth it­ self: the human mind living in the changefulness of time. But the cogency of the formula id quo maius, containing a comparative that respects the in­ dependence of the two poles of the comparison, the thinking mind on the one hand and the changeless God on the other, while at the same time hav­ ing them united in one and the same performative formula, is such as to produce the presence of God through the sound of language, thus offering the observing and listening mind a glimpse of what He looks like. But what about the spatial and temporal dimensions of reading? What about the text of De trinitate being reread by Anselm in the Monologion, and the text of the Monologion being reread by Anselm in the Proslogioni First, it should be noted that the id quo maius itself is a text, or rather a textual trick performed on another text: “the fool says in his heart: there is no God.” That fool turns out to say something that cannot be thought: he does not know how to read properly and, therefore, he does not think properly. In short, he is a fool. That is all there is to it. Once the id quo maius is pronounced, it inevitably proves itself as well as the fool’s silliness. Next, it should be realized that the very notion of cogency is rooted in

1

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memory. As such, taking on the shape of sola ratione and, even more eco­ nomically, of unum argumentum, it once more maps out, by way of con­ densation, the text of Augustine’s De trinitate and Anselms own Monolo­ gion. But, however dense and perhaps invisible the ratio Anselmi may be, the route this argument follows is the route of the Trinity and its repro­ ducing image. Here we have perhaps the best-kept secret of Anselms trick: the unum argumentum, rather than being just reason, consists of memory, intellect, and will. Reason performing a perfect operation, and, therefore, being by necessity a kind of perfecta similitudo of its source, how could it be otherwise? As such, the unum argumentum is an act of reading and rereading. Or, to put it more correctly, it is a perfect example of reciprocal reading, reading as reading ought to be. Nowhere does Anselm put this point so clearly as in the preface to the Proslogion:

After I had published, at the compelling request of some of my fellow brothers, a little work as an example of how to meditate about the structure of faith—acting as a person who, through silent reasoning with himself, ex­ amines what he ignores—I considered that work to be too much assembled out of a multitude of arguments. That is why I began to ask myself if it would be possible to find one argument, which was in no need of another one except itself to prove itself, and that alone would suffice to prove that God truly exists and that there exists a supreme good that does not need anything else whereas all other things, in order to be and to be well, do need the supreme good, as well as all the other things we believe about the divine substance. I kept focusing my attention on that issue. And one moment it seemed as if I could grasp what I was looking for. But the other moment it totally eluded my mind. In the end, I became so desperate that I wanted to stop my search for an argument that could not be found. However, the very moment I wanted to banish that thought from my mind altogether, lest it would prevent my mind from making progress in other fields when it kept occupying itself in vain with this particular issue, it increasingly started to impose itself upon me with a certain impertinence, against my will and op­ position. One day when I was extremely tired, resisting with all my power the very thought that forced itself upon me against my will, that which I de­ spaired about presented itself right in the middle of the turmoil of my thoughts so as to make me embrace eagerly the very thought that I had taken care to reject. Joyful about what I had discovered, I thought that it might please some

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reader when it was written down. It is about this subject and about some others that I have written the present little treatise in the guise of a person trying to erect his mind in order to see God, and of a person who seeks to understand what he believes.14 In a sense this preface can be read as foreshadowing the unum argumentum itself. When Anselm finally discovers his argument, it is after a long battle between its elusive and tentative appearances and the restless mind. But in the end all it had to do was sound. Thus, retrospectively, considering the simplicity of the solution, the mental struggle becomes almost ironic. And

ironic it is, absorbed as it is now by the clarity of the outcome. This is pre­ cisely what Anselms cogency produces. Correcting language and thought and reducing it to its proper shape and proportions, it lends meaning, drama, and relief to former circumlocutions. A similar element of retro­ spective irony makes itself felt when Anselm, concluding his preface in which he had announced the most daring thought experiment ever under­ taken, adds timidly that he has put his name to the treatise on the order (auctoritate) of Bishop Hugh of Lyon. In other words, the vertical coup performed by the unum argumentum springs from memory and recharges the past, including past readings and

writings, without erasing them altogether. On the contrary. For since it has become clear that reading and writing, undercut and redirected as they are by the unum argumentum, are a mere matter of reciprocity—a struggle in hindsight, a cause for boundless joy at present—the gaudium plenum thus achieved provides both the past and the future with such stuff as rumina­

tion is made on: sweet memories and high expectations. By way of conclusion we should once more face the question: does this Anselmian concept of cogency, consisting of memory, understanding, and w , imp y that in the last resort the human mind works according to the

ame principle as those through which the persons of the Trinity commu­ nicate. Are, for example, the products of our memory such as our thought about God and His creation eventually to be seen as “memory of memory,” as part of a reciprocal process of knowledge? As we have seen above, in terms o a general theory of knowledge, the answer has to be negative. Yet rom the viewpoint of the enclosed space of his monastic ruminations, ere is a sense in which Anselm can be said to reread Augustine as well as

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his own Monologion by applying his principle of rational cogency to hu­ man language and thought. So doing, he does not deprive the human mind of external sources to articulate its thoughts. Instead, he firmly re­ duces those thoughts, once formulated, to their agents, to the mind pro­ ducing them, to the memory of the monastic mind in search of God, which is intellect as well as will. This then appears to be the ultimate mean­ ing of Anselms concept of cogency. In the light of this conclusion it may make sense to reread the opening of the Monologion. If anyone, either by not having heard of it or by not believing, does not know of one nature and further happens to be ignorant of most of the other things we necessarily believe about God and His creation—that supreme nature that is the highest of all that is, autarchic in its eternal beatitude, giv­ ing and making though His omnipotent goodness the very being or the well-being to all other things—then I believe such a person, even if of a modest intellectual capacity, to be able to convince himself of the truth of most of all this by reason alone.

If we ruminate on this text, it turns out to present us with a precise itiner­ ary of the monastic mind. Whatever part of reality is touched by the mind, the sola ratione, culminating in the unum argumentum, reveals this reality, in spite of the latter’s obscure provenance from the realm of images and in­ sufficient reason—remember Anselms turmoil in the preface to the Proslo­ gion—to be part of “the supreme nature and rhe other things we necessar­ ily believe about God and His creation.” To think of that nature and of those “other things” sola ratione means to draw them from memory right through the oblivion caused by the inaccuracies of our normal speech habits. If, then, in the Monologion and the Proslogion Anselm proves, in dif­ ferent ways and with an ever-increasing degree of cogency, the existence of God, he does so by reducing the vague and obscured knowledge we have about God from our (sense and image) experience to a “memory of mem­ ory,” that is, “to an activity of the mind remembering being remembered by God.” Ultimately, it is in the complete reciprocity between the mind and its object, and between the object and “its” mind, that the sola ratione brings out the presence of God. This presence embraces both the forget­ fulness of the mind caught up in the sinful obscurities of language and thought, and the happiness it enjoys after it has completed its mission of remembering God and his creation.

r

CHAPTER 10

Death and Pleasure The Poetics ofCur deus homo

by does tragedy give pleasure?' Why did God become man: Cur ------- jj deus homo?Two questions, the first of which seems quite unte­ sted to the second. Surely Anselms Cur deus homo is neither a tragedy nor a comedy, neither an epic nor a lyric poem. That does not mean, however, that we know how it should be labeled from a poetical point ofview or, for at matter, that the question as to the poetics of Cur deus homo should not e raised. We all know what the fate ofAnselms work has been throughout t e ages. Fragments of his thought can be found scattered all over Christtan t eology. And although treatises such as the Proslogion seem to have su ered the worst from fragmentation into theological and philosophical s'atcmen ts out of context, one should not underestimate the harm done to e s ape and argument of Cur deus homo by the theologians’ custom of ere iting it with providing the history of doctrine with a well-defined locus of redemption. Admittedly, recent research has shown much more respect for the text, ringing to the surface the Augustinian and monastic nature of Anselm’s thought. Prayer and meditation have been rediscovered as the constitutive rame of his every reflection and argument. Thus justice is being done to t e affective and emotional dimensions as integral parts of his reasoning, ne question that remains unanswered, however, is the exact relation be­ tween the different elements: affection, argumentation, and rhetoric. Of course, this is not to ignore the fact that the Augustinian principle of credo ut intelligam is underlying every Anselmian argument. It does so indeed,

ut this does not suffice. For what the credo ut intelligam fails to account for is the poetics ofAnselm’s work, that is, the way in which monastic lan-

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guage—arguments and images alike—is molded into a blend, a synthesis that does not coincide with the sum of its parts and that, like a tragedy,

stands alone before touching the ear of the listener and reader. To illustrate this point, I would like to make a few remarks about A. D. Nuttall’s interesting essay Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? in order next to use it as a heuristic means of bringing out some problems concern­ ing Anselms poetics. Ever since Aristotle, “tragic joy,” as Nietzsche called it, has been an intriguing phenomenon. Nuttall himself succinctly sums up the paradox resulting from the odd simultaneity of joy and horror as fol­ lows: “In the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as a matter for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in their turn matter for enjoyment.”2 First, Nuttall deals with Aristotle’s Poetics, defending the “physical” in­ terpretation of katharsis against the emotional, psychological one as put forward by Martha Nussbaum, among others. The important point here is that in the tragic theater the emotions are purged through pity and fear rather than clarified. If emotions were to be clarified in a nonphysical way, the process would be a psychological one, the emotions staying in place. We should keep this in mind when we consider the tightness of Anselms “psychology.” Second, Nuttall turns to Freud’s scientific underworld, or, paraphras­ ing Pascal’s “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point”—notice the Augustinian ring the remark has about it—to “the Unconscious which has a mind of which the Mind is wholly unaware.”3 Like so many others, Nuttall does not believe in the scientific claims made by Freud. However, together with the tightness of Anselms psychology we should also keep in mind the problem of rationality when applying the pleasure of tragedy to Anselm’s “scientific” explanation of the pleasure and necessity of (the) in­ carnation. In doing so doing we will be confronted with the scientific and aesthetic tightness of Cur deus homo versus the subterranean streams it keeps both running and at bay. Third, criticizing Freud s scientific reductionism with rhe help of some shrewd remarks on the subject by C. S. Lewis, Nuttall raises a problem that, in a slightly different fashion, the reader of Anselm is also bound to face. I quote the passage in full. Lewis knew about the second thesis of psychoanalysis in which the mecha­ nisms of repression are emphasized. We are not only libidinal beings, we are

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also comprehensively repressed beings (indeed, if we were not repressed, there would be no such thing as the Unconscious). Therefore we are not al­ lowed to enjoy the 1 ibidinal material directly; all sorts of alarm bells are jan­ gling, the mind’s police are being mobilized. It is at this point that Lewis be­ comes clever. “Fine,” he says, in effect, “I understand that.” But if we’re not allowed to enjoy the libidinal material directly and arc obliged to get our pleasure indirectly by way of muffling images, what is one to make of the medieval poem, Guillaume de Lorris’s Le Roman de la Rosel In this poem the plucking of the rose means exactly what Freud would have it mean, but the poet has sign-posted everything, made this meaning explicitly clear. The im­ agery, therefore, cannot be there to provide an essential disguise. It really looks very much as if the poet and his audience were interested in both sex and gardens—and in the rich imaginative commerce between the two.4

Fourth, in his last chapter Nuttall once more explores what he calls “the game of death.” On a more profound level than the theories of Freud, Shakespeare’s King Lear expresses for him the hidden sources of tragic plea­ sure. 1 In King Lear the game of death is played very hard—even to the point of making us aware that all the stately signals of formality are frail, that the rules of language and hypothesis which make it, still, a game and not death itself, are only temporary and artificial defences.”5 Here we find ourselves on the borderline of the form (of tragedy) that is often supposed

to arouse pleasure against the darkness of tragic events and protagonists, and the uncontrollable darkness itself. One of the many uncomfortable feelings King Lear brings out in the spectator is the fear that ultimately the

defenses of language and form may not hold. I have quoted Nuttalls views at some length without interrupting him too much with Anselmian comparisons. The reason for this circumlocutory approach is that I am not so much interested in comparing Anselms Chris­

tian meditation with Greek or early modern tragedy. I rather want to ar­ ticulate a phenomenon that—for the time being—cannot be identified in terms of Anselms vocabulary proper and that is a basic, and paradoxical, dissimukaneous simultaneity that is running through the text, lending it an extraordinary degree of suspense and drama. The emotional impact of this dissimukaneous simultaneity can best be reformulated—without pay­ ing too much attention to the differences of genre—in terms of the the­ atrical question: why does tragedy give pleasure? For in this question oth-

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ers, as brought up by Nuttall, are subsumed. They can be recapitulated as follows, in the reverse order in which I summarized them above: i. The frailty of language and thought in the face of death or, in Anselms case, perfection versus the immense power of (tragic) form and argumentation z. The fiailty of the metonymic relationship between (tragic) argu­ mentation and necessity on the one hand and the world of images on the

other 3. The subterranean strands beneath the surface of dramatic or, in Anselms case, rational articulation 4. The tightness of drama/tragedy excluding, like a razor, unwanted (or inaccurate) emotional and affective expansion All these questions somehow reflect the basic fear and pleasure both the spectator of tragedy and the reader of Cur deus homo experience. Fear and pleasure, then, emotion and expansion, articulation and subterranean strands, image and reason, all of them reflect the presence of time, whether narrative or dramatic, whether extratextual and historic or measured as the duration of an argument or the course of emotions.

The Fragility of Language and Thought

Does Anselms scientific experiment succeed, not only within the self-im­ posed confines of the sola ratione and the Christo remote, but also with re­ gard to its overall claim “to account for the hope which is in us,”fi that is, to establish, between faith and vision, the presence of the divine? Language of faith may stand, albeit without understanding. Vision there may be, however postponed. But what about the rational structure to be erected in between these two? Does it hold? What about the confidence expressed in Anselms programmatic opening statement of Cur deus homo-. “In short, because I take the intellect that we grasp in this life to be the medium be­ tween faith and vision, I think that the more progress someone makes in understanding, the closer he comes to the vision we all long for”?7 There is a tendency on the part of the modern reader to take Anselms scientific experiment, and, more in particular, the linguistic techniques by which this experiment is supported and performed, for granted. More of-

Death and Pleasure 181 ten than not it is both the readers familiarity with later, scholastic and de­ votional language and his ability to recognize the Augustinian presence in Anselm’s work that account for this ease, which is further stimulated by Anselm’s clarity and brevity. However, Anselm’s is an extremely complex simplicity. Admittedly, Augustine is all over the place. But nowhere in Anselm do we meet the multilayered rhetoric of Augustine. Of course, there is the long opening prayer of the Proslogion reflecting Augustinianmonastic nervousness about the condition htimaine. But as of chapter 2 it has gone, only to reappear in a reversed version as the gaudium plenum of the end.8 And as for Cur deus homo, the autobiographical may be not com­ pletely lacking. But, true to type, it is brief and shrouded in secrecy and privacy: “In magna enim cordis tribulatione quam unde et cur passus sim novit deus, illud in Anglia rogatus incepi et in Capuana provincia peregrinus perfect I'With heartfelt suffering whose origin and cause are known to God I have started writing this book, upon request, in England and I have fin­ ished it in the province of Capua, a stranger in a strange land.” Unlike Au­ gustine’s continuous self-examination in the Confessiones, Anselm’s bitter sigh is not sustained in what follows. Instead, the rigor of scientific debate is introduced. Not sustained, but not forgotten either. Unmistakably, this brief autobiographical remark lends a touch of pathos to the Cur deus homo that arouses a feeling of compassion in the reader. As a silent subauditur, that pathos keeps underlying the rigor of Anselm’s dialectical exercise. As such it is somehow reminiscent of the pleasure of tragedy. On the other hand, Anselm’s dialectical experiment is not as self-suffi­ cient as are the summae of its scholastic successors. For that both the affin­ ity to, and the distance from, faith and vision are too intense. Although scholastic language is capable of absorbing the religious objects it discusses or, alternatively, leaves it entirely to the realm of devotion, Anselms dialec­ tical and rhetorical purity demands suspense and exclusion of faith and vi­ sion without—as I will try to argue—those two losing their (excluded) presence for a moment. When in the heat of the discussion Boso replies to Anselms question how Boso himself thinks to achieve salvation by saying that he despairs of reason and trusts in the Christian faith and works through love,” Boso is severely rebuked by his master.9 For the agreement was to do without Christ and the Christian faith and to operate through reason alone. A premature return to faith and vision would spoil the oper-

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ation. But the operation itself hinges on what it momentarily excludes. So, apart from the fact that Augustinian and scholastic language both need a poetics of their own, their historiographic presence should not ob­ scure the specific nature of Anselm’s literary constructs. If we look at his work without earlier or later connotations, the sola ratione, for one, looks quite problematic. Exactly what is its position between faith and vision? What do I mean by saying that the dialectical experiment is not as self-suf­ ficient as later Scholasticism when Anselms sola ratione seems to be bolder than the rather toned down sic et non of the scholastic method that even al­ lows for appeal to authority? What I mean is that, unlike either Augustine’s rhetoric or the scholastic corpus, the sola ratione, precisely by operating sharply and purely, does not stand on its own feet. Working through nega­ tion and double negation (compare the remoto Christo'0 and the fool’s negation of id quo maius nihil cogitari potest," that is, the impossibility of negating the existence of God), it creates a lacuna or a void in the world of feith and images.12 For the time being, that is, for the time of dialectical ar­ gumentation, we keep our breath. How fragile this experiment looks! When vision and faith are banished, reason is quite alone. Yet, the more ac­ curately reason operates, the more powerfully the presence of divine per­ fection makes itself felt. Thus the urgency of rational accuracy is under­ scored. If reason fails, faith and vision collapse. The Metonymic Relationship between Reason and Images The end of Cur deus homo is no less unsettling than the end of King Lear. If the game of death “makes us aware that all the stately signals of formal­ ity are frail,” so does the final outcome of the argument about the absent Christ. Ultimately, the conclusion of that argument is that he suffered and died out of necessity (however sequent rather than praecedens}.

Because the faith or prophesy concerning Christ was true since he was to die out of will and not out of necessity, it was necessary rhat it so happened. Out of that necessity he has become man. Out of that necessity he has suf­ fered; out of that necessity he has willed what he has willed. For out of that necessity those things happened because they were to happen in the future. And they were future, because they happened. And they happened because they happened.13

2;

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This necessity indeed being sequens rather than praecedens seems to blow up, as it were, the fragile fabric of argumentation that had led to this con­ clusion, For what room is left by a necessity that expresses seamlessly that whatever is, is because it is? What remains is the image of Christ in all its splendor and perfection. But at this stage “image” can no longer be distin­ guished from reality, as indeed it now turns out to have been the case all along. In a sense, the course of the argumentation in Cur deus homo has a long history of confronting the imperatives of reality, that is, perfect real­ ity. There is an elaborate argument, for example—one among many others—about whether Christ suffered sponte if he had no choice but to obey his Fathers orders and accept death. If even the Virgin Mary derives the truth of her faith from the future death of her son, to state that he had the liberty not to die would imply the falsity of that faith. For, given the pre­ ceding factuality of his death, not to want it would be the same as equat­ ing non-being with being.14 The burden of perfection weighs heavily on Cur deus homo. There is the perfection of God’s being that comprises the perfection of his plan with mankind and the restitution for the break of that plan. This very same di­ vine perfection produces drama—a kind of drama that at times is quite close to tragedy when confronted with the human condition. Can one think of a more dramatic statement than Anselms wry conclusion that ei­ ther God will finish what he has begun with human nature [out hoc de humanaperficiet natura}, or he will turn out to have made it in vain ?15 The latter statement may be gloomy, but the former certainly has the odor of tragedy and, one might almost say, tragic cruelty, highlighting as it does— as a subouditur the hopeless state of man himself in the light of what he had once been and once will be but definitely now is not. It does some­ thing else as well. In a nutshell it expresses the entire argument and drama of Cur deus homo. It is this divine perfection that, shipwrecked on the sinful state of man, triggers the frantic activities of the intellect. It is this very same perfection that disallows the intellect to manifest itself in a shape other than the neg­ ative or, rather, the double negative. And precisely at this point, when the dialectical handling of the negative transforms into imagery, the fragility of their relationship comes to the fore. In order to illustrate this as yet unproven assumption I turn briefly to

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De casu diaboli, that is, to the treatise that discusses divine perfection-inthe-reverse. The point of departure of the argument is the phrase from Scripture, "quid babes quod non accepisti?! what have you that you did not receive?”16 So, all we have we receive from God. However, this does not mean that not-receiving is always the result of not-giving: "Potest enim non

dare non esse causam non accipiendi, etiamsi dare semper causa esset accipi­ endi/not giving is capable of not being the cause of not receiving, although giving is always the cause of receiving.”17 In the specific case of the fall of the devil, the not-accepting preceded the not-giving. How? By failing to persevere. But how could he persevere if he had not been given something to persevere in? In a series of reformulations of the argument Anselm proves that the end—the refusal to persevere—is prior to the beginning— the receiving of God’s gift. “Thus one ought to say that the devil who re­ ceived the will and the power to receive perseverance and the will and the power to persevere did neither receive nor persevere because he did not will to perfection [nonpervoluit].”n Interestingly, to express the devil’s fall adequately, that is, effectively from a dialectical and rhetorical point of view, three negations are required [potest non dare non esse causam non accipiendi}, when, strictly speaking, one would suffice (the devil did not receive). In the same way Anselm’s di­ alectical rendering of God’s role in the drama of redemption, and, for that matter, of his existence as proven in the Proslogion, required two negations (it is impossible not to think God, it is impossible for Christ not to suffer) where one positive statement would have sufficed. The game of logic is like the game of death. It raises the stakes. Posi­ tively stating that Christ had to die for us or positively stating that the devil had denied God’s gift prior to receiving it may be a matter of faith or vi­ sion. However, introducing the twofold and threefold negation, respec­ tively, creates an air of lightness and drama. Once it is introduced, the cor­ rect dialectical handling of negations is a matter of (dramatic) life and death. Without the external support of faith and vision this play has to be pursued to its logical end. In the process, the dramatic suspense does not lie in the outcome, be it death or a happy ending, but in the dramatization of “lifeless” perfection (either believed or seen). It is up to Anselm to crack Boso’s justified fear of the stony death to which the practice of dialectics could lead. “But we see, on the contrary, that what God wills immutably,

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cannot not be, but is by necessity.”19 The introduction and the rewriting of negations (for example, Christ’s ability to lie) is a remarkable effort, not only to strengthen faith, but also to view reality upside down, acrobatically, that is. First things first. The perfect image of Christ becoming man, the end of history, is its beginning, as it indeed always has been and always will be. But it is only a thin line between stoniness and solidity. Solidity is achieved when the shaky status of the picture of faith as introduced at the beginning of Cur deus homo by mouth of the infidels is replaced by truth. Thus in book II, chapter 8, Anselm, marveling about the parallel between man’s fall because of a woman and the beauty of Christ born out of a vir­ gin-woman, exclaims: "Pinge"—repeating it thrice—"non super fictam vanitatem, sed super solidam veritatem.” Part of this beauty, however, is the reversal of order implied in and imposed by the solidity of this picture. It is no longer the picture of faith that presents itself here. What we have here is much more difficult to handle: the presence of divine perfection in the disguise of a pulchra et rationabilis pictures. Its exact place in human lan­ guage and thought, and the splendor and connotative power of its pres­ ence, have to be further assessed in the next paragraph. , IS sect’on one more problem has to be faced. We have been g a out t e ultimate solidity of pictures, but what about the frailty of 8 8 an even more seriously, what about the frailty resulting from t e insertion of a series of negations into the divine perfection? F d Wh ese quest*ons we are back at Lewis’s (and Nuttall’s) criticism of z . , ln, ecd’ was *c not possible to reduce the metonymy of roses I f °rris s poems) to its underlying scientific structure? So much is rom t e outset. Anselms “imagery, therefore, cannot be there to provtde an essential disguise.” Further, in C. S. Lewis’s view, just as de Lorris’s . ij eemed t0 interested in both sex andgardens, so Anselm’s reader s ould take in both rational argumentation and the picture of Christ. The atter comes to life through exclusion as well as the introduction of the forne might even argue that Anselms deft manipulation of reasoning °ne8at*°ns produces similar effects to Augustine’s rhetoric of un­ rest. Affirmation and negation, crw/wand prohibit, necessity and possity. t ese notions create a kind of “libidinal” tension preventing the an writer from enjoying the material, alias pictures, directly. But in

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the end they represent nothing. For the sola ratione, in order to be effective as the medium between faith and vision, should be empty. Only on that condition can the frailty of the metonymic relationship between argumen­ tation and the world of images stand and indeed be enjoyed.

The Subterranean Strands beneath Rational Argumentation

The weight of perfection: that is what Cur deus homo is about. But what exacdy do we mean by the weight of perfection? To whom does it belong? Clearly, perfection is first and foremost to be associated with divine pres­ ence. And it is this very presence whose disturbing influence is felt and has to be accounted for. On the one hand, there is something satisfying about the Anselmian habit of argumentation that first introduces negations into the massive and often offensive presence of divine necessity and next resolves those nega­ tions into the transparency of perfection. Thus the possibility of Christs ly­ ing, of his being forced to die, is reduced first to his will and next, more specifically, to his pervelle, to his perseverance. However, perseverance, like perfection, does not mean anything as long as it is unconnected, as long as its presence in the text and the argumentation is massively empty and meaningless. The problem is the more urgent because, unlike Augustine’s overrhetorical evocation of the donum perseverantiae, Anselms subtle di­ alectics is responsible for fine-tuning perseverances presence in text and thought, for establishing it between faith and vision, that is, for attaching it to the thinking mind. In other words, the effect of perseverance depends on the precision of its attachment to different points of view. Take, for example, the threefold negation in the quote from De casu diaboli-. “potest enim non dare non esse causa non accipiendi, etiamsi dare sem­ per esset causa accipiendiI not-giving is capable of not being the cause of not-receiving even though giving is always the cause of receiving.” The verb is, as well as the subsequent argumentation about the one who gives, the one who receives, and the one who does not receive before he is being given, hinges on the different points of view of the actors. The devil’s claim (made from his point of view) of not having received because nothing was given is refuted only when it is overruled by another, superior point of

i

Death and Pleasure 187

view, the analysis of velle ^pervelle. The point of the argument is precisely that although the reduction to pervelle may be the final outcome, and al­ though with the blessing of hindsight, this admittedly has been the case all along for the duration of the argument things look different. For the pe­ riod of the argument deniers are allowed to have their say. That is what makes the process of argumentation an intrinsically dramatic one. Thus the full impact of the phrase potest enim non dare comes to the surface, slowly and painfully, when the actor (the one who wills or does not will) wi 1 be shown either to be absorbed by his own perseverance or, by his own failure to persevere, to be banished from willing at all. Why do I keep calling this procedure intrinsically dramatic? The rea­ son or this is that Anselm, unlike the later Augustine, does not confine himself to a rhetorical-devotional evocation of perseverance. Like that most rigorous of playwrights, Racine, he takes perseverance out of the protected re m of faith and places it on the dissecting table of his laboratory. Thus perseverance has to run the entire course of necessity and force, and of dra­ matic disguise, as, for example, being attributed to the wrong actor or be­ ing misunderstood as velle rather than as pervelle. Only by a painful and su t e process of rewriting and transformations, that is, by eliminating len necessity and establishing the right points of view, perseverance, w ic in its alien disguise looks like the brute reality of that which is and cannot be but that which it is, comes to life and turns into the drama of the necessity of Christs suffering. Once we see how the perseverance of Christ (that is, the general com­ plex of perfection and pervelle), through the threads of argumentation, is su t y attached to the different actors, breaking, so to speak, into different points of view, we also realize that the so-called rational structure of Cur eus homo is not the final word about its effect and impact. On the con­ trary, what we see is that the gift of perseverance, rather than being topped or given, as in Augustine’s case, or being reduced to the unassail­ able realm of the minds mechanisms, as is the case with Freuds scientific reductionism, is being processed by the intellect. The effect of this opera­ tion is similar to what happens in the theater. Just as in tragedy, for one, the spectator is not provided with the subterranean motives of the protagonists in the play but rather with the steeling sequence of events, so the perfect actuality and necessity of Christ’s incarnation confronts the reader of

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Anselms Cur deus homo. It is this iron necessity that, being steered by the intellect, creates room for the subterranean on the one hand and the inac­ cessible divine on the other. Although in the analysis of sin Anselms rational measure marks the ponduspeccatil the weight of sin as beyond repair and beyond imagination, preventing the latter from getting off too easily as a mendable part of the human devotion, the very same intellect that analyzed the depths of de­ spair brings out the altitude of God’s mercy. “The mercy of God that seemed to you to vanish when we considered the justice of God and the sin of man, is found by us to be so great and so in accordance with justice that greater and more just than this mercy cannot be thought.”20 So, far from rationalizing faith, the intellect evokes both the subterranean and uncon­ trollable strands of the human mind and the altitude of God. Both, it must be added, are impenetrable. Neither can they be reformulated as romantic evocations of reason beyond reason, as a constitutive un- or subconscious, or, with regard to the divine, as an infinitely creative supreme being. For that they are too much related to, and kept at bay by, the intellect. What the intellect does effect is the articulation of perseverance: “It is therefore reasons task to discern between just and unjust, between good and evil, and between better and less good / idea namque rationalis est, ut discernat inter iustum et iniustum, et inter bonum et malum, et inter magis bonum et minus bonum."1' “For it is better to be just than unjust, better to be happy than unhappy.”22 Language, thought, and reality may be full of more spec­ tacular statements and visions. However, no salvation is to be expected from the heights and depths of general, that is, uncorrected, language and thought. For Anselm what counts is the priority of proper language, the priority ofpervelle before and beyond the abyss of refusal, pointing to the abyss of bliss. The Tightness of Drama versus Unwanted Affective Expansion The notion of katharsis is so tricky as to exclude the possibility of a useful comparison with Anselmian drama. But leaving the intricate knots sur­ rounding this problem aside, there is one important point raised by Nut­ tall that might be helpful when assessing the nature of Cur deus homo, and that is his emphasis on the tightness, and in the specific case of katharsis,

•s

Death and Pleasure 189

the physicality of drama. In an older book on Greek tragedy, John Jones had pointed in the same direction, arguing against the modern tendency to conceive of human privacy only in terms of inwardness.”23 In his own way Anselm can be called a master of externalization. For so much is certain: a substantial part of the fame of Cur deus homo is founded upon the exclusion of the devil from the drama of sin and reemption. Full responsibility is attributed to the only protagonists who are open to blame or praise. Of course, that is not to say that the devil was not to blame for luring man into sin. However, being the inventor rather than the victim of sin, he is at fault so completely that he is banished from any participation whatever in the process of redemption. Consequently, his is the ultimate isolation. Once Anselm has purged the argument between God and man of the o scurities of myth, the full focus is on the efforts by the intellect to clear out of the way the real obstacles between the contestants. The means used y the intellect consist of the subtle handling and the precise positioning o negations. Here, the importance of tightness comes to the fore once more. Since negations as manipulated by the intellect are supposed to esta ish, through a process of widening and narrowing down, coactio and prohibit™, the inalienable link between God and man, their effectiveness epends on their purity and emptiness. In other words, the expansion of the intellect is utterly functional. Its task is to unmask myth and to cut off cheap faith, vision, and affections. Ultimately, the effect of Anselms negations is a dramatic one. Ironi­ cally, although the course and outcome of the argument of Cur deus homo are important, they do not hinge on its linear development. The most striking feature of the negation expressing the impossibility of Christ not to die is its poetical power. For what is evoked in this handling of negation is the perseverance of Christ, his pervelle that in turn reveals the intellect that performs this operation to have been part of it all along. This would be drama along linear lines if we were to witness here a happy ending in the same way as we may witness doom and disaster in tragedy. However, just as in good tragedy, so in Cur deus homo, it is not the story that counts. It is the phantom of negation in which time is compressed, reversed, and even, it seems, suspended. For this reason Anselms sola ratione and remote Christo are primarily poetical statements. Consequently, when the reader is told that man is made to be happy since, if it were otherwise, God would

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have created him in vain, he cannot but take in the full drama so succinctly expressed. Technically, that drama is performed by the negation implied in the frustra I in vain. By appealing to the perseverance and the pervelle of Christ it deprives the story of time and presents the intellect with a knot to be disentangled here and now. All things considered, Anselms poetics turns every single line into a drama. Whether the fool says there is no God, whether the infidels deny the ne­ cessity of the incarnation, whether man is (vainly) created to be happy, whether Christ can or cannot lie, whether it is necessary for Christ to die, ever}' single statement, by being pushed and withdrawn by the intellect, tells it all. This is how grief and fear become a matter for enjoyment, not by marking a happy ending, but by breaking the weight, the pondus, of perfection and doom. No wonder that the most dramatic and absurdist tale is told by the one who has excluded himself from the game of the in­ tellect and, in so doing, from the game of death: the devil. The most be­ wildering question that also underlies the argument of Cur deus homo is in­ deed the one raised by the student in De casu diabolr. “Quomodo potuit diabolus velle quod non potuit cogitareU How, then, could the devil want that which he could not think?”24

PART III

Exile

X'vAAv/

hen, in the introduction to part two, “Density,” I presented

■ ; Anselm’s poetics of monasticism as the ultimate, inward fulfillment of Christian history, it became clear that such density was not des­ tined to survive. This leaves undisputed that Western Christianity, from Augustine through the Reformation and Counterreformation, was never­ theless shaped by this same monasticism. What is more, both Catholic and Protestant devotion continued to be permeated by the claims and ambi­ tions of monastic discipline. However, as the enclosure and stability pre­ scribed by the Rule of Benedict gave way to the less restricted lifestyles of the mendicant orders and their successors, the hold of eternity over time gradually loosened. Once the unique contraction and simultaneity of hope and despair within the monastic punctum became deprived of its substra­ tum, the monastic game as the paradox of constriction (living a “regular life) and playfulness was up. Venus, in a sense, lost her grip. By Exile I mean the cirhnonie des adieiix (the ceremony of farewell), a farewell to the special status of monastic literature as I have described it in its “ultimate,” Anselmian state. Of course, from a historical point of view, reality is much more complex than the state of affairs sketched here, since the dividing lines between the different periods and mentalities are fluid rather than clear-cut. Moreover, as historical developments go, the absorption of monastic culture into the more urbane devotion of the early modern era has prevented the farewell to the old world from being articu­ lated as such. Poetically speaking, however, the notion of exile seen as a self-imposed expulsion from the monastic paradise, the paradistis clrttistraits, may be useful to bring out the contrast between monastic density on

Introduction to Part III

19Z

the one hand, and late medieval and early modern language of piety and

devotion on the other. If we punctuate specimens of later devotion against the backdrop of monastic poetics in this way, we may well come up with some interesting results. One of the problems facing us is the fact that, until recently, the history of devotion was monopolized by clerical scholars who favored the continu­ ity of the doctrinal over the specificity of the literary. Even the monumen­ tal study by Henri Bremond with the promising title Histoire litteraire du sentiment religieux en France (Literary history of religious sentiment in France) tends to emphasize the intrinsic orthodoxy of many an experiment­ ally mystically oriented author. Conversely, behind the much more mod­ ern views of a scholar like Michel de Certeau, who has done pioneering work in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mysticism, there still looms the suffocating stability of church institutions against which the

wildness of the mystical mind is measured and appreciated. Yet if we turn to the devotional views of a prince of the church like Cardinal Pierre de Berulle (1575-1630), the conventional interpretative strategies glaringly fail. Here we have someone who has managed to absorb the entire corpus of Christian contemplative language, from the Neoplatonic imagery of Dionysius the Areopagite, through the personalized devotion of Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi, to the intimacy of the Flemish mystics. Underneath the flow of devotional language, Berulle constructs a continu­ ity between the human and the divine that had once been the officium of the monk. Terms and concepts that formed the very fabric of monastic thought abound such as contemptus mundi, the art of despair and renunci­ ation. And yet, since the infrastructure of the monastic circle is lacking, there is no longer the prospect of intertwining hope and despair in the same way, at least not with the same density achieved by the unum argumentum. For Berulle, each moment inside rhe circle of devotion becomes hypostatized, frozen, as it were, as monads in a devotional universe, held together by both the ever-shining light of the divine sun and the uninter­ rupted self-denial of the human subject. In one way or another those two, the divine light and the self-abased subject, cannot fail to meet. In this pic­ ture of Baroque devotion, the dynamics of the light shining from above and the gaze of the faithful beholder somehow vie for a place. But, as there is no more room for “recreation,” rest turns into motion and vice versa.

K

Introduction to Part III 193

I

The result is like a devotional Pompeii. What we see is a subject frozen yet forever in action, lacking the leisure and stillness of the Benedictine life of memory and rumination. All this sounds quite negative, that is, if we mistake this analysis for an aesthetic judgment on a historical development. But that is not what I in­ tend to do in this introduction or, for that matter, in this book. As far as I am concerned, indifference reigns supreme in matters historical. If what I have called the soul in the text” has at one time disappeared in its monas­ tic guise, there is no reason why it should not return in another one. What I am rather puzzled by is how Western Christianity has unfolded in such inexplicable ways ever since it rid itself of its monastic context and infra­ structure, or to put it more heuristically, how to understand Western ristianity if we look at it without the help of that infrastructure. This stance obviously demands an explanation. What exactly is so difficult about, say, Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” to mention one the highlights of estern religion and culture? Is that work not itself proof of the accessii ity of (Baroque) Christianity, appealing as it does to the heart of even the most outspoken atheist? As things stand, this very appeal to the heart is part of the complex of subjectivity and individuality whose point of de­ parture lies in the aftermath of monastic culture. The rise of the human su ject is generally considered one of the great achievements of Western cu ture. Yet its origins are quite recent, even more recent than is frequently c aimed. Augustine, for all his probing of his innermost self, does not beong to it, and neither does the Augustinian-monastic reading culture up to e twelfth century. As for the birth of the human subject, it depended on a use of literacy different from the memorial, monastic one. Just as the co es of law, the manuals for sermons, the structure of the scholastic argu­ ment, the language of philosophy and theology, so devotional texts, in orer successfully to create an appeal to the heart, had to be basically empty or, more precisely, soulless. ’ The category mistake I appear to be making here by conflating two incompatible sets of language is less obvious than it may seem. Of course, the technical language of manuals and scholastic ar­ gumentation should not be confused with more emotive modes of linguis­ tic expression. What all those different languages have in common, how­ ever, is the fact that they contribute to this process of externalization. As texts, they are not themselves sources on which the ruminating mind can

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fall back in order to articulate itself. Reading them rather drives the mind forward, out of the text, thus establishing a subject of sorts accompanied by its own emotions. It is this subject void of memory that has dominated the scene ever since the late Middle Ages, although I would not for one moment deny that texts “with a soul” continued to exist. Eckhart would be a case in point, although 1 cannot be so sure about Tauler, Suso, or Luther. As I shall argue below, Calvins is most definitely a text without a soul. If the notion of a soulless text should not by definition be negative, where exacdy lies its strength? Strength certainly is the right expression here. For a “soulless” text has to be robust and tough, and, in a sense, unambigu­ ous. Only then can it be used properly in the sense that it applies to the reader. This reader, in turn, has to be strong and sovereign as well, a kind of superman avant la lettre, uncontaminated by any memorial space shared by the text and himself. He—the empty subject, that is—has to be outside the text before entering it, and he has to leave after having perused it. It is one of the ironies of the history of Western, post-monastic Chris­ tian devotion that it should have understood itself exclusively in terms of its own involvement in the texts and images it produced. That is what I mean by its inexplicability. Let us take our Bach listener as an example. The music goes straight to his heart. It is such as to make him quite will­ ing to “help the daughters of Sion weep,” or “to sit down in tears” and lull his Lord asleep, or even “readily to carry his own staff of the cross/ ich will den Kreuzstab geme tragen." Yet all that involvement is possible on the con­ dition that he (his mind, his subjectivity) stay out of it. The inclusive sug­ gestion of pietistic language is quite misleading in this respect, as mislead­ ing, in fact, as Berulle’s Baroque imagery of permanent involvement in the flow of divine light. Weinen, klagen, sorgen, zagen (to weep, to wail, to worry, to waver) may sound monastic. In fact, however, it is monasticism deprived of memory and of the connotative leisure of rumination. As such it is tough, disciplinary language, as tough as the ever-repeated sola fide of the Reformers that was at the foundation of (Bach’s) pietism, or, for that

matter, as the “exercises” of Ignatius of Loyola. If it is not too far-fetched to interpret Baroque art, literature, and music with the aid of the notion of exile as comprising the empty subject and the suggestion of involvement, it may well illustrate, if not explain, its extraordinary aesthetic success and effectiveness.

Introduction to Part III 195 On the face of it, the religious subject as one that is external to the ex­ pression of ks emotions and faith suggests a return of the Hellenistic liter­ atus. After all, he was at liberty to apply his acquired skills in the arts at any place and any time. There may be some truth in this suggestion insofar as one s ou indeed not underestimate the technical nature of post-medieval devotion. The direct access (to the religious life, the self, and God) sug­ gested by Baroque devotion, Protestant and Catholic alike, has tended to scure how Christianity also survived in its guise of artificiality. Next Ro­ manticism, following in the footsteps of Baroque devotion, has further contributed to keeping this suggestion alive, while at the same time widen­ ing its scope. Things are, however, considerably more complicated. Direct ^cess *s exactly what the founders of early modern devotion—Luther and vin, on the one hand, and Ignatius of Loyola and Francois de Sales, amongst others, on the other—seem to have established and what their aroque) successors, countless variations and alternations notwithstand1 nS’decided to cherish as a treasure never to be given away. How, then, can arti iciality and accessibility be compatible? Or is the claim of their very simu taneity only to be maintained at the cost of labeling post-medieval dein all its complexity as one gigantic trompe 1’oeil? lere is no denying that the Baroque period, as the formative era of our own culture in that it absorbed the Middle Ages and Renaissance and paved the way for Romanticism in art, music, literature, and theology, can aracterized as an ultimate triumph of technique. If, for once, we over­ come the fear of inaccuracy inherent in all generalizations, we will detect w somewhere in each manifestation of Baroque technique there is a ack in the picture, a (hidden) tension between a pull toward externalizaon and the powerful presence of an empty subjectivity. As in music and art, so in devotion, it is the subject that has been predominant for a long time. Yet, although in music the drive for authenticity has recently become appreciated as a restoration of the balance between technique and expres­ sion, it may be apparent that the language of devotion is still waiting for its own Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

embark J entUre 0 driving out despair sola rations that Anselm so boldly nimir- A UP°n as Anally become locked in the iron embrace of tech­ emotion as displayed by Baroque art and literature and the cias-

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sicist movement that followed. Of course, this only holds true if measured against the poetics of monasticism. If we look at this complex from the per­

spective of the present, and observe how the post-medieval period is grad­ ually rescued from the equalizing claws of Romanticism, the question arises how it can be characterized such as it was. Just as we cannot go on blaming Romanticism for distorting our view of the past, so, eventually, the language of late- and post-medieval devotion should be read and ap­ preciated for its own sake despite its continued monastic overtones. For the time being, I, for one, feel quite incapable of doing just that. To put it more bluntly, this last section on post-medieval and post-monastic texts stems from an ignorance, if not embarrassment, on my part with regard to the way those texts should be assessed. Though I can appreciate the poetry of John of the Cross, the dense and autarkic argumentation of Calvin, the deus absconditus (the hidden God) of Luther, the militant and flexible use of Christian imagery by Ignatius, or the desperate purity of Pascal’s gam­ ble, I do not really understand what they are up to; unless, of course, I re­ sort once more to the well-known milestones of early modern history such as the birth of subjectivity. But it is precisely these milestones that are problematic, primarily because they are part and parcel of our outillage mental. The very inarticulateness of their presence tends to conceal basic flaws, aporias, and circular arguments, such as the fact that we are inclined to interpret subjectivity, for example, in terms of its own genesis. With Anselm’s sola ratione in mind, then, as the ultimate expression of monastic poetics, I intend to counterpoint texts that, while keeping up the appearance of monastic language, are nevertheless increasingly organized around different principles. What they all have in common is a certain el­ ement of irreducibility. By this I mean a certain poetical robustness that is the result of a lack of connotation. Let us once more call to mind the cir­ cularity of Anselms poetics enabling words and images to extend and to shrink, to move and to rest anywhere and at any time. If we next withdraw that circle from underneath the text, we are left with the same notions, but they are now frozen. Since they are no longer a memoria memoriae within the monastic circle, they are, in one way or another, to be used, applied, ex­ ternalized. The first chapter of part three starts our with a cautious introduction of

Introduction to Part III 197 the new “poetics” that characterize post-medieval devotion. Taking as my point of departure a miracle story by Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny at the height of its power, I confront the aristocratic spaciousness and leisure of that story with the later exempla that grew out of it. Remarkably, complexity seems to precede simplicity here in the same way that monas­ tic playfulness was followed by a one-dimensionality that became the pre­ condition for a variety of further applications. Next I discuss various texts by Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola. As far as I can see, they are the champions of poetical harshness. Considering their success, this very harshness was nothing but a stroke of genius on their part. Both Calvin and Ignatius produced texts without a soul, texts from which the author and the reader are totally absent. Instead, these texts, written with a steady hand and by powerful authors, appeal to a robust reader, a reader, that is, who knows how to handle them. Thence I seem to go back, not in time, but in terms of subject matter. Can one imagine any­ thing more render, more courtly-medieval, than the erotic lyricism ofJohn of the Cross? Yet here, too, we face the tough pull of externalization. Un­ like the monastic love language of someone like Bernard of Clairvaux, who produced imagery both rising and falling, John’s lyricism, as well as its un­ derlying theory of knowledge,” is based on the senses. As a result, there is a directness in his poetry that appeals to the (heart of the) reader. As I have pointed out above, externalization as such is not the privilege of one par­ ticular period, and there is no reason why its effect should not have been noticeable in older epics and lyricism. What is special about John, though, is the fact that his mystical subjectivity takes as its starting point not the unfathomable depths of memory, but the world of sense experience. In the mystical works of Pierre de Berulle, we seem to be witnessing the return of a text with a soul. However, nothing is further from the truth. Defining Baroque” as the interplay of motion and rest, I identify Berulle s eloquent appeal to the soul as an uninterrupted drive outward. Because Berulle has no opportunity to turn back, his imagery of Christ, Mary, and the soul becomes hypostatized into a merry-go-round that is never allowed

to come to a halt. Finally, I turn once more to Ignatius’s Exercises. Through an analysis of Joyce’s A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man from an Ignatian point of view, I intend to bring out the power and rhe glory of iron imagery “forged

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in the smithy of the soul.” No doubt, exile is both the condition for and the result of such poetics: “that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels.”1 However, there is no doubt too that exile is about the return of, and to, the soul and mem­ ory (“mememormee”) as symbolized by the river LifFey, sea-bound forever:

And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. . . . Yes tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a long the2

I

*

CHAPTER I I

Narrative Superiority Peter the Venerable and the Miracle ofthe Bees

The Text

JellsX'111

1 b Petef the Venerable (IO92"II5I)

egi°n ofAuvergne there was a man who kept beehives in which f ^1° J65 USe^ tO Pr°duce sweet honeycombs. Whether this peasant ^eared that his bees would fly away or die or that he would suffer their loss e o an accident, he resorted to following the bad counsel ofsoothsayinto d r0U®^ C^e -ks °f the devil, even manage to turn God’s gifts k i.ee^S much tts I hate to say it—abuse the divine sacraments ' A k k tr*C^CS °f maB'c- This man went to church and, after he had reC k of the Lord from the priest, in accordance with Christian om, e ept it in his mouth. Contrary to what he had been taught, he be t0 ^Wa“°W *L Instead he went to one of his beehives in which his b h ,Were e*n£ kePc and started to blow through the small opening in the ye, pressing his lips against it. For he had told himself that, if he would into the beehive with the body of the Lord in his mouth, in the future none Of them would die, none of them would leave, none of them would P ther their integral survival and conservation would guarantee him pa eaSUFe °^see^ng them multiply to a much greater degree than in the

,

’ h i? k^aS been sa*d. He pressed his mouth against the beehive and,

with all his power, he blew into the interior. And when this greedy man, P pmg up his breath, blew vehemently, the combined power ofhis gue and the air pushed the body of the Lord out of his mouth and it fell

onto the ground next to the beehive. And behold, the entire commu­ nity of bees came out of the beehive and ran reverently to the body of their nd with great veneration they lifted up the body from the ground

Narrative Superiority

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and carried it inside their dwelling place, under the very eyes of the man. And seeing that the man, either ignoring what had just happened or think­ ing very little of it, turned to other things to which his domestic business called him and went home. But, as he himself has said later, on his way home he was suddenly seized with an unbearable fear that he had done wrong and started to come to his senses. Thus, remorsefully and, indeed, driven by an inner power, he soon re­ turned. And, in his attempt to redeem his crime he killed the very bees whose life he had wanted to safeguard through an evil deed, by drowning them in water. After he had killed off his bees, while inspecting the interior of the honeycombs he wanted to stow away and preserve for himself, lo and behold, a miracle: he saw the body of the Lord that had fallen out of his mouth lying between the combs and the honey changed into the shape of a most beautiful, newborn boy. On seeing that holy miracle he was flabber­ gasted and started trembling. But for some time he was at a loss as to what to do next. He concocted the following plan. If he took the boy in his hands and brought it to the church, then he could bury the little God-boy, who seemed quite dead to him, alone, without anybody knowing about it. But when he set out taking the boy in his hands and carrying it to the church in order to bury it as if in secret, the boy all of a sudden escaped, invisibly, out of the hands of the man who carried him unworthily, and vanished into thin air. Those are recent events. The man himself told his priest the story as it happened. The priest in turn told it to the bishop of Clermont who has told me. By writing the story down I have taken care to bring it to the attention of the reader. And one did not have to wait long before this serious crime was being avenged. For in no time that region, which had once been populated before, was depopulated for various reasons and reduced to utter desolation.

Later Versions and the Complexities of Exempla This story is the first ever about a eucharistic miracle performed by bees. Its origin and setting can be called basically monastic. The author, Peter the Venerable, was the abbot of the famous monastery of Cluny in Burgundy. In that capacity he presided over one of the most influential and powerful institutions in Western Christendom. And although Cluny was not partic­ ularly known for its scholarly and literary output, it was there that the Benedictine lifestyle of ritual and liturgy was practiced in its most pro­

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I

tracted and lavish guise. Consequently, stories originating in that world can somehow be expected to fit in with the fine blend of aristocratic leisure and spiritual aloofness that was the hallmark of the Cluniac way of life. The next to associate bees with the fortunes, both good and evil, of the host is Caesarius of Heisterbach in his Dialogue miraculorum.1 His version of Peter’s story, together with countless others—including Peter’s story it­ self—reappears in Thomas of Cantimprtfs Bonum universale de apibus, which is all about bees representing a perfect society.3 In fact, with Thomas the bee stories have become what in a sense they had been all along: exempla, whose main function it was to bring home to a broad audience a moral or religious message. However rich and complex the history of the exemplum, from antiq­ uity until the later Middle Ages, may be, in the latter period the focus of the use of exempla is on illustrating, in a lively manner, the presence and power of the divine? The structure of the exemplum is characterized by cer­ tain features, the most essential of which are summed up by Jacques Berlioz as univocity (the message and meaning has to be unambiguously clear), brevity, the appeal to authenticity, probability, the element of de­ light, the metaphoric nature of the entire exemplum, and the exercise of memory in providing the intellect with the sensory material from which to draw spiritual knowledge.5 If we look for these criteria in Caesarius’s bee story, most of them can easily be applied. In order to see for ourselves, let us first have a look at the story. A woman is keeping bees without much success. They languish and die. She cunningly thinks of a remedy. She goes to church, pretends to wish to take communion, receives the host, takes it with her, and puts it in one of the beehives. And behold, a miracle occurs! The bees, “acknowledging their creator,” build a beautiful chapel made out of the honeycombs. Inside they erect an altar on which they place the host. When the woman returns, she is frightened to death at the sight of this miracle. She runs to the priest and confesses her sin. Next the priest and his flock go to see for themselves and admire the fine chapel built by the bees. They take the host with them and bring it back to the church. As with all his miracles, Caesarius names his spokesmen and their wit­ nesses. The message is clear and brief: the bees, which, in spite of their lower state as vermes, are symbols of purity and craftsmanship, acknowl­ edge the holiness of the host against the evil motives of man. Yet some

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doubt as to the univocity of this story seems legitimate. Exactly what does Berlioz mean by this criterion, which he describes as follows? “In order to impress upon the audience a moral truth that may benefit its salvation, the preacher should pin down for himself the meaning of the history, of the story he relates, by eliminating any possibility whatever of multiple inter­ pretations.”6 First there are the transformations of the story itself as they have de­ veloped in the course of the Middle Ages, reflecting different shades and accents that in turn represent the different interests of the successive read­ ers and writers. Thus Siegfried Ringler, in his brief survey of the history of this exemplum, shows how a shift has occurred away from Caesarius’s em­ phasis on the importance of the actors in the story (the sinful woman, God, the bees, the priest, the people) toward the Verdinglichung, the factu­ ality of the miracle (accompanied, for example, by flashes of light), which materializes in the building of the wax church.7 Next there is the possibil­ ity of a multiplicity of meaning—or, at least, the absence of a strict uni­ vocity—inside the story itself, suggested by the variety of roles, actors, and motives. The bees, for one, represent both the lowliness of their state and the purity and complexity of their society. And although it is fair to say that the primary meaning of this exemplum is the awe shown by the bees for the Eucharist whose holiness has been violated, and which can be re­ formulated—see the function of memory—as the miraculous working of God even in minimis (Ringler), the story abounds with other motives. From this wealth of motives a “chain” (Ringler) of eucharistic bee miracles has sprung, the main elements of which figure already in Caesarius’s ac­ count: the human devotion of the Eucharist, the conservation of the host by the bees, the building of a wax chapel, the bees worshiping the host (in procession), and the rediscovery of the host and the wax chapel by the priest and his flock (Ringler). So, Berlioz’s criterion of univocity apparently does not exclude a certain degree of narrative complexity, on the condition, one might assume, that the message remain clear and unambiguous. Un­ der no circumstances should the audience be required to look for more complex layers of meaning. Even so, the history of this exemplum is not without a touch of irony if we realize that, out of an initial richness, the transformation process of the story has in fact resulted in the Verding­ lichung, that is, in the most simplified version imaginable of the miracle of

Narrative Superiority 203 the wax church and the subsequent exclusion of persons and concomitant motives. There is no denying that we have univocity here, albeit at some cost. The host, temporarily contained in the wax church, seems deprived of its dramatic potential. What has happened? In order to get a clearer picture of these problems, another element t at may complicate Berliozs notion of univocity even further should be introduced, and that is the historians’ and theologians’ interpretation of medieval eucharistic miracles. Paradoxically, this interpretation intensifies rather than diminishes the degree of univocity since it takes all eucharistic miracles exclusively to express the real presence of the host in the sacra­ ment. Tridentine and post-Tridentine Catholic embarrassment with regard to the wildness of late medieval devotion in light of Protestant criticism of t at period as decadent and magic-prone has contributed to a sacramentocused writing and rewriting of late medieval theology. As a result of this sacramental simplification, two basic problems with regard to the relations ip of the (eucharistic) sacrament and its wider context were suppressed, irst, narrowing down the history of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages to an increasing awareness of the real presence at the moment of transubstantiation tends to obscure the fact that, ever since the controversy be­ tween Lanfranc and Berengar in the eleventh century, the sacramental mo­ ment of the real presence had been as much a cause of embarrassment as of consolation, embarrassment because, in order to be effective, it had more or lew moved out of the liturgico-narrative frame in which it had origi­ nate , consolation because the relative emptiness and void of the sacra­ mental moment of transubstantiation triggered a chain of satellite devo­ tions that included stories, miracles, processions, and, ultimately, a separate devotion of the sacrament itself.’ Second, the apparent complex­ ity of the eucharistic devotion was most poignantly expressed in the devel­ opment of the so-called spiritual communion. Admittedly, on the one hand, this phenomenon can be seen as a rival of the sacramentalization of the Eucharist. On the other hand, a pattern can be traced in which the two have developed hand in hand, though sometimes not without the conflict of dialectical tensions. Reducing, however, the spiritual communion, either negatively (the Protestants’ view) or positively (the post-Tridentine view), to the “official" sacrament of the Eucharist now looks like an anachronistic attempt to save the sacramental respectability of the later Middle Ages.

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If we now return to the story of the bees and, in particular, to its oldest ver­ sion as it appears in Peter the Venerable’s De miraculis 1,1, we are struck by its complexity. It is therefore important to specify what we mean by “its.” Does it refer to the story and, if so, does this story still qualify as an exem­ plum, as it did in Caesarius’s case? Or do we mean by “its” the complexity of the story’s content? It goes without saying that form and content are in­ extricably intertwined. Yet doctrinal history, in its effort to establish uni­ formity, has tended to neglect the complexities involved in this intertwin­

ing of form and content. To give an example of this unifying tendency underlying not only doc­ trinal but also historical studies, I would like to refer to one of the rare books that deal explicidy with Peter’s De miraculis, Pierre le Venerable etsa vision du monde, by Jean-Pierre Torrell and Denise Bouthillier. The authors are in no doubt as to Peter’s general purpose in De miraculis: the book is written to instruct religiously and morally. In the case of a eucharistic mir­ acle this means that the author’s aim is primarily to “drive home respect due to the sacrament and, in particular, to strengthen the belief in the real presence” (inculcer le respect du au sacrement etsurtout defortifier lafoi en la presence reelle).'0 As for the literary shape Peter has given to his miracles, Torrell and Bouthillier propose to label De miraculis as a collection of ex­ empla. In view of the longevity of the bee story, later adopted and rephrased by Caesarius of Heisterbach, Thomas of Cantimpre, and many others, such a qualification seems plausible. Yet the very way in which the concept of exemplum is applied to Peter’s miracles betrays some confusion on the part of the authors as to how univocity bears, or should bear, upon both the structure and the function of an exemplum. Peter is not interested in the miracula for their own sake. All his miracle sto­ ries are directed toward a goal that altogether surpasses the anecdote that was the source of the story. To put it differently, those stories belong to the genre, so widespread in medieval literature, of the exempla collections. ... If it is possible to separate the term exemplum from the idea of teaching exclu­ sively by way of preaching and from its being linked—often in too narrow a fashion—with an extremely brief, moralizing lesson, the De miraculis, in our view, can perhaps be seen as a doctrine-orientated exempla collection to which the quality of its author lends a special place within this genre of lit-

Narrative Superiority 205 erature. It is to be regretted that the nature of the De miraculis has eluded most interpreters of this work and that they often do not discuss this work at all. In fact, this book seems to us a fine example of what a collection of exempla may have looked liked at a time when the expansion of the narra­ tive element had not yet pushed the doctrinal element into the background.11

The last remark about the expansion of the narrative element refers to the view ofJ. Th. Welter,12 who considered this development decadent because of the diminishment of the doctrinal exposition in favor of an almost un­ bridled love of storytelling; a view, by the way, to which Torrell and Bouthillier subscribe. I do not agree. To blame the late medieval passion for the expansion of the narrative and the anecdotal for being potentially deca dent and to oppose it, in a slightly condescending fashion, to the superior ity of the doctrinal seems to ignore one of Berliozs other criteria for the ex emplum, delight. Since the latter is, and always has been, an integral part of the exemplum as narrative, it is difficult to see how it should rank ^°'v the doctrinal or, rather, how the anecdotal should be transcended an e assigned to the humble task of supporting the doctrinal in which the ig it ness of delight is so conspicuously lacking. So clear-cut a separation e tween the narrative and the doctrinal would run counter to a long tra 1 tion, starting in the East and splendidly continued in the West, storytellers such as Gregory the Great and the Venerable Bede, whose nar rative was at once so simple and subtle as delightfully to absorb the octn nal. If the late Middle Ages are to be called decadent from a narrative po of view, so must the early Middle Ages. Here we are once more con ron with a kind of univocity—quite unlike Berliozs narrative criterion is based on doctrinal presuppositions. This would be of no importanc did no harm to the narrative or, for that matter, to the doctrina itse things stand, both aspects suffer from this separation. As 1 sha poin ,

separating the narrative from the doctrinal runs parallel to (anac cally) separating the sacramental from the spiritual communion, re in a serious distortion of the delicate fabric of medieval thoug t.

So, in my view there is a sense in which Peters story can e ca exemplum, on the condition, though, that its meaning not nec derived from a superior doctrine. That is not to say that I ° n0 that the relationship between the late medieval exemplum an

g

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developed into an increasingly complicated one. We have seen already that the expansion of the ec«nj>/«z»-narrative, as Welter calls it, coincided with a serious simplification of earlier versions. I do not wish here to elaborate on this problem and raise the question as to exactly what has been left out in the ver)’ process of expansion. All I want to say is that in the twelfth cen­ tury and, more specifically, in Peter’s De miraculis, we have an “expanded narrative” of sorts, containing some of Berlioz’s criteria for the exemplum but somehow lacking the most important criterion—apart from brevity— that is univocity, or, to put it more mildly, containing a rather complex kind of univocity. For that reason Peter’s miracle can be said to be standing quite alone. Narrative Indeterminacy All these preliminary remarks were necessary to create room for a fair ap­ preciation of Peters tale. If we now take a closer look at the story itself and compare it to Caesarius’s version, what strikes us first is the number of dif­ ferent endings. Instead of ending with a triumphant procession carrying the host back to the church where it belongs, Peters story ends on a much more inconclusive note; indeed, the notion of evasiveness can be said to ap­ ply to the story in its entirety. As in earlier non-Christian miracle stories, such as the antecedents of the story of Daniel in the lion’s den, in Peter’s tale the fixity of the place is neither the narrative frame nor the letter wait­ ing for a metaphorical reading. Just as in Mesopotamian versions of Daniel’s adventures the spiritual experience of the lions’ threat is prior to later literalization,13 so in Peter’s case, in spite of the fact that a church does play a role, the ultimate evasiveness of the events sweeps away whatever fix­ ity may be left. After the man’s—we have a man here instead of Caesarius’s woman—failed attempt to bring the host back to church Peter concludes his story with the traditional appeal to authority: he has the story from the bishop of Clermont, who in turn has it from the priest involved. Subse­ quently, he adds the grim communication that the region soon grew de­ serted and depopulated as a divine vengeance for the crime committed. Admittedly, rather than evasive this ending may be said clearly and dis­ tinctly to fit in with the univocity of the exemplunr. a criminal robbing of the host will end in nothing but punishment and desolation. Yes, the mes-

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sage may be there all right, but so is the story. And in that story very few things are clear and distinct. In fact, quite a number of “holes” or “lacu­ nae” (Leerstellen)—to use Iser’s phraseology14—remain. The first part of the story looks quite straightforward. Like the woman in Caesarius’s version, the man keeps the host in his mouth. Then the fo­ cus shifts to the man’s greed when we see him blowing with all his power and energy through the small opening of the beehive, only to have the host fall out of his mouth onto the ground next to the beehive (adterrani). Here already a subtle mixture of message, story, and psychology makes itself felt. The criminal nature of the man’s deed is emphasized by his desire to keep the host; the progress and liveliness of the story are heightened by the in­ cident (in contrast to Caesarius’s story, in which the woman unhesitatingly puts the host straight into the honeycombs) of the host falling out of the man’s mouth, in other words, his inability to perform the crime as planned. Next there follows the quasi-liturgical acting by the bees that come out of the beehive and carry the host inside under the watchful eye of the man. Hereafter a chain of uncertainties regarding the subsequent behavior of the man is introduced. The man goes home, but we are explicitly told that we do not know why he was not impressed by the miracle that had occurred under his very eyes. Thus we are prevented from casting the man in the role of criminal throughout. Maybe it was either negligence or an appreci ation of the event as of little importance or the fact that he had business at home to attend to, Peter says, but all we know is that he went home. More inconclusive behavior is to follow. Once home, the man has second thoughts about what he has done. Driven by compunction he returns to his bees and, in an attempt to redeem his crime, he commits another one. He kills his bees by drowning them in water. Once they are dead he pro ceeds to recover the honeycombs. In the process he discovers the bo y o the Lord, which had fallen out of his mouth, in the shape of a beautiful young boy. He is flabbergasted and for a long time is at a loss about w a to do next. In the end he decides to carry the God-boy (notice, t e oy rather than the host), whom he supposes to be dead, back to the churc in order to bury him in secret (nullo sciente solus Deum puerulum tumularet). Before he gets to the church, however, the God-boy suddenly flies away out of his unworthy hand and disappears into thin air. So, it is not only the man’s behavior that is rather shaky from both a

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narrative and psychological point of view (is he a criminal throughout, and what do his pangs of contrition mean?), although ultimately his criminal side predominates (note “the unworthy hands”). Nor is the status of the host stable and fixed. What starts out as the host proper (the corpus domini) turns into the God-boy, beautiful and light, and at the end of the story it/he flies away. Here evasiveness sets the tone rather than the sacra­ mental, material-like change of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This is not to say that the sacrament plays no role in Peters story. It undoubtedly does, as in so many of his other stories of miracles, as a point of departure, as a source from which images and stories spring. But it is hard to maintain that the story’s main focus is to impress upon the reader the doctrine of real presence. For that too much lightness, hesitancy, and absence, indeed, too many “holes” and “lacunae,” are in the air. The man, the host, the church, and the region, all of them share in the shade of evanescence that permeates the story. Or is this lightness rather to be seen as a touch of decadence? If so, it is surely quite different from the decadent expansion of the narrative that Welter took to be the hallmark of late medieval exempla. If there is deca­ dence in Peter the Venerable, it lies, in my opinion, in his subtle manipu­ lation of word and image. By this I mean that, the explosive growth of doc­ trinal reflection notwithstanding, Peter can still be said to belong to a textual community in which the doctrinal had not yet moved out of its “performative” context. In terms of the Eucharist this means that, although it had been quite an issue ever since the controversy between Berengar and Lanfranc, and although a process of Verdinglichung of the Eucharist was under way and slowly pervaded the art of story—and miracle telling—the liturgico-narrative frame still prevailed. If there is a shift to be detected in this process, it is the shift of emphasis from the liturgy itself—or, more precisely, the fixed yet dynamic status of the sacrament within the liturgy—toward a dual trend of an increasing independence of the sacra­ ment on the one hand and a spiritual, mystical devotion and manipulation

of the sacrament on the other. “The human soul is moved more by presence than by absence, is moved more by having seen Christ than by having heard Him; is moved to admiration, is moved to love.”15 In De miractdis I, 1 we catch Peter at the crossroads of this development. The story he tells us is no longer a repeti-

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non of liturgy, although the liturgical element is not lacking (see the bees’ procession) On the other hand, it is not a static, i/m^like miracle story either. On the contrary, the narrative, having taken one step away from the liturgy, is almost playing with the notion of eucharistic presence, produc­ ing, so to speak, an oblique kind of liturgical drama. “The soul loves to be moved by the presence of Christ.” But neither the liturgy nor, more specif­ ically, the Eucharist as acted out in the liturgy, nor the eucharistic narrative guarantees that presence. Through the subtle use of “holes” and “lacu’ I l at 'S W^at mean by the oblique narrative use of liturgical mate1 t at presence is at once established and wiped out. This move may then be called “decadent.” From his superior position as storyteller Peter mampu ates the host, making it come and go, just as, on another level, he ceps t e suspense alive with regard to the evil or contrite motives of the C^e C^urc^ building vanishes into the desolation at the us, experiencing the presence of the corpus domini is not exclusively a matter of sacramental communion. Nor is it a matter of seeing or contemp ating a ready-made image. The sense of a presence is brought about at er y first creating and next manipulating an image of the present nst in the full awareness of its fragile status and the possibility of its dis­ appearance. Peter s hesitancy presupposes a rather different notion of narrative time rom t e one governing the average exemplum. It is not only a difference tween brevity and lengthiness that sets Peter apart from the later tech­ nique of exemplum telling, but rather a Henry James-like production and pro iferation of images that come and go while the uncertainty, the hesiancy in between the coming and going, is sustained by the author. In con• eCJ*°n w*t'1 Janies we could observe the superiority of the author placg his different points of view amidst a continuous discourse. This superiority unsettles the fixity of motives and desires—in literary terms, t ie points of view of the different protagonists and injects into Peters text a touch of decadence. If there is brevity in this context it is the brevity of the flashlike image or set of images embedded in the ongoing act of sto­ rytelling rather than of the story as such. How does this technique work? How is this flashlike imagery pro­ duced? Here I should like once more to point to the importance of textuality in the process of storytelling and image building. In contrast to the ex-

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empla literature of the later Middle Ages, Peter’s images are not previously established, nor are they one-dimensional, waiting to be used exclusively for conveying a (doctrinal) message. The refined nature of this technique is aptly illustrated by yet another story’ from De miraculis (I, 8; 23-34). Here we have an exemplum that has almost grown into a vita dealing with the life of a certain Gerardus. Be­ cause of his pure and simple lifestyle and devotion, Gerardus was granted the experience of some remarkable eucharistic miracles. We are presented with almost a counterimage of the evil beekeeper in the first miracle. Dri­ ven by’ an equally ardent though better focused love for the corpus domini, Gerardus is given access to the inner secrets of celestial revelation.

Who is able to tell with ease how, with the clear eye of faith, he did not ad­ mire the Lord Jesus under the veil of the sacraments as veiled, but rather contemplated Him as revealed? The exterior beauty of the Lord caused no darkness to his intellect. He was rather able to discern Him with a spiritual gaze. Together with the aposdes he saw Him walking on the earth, together with the blessed Virgin he saw Him hanging on the cross, together with Mary Magdalene he saw Him rise from the dead. To that mystery of the sa­ cred body and blood of Christ he brought all his hope. . . . You could have seen him standing at the altar, often totally shaken by streams of tears, his speech interrupted by frequent sobbing, his breast burdened by deep sighs.16 In a sense what happens here is scarcely to be characterized as a miracle. For that it reminds us too much of the monastic-exegetical practice of mys­ tical tropology, that is, the textual technique of establishing the presence of scriptural scenes, in particular from the Gospel. Yet what triggers Gerar­ dus’s vision is not the reading and ruminating of Scripture. It is the sheer presence and contemplation of the corpus domini on the altar. It is on that spot that Peter invites his reader to focus, through the eyes of his protago­ nist, in order to share in the transformation process of bread and wine into the visionary figures in the mind of the beholder. This visual-narrative technique—visual as far as the protagonist is concerned, narrative as far as the authorial embedding is concerned—of “making a miracle” can be seen at work in an even more spectacular fash­ ion when, on another occasion, Gerardus, once more standing at the altar, “did not see the shape of the bread that he had put on it; instead he saw a

Narrative Superiority zn little boy, gesticulating in a childlike manner with his arms and hands.”17 Trying hard to come to his senses, Gerardus looks away at the side of the altar just to see the Virgin Mary standing there, taking care of the child Je­ sus. An even closer look reveals the presence of a beautiful angel who ad­ dresses him with the following words, truly reported by Gerardus to Peter: “Why should you be surprised? This boy whom you see governs heaven and earth.”18 Then the heavenly vision wanes. If Gerardus looks again at the sacrament on the altar, he no longer sees a child but the shape of the bread as he had seen it before he put it on the altar. And that is the end of the story.

What marks Peter’s art of storytelling—in contrast to Caesarius s direct ness—is the almost aristocratic superiority of leisure, of taking his time when telling a story, that is, of lending time and duration, hesitancy, “holes,” and "lacunae” to his narrative. Against the backdrop of a textual, monastic community visualization is produced and eliminated in a contin uous process of verbal flow. The reader who is invited to join in in t is continuity is present at the creation of miracles, visions, and many ot delightful events. If there is real presence here, and, subsequently, umvoc ity of meaning, it is neither the given message of transubstantiate of bread and wine nor a given set of transformations that are suppose lustrate this change. In short, although the ingredients are known, t ere no preset “iconography,” no fixed baby Jesus and Mary or ange s, or, that matter, bees. In Peter’s stories we indeed witness the making of (eucharistic) miracles, their being squeezed out of bread and wine. Vision a visions there may be. However, they rise and fall, they originate in, a turn to, the celebration of speech.

CHAPTER 12

Text and Soul Calvin, Ignatius, Eckhart

T I

here is no doubt that the period between 1400 and 1600 *1 abounded with turmoil, revolution, and change. The crisis in

the Church; the increasingly centralist claims of Rome versus conciliarism; the rise of the nation-state accompanied by a corresponding rearrangement of power; the emergence of private devotion resulting in the Reformation, which was to be criticized, countered, and in part imitated by Tridentine Catholicism: all these phenomena, in one way or another, tell us the story of a period in which the rules were rewritten. Nor is it impossible to detect in each of these phenomena a shift of authority, or, if success ultimately did not materialize, as in the case of conciliarism, at least an attempt, however abortive, to change the rules and appropriate power. Tackling these issues, the historian faces some quite formidable obsta­ cles. First, there is the difference between his own presuppositions as shaped in the course of history and the general assumptions of the period he is in the process of describing. For our historian it is a matter of course that far-reaching changes took place in the period between 1400 and 1600. However, it cannot be denied that, although this is true from a historical point of view, somehow such an assumption is no more than a vaticinium ex eventu. The real historical authors and actors, though conscious of their critical attitude, more often than not phrased their novelties in terms of restoration of the past. As far as the majority were concerned, they had no wish whatsoever to produce a Communist Manifesto, announcing a future of radical change. Or did they? Is it not one of the ironies of history that in so many and diverse fields as political theory, philosophy, rhetoric, and re­ ligion long-lasting revolutions were often wrought by people whose main

Text and Soul 213 aim it was to restore law and order? However that may be, there is no denying that the activities of people like Luther, Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola, each in their own way, marked a significant break with the past. Things become even more complicated if one takes into account the fact that it was precisely this element of discontinuity that was rewritten by the immediate successors of the parties involved, the Protestants by glorifying the revolutionary behavior of the reformers and turning it into an almost timeless moment of a resumed origin, the Catholics by stressing the unin­ terrupted continuity with medieval devotion and theology. Memorials were created for so outstanding a performance of the sixteenth-century he­ roes, Protestant orthodoxy for the one, the implementation of the Triden­ tine council for the other. Both parties managed to dissociate themselves from the nasty side effects of what had indeed been radical changes but what came, in the course of time, to be advertised as an unchanged and unchangeable truth. In either case, what looked too much like overt radi­ calism, whether Anabaptist, Socinian on the Protestant side, or ultra-Augustinian and mystical on the Roman Catholic side, was marginalized. Those who were too hotheaded to join the balancing act of the “official” parties, though managing to survive in the margin, had to wait for more Romantic times before receiving official recognition.

torians task’s from simple. Before setting out to deal with the that h matT Pr°Per’ he haS t0 disenrangle it from the fixity of the views on th 1 J fn,Shape in the course of the reception history. It is precisely eratv s 0 c e source material proper and, more specifically, on its Jitrian’e cture> c^at I want to focus. Staying away from the general histoow P cePtIon of his task as distilling, by means of his technical skills, his c r°/? C e sourc«> reworking, so to speak, the original, I want to Th b t0 r^C StOr^ 35 t0^ by the historical protagonists themselves. . . \ *P or’ng dynamics and limits of language through discourse na ysis, I leave “official” history to itself without, however, dropping the

I h UC k,an appr°acb being itself intrinsically historical. n 1 IS C aPter I propose to present and analyze three texts by three 11 hrenC ’ft Eckhart* Calvin’ and I8natius of Loyola. The writing of o t em, both stylistically and as far as content is concerned, disP y e ement of indeterminacy, a blank spot that either has to be left as

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it is or has to be filled in by the reader. Whether this element of indeter­ minacy is part of subtle planning or is to be labeled a deficiency remains to be seen. So much is clear: the writings of Eckhart, Calvin, and Ignatius share the fate of having been “saved” by later readers in order to fit in with more rigid textual and religious patterns than their texts initially allowed for. It was thus difficult for the late medieval interpreter and his ecclesias­ tical successors to leave Eckharts s&paxatenesslAbgeschiedenheit, his desert and nothingness, as alone and unadorned as it manifested itself in the orig­ inal text. It was hard for the Calvinists to resist the temptation of freezing the moments of hesitancy in Calvins writings. The fellow Jesuit and fellow Catholic readers of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises felt it their duty to intro­ duce more doctrinal fixity into the extremely flexible meditations of their admired saint, steering those reflections into the safe haven of churchproven mysticism. It goes without saying that such filling in of alleged gaps, in the dis­ guise of orthodox reading of any kind whatsoever, was bound to distort the original. Without, of course, pretending be to able to reconstruct such an original in its entirety, I want to argue that in those texts a shift of author­ ity and normativity can be detected that runs the risk of being obscured if covered up, implicitly or explicidy and however invisibly, by ecclesiastic or orthodox additions or reinterpretations. Admittedly, what I am proposing here could easily be accused of being a truism. Is it not the fate of every text to be changed and, consequently, distorted in the process of reading by the very authority and normativity of the reader himself, which, for reasons of temporal difference alone, can never coincide with the text, or for that matter, with textual time, with le temps du redd That may be true. But what I intend to try my hand at is not describing the process of authoritarian and centralizing impositions on the text, but reading in such a way as to discover the dynamics of shifts and changes within the texts themselves. Or, to put it in Eckhartian terms, what I want to try, by way of “ascetic” reading, is to discover, quantum possibile, the unadorned desert/Ode of the text itself. Yet, by stating my intentions this way, not all methodological prob­ lems have been solved. With regard to the subject of temps et recit, inner— textual—and outer time, it should be realized that I assume the texts I have selected to be of such a nature as to enable the reader to discover blank

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spots that are part and parcel of their very structure. In that respect they differ from other texts that do not allow for such a “desert-like” reading. Apocalyptic texts, for example, which abounded in the sixteenth century, do not leave it to the readers imagination to finish what has been left un­ resolved, or, even, to postpone doing so. As far as temps et Mt are con­ cerned, they coincide within the text. As such the story told by the apoca­ lyptic writers is brought to its fulfillment within textual space and time. All the reader has to do is wait—and occasionally he does not have to wait for long—for this text, however improbable from a historical point of view, to materialize exactly as it is written down. It is a well-known fact that the founding fathers of the Reformation, Luther and Calvin, were utterly en­

raged by Karlstadt, Miinzer, David Joris, and all the others who prema­ turely claimed the present times to be identical to, that is, to be the fulfill­ ment of, written prophecies. For Luther and Calvin, what was at stake here was the correct way of reading Scripture. Was one to close down these texts, as many of the radical reformers apparently wanted to do, or should one acknowledge, when reading Scripture, the presence of protracted di­ mensions of postponement, hesitancy, and ignorance in text and reader alike? Interestingly, it was no lack of confidence with regard to their ability to shape their own reading of Scripture that kept Luther and Calvin from drawing the ultimate conclusion—which the radical reformers did not hes­ itate to draw—and identify with that reading. As a result, theirs became an even greater burden in the shape of a complete responsibility for the han­ dling of Scripture: the reading and appropriation of, their presence in, and their distance from, that holy text. Within that framework the famous sola scriptlira can indeed be seen as a telling example of normative centering. But was this principle itself open to articulation and explanation? Although the radical reformers can be said to have appropriated both temps and Mt, the others faced the self-imposed task of upholding, in one way or another,

the distinction between textual and “historical” time. But did sola scriptura allow them to succeed in that effort? Or was it bound to be so absolute and powerful as to blow up whatever dared come near it, whether a reading subject or an object to be distilled from it? If this were true, we would be

left behind with a norm “without qualities,” a center without extension, a normative centering without a subject to direct or an object to be directed.

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The urgency of this question may be a little obscured by the actual success of the Reformation. For there is no doubt that the message of Luther and Calvin, deriving its legitimacy from sola scriptura, had an enor­ mous impact on the mind of the early sixteenth-century religious audience. Yet this does not necessarily suppose the language in which that message was conveyed to the public to have been capable of articulation. Such ar­ ticulation would be supposed to contain dimensions of space and time that simultaneously kept the reader or interpreter at bay and invited him to for­ mulate both his own distance from, and involvement in, the text. If, how­ ever, the conclusion should be drawn that, ultimately, sola scriptura itself cannot be articulated by its user because of its self-contained status in which the distinction between narrative time and the readers time is blurred, then, rather than expanding by way of interpretation and reinter­ pretation, it seems to be doomed, in a never-ending process of reading and rereading, to repeat itself ad infinitum. If that is indeed the case it raises an interesting question (which, by the way, cannot be answered in this chap­ ter, if at all): to what degree is the powerful and successful message of the Reformation related—in terms of cause and effect and vice versa—to this element of repetition? If the element of repetition does indeed prevent the cause from being distinguished from the effect—in other words, if the thought and language of the Reformation turn out to be intrinsically cir­ cular—it is not only the centralizing principle of sola scriptura that runs the risk of being impenetrable and inaccessible, but also the entire message of the Reformation itself.1 Odd though it may seem, this impenetrability of sola scriptura reminds one of the role played by the synteresis, taken here as the general description of the mystical faculty in the human soul beyond the reach of any articula­ tion in terms of reason and will. Steven Ozment, in his Mysticism and Dis­ sent, has drawn attention to the subversive potential of this principle. Both in terms of its objective orientation and its subjective power the mysti­ cal enterprise is peculiar, departing the ordinary way to religious truth and salvation for a more direct and intimate communion with God. It reaches further than the normal psychological functions of the soul can grasp and demands more than the normal institutional structures of the church can give. In the most literal sense of the words, the mystical enterprise is transrational and transinstitutional. And because it is such, it bears a potential anti-

1

Text and Soul 217 intellectual and ^-institutional stance, which can be adopted for the criti­ cal purposes of dissent, reform, and even revolution.2

This quotation may be slightly misleading in that the use of “the ordinary way to re igious truth and salvation” and the “normal institutional struc­ tures o the church could suggest that the antecedents of a church instituan devotion were based on an unmovable kind of normative center­ ing. Of course, Ozment is too much ofa historian really to believe in such 3 IXj