by C. S. Lewis
After foretelling his grandson’s future political career (just as Cacciaguida foretells Dante’s in Paradiso, XVII), Africanus explains to him that ‘all who have been saviours or champions of their native land or increased its dominions have their appointed place in Heaven’ (xiii). This is a good instance of the intractable material with which later syncretism was confronted. Cicero is making a heaven for public men, for politicians and generals. Neither the Pagan sage (like Pythagoras), nor the Christian saint, could enter it. This was quite inconsistent with some Pagan, and with all Christian, authorities. But in this case, as we shall see later, a harmonistic interpretation had been reached before the Middle Ages began.
The younger Scipio, fired by this prospect, now asks why he should not hasten to join that happy company at once. ‘No,’ replies the elder (XV), ‘unless that God who has for his temple this whole universe which you behold, has set you free from the fetters of the body, the way hither is not open to you. For men were born under the law that they should garrison (tuerentur) the globe you see yonder in the middle of the temple, which is called Earth. . . . Therefore you, Publius, and all good men must retain the soul in the body’s fetters and not depart from human life without the orders of him who gave you a soul; otherwise, you may be held to have deserted the duty allotted by God to man.’ This prohibition of suicide is Platonic. I think Cicero is following a passage in Plato’s Phaedo where Socrates remarks of suicide, ‘They say it is unlawful’ (61c), even one of those few acts which are unlawful in all circumstances (62a). He goes on to explain. Whether we accept or not the doctrine taught in the Mysteries (that the body is a prison and we must not break from it), at any rate we men are certainly the property (κτήματα) of the gods, and property must not dispose of itself (62b–c). That this prohibition makes part of Christian ethics is indisputable; but many, not unlearned, people have been unable to tell me when or how it became so. The passage we are considering may possibly have had some influence. Certainly references in later writers to suicide or to the unlawful risking of one’s own life seem to be written with the speech of Africanus in mind, for they draw out the military metaphor which is implicit in it. Spenser’s Redcross Knight answers Despair’s temptation to suicide with the words
The souldier may not move from watchfull sted
Nor leave his stand3 untill his Captaine bed,
and Despair, trying to turn the argument, replies
He that points the Centonell his roome,
Doth license him depart at sound of morning droome.
(F.Q. I, ix, 41.)
Similarly Donne (Satyre III, 29) reprobates duelling in the words
O desperate coward, wilt thou seeme bold, and
To thy foes and his (who made thee to stand
Sentinell in his worlds garrison) thus yeeld . . . .
Scipio now noticed that the stars were globes which easily outstripped the Earth in size. Indeed the Earth now appeared so small in comparison that the Roman Empire, which was hardly more than a point on that tiny surface, excited his contempt (xvi). This passage was constantly in the minds of succeeding writers. The insignificance (by cosmic standards) of the Earth became as much a commonplace to the medieval, as to the modern, thinker; it was part of the moralists’ stock-in-trade, used, as Cicero uses it (xix), to mortify human ambition.
Other details from the Somnium will meet us in later literature, though it was certainly not the only channel by which all of them were transmitted. In xviii we have the music of the spheres; in xxvi, the doctrine of the earth-bound ghost. In xvii (if it will not be thought too trifling) we may notice that the Sun is the world’s mind, mens mundi. Ovid (Met. IV, 228) made it mundi oculus, the world’s eye. The elder Pliny (Nat. Hist. II, iv) reverted to Cicero with a slight change: mundi animus. Bernardus Silvestris used both honorifics—mens mundi . . . mundanusque oculus.4 Milton, who had presumably not read Bernardus but had certainly read the Somnium and Ovid and probably Pliny, does the same, ‘Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul’ (P.L. V, 171). Shelley, perhaps with Milton only in mind, raises the eye image to a higher level: ‘the eye with which the universe Beholds itself and knows itself divine’ (Hymn of Apollo, 31).
Far more important than such curiosities, however, is the general character of this text, which is typical of much material which the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity. Superficially it seems to need only a few touches to bring it into line with Christianity; fundamentally it pre-supposes a wholly Pagan ethics and metaphysics. As we have seen, there is a heaven, but a heaven for statesmen. Scipio is exhorted (xxiii) to look above and despise the world; but he is to despise primarily ‘the talk of the rabble’ and what he is to look for above is the reward ‘of his achievements’ (rerum). It will be decus, fame or ‘glory’ in a sense very different from the Christian. Most deceptive of all is xxiv, where he is exhorted to remember that not he, but only his body, is mortal. Every Christian would in some sense agree. But it is followed almost immediately by the words ‘Realise therefore that you are a god’. For Cicero that is obvious; ‘among the Greeks’, says Von Hügel—and he might have said ‘in all classical thought’—‘he who says immortal says god. The conceptions are interchangeable.’5 If men can go to heaven it is because they came from there; their ascent is a return (revertuntur, xxvi). That is why the body is ‘fetters’; we come into it by a sort of Fall. It is irrelevant to our nature; ‘the mind of each man is the man’ (xxiv). All this belongs to a circle of ideas wholly different from the Christian doctrines of man’s creation, fall, redemption, and resurrection. The attitude to the body which it involves was to be an unfortunate legacy for medieval Christendon.
Cicero also hands on a doctrine which may have helped, for centuries, to discourage geographical exploration. The Earth is (of course) spherical. It is divided into five zones, of which two, the Arctic and the Antarctic, are uninhabitable through cold. Between the two habitable and temperate zones spreads the torrid zone, uninhabitable through heat. That is why the Antipodes, the ‘contrariwise-footed’ people who ‘plant their footsteps in the direction opposite to you’ (adversa vobis urgent vestigia), and live in the southern temperate zone, are nothing to us. We can never meet them; a belt of deadly heat is between us and them (xx). It was against this theory that George Best wrote his chapter ‘Experiences and reasons of the Sphere, to proove all parts of the worlde habitable, and thereby to confute the position6 of the five Zones’ (A True Discourse, 1578).
Like all his successors, Cicero makes the Moon the boundary between eternal and perishable things, and also asserts the influence of the planets on our fortunes—rather vaguely and incompletely but also without the qualifications which a medieval theologian would have added (xvii).
B. LUCAN
Lucan lived from A.D. 34 to 65. Seneca and Gallio (the one who ‘cared for none of these things’) were his uncles. His epic on the Civil War, the Pharsalia, was cut short by the wretchedest death a man can die; he conspired against Nero, was caught, turned king’s evidence under a promise of pardon, incriminated (among many) his own mother, and was executed none the less. His poem is now, in my opinion, undervalued; it is, to be sure, a blood and thunder affair, but no worse in that respect than Webster and Tourneur. In style, Lucan is, like Young, ‘a gloomy epigrammatist’, and like Seneca, a master of ‘the verbal coup de théâtre’.
This style was not, so far as I know, imitated in the Middle Ages, but Lucan was regarded with great respect. Dante in the De Volgari Eloquentia mentions him, along with Virgil, Ovid, and Statius as one of the four regulati poetae (II, vi, 7). In the noble castle of Limbo he ranks side by side with Homer, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and Dante himself.7 Chaucer, sending his Troilus out into the world, bids it kiss the footprints of ‘Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace’ (V, 1791).
The most popular of Lucan’s figures was Amyclas,8 the poor fisherman who ferries Caesar from Palaestra to Italy. Lucan uses him as a peg on which to hang the praise of poverty. Amyclas, he sa
ys, was not at all discomposed by Caesar knocking at his door: what temples, what ramparts, could boast the like security (V, 527 sq.)? Dante translates the passage enthusiastically in the Convivio (IV, xiii, 12), and recalls it more beautifully in the Paradiso when he makes Thomas Aquinas say that the bride of St Francis had long remained without a suitor despite the fact that he who frightened all the world beside found her unalarmed in the house of Amyclas (XI, 67 sq.). Two of Lucan’s great ladies, Julia (from Pharsalia, I, III), and Marcia (II, 326) also appear among the noble and virtuous Pagans in the Inferno (IV, 128). The Corniglia there associated with them is often taken to be the mother of the Gracchi, but I think she is more probably Cornelia the wife of Pompey who appears in Lucan (V, 722 sq.) as an ideal spouse.
Except as evidence of Lucan’s popularity, however, these borrowings do not much concern us. Two other passages in Dante are for our purpose far more instructive, because they reveal the peculiarities of the medieval approach to ancient texts.
In his second book (325 sq.) Lucan relates how Marcia, first married to Cato and then, at his command, to Hortensius, now after Hortensius’ death returns to her old husband at his and Rome’s darkest hour, and demands, successfully, a re-marriage. Though rhetorically treated, it is a moving, and a purely human scene. But Dante9 reads it all allegorically. Marcia is for him la nobile anima. As a virgin she represents l’adolescenza; as Cato’s wife, la gioventute. The children she bore to Cato are the virtues proper to that period of life. Her marriage to Hortensius is senettude and her children by him the virtues of the elderly. The death of Hortensius and her widowhood represent the transition to extreme old age (senio). Her return to Cato shows us the noble soul turning to God. ‘And’, adds Dante, ‘what earthly man was worthier than Cato to symbolise (significare) God? Assuredly none.’ This astonishingly high estimate of the old suicide helps to explain his later position as usher to Purgatory in the Comedy.
Again, in the same Convivio (III, V, 12), Dante asserts the existence of the Antipodes, and very naturally quotes Albertus Magnus—as good a scientific authority as was then available—in support of his view. But the interesting thing is that, not content with this, he also cites Lucan. During the desert march in Pharsalia, IX, one of the soldiers, complaining that they were lost in an unknown region of the earth, had said, ‘And perhaps Rome herself is now under our feet’ (877). The poet is ranked with the scientist as authority for a purely scientific proposition. This astonishing failure or refusal to distinguish—in practice, though not always in theory—between books of different sorts must be borne in mind whenever we are trying to gauge the total effect of an ancient text on its medieval readers. The habit, like many medieval habits, long outlived the Middle Ages. Burton is a notable offender. He illustrates10 the physiological force of imagination from the Aethiopica of Heliodorus as if that romance were a history, and offers us the myth of Orpheus as evidence that beasts can appreciate music.11 In the long Latin passage on sexual perversions12 Pygmalion and Pasiphae are mentioned side by side with modern and historical instances. It is therefore quite possible that Lucan’s lengthy account of the abominations practised by the witch Erictho13 may have had a more than literary, and a most disastrous, influence. Witch-hunting tribunals might have had it in mind. But since the great period of witch hunts fell after the Middle Ages, I will not here explore the possibility.
What is perhaps Lucan’s most important contribution to the Model comes at the beginning of his ninth book, where the soul of Pompey ascends from the funeral pyre to the heavens. This repeats the ascension of Scipio in Cicero’s Dream, adding new details. Pompey arrives ‘where the murky air joins the star-bearing wheels’,14 the spheres (5). That is, he has come to the great frontier between air and aether, between Aristotle’s ‘Nature’ and ‘Sky’. This is clearly at the orbit of the moon, for the region of the air is ‘what lies between the countries of Earth and the lunar movements’,15 (6), inhabited by semidei Manes (7), the ghosts of good men who are now demigods. Apparently they inhabit the very surface of the air, almost in the aether itself, for Lucan describes them as patientes aetheris imi (8), ‘able to bear (perhaps to breathe), the lowest aether’, as if the aether grew more airish or the air more aetherial at their meeting-place. Here first Pompey fills himself with, drinks in, ‘true light’16 (II, 12) and sees ‘under how vast a night lies what we call Day’17 (13). Finally risitque sui ludibria trunci (14): he looked down and saw the mockeries done to his own corpse, which was having a wretched and hugger-mugger funeral. They made him laugh.
Every detail of this will meet us again in one author or another; for Englishmen the passage, as is well known, has another and more particular interest. First, Boccaccio borrowed it in his Teseide (XI, I sq.) and used it for the ghost of his Arcita. It went flying up to the concavity of the eighth sphere or stellatum, leaving behind it the convex sides (conversi) of the (other) elementi—which here, as often, are not elements but celestial spheres. Each sphere was naturally concave as he came up to it from beneath and convex when he looked back on it from above. That of the Fixed Stars, the stellatum, remains concave because he does not go through and beyond it (he has already gone far higher than Pompey). Like Scipio, he observes how very small the Earth is; like Pompey, he laughs; but not because his funeral, like Pompey’s, is a hole-and-corner affair: it is the mourning that he laughs at. Chaucer ignored this passage when he was using the Teseide for his Knight’s Tale, but used it for the ghost of Troilus (v, 1807 sq.). Some have taken the laughter of Troilus to be embittered and ironic. I never thought so, and the descent of the passage, as we have just traced it, seems to me to make it even less probable. I think all three ghosts—Pompey’s, Arcita’s, and Troilus’—laughed for the same reason, laughed at the littleness of all those things that had seemed so important before they died; as we laugh, on waking, at the trifles or absurdities that loomed so large in our dreams.
C. STATIUS, CLAUDIAN, AND THE LADY NATURA
Statius, whose Thebaid appeared in the ’nineties of the first century, ranked in the Middle Ages (as we have already seen) with Virgil, Homer, and Lucan. Like Lucan, he strained after the stunning phrase, less successfully, but also less continuously. He had a larger mind than Lucan, more true seriousness, more pity, a more versatile imagination; the Thebaid is a less tiring and a more spacious poem than the Pharsalia. The Middle Ages were quite right to accept it as a noble ‘historial’ romance. It was in many ways especially congenial to them. Its Jupiter was more like the God of monotheism than any other being in the Pagan poetry they knew. Its fiends (and some of its gods) were more like the devils of their own religion than any other Pagan spirits. Its deep respect for virginity—with even the curious suggestion that the sexual act, however sanctioned by marriage, is a culpa which needs excuse (II, 233, 256)—appealed to the vein of asceticism in their theology. Finally, the vividness and importance of its personifications (Virtus, Clementia, Pietas, and Natura) brought it in places very close to the fully allegorical poetry in which they delighted. But I have shot my bolt about these matters elsewhere18 and at present Natura is my only concern.
The reader of Renaissance and Medieval literature will have met this lady or goddess fairly often. He will recall the veiled and numinous Nature of Spenser (F.Q., Mutabilitie, vii); going back from her, he will meet the more genial, but hardly less august, Nature in Chaucer’s Parlement. In Deguileville’s Pèlerinage he will be surprised by a Nature more sturdy and turbulent than either; a Nature with more than a dash of the Wife of Bath in her, who sets her arms akimbo and stands up to a superior power in defence of her lawful franchises.19 Still re-ascending, he will come to the Nature who dominates the Romance of the Rose for thousands of lines (15,893–19,438); as vivid as Deguileville’s, as genial as Chaucer’s, hardly less divine than Spenser’s, but far more purposive, far busier, than all of them; working unwearied in her contest with death; weeping, repenting, complaining, confessing, receiving penance and absolution; of a beauty that the poet ca
nnot describe, for in her God set the inexhaustible fountain of all beauty (16,232); an image of energy and fertility which at moments (Jean de Meung is fatally digressive) takes one’s breath away. From her it is only a step back to Natura as Alanus brings her in, stiffly robed in rhetoric, conceit, and symbol, pleading again the cause of life or procreation in her planctus (against the sodomites); and thence to the two figures of Physis and Natura who are the heroines of that more sober work, Bernardus’ De Mundi Universitate. For all this the student will quite rightly suspect a classical origin. When he turns to those ancients whom the Middle Ages knew he will find what he is looking for. But he will not find very much of it. The medieval development, in quantity and still more in vitality, is quite out of proportion to the hints supplied by antiquity.
He will find nothing (where he might hope to find it) in Plato’s Timaeus. The passages in Marcus Aurelius where Physis is addressed as a deity will be no use, for they were unknown in the Middle Ages. The relevant material comes down to not much more than Statius and Claudian.20 In Statius Natura is seldom mentioned, but the passages are impressive. In XI, 465 sq., she is the princeps and creatrix, I think, of all things, certainly of that very passion (Pietas) which rebels against her. In XII, 645, she is the dux of those who are fighting a holy war against things monstrous and ‘unnatural’. In Claudian we get a little more. She is the demiurge who reduced primeval chaos to cosmos (De Raptu Proserpinae, I, 249); she appointed the gods to serve Jupiter (De IV˚ Consulatu Honorii, 198 sq.); more memorably, she sits, aged yet beautiful, before the cavern of Aevum in the De Consulatu Stilichonis (II, 424 sq.).
Why the ancients made so little of Nature, and the medievals so much, may be easier to understand after a glance at her history.