hThe Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity

Essays in Imagination and Religion

Patricia Cox Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351776349
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

This title was first published in 2001. These collected essays by Patricia Cox Miller identify new possibilities of meaning in the study of religion in late antiquity. The book addresses the topic of the imaginative mindset of late ancient authors from a variety of Greco-Roman religious traditions. Attending to the play of language, as well as to the late ancient sensitivity to image, metaphor, and paradox, Cox Miller's work highlights the poetizing sensibility that marked many of the texts of this period and draws on methods of interpretation from a variety of contemporary literary-critical theories. This book will appeal to scholars of late antiquity, religious literature, and literary critical theory more widely, illustrating how fruitful dialogue across the centuries can be - not only in eliciting aspects of late ancient texts that have gone unnoticed but also in showing that many 'modern' ideas, such as Roland Barthes', were actually already alive and well in ancient texts.

PART I

POETIC IMAGES AND NATURE

PART I

POETIC IMAGES AND NATURE

Preface

Nature engaged late ancient authors in a variety of ways. It produced sheer wonder at its strange beauty, but it also provoked complex readings that treated it as a cache of riddles that needed to be deciphered. Beginning with the Hellenistic Physika (literary compendia of the elements of nature often arranged alphabetically) and continuing through the late ancient Christian genre of the Hexaemeron (commentaries on the six days of creation in the book of Genesis), interpreters surveyed the natural world for the wisdom it had to offer.

Although the Physika and the Hexaemera included plants and other natural phenomena like rocks and planets within their purview, it was nature’s animals that were most compelling. Whether real or imagined—scowling lions, an animal tree, frugal ants and playful partridges, as well as such hybrid monsters as centaurs and satyrs—animals claimed the attention of writers who meditated on nature in late antiquity. Generally, animals claimed attention in this period not as objective specimens to be classified scientifically but rather as indicators of a dynamic process that was defined both theologically and psychologically. What I have thus called the “bestial imagination” is the focus of the essays included in this section.

For the late ancient interpreters presented here, animals were “good to think with.” Although authors like Marcus Aurelius sometimes seemed to portray nature, and especially nature’s beasts, as a discreet “real” world valuable in its own right, there was typically another, specifically religious perspective at work that transformed “real” animals into images bearing meanings quite different from those of naturalism or zoology. For example, when Marcus included “the drip of foam from a wild boar’s jaw” in one of his lists of the signs of nature’s grace and fascination (Meditations 3.1), he not only conjured up a “real” animal; he also poetized it by making it an image of that vast providential order whose intricate workings thus manifested themselves.

This penchant for theologizing “nature” by turning its elements into tropes of the spirit, whether in Stoicism, Gnosticism, or Christianity, is the main theme of the essays that follow. Natural phenomena were used as the vehicles through which to explain religious conceptions of reality. Animals, in particular, were not the subject-matter to be explained; instead, animals became part of a “language” of divine images and patterns that could be “read” in such a way as to disclose stark truths about human life in a world thought to be shot through with riddles and enigmas of the divine.

The key to the theological art of meditation on nature in late antiquity is the beast-as-metaphor. This zoological rhetoric was wielded for different purposes: in some texts, animals images were used to explore the very process of figuration of which they were a part, while in other texts, animals were metaphors of the irrational aspects of the human soul whose “wildness” expressed one aspect of the multiplicity of the self. In still other texts, animals figured the cunning presence of God in the world. Despite the tendency among modern interpreters to slight these “textual” animals as naïve or romantic fabrications, bestial images were not the product of an ancient credulity. On the contrary, they formed part of an imaginal sign-system in which nature was infused with religious and emotional sensibilities.

Whenever bestial metaphors appear in the texts studied here, they are agonistic images; they carry the violence, discord, and dissonance that attend the breaking of habituated modes of consciousness and structures of thought. The violence of many of these images is understandable, since the bestial imagination tended to expose areas of human life that were unsettling, as the following examples from the chapters in this section demonstrate.

Drawing on Scripture for the veritable menagerie of animals that appear in his theological writings, Origen of Alexandria used beasts as figures for unexplored dimensions of the human soul that must be dragged into consciousness, wrestled with, and tamed. Serpentine, horse-like, and piggish, these psychic fantasies represented for Origen both the pitfalls and the opportunities for ethical and spiritual development. Jerome likewise used an animal to picture human identity. Paradoxically using as figure for the celibate ascetic the sexually-aggressive centaur—a half-human, half-bestial monster from mythology—Jerome portrayed the radical but ambivalent self-consciousness demanded of the Christian ascetic as he experimented with physical and psychological transformation.

In such texts, animal were metaphors used to evoke and contemplate the often discordant complexity of the human soul. Religious psychology, however, was not the only haunt of the beasts. Theology was also subject to the violent insights associated with these images. The most stunning presentation of the “animalization” of the divine realm studied here can be found in the Physiologus, a text whose bestial images of Christ as stealthy lion and savage panther complicate simplistic definitions of divine beneficence. With its use of animal stories to provide connections between passages from the Old and New Testaments that are often quite disparate, this text also introduces a jarring note into the allegorical tradition of interpretation to which it is indebted. Even sacred texts were subject to bestial dissonance.

I have emphasized the violent quality of so many of these bestial images because, at least in the case of the texts presented in this section, there is an underlying realization that to see with the eye of the beast—that is, to accept metaphor as the foundation of human language and consciousness—is itself violent. It is violent because its premise is that meaning is not single, simple, or literal, but multiple, allusive, paradoxical, and riddling. The bestial imagination of late antiquity offers a view of reality that is as uncomfortable as it is rich.

Chapter One

“Adam Ate From the Animal Tree”: A Bestial Poetry of Soul

The person has a mould. But not

Its animal. The angelic ones

Speak of the soul, the mind. It is

An animal. The blue guitar –

On that its claws propound, its fangs

Articulate its desert days.

The blue guitar a mould? That shell?

Well, after all, the north wind blows

A hom, on which its victory

Is a worm composing on a straw.¹

In these lines from a modern poet, one is confronted by a remarkable example of the use of bestial metaphors to give image to the play of language. This “modern” idea that language plays like an animal is to be found in a surprising way already in Late Antiquity in the thinking of such authors as Origen and Plotinus. Across the centuries, poets and philosophers, critics and theologians have entertained the uncomfortable thought that speaking is a bestial music.

Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” pictures the mould of a man—his shape, his shell—as an animal. Further, it is angelic ones who speak thus of man, as though the beast were our angelic name. Yet the beast has claws and fangs, which pick a desert tune on the blue guitar.

In these verses there is an abysmal figuration of meaning. It is impossible to tell what is what. Is the blue guitar the animal, the music of our bestial mould? Do we play the blue guitar, or does it play us? There is a play here, which one critic has likened to “a snake almost succeeding in getting its tail in its mouth”.²

Stevens was fascinated by this “almost”, by absurd, bestial dissonance.³ Earlier in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, he had written:

It is the chord nat falsifies…

The fields entrap the children, brick

Is a weed and all the flies are caught,

Wingless and withered, but living alive.

The discord merely magnifies.⁴

In a letter on this passage, Stevens remarked that “the chord destroys its elements by uniting them in the chord. They then cease to exist separately. On the other hand, discord exaggerates the separation between its elements”.⁵

The point is that, for Stevens, bestial music is a figure for language. Playing the guitar is a kind of speaking, and a poet finds himself drawn especially to the magnifying discordant notes. “Personally, I like words to sound wrong”, Stevens once wrote.⁶ Perhaps he was thinking of the dissonant quality of words themselves, where words are images that coil about our thoughts snake-like, succeeding—almost—in biting the tail of meaning.

The Bestial Play of Words

There is something insidiously serpentine about words. If the beast is a metaphor of poetic language, it is so abysmally. As one ancient literary critic, Plutarch, noted, words tell the truth while lying. Naked truth wounds, and is too harsh; thus the Gods speak in poetic circumlocution, that is, in metaphor.⁷ Divine language is equivocal, supremely indirect, a beast almost as discordant as the truth that it reveals while hiding it.

Other poets, and literary critics as well, have been drawn to the beast as image for the play of language through us. A gentle example is the poet Howard Nemerov, who found it fitting to open an essay on the nature of metaphor by comparing purple finches to sparrows dipped in raspberry juice.⁸ Marianne Moore likened poetry to imaginary gardens—with real toads in them.⁹

Somewhat darker is the image offered by the theologian and literary critic, Stanley Romaine Hopper. In one of his essays,¹⁰ he discusses metaphor as a kind of thinking and speaking that creates space for being to come to presence. That is, metaphoric consciousness violates or breaks through those frameworks of interpretation that we absolutize to such an extent that they become the unconscious presupposition of all our thinking. Metaphor places us forcefully in what has been called, variously, the “between”, the “gap”, the “rift”, the “boundary”, the “abyss”—in Hopper’s words, a gap between the perceiver and that which is perceived, between identity and difference, between self-identity and openness.

Of course, to speak about metaphor abstractly is to perpetuate the very kind of thinking that radical metaphor militates against. To speak about figure without figures is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: POETIC IMAGES AND NATURE
• PART II: POETIC IMAGES AND THE BODY
• PART III: POETIC IMAGES AND THEOLOGY
• Bibliography