Two weeks ago I published a little piece about Boethius. I had been stimulated to do so by the announcement of a forthcoming mini-conference marking the 1500th anniversary of the poet-philosopher’s death. That conference, sponsored by our Classics Department, took place toward the end of last week, and I was able to be in attendance, much to my intellectual profit. It was immensely encouraging in the face of all the chatter about the eclipse of the humanities in our liberal arts institutions. That the small seminar room in which it was held was uncomfortably full is a very good sign of the robust health of the humanities. I expected a Times headline: “At Princeton, Standing Room Only for Sixth-Century Neo-Platonist”.
Having already offered my widow’s mite on Boethius himself, I shall now attempt to do the same on the topic of his apparent concept of human nature. For that is one of the major if mainly implicit subjects of his great best-seller, the Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius was actually a theologian, though he wrote his Consolation in the guise of a secular philosopher. The metaphoric structure of the Consolation is founded in the idea that Lady Philosophy is a wise healer/teacher dealing with a very ill patient whose malady stems from his oblivion of his own true nature. Lady Philosophy begins her diagnostic interrogation by asking Boethius whether he is aware that he is a man (he is so aware). Having further heard his opinion that he is a man, she asks whether he can define what that is. His answer: “A mortal rational animal…and nothing more.” This answer appalls Lady Philosophy because of its materialism. Where is the soul? For us the concept of the soul is mainly if not entirely metaphorical: the battle for the soul of the nation, etc. But in the old psychology soul (anima) was an absolute if immaterial reality, that which was the unique special constituent of the human species, both a feature and a proof of man’s immortality.
One of the most consequential medieval popes, Innocent III (d. 1216), wrote a kind of anthropological diptych, one volume extolling the dignity of human nature and a second excoriating its depravity. It perhaps tells us something that only the second survives. It is called De miseria humanae conditionis, which even the unLatinated can see looks pretty grim. Chaucer translated it as Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde—a coffin-table book, perhaps? The more positive view has its own rich literature of course, wonderfully delineated in a classic study by a Harvard English Professor, Herschel Baker, The Dignity of Man: Studies in the Persistence of an Idea (1947). Baker’s book is endlessly fascinating in its presentation of the traditional old European theory of man’s nature as sacramental, that is, having both an outward physical body and an invisible spiritual core. Anybody interested in our earlier literature, especially Shakespeare, Cervantes, and other such Renaissance giants, will benefit from reading Baker’s book.
We often seem to think that the decisive progress toward the “modern” in Western thought is a feature of the Renaissance, but I put my money on the Eighteenth Century. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man”—so go the famous lines from Alexander Pope (the neo-classical poet, no relative of any of the several Pope Alexanders). That was in his “Essay on Man” in the 1730s. Somewhat later the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, opined that “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular.”
I cannot believe this is true; at least if it is, I have been barking up the wrong tree for many decades, a possibility by no means to be dismissed out of hand. Of course, brilliant writers have been writing about human nature from the dawn of recorded human history, and as often as not they have been more concerned to show its consistency than its variety. But I am more in tune with the Dutch psychologist Jan Henrik Van den Berg in his very challenging book The Changing Nature of Man (1956). Part of our difficulty in understanding—understanding, that is, as opposed to confidently misunderstanding them—is our natural tendency to apply the contemporary mental categories that for us are virtually instinctive to situations in the remote past. But as my own greatest teacher was wont to say, “You cannot play hopscotch before the rules for hopscotch are invented”. We may safely assume that blood was circulating through the human body before 1628, when that fact was “discovered” by William Harvey. But that truth is a fairly recent discovery in terms of the long history of world literature. We cannot expect medieval literary references to the heart, of which there are very many indeed, to reflect the attitudes of modern cardiology.
Psycho-history, or “mentalities” as the French like to call it, is a topic nearly infinite, but I want to scratch another half inch of its surface by mentioning the work of Julian Jaynes. By chance I was personally interacting frequently with Julian beginning about 1970, when he was a research psychologist at Princeton and I was in the early years of my career. We were both deeply interested in undergraduate life, and in the promise we saw in the idea of the residential college—of the sort that eventually has become universal on our campus. (The residential college system creates coherent subgroups among an undergraduate body of a size to foster a wide variety of intellectual and cultural activities, such as theater, musical groups, or community action volunteers, at what might be called local scale.) Julian was the first faculty Master of the Woodrow Wilson Society, later Wilson College, of which I was the first regular faculty director. The system, consisting of seven separate colleges, is now universal. Jaynes was officially a researcher attached to the Psychology Department. We all knew that he was writing some kind of ambitious book, concerning which he was so evasive as to lead us to believe it was a pipe dream rather than a bibliographical reality. But then in 1976 it suddenly burst upon the literary world: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). For a while it cut a pretty broad swath, and it (unlike Julian himself, alas) is still very much alive. There is even a Julian Jaynes Society. I shall not try to tell you what is in it, or to pretend that I even fully understand the argument. But I can and do use the professorial dodge of recommending that you read it for yourself. It is in one oblique way a literary study. He uses the classical Homeric materials to posit a dramatic hypothesis about a profound historical change in the operations of the human mind.
