What Would Jesus Tweet?

Stanley Spencer, The General Resurrection (Tate Gallery) 

Not many readers, perhaps, will recognize the name of Walter Savage Landor; but your bloguiste is among what must be a happy few who own a fine large paper edition of his complete works—all sixteen volumes of them. Old Landor (1775-1864) was a colorful and rebarbative literary figure, who back in the day won elite critical acclaim (but, alas, only a puny popular audience) as a poet and dramatist. His most enduring works, however, are several volumes of Imaginary Conversations in which historical characters have improbable chats with each other across the centuries. Two of my favorites are a conversation between Fra Lippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius IV, and a three-way debate among Dante, Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer—on the occasion of the English poet’s well-known visit to Arezzo.

Walter Savage Landor

There are also conversations that one can only wish were imaginary. In the spiritual frenzy attendant upon the celebration of Passover and Easter, the American Broadcasting Corporation had the bright idea to launch an “in depth” investigation of the current state of American religion, in which their exotic news anchor, Christiane Amanpour, would conduct a series of probing conversations with prominent “religious leaders”. The conversation  I stumbled upon was with religious leader Franklin Graham, son of the once-famous evangelist Billy Graham.

My father was a simple believer, yet a man of deep theological insights. One of them was this: Should you have any doubts concerning the divine nature of the Church, you need only consider the miraculous fact of its continuing existence despite the nature of its leadership over the centuries. Enter, right, the Rev. Franklin Graham. He and Ms. Amanpour warily circle a couple of the great spiritual issues of the age before homing in on the most pressing of all: the Second Coming of Jesus Christ! Mr. Graham is sure that we are in the “last times”—though estimates range elastically between a week and a millennium—for all the biblical signs are there. Wars? Check. Rumors of war? Check. Earthquakes? Check.

 The Rev. Franklin Graham in conversation with Christiane Amanpour

The terrible Lisbon earthquake of 1755 caused the greatest thinkers of that age to question whether the world could possibly be governed by a loving God, but from the apocalyptic point of view it’s apparently the more the merrier. One technical problem puzzles Graham. The Second Coming will be known to “all men” (Luke 21:35). But earth’s population is very large and widely distributed across the globe. How will everybody know when the Great Event occurs? Somewhat cautiously Ms. Amanpour suggests a possible solution: will God use Social Media?

To the dramatic forms of communication already predicted by Saint Paul --“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first” (I Thessalonians 4:16)—Amanpour and Graham add a possibility more awesome yet. Christ will announce his return with a terrible tweet!

It is an idea that had never occurred to me, to be honest, but it seems to have merit. There are actually few ideas sufficiently simple-minded as positively to benefit from the discipline of being limited to Twitter’s 140 keyboard strokes, but I suppose the apocalyptic imperative must be one of them:

Amanpour and Graham are onto something big. Some witty Torah scholar was able to encompass the entire Passover story in a Social Media format. Christian leaders ought to be able to do as well. Jesus was a man who knew his audience. “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” he said. There is every good reason to believe that were he here today, Jesus would tweet.

His followers need to follow his lead in this as in other matters. This may involve thinking outside the box. For example relatively few parts of the Bible, in its present form, are really fit for the Social Media Age. This fact may explain what seems to me to be a creeping biblical illiteracy among our youth. It’s just, like, way too many key-strokes. Take the current Ten Commandments, for example. Among their other conspicuous inconveniences is their utter untweetability. As things now stand, you get on average only fourteen keyboard strokes per commandment. Now it just so happens that, counting its two word spaces, thou shalt not alone takes up all fourteen, exactly. A carefully selected, edited, and compressed Three and a Half Commandments might rescue the social-media situation, while at the same time giving us all a slightly better shot at salvation. (I could handle honoring my parents and avoiding making graven images, and there has to be half another one I could scrape up somewhere.)

Other parts simply require the exercise of a little imagination, as in the Twitter Lord’s Prayer: “Papa God, hurry up, send bread, forgive sins like us, ixnay on the temptation, keep away from bad stuff, you’ve got big three, always. Amen.”

On the other hand, there are a few discrete passages of Scripture that are already such perfect tweets as to defy any possibility of improvement. One of them, as it happens, is strikingly appropriate to the conversation of Ms. Amanpour and Mr. Graham concerning the Second Coming. It is in fact the shortest verse in the Authorized Version of the Bible (John: 11:35): Jesus wept.

The Lord is risen, indeed! or, Why Our Youngest Son is Named Luke

Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre, and they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments. And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen! 

                                    the Evangelist Luke, ca. anno Domini 85

                                                 Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533)

Wordsworth Vindaloo

"Ten thousand saw I at a glance"

Last week I revealed to my readers some of the many exalted positions I occupy, and this week I announce another: I am a Co-Chair of the Grounds Committee of the Gray Farm Neighbors Association. The residents of our lakeside tract in Princeton Township share ownership of ten or fifteen acres of meadows and woodland. For the Grounds Committee the main tasks in tending the Common Ground are beating back the jungle and cleaning up storm damage, but we strive also to do some actual landscaping. In its third year, my scheme of mass bulb planting has begun to pay off, and in particular we have a spectacular show of daffodils and narcissi along the paths next to the lake.

Daffodils above Ullswater

Unfortunately I can show you no photograph, for blog day has arrived precipitate in a double sense. It hardly matters, though, since you can capture the essence of the scene perfectly by looking at the most famous water-side daffodils in the world, those above Ullswater in the Lake District in England. The divine Creator gave them their beauty in time immemorial; William Wordsworth gave them their fame in 1804 with the following poem.

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Anybody who reads poems at all has probably read this one. It is justly famous, despite some pretty awful lines, such as

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought. 

In chasing a pedestrian rhyme Wordsworth leaves huge, muddy bootprints all over the natural syntax of the English language, completely abandoning, incidentally, the noble theory he and Coleridge laid out in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads: “The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions. How, then, can his language differ in any material degree from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly?” Well, by the verb to the end of the sentence artificially postponing, that’s how. Still, the inward eye…the bliss of solitude is pure gold, like the daffodils themselves.

The line that makes the poem unteachable today, though, is not Wordsworth’s fault:

A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company

This now elicits titters or guffaws. But the sexual meaning of gay, today nearly universal, is a mysterious neologism. Wordsworth had never heard of it. It is furthermore incoherent. If homosexuality is gay, heterosexuality should be morose. Instead, oddly, it is straight, in which case…

But I learned long ago, in my very first job, that the Romantic Poets were unlikely to survive modern undergraduate sexual obsessions. The moment of truth came in 1963 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in a freshman literature survey populated largely by fresh-faced, blue-eyed, blond-haired young women called Karen, from someplace called Fond du Lac.

We read Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, and I assigned a short paper on one of the best known of them, “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known”. In this poem the poet-lover sees his girlfriend’s house by moonlight and has the irrational apprehension (“strange fit of passion”, indeed) that she might lie dead within it. As the rider passes the house, the moon sank low upon it.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still. 

Well, I was home one Saturday night grading papers, just beginning to nod, when I came to one that made the hair on the back of my neck stiffen. One of the fresh-faced Karens from Fond du Lac had written a psycho-sexual interpretation of the poem that probably deserved an X-rating but might have squeaked through with a strong Parental Guidance Advisory. For both Wordsworth and Karen had been victimized by philological vagaries over which they had no control.

cots

There was a perfectly good Old English word cot, meaning a modest house, a humble dwelling. Eventually it was replaced by cottage, but it survived well into the nineteenth century and survives still in various place names and compounds such as dovecote. Meanwhile there had been a distantly related old Sanskrit root *khatva, generally suggesting narrowness or constriction, which in a later Prakrit became khat, meaning a most useful piece of portable furniture so characterized—to wit, a camp-bed or cot. The Brits brought back this useful thing, and the useful word denoting it, along with other Indian treasures such as umbrellas and Darjeeling tea. Gradually the Indian homophone hogged the whole space formerly occupied by the Old English word.

 Karen (from Fond du Lac)

For Wordsworth the cot was his girlfriend’s little house, viewed distantly as a dark exterior--and nothing more. And why should Karen from Fond du Lac think that the cot was anything else than, well, a cot. I have to admit that it definitely spices up a rather lugubrious poem if you think that it is all taking place in bed—sort of Wordsworth Vindaloo.

 William Wordsworth (from the Lake District)


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SEMI-SUNSHINE ADDENDUM  3PM ET 20 April 2011

Some weak sunshine has appeared, allowing me to give an impression of what this post was supposed to be about--the show of daffodils on the Gray Farm paths above Carnegieswater.

Gentlemen of the Old School

Vintage post card (1934) of Trenton Central High School

I have often remarked in my blog posts, as all of us surely do in our daily lives, the surprising outcomes arising from the intersection of disparate incidental circumstances.  Thus it is that two of my more whimsical roles—necrologist and recreational swimmer—lead me to an unhappy meditation on the decline of the American high school.

I am the current Orator of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America—a position only slightly below the pay-grade of Melville’s “late consumptive Usher to a Grammar School”.  One of my jobs is to prepare for presentation at the annual meeting brief memorials of famous medievalists who have died in the year previous.  I leave in the morning for this year's meeting in Phoenix, so that I have been thinking about such people, one of whom was Charles Muscatine of the University of California, who died about a year ago.

Muscatine was an eminent Chaucerian, the author of an important book on Chaucer and the French Tradition.  I knew him fairly well, though not intimately.  One of the things that most struck me about him was his breadth of education, his ability to chat in an interesting fashion on any topic that happened to come up.  Well, the man did have three Yale degrees.

Professor Charles Muscatine (1920-2010)

In addition to necrology, I’m into recreational swimming.  I try to begin each day with an early morning plunge.  There are a few us who practice this form of masochism daily, one of whom is a man named Norman who, I now have excellent reason to believe, is very likely to be eighty-eight or eighty-nine years old.  To reach the swimming pool in the Dillon Gym from the locker rooms you go down two levels, five short zig-zag flights of stairs, with the heavily used machine room at the midpoint.  Almost always three or four of us get there early and must sit on the stairs outside the locked pool door, invigorated by the medicinal aroma of the floor disinfectant, until the lifeguard arrives and opens it—in theory at 6:45 but in practice sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later.  The descending stairwell becomes a kind of echo chamber that exaggerates the sounds of footfalls and, especially, of the noisy turnstile at the entrance of the weights room.  It sounds sort of like the soundtrack of every prison movie you have ever seen.

It is difficult among the reverberations for the early birds--early fish?-- to conduct conversation.  It is especially hard for Norman, in whom the circumstances induce a kind of generalized tinnitus.  Nonetheless we do pursue some interesting semi-naked, half-heard seminars.  The other day Norman said the acoustic situation reminded him of Poe’s poem “The Bells,” of which he then proceeded to cite some relevant lines from memory:

…Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells…

He added that he had memorized reams of poetry in school.  “I got a great literary education,” he said.  “I loved it”.   I already knew that, actually.  I had by then enjoyed years of Norman’s casual erudition, but only now grasped its source.  It turned out he was referring to his years at Central High School in Trenton, N.J.

After the swim we continued the theme back in the comparative quiet of the locker room.  After more praise for his English teachers, he turned to the rich intellectual camaraderie he had enjoyed with some of his fellow students.  An idea suddenly struck him.   “There was one guy,” he said, “who later became a Chaucer professor, like you.  Did you ever hear of Charlie Muscatine?”  I had to tell him that I not only knew him, but was at that very moment tasked with writing his obituary.  His death came as news to Norman, who had not seen him in more than half a century.  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.  “He was a really good student…and a terrific singer.  He had the lead role in the class opera.”  Yes, you heard me.  In the pre-war period the senior class at Trenton Central High School each year mounted a musical drama! 

Central High in Trenton is not unknown to me.  Today it is a classic urban drop-out factory and blackboard jungle.  Its graduation rate is pathetic.  Over the years Princeton University has had numerous ineffectual, feel-good “outreach” programs for its faculty and students.  I personally had the experience of teaching some classes there.  One day I followed my usual practice of placing my watch on the podium to keep track of the time.  While my back was turned to write something on the board somebody stole the watch!  (Tempus fugit).  I don’t much like sending my readers off to Wikipedia, but I recommend its article on Central High, which is of the genre sad but true.  As I tried to suggest in another post, the school’s problems are beyond the reach of any of the solutions being proposed by our education experts—especially the solution of throwing money at them.

Things were very different in 1932, when Central High was proudly opened as a minor architectural miracle and one of the notable cultural ornaments of central New Jersey.  This is the place that Norman, aged about sixteen, was learning that Poe’s “Bells” was “…a kind of phonic experiment, in which the sounds themselves convey concrete ideas, as in the line What a gush of euphony voluminously wells…”  and young Charles Muscatine was building the foundation for a distinguished scholarly career.

Cleopatra as Bibliophile

 

 Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra

                                                                                                                                                Ernest Rhys

 
 BENEFACTORS OF HUMANITY

Elizabeth Taylor’s death on March 23 occasioned an orgy of rehashed fan magazine gossip and a brief episode of Egyptomania in the form of the publication of a thousand stills from the film Cleopatra (1963).  A fleeting thought of a blog post entitled “Elizabeth Taylor and the Life of the Mind” flashed across my inner monitor; but it was overwhelmed by my distaste for Hollywood, vapid glitz, and highly publicized serial matrimony.  However, the next Sunday I walked into a church service where the visiting preacher turned out to be one of the directors of an outfit called GAIA (Global Aids Interfaith Alliance), which conducts an impressive AIDS ministry in Malawi.  He mentioned that one of their important projects was “funded by Elizabeth Taylor.”  It was pretty clear that between his unworldliness and the fog of international travel he was not yet aware of her death—just as between my prejudices and presuppositions I had been unaware of her impressive good deeds while living.

So it’s back to “Elizabeth Taylor and the Life of the Mind”, this time penitently.  To defang the topic of any suspicion of sarcasm requires a bibliographical digression.  Among my acquaintances is Mr. Terry Seymour of the Princeton Class of 1966, a man of parts whose career success in the financial industry has allowed him to build a remarkable private library that includes many rare and indeed unique items.  Among several erudite interests, British literature of the Eighteenth Century is conspicuous.  In one important field of literature Seymour is not merely the world’s greatest academic expert, but the world’s leading private collector as well.  That field is Everyman’s Library.

Philanthropy is of many kinds.  Among the very greatest intellectual philanthropists nourished by Britain, that great mother of intellectual philanthropists, was Ernest Percival Rhys (1859 –1946).  Rhys was a minor poet of the fin-de-siècle and a co-founder with Yeats of the Rhymers’ Club.  If that was all he ever did, he would still have an honored place in the small print of histories of Edwardian literature.  He did something greater, however, that effected what can only be called a literary revolution.  He convinced the London publisher, Dent, to launch one of the most audacious publishing ventures in history. 

Rhys proposed to publish, under his general editorial supervision, a popular library of 1000 of the world’s greatest books—mainly British and mainly “literary”--awesome in its ambition.  The books, to be issued ten at a time on a regular schedule, would be well made, chastely elegant, cloth covered, and very cheap.  Coal miners and milliners’ assistants could and did buy and read these books.  The “Everyman” of the title was not gender specific, but the universalizing humanity of the late medieval morality play Everyman.  Facing death and divine judgment Everyman is abandoned by all worldly comforters—material possessions, social honors, family station.  The personifications “Good Deeds” and Good Deeds’ sister “Knowledge” alone are steadfast.  Knowledge says to Everyman: “Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy Guide/ In thy most need to go by thy side.”  This motto, with pre-Raphaelite image of Knowledge herself, adorned front and back endpapers of every volume.

           

Now…where was I?  O, yes.  Though the competition was fierce, most impartial observers would agree that Elizabeth Taylor’s Main Man was the Welsh actor Richard Burton (1925-1984).  As least he’s the only one she married twice.  Richard Burton’s formal education was truncated by life’s circumstances and his early and unrelenting pursuit of an acting career.  He was nonetheless a sharply intelligent and very well read autodidact, blessed with a retentive memory that, for example, gave him a command of Shakespeare that approached the encyclopedic.  He was of a “type” not uncommon among earlier generations of the European (and American) working classes, one well known to me from personal experience.  Much of his voracious early reading was done among assiduously acquired volumes of Everyman’s Library, several of which he claimed to have of necessity shoplifted--an anecdotal fact or factoid that found a prominent place in his rags-to-riches self-fashioning.

Burton          .          .          .           .                   .                .           .     Seymour

 NOTABLE COLLECTORS

 As an item Taylor and Burton were notoriously on and off.   In one of the “on” periods, in a brilliantly original homage to her husband’s youthful erudition and the means of its acquisition, Elizabeth Taylor commissioned agents to seek out and purchase copies of every title in the Everyman’s books—a commission exhibiting great imagination on the part of Elizabeth Taylor and requiring no small expenditure of time and effort on that of her book agents.  She then had the whole lot rebound in bright full leather and presented the library to her inamorato.
Rebinding an Everyman’s title in full leather is perhaps just a little like serving a Big Mac on Spode porcelain.  It’s not exactly illegal, but the very idea is sufficiently preposterous to induce a thrill of transgression.  Ethically, perhaps, Ms. Taylor’s sumptuous gift cannot escape the opprobrium due most displays of conspicuous consumption.  But at the imaginative and artistic levels, it is much more like a Fabergé Easter egg for the czarina than the necklace for the tootsie in Pretty Woman. That is, there was more to it than just money.

After Burton’s death the library was auctioned, with the spoils shared by a number of dealers keen on “association copies.”  Individual volumes have now begun to recycle through the second-hand market.  Terry Seymour is in the lead here, as on all other aspects of Everyman collecting; but there is a brief window of opportunity for readers of "Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche".  There are a few items currently available on Abebooks.com.  You should not move, of course, without consulting Seymour’s definitive collectors’ guide and the account of the major library exhibition he mounted in Chapel Hill (http://www.lib.unc.edu/spotlight/2008/everymans.html) in 2008.

But a cat can look at a king, and I’ll make a recommendation on my own: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  Not merely is it at $250 significantly the cheapest of the items available; but you could then read the whole story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard from last week’s post for yourself.

Some "normal" vintage Everymans

 Terry Seymour's shelf of "Taylor-Burton" Everymans, with some associated items.  (Photo: Mr. Seymour)

Bring Back the Old Words

          

 

KUNG-FU IN ITS HIGHER AND LOWER FORMS

  

  

My good friend Dr. T. K. Chu, whom I hope soon to introduce to my readership in a more formal fashion, recently drew my attention to an article concerning the philosophical meaning of kung-fu.  I refer to the Mandarin word, not the supposed “martial art,” which, it turns out, is merely a pallid and limited application of a broad ethical concept.  “Real kung-fu,” Chu explained to me, “is a state of ethical, spiritual, and physical being achieved through long discipline, mental acuity, ascetic preparation, and concentration of the will.  A person’s kung-fu remains hidden until absolutely demanded by circumstance, when its confident display astounds all witnesses.”  In other words, nobody knew that Clark Kent had kung-fu before he stepped into the phone booth.  Or maybe the Monty Python rabbit.

 Leporine Kung-fu

            In my opinion English speakers would do well to welcome and naturalize two crisp syllables which their current resources require some fifty words merely to approximate.  In fact there are many words we need, and the pity of it all is that we used to have several of them.  I refer to some of the highlights of the Old English vocabulary.   Since the invaders led by the frenchified Viking bastard William couldn’t get their piratical tongues around them, they simply threw away a couple of thousand great words and the very phonic elements that gave them distinction.  For example, there were a whole bunch of wl--- words.  The initial sound wl is intrinsically beautiful.  Hence the superior beauty of the word wlitig, meaning “beautiful”.  Who would ever use the trite pretty, were wlitig available?  And don’t forget the great gn—words, rare but irreplaceable.  What could be sadder or more mournful than gnorn?  And how could there be a better word for a prison than gnorn-hof?  Or for a poetic lament than a gnorn-word?  The idea that the initial g in such pitiful survivors as gnat or gnash should be “silent” is more Francophone fascism.

            I haven’t taught Old English in at least thirty-five years, but in my earliest days at Princeton, there was always a small class of enthusiasts who actually arrived at the ability to read Beowulf by the end of a single semester.  As that is probably harder than preparing to read the German text of Goethe’s Faust in the same length of time, it required no small reservoirs of kung-fu.  We had our little sport.  Each year’s class would pick out a single highly desirable but long vanished Old English word and, without further comment, simply adopt it as part of their working vocabularies.  It takes but twenty linguistic kung-fuists to infiltrate the lingo of a whole campus.  One great success, I remember, came with wod and wodnesse (crazy and madness).  I knew our benign sabotage was working when in a speech on the faculty floor one of the deans actually denounced some suggestion or another as “absolute wodenesse”.

            This idea occurred to me because of the nature of my own introduction to Old English at Oxford, which was not nearly so much fun.  My eminent but terminally humorless tutor began at the beginning, which apparently meant the year 755 as dealt with in the Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.  (This appears to be a mistake for 757, but our older historians were free of the constricting accuracy fetishes of our age.)  

It was Cyneheard over Cynewulf, one-nil

In this year there was a major dust-up among the petty princes of Wessex.  The story begins with marvelous incoherence: “In this year Cynewulf, with the consent of the West-Saxon council, deprived Sigebryht of his kingdom for unrighteous deeds-- except for Hampshire, which he retained until he slew the alderman who remained the longest with him.”  This led to hard feelings between Cynewulf and Cyneheard, Sigebryht’s brother.  Many years later Cyneheard killed Cynewulf under somewhat peculiar circumstances.  “þa geascode he þone cyning lytle werode on wifcyþþe on Merantune.”  This means “he [Cyneheard] discovered that the king [Cynewulf] was with [only] a small band of men at Merton”.  The perfect opportunity for an assassination!  But what was Cynewulf doing there?  Well, he was on wifcyþþe.  I asked my tutor what that meant, and the man actually blushed.  In an instant, intuitively, I knew.  Something that could get an emotional reaction out of this guy really had to be good!

            Well, wif was obvious—woman.  Old English cyþan means “to know;” and a form of it survives in our adjective “uncouth”.  “Uncouthe, unkiste, sayde the old famous Poete Chaucer.”  With that (mis)quotation Spenser began his own famous Shepherds’ Calendar.  The clear implication is that what is couth might well be kissed, an implication by no means contradicted by the way the King James Bible used the verb to know.  “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived…” (Genesis 4:1).

            Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, the compilers of the great old Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections, were both proper Victorian gentlemen.  For them wifcyþ was “a visit to a woman.”  But I saw in an instant that our Anglo-Saxon forbears had an excellent, no-nonsense word for an important aspect of human life for which we now have only obscenities, medical technicalities, or the absurd expression “having sex”.  I mean, really.  Everybody “has sex”.  You are born with it.   Wifcyþ and the equal opportunity mancyþ, on the other hand, may require at least the most elementary progress in kung-fu.

Wifcyþ presented Google Images with an insuperable challenge but they did their best with wlitig wif, aka Swiche wenche

Justice or Grace?

 Cranach: "Law and Grace" (Prague)

            Attempting to squeeze out the last succulent drops of a short stay in Paris, we mounted an artistic double-header one day just before leaving.  In the morning we took in the show at the Pinacothèque about the Romanovs as art collectors.  It was an engaging show, but of course as scattered and eclectic as the collection in the Hermitage itself, the residual monument of their activities.  Far more memorable to me was the show we saw in the afternoon, at the Senate Gallery in the Luxembourg Palace: “Cranach and His Times”.   There, in one of the exhibition’s more modest rooms, I had a significant aperçu.

            Most of my thinking and writing these days has to do with intellectual developments of the eighteenth century.  That is the century, I have long believed, that witnessed the principal shifts in mental perspective that, in conjunction with dramatic changes in material culture, constitute the most important differences between the Old World (“my” world of the Middle Ages) and modernity (“my” world of existential experience).

            Here’s a little aphorism for your collection, to be filed alongside Aristotle’s “Men by nature desire to know” and Augustine’s “All teaching is about things or signs”.  All history is about change or stasis.  Yet by a dramatic ratio historians and their readers prefer change.  How much luck would a writer have, with either publishers or readers, with a title like Three Centuries of Monotonous Stability in a Westphalian Monastery or The Horseshoe Crab: Still the Same After Millions of Years? Many historians, including several of my colleagues, think that their job is not merely to explain change, but to effect it.  Here they follow the historian Karl Marx in the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”  (And now having gotten that off my chest, I solemnly promise my readers never, ever, to mention the name of Feuerbach in a blog post again.)

                   Jules Michelet                                 

and Lucas Cranach the Elder                                                                                                     

  


I am currently writing about a period of dramatic historical change, the Enlightenment, which fed upon another, that of the Protestant Reformation.  Lucas Cranach the Elder got in on the ground floor of the Reform: he was a close personal friend of Martin Luther himself, of whom he painted several portraits.  And one of his most conspicuously “reformed” paintings destroyed a chapter I had nearly completed.  Damn!

The greatest event of the eighteenth century, and probably still the iconic event of modern history, was the French Revolution.  Its relationship to Enlightenment is obvious if imprecise, if you see what I mean; and whether you think the Revolution was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing will depend in part on how “enlightened” you think it was.  My own thinking has been much influenced by the great historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), who clearly thought it was a Good Thing.

One of the prefaces to his brilliant and contentious History of the French Revolution is entitled “Concerning the Religion of the Middle Ages”.   According to Michelet the still essentially medieval world of the Ancien Régime was governed by the notion of grace, that of the enlightened revolutionaries by the notion of justice.  In the Old World, God and his temporal vicars (the pope, the king, the clergy, the privileged aristocracy, etc.) doled out grace and favor as they saw fit, benignly of course, but under no controlling obligation.  The rain fell upon the just and the unjust alike.  But the architects of the new world of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality believed in justice.  Every Frenchman had rights.  These were the famous “Rights of Man and Citizen” (1789)  —later universalized by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).                       

Now Michelet seemed to me not only so very right but so very right on!, to use the proper revolutionary lingo, that it was very disconcerting to have to think hard about Cranach’s painting (normally housed in Prague Castle) entitled “Law and Grace”.  Cranach did several versions of this tableau.  Its reflexes elsewhere in Reformation art number in the scores, for it perfectly captures what is perhaps Luther’s most famous doctrine: “justification by faith alone.”  As the gloomy German friar brooded over the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, a light flashed within his mind.  “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”  You cannot do anything to be saved except believe that you cannot do anything.  Giving up wine, women, and song for the austerities of monastic life won’t save you.  Certainly building a huge cathedral in Rome won’t.  The only channel of salvation is divine grace, absolutely arbitrary and unmerited, not for sale in any store.

Martin Luther as seen by a friend

Indeed to hope for justice is to ask for death.  In the left (“Law”) side of Cranach’s image there is death everywhere, including the left half of the tree that divides it.  Only the gratuitous grace of Christ’s sacrifice offers hope.  Pictorial art often expresses complex ideas with a clarity denied to mere discursive prose, and Cranach made me see in a split second a complication I would be happier to avoid.  The complication is this: if Martin Luther overthrew the religion of the Middle Ages by discarding justice in favor of grace, and if two hundred and fifty years later Michelet’s revolutionaries overthrew the religion of the Middle Ages by discarding grace in favor of justice—well, you perhaps see my problem.

Cranach: "Law and Grace" (Gotha) 

 "Law and Grace" (Popular print after Cranach)