The Gospel Truth

 

 

The motto of Harvard University, to be found  boldly divided into trinitarian folios and mounted on an heraldic shield,  is VERITAS, Latin for “truth”.  You are sure to have seen it at the bottom of the title page of a learned book, or, if not there, on a keyring, beer mug, or sweatshirt.  It is also the title of a terrific new book* by Ariel Sabar that my erudite son-in-law Zvi just sent me as a gift.  Zvi is a broad-gauged historian, a Sinologist, an expert among other things on Islam in China.  In his spare time he is also what you might call a Bible buff, a student of the literature and archaeology of antique Judaism in the time of Jesus.  Some of his more colorful fellow Bible buffs play roles in the book Veritas, to which I shall return after a brief but necessary digression into scholarly autobiography and an embarrassing confession I have not before made public.

 

            The subject of my doctoral dissertation was the iconography—the pictorial illustrations—of medieval manuscripts of a popular medieval poem, The Romance of the Rose.  Most of its many surviving manuscripts date from the fourteenth century, the period of the height of its popularity.  There are many illustrations of aristocratic women, some allegorical and some not.  A common feature of attire of aristocratic French women was the tippet—a decorative band of cloth, often a long one, that hung from the sleeve.  I had never before seen such a thing.  The human mind, puzzled by what is unknown and unfamiliar, strives mightily to crowbar the phenomena into categories of the known and the familiar.  Looking really hard, I did not see strips of cloth but rods of wood attached by a ringed clasp to the arm near the elbow: medieval elbow crutches!  But how to account for such a large population of crippled women?  Probably bone degeneration caused by dietary insufficiency.

 

 

            This “discovery” was entirely peripheral to my interest in the poem, and I had no ideological commitment to its validity.  But for about three weeks I truly believed it, and continued to “see” wooden rods, until somebody told me about tippets.  Fortunately, I had not mentioned my breakthrough in medical history to anyone.  It was an interior drama of the mind.  Having established my own residence in a glass house, I can now start hurling stones.  Veritas is about what can happen when a scholar does have an ideological commitment to a wacky idea and does want to tell people all about it.

 

            The wacky idea was that Jesus had a wife, probably Mary Magdalene, and that there was written evidence of this not merely in the Da Vinci Code but in a very ancient bible-like text, a newly discovered fragment of a Gnostic gospel henceforth to be known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife (GJW in academy-speak).  The scholar with ideological commitments was Professor Karen King, formerly a professor of divinity at Harvard.  If you do want to read a four-hundred-page book about feminist biblical scholarship, hot wives, child molestation, con artists, and the curious sociology of south Florida—as I sincerely hope you do—stop reading this essay immediately, as it could spoil a great experience awaiting you in Veritas.  But for the unfortunate few who lack the time or inclination I shall persist.  Prepare yourself for a breathless ride.

 

            There are three human actors in this drama, and one on paper.  The two human antagonists are an erudite and famous and feisty feminist scholar at Harvard and a seedy German con man and pornographer.  The hero is Ariel Sabar, the author, who styles himself a journalist, but obviously is actually the world’s Numero Uno Private Eye.  The paper player (GJW) is a fragmentary text on a piece of papyrus of about five square inches.  You can read the whole thing in less than thirty seconds—provided, of course, that you can read garbled Coptic fluently, as a surprising number of people in this book seem to be able to do.  The fourth line of GJW is supposed to say: Jesus said unto them my wife…I think it’s in Lolita that the narrator, Humbert Humbert, recalls having read a French mystery novel in which the clues were printed in italics. The scribe of GJW was similarly accommodating.  Karen King, the Harvard Professor, biblical scholar, ewig Weibliche  of the radical Jesus Seminar, and author of an imaginative book about Mary Magdalene, was intrigued to hear this, for she was already of the belief that women were far more important in organizing primitive Christianity than you would know from reading the canonical gospels.  Those gospels had first been spun and then given privileged status by a bunch of patriarchal geezers whose sex phobias encouraged misogyny, the suppression of women, and the establishment of an exclusively male and celibate clerical caste.  Speaking of gospels, in this tale Professor King  was in the classical lingo of the confidence game the mark.  The con man was a brilliant but reptilian German lowlife named (no kidding) Fritz.  Raised in the south of (West) Germany, Mr. Fritz had a difficult and perhaps traumatic childhood.  Later he started on a graduate degree in Egyptology in Berlin but dropped out before achieving it.  He reappears sometime after German reunification as the director of a new museum dedicated to the Stasi, the old East German Secret Police.  His directorship was brief, as he was lousy at his job though possibly adept at stealing treasures he was ostensibly guarding.  The next act finds him in south Florida, where he may be an officer in a German tool-making company, and may be the proprietor of a Potemkin gallery dealing in Egyptian art and antiquities, but certainly is the entrepreneur of a robust pornography outfit called HotWives.  HotWives is more or less what its name suggests, and the hottest wife, the superstar of most of the videos, is Mrs. Fritz—porn name, Jenny Seemore.  And, oh, yes: using linguistic expertise gleaned in graduate school, and a piece of ancient papyrus gleaned from God knows where, Mr. Fritz forged the fragment GJW and drew it to the attention of a famous Harvard professor who, he had excellent reason to believe, might be willing to authenticate it.  Eventually she did, against her own first instinct and the view of numerous peers whose shared perception of the fraud differed mainly in their esthetic judgement of the degree of the amateurishness of its fakery.  The coming-out party was  a biblical conference in Rome.  That was the place to stick it to the Pope and all that Virgin Birth, clerical celibacy, male priesthood stuff!  She then published it to academic drumrolls in the prestigious Harvard Theological Review. 

 

            It turned out to be a debacle, of course, leaving not only Professor King but various other Harvard worthies (its PR departments, the editors of the Theological Review) with most of a large, drippy omelet smeared across their faces.  But in the end traditional Christians dodged the bullet of having to think about a sexually active Jesus Christ.  I suppose I am not a traditional Christian, because that idea in the abstract bothers me not at all.  My medieval Franciscans spent endless folios in meditating upon Jesus’s Passion and its agonies.  Giving a little time to some imagined ecstasy might seem only fair were there any better evidence than that concocted by an erudite pornographer.  There isn’t.

 

            Sabar tells this story in amazingly documented detail, leaving a reader marveling at his forensic skills.  The first two thirds of the book can be read as a kind of exotic academic comedy, but in its last movement it becomes quite somber.  The author does not hesitate to detail the long path of evasion, obfuscation, professional impropriety, and actual prevarication Karen King traveled in order to overcome her own disbelief in a pseudo-antique fraud highly convenient to supporters of certain political and cultural arguments of today.  Nor does Sabar stop there.  He goes “heavy” of a sudden.  He wonders aloud how well a postmodern historiography for which facts are the malleable ornaments rather than the solid foundation of the intellectual enterprise actually can serve the endlessly  restated mission of our educational institutions, particularly the oldest and most famous of them, one proclaiming in wrought iron its allegiance to Veritas.  It turns out that “seeing is believing”  is  fake news.  Very often it works the other way around.  We see what we already believe, want to believe, or need to believe.  That’s how  one sees prosthetic devices instead of haute couture.

 

*Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife (Doubleday: New York, 2020), pp. 401

Courting Disaster

 

 

            Give no thought to the morrow.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  We have that on the highest possible authority, but I am no more able than the vast majority of my compatriots to cease from worrying about the next day, and the next after that.  A general pandemic anxiety, often vague but always disconcerting, has suffused our household and probably most households.  There has been and continues to be plenty to be worried about: the virus and its medical and economic devastations, police brutality, mob brutality, violent storms, raging wild fires, an impending general election already characterized by rancor, suspicion, and (whatever the results of the voting) premonitions of outraging approximately half of our fellow citizens.

 

            One of the gaudiest floats in the fast-moving pageant of impending dangers is dedicated to the donnybrook awaiting us in the confirmation process for a new nominee to the Supreme Court.  The nomination is not yet a week old, but the first brickbats were already being hurled in the actual public announcements of Justice Ginsburg’s death on September 18.  As seemliness has long since disappeared from our politics, we can hardly wonder at its absence in much of our political journalism.  Be that as it may, the opposing forces have formed their ranks.

 

            Our Supreme Court was one of the most extraordinary innovations of our Constitution.  There was no very close model then in existence, and there have been surprisingly few close imitations since.  Only in the first decade of the nineteenth century did the court’s principal task, judicial review, become explicit.  The famous early Chief Justice, John Marshall, put it this way: “It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is.”  That dictum itself, was, of course, already an interpretation of the written document that was to be the final arbiter of the validity of all legislation proposed by Congress and confirmed by the signature of the President.  That document was, and is, the Constitution.  Thus I can say emphatically, using Marshall’s word, that the Supreme Court is a body of literary critics charged with adjudicating the meaning of written texts—laws proposed by the Congress—in the light of an older one, the governing Constitution of the United States.  Since my whole career as a professor of literature has been devoted to the attempt to explain the meaning of old literary texts, I consider myself qualified to comment, in a general way, on the Court’s performance in that same genre.  A cat may look at a king.

           

            The unspeakable is not the same thing as the not spoken about, but not infrequently the two are close allied.  The American Civil War had several contributory causes, and some historians of the war, like some of their predecessors who were participants in it, have been eager to cloud the obvious principal cause in some kind of redeeming complexity.  Not so Lincoln.  In his justly famous Second Inaugural, the President said this: ”One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”  Even if “all knew” that slavery was the cause of the war, there was a preference for talking about other causes, mainly more abstract and high-minded or at least less concrete and sordid ones, such the preservation of the Union or the sovereign rights of individual states.

 

            Talking about secondary or even factitious issues is in political circles a time-honored means of avoiding real ones that are controversial.  In any political system in which continuing access to power depends upon the short-term popularity of elected representatives there is bound to be a lot of dodging and weaving.  Sometimes admirable motives seem to justify the grossly politic in all politics.  The framers of the Constitution were so eager to achieve a fragile political union that they thought they could get by with passing the buck about slavery.  Not to do so might have doomed the national project from the start.  After the Civil War politicians thought they could get by with passing the buck about unjust social arrangements that frustrated the promises of emancipation.  They have been doing that more or less ever since, with results so lamentable only the blind can fail to see them.

 

            The anticipated battle over the proposed confirmation of Judge Barrett is not unrelated to the unhappy history of avoiding unpleasant topics.  I venture to suggest that, as Lincoln would put it,  “all know” that “somehow” the cause of this war is abortion.  But it is ever so much more comfortable to talk about other things, such as the outrageous hypocrisy of Senators McConnell and Graham, the fate of Merrick Garland, the high-handedness of Harry Reid, the borking of Robert Bork by Ted Kennedy—well, I’ll cut it off there, but we could easily continue on a bipartisan grievance tour probably going back to the British Enclosure Act of 1773 and beyond.  These topics are all of great interest, and have undoubtedly contributed to the poisonous atmosphere in which the battle will be joined.  But outrageous hypocrisy is nowhere mentioned in our secular Sacred Text, nor is there any suggestion that a duly elected President cannot offer a nomination three weeks or three days before the end of his statutory term.

           

            Abortion, though a supremely contentious issue in the country, nonetheless commands a kind of strange and paradoxical consensus.  Most Americans don’t much like the idea of abortion; most Americans don’t much like the idea of criminalizing abortions either.  That pretty well describes my own state of ambivalence.  What is for some a settled matter of constitutional right is for others an everlasting affront to conscience.  One can well understand why prudential legislators have been willing to let the literary critics on the Supreme Court deal with the matter.

 

            Any intelligent American can read the Court’s decision in the case of Roe versus Wade, which is based in an exegesis of certain phrases of the Fourteenth Amendment.   The Court’s vote in 1973 was not even close, seven to two.  We now know what the law is because “it is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is.”  But though that same intelligent American is obligated to honor the force of the law, she is not forbidden from regarding the exegesis on which it is based as highly curious.  As early as the period of classical antiquity Stoic logicians bewailed the near impossibility of meaningful written communication “because all words are ambiguous.”  Yet they could only be interpreted through other words.  “That is like bringing a quenched candle into an unlighted room”.  The heirs of such ideas, in trendy modernized form, are today very common in university departments of literature.  This is one reason why much literary criticism, which in earlier periods commanded a broad audience among general readers, has become an arcane, mandarin, and above all unconvincing enterprise uncongenial to lovers of literature.   You may or may not buy the argument that Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost quite without Milton’s realizing that fact.  That was a rather mad idea floated by William Blake when Paradise Lost was not quite as old to him as the Constitution was for Justice Blackmun when he wrote the majority decision in Roe versus Wade.  There is not a lot of “real life” consequence in that interpretation of Paradise Lost, which is now commonplace in Departments of English.  Yet it is neither more nor less obvious than the interpretation of “unreasonable search and seizure” in the Fourteenth Amendment made by the court in 1973.  That is why both parties in our duopoly have been at times quite open in insisting that the crucial issues in a presidential election are the President’s powers of nomination and the Senate’s power of confirmation.  Power is often unattractive in its naked form, but eventually real issues do emerge even, or perhaps especially, when Congress doesn’t want to deal with them.  But the issue here is not really a clash of high-minded moral principles— let alone the struggle of good and evil so often invoked to describe it.  It is a squabble of literary critics and a contest of textual interpretation.  Not that high principle plays no role.  The high principle of the Republicans is that their candidate must be confirmed.  The high principle of the Democrats is that that must never happen.  The situation seems rather bleak, yet not quite so bad as last night’s alleged “debate.”

 

 

 

Instrumental Agreement

 

            “All the instruments agree..,”  It’s actually part of a line from an Auden poem, his famous elegy written in response to the death of W. B.  Yeats on January 28, 1939.  What all the instruments were in agreement about was that the day of the great poet’s death was “a cold, dark day”.  I now hear the phrase about the agreement of all instruments being applied to almost anything the speaker wants us to believe is certain.  In fact I have myself used it in that sense.  Of course Auden himself had in mind far more than just the weather or the meteorological instruments used to measure and describe it.  The instruments of mind and heart and artistic aspiration were likewise in mournful concord at the loss of so great a poet.  When a great life, talent, or virtue is extinguished, the physical loss is often the least of it.  The death of greatness casts a very large shadow.  The application to art and artists is hardly a new one.  At the death of Orpheus all of Nature wept.

 

            As it happens, the agreement of all instruments beginning with those of the meteorologists has been much on my mind this week on account of the unusually dramatic arrival of autumn.  The calendrical event took place on Monday, though I think that the actual measurable equinox was yesterday.  The drama of autumn’s arrival, however, was not in the calendar but in the change of the weather itself.  The last day of summer was sultry, hot and moist.  The first day of autumn was cool, crisp and dry.  Like most of the rest of the country we had been following news of the terrible fires on the West Coast.  We have friends in Portland, and a close friend here has a daughter and grandchildren living there.  Along with the refreshment of cool air in central New Jersey came the news of considerable improvement three thousand miles to the west.  They had had some rain, enough to douse some fires and slow down others, and to clear away some of the clouds of suffocating smoke.  Our friend’s daughter reported by phone that she and her kids were at last able to go out of doors comfortably, and “even to breathe some fresh air.”  Again all the instruments, or at least several important ones, appeared to be agreeing.

 

            Is the paradox here real, or simply imagined?—that the refreshment of new life should appear with the advent of the season of waning, retrenchment, indeed death?  For death did indeed arrive.  On the last Friday of summer came the news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of our Supreme Court had died.  The national outpouring of sadness and admiration has been extraordinary.  I can remember no other such widespread lament for a defunct jurist in my lifetime.  Its genuine basis cannot be doubted even though it is probably exacerbated by specific political anxieties as well as a much more generalized feeling of foreboding triggered by the disquieting anxieties of the medical pandemic. 

 

            Most of us operate on an emotional plane on which the personal and the public, the interior and the exterior, the individual and the cosmic are in interplay.  As the years have rolled by the autumn has become for me an ever more wistful season.  I think I have probably written about this more than once.  Certainly I remember an essay I devoted about a year ago Keats’s great “Ode to Autumn”, among the many excellences of which is the poet’s perfect capture of the season’s paradox, or at least the somber interplay between fruition and decay, vitality and extinction.  Then, in yesterday’s newspaper, I found a beautiful little essay entitled “At Summer’s End” by a fine Nashville writer named Margaret Renki, a contributor to the Times who specializes in such topics as the “flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South”.

 

            Though it didn’t get around to politics or culture, exactly, her essay is full of little gems—about the natural world and about the lessons of life and art that world teaches.  I suppose one could say the same thing about the “Ode to Autumn.”  But at heart her column was for me an instance of déjà vu and not that only.   For I have not merely seen it  before but read and written it before as well.  Ms. Renki would appear to be considerably younger than I, for her sense of vague plangency at fall’s arrival appears to be a new thing for her.  It is one I have known for at least two decades.  “But perhaps the reason I didn’t feel sad about the onset of fall when I was young,” she writes,  “is only that I was younger, with my whole life still ahead.”  Yes, perhaps so.  But the analogy of the course of human life and the course of the vegetative year, with the beginning of autumn the definitive beginning of an end, is surely hard-wired?  All the instruments agree.

 

Church Militant

 

 

 

            Some years ago, while researching a book concerning the literature of the Cold War, I came upon a French Communist front organization active in the late 1940s with what I thought was an amusing name—Combattants de la paix, which might be roughly translated as “Warriors of Peace.”  This group was active in various phases of the Soviet “Peace Offensive” in which various eminent Western intellectuals—including Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Erica Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertrand Russell played prominent roles—up through the McCarthy Era.  The “Warriors of Peace” struck a chord in my medievalist’s consciousness, though not one relevant to the research I was then conducting.  But now the stir-craziness of pandemic isolation and a friend’s jigsaw puzzles encourage me to return to the theme.

 

            In a post three weeks ago I explained that a friend has loaned me two high-tech wooden jigsaw puzzles.  To the first, an exquisite religious panel by Fra Angelico, I devoted an essay of iconographic description.  I arrive now at the second, which features a gorgeous book painting from an early Renaissance historical chronicle in the National Library of France.  Its subject is the amazing defense made by the Knights Hospitaller of their stronghold on the island of Rhodes when besieged by the huge army of the Sultan Mehmed in 1480.  In the painting reproduced in the puzzle the Ottoman attackers foregrounded on its left side are given visual top billing.  Never mind the challenge they present to the Christian knights in the serried ranks within the castle walls.  Think of the challenge their jig-sawed gorgeousness presented to me. 

 

            Military metaphors have probably been popular since the invention of language.  Ovid has a well-known poem “Every Lover is a Soldier”.   In my own lifetime I have been witness to wars on poverty, drugs, obesity, Christmas, women, cancer and other adversaries too numerous to mention.  Even in the spiritual realm warfare antedates St. Paul’s donning his breastplate of salvation.  Was it not Job who said “The life of man upon earth is a warfare”?  But the medieval Christian Church, moving beyond metaphor, saw the rise of several small armies composed of men who were at once monks and Marines, “Combatants for the Prince of Peace,” usually called the Military Orders.

 

            The most important of these, the subject of my puzzle and my theme today, was the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, usually called the Knights Hospitaller (after their principal charitable vocations) or the Knights of Malta (after the island stronghold to which they strategically retreated after being kicked out of Rhodes in a second siege, in 1522).  But I must mention at least two other such orders, the Teutonic Knights and the Knights of the Temple, or Templars.  The Templars are probably the military order today’s general reader is most likely to have heard of.  That is because the conspiracy theories instrumental in its grisly destruction have become only more lively and fantastic in the seven hundred years since.  Today if you want to persuade people that Hilary Clinton is involved in a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlor, you will probably be called a QAnon nut-job.  On the other hand write a book about how the Templars kept Jesus’s hook-up with Mary Magdalene under wraps until Leonardo da Vinci blew the whistle on that caper in his “Last Supper” and you’ll make a few millions.  The Templar factor makes all the difference.

 

            The English words hospital and hospitality, though obviously related, today have gone in separate directions with only one of them necessarily suggesting medical attention. The medical implication arose in the Middle Ages.   Ancient “hospitality” is perhaps best illustrated in biblical terms in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who ministered to a severely injured traveler both by addressing his wounds and by paying for a recuperative rest at an inn.  Premodern travel was an arduous and often dangerous business; one of the common motives of medieval travel was religious pilgrimage, and for Europeans the pilgrimage par excellence was that to Jerusalem.  Already early in the Middle Ages charitable people established pilgrim hostels; religious hospitality was also to be had at many monasteries.  The Knights Hospitaller had their remote origins in that mileu, but the order’s militarization and prominence came in the Crusades.  The bellicose knights enjoyed their greatest prestige after the fall of Constantinople when from their stronghold on the island of Rhodes they long hindered the trade and expansive ambitions of the Ottomans in the Mediterranean.  In this regard the knights’ heroic repulse of a third siege, that of Malta in 1565, was perhaps of even greater significance than the stunning and better remembered Christian naval victory in the Battle of Lepanto (1571).

 

                                                                                        Suleiman the Magnificent
 

            I found the hardest part of the puzzle was the challenge of the Turkish tents on the left side and the top, both the two ornate ones and, especially, those in the soldiers’ campground seen in the distance.  But I knew the very moment the last remaining blob of ambiguous gray necessarily fitted into the last lacuna on the board that I had to learn more about the Knights of Malta and their formidable Muslim adversaries, especially the Sultans Mehmed the Conqueror and  Suleiman the Magnificent.  So I did what has become a custom for me during the pandemic lockdown while I have had no access to the university.  I simply ordered a few promising and affordable second-hand books on-line.  Two of these were essentially light reading:  The Siege of Rhodes (1985, English translation 2006) is a work by the popular Japanese historian Nanami Shiono, whose field of expertise is Italy from Brutus to the Borgias.  The Shadow of God (2002) is “a novel of war and faith” by Anthony Goodman, an octogenarian medical professor and history buff.  .The differences between an historical novelist and a novelistic historian are not all that great, and both of these books are good, exciting reads.  Two others were much more substantial,  One is the learned biography Suleiman the Magnificent (1944) by the Harvard historian R. B. Merriman.  The other is the “official” history of  The Knights of Malta (Yale, 1994) by H. J. A. Sire, a British free-lance historian whose Gibbonesque style I find enviable.  Of the battles for Rhodes and Malta he begins thus: “Our story carries us to a period of eighty-five years in which the Order of St John, comparable in numbers to the population of a village, produced three leaders and three feats of arms worthy of an empire.”  I  was astonished to discover that the author was himself a member of the order he studied.  Admittedly the group these days is more similar to the Knights of Columbus than those of Jean de la Valette, but still….Indeed researching the historian was in this instance nearly as engaging as his own research.  Sire is a theologically arch-conservative Roman Catholic vehement in his hostility to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.  Some years after the publication of this authorized history, the Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of Malta felt obliged to suspend its author from the brotherhood on account of  controversial attitudes expressed by him in a subsequent book about the current pope, Francis I.  I have not seen the book, but there is perhaps a clue in its title: The Dictator Pope.  Ah, Combattants de la paix!

 

 

Conversations

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1865)

            One of the things that keeps living languages alive is their accommodation of linguistic change, one feature of which is semantic change, that is, change in the generally accepted meanings of words.  In our tongue the process is particularly robust, and there is not the damnedest thing grumpy old English professors can do about it—except, of course, write grumpy blog posts.  If you frequently use dictionaries—as all intelligent readers do (a group necessarily including readers of this blog)—it is a good idea not merely to take notice of definitions.  Quite as informative, often, are etymologies.  These days any reader with a smart phone can have pocket access to the entire Oxford English Dictionary, the Rolls Royce of word-books, and thus, in effect, can read a mini-history of any word in our mother tongue.  Change being an immutable feature of the Heraclitean universe, if you will indulge the paradox, even dead languages undergo semantic change.  Imagine how Cicero would respond to a query as to whether one could find his declamations on Catiline'a conspiracy on video.

            So I am definitely on board with semantic change.  I also recognize the reality that the change is likely to exhibit ethical decay.  It was with more imagination than linguistic science that Sir Walter Raleigh derived the word world from wear-olde, that which “groweth worse as it groweth older.”  But many ordinary words like boor, knave and harlot began life without pejorative connotation.  Right now I am worried about the moral fate of the word conversation, which in its common usage means “oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas.”  A crucial part of this definition is exchange.  Within the last few years I have noticed—first in academic-speak and then in the speech of ordinary mortals—a new meaning of the word.  We are getting more and more important conversations, long-overdue conversions, national conversations, and conversations we absolutely need to have.  In recent weeks I have participated, sort of, in several such conversations having to do with race and race relations in America.  They have varied considerably in quality.  The best of them were lectures, the less good harangues, but  none of them was a conversation—not if a conversation involves the significant participation of at least two people.  We may regard them as “imaginary conversations,” though not of the sort to which I now turn.

            Consider dialog(ue), another English word apparently yearning to breathe free.  The obvious meaning of this word is an oral exchange between two speakers.  I recently have noted that if an important conversation is important enough it may require that dialogue be turned into a verb.  “We have to sit down and dialogue about this.”  This usage may become common, though for the time being “dialogue” still retains a literary and more specifically theatrical suggestion.  But a good deal of ancient literary dialogue, including that of the drama, is not exactly what we would call conversation.  Imagined dialogues have more prominently been the vehicle of “important conversations” about politics, law, ethics, and religion.  Think about Plato, Cicero, and Boethius for starters.

            For dialogue you will recognize as actually conversational, you may have better luck with modern authors.  My latest delivery from the Library of America included three volumes of novels by Elmore Leonard, one of several recent authors I had thus far neglected.  The precision with which he captures the way certain Americans talk to each other is astonishing, though not less so than the ingenuity of his plots.  But only one author known to me actually built a literary career on imaginary conversations.  For that is the generic title—Imaginary Conversations—of several volumes of dialogues written by Walter Savage Landor.  There are many people for whom the name Landor (1775-1865) may be new.  He is, in my view, among the most important of little-known British literary figures.  His biographer Sidney Colvin, who in his youth knew him,  put it thus: “Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little.”  Landor was a brilliant man of enormous energy, and a very remarkable classical scholar, a large portion of whose poetical compositions were in Latin.  He was an advanced political thinker and a wellspring of personal virtues sometimes concealed by rebarbative impulses that repeatedly brought serious trouble upon him.  He was kicked out of various distinguished places, such as Rugby School, Trinity College, Oxford, and (in a sense) his family home and England itself.  He was a passionate supporter of the oppressed peoples of southern Europe, first the Greeks smarting beneath their Muslim Ottoman occupiers, then the Italians abused by their own petty Christian tyrants left around from the Middle Ages.

            He knew many of the giants of the English literary world over the course of a very long career.  (He published his last book sixty-nine years after he had published his first.)  Many of his most productive years were spent abroad, especially in Italy; and it was there in the 1820s that he undertook the enormous work of the Imaginary Conversations.  Years ago by luck I came into possession of the great edition of Landor’s English works, ten of the sixteen volumes of which are devoted to them.  He throws together unlikely conversation partners from many ages and civilizations, though the first he ever published (1823) featured Englishmen personally known to him: the poet Robert Southey and the great classical scholar Richard Porson.  The subject of their conversation was the poetry of Wordsworth—presumably his early poetry, given that Porson died in 1808.

            One imaginary conversation of particular current interest is that between the British parliamentarians Samuel Romilly and William Wilberforce (vol. 5: 126-138) supposedly in the first decade of the nineteenth century.  Both of these men, and especially Wilberforce, were animated by reforming zeal, and among the most burning issue on Wilberforce’s mind was the suppression of the slave trade, which (as knowledgeable European statesmen knew) was by constitutional arrangement to cease in the United States in 1820.  European slavers knew they had better make hay while the sun shined, incurring the disgust as well as the bitter opposition of reformers.

            I must say the slightest word about Landor as a poet.  One specialty of his was the four-liner, a kind of poetic epigram.  Two of those written in old age as he faced the abyss are likely to impress any reader in a similar situation.  The most famous, the supposed testament of an aged philosopher, goes as follows:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife:

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:

I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

The image of “warm[ing] both hands before the fire of life” is a beautiful statement of the enthusiasm with which he had thrown himself into so many causes, controversies, loves and labors.  And that now waning fire is the occasion of another of his mini-masterpieces, a strangely one-sided “conversation” the full meaning of which is perhaps clearer to the eavesdropper-reader than to the poet-participant.

Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear;

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear.

Is the Left Right?

            People who lack a scrupulous attitude toward history are prone to trivialize it with faulty analogies, a tendency especially prominent in the cavalier ease with which they invoke the name of Adolf Hitler, a leader in whom unspeakable evil joined with the arbitrary control of tremendous power in a fashion with few parallels in modern times.  Those parallels do not come close to applying to any American president, including the current one; and I have resisted the rise of Hitler-trivializing disguised as Trump-bashing.  Rapidly developing events of the last week, however, certainly have me thinking about Germany in the early ‘Thirties.

            I refer to street brawls in Kenosha and Portland in which Americans animated by political passion have gunned down compatriots.  Some years ago, quite by accident, I had to become an expert on a book called Out of the Night by Richard Krebs, pseudonym Jan Valtin.  You may well never have heard of it, but it was the best-selling book in this country in 1941.  It purports to be the autobiography of a German merchant sailor and Communist agitator active in the German, Scandinavian, and Belgian seaports beginning in the late ‘Twenties.  Its vivid, blood-curdling accounts of the murderous street fighting between Brown  thugs and Red thugs are undoubtedly founded in the direct reporting of actual experience.  And chilling experience it was.  “Valtin” reports the instructions received from  his Party boss, Heinz Neumann, as he sent his warriors into the streets:  “I want to see bodies!”  The command was obeyed in melees of red flags and swastika banners.  Well, we seem pretty far advanced in importing the model to the streets of American cities, with, no doubt, some pretty terrible people on both sides.

           

            But what are the “sides,” and are there only two of them?  I don’t know the name of the architect who determined the layout of the building in which the French National Assembly gathered in the late eighteenth century, but that person’s possibly unconscious contribution to modern political history was enormous.  For it was essentially the furniture arrangements in that auditorium that established the durable paradigm of the political “left” and the political “right”—a paradigm that despite its manifest inadequacy continues to hold sway over the minds of our politicians, journalists, and opinion-makers, who habitually use the terms with an undeserved confidence in the certainty of their meaning.  In general “left” refers to what is new and experimental, what is progressive in terms of its tendency towards explicit leftist goals believed to be desirable, and what maximizes the perceived needs and desires of social groups and classes deemed to have been unfairly retarded by other groups and classes unfairly possessing unshared resources and political power.  Leftists feel little constraint from historical precedents—at least from the ones of which they disapprove, which means most of them—and some would like to abolish history altogether.  (One of the lines of the Socialist “Internationale” goes “Let us make a blank slate of the past.”)  Conservatives, on the other hand, reverence what they take to be the tried and true, custom, tradition, inherited social and religious institutions of very long duration.  They are not blind to historical sins and  injustices of the past, but as they rarely espouse notions of human perfectibility they tend to avoid, when speaking of their ancestors, the historical opprobrium they would not wish for themselves.  “In seeking to add to the treasury of truths which comprise the capital acquired by the human race, we are the successors of our pious ancestors, who loved the good and the true in the form received in their time”.   So wrote Ernst Renan, one of the great radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century.  And he continued: “ The most distressing error is to believe that one serves one’s country in the calumny of those who founded it.  All a nation’s ages are the leaves in the same book.  The true progressives are those who begin with a profound respect for the past.”

            But how useful is the left/right paradigm?  I have come to the conclusion: not all that useful.  From the historical point of view the traditional oppressors of freedom of action, speech and thought would seem definitely to have been from the right: arbitrary rulers (Caligula), bigoted and obscurantist religious authorities (Torquemada), tyrannical bureaucracies (the Star Camber), and so forth.  These people were forever telling you what you couldn’t do, wear, make, write, say and of course, drink.  I am so old that I grew up in a dry county where the Baptists and the bootleggers joined in silent collusion to augment the social piety of the former and the bank accounts of the latter at the expense of some poor farmer who liked a beer now and then. But already among the French revolutionaries we get the tyrants from the left and the puritan Jacobins of the Committee on Public Safety.  Tyranny frequently comes under the promise of protection.  Lenin’s Cheka was “an organ of social protection.”  Both the Antifa extremists in Portland and the teen-aged gunman in Kenosha were in place—uninvited and unauthorized, of course—ostensibly in order to protect the public from the alleged dangers presented by rampaging racists on the one hand or vandals and looters on the other.  The mention of Lenin can remind us that the champion criminals of the twentieth century were brutal Marxist ideologues in Russia, China, and Cambodia whose accomplishment in human destruction, laid out in the statistics of The Black Book of Communism, make the achievements of the Third Reich in that department seem comparatively modest.  The most shocking display of the myopia of the intellectuals of the 1930s was the belief, still alive and well in today’s academic world, that there was a huge chasm separating Socialism under Stalin from National Socialism under Hitler.  Left?  Or right?

            Lord Falkland, a sort of hyper-Tory of the seventeenth century, uttered the following memorable principle: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”  Whatever you might think of the doctrine, it at least invites the application of mental discrimination in the adjudication of ideas.  There are in our country things urgently in need of change, several of which are gathered within the slogan of “Black lives matter”.  There are suggested changes it would be lunacy to implement, such as “Abolish the police.”  It does absolutely no good either to conflate the two or to assign them to pigeonholes of left or right.

            We ought to be able to agree on some shared good ideas without violent controversy about ideas on which we do not agree.  Here the rediscovery of the Center is much to be desired.  Democratic government should aim to give everyone a voice but nobody a veto.  The good and the true as seen by the founders of our nation and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence seem good and true to me still today.  The fact that we have as yet failed to implement good and true ideas fully is a moral rebuke to us, not an exposure of the debility of the ideas themselves.  The situation actually presents an exhilarating challenge.  For if government of the people, by the people, and for the people should vanish from the earth, the tragedy would be much greater than it would have been at the time of Gettysburg.  For there are now three hundred more million Americans to be betrayed than there were then, and untold millions of others anxiously watching from beyond our shores.

The Puzzle of Fra Angelico

 Friar John of Fiesole, O. P., believed to be a self-portrait

            If you are so locked down that the only social event in your month is chemotherapeutical or ophthalmological, you find yourself searching for challenging things to do around home, especially on days too hot or too wet to move your molecules in the garden.  An excellent old friend, once my student and now my teacher, recently came to the rescue by loaning me two very high-quality jigsaw puzzles produced by a British outfit called Wentworth.  Obviously there has been a technological revolution in the manufacture of puzzles during the twenty years my back was turned.  Gone are the imperfectly die-mashed bits of cardboard with wounded, wobbly lobes.  These gorgeous things are works of art in and of themselves: cut by laser saws from slim sheets of strong hardwood with razor-thin precision.  There are no pieces that almost fit, only very tight fits.  This particular company specializes in what they call “whimsy” pieces.  For each puzzle they make a few intricately shaped pieces to correlate with the larger iconographic theme of the whole work of art or scene.  The laser control allows fiendishly precise cuts along color lines and other dirty tricks such as the suppression of right-angled corner pieces.  Finally, the printing process by which the image has been inked upon the wood is of superb quality.

            My friend Frank is among other things a medievalist, and the puzzles he loaned me were gifts given to him by his brother with his medieval (and Renaissance) interests in mind.  The one I tackled first was very much down my line: a panel from the fabulous “Silver Chest” or Armadio degli Argenti built to hold the sacred treasures of the Church of the Annunciation in Florence and painted by Fra Angelico around 1450.  Rarely are the containers of such objects more precious than the objects themselves, but this richly painted armadio is quite literally priceless. 

            Much of my own scholarly work has dealt with the cultural contributions of the medieval mendicant orders, and I have had a particular interest in the visual arts, especially within the Franciscan Order.  Fra Angelico got his nickname from the nearly supernatural beauty of his paintings.  His more conventional name was Brother John of Fiesole, and he was a member of the Dominican Order.  These two largest orders of friars, though sharing a great deal in common, were in a sense spiritual rivals, emphasizing different evangelical vocations.  The Dominicans might be said to be the more intellectual, their most famous theologian being Thomas Aquinas.

            There are complex theological ideas conveyed by the stunning chromatic beauty in Fra Angelico’s panels.  It was a common medieval belief that both words and pictures were conventional signs of communication, and both were extensively used by friar-missionaries, often with subtle interrelationships.  My late friend Michael Curschmann wrote many important studies of the commerce between text and image in medieval books and other artifacts.

            Fra Angelico’s design for the amazing coffer is that of a miniature art gallery depicting mainly a series of small, related scenes taken from the life of Christ.  The principal subjects of the particular side of the chest reproduced in “my” jigsaw puzzle are the Passion and its post-Resurrection sequence.  I think I detect in several of the small quadrants the definite influence of a famous fourteenth-century Franciscan work called the Meditations on the Life of Christ, and I may follow that hunch up with some serious scholarly research if I can ever get back to proper work.

            Just for the moment jigsaw puzzles are probably the appropriate mode.  The particular panel of the chest featured in the puzzle I put together is laid out in twelve sequential “scenes” in four columns of three-mini panels each intended to be read,  as one would the written lines in a book.  The specific layout is as follows:

1 VIA DOLORSA    2. STRIPPING          3.CRUCIFIXION      4.DEPOSITION

5. HARROWING     6.QUEM QUAERITIS?            7.ASCENSION              8.PENTECOST

                9.  and  10.       LAST  JUDGMENT        11. CORONATION           12. LEX   AMORIS                                                       

the puzzle completed

Beginning with Christ’s painful road to Calvary (1), the “historical” sequence ends with the mytho-poetic Coronation of the Virgin (11).  The Last Judgment is divided between two panels (9 and 10) as Christ sits in glory in his role as judge, with the saved souls to his right and the damned to his left, sinister in Latin.  The final mini-panel (12) is a theologico-pictorial tract of considerable numerological ingenuity.  On the shield of the female figure at the left we can read LEX AMORIS, the “Law of Love,” the concept that is the key to the scheme of the entire complex work.  The whole of this panel is a symphony of text and image, with each scene appropriately designated with texts from the Latin Bible.  The LEX AMORIS “scene” is mainly textual, but founded in the mystical meanings of two numbers, seven and twelve.  The most prominent pictorial element—perfectly chosen for a receptacle designed for sacred furniture—is a large and beautiful seven-branched candlestick or menorah.  The seven banners weaving in and out of its branches are devoted to the seven sacraments of the Church.  On the “north side” of the picture (taking the cross at the top, the vertical extension of the candlestick, as representing the east end of a church) we have twelve Hebrew prophets with their individual prophetic scrolls.  On the right (south) the common iconographic motif of the twelve apostles each with his written clause of the Apostle’s Creed.  This constitutes an allegorical claim for the spiritual continuity between the prophets and the apostles, and from Temple to Church.  The scribal banderoles  above and below the “Lex Amoris” are the only ones left blank.  What was the intended missing text?

 The "Lex Amoris" (12) with empty banderoles

            That is one of the puzzles generated by another.  A second is more personal.  I have a special, eccentric reason to be enthusiastic about Fra Angelico.  For many years I had a low-voltage friendship with one of the Princeton rare books librarians, Jean Preston, a manuscripts expert and a scholar extremely knowledgeable about medieval English literature.  Ms. Preston was a very unpretentious, modest, reserved English lady, of the sort sometimes unkindly called timid or even mousy, who walked quietly on her little patch of earth leaving no scuff marks in her wake.  I knew she had a small collection of what she called “treasures,” though I never was privileged to view them.  She retired shortly before I did, moved back to England, and took up residence in a small and unremarkable house in Oxford, where she died in 2006.  I had not been in touch with her since she left Princeton.  When her executors set out to deal with her few possessions they discovered they included several extremely valuable books and paintings, including two small panels by Fra Angelico.  Those two pieces alone went for about four million dollars at auction.  But that is only how the world assesses value.  I think Jean, like Fra Angelico himself, operated according to a different, higher standard.

from the domestic decorations of Ms. Jean Preston