Strange Flesh

The American presidential campaign has witnessed what is apparently a second serious threat within two months against the life of candidate Trump, but thus far most of the news coverage about it seems concentrated upon the level of competence demonstrated by Secret Service officers in nipping it in the bud.  The press’s attitude would seem to be that since the only gunshots actually fired were those fired by the security forces, the real subject of interest continues to be the candidates’ debate held about a week previously. According to presumably reliable statistics, slightly more than sixty-one million people in this country watched the debate on television.  I will not put the well-deserved quotation marks around the word debate, even though the event had little in common with what happens regularly at the Oxford Union let alone what happened in 1858 at five venues scattered through the state of Illinois when Lincoln dueled with Douglas in an earlier set of American presidential debates.  From among the plethora of pressing national, international, and indeed inter-galactic political and socio-economic problems that potentially face the next occupant of the White House, the one that was discussed most memorably, and most thoroughly featured in the press, was the putative diet of recent immigrants to the small city of Springfield Ohio.  Mr. Trump imputed to a group of recent immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, a canine/feline diet.  According to Mr. Trump “they are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” 

 

What goes without saying too often goes unsaid.  So before advancing in this brief essay I suppose I am obliged to tell you that this is utter rubbish.  Neither the newest residents of Springfield, Ohio (most of them immigrants from Haiti) nor the native population (mainly though not exclusively of European ancestry) are eating dogs or cats.  This is just one of those things Mr. Trump likes to say in aid of wresting defeat from the jaws of probable victory.  From what might be called the ethical point of view, one does not know whether to hope that Mr. Trump actually believes what he claims or that he is merely making it up with gusto.  Yet more discouraging in my view is the fact that millions of his supporters greet Trump’s declaration with a yawn.  He probably was talking about hot dogs slathered with catsup.  So far has political deviancy been defined downward.  “Democracy,” said Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” 

 

From the historical point of view, however, it is likely, nay certain, that at some places and at some times on this large globe, people have indeed eaten cats and dogs.  Quite apart from the fact that the human diet throughout the world is as diversified as is human language, if you are hungry enough, you will eat anything edible and a few things that are not.  In fact, inventiveness of diet when in extremis has often been regarded as ingenious and gutsy.  Shakespeare’s Antony, rendered ethically feeble by his all-consuming passion for Cleopatra, is thus chided by Caesar.  Caesar is reminding him that he is supposed to be a tough guy, as indeed he used to be before he lost his mind over this woman:

 

…Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once
Wast beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
Did famine follow; whom thou fought'st against,
Though daintily brought up, with patience more
Than savages could suffer: thou didst drink
The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at: thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge;
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed'st; on the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this—
It wounds thine honour that I speak it now—
Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank'd not.  (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 4,  485f)

 

Even without the gilded puddle chaser, such victuals do not sound exactly appetizing. Of course military power and cultural prestige have been wielded by many civilizations of beastly feeders in the past.  The Aztecs of Mexico, notable warriors, poets, and even astronomers, created a major empire powered, at the alimentary level, mainly by acociles (a very dubious looking crayfish thing thick on the bottom of Lake Texcoco), and spirulina algae transformed into a kind of flour suitable for baking.  Armadillos were a delicacy reserved for special occasions.  I must regard this menu item, though far from unknown in the American South of my youth,  as a bit iffy.  Armadillos are known to carry leprosy, and although the incidence level is “fairly low in most regions” there is apparently still a risk of transmission in handling the carcasses.

 

            One of the terms of opprobrium among the volunteer critics in our universities is “cultural appropriation”.  Recently young kids have needed to be very careful around Halloween time if they want to avoid cancellation by their second-grade confreres.  South-of-the-border sombreros are definitely out, and pirates’ eye-patches risk grave offense to the otherly abled.  You probably remember a highly televised fracas along these lines at one of the undergraduate colleges of Yale University not too long ago.  Despite this, it seems to me that cultural appropriation is a fecund force in human development, and often a very good one.  I am very glad we in this country appropriated the wheel and penicillin, to cite just a couple of examples out of many.

 

            I am now quite old, and for many decades I have had a professional interest in the English language.  Under these circumstances I am personally aware of the extraordinary increment in the vocabulary of our widely shared English language, just during my own lifetime, brought about by the American naturalization of an international cuisine.  Is there anybody who doesn’t know what a tortilla, a paella, or a barbeque is?  I could list a hundred more.  When I was a kid the only Chinese dish I had ever heard of was chop suey.  Is that even a thing now?  When it comes to gastronomic appropriation most Americans are all for it.

 

 

Pangur Bán

 

Pangur bán, meaning something like “Whitey” in Old Irish, or perhaps “Super-White” or “Snowball,” was the name of the pet white cat made famous by an unknown monastic scribe toward the end of the first millennium.  For him and his brethren the name would have had mystical associations to which no modern detergent ad could aspire.  For them it recalled the shekinah, the visible sign of the presence of the Lord, of Moses and then Jesus on the Mountain, a spiritual radiance and a whiteness “that no fuller on earth could achieve.”  (Mark 9:2). 

 

Reichenau, the small island in Lake Constance in southern Germany where the cat and the scribe lived out their companionate lives, was the site of a Benedictine monastery that became an important center of learning in Carolingian times.  The subject of the ancient and most unusual poem “Pangur bán” is a comparison of a mouser cat in its stealthy pursuit of mice and a scriptural exegete in his arduous search for the hidden meaning of a biblical text.  It is a delightful jeu d’ésprit composed and recorded not in Latin but in the vernacular language of his distant native land. Its unique character has made it one of the best known examples of Old Irish lyric poetry, of which there are unfortunately few surviving models.   I append the full text of the poem in the translation of one of the most distinguished of recent Irish poets.

 

In turning to what some may regard as an obscure subject (monastic cats) I meant consciously to seek refuge from the exhausting political scene that has been preoccupying me and so many others.  But of course there is no escape to be found.  The topic had barely forced its way to the periphery of my mental landscape when an exhumed years-old insult directed at childless “cat ladies” by J. D. Vance, Trump’s hand-picked running mate, forced itself on my attention.

 

            We happily housed a couple of cats for many years, but when they in the natural cycle of things expired, we did not replace them.  Our only current pets are turtles.  So I am not a “cat person”.  I do claim to be a “monk person,” however, having spent many years studying forms of Christian religious life in the Middle Ages.  It is understandable that most of the (few) people who have written about the poem “Pangur bán” have been most interested in the cat part.  But as a scholar I am more interested in the monk part.  The monk, after all, is the one who wrote the poem, and its subject is monastic scholarship, for which he wittily finds a surprising analogue in a cat’s mouse-hunting.

 

            Mr. Vance is a fairly recent convert to Roman Catholicism.  I have read that while he was preparing to enter the Church he chose from among the saints Augustine of Hippo as a special spiritual inspiration.  I myself am a great admirer of Augustine, and have spent many years reading and thinking about his writings, especially as they touch upon linguistic, moral, and social issues.  Without beating about the bush, I will say the silent part out loud.  Quite by accident, I know a great deal more about Augustine, his thought, and his writings than Mr. Vance is ever likely to learn on purpose.  Ordinarily the quality of an American political candidate’s Augustinianism is not a pressing issue, but Mr. Vance has made it one by declaring that childless women among our citizens necessarily lack a vital connection with the fate of the nation.  "We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable…. It's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC--the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children."  I cannot say with certainty that no American politician dependent upon popular election for his position has ever uttered such a gratuitously stupid remark, but I must say I doubt it.

 

            Augustine, though not quite so fanatical about celibacy as some of the other early Church leaders, does make it clear in dozens of places, including two whole books explicitly devoted to  the subject of marriage, that wedlock is an inferior state, its redeeming virtue being that it turns to a socially useful good (the  continuity of the human race) an intrinsically evil phenomenon (the irrational supremacy of sensuality in the sexual act).  Much of the comedy of Chaucer’s brilliant presentation of the Woman from Bath is recreated from the rich controversial literature (mostly deeply misogynist) created by unconvincing clerical cheerleaders for celibacy over several centuries.

 

            But I will leave Senator Vance to wander alone and with unsure foot through the landscape of verbal pitfalls of his own digging.  He is a man who has talked a lot, often volubly and vehemently, and an army of Democratic Party gnomes are even now busy picking their way through a sizeable mountain of his careless obiter dicta.  There are bound to be many more remarks of the “cat lady” variety.  My own eccentric interest as a medievalist is with the feline-loving scribe of Reichenau a thousand years ago.  We do not know his name or his age.  That he wrote in Irish makes it virtually certain that he was an Irishman.  The text of his poem strongly suggests his amiability, self-effacement, cleverness, and studiousness.  His type should be well known to us from the sweet pages of a great book, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, by the late French monk Jean Leclercq, a Benedictine scholar in the still living medieval tradition himself.  The phrase “opus Dei,” the Work of God or the Divine Task, is probably most familiar to most readers, if known to them at all, in reference to a controversial society within the contemporary Roman Church.  But its main meaning in earlier centuries was the wholeness of the life lived by the black monks, usually referred to today as Benedictines.  It was a carefully organized life of regular, scheduled prayer and work, the work including the manufacture and study of books by scribes and scholars.  These were the men who did the heavy lifting of passing on the cultural history of ancient Greece and Rome through the centuries of the formation of Europe to the rebirth of learning in the Renaissance.  Many of these cultural heroes are known to us not at all, many others only by a name or a date in a necrology.  Concerning this particular monastic “cat man” we do not even know these things.  We know only that he must have been a lovely fellow, a friend to feline and man alike, and that he led a life of gentle, unostentatious utility, the kind of life that makes the world a better place.

 

 

 

Pangur Bán and I at work,

Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:

His whole instinct is to hunt,

Mine to free the meaning pent.

 

More than loud acclaim, I love

Books, silence, thought, my alcove.

Happy for me, Pangur Bán

Child-plays round some mouse’s den.

 

Truth to tell, just being here,

Housed alone, housed together,

Adds up to its own reward:

Concentration, stealthy art.

 

Next thing an unwary mouse

Bares his flank: Pangur pounces.

Next thing lines that held and held

Meaning back begin to yield.

 

All the while, his round bright eye

Fixes on the wall, while I

Focus my less piercing gaze

On the challenge of the page.

 

With his unsheathed, perfect nails

Pangur springs, exults and kills.

When the longed-for, difficult

Answers come, I too exult.

 

So it goes. To each his own.

No vying. No vexation.

Taking pleasure, taking pains,

Kindred spirits, veterans.

 

Day and night, soft purr, soft pad,

Pangur Bán has learned his trade.

Day and night, my own hard work

Solves the cruxes, makes a mark.  (trans. Seamus Heaney)

 

 

                 

 

 

Monasticats

One of the more complex pleasures of my profession is to have played some role in the education of brilliant undergraduate students who later go on to become famous scholars. If you have ever heard of William of Champeaux—which is at least possible—it is only because he was the teacher of Abelard, of whom you have certainly heard. One of several Abelardian eminences whose reflected glory combats the falling shadows of my senectitude is the provost of Georgetown, James J. O’Donnell. He has appeared once before in this blog, around which we conduct a laconic and intermittent correspondence.

O’Donnell has produced the definitive edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, but he is also what you would call a “general reader”. It is he, for example, who introduced me to Chic Sale’s The Specialist, the ne plus ultra in outhouse humor. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the “prince of travel writers,” died on June 10. As comment on this sad event, a week or so later Jim forwarded to me one of his favorite Fermorian prose gobbets, a description of a religious liturgy in a two-man Greek Orthodox mini-monastery:

The church, which is scarcely larger than the oratory of a castle, is dedicated to All the Saints. A lowered sanctuary lamp and the tapers that lighted the breviaries of Father Christopher and Bessarion dispelled a little the surrounding shadows. But outside their narrow pools of light, all was dark. I leant in one of the miserere-stalls that lined the small semicircular bay on the right of the chancel. The corresponding apsidal concavity on the left was lost in gloom. The three of us were alone in the church. As Bessarion chanted the office, I attempted to follow the neumes and flexions and quarter-tones in the oriental-sounding monody by the dots and the rise and fall of the slender curves and pothooks in scarlet ink above the text on the taper-lit page. The hair of both the monks, usually twisted into buns and tucked under their headgear, now tumbled in long twists half-way down their backs. From below, the candle-light threw peculiar shadows on the waxen features of Bessarion and sharply defined the deep eyesockets, the fiercely bridged nose and quizzically wrinkled brow of Father Christopher, when, censer in hand, a magnificent colossus in splendid and threadbare vestments, he emerged from the altar. His deep voice groaned the responses to the higher pitch of Bessarion. At a pause in the liturgy, the deacon swung the pyramidal lectern round on its pivot, turned the pages, and began intoning the panegyric of St. Demetrios. Makry the tom cat stalked slowly into the church and up to the rood-screen; the light from the central arch cast his elongated shadow portentously across the flagstones. Nimbly he leapt on the high, mother-of-pearl-inlaid octagonal table supporting the lectern and, curling his tail neatly round his haunches, sat gazing at the page. Without a break in the chanting, Bessarion pushed the raised paw away form the margin and gently stroked the tortoiseshell head as he sang; and slowly the long liturgy unfolded.

 

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)

A glorious piece of writing, indeed, a  tribute alike to an author’s power and a reader’s taste. I had not read the book from which it comes (Roumeli), and one detail in it captured my special attention: the tortoiseshell cat. That is because among the four-foot shelf of Fleming’s unpublished (because unwritten) books is a study of monks and animals: The Monastic Menagerie.

In it cats would claim an important chapter. The best known is probably the industrial-sized cat who is Saint Jerome’s constant eremitic companion, just as in the secular tradition, and for nearly identical reasons, he is the companion of Androcles. But the most delightful monasticat is surely the humble mouser, Pangur Bán, who crept about the scriptorium of the famous island abbey of Reichenau, in the Bodensee, probably sometime in the eighth or ninth century. In the margins of one of his manuscripts a nameless Irish monk, far from home, wrote in his native vernacular tongue a charming poem about Pangur Bán, whose Irish name means something like “Whitey,” “Snow White”, or rather (with a scriptural allusion to Mark 9:3) “Transfiguration White”.

Bulger Bán and Pangur Bán, alias McCavity, the Mystery Cat

"For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity." 

(Irish expatriates appear to be partial to the name “Whitey”, whether for felines or felons.)

Here are its opening lines:


I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net…

You should read the whole poem, which has been rendered into English by many eminent hands, including several well-known Irish poets. I want to recommend this translation of the English medievalist Robin Flower, because he so clearly presents the poem’s actual subject, which is that special mode of scriptural exegesis called by the monks the lectio divina. The lectio divina (“sacred reading”) was to the pleasures of the heart and mind what the Slow Food Movement is to the pleasures of the tongue and gullet. The medieval monks savored their readings in the Bible, which they sometimes compared to the extraction of honey from the comb or marrow from the bone. For they sought what they called the “spiritual sense” of a text, its veiled or allegorical meaning. That is what the old Irish poet meant by capturing a meaning with the net of his thought.

Reichenau today

Our own English poetry was born of the monastic life. Bede tells us as a notable wonder the story of the poet Caedmon, an uneducated agricultural worker in the coeducational monastery at Whitby in Yorkshire. Though illiterate, Caedmon, through divine inspiration, was able to transpose into English verse the Bible stories read to him by the brothers. Bede draws his very traditional monastic simile from the bovines rather than the felines: “And he was able to learn all that he heard, and, keeping it all in mind, just as a clean animal chewing cud, turned it into the sweetest song.”

The word hermit literally means a “desert-dweller,” and the old practitioners of the lectio divina associated themselves metaphorically with the four little critters of the wasteland (Proverbs 30:24) that are “the least upon the earth, yet exceeding wise”: the ant, the grasshopper, the rock-dwelling rabbit, and the lizard (stilio). It is this association that explains the recurrent zoology and entomology of learned medieval and Renaissance pictorial treatments of ascetic themes.

Saint Jerome with friends