The Myth of Orpheus, continued…

Orphic Mythology in Medieval Christian Commentary:

Boethius; William of Conches; Bernardus Silvestris

     If Orpheus’ music could pacify the breasts of wild beasts, and cause even rocks to follow him, it must have been because these beings, like all things, were, as Virgil says, filled with soul.

This was the conviction of the Orphics, who taught a form of pantheism or hylozoism, according to which the entire material world was enlivened and alive with the One Soul-Substance, that of the Godhead itself, which underwent an endless series of transmigrations or reincarnations and yet remained the same.

Music, moreover, was the most potent way of reawakening the indwelling divine soul to an awareness of its celestial origins, nature, and unbroken connection with the Godhead, since, in its celestial pre-existence, the otherworldly harmony of the spheres was its birthsong.  Because the sensual din of the world and the physical senses inevitably drowns out this transcendental harmony, the duty of the Orphic is to stop up his outer ears, to mortify and anesthetize his physical senses, and cultivate instead the inner senses with which alone the heavenly music can be heard.

The Orphic way of the salvation of the soul is thus (as Socrates describes the life of the philosopher in the Phaedo) a withdrawing of the soul from the world and the body into the stillness of the divine world that resides in its own depths.  The Orphic becomes an immortal god because he has lived the Orphic life, the life of one who is aware of the celestial origins and essentially divine nature of his soul– his “self”, as both the Orphics and later the Gnostics called it–, an entity that therefore utterly transcends the mortal world.

It is this fundamental Orphic doctrine of man’s essential divinity that resonates in Scipio Africanus’ advice to his grandson at the end of the Somnium: 

Strive on indeed, and be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body.  For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by the finger.  Know, then, that you are a god, if a god is that which…rules, governs, and moves the body over which it is set, just as the supreme God above us rules this universe.  And just as the eternal God moves the universe, which is partly mortal, so an immortal spirit moves the frail body.

The Orphic myth was, like all the myths of classical antiquity, the subject of a long and rich tradition of allegorical commentary in the Christian Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Here, once again, its principal moral message of withdrawing the rational soul from the contaminating influence of the physical senses, the carnal passions, and the temporal things of this world was assimilated, more or less unaltered, into orthodox Christian soteriology.

In the twelfth meter of Book III of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy begins,

Happy is he who can look into the shining spring of good: happy is he who can break the heavy chains of earth…,

and then, after She narrates the myth of Orpheus in detail, the meter concludes:

The fable applies to all of you who seek to raise your minds to sovereign day.  For whoever is conquered and turns his eyes back to the pit of hell, looking into the inferno, loses all the excellence he has gained.

In the eleventh century, William of Conches (Christian Platonist and commentator on Macrobius’ commentary on the Somnium) explains:

Orpheus is used to designate any wise and eloquent man, and hence the name Orpheus is as if to say orea phone, or “best voice”.  His wife is Eurydice, or, that is, natural concupiscence which is joined to everyone…But this natural concupiscence is well named “Eurydice”, or “judgment of the good”, for whatever anyone judges to be good, whether rightly or wrongly, he desires.  This concupiscence while it wandered in the meadow was loved by Aristaeus. Aristaeus is used to represent virtue, for ares means “virtue”.  But this virtue loved that Eurydice, or natural concupiscence, as it wondered through the meadow, or through terrestrial things, which like a meadow now flourish and now dry up.  That is, virtue follows concupiscence always, because it needs to take it away from earthly things.  But Eurydice fled from Aristaeus, for natural concupiscence contradicts virtue, since it desires its own pleasure, which virtue forbids.  But then it dies and descends to Hell, or, that is, to delight in terrestrial things.  When his wife dies, Orpheus sorrows, because when a wise man sees his effort and delight residing in temporal things, he is displeased.  But even though he may overcome everything else with his wise music, he cannot overcome the sorrow for his lost wife, because even if a wise man with his eloquence and wisdom can overcome the vices of others, he cannot take away his own concupiscence from temporal things.  Hence he sorrows greatly. But Orpheus descends to Hell to remove his wife as a wise man descends to a knowledge of terrestrial things so that, having seen that there is no good in them, he may withdraw his concupiscence from them.  But a law is given to him that he must not look back, for “No man putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” [Luke 9:62]

The imagery of this text should by now be familiar.  I draw your attention to three interesting points, however:

First, the incidental analogy to Jesus’ admonition to the plowman not to look behind him (i.e., not to shirk the duties of the Christian life), was indeed regularly linked to the myth of Orpheus looking back at Eurydice–both exemplifying the Orpheo-Platonic imperative, now identified with the Christian, to keep the eye of the soul trained upward upon the heavenly invisibilia.   With these two loci, moreover, the biblical narrative of Lot’s wife looking back at the burning city of Sodom and in punishment changed by God into a pillar of salt, was also often included as another admonitory tale about the perils of the same errant earthly attitude.

Secondly, one can see again (as we saw when discussing medieval marriage) that the mythical pairs Aristaeus and Eurydice, and Orpheus and Eurydice, are pre-eminently allegorical symbols of the male reason and female sensuality, whose hierarchical relationship is turned “upso-doun”, as Chaucer would say, when Eurydice flees Aristaeus-virtue and goes hankering after terrestrial things, from which Orpheus-reason must then rescue her.

The final point to note is the equation implicitly drawn by William between Orpheus’ reason/virtue/wisdom and his “wise music”, all of which are merely images for the same essential divine “self” which must assert itself against the downward gravitational pull of the world.

Another important allegorical interpretation of the Orpheus myth comes from the commentary on theAeneid of the great twelfth-century poet and doctor of the cathedral school of Chartres, Bernardus Silvestris—a text whose Platonic and Orphic afflatus is unmistakable:

The descent into Hell is quadriform:  there is a descent of nature, another of virtue, another of vice, and another of artifice.  The natural descent is the birth of man, for in that event the soul naturally begins to be in this fallen region and thus to descend to Hell, to recede from its divinity, and soon to bend toward vices and to consent to sensual pleasures.  But this way is common to all.  There is another descent of virtue which is made when a wise man descends to worldly things to consider them, not so that he may place his intention in them, but so that their fragility being known, he may cast them aside and hastily return to the realm of invisible things and know the Creator more clearly through a knowledge of the creatures [cf. Rom. 1:20].  In this way Orpheus and Hercules, who were called wise men, descended.  There is a third descent of vice, which is common, in which one is brought to temporal things in such a way that the whole intention is placed in them and they are served with the whole mind, nor is the soul moved from them any more.  In this way we read that Eurydice descended to Hell. Moreover, from this descent there is no return…

With the myth and its allegorical tradition in mind, one can see, as I said before, that Shakespeare’s allusion to the Orphic motives of music’s ability to tranquilize the passions of wild horses and mobilize trees and rocks is hardly merely decorative. As a symbol of the Old Law of Justice, the implacable Shylock would have been impervious to the efficacy of Orpheus’ music, though it moved even the vengeful fiends of Hell to mercy and love.  As Lorenzo implies, “he hath no music” in his immortal soul.  In Orphic terms, his soul is vacant of the divine music that is innate and immanent in all men–or ought to be–, and as such, his whole “intention” (to use Bernard’s noun) is upon worldly wealth.

Orphism…Its Origins and Continuing Influence…

Orpheus, Founder of Music…

His Myth…Orpheus and Eurydice…

Death at the Hands of  Dionysius’ Maenads…

     The reference to Orpheus in The Merchant of Venice, in the context of Lorenzo’s disquisition on the harmony of the spheres, is also conventional, but not merely so, since with it Shakespeare transports the reader back to the original religious matrix of all of these symbols and ideas.

The Orphic cult was centered in southern Italy in the sixth century B.C., where and when Pythagoras taught.  It is probable that Pythagoras was an initiate of the Orphic mysteries, and there is no doubt that he, his fellow philosophers Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Plato, as well as the poets Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes (the author of the Argonautica), and Ovid (whose motive of “metamorphosis” is a literary conceit inspired by the Orphic doctrine of transmigration of souls), just to name a few of the ancients, were profoundly indebted to Orphic ideas.

We have already encountered, in our texts from Cicero and Virgil, direct evidence of that widespread indebtedness.  Orphic ideas continued to influence the Neoplatonists Plotinus, Porphyry, Macrobius, and Proclus in pagan late antiquity. And, indeed, they profoundly shaped Christian thought from the time of Clement and Origen in second-century Alexandria, through the Cappadocian Fathers of the third and fourth, the moral philosophy of Boethius and the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius in the early sixth, the Platonist revival of twelfth-century Chartres (especially the poetry and theology of Alan of Lisle and Bernardus Silvestris), and the overtly Orphic geography of the underworld and conception of the purgation of sins in Dante’s Commedia.

In the late-fifteenth century, the Florentine Christian Neoplatonists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola expressly identified themselves as adherents of the so-called Orphic theology.  And in the early seventeenth century, the eminently sensible Mr. Shakespeare makes his King Lear an Orphic when he laments to Cordelia:

You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

 

In all references to the original corpus of Orphic texts (of which, of course, little survives), the same complex of doctrines and beliefs is always assumed:  the idea of the pre-existence of souls in a pure, disembodied state in the celestial aether; the doctrine succinctly expressed by the Greek formula sema soma (body tomb)–that is, the idea of birth in the world and the body as a fall, death, burial or imprisonment of the soul–; the necessity therefore of the soul to purify itself of the contaminating taints of the body and the senses both in this world and the next if it is to be saved; its expectation of a retributive afterlife in which the just will be rewarded with bliss and the unjust punished; the belief in transmigration of souls or metempsychosis, according to which the soul must undergo a series of incarnations in this world and purgations in the next before it may escape the “wheel of fire” and fly back into the pure aether whence it came.  This, of course, is the complex of ideas assumed and promulgated in Plato, in Cicero’s Somnium, as in Virgil’s sixth Aeneid.  And given that Pythagoras was a disciple of the Orphic cult, it is hardly, then, a coincidence that music played such a central role in his philosophy.

 

Orpheus is by tradition the original master of the humane art of music, and music is, accordingly, one of the leitmotives of Orphic myth.  In the usual manner of Greek myth, Orpheus is a demigod, half mortal and half divine, the son of a Thracian King and his queen Calliope (not coincidentally the Muse of epic song).  As his parentage would suggest, he was a great musician:  the culture hero, in fact, who was the first to bring the civilizing arts of both poetry and music to the rude Greeks of the pre-historic age.

Orpheus, we are assured, lived in the age of other heroes and demigods–in the generation before Odysseus and the Trojan War, to be precise.   He was not, of course, the originator of music—the gods were.  Athena had invented the flute, although she refused to play it lest in doing so her face should become unpleasantly contorted.  Pan is credited with the manufacture of the reed-pipe, and Hermes the shepherd’s pipe.  Hermes also invented the seven-stringed lyre (one string for each tone of the major scale), and presented it to Apollo, who drew from its strings sounds so entrancing that when he played, the gods of Olympus forgot all else; indeed, even Zeus paused from his philandering for a time.

But, among mortals, Orpheus was the greatest musician, and for good reason. Apollo himself presented him with a lyre, his Muse mother and her sisters instructed him in its use, and his fortuitous upbringing in Thrace (home of Dionysus) inevitably nurtured his young musical talent.

So accomplished did it become that it was said that when Orpheus played his lyre on the Thracian mountainsides, its sweet sound uprooted trees, caused rocks to move, deflected the courses of rivers, and pacified the wild beasts, all of which left their wonted habitats to follow him.  All of nature, animate and inanimate, sensate and insensate, seemed to be affected by his celestial melody.

 

After a visit to Egypt, Orpheus joined Jason’s Argonauts, and on several occasions saved the expedition from imminent disaster.  When the sailors became weary, he would strike his lyre and inspire them to row with renewed zeal.  If a quarrel threatened, he would play so tenderly that the most aggrieved spirits would be tranquilized and forget their anger.  Orpheus saved the Argonauts, too, from the Sirens.  Knowing that the sailors would be tempted to listen to their enthralling song, Orpheus took up his lyre and played a melody so beautiful and clear that it drowned out the sound of the Sirens’ fatal voices.  Thus the Argo was set back on course and the winds sped her away from that most dangerous of places.

 

On his return, Orpheus met and married Eurydice, but their joy was brief.  After the wedding, while walking with her bridesmaids and picking flowers in a pleasant vernal meadow, Eurydice was accosted by one of the guests, Aristaeus, who tried to force her; fleeing, she trod on a serpent and died of its bite.

Overwhelmed with grief, Orpheus determined to go down to the world of death and bring Eurydice back.  To enter where no mortal may, he struck his lyre and charmed both the ferryman Charon and the ferocious canine guardian of hell’s gates, the three-headed dog Cerberus.

As he passed through Tartarus, his music gave temporary respite to the suffering sinners:  for a moment, Ixion’s wheel ceased to revolve, Sisyphus sat peacefully upon his stone, and Tantalus listened, forgetting his hunger and thirst.  For the first time, the faces of the dread Furies were wet with tears, and even Hades and Persephone, king and queen of the underworld, were moved to pity.  With unwonted tears flowing down his cheeks, the implacable King of the Dead could not refuse Orpheus’ request, which he granted on only one condition:  that he not look back at Eurydice as she followed him, until they both reached the upper world.

The condition accepted, Orpheus re-ascended with Eurydice following close behind, guided through the darkness by the sound of his music. But he was all the while desperate for some assurance that she had not wandered into danger, and when, upon reaching the sunlight, he looked anxiously backwards, she was still in the cavern.  Thus, he lost her forever.

Orpheus tried to rush back into Tartarus after her, but he was prevented.  Though the exemption had been granted on a few occasions–to Hercules, Theseus, and now Orpheus himself–, no more than one descent into the underworld could be allotted to living mortals.

 

In utter desolation, Orpheus returned to earth alone.  In his bereavement, he forsook the company of men, and in fidelity to the memory of his dead wife, he brusquely rebuffed the advances of the women who hoped to replace her.  Comfortless save for his lyre, Orpheus wandered through the wild solitudes of Thrace,  playing for the rocks, rivers, trees, and beasts which were his only companions.

One day, when the jubilant mysteries of Dionsysus were being celebrated, Orpheus, in his grief and anger, neglected to honour the god.  Indeed, some say that he taught other sacred mysteries to the inhabitants of Thrace.  Thus, every morning he would rise to greet the dawn on the summit of Mt. Pangaeum, preaching that Apollo, the sun, was the greatest of gods.

Affronted, Dionysus set the Maenads upon him.  Offended not only by Orpheus’ insult to their god but his general rebuff to womankind, the Maenads waited until their husbands had entered the temple of Apollo where Orpheus served as priest; then they murdered them and tore Orpheus limb from limb.

Orpheus’ head was unceremoniously thrown into the river Hebrus; but it floated, still singing, down to the sea, whose waves carried it to the isle of Lesbos.  Eventually it was found by the Muses, and along with his limbs which they tearfully collected, it was buried at the foot of Mount Olympus, where to this day the nightingales sing sweeter than anywhere else in the world.

We flatter ourselves that we are very sophisticated about sex, but that sophistication is at most a technical one.  One hears parents boasting, ironically, that their teenagers know more about the birds and the bees than they ever did when they were young.  They boast of this in the same way that they boast about the younger generation’s precocious facility with computers (another dubious accomplishment, when the same children are unable to read, write, or do sums as well as their parents at their age, nor have they the minimal cultural literacy attained from having acquired an education in that antediluvian epoch when schools still taught the rudiments of history, philosophy, and literature).

What these proud parents really mean is that their children now have more experience with sex, not that they have any deeper understanding of what has, until recently, always been regarded as a mystery.  As Dr. Johnson has said, “Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge”.  In spite of the word’s etymology, one doesn’t require experience with something to be an expert.  The best expert on drowning is the man who can swim; the man with too much experience of it will have nothing to say on the subject.

Today, our casual and routine familiarity with sex has bred a kind of childlike innocence about it.  In pagan antiquity, Eros was feared and respected as a capricious and omnipotent daimon (as Socrates describes him in the Symposium).  It was not until the Renaissance that he metamorphosed into the cuddly putto with whom we are still familiar from Valentine’s cards.  But even in the Renaissance, everyone knew that Cupid’s innocence was a sentimental snare.  With all our supposed modern skepticism and sophistication, we tend to take Eros and the erotic at face value.

Historically, the Sexual Revolution has ushered in an era of unprecedented ignorance about the deeper moral and philosophical meaning of human sexuality.  Social revolutions are almost always intellectually beggaring in this way, insofar as they require that revolutionary societies unlearn the accumulated moral and social wisdom of the immemorial civilization that preceded them, while rarely knowing how to replace that wisdom with anything wiser.  Revolutions are secular initiation rites, dromena of death and rebirth.  The religious mysteries of rebirth (of which social revolutions are pale ideological imitations) were salvific inasmuch as there remained a number of adults around (the elders of the tribe) to shepherd the neophytes prudently into mature membership in the community.  The revolutionary dromenon, on the other hand, too frequently begins by lining all adults over a certain age up against the wall, and ends when everyone in the revolutionary community has been turned, culturally and socially, into a prattling child again.  As in post-Maoist China or post-Soviet Russia, revolutionary societies have often to wait another civilizational epoch before they rediscover those sane and workable social arrangements (marriage, the family, democracy, the rule of law, the rights of the individual, the unhindered exchange of goods) that the revolutionary new-born have thrown out with the proverbial bathwater.  The essential fact about revolutions is that they revolve; they roll back the wheel of human progress to the point that they are sometimes forced to reinvent the wheel.

The Sexual Revolution’s intoxicating poetry of “freedom” and “liberation”, while the wonted historical language of revolution, ought to strike us in retrospect as at least paradoxical, if not positively Orwellian.   One remembers that the serial imposition around the world of Marxist tyrannies by the Soviet military was also described as movements of national “liberation”.   One recalls too that contemporary with the Sexual Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States appropriated the language and imagery of the Exodus, when Moses shepherded the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.   But whatever it was, it is hard to describe the condition in which mankind languished for all those millennia before we were delivered by our sexual emancipators as slavery, not to mention the place to which they have taken us as the Promised Land.  Forty long years in the wilderness is probably an optimistic description of life in America since Woodstock and Roe v. Wade.

Liberated from what, exactly?  I doubt that Americans or Europeans on the eve of the Summer of Love felt themselves sexually enslaved.  Those who promised emancipation were hardly responding to the seething discontent of ordinary folk who woke up in 1969 and could no longer tolerate laboring for one more day in the pharaonic brickyards of conventional courtship and marriage.  Whatever grinding servitude from which it affected to deliver mankind, the Sexual Revolution had nothing in common with the popular peasant and proletarian revolts of the early twentieth and previous centuries.  Even accounting for the rhetorical hyperbole of revolutionary propaganda, its prophets could never have brought themselves to say, except as a winking pun, “Chaste and abstinent of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

All populist political revolutions are to some extent aristocratically conceived and driven, but the Sexual Revolution was surely the most top-heavy amongst them.  Its exponents were a tiny intellectual and economic elite of moral bolshevists who had tasted the forbidden fruit of sexual “freedom” and were avid to democratize the pleasure.  “Free love” (as old as Caligula’s Rome, in fact) had always worked for them, inasmuch as they could afford to arrange for discreet abortions, or set up their mistresses in convenient pieds a terre, while packing off any illegitimate offspring to boarding schools.  Free love still works in this way for the rich and famous:  bored hotel heiresses, Hollywood stars and starlets, overpaid rock musicians and athletes, New World aristocrats like the Kennedys, French and Italian politicians, American presidents who mistake the Oval Office for the Playboy Mansion.  It hasn’t worked out quite so well for the urban Black underclass.

After the dismal track record of revolution in the first half of the twentieth century—with its gulags, re-education camps, purges, and mass murders–, one might have thought that when the sexual liberators came along at the end of the Sixties to offer us another one, we would have said, No thanks.   But insurrection was then in the air, and there’s nothing that an independent-minded free-thinker can resist less than the coquettish lowing of the herd of independent minds.  In retrospect, what strikes one most about the heroic non-conformity of the Sixties revolutionaries was their pusillanimous conformism.  It should have struck us right away:  Non-conformists do not generally wear uniforms.  Genuine dissidents risk ostracism, opprobrium, and jail; but no one advocating the joys of free love was incommoded in the least on account of his brave new ideas.  Neither Playboy nor Hustler had their offices raided or their presses shut down.  The smashers of sexual taboos were never forced to circulate their manifestoes in samizdat copies cranked out on old mimeograph machines in dank basements or dingy garrets.   The heroism of the sexual rebels was, in short, a completely dangerless heroism.  A Christian is at greater peril today of being hauled up before the authorities for calling sodomy a sin than anyone in the Sixties would have been for openly practising it.

 

No one denies that something radically new was fecundated in the mud of Woodstock.   But whatever it was, it was not from the marriage of true minds.   Taking their cues from the Orwellian discourse of revolution (war is peace; dictatorship is democracy; slavery is liberation), the sexual rebels prettified lust as love.  For all of their free-thinking and iconoclasm, they lacked the courage to forgo such a sentimental and bourgeois evasion.  Under love’s sweet auspices, they rehabilitated into a virtue what had always been regarded by men of self-reflection as either a resistible human frailty or a feral vice.

It was the ethical first principle of the Sexual Revolution that sexual pleasure is in itself a human desideratum, and from it have followed all of the arguments of our age in defense of unrestricted abortion, universal contraception, and homosexuality.  If the joy of sex is innocent, then it is every man’s “birthright”, as Joseph Sobran pointed out; and if it is “natural” (as the anthropologists of the period informed us with academic solemnity), it is man’s moral obligation to discover his sexual nature in his quest to discover who he really is.  No person, endowed with this right and seeking to fulfill his destiny, ought to be made to suffer hardship or impediment, not even if it is the direct result of his own actions.  Pregnancy or parenthood, when unintended, are extreme penalties for what is a perfectly “normal and healthy” human activity.  And if the pleasure of sex is a natural right, then freedom to experience it, scarcely different from freedom of speech or association, must be vigilantly protected and guaranteed.

It follows that birth control and abortion are not merely expedients to facilitate life-style choices, but rights essential to man’s exercise of a fundamental human liberty.  Naturally, there is nothing sacred about childbirth, marriage, parenthood, or the family; on the contrary, these are often fatal obstacles in the way of self-realization.  As a universal right, sexual rapture shatters the “stereotypes” of traditional gender roles; women, no less than men (as feminists have assiduously argued), mustn’t have their personal development delayed by pregnancy or motherhood, and are equally entitled to their orgasms.  If man is called to explore his sexuality, what can be wrong with homosexuality? adultery? pedophilia? polygamy?  Nothing whatsoever.  As Sobran has said, “Sample every exotic delicacy on the sensual smorgasbord.  Sex is free.”

Leaving aside its disastrous social and economic consequences, there is little evidence that in pursuit of his sexual destiny mankind has finally achieved eudaimonia, or that the release of our pent-up libido has inseminated any great cultural or intellectual flowering.  The signal new literary genre of the Sixties was the sex manual, and its ongoing spawn of magazine articles on how to “spice up” your sex life (so bland and commonplace has it apparently become that it can only go down with added seasoning).    One would have expected that the Sexual Revolution would inaugurate a renaissance in erotic poetry, but it has produced nothing to compare with the Song of Songs, Catullus, the Goliard poets, the trouveres, the medieval courtly romances, or the sonnet sequences of the Renaissance, nor does today’s pornography approach the artistry of anything penned or painted through the centuries of Christian rectitude and Victorian prudery–a persuasive enough argument for sexual restraint, if only on aesthetic grounds.   In music, we had the Seventies disco beat to grind by, and more recently the brutally misogynist lyrics of rap and hip hop to incite us to violent lust, but nothing as wittily provocative as 1950s rock and roll.  A good deal of what comes out of the mass-market fashion houses, advertising offices, and film and TV studios today can only be described as pornography-lite, whose effect is to keep the populace in a permanent state of semi-arousal, ready at a moment’s notice for intercourse as the ancient Spartans were ready for war, a pitiable condition akin to that of the herms that once marked the boundaries of ancient Roman fields or the Priapic statuary that adorned their gardens, with the exception that their raison d’etre was to encourage fertility, whereas our chronic sexual readiness is usually barren.

 

If the rapture of sex is a human telos, then, of course, restraint and self-mastery are no longer virtues; on the contrary, restraint is “repression”.   How risible such an idea would have been considered by our ancestors, for whom, until fifty years ago, self-mastery was the defining virtue of man.

From the very dawn of Western philosophy in ancient Greece, no school of thought, religious sect, or civilized nation has disagreed on this.  It is one of the longest-running topoi in literary and philosophical history that what distinguishes man from the beasts, and defines his essential human nature, is his rational soul.  The exercise of his human freedom and realization of his essential self depend upon right reason, directing an active will in pursuit of the good, rather than passively succumbing to involuntary biological instincts and animal appetites.  The latter is the opposite of liberty; it is slavery (another ancient topos).   And the enslavement of the rational spirit to the animal passions effectively denatures man, degrading him ontologically to a rank on the chain of being lower than he was born to.   The cult of sexual passion is, on this order, precisely the forfeiture of man’s birthright:  not self-discovery, but self-abnegation.

Many of the critics of the Sexual Revolution have described its philosophy as “neo-paganism”, but this is an insult to paleo-paganism.  None of the ancient pagans with whom I am familiar encouraged the indulgence of carnal desire, not even Epicurus, who regarded inordinate bodily pleasure as contemptible, and almost certain to render its subject liable to even greater pain.   Classical mythology is a repository of admonitory tales and moral exempla warning of the folly and peril of subordinating reason to sensuality, adulterous passion above all.   Greek mythology veritably begins with Paris’ world-destroying lust for Helen, which re-asserts itself in Achilles’ irresponsible lust for Briseis and Patroclus, and Odysseus’ idle lust for Calypso.  Virgil answers Homer with Dido’s maniacal, suicidal lust for Aeneas, while Apollonius of Rhodes relates the tragedy of Medea’s demonic lust for Jason.  Ovid retails the mutilating lust of Tereus for Philomela, the degrading, feral lust of Apollo for Daphne, the homicidal lust of Venus for Adonis, the unnatural lust of Pasiphae for her beautiful bull, the family-wrecking lust of Phaedra for Hippolytus, the auto-erotic lust of Narcissus for himself, the deranged lust of Pygmalion for a statue, and the demeaning lust of Jupiter for practically every man and woman else.  Ovid also mercilessly ridicules the emasculating lust of Mars caught in the net of Vulcan with Venus (the decisive riposte to the Sixties slogan, Make love, not war), and mockingly enumerates the rules of romantic passion in his hilariously satirical Ars Amatorica.

 

It was hardly the Church, then, that invented the enmity between the spirit and the flesh; that enmity has been experienced by every human person who has ever achieved consciousness.  The revolutionaries of the Sixties, on the other hand, seem hardly to be aware that body and soul are different human principles, having different loyalties and ends.   It is one thing when materialists deny the possibility of a metaphysical proposition such as the soul; it is rather another when they deny even the plain empirical evidence for the existence of divergent human tendencies and aspirations.  Have they never felt the temptation to eat too much, and resisted?  And if so, on what grounds do they explain the opposite pull of their bodily appetite on the one hand and that impulse not to give in to it on the other?

The predicament of human consciousness is duality:  the ordeal of being torn apart by the opposites.  The pagan emblem for this condition is Hercules at the Crossroads; the Christian is the Universal Man on the Cross, sectioned by the vertical of the spirit and the horizontal of the flesh.  In the pre-conscious infancy of the race (as in the infancy of every individual), man once lived in a paradise of unitary certainty, directed by instincts inherited from his evolutionary past, and as yet unconscious of the opposites (subject and object, good and evil, spirit and flesh).  The myth of the Fall records the felix culpa by which the curse of consciousness came into the world.  In moods of weariness, we yearn for the recovery of that lost paradise.  The trajectory of a life driven automatically by instinct is blissfully straight and clear, but it evades the duty that consciousness has imposed upon us, however much we dream of sailing down a turnpike on cruise control, never having to endure the Herculean agon of choosing.

 

For all its heroic pretensions, the morality of the Sexual Revolution was a singularly submissive and regressive one, as if men were doomed by fate never to move beyond their animal ancestry; or, rather, as if men were positively called to return to it.  This takes respect for tradition well beyond anything a progressive thinker would normally dare to entertain.

The reductive modern definition of what is “natural” is part of the problem. Long before Darwin, the ancient Platonists and Stoics understood well enough that man inherits from nature his carnal and biological appetites; but they recognized other spiritual factors that were no less a part of his essential nature and birthright, all the more so, in fact, because inherited from that higher and universal Nature that suffuses and rationally governs the cosmos.

Two millennia later, Milton still remembers this opposition in Paradise Lost, when the fallen Adam, gazing upon the amorous dalliances enjoyed by the generation before the Flood, imagines that “here Nature seems fulfill’d in all her ends”.  To which Michael replies:

Judge not what is best

By pleasure, though to Nature seeming meet,

Created as thou art, to nobler end

Holy and pure, conformity divine.

 

Commenting earlier on the same scene, Michael invokes man’s higher Nature explicitly:

Thir Maker’s Image…then

Forsook them, when themselves they vilifi’d

To serve ungovern’d appetite, and took

His Image whom they served, a brutish vice…

Disfiguring not God’s likeness, but their own,

Or if his likeness, by themselves defac’t

While they pervert pure Nature’s healthful rules

To loathsome sickness…

 

Rousseau, Darwin, and Freud have by now effectively defenestrated the higher Nature, and convinced us to seek our authentic selves in the lower.  Accepting this reductive and one-sided definition of man, many now find suspect and dispensable all of the moral norms and social institutions of a supposedly artificial and merely customary civilization (even though they were “selected” after millennia of adaption and perfection by a process precisely analogical to that of Darwinian evolution).

They are like the rambler whom Chesterton imagines happening upon a fence in an open field; not seeing the use for it, he determines to tear it down.  But it is only the man, as Chesterton admonishes, who, seeing the use of a thing, is in any position to recommend its removal.   Those who equate man’s end with sexual pleasure see no use for moral fences; they seem completely oblivious, besides, of the fact that the greatest poets and sages throughout Western history could hardly imagine life—at least, not human life–without them.

What is love?  ‘Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Hey bud, can you spare some change for a bite to eat and a birth control pill?  No?  OK, have a nice day.

 

The March for Life in Washington once again attracted more than a quarter of a million participants.  And the Washington Post, once again, estimated the crowd at a paltry “few thousand”.   One wonders how, year after year, the mainstream media get away with such deliberate distortions–remembering, that is, that journalists are, above all, disinterested reporters of the facts, and that the purported liberal bias in the media is a paranoiac specter conjured up by the vast right-wing conspiracy…, blah, blah, blah.

Perhaps the liberal press has been enumerating the pro-life battalions as fetuses, who do not, of course, count as full, non-fractionated human “persons”.

A modest proposal for the Marchers:  Next year in Washington, find a public park, truck in port-o-potties, pitch a half-dozen tents, abominate the wealthy, and humbly congratulate yourselves on belonging to the “99%”.   The estimates will then certainly run into the millions.

Coincident with the March, President Obama issued a press release, intoning solemnly that abortion is “a sensitive and divisive issue”, and assuring us at the same time that “all Americans” are determined “to prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant women and mothers, prevent the need for abortion, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption”.  Nonetheless, he concluded, “I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose.”

A woman’s right to choose?  Several decades after Roe v. Wade, you would think that the pro-abortion movement might have come up with a new euphemism, just for variety’s sake.  Would someone please lend them a thesaurus?  And “encourage healthy relationships”?  What does that signify, other than that our modern Demosthenes couldn’t quite bring himself to pronounce the outmoded word “marriage”?

As A-Uniter-And–Not-A-Divider, President Obama must be gratified that all Americans are in agreement on the desiderata he enumerated, while all the more chagrined that pro-lifers remain so recalcitrantly “divisive” on just how to achieve them.  (Author’s Note:  A Uniter is one who agrees with liberal ideology, e.g., a Democrat.  Anyone who doesn’t is “divisive”, e.g., a conservative Republican.)

 

President Obama did not say exactly how he would “prevent unintended pregnancies”.  But he gave us a not so subtle hint a couple of weeks after the Washington March, when it was revealed that as part of his new health care bill (hidden agenda, anyone?) employers–including Catholic churches, hospitals, schools, and charitable organizations–would be compelled to provide “free” contraceptives and abortifacients for their employees.  And wouldn’t you just know it, the jumpy forces of division were on the march once again.

When the Church objected to the President’s edict, on the retrograde principle that it violated every American citizen’s fundamental right to religious liberty, Obama, in a subsequent “compromise” (he’s a Uniter, after all), offered no longer to compel Catholic employers but only their health insurance companies to provide free contraceptives and abortifacients.  (Author’s Note.  Free:  Something the Government gives some citizens by coercing others to pay for it.)   Temporarily transcending its perennial divisiveness, the Church was apparently appeased, even though Obama’s compromise would continue to coerce Catholics–only this time through the deniable intermediary of their health insurance providers–to confer a benefit upon their employees that fundamentally violates their religious consciences.

But then, immediately, the divisive defenders of capitalism and constitutional liberty objected in turn on the principle that the State has no right to compel any legal business enterprise to give away its products or services for “free”.  Some were even so intemperate as to compare Obama’s generous enslavement of the insurance companies to the purported needs of ordinary Americans, to Hugo Chavez-style nationalization.

What’s a Uniter to do?  To quote one of Obama’s forerunners in the politics of mutual respect and compromise, “Can’t we all just get along?”

 

One is grateful to the President if only for the bracing clarity with which his new initiative epitomizes the culture of economic entitlement and sexual insouciance that has been the Left’s ongoing bequest to America for almost fifty years now.  Since the Sixties, liberalism has thriven by disinterring ever more arcane “needs”, and compassionately offering to satisfy them at taxpayers’ expense.  (Author’s Note:  As the late Joseph Sobran has enucleated three of the essential terms of contemporary liberal political discourse, greed is when someone wants to keep more of his own money; need is when someone wants more of what the former wants to keep; and compassion is when Government arranges the transfer.)  Time was when politicians bribed their electorate with promises of taxpayer-subsidized shelter and alimentation–the proverbial chicken in every pot; now it is a prophylactic in every pocket and a morning-after pill on every bedside table.  That’s progress, at least as statists define it.

Does Obama really believe that the current and protracted epidemic of “unintended pregnancies” (and thence, the need for abortions to “cure” mothers of them) is all the result of condoms and birth control pills being too expensive for the huddled masses of teens and undergraduates to afford?  One doubts it; but that has never stopped a compassionate politician or community organizer from asking us to believe such things.  It has been forty years now since contraceptives have been widely available (ubiquitous, in fact), during which the rates of teen and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, leading to the present abortion holocaust, have risen into the stratosphere.  The research data have unanimously confirmed the correlation for decades now, but the devout of Planned Parenthood continue to profess it on faith that if only we distributed enough condoms and birth control pills, abortion would disappear, and we would enter upon a new Golden Age of peace, prosperity, and social justice.  Today in the United States, when every teenage girl is presented with a prescription for the Pill as a kind of gift upon her first issue of blood, and condoms are pressed into the hands of stupefied pre-pubescents in primary schools, four out of every ten births occur out of wedlock, and a million plus abortions are performed annually.  That’s some contraceptive failure rate.

That more widely available contraception begets more abortions is a veritable law of human behavior, of course:  it is as certain as that fire insurance leads to more fires:  an unintended but hardly unforeseen consequence predicted by actuaries in the nineteenth century even before fire insurance became mandatory and universal.  The sexual liberators of the Sixties, concomitantly, could hardly have failed to foresee the results of their campaign to issue universal contraceptive insurance to an endangered population, against the benighted resistance of an antediluvian Church doctrine.  Merchandise casual fornication as seemingly riskless, sever the moral nexus between present mirth and future pain (inasmuch as marriage, childbirth, and parenthood are now defined as penal), and inevitably more and more children will play with matches and occasionally get burnt.  (What does one imagine will happen when society’s message to a sexually pyromaniacal teenager is that, since he’s going to “do it anyway”, he might as well do it outfitted in a community-approved and issued fire-retardant suit, and that, in any case, the blaze can be surgically extinguished at any point later on?  That’s what the word “safe” in “safe sex” really signifies in our sex-fueled youth culture:  not immunity from sexually transmitted diseases–a secondary selling-point, to be sure–, but immunity to make the beast with two backs without having to reckon with the annoying by-products of pregnancy or child-rearing, or the miserly restriction of sexual bliss to the superannuated ecclesiastical institution of marriage. )

In the case of contraception, sexual insouciance along with all of its attendant social pathologies have been “unintended consequences” that seem suspiciously to have been intended all along.  In the propaganda of the Sixties, contraception and what the evangelists of the Sexual Revolution called “free love” went together like a horse and carriage:   “free love”, we were told, was love in its most authentic mood, finally emancipated from the artificial social constructs of marriage and the encumbrance of parenthood, both of which the technological wonder of modern contraception had so happily rendered redundant. Unfortunately, free love has turned out to be rather less free of the pullulant spawn of social pathologies it has engendered:  teen pregnancy, single mothers generationally dependent upon the State, children growing up without fathers, and thus disproportionately prone to drug addiction, gang violence, and incarceration.   Free love has been free only in that its proponents and practitioners have gotten away with it, imposing upon everyone else the burden of paying its enormous social costs.  But that’s how social democracy works.  The progressive sexual politics of free love—present mirth for which the bill is paid by others—and the progressive fiscal politics of the debt-ridden Welfare State—present mirth for which the bill is passed off to future generations–are not analogical by mere coincidence.

 

For nearly two thousand years, the Church’s proscription of contraception and its unapologetic stigmatization of abortion—though Christianity has hardly been unique throughout history in abominating a mother’s killing of her own offspring as a self-evidently unnatural act—have served at least to forestall the present sociological calamities.  As it turns out, the Church has been right all along.  Progressives never fail to remind us that illegitimacy and abortion have always been with us.  But they have been with us only in the sense that failures of virtue have always been with us–as aberrations and deviations from an otherwise intact moral norm.  Though exceptions have always proven the rule, we have recently become hysterical about them.  The present open-ended abortion regime has itself been erected upon a rickety moral scaffolding of rare exceptions, “hard cases” such as rape and the life of the mother.  As Chesterton has observed, it is the morbid habit of modernity to everywhere and always sacrifice the normal to the abnormal.  Our modern solution to the problem of exceptions has been to rescind the rule.

The “pro-choice” mantra is that abortion should be “legal, safe, accessible, and rare”.  (Obama’s press release after the March in Washington was a stale reformulation of it.)  But even those who intone it know that to reduce an unwanted social habit requires that it be made at least nominally illegal, socially unsafe (disreputable), and less than completely accessible, as every civilized culture and nation throughout history has done with abortion until a few decades ago.   Even today, abortion must be the only practice the incidence of which the U.S. Government has ever hoped to make “rare” by making it universally accessible.  Try to imagine a liberal politician urging us to make teenage smoking “accessible and rare.”  God forbid!  Cigarettes must be hidden under the counter, immured in little cardboard coffins defaced with scenes from horror films, and available only to those with valid ID.  When teenagers are in need of condoms, contraceptives, or abortions, on the other hand, the current policy is that they must never be forced to walk too far, ask permission, or face embarrassing questions.  That in itself tells you all you need to know about what progressives want to make rare, and what they want to normalize.

What there has never been in history is a society in which fully forty percent of children have been born out of wedlock and raised by single mothers (who are often now themselves barely more than children); nor in which one abortion is performed for every three live births.  These are breathtaking statistical enormities:  moral and social affronts that no culture, however primitive or barbarous, would have tolerated—neither the ancient Greeks, nor the worshipers of Moloch.   Along with rampant welfare dependency, AIDs, pedophilia, and pornography, they are the unique and signal accomplishments of our sexually enlightened age.

The Platonic Afflatus of Christianity…

Clement of Alexandria and the Phaedo

Platonic Paradoxes:  Night and Day; Sleeping and Waking; Dream and “Reality”…

The Way of the Cross and the Way of the Philosopher…

     It is impossible to overestimate the importance of these ideas for later Western thought.  The whole Christian ethos of contemptus mundiof mortifying the body and anesthetizing the physical senses, of dying to the world and the flesh with Christ on the Cross and in baptism–is profoundly indebted to them, insofar as the early Fathers expressly read the teaching of Plato in general and the Phaedo in particular into the Christian narrative and doctrine.

Since the Platonic afflatus of Christianity is so little understood by contemporary Christians, not excluding the Church’s hierarchs, I cannot resist giving you just a few examples.  For the sake of economy I limit myself here to the early Christian Apologist and Father of the Church, Clement of Alexandria, writing at the end of the second century A.D. (though all of the Christian theologians from the second to the fourth centuries are similarly indebted to the Platonic Muse).

In his great summa, The Stromata, Clement writes:

…The Saviour Himself enjoins, “Watch therefore, for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” [Matt. 24: 42]; as much as to say, “Study how to live, and endeavour to separate the soul from the body.”  (V, xiv).

The quotation is, of course, from Phaedo 67 e, where the goal of the rational life is defined in terms of the soul’s emancipation from the body at death, of which the philosopher’s vocation is a protracted rehearsal.

The whole Platonic gospel of the deliverance of the embodied soul from the earthly cave of shadows and illusions into the ethereal daylight to which it belongs is thus placed by Clement in the mouth of Christ, and identified as the “True Philosophy”:

Now the sacrifice which is acceptable to God is the unswerving abstraction of the mind from the body and its passions [Phaed. 64 c-65 d].  This is the really true piety.  And is not, on this account, philosophy rightly called by Socrates the practice of death? [Phaed. 64 a; 67 e]  For he who neither employs his eyes in the exercise of thought, nor draws anything from his other senses, but with the purified mind alone apprehends reality [Phaed. 65 e-66 a, 82 d-84 b], practises the True Philosophy.  (Strom. V, xi)

The promise of Greek philosophy is thus fulfilled by the “True Philosopher” Christ and His “Gnostic” followers.  Echoing the Phaedo once again, Clement writes:

Just as death is the separation of the soul from the body, so is Gnosis as it were the rational death urging the spirit away, separating it from the passions,…so that it may say with confidence to God, “I live as Thou wishest.”  (Strom. VII, xii)

But Christ’s “True Philosophy” continues nevertheless to be expressed by Clement in terms of the well-known paradoxes of Platonism.  We have just noted one of them, in the inverse relationship between outer sight and hearing and the inner senses.  We have already encountered another in Cicero’s Somnium, in which life on earth is called by Scipio “death”, whereas the death that liberates the soul from its carnal prison ushers in the true life of the spirit in heaven.  According to another, related paradox, our waking consciousness is really a dream of unreality, and it is only in sleep and dream, when our physical senses are anaesthetized, that our inner spiritual senses are awakened and, with them, we perceive reality.

The most famous locus of this complex of ideas is in Socrates’ exposition of the allegory of the caveRepublic, to whose teaching Clement refers approvingly in the Stromata: 

Plato, again, in the seventh book of the Republic, has called “the day here nocturnal”, as I suppose, on account of “the world-rulers of this darkness” [Eph. 6:12], and the descent of the soul into the body, sleep and death, similarly with Heraclitus…(Strom. V, xiv)

But if the “day here” is, by comparison to the “true day”, a dream of unreality, yet, as Clement writes in his Paedagogus,

Turning in on ourselves [Phaed. 65 c], illumining the eyes of the hidden man, and gazing on truth itself,…we may clearly and intelligibly reveal such dreams as are true. (Paed. II, ix)

The distinction between the false dream that haunts the shadow-world of the embodied soul and the true dreams revealed to the inward-turning intelligence was a commonplace of the pagan Middle Platonism of Clement’s time.  The late-second-century Middle Platonist Maximus of Tyre provides a contemporary statement of the theme:

Our life in this realm is simply and truly a dream; the soul, buried in the body and overwhelmed by stupor and repletion, perceives reality with the dim approximation of one dreaming…but should there be a pure and sober soul, little fuddled by the stupor and repletion of this world, then it is surely reasonable to suppose that the dreams which it encounters…are clear and distinct and close to the truth.

…the freedom of the good man’s soul from the pleasures and sufferings of the body, when by escaping from the tumult of the physical world and turning its intelligence in on itself [Phaed. 65 c], [allows it to] re-encounter pure Truth, free from imperfect images.  This does indeed resemble a beautiful slumber, full of vivid dreams…[Then] Reason…reawakens the understanding [of the soul], which is dim and constrained and torpid. (Orations, passim)

The complementary relationship between the inner and outer faculties suggested by this passage was another ubiquitous Middle Platonic theme.  As the birth of the soul in the body is the sleep of mind, so, in the imagery of Plato and his followers, by turning away from the bodily senses the mind lulls them into somnolence, and reawakens its own inner, spiritual sensorium:  “You must put the life of the senses to sleep”, enjoins the pagan Middle Platonist Celsus (c. 160 A.D.), “and lift up your minds, turn away from the flesh and open the eyes of your souls [Rep. 533 d].  By those means alone will you be able to see God.” (The True Doctrine)

Clement expresses a variant of the same idea as follows:

The need of sleep is not in the soul…But while the body is relieved by sleep, the soul meanwhile not acting through the body is able to exercise intelligence within itself,…undistracted [Phaed. 66 a] by the affections of the body, and counseling with itself in the best manner…From the practice of wakefulness, it grasps eternity. (Paed. II, ix)

As the reader is invited to infer, then, it is the wakefulness of the Platonic inner man, unclouded by the physical senses, that Clement understands by the vigilance enjoined by Christ in Matt. 24: 42 (Strom. V, xiv, above).  The wakefulness of the intelligence, that is, entails the “sleep” of the physical senses, which is like the “death” of the body, insofar as it releases the mind from the body’s soporific influence, and allows the soul to live again as it was originally intended to, “alone” and unencumbered:

And for this reason…they have called night Euphrone [cheerful, genial]; since then the soul, released from the perceptions of sense, turns in on itself (Phaed. 65 c), and has a truer hold on wisdom.  Wherefore the mysteries are for the most part celebrated at night, indicating the withdrawal of the soul from the body, which takes place [in sleep] at night…And as to what, again, they say of sleep, the very same things are to be understood of death.  For each exhibits the departure of the soul…; as we may also understand this in Heraclitus:  “Man touches truth in himself, when dead and his light quenched; and alive, when he sleeps he touches the truth of the dead; and awake, when he shuts his eyes.” (Strom., IV, xxii)

Other allusions to the Phaedo reveal the same perfunctory Christianizations of these conventional Platonic themes.  Clement records Plato’s warning that “each pleasure and pain nails the soul to the tomb of the body” (Phaed. 83 d). This suggests the New Testament imagery of the Cross, which Clement explicitly discovers in the Platonic exhortation (a calculated paraphrase) to “crucify the passions”.

In Clement’s mind, the way of the Cross and the way of the philosopher are one:

  For if you would loose, and withdraw, and separate yourself [Phaed. 64 c, e, 65 c-d]–for this is what the Cross means–from your life in this world, you will possess it.  And this would be the practice of death [Phaed. 67 e]. (Strom. II, xx)

Thus, the Christian who mortifies the flesh with Christ on the Cross, losing his life in order to save his soul, pursues the identical vocation as the Platonic sage who “rehearses death” as prescribed in thePhaedo, by turning away from the distractions of the body, the senses, and the world and withdrawing into the psychic depths, where the mind may live in tranquil solitude.

Throughout The Stromata, the Pauline ideal of deadness to this world is in this way equated by Clement with the Platonic philosopher’s curriculum of death:

The severance, therefore, of the soul from the body, made a life-long study, produces in the philosopher Gnostic alacrity, so the he is easily able to bear natural death, which is the dissolution of the chains which bind the soul to the body.  “For the world is crucified to me, and I to the world”, the apostle says [Gal. 6: 14]. (Strom. IV, iii)

…And the Realities of Life on Earth…

 

Some cultural phenomena are self-satirizing.  Consider the interminable seventies-era movie series Airport starring George Kennedy, which hardly required its later take-off (pun intended) Airplane with Leslie “Don’t call me Shirley” Nielson to demonstrate its formulaic stupidity.  (However unintentionally, the scene in the original in which a folk-singing celebrity performs to the delight of a plucky pubescent girl en route to a liver transplant is much funnier than any conceivable parody, even one that involves a guitar-strumming nun.)

Along with Airport, the Arab Street celebrating by firing Kalashnikovs into the air, and a few other manifestations of the brute insanity of the contemporary world, surely (Shirley) the Occupy Wall Street Movement falls into the same self-satirizing category.

Now that their discarded Slurpee cups, spent needles, and soiled condoms have been gathered up by volunteers, and new sod laid in the Woodstockian mud that the Occupiers left behind, it is time to pause in wonder that anyone could have taken them or their risible message seriously.

The 99%?  Shirley not.  I defer to no one in my abysmal estimate of the state of human civilization; but not even I am such a bilious misanthrope as to imagine that the vast majority of mankind bears any similarity to the whining, drug-addled moral bullies who, being off their medication for too long, have recently trampled, pissed, and defecated upon the fall flowers in some of the world’s most beautiful parks.  (Try to imagine the outcry from these same vaunted defenders of Gaia if a corporation had so polluted public lands.)

In the Middle Ages, the sin of hypocrisy was typically personified by a literary character known as Faux Semblant, usually a friar who, having taken a solemn vow of poverty and humility, disports himself like a cross between Croesus and Dominique Strauss-Khan.   Today, I can think of no more apt representative of that persistent vice than the anti-capitalist protestor.

Never before has the world been so credulous of rank hypocrisy.   The progressive thinker need do nothing more these days than promote some pious statist fantasy (income equality; wind turbines; solar power; ethanol) and the beau monde’s critical faculties are instantly benumbed.  Say the magic word “green”, “clean”,  or “earth” in conjunction with any cockamamie scheme and—open sesame—the gates to government tax breaks and subsidies are instantly unbarred to the shiftiest of venture capitalists.  When it serves them as a cudgel with which to beat capitalism, progressives are constantly complaining about corporate welfare; but they grow reverently silent when the recipient is Big Green.  Save the planet?  I would have been happy if the Occupiers had merely deigned to stoop and scoop their own excreta.

 

The anathematization by righteous socialists of the sins of capitalist culture (greed, selfishness, materialism, and so on) might be more credible were they not themselves so spectacularly guilty of them.  The annual socialist protest tour is invariably attended by middle class youths shod in Nikes and carrying Blackberries or iPhones–the very icons of conspicuous consumption, not to mention products that could only have been brought to market by vast multinational corporations raising capital through the international banking system and sourcing parts and labour in the global marketplace.  At the recent anti-G-20 demonstration in Toronto, the storm-troopers of social justice smashed the windows of Mom and Pop stores and altruistically looted their hard-won livelihood, iPhones and big screen TVs being their preferred booty.  In the nineteen-thirties, when real poverty still existed, rioters smashed the windows of bakeries and stole bread.  But no one hears of the soi-disant poor breaking into bakeries these days.

Though the bedrock of justice and democracy is equality before the law, the Occupiers had no permits for their demonstrations and continued to squat in public spaces even after the courts issued injunctions for their removal.  Every other group in the world is bound to apply for and be granted permission to demonstrate on public property, and none would ever have been allowed to forcibly take over common land for their unlimited private enjoyment (the real, unsentimental meaning of the “occupation”); but the Occupiers evidently assumed that they were somewhat more equal than others.  So much for their egalitarian scorn for the privileged 1%.

President Obama said their cause was just, and vociferously supported them.  But then President Obama’s own populist “soak the rich” re-election campaign can only profit–is it ontologically possible for socialists to profit?–from widespread demonstrations against capitalism.  I wonder whether he will ever publically take responsibility for the inevitable violence and property damage that his words have incited.

 

Outside the hive of leftist politicians, academics, and journalists (still, thankfully, considerably less than 1% of the population), the only other supporters of the Occupiers were the public sector union grandees who provided logistics:   specifically, port-o-potties (which, alas, the Occupiers did not always use) and meals (which the Occupiers instructively refused to share with the indigenous homeless—the original Occupiers–occasionally leading to violent confrontations between the “poor” and their supposed advocates.)

Leaders of the public sector unions are regulars on the anti-capitalist protest tour where, from the safety of the sidelines, they egg on to anarchic violence the more excitable youth.  It is quaint to hear them decry the privileges of the wealthy as they disport themselves on their ideological junkets, paid for by the compulsory dues extracted from the union rank and file whether they agree with official union class-warfare demagoguery or not.  In the past, union delegations were dispatched to such grim laboratories of socialism as Bulgaria and Romania; today, they are feted at five-star hotels in Brussels, London, or New York.

The union presence on the protest rota is supposed to dramatize the great Gnostic struggle between the capitalist World-Governors (i.e., the Wall Street Bankers and corporate CEOs) and the ORDINARY WORKING MAN.   Save that if he is lucky enough to be employed in the public sector, the “ordinary working man” enjoys a salary, benefits package, pension, job security, and annual raises that no private sector employee would dare to confabulate in his wildest dreams.  These, moreover, are paid directly by the taxpayer (the real 99%), as will be the tumescent debt with which public sector selfishness and greed have burdened present and future generations in perpetuity.  The State functionary’s lifestyle of parasitical privilege, as demonstrated recently in Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, is responsible for the evaporation of more trillions of dollars of wealth in international stock markets (in which everyone is now invested) than the original Great Recession of 2008.  And while the “obscene compensation” conferred upon corporate CEOs is a matter of direct concern only to the company’s board of directors and shareholders (who remain at liberty to rein them in or invest elsewhere), that freedom is never enjoyed by the taxpayer, whose only choices are to fund State profligacy or face incarceration.  No matter what frontier you fix beyond which you calculate that remuneration has become “obscene”, you will find that in absolute terms there is exponentially more fraud, waste, and over-compensation (i.e., obscenity) in the grasping, porcine apparatus of any single Western Welfare State than in the combined salaries of all the corporate CEOs on the planet.

Sooner or later, if any social or moral progress is to be achieved by humankind, the Axis of Progress is going to have to metabolize the rudimentary fact that the State and all who are dependent upon the State live at the expense of, and by the good graces, of private citizens active in the capitalist economy.   It is only by confiscating and redistributing the “obscene profits” of capitalist entrepreneurs—those who actually seed and create wealth in the first place (including Wall Street and the corporations)–that the government and its unionized functionaries enjoy their relative affluence.   The generous pensions of unionized workers, moreover, would be insolvent if they weren’t managed by shifty Wall Street bankers and invested in rapacious corporations listed on the world’s stock exchanges.  The profits of those diabolical capitalist entities keep union pensions afloat and growing.   Only when union caudillos put their money—literally—where their mouths are, demanding divestiture from the global market (and thus willingly beggaring themselves), should anyone begin to take their stale Marxist rodomontade seriously.

 

Appealing as it does to the most deadly of the deadly sins (envy, ire, idleness, pride, and especially avarice), the Marxist myth has apparently proven unkillable.  In the popular imagination, the recession of 2008 continues to be imputed to the malfeasance and greed of Wall Street bankers, even though the root cause—to use a beloved progressive phrase–of the crisis was another grand government social program:  the wildly irresponsible extension of mortgages, by both state agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and private banks, all under governmental directive and with governmental guarantees, to those without the means to repay them, in fulfillment of the egalitarian fantasy that every American should be able to own his own home.    When the bubble burst and the world economy crashed, those who had engineered this calamity, not wanting to waste a good crisis, took the opportunity to blame it on the inherent defectiveness of capitalism.   The capitalist system, they intoned gravely, was nigh its end.  The whirlwind sown by years of unregulated Reagan-era greed was about be reaped!  A year or so later, the European sovereign debt crisis plunged the global economy back into an even deeper and evidently more intransigent recession.  But no one inculpated the recklessness, or animadverted on the inherent defectiveness, of the European Welfare State.  No one proclaimed the final and merciful demise of democratic socialism.  I for one was grateful that the Axis of Progress did not find a way to blame the European debt crisis too on capitalism.

There is nothing new or surprising about the protracted and ongoing European debacle, the predictable result of generations of populist politicians and community activists claiming credit for altruism and compassion by selflessly giving away other people’s money to buy the votes and pander to the idleness and avarice of their dependent constituencies, while gratifying their own lust for wealth and power.  It would have been too much to hope that the Occupiers or their supporters would be anything but silent on their drunken orgy of spending, notwithstanding that Big Government had once again fattened itself to bursting, while impoverishing everyone else, including the poorest of the poor in developing countries, across the globe.   Instead, the Occupiers went about their business as if the default of Europe never happened, and reflexively revived the perennial mantras of the anti-capitalist campaign:   THE RICH DON’T PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE OF TAXES; THE RICH ARE GETTING RICHER; THE POOR ARE GETTING POORER; THE GAP BETWEEN THEM IS WIDENING; THE MIDDLE CLASS IS DISAPPEARING.

Over the decades, such prefabricated dooms have been pronounced by anti-capitalist eschatologists indifferently through bad times and good, bear markets and bull, and no matter how Chicken-Littleish they must sound by now to anyone over the age of twenty, the megaphones of the liberal media never fail to echo them with apocalyptic urgency.   By such glib repetition, the sort of Big Lies that ought to have been buried forevermore at the bottom of the historical rubbish heap, beneath the ruins of the Berlin Wall, periodically rise again in the West and walk the earth like the undead, reminding us that socialism is not an economic theory so much as an ineradicable superstition.

In the U.S. in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available), the top 1% of earners paid 37% of all federal income taxes; the top 10% paid 70%, the top 25%, 87%; and the top 50%, 98%.  The bottom 49% paid nothing.  The figures going back to 1999 show a very nearly identical pattern of dispersion from year to year.  (One interesting footnote is that the income threshold for the top 1% in 2009 was $343,000, down substantially from $410,000 in 2007, whereas the bottom 50% remained steady.  So much for the bromide that the rich are always getting richer, immune as they supposedly are to economic downturns, and the poor poorer.)

The rich don’t pay their fair share?  One should be grateful, I suppose, when at least a parody of the truth percolates up from the fever swamps of leftist agit-prop.  But by any objective standard, it is the rich, not the poor, who are the victims of gross unfairness.  As the data show, the modern Ship of State is propelled by a small cohort of earners chained to the oars below, while a majority lounge on deck enjoying the fresh sea breezes.   The rich are in fact an exploited minority of helot-workers who produce the wealth that sustains a leviathanic Welfare State and its dependent citizenry.   When the labour of a quarter of the population is expropriated for the sustenance of the rest you have economic enslavement on an ancient Spartan scale.  A version of the Marxist clarion-call is for once apposite:  Wealthy of the world, unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains.

To argue that the rich don’t pay their fair share requires a Protean re-definition of the concept of fairness, to say the least.  But then the Axis of Progress has always been admirably adept at finding novel significations for universally agreed-upon terms (cf., most recently, homosexual “marriage”).  As it applies to taxation, the old-fashioned dictionary meaning of fairness demands one of only two possible alternatives.  Either every citizen pays an equal portion of total taxes (i.e., a fraction of 1 over the number that represents the total taxpaying population).  Or every citizen pays for no more and no less than what he personally consumes in government disbursements and services.  Under both definitions, the rich are spectacularly ill-used, even if one were to eliminate progressivity and adopt a flat tax instead.  (Unless traditional arithmetic has been superseded in the same way as traditional moral nomenclature, 20% of, say, a million dollars is still exponentially more than 20% of $50,000).  Compounding the injustice is the fact that high earners consume an infinitesimal fraction of the government benefits bestowed upon the middle class or the poor (i.e., the rich don’t rely on food stamps, rent subsidies, Medicaid, welfare, unemployment “insurance”, and the vast array of anti-poverty programs; they tend not to apply, or qualify for, tuition bursaries, job counseling, grants for unread magazines, homosexual theatre groups, blasphemous art installations, etc., etc.)

 

Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t feel the least bit sorry for the wealthy.  All in all, they strike me as a morbidly pusillanimous lot, either too spineless to object to being fleeced, or too willing to be suborned (for their own selfish reasons, of course) by the anti-capitalist mob.  As the R.H. Macy character explains in the Christmas classic Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, while endorsing his new store Santa’s altruistic policy of sending customers to other stores when Macy’s doesn’t have what they want:   “From now on, we’ll be known as the caring company, the company with a heart, the company that puts people before profits.  And consequently we’ll make more profit than ever before.”

Along with Bill Gates, George Soros, and others, Warren Buffett has recently stepped forth as the spokesman for a cell of super-rich penitents who, burdened by capitalist remorse, expiate their guilt by publically flagellating others.  In one of the rankest factoids of disinformation to emerge from the propaganda mills of the Left in decades, Buffett has reported (confessed) that he pays the same amount in taxes as his own secretary!  Let us be charitable.  Perhaps he meant—no doubt he “misspoke”– that he is in the same tax bracket as his secretary.  But then, even so, it is only because his high-priced accountants have arranged for him to be remunerated in the form of capital gains rather than salary.   Why has he taken their advice?  Because capital gains are taxed at a lower rate, of course.  For a deliberate tax dodger to then represent himself as a champion of tax fairness and demand that the rich pay “their share” is hypocrisy of Tartuffian proportions.  If Buffett thinks he should be paying more in taxes, he is entirely free at any time to hand over all or any portion of his income to the IRS, without hectoring others on their moral responsibilities.

Increasing taxes on the rich is Buffett’s and the Occupiers’ solution to the supposed problem of the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor.  Not that this has ever worked in the past.  Even the rich put limits on their guilty servitude, and while they are too complacent to rise up, they can always opt out.  Tax their filthy lucre beyond a certain threshold and they will eventually resort to such loopholes as those discovered by Buffett’s accountants, or conclude that it is no longer worth the risk and effort to persevere in greed and malefaction for the privilege of keeping the meager scraps left to them by the State.  They will close up shop, and the tax collector will thereafter walk away empty-handed.   (A dramatic illustration of this rudimentary behavioural principle occurred recently when, seeking to “soak the rich”, populist politicians raised taxes on yachts, thus completely destroying the luxury boatbuilding industry, un-employing its thousands of workers, and depleting government coffers in the process.)    As the evidence has proven redundantly over the decades, the inverse relationship between tax rates and tax revenues is an iron law of economics.  High marginal tax rates result in lower absolute returns; low rates, conversely, yield high tax revenues because they are incentives to the creation of new businesses, and investment in and expansion of existing ones.  If the State really wants to reap more tax revenues, it ought to be a little kinder to the downtrodden sowers in the field:  it ought to be known (to paraphrase Mr. Macy) as the government that puts people before revenues.  And consequently, it will collect more tax revenues than ever before.

 

Of course the rich are getting richer.  But then so too are the poor and the middle class (alive and well).  Of course the gap between the richest and the poorest is widening.  But how could it be otherwise?  If in 1990, let us say, the average menial labourer earned $x, the average corporate CEO $100x, and the economy grew by 3% per annum in the next ten years, wouldn’t the income gap between them have increased to considerably more than $99x by the year 2000?  Such modest growth in GDP as most capitalist economies traditionally enjoy widens gaps as a matter of mathematical necessity (while also enriching everyone in the process).  

One doesn’t expect these banal arithmetical realities to penetrate the consciousness of the Occupiers and their allies, for whom punishing the rich and appropriating more of their ill-gotten gains (greed, anyone?) are moral obsessions.  For the economic illiterate with a smattering of Marxist theory, the economy will always be a zero-sum game, the rich will only get richer at the expense of the poor, and Robin Hood will always be the model of Good Government.  My favourite of the Occupiers’ signs decrying the disparity between rich and poor:  MAKE THE RICH POOR AND THE POOR RICH.   Leaving aside that this will merely eternize the “problem” as the clever sign-bearer misunderstands it, there is once again a parodic inflection of the truth lurking beneath the literal surface of this self-defeating desideratum:  Making the rich poor and the poor rich is the ruthless genius of capitalism; (the converse is that socialism tends to render everyone, outside of the State apparatus, immutably equal in poverty).  In free societies, income disparity is rarely a static (i.e., “class”) phenomenon, and usually a highly fluid and personal one.  It occurs most dramatically within a single earner’s lifetime.  But a few short years ago, today’s super-rich (e.g., Steve Jobs, Bill Gates) were mere peons.  Some of today’s poor will be fabulously wealthy tomorrow.

Lovers of freedom celebrate that sort of disparity, insofar as it corresponds to the natural disparities that occur in the real world—disparities in talent, industry, and dumb luck–as opposed to the unnatural equality that can only be imposed by totalitarian force.  Wisdom, as Western Philosophy used to define it before descending into existential angst, consists in accepting these disparities with resignation or even gratitude, rather than being permanently discomposed by envy or indignant wrath.

For this reason, it is hard for me to understand why adults should be find economic disparity so peculiarly perturbing.  Doesn’t the top percentile in intelligence own a disproportionate quantum of the world’s brains?  No one protests that Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon have between them accumulated much more than their fair share of the cuteness extant in the world (let alone the power, money, and influence that these unearned natural endowments confer).  The only difference between such “unfair” personal advantages as beauty and intelligence on the one hand and wealth on the other is that the former can’t be forcibly redistributed—else the Soviets would have already done so.  As a bald man, who has lived his life under a serious handicap in the ruthless competition for a mate, I resent the fact that the obscenely hirsute have more hair than they could possibly need.  But then, unfairness and cut-throat competition are not the creations of capitalism; they are the baneful conditions of life on earth.

 

I have to admit, the Occupiers’ choice of metaphor was certainly (if unconsciously) inspired.  In popular usage, the word “occupation” has two primary denotations.  It can mean a job, such as many of the Occupiers have eschewed with the same sense of urgency as P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.  It also signifies an act of military depredation, in which conquerors usurp territory that belongs to others and live on in these stolen domains as colonial slave-masters.  The latter applies directly to the anti-capitalist Occupiers, as I have said, but more importantly inasmuch as the socialist mythology they propagate continues to possess and enslave the Western psyche two decades after it was buried in those Eastern Bloc countries once occupied in the literal sense.

Redemptive Music…

The Merchant of Venice…The Phaedo…

Inner and Outer Hearing and Sight…

       Demonstrating again the durability of such ideas and their ability to transcend the divisions of time and religious culture, the notion that music can be redemptive, inasmuch as it echoes the heavenly music of the spheres,  is rehearsed in another classic expression of the topos in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

Lorenzo.
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit and let sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches [i.e., by the finger on the string] of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica.  Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring [i.e., “choiring”, but with a pun on “book”] to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Come ho, and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear
And draw her home with music.

Jessica.
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.

Lorenzo.
The reason is, your spirits are attentive.
For do but note a wild and wanton herd
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music.  Therefore the poet [Homer]
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;
Since naught so stockish, hard, and full of rage
But music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirits are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.  Mark the music. (V, i 55f.)

There are many points to note about this remarkable passage.  First, though it is a set-piece (which need have no other raison d’etre than the traditional authority of the topos itself), its relevance to the dramatic context is plain enough.  Jessica is the apostate daughter of the Jew Shylock, whose unwillingness to trust and be trusted is proof enough that he has no music in his soul.   He is a devout of a merciless Old Law, a singer of the Old Song, which in Pauline terms, as we’ll see later, means that he is carnal and worldly; he understands only the superficial letter of the Law, the visible outward symbolum but not its invisible inner spirit; and correspondingly, when he reads the book of the world, his eyes are fixed downward upon the earthly visibilia (especially in the form of wealth), rather than upward upon the everlasting treasure of heaven.   Shylock’s Law is purportedly the Law of Justice, but lacking love, it is really only the outward show of justice, which like love, is a condition of concord, of which the harmony of the spheres is the macrocosmic expression.

The main point, however, is that a man has, or should have, this celestial harmony “in him”, “in his immortal soul”, even if it is difficult to detect.  And it is difficult to detect.  When Lorenzo (that is, Shakespeare) explains that the reason we can’t hear it is that “this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close it in”, he is offering a different explanation, of course, from either Cicero or Aristotle.  Yet, though fifteen hundred years and another religion later, Shakespeare’s is ironically truer to the original Pythagoreo-Platonic ethos out of which our topos first arose.

The harmony of the spheres, says Lorenzo, ought to resonate in the depths of the “immortal soul”, but for the gross material body in which it is enclosed.  Somehow, he implies, the body blocks out the sound.  Lorenzo does not explain in further detail how this occurs, beyond his allusion to the traditional Platonic metaphor of the plight of the embodied soul which is “closed in”, “imprisoned”, or “entombed” by the body.  In a cognate metaphor, the carnal envelope is said to “suffocate” or “extinguish” the immanent scintilla dei, and so alienate the soul from heaven, even as it alienates our secular personalities from our inner divine selves.  The extinction of the fire and obscuration of the light of heaven (causing inner blindness) must then be the ocular equivalent of the deafness of the soul to the harmony of the spheres.

 

In any case, such metaphors, in conjunction with the theme of the inaudibility of the musica mundana, seem to be articulated with the epistemological problem that Socrates identifies in the Phaedo. Here are a couple of representative passages, with which you may already be familiar:

And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her—neither sounds nor sights nor pain, nor again any pleasure,–when she takes leave of the body, and has as little to do with it, when she has no bodily senses or desires, but is aspiring after true being.

***

And he attains to the purest knowledge of [the Ideas] who goes to each with the intellect alone, not introducing or intruding in the act of thought sight or any other sense together with reason, but with the intellect in its purity searches into the truth of each thing in its purity; he who has got rid, as far as he can, of eyes and ears and, so to speak, of the whole body, these being in his opinion distracting elements which when they associate with the soul hinder her from acquiring truth and knowledge…

***

For the body is the source of countless distractions by reason of the mere requirement of food…it fills us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and endless foolery….Whence come wars, and conflicts, and factions?  Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body?  All wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake of the body and in slavish ministration to it; …and even if the body allows us leisure and we betake ourselves to some speculation, it is always breaking in upon us, causing turmoil and confusion in our inquiries…

(65c ff.)

The inner reason or intelligence, which is the essential and immortal component of the soul, strives to achieve knowledge of the otherworldly ideas, but the body interposes itself between the two; it cuts off the soul’s access to the heavenly realm in which it was born.  The constant bombardment of stimuli streaming in through the physical senses interferes with the spiritual frequency, so to speak, upon which the reason must tune in the invisibilia.  In order for the inner intellectual faculties to function without such interference, the outer eyes and ears must be tuned out, and the carnal passions must be tranquilized.

In another of those longstanding topoi to which we must return, there is an inverse relationship between the health and vigour of the inner and outer senses.  The man whose outer sight and hearing are acute is usually blind and deaf to the spiritual significance of things, while the man who is physically blind or deaf perceives, with his inner sense of sight and hearing, these hidden mysteries.  Teiresias the prophet is such a blindman who sees farther than those with normal sight; the divine Homer is another, whose blindness, according to the ancient commentators, was compensated by an inner vision with which he surveyed the cosmos from the depths of Tartarus to the summit of Olympus.  (Amongst modern poets, Milton is the son of Homer in this regard).  Oedipus is another legendary example, since he only comes to see the truth after he plucks out his eyes; Shakespeare’s Gloucester is another, who says “I stumbled when I saw”.

And his Jessica, too, seems to belong to this type.  The outwardly sensible earthly music, she says, has no effect on her, because her inner sense of hearing, what Lorenzo call her “spirit”, is already “attentive” to such heavenly melodies as will remain forever inaudible to her seeing and hearing, but spiritually blind and deaf, father.

The Music of the Spheres and the Vanity of Earthly Fame, continued…

Dante…Chaucer…

The Pythagoreo-Platonic Myth of the Celestial Birth of the Soul…

    The insignificance of worldly glory, by comparison to the spatial and temporal vastness of the cosmos, was yet another commonplace of early literature– “part”, as C.S. Lewis says, “of the moralists’ stock-in-trade”–, and it was almost always expressed in conjunction with the topos of the harmony of the spheres. 

This conjunction was more or less assured by the fact that in the last book of Plato’s Republic there is an account of Er’s descent into Hades and his journey to the other world, during which the music of the spheres fills his ears.  Cicero’s Republic is, of course, a self-conscious tribute to Plato’s; Cicero’s, accordingly, must also end with a visionary ascent to the heavens and another statement of the Pythagorean topos of the musica mundana.

Scipio’s was, in fact, the prototype for any number of ascents to heaven in medieval and Renaissance literature, from which vantage point the visionary looks down with scorn upon the meagerness of earthly fame and glory.  Here, for instance, is the once feted, soon to be ignored, artist Oderisi, as he overlooks Italy from the summit of Mount Purgatory in Dante’s Purgatorio, canto 11:

A breath of wind—no more—is earthly fame,
And now this way it blows and that way now,
And as it changes quarter, changes name.
Ten centuries hence, what greater fame hast thou,
Stripping the flesh off late, than if thoud’st died
Ere thou wast done with gee-gee and bow-wow?
Ten centuries hence—and that’s a briefer tide,
Matched with eternity, than one eye-wink
To that wheeled course Heaven’s tardiest sphere must ride. (100 f.)

 

     But there are many other examples.  Less than a century after the publication of the Commedia,Chaucer, in his House of Fame, relates that he was lifted up to heaven in a dream by his mystagogue, the philosophical eagle:

But thus sone in a while he
Was flowen fro the gound so hye
That al the world, as to myn ye,
No more semed than a prikke…

“No wonder”,
Quod he, “for half so high as this
Nas Alixandre Macedo;
Ne the kyng, Daun Scipio,
That  saw in drem, at point devys,
Helle and erthe and paradys” (II, 904f.)

The poet then duly expresses his scorn for earthly vanity, in part by comparing the raucous noise that he hears in the House of Fame with the harmonious melody of the spheres.

Similarly, at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the poet records the apotheosis of Troilus’ ghost who, like Scipio, casts his gaze downward from the height of the fixed stars upon “this little spot of erthe”, realizing, in the clarity of mind that comes with his disembodied state–his reason finally liberated from the passions–, how tiny and insignificant it is when measured against the vastness of the cosmos and the eternity of heaven:

And when that he was slayn in this manere,
His lighte goost ful blisfully is went
Up to the holughnesse [concavity] of the eighthe spere,
In convers letyng everich element [leaving every element behind];
And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,
The erratic sterres [wandering planets], herkenyng armonye
With sownes ful of hevenyssh melodie.
And down from thennes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe that with the se
Embraced is, and fully gan despise
This wrecched world, and held al vanite
To respect of the pleyne felicite
That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
Ther [where] he was slayn his lokyng down he caste,
And in himself he lough right at the wo
Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste,
And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so
The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste,
And sholden al our herte on heven caste.

To “such an end”, continues the narrator, has come all of Troilus’ “great worthiness”, all his wealth, nobility, chivalric prowess, all the useless striving, anxiety, and sorrow occasioned by his merely earthly love for Criseyde (for such is the “world’s brittleness”).  And then he ends with this admonition:

O yonge, freshe folks, he or she,
In which that love up growth with youre age,
Repayreth hom fro worldly vanyte,
And of youre herte up casteth the visage
To thilke God that after his ymage
Yow made, and thynketh al nys but a faire,
This world that passeth soon as floures faire.
(V, 1807ff.)

This, then, is the enduring Platonic note, sounded by the Christian Chaucer in the fourteenth century as it had been sounded by the Roman pagan Cicero in the first century B.C.  In both texts, the topos of the music of the spheres is articulated with a larger mythology and doctrine that assumes that the human soul is in origin and nature heavenly and divine; and that it can, and must, “repair homeward” byaverting its gaze from the false and transient goods of the world in which it is an exile and stranger, andfixing it instead upon the eternal and immutable realities of the divine patria from which it first descended.

According to this doctrine, the temporal world is like a play, a pageant, a fair that comes to town and departs as quickly, a summer flower that soon fades and withers; or, as Theseus’ wise father Egeus expresses the topos at the end of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale:

This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,
And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro.

Whatever the conceit of the moralist, the wise man scorns the transience and mutability of the world, casting his gaze upward toward the stability of heaven, in contemplation of which throughout his lifetime, he “repaireth hom”, returns to the place of his soul’s nativity, where he had once enjoyed his true life before his death, exile, and bondage in the body.  We have dealt with these ubiquitous images before.  But inevitably this entire symbol-system is implicit in every reference to the music of the spheres insofar as it was the soul’s birthsong, which it is the wise man’s vocation to remember and amplify to the point of audibility in the midst of the din of this world.

Cicero, as we’ve just seen, repeats Aristotle’s explanation that we can’t hear it because it is inborn and therefore always with us, like the background noise of the bronze foundries that Aristotle says workers learn to tune out, or like the deafening sound of the cataracts of the Nile (in Cicero’s example), with which the local inhabitants have lived all their lives.

Cicero assures us nonetheless that “learned men, by imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in song, have gained for themselves a return to this region”, and that this redemptive musical regime is conjunctive with the contemplation practiced by “others [who] have obtained the same reward by devoting their brilliant intellects to divine pursuits during their earthly lives”. 

Mathematics…Music…The Harmony of the Spheres…

The Literary Dream Vision…The Vanity of  Earthly Fame…

and

Cicero’s Dream of Scipio…

In the first installment of Involuted Mysteries, we began with the question asked by the earliest Greek philosophers:  What is the universe made of?  One of the recurrent answers of the Pre-Socratics was number.  That, in turn, occasioned our steady march through the numerals one to twelve, which served, if nothing more, as a convenient means of introducing some of the foundational themes and topoi that inevitably presented themselves along the way.

It was Pythagoras, of course, who first posited number as the underlying principle–the Physis or Nature–that governs the orderly operations of the cosmos.  Needless to say, his intuition of the secret mathematical structure of the universe was, for the future of science, momentous.  But Pythagoras was hardly interested in mathematical theory per se.  His discovery of the rudiments of arithmetic and geometry was a by-product, in fact, of his investigations into the secrets of music, our next broad theme.

As we saw when discussing the Seven Liberal Arts, Pythagoras was typically depicted in the sculptural representations of the Arts on the facades of medieval churches as the founder, master, and patron spirit sometimes of Music, sometimes of Arithmetic, sometimes of both.  This is not only because he is the traditional inventor of both of these ancient Arts, but because, from the beginning, he regarded them as mutually interdependent departments of knowledge.

It was Pythagoras who first noted that the principal intervals, the octave, major third, fourth, and fifth, were produced as a function of the ratio or proportion between the length of a string and the length from one end of it to the point at which it is stopped.  Put your finger on a string at its midpoint and the resulting note will be an octave higher than that when you plucked the string unstopped.  This, of course, is a universal physical law.

Pythagoras was probably unaware that it had anything to do with the frequency of the string’s vibration (twice as fast, at half its length); nonetheless, it is impossible to overestimate the significance of his discovery of the mathematical basis of the science of sound as it presaged the mathematical basis of physics, astronomy, and every other branch of scientific inquiry.

As Aristotle writes in his Metaphysics (the first book of which is an invaluable history of philosophy from its beginnings down to his own time in the early fourth century):

The so-called Pythagoreans, having applied themselves to mathematics, first advanced that study; and having been trained in it they thought that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.  Since of these principles numbers are by nature first, they thought they saw many similarities to things which exist and come into being in numbers rather than in fire and earth and water—justice being such and such a modification of numbers, soul and reason, being another,…and so with the rest, each being expressible numerically.  Seeing, further, that the properties and ratios of the musical consonances were expressible in numbers, and that indeed all other things seemed to be wholly modeled in their nature upon numbers, they took numbers to be the whole of reality, the elements of numbers to be the elements of all existing things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.

Aristotle refers here to the Pythagorean doctrine of the music or harmony of the spheres, which was to become one of the most enduring and popular topoi in Western literature and thought.

 

In his De Caelo, Aristotle gives a somewhat more detailed account of the doctrine:

Some thinkers suppose that the motion of bodies [the stars and planets] so great must produce a noise, since even objects here on earth do so, though they are not equal in bulk to those, nor do they move at such high speeds.  That the sun and moon and stars, so great in number and in size, and moving with so swift a motion, should fail to produce a sound correspondingly great, is (they say) incredible.  On this assumption, then, together with the further assumption that their speeds, as determined by their distances from the centre are in the ratios of the musical consonances, they say that the sound made by the heavenly bodies as they revolve is a harmony.  And in order to account for the fact that we do not hear the sound, they say that it is with us from the moment of birth, so that we are unable to distinguish it from its opposite, silence; for sound and silence are only known by contrast.  Consequently, what happens to us is similar to what happens to workers in bronze, who are so used to noise that they do not notice it.

That the pitch of the sound produced by a revolving object is directly related to its speed was a fact well enough known from ordinary experience.  The Pythagorean philosopher Archytas, who lived from 428 to 347 B.C., and who was a friend of Plato, used the example of the “rhombos”, a liturgical wind instrument whirled about at the end of a stick or string during the celebration of the Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries, which, Archytas observes, produces a low note when whirled slowly, and a high one when whirled vigorously.  But the speed of the heavenly bodies is in turn a function of their distance “from the centre”, as Aristotle notes—that is, from the earth.  For Pythagoras, the rotation of the seven planets and fixed stars about the earth was assumed to be in the same plane, and each of the eight spheres was also assumed to complete its revolution over the same period.  To keep their position relative to one another, the outermost spheres—those closer to the circumference–must naturally revolve more swiftly than those closer to the centre, just as a point along the spoke of a wagon wheel that is near the felloe or tire must move more swiftly than a point near the hub.  For this reason, they produced different pitches:  the moon (that is to say, the planet that is closest to the earth) producing the lowest, and the Stellatum or sphere of the fixed stars, which is farthest from the earth (on the very circumference of the cosmos) producing the highest.

One of the classic statements of this topos is found in Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, a text to which you may have already heard me refer many times in previous courses, because, as is the nature of seminal texts, it so perfectly recapitulates an otherwise complex philosophical tradition.  We need to look carefully at this text insofar as it demonstrates that the doctrine of the music of the spheres, like all “merely” cosmological doctrines, is at root a religious or mythological symbol, amongst many that belong to a more or less universal ancient method for the salvation of the soul.

Cicero’s Dream is the principal remaining fragment of the sixth and final book of his Republic.  In the dialogue, the speaker Scipio the Younger relates that while serving as a military tribune in Africa, he met King Massinissa, whose hereditary territory Scipio Africanus the Elder (Scipio the Younger’s eminent namesake and adoptive grandfather) had restored.  They spend the day in conversation, reminiscing about the deeds of Scipio’s glorious ancestor, and then, after dinner, as the speaker relates, “the following dream came to me, prompted, I suppose, by the subject of our conversation; for it often happens that our thoughts and words have some such effect in our sleep…”   In the dream, the spirit of Scipio the Elder duly appears to him, looking down from his eternal abode in the eighth sphere.

 

Scipio’s explanation that dreams are fecundated by our recent waking preoccupations was a commonplace of traditional dream theory, which is in itself a topic so ubiquitous that we’ll have at some point to return to it.  But, for now, a couple of examples should suffice to illustrate both the influence of Cicero’s Somnium and the tendency of early literature to rehearse such conventional themes.

In Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules, the poet-narrator reads the Somnium Scipionis itself, a summary of whose doctrine he provides.  While still pondering his reading matter, he falls asleep and has a dream in which, none other than Scipio Africanus appears to him.  Indeed, as the poet explains, it is because he had been reading the Dream of Scipio that his own dream takes the form that it does.

Here, of course, Chaucer is merely repeating the pattern of the Dream of Scipio, in which Scipio the Younger dreams about Scipio the Elder after having a conversation about him the afternoon before.

One other example comes immediately to mind, this also from Chaucer.  In the Proem to Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, the poet-narrator picks up his volume of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the hope that it will help him fall asleep (not the greatest compliment he might have paid to Ovid, who was held in high reverence in the Middle Ages).  By chance, his eyes alight upon the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone.

Ceyx and Alcyone, as the narrator paraphrases Ovid, are the king and queen of Thessaly, and so much in love that they were never willingly apart.  But Ceyx decides that he must depart on a long sea voyage to consult the Delphic oracle.  As the daughter of Aeolus, king of the winds, Alcyone knows how perilous the sea can be, and full of foreboding, she tries to dissuade her husband from embarking.  And indeed when he does, that very night, there is a monstrous storm, which sinks his ship and all its crew.

Ceyx dies with the name of his beloved Alcyone on his lips.  Every day thereafter, Alcyone waits anxiously, weaving a beautiful robe in expectation of Ceyx’ return—the Penelope motif–, going down to the shore in hopes of spotting her husband’s ship, and praying to Juno for his safe return.  When Juno hears her prayers, she takes pity upon her, sending Iris, the messenger goddess, to the house of Somnus, god of sleep, bidding that he send Alcyone a dream in which she might learn of Ceyx’ death.

Somnus is awoken painfully by Iris—a typical flourish of Ovidian humour–, but accepts the commission, which he then hands on to his son Morpheus, who is able to take the shape of anyone at will.  Morpheus is finally awoken with equal difficulty, but promptly assumes the shape of Ceyx, and appearing to Alcyone in a dream, tells her to wait for him no longer, for he has drowned, and must now descend into the underworld.  Ceyx-Morpheus then assures her of his undying love, begs that she accept his death with equanimity, and vanishes.

The news, however, only makes Alcyone go mad with grief, and determine to join him in the kingdom of the dead.  But when she goes down to the shore with the intention of throwing herself into the sea, she sees the corpse of her husband drifting landward.  Then, as Ovid ends the story in his usual way, the gods take pity on them both, metamorphosing them into birds, who are always thereafter seen together.  Their permanent reunion in avian form is the reason why every winter there are seven days of perfect sunshine and calm, the days during which Alcyone broods over her nest, called, therefore, Halcyon days.  Again, this is the typical Ovidian coda, and a perfect example of what mythologists call an “aetiological myth”, i.e., one that is invented to explain some ritual or tradition whose original meaning has been lost in the mists of time.

This, then, is the poet’s bedtime reading.  After retailing the myth, he says that he becomes so drowsy that he falls asleep right upon his book, and dreams.  The content of his dream is, of course, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, which tells the story of the untimely death of Chaucer’s patroness Blanch, the Duchess of Gaunt, wife of Duke John of Gaunt, whose love and devotion to one another was as celebrated as that between Ceyx and Alcyone.

The Book of the Duchess is thus an elegy, cast in the form of a dream, whose purpose is to console John of Gaunt and Chaucer himself, both bereft by the death of a beloved lady, just as in the Ovidian myth which the poet had been reading before falling asleep, Alcyone is bereft by the death of her beloved husband Ceyx, who appears to her in a dream meant to console her.

 

But the nature and classification of dreams is, as I said, another ancient and longstanding topos, a fuller discussion of which we will have to postpone until later.  Let us return, then, to the Dream of Scipioand the harmony of the spheres.

In his dream, Scipio beholds his famous ancestor standing before him, and enumerating the great military and political deeds that his grandson will in due course accomplish; (and since Cicero wrote hisRepublic nearly a century after the death of Scipio the Younger, these predictions turn out to be uncannily accurate).

This half-humorous motive, too, is conventional, the most celebrated instance of which is the panoramic prophecy revealed by the ghost of Aeneas’ father Anchises of his son’s, and Rome’s, glorious future, in the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Anchises “predicts” the history of Rome from the time of its establishment down, by sheer coincidence, to Virgil’s own day.

There are innumerable other examples, of course, including Paradiso canto 17, in which the spirit of Cacciaguida foretells the eternal fame of Dante the poet—a prophetic self-compliment–, but I merely note these in passing as another commonplace of pre-modern literature.

Scipio then advises his descendant that nothing is more pleasing to the gods than the just and benevolent administration of the commonwealth, whose rulers “have a special place reserved for them in the heavens, where they may enjoy an eternal life of happiness”.  This place, he says, reiterating the Orpheo-Pythagoreo-Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of souls in the other world and their return thereto, is the place from which just rulers first descended to earth, and the place to which, after death, they will repair.

Scipio then asks whether his grandfather and father Paulus are really still alive, and he is told emphatically:  Surely all those are alive who have escaped from the bondage of the body as from a prison; but that life of yours, which men so call, is really death.”  If this is so, asks Scipio the Younger, why should he not commit suicide in order to “hasten thither to you”.

Scipio the Elder then enumerates the reasons for the prohibition against suicide, the same reasons given by Socrates when asked the same question by his interlocutor Cebes in a passage that occurs early in Plato’s Phaedo, the passage upon which Cicero has self-consciously modeled this section of theDream:

“Not so, for unless God, whose temple is everything that you see, has freed you from the prison of the body, you cannot gain entrance there.  For man was given life that he might inhabit that sphere called Earth, which you see in the centre of this temple; and he has been given a soul out of those eternal fires which you call stars and planets, which, being round and globular bodies animated by divine intelligences, circle about in their fixed orbits with marvelous speed.  Wherefore you, Publius, and all good men, must leave that soul in the custody of the body, and must not abandon human life except at the behest of him by whom it was given you, lest you appear to have shirked the duty imposed upon man by God.”

That duty, as Scipio explains, is twofold:  The first duty is the cultivation of virtue and wisdom, by which the soul prepares itself in this living death for the true life of the other world.  The second, of course, is service to the commonwealth, so that under the guidance of wise rulers, its citizens might live in justice and harmony.   (Inasmuch as the Christian prohibition against suicide probably comes from this passage, it is not surprising to find the same reasoning, expressed in terms of military duty, implicit in the words of  Redcross Knight’s admonition, who answers Despair’s temptation to suicide in Spenser’s sixteenth-century poem, The Faerie Queene:

The souldier may not move from watchfull sted
Nor leave his stand until his Captaine bid
FQ I, xi 41)

By this point in his dream, Scipio the Younger has presumably been exalted to the side of his grandfather in heaven, and from this superior perspective he overlooks the vastness of the cosmos.  What follows is an epitome of Ptolemaic astronomy, replete, as always, with the traditional moral and psychological assumptions of which the pre-modern model of the cosmos is the projected image:

     When I gazed in every direction from that point, all else appeared wonderfully beautiful. There were stars which we never see from the earth, and they were all larger than we have ever imagined.  The smallest of them was that farthest from heaven and nearest the earth which shone with a borrowed light [i.e., the Moon].  The starry spheres were much larger than the earth; indeed the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was scornful of our empire, which covers only a single point, as it were, upon its surface.

As I gazed still more fixedly at the earth, Africanus said:  “How long will your thoughts be fixed upon the lowly earth?  Do you not see what lofty regions you have entered?  These are the nine circles, or rather spheres, by which the whole is joined.  One of them, the outermost, is that of heaven; it contains all the rest, and is itself the supreme God, holding and embracing within itself all the other spheres; in it are fixed the eternal revolving courses of the stars. Beneath it are seven other spheres which revolve in the opposite direction to that of heaven. One of these globes is that light which on earth is called Saturn’s.  Next comes the star called Jupiter’s, which brings fortune and health to mankind.  Beneath it is that star, red and terrible to the dwellings of man, which you assign to Mars.  Below it and almost midway of the distance [i.e., between God’s heaven at the circumference and earth at the centre] is the Sun, the lord, chief, and ruler of the other lights, the mind and guiding principle of the universe, of such magnitude that he reveals and fills all things with his light.  He is accompanied by his companions, as it were—Venus and Mercury in their orbits, and in the lowest sphere revolves the Moon, set on fire by the rays of the Sun.  But below the Moon there is nothing except what is mortal and doomed to decay, save only the souls given to the human race by the bounty of the gods, while above the Moon all things are eternal.   For the ninth and central sphere, which is the earth, is immovable and the lowest of all, and toward it all ponderable bodies are drawn by their own natural tendency downward.”

After recovering from the astonishment with which I viewed these wonders, I said:  “What is this loud and agreeable sound that fills my ears?”

“That is produced”, he replied, “by the onward rush and motion of the spheres themselves; the intervals between them, though unequal, being exactly arranged in a fixed proportion, by an agreeable blending of high and low tones various harmonies are produced; for such mighty motions cannot be carried on so swiftly in silence; and Nature has provided that one extreme shall produce low tones while the other gives forth high.  Therefore this uppermost sphere of heaven, which bears the stars, as it revolves more rapidly, produces a high, shrill tone, whereas the lowest revolving sphere, that of the Moon, gives forth the lowest tone; for the earthly sphere, the ninth, remains ever motionless and stationary, in its position in the centre of the universe.  But the other eight spheres…produce seven different sounds—a number which is the key of almost everything.  Learned men, by imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in song, have gained for themselves a return to this region, as others have obtained the same reward by devoting their brilliant intellects to divine pursuits during their earthly lives.  Men’s ears, ever filled with this sound, have become deaf to it…We find a similar phenomenon where the Nile rushes down from those lofty mountains at the place called Catadupa [i.e., the cataracts of the Nile]; the people who live nearby have lost their sense of hearing on account of the loudness of the sound.  But this mighty music, produced by the revolution of the whole universe at the highest speed, cannot be perceived by human ears, any more than you can look straight at the Sun, your sense of sight being overpowered by its radiance.”

While gazing at these wanders, I was repeatedly turning my eyes back to earth.  Then Africanus resumed:

“I see that you are still directing your gaze upon the habitation and abode of men.  If it seems small to you, as it actually is, keep your gaze fixed upon those heavenly things and scorn the earthly…”

The Dream then goes on to dilate upon the theme of human vanity; his grandson, having already noted that by comparison to the stars the earth was so small that the Roman Empire–which was hardly more than a point on its tiny surface–excited his contempt, Scipio the Elder now points out that only a few small regions of our miniscule globe inhabited by men, to which the fame of the most glorious amongst them is limited.  Indeed, a man may be famous in one city, and completely unknown in an adjoining province.  Moreover, every time the world is periodically destroyed by conflagration or flood, and renewed throughout the recurrent cycle of death and rebirth, a man’s fame is utterly obliterated.  How insubstantial a thing is earthly fame, then, which can hardly last a single year, compared with the great or revolving year when the stars and planets return to their original configuration, and the cycle finally ends.

In the nineteen-seventies, the beau monde decided that Toronto was a “world-class city”.  Only those who had been born here, and never wandered farther afield than Tonawanda, N.Y., could possibly have failed to recognize this as jingoistic flapdoodle.  Yet the mantra continues to be intoned to this day by local politicians, multi-cult cultists, and self-lauding residents alike.

The essays that follow are intended for those who might be interested in a few thoughts about real world-class cities.  (A version of the first, on Paris, was originally published in The IDLER in 1985.  But then real world-class cities don’t change much over a mere quarter-century…) 

 

PARIS

      Paris is a city of style.  Now style is to beauty what art is to nature.  Specifically, style is to be distinguished from beauty because it requires that beautiful elements be also beautifully arranged.  Helen of Troy was beautiful.  For Helen to have had style, Paris would have had to have kidnapped her to, well, Paris, and taken her on a spree on the Rue de la Paix.

      The visitor to Paris discerns no single regnant fashion, except elegance.  It is remarkable, for instance, that both Parisian men and women are fascinated by such North American vulgarities as punk and urban grunge; but neither can pull them off.  They insist on civilizing their essential brutality (they are Parisians, after all), and so transform them beyond recognition.

     The exigencies of style affect every aspect of behaviour.  To Parisians, walking is less a means of transit than of self-expression.  There is no manifest intention of getting somewhere, as with other urbanites.  Down the sidewalks or across the streets, Parisians proceed more or less as Narcissus would if he were sipping cognac in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

     There are, in fact, numerous reasons for the Parisians’ slowness of gait.  1. You do not tell gorgeousness to move along.  2. There are constant disembarkations at the terasse.  (Parisians need to be fed coffee before exerting themselves to roll over in bed at night.)  3. Such is the vestigial sway of courtoisie, that on the sidewalks Parisians are always stopping to excuse themselves, under the moral anxiety of brushing another pedestrian’s arm.  (The contrast with North America is dramatic.  In New York or Toronto, pedestrians would never say excuse me, even if they were on their way to confession.)

     Neither courtesy nor caution applies to the driving of cars, however, where style demands danger, and the top-of-the-line Peugeot unleashes floods of masculinity.  H.G. Wells, the world-class atheist, once said that he did not dare to drive a motorcar in the streets of Paris for fear of succumbing to temptation and running over a priest.  Among native Frenchmen, there has been no abatement of anti-clerical sentiment since the Revolution.  And motorists in Paris continue to drive as if it were still a cathedral town, and every pedestrian hid a tonsure beneath his chapeau.

     From atop the Eiffel Tower, certain intersections in Paris resemble a giant game of Pac-Man.  Traversing the Place de la Concorde is either an act of Promethean bravado, or final submission.  If the welfare government in France were truly caring, it would install a psychotherapist on every corner (about sixteen) to try to talk pedestrians down.

 

     All of this is rather daunting to the tourist, I’m afraid.  But Paris is not for tourists, at least not that part of it that depends upon the goodwill of the natives.  The tourist does not visit Paris; it occasionally grants him an audience.

      The museums, for instance, might be open, or they might not, depending upon how they feel when they get up in the morning.  The first time I went to the City of Light, the Louvre guards were out en greve; the next time, the doors were shut in solidarity with a national truckers’ strike.  Just before the time of writing this (March, 1985), my visit was aborted by a student day of action against government “austerity” measures.  (When it comes to the eternal protest against putative threats to the nanny state, no one can doubt the wisdom of the French expression, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.)

     It is thus part of the Paris style, it seems, to be generally exclusive.  Do not try, for instance, to eat in Paris.  When a North American enters a French restaurant he is treated as Australopithecus would be by the Dean of Admissions at Harvard.  The Revolution issued promissory notes for liberte, egalite, and fraternite; but egalite and fraternite are non-negotiable by the non-French.  Foreigners are extended the liberte to be themselves, which is to say, unequal, and therefore, unfraternized.  If President Roosevelt had walked, chest-proud, into a Paris bistro immediately following the liberation of France, he would have been led to a table by the kitchen.

     All in all, it may be best for the tourist to forget the Parisians.  This is not to be taken as the ossified Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the Frogs, which is at best an inverted snobbery.  I offer it as a general prophylactic when visiting world-class cities.  After all, the people will come and go; the buildings (and in Paris, the buildings are considerably more friendly) will endure more or less forever.

 

     Someone once said that architecture is the science of style built to last.  There is certainly a sense in which Parisians, generation after generation, are shamed into their gorgeousness by the buildings.

     I admit that I find old buildings titillating.  There are others of similar orientation in every quarter of the globe; but as a group, we have yet to come out of the closet.  Many of us are forced to lead a double life.  On my first trip to Europe (my honeymoon), I took seven hundred slides of buildings and six of my wife.  During each of these essays in family portraiture, I aimed the camera affectionately in her direction; but the truth is, I used her for scale.

     What is it that makes European cities so seductive?  That they are old?  This is part of it; but then the Canadian Shield is old, and to the lovers of architecture, such untutored grandeur succeeds merely in inducing frozen fits of agoraphobia.  Rather, that they offer the visitor that reassuring sense of enclosure promised by his gestation.

     In European streets the eye is freighted down an unbroken line of facades.  Humbly, individual buildings march up to, but not beyond, a solid street wall, under an ancient urban obligation.  This is a visual datum with which the semi-rusticated inhabitants of Toronto or Atlanta are unfamiliar.  In such a neoteric birthplace, the infant will tumble directly from the womb into an open-concept daycare centre, his trauma later reinforced by widened sidewalks, herniated streetscapes, concrete office plazas, low-density-zoning set-backs, fully-detached homes, freeways, parking lots, and commercial towers that (in deference to the sun) retreat from corners like Dracula from the Cross.  (Professor Eric Arthur, remarking on the amount of “open space” in the downtown core, said that Toronto reminded him of London after the blitz.)  In North America, what we have are half-cities, hybrid monsters of architecture’s me-generation, meccano-assembled by town planners with claustrophobic inclinations, Arcadian fantasies, sociological backgrounds, and suburban minds.

 

     Paris, by contrast, offers the visitor an almost perfect urban snugness.  There are streets here so narrow that the anorexic models have to turn sideways.  In some quarters, like the Marais, you don’t walk down the streets, you slip them on.

     There are also superhuman vistas here, the kind that make one think that if God had wished to design an approach to the Primum Mobile, he might have hired Mansart or Vicomte–when the visitor perches on the banks of the Seine, for instance, or when he turns around to look back at the Hotel des Invalides, or the Palais de Luxembourg.  But even these vast expanses are relentlessly enclosed, making one feel humble, but not hopeless, a free agent, but not abandoned to the existential void.

     Preserving the seamless Parisian streetscape was the probable cynosure when France surrendered early in Wold War II.  Other great European cities must put up with anachronistic intrusions until the next world war.  Passing one of those high-tech piles heaped up by post-bellum modernists in their experimentation on the natives of Berlin, a bus tour companion asked trenchantly:  “What’s the point in bombing out whole sectors of a city if you’re only going to replace them with stuff like that?”

     Ironically, nothing so inspires a love of the past as an unlovely present.  Thus North American tourists, who profess to love novelty, flock to such cities as Paris as to havens from it.  Here, there are only a few gleaming glass boxes, and modernity, when it is suffered, is usually exiled to the periphery, where it stands like the crested helmets of some new envious barbarism.