Tag: grammar-of-symbols-and-ideas-ii

Music, Love, and Justice…

Justice as a Concors Discordiae…

The Law of Correspondence …

The “Justice” of the Cosmos:  Homer, Anaximander, Greek Tragedy…

Hybris and the Law of Compensation…

     The analogy between David and Orpheus as singers of cosmogony suggests the final and most symbolically resonant way in which the music of the spheres can reawaken the divine self that sleeps in the depths of the soul.

     To understand this we need to remind ourselves of the association of music with justice as we have encountered it so far.  Recall that the music of the spheres is invoked in Cicero’s Somnium in the context of a larger work, which like Plato’s Republic, sets itself the imaginative task of founding the Just City, and in the more specific context of a vision in which Scipio the Elder exhorts his grandson to dedicate himself to the just administration of the commonwealth, which he says is as one of the highest vocations of the wise man.  The just functioning of the commonwealth, says Scipio, depends upon the harmonious interaction of its various estates whose interests are often at odds.  It is, as such, as kind of concors discordiae—a harmony of discord.

     Remember too that in Lorenzo’s evocation of the theme, the contrast between the Justice of the Old Law and the Mercy of the New is obviously the central theme of Shakespeare’s play.  In the Christian dispensation, Justice and Love are opposites, while at the same time merely different aspects of the same quality; reconciled in the New Law, they produce, once again, a concors discordiae.

    For related reasons, Justice, Love, and the music of the spheres have always been symbolically assimilated.  The conflation of these concepts goes back, in fact, to the very beginning of Western thought.

     The music of the spheres is produced by the revolutions of the stars and planets, and as moderns we might wonder why these inanimate and impersonal bodies should behave as if they were living beings constrained by the same moral laws that regulate human society.  The short answer is that they areliving beings, celestial animals, as Plato calls them, whose spherical material bodies are animated by indwelling souls he calls Intelligences.  Indeed, the cosmos itself is, in Plato’s phrase, a divine animal, whose visible materia is God’s body, and whose invisible form is God’s soul–his “immanent Mind”, to use Virgil’s phrase.

     Such philosophical metaphors merely illustrate the habit of the primitive and mythogenic psyche to project itself into the material universe, finding there the fundamental human dichotomy between body and soul, and all the emotions, virtues and vices, qualities and conditions of ordinary human experience, including Justice, Love, and so on.  In later literature and philosophy, this reflex is rationalized as the law of correspondence, according to which everything in the great world (the macrocosm) exists in miniature in the little world of man (the microcosm).  The law of correspondence, therefore, suggests that the just, orderly, and harmonious operations of the human collective (the polis) and the human individual (the moral psyche) have their counterparts in the justice, order, and harmony that govern nature on a universal scale.  

     The idea of the “justice” of the cosmos also goes back to the very beginning of European thought.  Both Homer and Hesiod refer to the just and equal apportionment to Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus of the government of the four regions into which the universe is divided—the underworld allotted to Hades, the sea to Poseidon, and the heavens to Zeus, with the earth and Mt. Olympus shared amongst the brothers.

     This is the sacred decree that is alluded to in a famous passage–the subject of endless allegorical commentary–in Iliad XV, where Zeus, enraged at the meddling of Poseidon in the war between the Greeks and Trojans, sends a messenger to command him to withdraw from the Trojan plain.  To Zeus’ highhanded decree, Poseidon protests angrily:

No, no.  Great though he be, this that he has said is too much,
if he will force me against my will, me, who am his equal
in rank.  Since we are three brothers born by Rheia to Kronos,
Zeus, and I, and the third is Hades, lord of the dead men.
All was divided among us three ways, each given his domain.
I when the lots were shaken drew the grey sea to live in
forever; Hades drew the lot of the mists and the darkness,
and Zeus was allotted the wide sky, in the cloud and the bright air.
But earth and high Olympos are common to all three. Therefore
I am no part of the mind of Zeus.  Let him in tranquility
and powerful as he is stay satisfied with his third share.

The three brothers have been given their provinces by “lot”, that is, by Moira or Destiny, and therefore any encroachment upon the province of one by another is fiercely resisted as an injustice, insofar as it threatens the balance of power upon which the peaceful government of the cosmos depends.

     As you remember, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades were, from the very earliest stages of Greek philosophy, conventionally interpreted naturaliter as allegorical symbols of the elements fire, water, and earth, respectively.   But even if as a rational philosopher (as opposed to a “lying poet”) you conceive of these as “inanimate” elements, they are, all the same, as bound as any Olympian god by the same sacred law of justice not to encroach upon the province of the other elements.

     Here is the teaching of the sixth-century B.C. Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander of Miletus, as outlined in a late-antique commentary by Simplicius on Aristotle’s Physics:

Anaximander…asserted that the source and element of existing things is “The Infinite” [to Apeiron].  He was the first to introduce this name for the source of all.  He says that it is neither water nor any of the other so-called “elements”, but of another nature which is infinite and eternal, from which all the heavens and the world-orders in them arise…

…He says that all existing things come into being and pass away according to what must be; for “they make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time”, as he puts it in somewhat poetical language. (On Aristotle’s Physics [6^th A.D.])

 From other fragments preserved by later authors, we can piece together what this cryptic statement means.  According to Anaximander, before they are “separated out” of The Infinite into a world-order, the elemental opposites—hot and cold, wet and dry—are all mixed up together in a formless heap, a state of mutual aggression, in which they commit “injustice” by overstepping their bounds, invading each other’s provinces, for which they must eventually make “reparation” if the balance is to be restored.  The same principle governs the revolution of the seasonal year—the meaning of Anaximander’s phrase “according to the ordinance of time”–, in which the excessive heat of summer is forced to withdraw and “make reparation” to the advancing cold, and the excessive cold of winter must make reparation for the injustice it has done to the hot.  This is Anaximander’s moral “law of compensation”, and it governs the human microcosm as it does the macrocosm.

     In our first series of essays (Involuted Mysteries) on numbers, we discussed the law of compensation as it applies to the human body, which falls into disease whenever one of the opposites becomes dominant in the form of an excess of one of the humours, the health of the body depending upon the restoration of balance amongst all four. The same law of compensation governs human society.

     We see the dire consequences of its violation most dramatically in Greek tragedy, with its admonition against hybris, the tragic failure of the protagonist to recognize his proper place in the cosmos–to “think mortal thoughts”, as the Apollonian aphorism goes–, the inevitable consequence of which is his payment of reparation in being cast down even lower than the position from which he originally aspired.  As the Chorus admonishes at the end of Sophocles’ Antigone:

Above all, happiness depends
On wisdom.  It is never right
To sin against the gods.  Great blows
Repay great words of boasting men,
And teach us wisdom in old age.

      The fall of the tragic hero is just payment for his overweening pride, especially his lack of regard for the rights of the gods.  So Oedipus and Jocasta who once scoffed at the oracle are repaid; so Agamemnon, who destroyed the altars of the gods at Troy, pays the penalty at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra.

The Analogy between Orpheus and David…

Christianity as a Syncretistic Religion…

     Before we quite leave the orbit of his mythology, I need to mention one other narrative tradition about a legendary musician to whom Orpheus was habitually compared.

In his important early-sixth-century treatise The Institutes, Cassiodorus draws the analogy between the power of Orpheus’ lyre to soothe the breasts of wild beasts and that of David’s harp to “deliver Saul from the unclean spirit by means of his redeeming melody”.   In the Middle Ages, the identification of Orpheus with David, and with Christ (the New David), was one of a number of analogies between pagan mythology and biblical history that evolved into literary commonplaces:  image clusters or complexes that tended to promote a vision of the archetypal provenance and universal amplitude of the Christian story and its God, and at the same time to blur the edges of the heavily bibliocentric theology of early Christian polemic, in which the Truth of the Bible was seen in triumphant and disqualifying contrast to the falsity of pagan myth.

 

The origin of the David-Orpheus analogy is in fact pre-Christian, having been first brewed up in late Hellenistic times when pagan philosophy and mystery religion, esoteric Jewish theosophy, and nascent Christianity were in fertile contact with one another, giving birth in turn to any number of strange offspring, including Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and the Kabbala.

In an Essenian manuscript discovered at Qumran, for example, a poem is placed in the mouth of David that is fecund with Orphic initiatory formulas and detailed allusions to the myth of the Greek musician, in which the Israelite King was shown to be entirely fluent.  Knowing as we do (after the disinterment of Qumran’s treasures) how completely suffused with Orphic and Pythagorean ideas was the Judaism of the Essenes, we may appreciate that the author of this poem was ventilating a sort of theological joke.

According to the conventional Deuteronomic theology of kingship of which David was the embodied ideal, the supreme vocation of the Israelite monarch was to immunize the Hebrew faith against contamination from neighbouring pagan cults. But far from purifying the high places, David himself is here imagined to be a sort of Orphic priest or sage.  This early “Orphic David” seems to testify to that sinful Jewish habit of syncretism that was abominated by the Prophets and Kings of Israel throughout Old Testament history.   But since Christianity is nothing if not a syncretistic phenomenon, it is not surprising that the mind of the Christian Middle Ages was struck by and avid to rehearse the many parallels and points of contact between the legends of Orpheus and David.

Just as David had exorcised the malignant demon from Saul’s spirit, according to the Byzantine theologian John Tzetzes, Orpheus’ music drew the snake-venom from the body, and the moral poison from the soul, of Eurydice.  “Just as Orpheus played his lyre in hell”, wrote Bernard of Utrecht (an eleventh-century commentator on the school text, the Eclogue of Theodulus), “so David played before Saul; and just as Orpheus mollified the gods of the underworld with his lyre, so David pacified Saul’s evil spirit.”

In both the Eclogue of Theodulus and the voluminous fourteenth-century allegorical commentary on the Metamorphoses known as the Ovide moralise, the Davidic harp that delivers Saul from his demonic rage is said to have been the very lyre of Orpheus that had once uprooted trees, halted rivers in their course, set rocks to dancing, and civilized the wildness of ferocious beasts.

 

Finally, both Orpheus, in his hymns, and David in his Psalms, were celebrated as divinely inspired singers of the creation of the world, and so in his commentary on the six days of creation in Genesis, the seventh-century exegete George of Pisidia, drew the comparison, “For however much Orpheus smote his divinely tuned lyre, so too David, seeing the glory of the heavens as they stretched from the height to the depths of creation, sang out about them”.

And in the fifteenth century, testifying to the continuity of this tradition, the Middle English poet John Lydgate equates “The harpis most melodious/Of David and of Orpheous”, whose

melodye was in all
So hevenly and celestiall
That there nys hert, I dar expresse,
Oppressed so with hevynesse,
Nor in sorwe so y-bounde,
That he sholde ther ha founde
Comfort hys sorowe to apese…

 

The “melodye” of David and Orpheus is not merely figuratively but literally “heavenly and celestial”, of course; it is, that is, the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, with which Orpheus’ lyre, and now David’s harp, reverberate.  Indeed, that Lydgate’s poem is entitled Resoun and Sensualite tells us, once again, that the doctrine of the harmony of spheres, along with its entire Orpheo-Pythagoreo-Platonic ethos, has long since been read into Christian biblical narrative and theology.

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.

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 mundi—of 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)

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.