The Influence of World Views on Romantic love, Punishment for sin, and internal Conflict... 1000 Words Min.

World Literature from a Christian Perspective

By Edwin McAllister

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Introduction to the Old Testament 8

Introduction to The Iliad 17

Introduction to The Odyssey 29

Introduction to Agamemnon 39

Introduction to Oedipus 50

Introduction to The Aeneid 59

Introduction to the New Testament 73

Introduction to The Confessions 79

Introduction to Beowulf 84

Introduction to The Inferno 90

Introduction to The Canterbury Tales 96

Introduction to Luther’s Commentary on Galatians 104

Introduction to The Prince 110

Introduction to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” 115

Introduction to Hamlet 121

Introduction to Paradise Lost 130

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World Literature From A Christian Perspective Introduction

When I was in grade school, I had an argument with a friend over the ethics of telling lies. We were having a schoolyard fight over a lie I’d been telling recently. I claimed to have broken my leg in order to avoid playing tackle football at recess, and my friend told me that I could not lie because “the Bible says lying is wrong.” I challenged him to “find the place” where the Bible says lying is wrong.

Finding “the place” turned out to be more difficult than my friend thought it would be. It took us half an hour to find the Ten Commandments in the dusty old King James we dug up, but when we did locate them, “Thou shalt not tell lies” was not among them. Instead, what we found was “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). That didn’t help much, since it didn’t really cover what I was doing. At worst, I was bearing false witness against myself. In our further attempt to find “the rule,” what we discovered was a lot of stories and poems and precious few straightforward “thou shalt not kill”-type rules.

Although we didn’t realize it at the time, my friend and I were learning a valuable lesson about the Bible: often, rather than directly stating truth or ethical ideals, the Bible uses literary techniques to embody or incarnate ideas. In other words, rather than saying “do not lie,” the Bible shows God’s hatred for lying in stories like that of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 or in figurative language like that Jesus uses in John 8 when he identifies Satan as “the father of lies.” Acts 5 never literally says “Do not lie,” but when Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead by God after lying to the Holy Spirit, the story shows that God hates lying. When Jesus identifies Satan as the father of lies he does not literally mean that Satan is a father who has lies as his children; instead, by identifying Satan as “the father” of lies, he implies that Satan is the ultimate source of all falsehood. Stories and figures like these embody God’s love of the truth and his hatred for falsehood.

Literature not only embodies propositional truths like “God hates lies,” it also conveys experiential truth, or what it feels like to live through a particular experience. At times, such experiential truth can gratify our curiosity about other lives, other cultures, and other times. None of us is likely to experience the brutal hand-to-hand combat described so precisely in the Iliad, but reading the Iliad can help us to understand something of the terror and exhilaration these warriors felt.

But the experiential dimension of literature does more than simply gratify our curiosity about the experiences of other people and places. The best literature teaches us something about how it feels to be a limited human being living in a fallen world. The Iliad not only asks us to experience combat, but to experience the grief of losing someone close to us. Achilles’ grief for Patroclus can help us to understand our own grief and how to avoid the worst excesses to which grief can drive us. Achilles’ grief can cause us to reflect on our own human limitations and the temptation to live as if those limitations did not exist. When we respond to good works of literature by saying to ourselves: “Yes, that is what life is like; that is how it feels to be human,” we are responding to the experiential truth that literature conveys.

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Finally, literature is frequently a better learning tool than propositional language. Memorizing the ten commandments is a chore. Remembering the basic outline of the story of Joseph is simple, yet that same story has as much to teach us about the character of God as the Ten Commandments, and perhaps more, as we shall see.

In addition to being pleasurable for its own sake (everyone loves stories), literature can intensify the impact of what we read by speaking to our hearts rather than to our heads only, implanting its lessons far more deeply than “head knowledge.” Literature is also easier to remember, a way of saying a great deal in a small space. When David writes “The Lord is my shepherd,” he’s using a metaphor that contains volumes of information about God—information that need not be memorized because it is packed into the metaphor itself.

Psalm 73, which we will explore at some length, is a great example of how Biblical literature can embody both propositional and experiential truth.

Psalm 73 1 Truly God is good to the upright,

to those who are pure in heart. 2 But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold. 3 For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. 4 They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong. 5 They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills. 6 Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence. 7 Their eyes swell out with fatness;

their hearts overflow with follies.

8 They scoff, and speak with malice; in their arrogance they threaten oppression. 9 They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth.

10 Therefore their people turn to them and praise them; and find no fault in them. 11 They say, “How can God know? Does the Most High have knowledge?”

12 This is what the wicked are like- always carefree, they increase in wealth. 13 Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence. 14 All day long I have been plagued; I have been punished every morning.

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15 If I had said, “I will speak thus,” I would have betrayed your children. 16 When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me 17 till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny. 18 Surely you place them on slippery ground; you make them fall down to ruin. 19 How suddenly are they destroyed, completely swept away by terrors! 20 As a dream when one awakes, so when you arise, O Lord, you will despise them as fantasies.

21 When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, 22 I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you. 23 Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. 24 You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory. 25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. 26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. 27 Those who are far from you will perish; you destroy all who are unfaithful to you. 28 But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge; I will tell of all your deeds. *This is the “New Revised Standard McAllister Version” (NRSMV) of this Psalm, cobbled together from several other translations.

The psalm begins with a statement of propositional truth: “Truly God is good to the upright.” We might notice, though, that the speaker begins this statement with the word “Truly,” as though the statement needed some intensification, indicating the speaker’s recognition that the propositional statement of the first verse (“God is good to the upright”) is not self-evident. From its beginning line, then, the poem embodies the truths of human experience, where short-term observations do not always support the abstract claims made elsewhere in the Bible. Is God really “good to the upright”? A cursory glance at the world would certainly suggest otherwise, for it is

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frequently the case that those who despise God and trample his truth seem to be the most “blessed.”

The dissonance between the Biblical truth that “God is good to the upright” and the experiential evidence of human observation is the puzzle that the speaker mulls over in this poem. The psalm itself embodies this dissonance because the claim that is ultimately upheld in the psalm (God IS good to the upright) is at first stated only as an abstract proposition, whereas the evidence against the claim (the wicked are prospering) is presented in a series of concrete images, which we will explore in some detail below.

The speaker begins with a series of relatively straightforward observations about the prosperity of the wicked: “they have no struggles” and “their bodies are healthy and strong.” The language becomes more recognizably literary when the speaker claims that “pride is their necklace.” “Pride” cannot literally be worn around the neck; this is figurative language. In this case, the figure is called a metaphor, a comparison that does not use the words “like” or “as.” Instead of saying “A is like B” (a figure called a simile), metaphor instead makes the much stronger and more striking claim that “A is B.” Metaphor helps us to grasp something abstract or unfamiliar (the pride of the wicked) by comparing it with something concrete and familiar (a person wearing a necklace). A necklace is something worn openly, often as a way of displaying prosperity (especially thick gold chains or jewels). So the suggestion here is that the wicked are not even ashamed of their pride, but rather display it openly.

The speaker goes on to tell us that the eyes of the wicked “swell out with fatness.” Again, the speaker simply presents us with a word-picture, but the picture speaks clearly enough that no further explanation is necessary. In this culture, fatness is not shameful, but is instead a sign of prosperity, indicating that one does not have to do manual labor and can afford to eat a great deal of rich food. So the image of the eyes of the wicked swelling out with fatness embodies or incarnates the abstract idea that the wicked are prospering.

An even more interesting figure appears in verse 9, where we are told that the tongue of the wicked “struts through the earth.” (NASB translates “struts” here as “parades.”) The figure here is called personification, which happens when a writer invests an object with human properties. In this case, a tongue is made to walk grandly around the earth as if it had legs and a brain to guide it. The psalmist asks us to see the picture as a way of understanding the real object he is describing: the words of the wicked, which are obviously as full of false pride as a lone man strutting through the earth laying claim to all that he sees.

Verses 10 and 11 show us the effect of the apparent prosperity of the wicked: other people admire the wicked and turn away from God. Seeing the wicked go unpunished, they are encouraged to engage in wicked behavior themselves. After all, if God does not punish the wicked but gives them prosperity, maybe he does not watch over human behavior at all. Of course, the psalm doesn’t literally say any of this. Instead, it simply reports the actions and speech of “the people” and leaves us to infer what these speeches and actions mean. The speaker even begins to report his own frustration with God’s

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lack of oversight in allowing the wicked to prosper by directly reporting his own thoughts: “Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure.” In other words, “What a waste of time to be obedient to God if wicked people have all the wealth, health, and happiness.”

But the psalm does not leave us to sort unaided through the implications of the disheartening experience of seeing the wicked prosper. Instead, just after verse 14, at the exact midpoint of the psalm, the tone changes based on the speaker’s having “entered the sanctuary of God.” This last phrase is more figurative language serving to indicate not necessarily a change in physical location, but a figurative change in thinking, since “entering” this sanctuary involves an entire change of heart on the part of the thinker, a change that will be embodied in the rest of the psalm.

This change of heart might be described as a shift from short-term to long-term thinking; the shift is incarnated for us in figurative language. The speaker remembers here that God places the wicked “on slippery ground.” Of course, the speaker does not literally mean that God puts down wicked people in the mud, but that figuratively speaking, the wicked are in “slippery places,” places where one cannot stand long before falling. “Slippery place” is a physical metaphor describing the spiritual position of the wicked before God. The implication, here and elsewhere, is that destruction is coming on the wicked eventually. The ultimate destruction of the wicked is one of the most fundamental of all Biblical themes, embodied in stories all over the Bible.

When we begin to allow ourselves to think in Biblical terms, when our hearts are soaked in the truth of the Bible, we understand that the prosperity of the wicked is only temporary. God has never allowed the wicked to prosper unpunished, though retribution comes on God’s timetable and not on man’s. God’s character as the punisher of evil deeds has not changed. The history of God’s interaction with humans is full of stories of the temporary prosperity of the wicked being ultimately placed under God’s judgment.

In Psalm 73, the speaker's ultimate embrace of God’s way of thinking, comes through, rather than apart from, a wrestling with the fallen world and its apparent contradiction of Biblical truth. The speaker in the psalm reaches solid ground theologically only after looking carefully and actively at his world, even in those places where the facts seem to contradict scripture, even at those actions and behaviors that are displeasing to God, not hiding from them, but encountering them and thinking about what they mean. To extend the psalmist’s metaphor, we enter the sanctuary of God by passing through the courtyard of critical thinking.

My prayer is that, even as the psalmist’s view of the world is deepened by approaching the evidence of experience from a Biblical perspective, your encounter with literature will help you undergo the same process of transformation this psalm embodies. This process is described by Paul in Romans 12:2, when he warns against being “conformed to this world,” as the speaker of the psalm appears to be in the first fourteen verses, relying solely on his short-term observations of the prosperity of the wicked. Paul commands instead that we allow ourselves to be “transformed by the renewing of [our] mind[s], that [we] may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will

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of God.” Knowing the will, and thus the character, of God, is the end or purpose of all human knowledge. The study of the best literature can be an invaluable aid in that process.

Worldview The Bible teaches us that humans are limited beings who exist in a fallen

world, a world that is very different from the world that God originally created for us to occupy. God created us with a consciousness that was designed for a perfect world, but, like fish out of water, we no longer occupy that world. As a result, our minds constantly scream that something is wrong. The hard facts of existence—death, disease, aging, human evil, our own loneliness and sense of isolation—strike us as desperately wrong, so we naturally search for answers. This search is as human and normal as breathing.

The mere fact of human consciousness, of existing in a fallen world, forces on each of us certain questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What should I be doing? What went wrong? Where am I? Who (or what) is in control of events? No culture has ever existed that did not feel the need to answer these questions, for they are built into the very nature of man.

Your answers to these questions define your worldview, your way of thinking about yourself and your relationship to the world and to God. Every human being has a worldview; some are more explicit and carefully constructed than others, but we all have one. One of the goals of this anthology is to encourage you to think more carefully about your own worldview and to begin “taking every thought captive” so that your thinking will become more clearly in line with a Biblical worldview. For organizational purposes, I am dividing these worldview questions up into three areas: view of man (who am I?), view of the world (where am I?), and view of the divine (what, or who, is in charge?). In practice, we’ll see that all of these questions are inter-related, that answering any of these questions in a particular way affects the way we answer the others.

View of Man Who am I? Every worldview attempts to provide a meaningful answer to

this question, an answer that helps an individual to understand his relationship with the world and with the divine. Am I created or did I “just happen”? Do I have free will, or are my actions predetermined by some external force? Can I take significant action? How can I live a meaningful life? How useful is my reason? How do I balance my responsibilities to the community with my own desires? Are my abilities and gifts in life the result of who my parents are? How important are “every day” events like cooking, eating, and caring for children? Are they less important than extraordinary events like wars, counsels, and business meetings? How important is romantic love? Is love merely a distraction from more important matters?

View of World Where am I? The nature of the world we inhabit has been a subject of

reflection for philosophers and scientists since the beginnings of recorded history. The primary questions that humans have asked about the world involve orderliness. Does the world display an order, a predictable pattern of behavior, or is the world simply random? Psalm 73 seems to be asking

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precisely this question; after all, if evildoers flourish, there must be no order. Answers to this question are generally based on how one answers other related questions: was the world created, or did it just happen? Is the physical world all that exists, or is there a spiritual world as well? Does the physical world really exist? Some non-Christian worldviews like Hinduism and Christian Science hold that the material world is merely an illusion and that the only “real” world is the spiritual. Other worldviews like Platonism hold that the material world exists but is only a shabby and imperfect reflection of the truly significant spiritual world. Finally, some worldviews like scientific determinism insist that the spiritual world does not exist at all, or if it does it is unnecessary for explaining the physical world. View of the world also includes views about man’s ultimate destination: where (if anywhere) do we go after death?

View of the Divine What (or who) is in control? The Bible tells us that God created humans

to be in a close and loving relationship with Him; when man sinned, he cut himself off from his relationship with God. Ever since, man apart from God has felt deeply that something or someone must be in control of the observable world, working behind the scenes. But different cultures and groups without the Biblical revelation of God have disagreed about the nature of that divine someone or something. Is there a force that transcends the physical world that controls it? Does that force have personal features like emotions, memory, or planning? If the force is personal, is there one God, as the Hebrew tradition insists, or are there many, as the Greeks, Hindus, and Mormons claim? How complete is the control of the divine over physical affairs? Did the force that controls the universe actually create the universe?

Organization of Chapters Each chapter of the textbook consists of an introduction to a single piece

of literature or selections from a single work or author. Each chapter will be divided into five, and sometimes six, sections. The first section of each chapter will be entitled “Introduction” and will include general notes about the author, the immediate historical context for the work, changes in critical opinions or receptions of the work, and other matters not directly related to worldview issues. The next three sections of each chapter (“View of Man,” “View of the Divine,” “View of the World”) will discuss how the work or group of works reflects a particular worldview. Where necessary, chapters will also include “Individual Analysis of Major Characters.” Finally, each chapter will include a section on the “Artistic / Aesthetic” qualities of each of the works. Here, we’ll explore the specifically literary qualities of each work: design and patterning, relationship to art of the past, how form reflects meaning, and finally how the work treats the importance of art itself to human existence.

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Introduction to the Old Testament 2 Chronicles 18-20 Introduction General Even students who know the Bible well may not recognize this obscure narrative from the Old Testament, but this brief passage can teach us a great deal about the Hebrew worldview, particularly when we compare some of the features of this passage with similar features we will encounter later in our study of classical literature. The narrative is drawn from the “divided kingdom” period, when the Israelites split into two political entities: Israel, which generally had apostate kings, and Judah, which generally remained faithful to God. View of Man

2 Chronicles 18-20 provides us with a great example of a literary feature that sets the Bible apart from literature being produced out of the classical tradition at the same time: the Bible's focus on the moral development of individuals. Jehoshaphat grows and changes over time and is a dynamic, multifaceted individual. Nevertheless, he retains certain features of his personality over time. Consider Jehoshaphat's early experience with Ahab; his alliance with this wicked King of Israel brings disaster, particularly because of ignoring the words of the prophet Micaiah. Jehoshaphat does not make the same mistake in his second great crisis. He learns and grows so that his behavior in the second crisis is in part determined by what he learned in the first crisis. Classical heroes, on the other hand, do not develop but remain static. Unfortunately, Jehoshaphat's transformation is not complete; some of his weakness of character evidently remains with him throughout life. Just as he was willing at the beginning of his reign to keep company with King Ahab, so at the end of his reign does he make a deal with Ahaziah, another wicked king of Israel.

In addition to his dynamic personality, Jehoshaphat’s ability to feel and to express fear also sets him apart from most classical heroes. Unlike Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who is so mighty in battle that he fears no man on earth and even takes on a god, Jehoshaphat is admirable precisely because he is aware of his own limitations. He cannot defeat the army that is approaching Judah through his own strength. This awareness motivates him to take his most significant action: calling directly on God in prayer.

The prayer itself makes an interesting contrast with prayers that we will find later in classical literature. For the Greeks, prayer is often a form of "deal-making" with the gods that places man in the position of a spiritual trading partner, offering to perform sacrifices, build temples, and carry out other “god-honoring” acts in return for favors from the

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gods. In the Iliad, a priest of Apollo begins his prayer to his god by reminding the god of all the good things the priest has done for him:

Hear me, Apollo! God of the silver bow . . . If ever I roofed a shrine to please your heart, Ever burned the long rich thigh bones of bulls and goats On your holy altar, now, now bring my prayers to pass!

Jehoshaphat’s prayer, on the other hand, shows that the God of the Bible cannot be manipulated, because he cannot be motivated by greed or vanity. Man, as understood from a Biblical perspective, has nothing to offer an entirely self-sufficient God as part of a deal-making process. If the cattle on a thousand hills belong to our God (Psalm 50:10b), He will not be impressed with our small sacrifices. More importantly, the gospel of grace tells us that God’s favor cannot be won through works of goodness; our works cannot make him love us more, nor can our neglect of works make Him love us less, since His character is unchanging and eternal. Thus, Jehoshaphat's prayer to this self-sufficient God simply reminds God of His character in the past and asks Him to act in a way that is consistent with His protection and provision of past times.

Most importantly, the prayer ends with a statement of utter dependence: "...we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you." If Jehoshaphat is the hero of this story, he is a very different kind of hero from those we will encounter in classical literature. We admire Achilles and Odysseus for their courage, their resourcefulness, and above all their splendid independence. But Jehoshaphat admits his own inability to help himself, declaring himself entirely dependent on God. God's answer to Jehoshaphat's prayer reveals a great deal about the nature of Biblical heroism and the ancient Hebrew worldview: "Do not be afraid. For the battle is not yours, but God's." In the context of the Hebrew’s belief in a God controlling all human affairs, traditional classical heroism is impossible. Man cannot win any genuine glory for himself, for all of his accomplishments are only expressions of the glory of God.

Thus, Biblical heroism differs from classical heroism mainly in its dependence and passivity. Biblical heroes are utterly dependent on God for their strength, for their skill, and for the favor that they find from others. Biblical heroes often express their heroism simply by believing God and waiting for him to work. Consider Daniel, a giant of faith; his greatest act of heroism was not being eaten by lions. Daniel doesn't tear the lions to pieces as Achilles would, or trick them into destroying themselves as the wily Odysseus would have. He simply stands and waits for God to take care of the situation. Joseph's heroism consists of waiting patiently in jail— or worse still, running away from a woman (Potiphar's wife). Try to imagine Achilles running from a woman! Homer does not ask us to admire his characters based on their moral behavior. View of World

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All the events that occur in this story are under the control of an omnipotent God. But this God is invisible, separate from the creation that he watches over. How God manages to make the Ammonites, Moabites, and Meunites destroy one another—what ruses or disguises he uses, how he manipulates their thinking—is of no interest to the narrator or, presumably, the audience. God’s presumed omnipotence makes defeating such an army so laughably simple that it seems to be not worth narrating at all. Compare this with Homer’s careful description of the intervention of the gods in the fighting before Troy. View of the Divine

The prayer of Jehoshaphat also points to a critical distinction between Greek and Hebrew ideas of God: where the Greeks gods are capricious, changing their minds, shifting alliances, and abandoning their favorites without warning, for the Hebrews, God is unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and forever. Thus, remembering God's behavior in the past becomes a critical part of understanding how He will behave in the present and future. God asks us to be familiar with His Word because it reveals His character to us, a character that remains the same throughout history.

The Greeks, as we will see, had no such assurance. Aside from their powers and their immortality, the Greek gods are ultimately no different morally from any human being; and their actions show it. Out of gratitude toward a particularly pious individual like Hector, they may act for a time to protect his interests. But when their own interests conflict with his, they withdraw their favor and allow him to die.

Artistic/Aesthetic A second great difference between classical and biblical narrative styles emerges early in Chapter 20, where we are told that "some men" came to warn Jehoshaphat about the approach of the armies out of Aram. Who are these “men”? How did they learn this news? What was their relationship with Jehoshaphat? The Bible never tells us. Compare this with Homer's treatment of the embassy to Achillles in Book IX of the Iliad. There, we learn the identities of all of the messengers, we learn the relationship of each of these men to Achilles, and we are treated to a long speech from each man that expresses his unique personality and relationship to Achilles.

The narrative also points to another difference between classical and Biblical narrative style: the comparative reticence of the Bible with regard to specific detail. Biblical narrative uses much greater economy of detail than Homeric narrative. Homer will often stop and lovingly describe objects – Achilles’ armor and shield, for example - that have nothing to do with the plot of the story. In classical narrative, details are often included for their aesthetic value. The greater economy of

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Biblical narrative underlines the fact that the Bible was written and read according to a very different set of assumptions than those that animated the production and consumption of classical works of literature. As grand as Homer's works are, and as fully as they express the ideals of classical civilization, they were ultimately created as entertainment, a way to kill time around the campfire. Thus, details are often included for their own sake. The Bible was produced as a didactic religious text, designed to teach us something about God, the world, man, and man's relationship with God. Details not relevant to the didactic point of the story are relentlessly stripped away, and we are left with only what is most important. It follows that ALL details in Biblical narrative are included for a reason.

We might also note that the Biblical narrative includes no details about the armies beyond their size and their points of origin. Unlike Homer, who skips effortlessly back and forth from the Greek to the Trojan army and introduces characters from both sides, the Biblical narrator is not interested in the makeup or character of the Moabite, Ammonite, and Meunite fighting forces. All we need to know is that they have opposed themselves to the people of God and that God will take care of them. Are there great heroes accompanying this army? Will there be a clash of mighty men like the struggle between Achilles and Hector that is the climax of the Iliad? Such issues are of very little interest or significance to Hebrew writers or readers. There are no such “clashes of the Titans” in the Bible; the only significant head-to-head physical combat in the Bible involves an insignificant shepherd boy fighting against the giant Goliath, and here the whole point of the story is the didactic lesson that God can empower even the lowliest and weakest to do battle with the mightiest hero on earth. Unlike the Greek gods, the God of the Bible is not impressed with physical prowess. This particular battle becomes a powerful expression of that truth. This army does not have to strike a single blow; they simply believe God and act on his commands. God does the work. When Jehoshaphat's army arrives on the battlefield, the enemy is already conquered. They have nothing to do except pick up the pieces and go home rejoicing.

Story of Joseph (Genesis 37, 39-46) Introduction

General I suggested in the introduction to 2 Chronicles 18-20 that the Bible follows a principle of “narrative economy” so that every specific detail will have some relevance for the story. If that principle holds true in relation to the story of Joseph, the mention of Joseph's exact age, seventeen, (in Gen 37:2) must be significant. Joseph's age at the beginning of the story puts him on the cusp between childhood and adulthood. The second mention of Joseph's age comes after he has

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taken the reins of power in Egypt, when we learn that he is thirty, and has thus come to full adulthood. The events in between represent a kind of "coming-of-age" story that allows us to see Joseph's early immaturity and to compare his earlier behavior with his later more mature behavior. Thus, the story reflects the Bible's characteristic focus on individual moral development. We must understand Joseph's past in order to understand his behavior in the present, for like other Biblical characters, his personality is the sum total of his experiences.

Joseph's character at the beginning of the story is clearly that of a spoiled youngest child. He is not only sheltered from doing the kind of work his brothers must do, but he is given what must be for the brothers an incredibly annoying symbol of his status as his father's favorite: a many-colored coat entirely inappropriate for a man of his age and birth order. Such a mark of favor should by rights be given to Reuben, the oldest brother. Jacob's decision to "play favorites" sets the sons of Zilpah, Bilhah, and Leah against Joseph, the son of Jacob's love-match with Rachel.

The first indication of Joseph's immaturity is his acting as "tattle tale" against these brothers, bringing home "their evil report" to Jacob. This does not endear Joseph to his brothers, but he makes matters considerably worse when he decides to tell his brothers about the dream he has had. Joseph's brothers immediately understand the meaning of the dream: at some point in the future Joseph will have power over them. The brothers assume, probably correctly, that Joseph too understands the meaning: "Shalt thou indeed reign over us?" In the Hebrew culture of Joseph's day, age and birth order were critically important for establishing a hierarchy of authority within the family; for Joseph, a youngest brother, to wear clothes that symbolize his favored status and to report to his brothers and parents a dream suggesting that he would rule over them would have been extremely offensive. Their resentment over this episode plays a large part in the brothers’ dislike of Joseph. Remember their remark as they see Joseph coming from afar, just before they sell him into slavery: "Behold this dreamer cometh." Joseph's behavior at the beginning of the story shows us an immature young man, displaying his desire for personal glory by lording his favored status and prophetic dreams over his older brothers and parents. Jacob's behavior, like Joseph's, is more intelligible if we know his past. In particular, his choice of Joseph as his favored son is understandable when we remember that Joseph is the product of Jacob’s love for Rachel, the woman he loved so dearly that he was willing to work 14 years for her father in order to win her hand in marriage. Because at this point Joseph is the only son Rachel has produced, Jacob is probably more inclined to favor him because of the love he bears his mother. But if Jacob's behavior is in part the product of his experiences and his

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environment, it is also consistently and unmistakably his own: his tendency to play favorites (which he undoubtedly inherited from his own parents, Isaac and Rebecca, who each had a favorite among their twin sons Jacob and Esau) is a constant feature of his personality from the beginning of this section of his history until the end: the favoritism he shows Joseph will be transferred to Benjamin (also a son of Rachel) by the story's end. Jacob's actions and speech are also marked by consistent melodrama and self-pity, as he repeatedly “refuse[s] to be comforted” and threatens his children with mourning himself to death: “in mourning will I go down to the the grave to my son” (37: 35). Later, he repeats the threat when Reuben proposes taking Benjamin to Egypt: “[Y]ou will bring my gray head down to the grave in sorrow” (42:38b).

View of the Divine Though God is very rarely mentioned in this narrative, His presence is nevertheless significant at every point. In fact, the entire narrative embodies the claim of Psalm 73, which is that although short- term observation may suggest the contrary: ultimately, God’s righteousness is knowable through the outward appearances of the observable world—in this case, the details of Joseph’s experience. As in 2 Chronicles 20, the narrator does not feel obliged to explain how God manipulates events or works behind the scenes to preserve and bless his people. God’s transcendent power is so great that such explanations would either be incomprehensible to limited human beings, or, if accommodated to our understanding through symbol and metaphor, would serve to lessen our sense of the power and majesty of our God. Like the speaker of Psalm 73, Joseph comes to understand God’s purpose fully only after passing through difficult experiences.

View of Man Joseph's heroic qualities are uniquely Biblical and contrast

powerfully with those character qualities we will see held up as heroic in classical literature. The chosen vessel of an omnipotent and omniscient God, Joseph is "heroic" primarily in his passivity, in his willingness to wait and see what his God will do. He is the helpless victim of his brothers. He has to wait patiently in prison, unable to free himself by his own exertions. He is principally distinguished from other characters in the tale not by his superior courage or strength, but by his quiet hope and trust in God and his constant willingness to deflect glory away from himself and toward God. When Joseph is praised for his ability to interpret dreams, he turns aside the praise: “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (40:8) or, “I cannot do it, but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires" (41:16).

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Joseph is not a warrior, not a king, but merely the spoiled youngest son (in a culture with very little value for youngest sons) of a sheep-herder. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Joseph is the last person in the world anyone would expect to have heroic qualities. And yet his obscurity and lack of early promise set Joseph firmly in the line of Biblical heroes, who often seem chosen by God precisely for their obscurity and lack of promise. Consider David, another youngest son whose primary responsibilities in his youth are sheep-herding and cheese-carrying. Yet David is chosen by God to defeat the mightiest warrior in the Philistine army at an age when the armor and weapons of an adult warrior are far too large for him. Or consider Gideon, the great military leader who begins his career cowering in a hole in the ground. Christ himself is perhaps the greatest example of this Biblical theme: an obscure son of an obscure carpenter living in an obscure corner of the earth. God chooses losers, underdogs, cowards, youngest sons, the obscure and unpromising, and makes them heroes.

The defining character quality for Biblical heroes is a trust in and a dependence on God. The Biblical hero is always dependent on God. Traditional heroism, particularly in its proud independence—the strength and courage of Achilles, the wily resourcefulness of Odysseus—

is not even a possibility for Biblical heroes. Joseph's lack of responsibility for his own personal success is underlined so often that it approaches the comic; he arrives somewhere—Potiphar's house, jail, the palace of the Pharaoh—and immediately "finds favor" and is put in charge. By the last repetition of this pattern, hardly ten minutes can have passed between the time Joseph is brought up from Pharaoh's dungeon and the moment he becomes the second most powerful man on Earth. The speed with which this happens, and the obvious disproportion between the duties Joseph performs and the Pharaoh's generous response (consider that at this point Pharaoh does not even know if Joseph's prediction is going to come to pass), all point very strongly to the fact that Joseph is still by and large a passive participant in his own meteoric rise to the top, utterly dependent on God for all he has.

The story also embodies another important Christian theme: the value of suffering. Joseph suffers horribly, yet in the end sees that God is in control of all the events of his life. This new awareness of the value of suffering brings about not only greater emotional maturity for Joseph, but also a better life for his entire family.

View of the World Is Joseph’s world orderly? Not at first glance; it cannot have seemed like an orderly world to Joseph when his brothers tossed him into a

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pit and sold him into slavery. Yet by the end of his life, Joseph is able to forgive his brothers precisely because he understands their behavior as part of a larger order imposed by God: “I am your brother Joseph and the one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you” (45:4-5). As Joseph comes to recognize the hand of God behind his sale into slavery, so too does he see God’s hand in all of the events that have brought him to this place: “So then it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler of all Egypt” (45:8). For Christians, God’s pattern of provision, though hidden from man in the short term, reveals itself in larger patterns. Perhaps the largest pattern, one unavailable even to Joseph, is God’s preservation not of Joseph, but of Judah, for it is through Judah’s line that Christ will come (Matthew 1:3); so God here is not merely preserving Joseph and his brothers, but exercising his plan of salvation for all humanity.

Dreams play a key role in revealing the orderliness of the world in the story of Joseph. Though they often seem random, the dreams ultimately come to pass. That God can impart dreams that give a clear vision of the future means God knows what is going to happen. At the very least, this means that the created world operates according to a pattern that is visible to God. But as the story of Joseph makes clear, the dreams of Joseph not only reveal a God who knows what will happen, but a God who wills those things to happen, a God who sees into a future in which His will for His people unfolds. The movement of this future from vision to reality, confirming the orderliness of creation and the sovereignty of God over that creation, is embodied in the story of Joseph.

Aesthetic/ Artistic This section of Genesis sets up a leitmotif, or a series of repeated

parallel scenes, that is based on Jacob's earlier deceptions and trickery. Jacob deceived Isaac through the use of clothing, taking some sheep's skin and laying it across his arms and breast to convince his dying father that he was Esau. In chapter 37, Genesis takes up the theme of poetic justice, "the kidder kidded," and repeats it four times before the story of Joseph ends. In the first instance, Joseph's brothers return from the fields with a torn piece of Joseph's coat dipped in blood. They use this item of clothing to convince Jacob that Joseph has been killed by a wild animal. The parallels with Jacob's deception of his own father should be obvious, particularly in the use of an item of clothing as the major prop for the deception. The theme appears a second time in the 38th chapter of Genesis (not included in our selection) in which Judah, a grown man

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now with children of his own, is in turn deceived by his daughter-in-law, Tamar, again through the use of clothing. Joseph himself falls victim to this form of deception at the hands of Potiphar's wife, who uses a bit of Joseph's clothing to convince her husband that Joseph has attempted to rape her. Finally, Joseph himself uses his robes and jewelry to deceive his brothers at the end of the story.

Biblical narrative makes significant demands on the reader. This pattern of deception is never explicitly mentioned by the narrator or by any of the characters, though it very easily could have been. For example, at the moment Jacob realizes that Joseph is not dead, he might cry out: “God has revenged himself on me for deceiving my own father!” or words to that effect. But neither he nor any of the other characters notice the justice of what has happened. Nor does the narrator go to any great length to point this out. The work of discovery is left to the reader. In like manner, God's shaping hand in the events of Joseph's life is never specifically mentioned until the very end. Biblical writers expect us to do the work. The Bible demands a far more active engagement on the part of the reader and may be far more subtle than classical literature.

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Homer’s Iliad Introduction General Notes

The Iliad begins in the middle of a complicated situation. We find ourselves with an army encamped on a beach before a city. The leaders of this army are bickering among themselves over women and other war- prizes. Beginning readers are often confused by the opening of the poem that assumes our familiarity with a wide array of strange characters and events—kings, heroes, gods, goddesses, wars and scandals long past. Who are these people? Why are they fighting the Trojans? Why are they fighting with each other? What are their relations with one another? How many "kings" are on this beach? Who's the boss?

However, our confusion over these matters can actually be instructive, since it leads us to a critical conclusion about Homer's audience: they were bound together by a common knowledge of a tremendous body of myths and legends that most contemporary readers have never learned. Homer's readers did not need the author to fill in the background of the events he describes because Homer could assume his readers already knew why the Greeks were fighting the Trojans, why an argument over a woman was important enough to overturn the war aims of the entire Greek army, how the chain of command in the army was supposed to work, and so on.

In fact, not only did Homer's readers know the background, they knew the story itself; it will remain true of classical literature before Virgil that audiences were already familiar with the plots of the stories they heard or watched. Greek audiences already knew the outcome of Agamemnon's dispute with Achilles. They already knew that Achilles would kill Hector, and that Troy would fall. The pleasure that they received in hearing these stories had very little to do with the kind of tension regarding outcome that contemporary adult audiences value so highly. Instead, Greek audiences took pleasure in the tale itself—hearing Achilles or Agamemnon speak in their characteristic fashion, watching the wiliness of Odysseus, hearing the long-windedness of old men like Nestor and Phoinix, waiting to see how this storyteller would handle the battle between Achilles and Hector—since the outcome of the battle was never in doubt.

The lack of what we call "plot tension" will remain a constant in the classical literature that we will read. Even in the Athenian tragedies, writers are simply reworking mythological materials that are already familiar to their audiences. Everyone already knows that Clytemnestra will murder Agamemnon, that Jason will desert Medea, and that Oedipus is guilty of unwittingly killing his father.

The "deep background" for the war in Troy involves a wedding in heaven. All the gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding except, logically enough, the goddess Discord, whose name means "trouble." Discord, angry at her exclusion from the festivities, disrupts them by

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rolling a golden apple into the wedding hall; on the apple are written the words "for the fairest." Three of the goddesses, vain creatures that they are, step forward to claim the apple: Hera, wife of Zeus and goddess of political power; Athena, daughter of Zeus and goddess of wisdom and battle; and Aphrodite, goddess of passionate physical love between men and women.

None of the gods are stupid enough to involve themselves in this dispute, so the goddesses decide to find a human to judge between them. Their choice ultimately lights on Paris (also called Alexandros), one of many sons of Priam, King of Troy, and a man considered to be the most handsome among mortal men. Given a choice between political power, martial prowess, and sexual attraction, Paris not surprisingly chooses Aphrodite. It will be a fatal choice for him and for many others.

As his reward for choosing her, Aphrodite gives Paris his request: the love of the most beautiful woman in the world—Helen, "the face that launched a thousand ships." Unfortunately, Helen is already married to Menelaos, a Greek king, son of Atreus and brother to Agamemnon. Paris, accepted as a guest into the home of Menelaos, "kidnaps" his willing wife (she's been charmed by Aphrodite) and takes her back with him to Troy. Menelaos and his brother Agamemnon gather together the other kings of Greece to help them to avenge their insulted honor, and set off for Troy. (The poem takes its name from the Greek name for Troy: Ilium or Ilias.)

This tale, not included in the Iliad, gives us a great deal of critical information for understanding the behavior of the gods, especially the hatred of Hera and Athena for Troy and the love of Aphrodite for the city and its inhabitants. It will also explain why Aphrodite, in the Aeneid, will become the protector of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who escapes the ruin of his city to found Rome.

View of Man

The Iliad is not “didactic.” That is, it does not explicitly set out to teach any particular lesson. Nevertheless, the story of Achilles and his withdrawal and its disastrous consequences embodies or incarnates a very specific lesson about the value of the human community and the dangers and consequences of leaving it. Achilles' decision to withdraw from the Greek army not only affects him, but causes suffering to all of those around him. So does Agamemnon's decision to ignore the plea of Chryses to return his daughter, which causes the terrible plague in Book One. Indeed, we are told that the entire community supports the return of Chryses' daughter to him, and that only Agamemnon is not pleased with his offer. By pointing out this contrast, Homer clearly underlines here that Agamemnon is setting himself against the will of the entire community; Agamemnon ultimately learns his lesson and admits that this refusal was a mistake. By the opening of Book Nine, he is ready to admit his error

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(though he blames it on the gods). Achilles never admits that deserting the community was a dangerous and irresponsible thing to do, but the loss of Patroclus causes Achilles deep regret.

Hector and Achilles, the tragic heroes of the Iliad, are torn between their public responsibilities and their private desires. Generally speaking, responsibility and desire are in harmony for the Greek warrior. The warrior has the public responsibility to face danger and death in defense of his comrades, family, and city; he is prompted to do so not only by public duty, but by his private desire for personal "glory," which consists in outward shows of his worth given to him by the community he protects. These “shows” can take the form of precedence in speaking in the assembly or the bestowal of gifts such as horses, women, gold bars, armor, or even whole cities. Generally, these public duties and private desires work in harmony.

When Agamemnon takes Briseus away from Achilles, he brings these goals into conflict. Achilles has been publicly insulted by Agamemnon and his honor has been lessened by having his “war prize” taken from him. As a result, Achilles loses his motivation to fight. When his three friends approach him in Book IX and urge him to return to the battle because his friends need protection, Achilles turns a deaf ear to their pleas. He is not moved by his responsibility to the community.

In Homer’s worldview, two factors limit human freedom. The first of these is the constant interference of the gods in human affairs. Gods instill desires in humans to do things they might not have done otherwise, although often the interference of the gods simply causes people to act in accordance with their own personalities. Aphrodite inflames Paris and Helen with uncontrollable desire for one another, so that they seem not to be in control of their own actions, but neither of them seems to possess much self-control at any point in the tale. Agamemnon blames the gods for his disastrous decision to take Briseus away from Achilles, but Agamemnon has never been a very good leader and is accused by Achilles of constantly taking the best prizes for himself even before Agamemnon takes Briseus.

The gods’ interference with human behavior does not mean that human life is completely under the control of the gods; only when the gods choose to interfere is human freedom limited. Otherwise, characters in Homer are “free” to behave in any way they choose, though almost all of them tend to behave in ways that are consistent with their predispositions: Nestor is long-winded, Agamemnon is selfish and self-aggrandizing, Ajax is laconic, Paris is shameless, and so on.

A more troubling limitation on human freedom in Homer is “fate” or “destiny.” Achilles knows more about his own destiny than any other

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human character. He knows that he will die in battle before Troy falls and that he will never see his home again. He knows that he is “fated” to die shortly after Hector. But even the fate that governs the lives of these heroes does not completely restrict human freedom. The Greeks understood “fate” as a destination or goal, a pre-determined endpoint. Thus, Hector may be fated to die at the hands of Achilles. But what happens before that time, and even the manner of that death, may not be determined at all. No human chooses his own fate, but he does have a choice about how he conducts himself on the way to that final destination. He may behave heroically and win glory, or he may behave shamefully.

The central facts of human existence as it is portrayed in the Iliad are its brevity and its ultimate end in death. The Iliad can properly be described as a poem of death, since the poem itself is primarily concerned with fighting and dying. Having no real belief in the afterlife, impending death is the central concern of all the heroes; their courage in battle and desire to win glory for themselves is one way of cheating death of its sting. Being remembered in songs and stories is the surest path to the only form of immortality the Greeks accepted. Achilles’ experiences here are meant in some ways to be representative of all humanity; despite his “godlike” excellence, Achilles knows that he is going to die young in Troy and that he will never return home. The death of Patroclus is so upsetting to Achilles that he loses his mental balance, becoming a terrifying monster of slaughter and desecration in his fruitless attempts to satisfy himself through revenge. View of World As the Iliad begins, a plague is destroying the Greek army. Its origins are unknown to the Greeks, but are assumed to involve the anger of Apollo, the god of plague. Taking the initiative because of his concern for his fellow soldiers, Achilles calls an assembly of the leaders to discuss the problem. Unfortunately, by doing so Achilles is making himself a stench in the nostrils of Agamemnon, who as leader of the army should have called this meeting himself. Achilles makes things worse when, in urging the seer Calchas to speak his mind, he promises to protect him from the anger of anyone, including Agamemnon; this is of course before anyone knows that the plague really is Agamemnon's fault. It is not surprising then that shortly afterwards, Agamemnon lashes out against Achilles, promising to take away Briseus.

The political world of the Iliad is purely aristocratic. The great heroes on the beach before Troy are all kings in their own homelands. The only way of determining precedence is “greatness,” a quality that includes, but is by no means limited by, physical courage and strength. Agamemnon is the “greatest” of the kings on the beach, but is no match for the killing power of Achilles, the strength of Ajax, or the wisdom of

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Odysseus. He is, however, clearly blessed by the gods above all the other heroes by virtue of his superior wealth; because he possesses more men, more ships, more cities, more slaves, and more gold than any of the other kings, Agamemnon can claim to be the greatest of the Greeks, even though others may excel him in particular strengths. This reveals an assumption implicit in the Greek worldview: great wealth is the equivalent of great favor from the gods. There is assumed to be a direct relationship between material prosperity and the love of the gods. Agamemnon is “the best” because the gods are assumed to love him the most. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the worldview expressed in Psalm 73, which tells us that material prosperity is not a measure of how greatly we are loved by god. Though the gods themselves do not seem to be particularly moral, engaged as they are in all kinds of petty bickering and jealousies, they do take some interest in the careful observation and preservation of particular kinds of human relationships, particularly the relationship of guest to host, the suppliant relationship, and family relationships. These relationships must be observed and respected, or swift punishment will result. Consider, for example, the place of the suppliant relationship in the Iliad. For the Greeks, to supplicate someone meant going and asking someone of higher rank for a favor. The suppliant kneeled before his patron, taking his knee in one hand and his chin in the other, and followed a highly ritualized pattern of requesting his favor. Greeks who were the recipients of supplications were expected to respond in some way that would address the needs of the suppliant. The Iliad begins with a supplication refused; Chryseis, the priest of Apollo, supplicates Agamemnon for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon refuses and chaos results. The Iliad ends with a supplication accepted; Priam comes to Achilles and begs for the return of the body of Hector. Achilles accepts and order is restored. The Trojan war begins because Paris violates the guest-host relationship. Oedipus Rex and the plays of the Oresteia explore the consequences of violating family relationships.

Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the Homeric worldview is the shield of Achilles. Forged by Hephaestus, the god of the forge, as a favor for Thetis, Achilles’ mother, the shield is a microcosm, or, literally, a “little world” that contains within itself the entirety of the Homeric universe: earth, sky, sea, sun, moon, and stars. The human world as it is pictured on the shield is as static and unchanging as the physical universe. There is one city at peace, where civility and order are expressed in weddings and feasts, and in particular with the public court deciding a blood feud that otherwise might lead to clan warfare. There is another city at war, in a state very much like Troy’s. The point of showing both cities is that both of these states are, in the Homeric worldview, normal and inescapable. Times of peace are followed by times of war. The rest of the shield contains other scenes of cyclical human activity: plowing, planting, harvesting, cattle-herding, sheep-grazing,

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dancing after the harvest is gathered. The shield expresses the Homeric view of history as cyclical; there is no progress. Man is static, as is the world that he lives in. Neither has any ultimate purpose, but exists for its own sake, going nowhere in particular. Virgil, in the Aeneid, will “adapt” Achilles’ shield for his hero, Aeneas, but will express on it a very different view of history. View of the Divine The ancient Greeks were polytheists, worshipping a large group of anthropomorphic gods, the most powerful of which was Zeus. These gods possess only limited control over the physical world. For example, though they can fly and move about with blinding speed, they are restricted in space and cannot be in more than one place at one time. Compare the accounts of Iris and Hermes, the female and male messenger gods, moving between heaven and earth with the Biblical accounts of God’s interaction with men. The Bible never tells us about God having to move from one place to another to speak with Abraham, or suggests that, like Zeus, God’s attention can be distracted from events in one place on earth by a visit to another place on earth. Greeks gods are subject to creation because they are a part of it. According to Greek mythology, the current group of Olympian gods took their power by force from Rhea and Cronos, their parents. They did not create the world in which they live, and thus cannot transcend certain aspects of it, such as space and time. They also cannot transcend the workings of the force called Fate or Destiny. Though Homeric works occasionally suggest that Zeus could overturn a hero’s Fate if he wanted to, he never does. Instead, Homer treats Fate as a force operating outside the will of Zeus and over which he has no control (although being immortal he is not “Fated” himself). For example, as Achilles chases Hector around the walls of Troy, Zeus takes up a set of golden scales and weighs the “portion” of Achilles against the “portion” of Hector, and Hector’s sinks. Zeus makes no decision in this case. He simply consults “Fate” and ultimately abides by its dictates.

Though the members of the Greek "pantheon" (the term means "all the gods") differ from human beings in their immortality (they cannot be killed) and in their tremendous powers, their morality is not superior to the morality of normal humans. In some cases, it is worse. Their motivations are basically the same as those moving the humans in the Iliad to act: vanity, vengeance, lust, wounded pride, and greed. They are capable of love, but they are equally capable of implacable and irrational hatred and are willing to destroy innocent humans to get their way. To a certain extent, everyone in Troy is a victim to the wounded vanity of Hera and Athena.

Homer constantly encourages us to compare the life of the gods with the life of mortals; the gods’ problems are always temporary and always

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trivial. For humans, the same difficulties are matters of ultimate importance. For example, when Homer shifts from the human world to the world of the divine in Book 1, we find many similarities between the situation there and the situation but on earth, but where things go disastrously on earth, they go very smoothly in Heaven. Where Chryseis’ supplication to Agamemnon in the first half of Book 1 is refused, in Heaven Thetis’ supplication to Zeus in the second half of Book 1 is accepted. Where the first half of Book 1 recounts the beginnings of a disastrous human power struggle between Achilles and Agamemnon, the power struggle between Zeus and Hera in the second half of Book 1 is brief, its outcome never in doubt, and ends happily. When Hera criticizes Zeus about his plans to favor the Trojans temporarily, he responds:

Ah but tell me, Hera,

Just what you can do about all this? Nothing.

Only estrange yourself from me a little more—

And all the worse for you . . .

Now go sit down. Be quiet now. Obey my orders,

For fear the gods, however many Olympus holds,

Are powerless to protect you when I come

To throttle you with my irresistible hands. (1.675-683)

Zeus speaks and the gods quake with fear. Hephaestus tells the story of his disastrous attempt to oppose the will of Zeus, provoking healing laughter. On Mount Olympus, there is no struggle for supremacy. Zeus is firmly in control, which ultimately turns out to be a good thing in Homer’s view, for the gods quickly end their feud and return to feasting, laughing, and lovemaking. Contrast this with the power struggle between Agamemnon and Achilles, which takes 24 books and countless deaths to patch up.

Artistic/Aesthetic Despite the fact that it embodies the values of classical culture and has a great deal to teach us, the Iliad, and classical literature in general (with the exception of the Aeneid), was generally not didactic—that is, was not written in order to teach a lesson. The primary purpose behind recitations of the material (probably done by a professional reciter of poetry called a "bard" for audiences gathered in a public place -- perhaps around a campfire) was entertainment. Thus, unlike the Bible, where material not explicitly related to the unfolding drama is generally excluded, in Homer such “extra” material is often the whole point; extra stories are included for an audience that loves extra stories. The story of

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Meleager included by Phoinix in his long-winded speech to Achilles in Book IX is a great example; such an interpolated narrative would never appear in the Bible--imagine the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac interrupted for a three chapter explanation of the birth of his mule and you get some idea of how alien this narrative technique would be to Hebrew readers.

It is also the case that the Iliad makes far fewer demands on its readers than the Bible. For example, Homeric characters remain almost entirely static. Even Achilles does not really change; rather, when his rage passes, he returns to being the man he was before he was insulted by Agamemnon. Homer’s heroes wake up each morning as if it were the first day of their lives; Odysseus is always wily, Ajax taciturn, Agamemnon self-glorifying, and so on. Biblical heroes, on the other hand, carry their pasts along with them, so that the behavior of Jacob late in life makes no sense unless one knows all of Jacob’s history. Yet the Bible never tells us “Jacob loved Joseph the most because Joseph was the son of Rachel, the wife he loved the most.” We are expected to understand issues like this in light of what we know about the past of these characters. Homer never makes this kind of demand.

One of the most characteristic literary techniques employed by Homer is the “epic” simile. Such similes were designed to describe and explain the mythic, heroic world of the epic for common farmers and herdsmen who had no experience with sieges, walled cities, and heroic combat. Homer draws his points of comparison in these similes from the world familiar to his listeners, from farming, herding, and the behavior of animals in the natural world. Thus, in Book VI, Homer compares Paris, running out to battle in his gleaming armor, to a “stallion full-fed at the manger” breaking free of his tethers and running out across the plain to a river. Or, in Book VIII, Homer compares the campfires of the Trojans surrounding the Greek ships to the stars in the night sky. Homer’s epic similes have the effect of familiarizing the unfamiliar. For Homer’s audience in the 8th century, the Trojan war was part of a very distant, heroic past, no longer part of history, but of myth.

Homer in his invocation announces his subject as the rage of Achilles and it will be this rage that gives the poem its unity. Some readers are surprised to find that the poem does not follow the Trojan war through to its conclusion, but the war is for Homer and his audience only the (very familiar) backdrop against which the human drama unfolds. Homer no more needs to "finish" the story than a contemporary American writer using the American Civil War as a background needs to inform a Southern audience about how things turned out. The great unifying subject here is anger: the poem begins with the beginning of Achilles' anger—originally directed at Agamemnon—but the poem does not end when Achilles and Agamemnon are reconciled to one another.

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Nor does the poem end when Achilles defeats Hector in revenge for the death of Patroklos, for afterwards his rage is redirected not only toward himself because of his part in the death of his friend, but toward the very order of existence and the human imperative to cope with death and loss. It is not too much to say that this is true of Achilles' anger all along: his rage is the anger of the adolescent who discovers that the world is unfair. When Achilles puts aside his "godlike" rage, when he "grows up" and returns to the human family -- accepting supplications, eating and drinking, weeping, mourning for his own father, sympathizing with the father of his enemy, accepting the inevitability of his own impending death, then (and only then) is the poem really over. Individual Analysis of Major Characters

Achilles When, in the first few lines of the Iliad, Homer announces as his

topic the "anger" of Achilles, he uses the Greek word mênis. Menis is probably better translated as "wrath," since it is a word that is used elsewhere exclusively for the anger of gods. The word points to Achilles’ "godlikeness," a point to which the poet constantly draws our attention by labeling him over and over as "godlike" Achilles. Not only the greatest warrior of his age, Achilles is also the child of a union between a goddess, Thetis, and a human, Peleus. He will constantly be torn between his humanity and his divinity, his "godlikeness." Remember, though, that in Homer’s view of the divine, calling a character “godlike” is not necessarily a compliment.

The temptation Achilles constantly faces is to withdraw himself from human concerns and affairs and to deny his human connections. He is, in a sense, godlike in his refusal to battle together with the other Greeks, godlike in his decision to ignore Agamemnon's apologies and pleas that he return to battle, godlike in his ultimate return to battle (twelve Trojan warriors die of fright before he ever picks up a spear), and finally in his grief for Patroclos, which expresses itself in his refusal to join the other Greeks in eating and drinking. No human being can deny his own humanity for long without suffering the consequences, and to a certain extent the entire Iliad traces the trajectory of Achilles' "godlike" decision to put himself outside the concerns of mere mortals, and the slow and painful process of his realization that he is mortal after all and must ultimately return to the human family.

It is worth noting that Achilles is very young and has spent almost his entire adult life on the beach before Troy. His behavior in some ways is similar to the behavior of many adolescents in his refusal to face his own limitations. He provokes authority figures from Agamemnon to Apollo, he refuses in his fury to accept a supplication from Hector - as other men do, refuses to relent in his fury toward Agamemnon - as other men do, refuses to accept inadequate compensation for the damage to

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his honor - as other men do, refuses to accept the death of a friend and move on - as other men do. Even after he returns to the army to fight, he refuses in his fury and grief to eat, drink, or engage in sexual relations with the women he has won. All of these refusals are characteristic of Achilles’ adolescent fury at discovering that the world is unfair and resistant to his desires. Achilles’ confrontation with his own limitations becomes all the more poignant because Achilles is “godlike” in so many other ways.

Hector Homer sets up a stark contrast between Hector, the greatest of the

Trojan heroes, and Achilles, preparing us for their final showdown in Book 22. By introducing us to Hector’s family in Book 6 (Andromache, his wife, Astyanax, his son, Queen Hekabe and King Priam, his mother and father, Paris, his brother, and Helen, the woman Paris stole away from Menelaos), Homer places Hector in the kind of domestic context that we never see for any of the Greek heroes—certainly not Achilles, who has deserted his lonely old father to go to war, nor Agamemnon, who will return to Greece with a concubine only to be murdered by his wife, nor even Odysseus, who takes up with a series of women before returning (temporarily) to his wife. Hector, Homer makes plain, has a great deal more to lose than his honor and glory.

In our selection, we first see Hector returning into the walls of Troy, where he is surrounded by Trojan women asking about sons, brothers, husbands, and neighbors. The scene establishes Hector as a man solidly rooted in a particular place and community, in stark contrast to Achilles in particular, who has left home and family long ago and knows he can never return, and to all the Greeks in general, who have by choice or force remained absent from their own homes for ten years.

But it is in his charming reunion with Andromache (historically perhaps the most popular episode in the Iliad) that Hector’s character is best established. Hector’s gentle and considerate treatment of Andromache, herself an early victim of kidnap and ransom, contrasts starkly with the Greek camp, where women are simply property to be traded between heroes. Hector finds Andromache on the city walls, where she has gone to watch the fighting out of her concern for his safety. She runs to meet her husband and brings with her Astyanax, their child. Thus, we see Hector with father and mother, wife and child, showing him as a far more complete human being than Achilles.

The conflict between his public responsibility to protect Troy and his family, and his private, individual pursuit of personal glory creates problems for Hector. Andromache, recognizing that Hector’s pursuit of personal glory may bring ruin on her and the city, warns her husband

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against fighting too aggressively, begging him to come back into the city and fight from atop its walls:

“Reckless one, my Hector—your own fiery courage will destroy you! Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me, And the destiny that weighs me down, your widow, Now so soon. Yes, soon they will kill you off, All the Achaean forces massed for assault . . . Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here, Before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow!”

Hector's response makes plain that, for all his domestic concerns, his motivation is still, ultimately, the same as Achilles': to gain personal glory and honor. Hector’s personal commitment to winning glory for himself will come at a heavy cost, as he well understands, as he goes on predict the fate of Andromache after the destruction of Troy. She will, he knows, be taken into slavery and forced to live as the concubine of a Greek warrior, and it may be that things will be worse for his wife and child because of his own fame. Hector’s thoughts before his final, tragic death at the hands of Achilles clarify that his personal priorities as a warrior-hero outweigh his communal responsibilities. Having advised the Trojan army to remain in the field despite the return of Achilles to battle, Hector refuses to retreat with the rest of the army into Troy when the tide of battle turns. Ignoring the pleas of his mother and father, Hector remains on the field to face Achilles. His reasoning shows how important winning glory and avoiding shame are to him, even if doing so comes at the cost not only of his own life, but ultimately of the family and city he is protecting:

No way out. If I slip inside the gates and walls, Polydamas will be first to heap disgrace on me— He was the one who urged me to lead our Trojans Back to Ilium just last night, the disastrous night Achilles rose in arms like a god. But did I give way? Not at all. And how much better it would have been! Now my army’s ruined, thanks to my own reckless pride, I would die of shame to face the men of Troy And the Trojan women trailing their long robes . . . Someone less of a man than I will say, “Our Hector— Staking all on his own strength, he destroyed his army!” So they will mutter. So better by far for me To stand up to Achilles, kill him, come home alive Or die at his hands in glory out before our walls.

The key words in the speech are “better by far for me,” because clearly Hector’s decision to stand and face Achilles is motivated by his personal desire to win glory and avoid shame. By putting Priam and Hecuba on the walls at this moment, by having Andromache earlier beg Hector to remain inside the walls, Homer makes clear that Hector understands the

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consequences of his decision. His family and community will ultimately pay the price for Hector’s glorious last moments. Without Hector to protect them, Troy and all its people are doomed.

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Homer’s Odyssey Introduction General

Samuel Butler was only half-joking when he called the Odyssey "the Iliad's wife." The Odyssey, far more than the Iliad, concerns itself with issues traditionally associated with women. In large measure, this is because, unlike the Iliad, the Odyssey focuses on the private realm of domestic life, a realm associated in the Greek mind with the women who occupied it and who were, in large measure, in control of it. The shaping principle of the Odyssey is Odysseus’ return home. Compare this with the Iliad, which, even in the rare moments when it deals with the domestic (Hector’s meeting with Andromache in Book 6, for example), does so only to contrast it with the more central business of warfare. The Odyssey, on the other hand, focuses on Odysseus’ attempts to return home to his family. Warfare is not the be-all and end-all of this hero’s life, but rather a means to a larger end: going home.

As a result of this changed focus, the tone of the two epics could hardly differ more. Where the Iliad is a tragic exploration of death and human limitations in a time of war, the Odyssey explores not glorious death but painful and costly survival after the war is over. It is a comic, future-oriented look at life and possibility in a time of peace, a fast- moving tale of a difficult journey undertaken by a man uniquely prepared for it. This has led many scholars to conclude that Homer (if he existed) probably wrote the Odyssey much later in life than the Iliad; its vision is fuller and more humane, its hero admirable both for his physical prowess and his cleverness.

The Odyssey displays a self-consciousness about the importance of art to the good life that is nearly absent from the Iliad, particularly in the way Homer uses Demodokos, the Phaiakian poet/bard, to represent the bardic tradition that probably produced Homer. Though there is no reliable historic evidence, tradition has it that Homer, like Demodokos, was blind; yet despite his blindness, the poet possesses the artistic capacity to move people very deeply with his art. Both Odysseus and his son Telemachus are moved to tears at different points in the Odyssey by the song of a bard; this is an especially painful and beautiful experience for Odysseus as he hears his own experience transmuted into art:

There is no boon in life more sweet, I say, than when a summer joy holds all the realm, and banqueters sit listening to a harper in a great hall, by rows of tables heaped with bread and roast meat . . . Here is the flower of life, it seems to me! (9:5-15)

The songs of Demodokos comment in interesting ways on Odysseus’ experiences in the past and those yet to come. In his first song, he tells of Odysseus’ conflict with Achilles. In Demodokos’ second performance, he sings of Hephaistos, the god of the forge, who comes home to find that

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his wife has been unfaithful, a future prospect that Odysseus himself perhaps is facing. Agamemnon, killed by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra at his homecoming, warns Odysseus from the underworld that he may face the same fate at the hands of Penelope. The songs of Demodokos help Odysseus make sense of his past and prepare for his future—the job of all good art!

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Thematic Comparison of Homer’s Epics

Odyssey Iliad Peace War Domesticity/Civilizations

eating sleeping washing clothes dancing singing telling stories poetry athletic contests families marriage funerals good manners social rituals

Combat/Savagery dressing for battle counsels between men wounding killing boasts and taunting disorderliness/chaos desecration of corpses men behaving like animals winning glory sacrificing domestic for martial destruction of families

Returning home Leaving home/Destruction of the domestic

Folk tale monsters witches magic

Myth heroes gods

Continuing life/Survival Death Guile/Cleverness Martial skill Women play significant role Women play no significant role

View of Man While the Iliad focuses on the tragedy of being human in its

constant reiteration of the themes of death’s inevitability, human limitations, and the shortcomings of “this world” versus the perfect world of the gods, the Odyssey pays far more attention to the things that make life bearable for human beings: eating, drinking, dancing, storytelling, lovemaking, and sleeping. It is to this “bearable” domestic world that Odysseus and his men long to return; they fight monsters, the weather, and the malice of the gods in order to do so. Odysseus even surrenders the possibility of immortality offered to him by Calypso in order to return to Penelope. He tells her:

I long for home, long for the sight of home. If any god has marked me out again For shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.

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What hardship have I not long since endured At sea, in battle! Let the trial come!

Nowhere is this focus on the mundane more evident than in the Odyssey’s repeated treatment of the theme of eating. It is no exaggeration to say that in the world of the Odyssey, the rule of life is eat or be eaten. And if one does eat, one had best be careful about when and where. The savage, uncivilized Kyklops Polyphemos, eats several of Odysseus’ men; the Laistrygonians are gigantic cannibal vampires, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis both threaten to eat Odysseus and all of his men. There are also perils related to what one eats. Those who eat the lotus root are trapped in a fantasy world and never want to leave it. Any man foolish enough to eat or drink in Kirke’s house finds himself transformed into a swine; the most shocking part of that transformation is that the men, after their transformation, are immediately fed pig food:

Scarce had they drunk when she flew after them With her long stick and shut them in a pigsty— Bodies, voices, heads, and bristles, all Swinish now, though minds were still unchanged. So, squealing, in they went. And Kirke tossed them Acorns, mast, and cornel berries—fodder For hogs who rut and slumber in the earth. (322)

The companions of Odysseus are finally lost to their own appetites when they are unable to stop themselves from eating the cattle of the Kikones and of Helios. The greatest crime of the suitors of Penelope, who are all killed by Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey, is consuming another man’s wine and food. How one eats seems to distinguish casualties from survivors, the innocent from the guilty, the civilized from the uncivilized, even the living from the dead (who crave blood). As David Denby points out in Great Books, the Odyssey is built around a paradox. On the one hand, the body constantly craves rest and food. As Odysseus tells Alkinoos, when he washes up on Phaiakia naked and starving:

There is nothing more shameless Than this belly of ours, which forces a man To pay attention to it, no matter how many Troubles he has, how much pain in his heart. (Lombardo 7:229- 32)

On the other hand, as soon as one does begin paying attention to the shameless belly, one is in danger of losing one’s full humanity, of ending up drugged, sleepy, and half-alive like the Lotus-Eaters, bestial like the transformed men on the island of Kirke, guilty and doomed like the suitors who endlessly consume Telemachus’ inheritance, or nearly comatose like Odysseus himself and his men after a year on the island of Calypso. In the Odyssey, humans live in constant tension between self- indulgence and self-denial; they are the Scylla and the Charybdis of

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every man’s life, and all of us must learn to sail between them without being consumed by either one.

Odysseus’ “heroism” is in some measure defined by his ability to practice the kind of self-denial that other heroes lack. Odysseus possesses the adult’s capacity to defer desire, particularly in the matter of personal glory. Odysseus constantly shows an ability to set aside his prerogatives as famous hero, for example disguising himself as a poor beggar on Phaiakia (or even, in the encounter with Polyphemos, as "Nobody"), something Achilles was notoriously incapable of doing. However, it's always a deferral of glory—postponing glory now to achieve it more fully later-- and it's never indefinite--as Odysseus proves when he feels compelled to reveal his identity to the furious Polyphemos, despite his own men begging him to keep his mouth shut. Odysseus is willing to be "Nobody" for a time, but ultimately he's motivated by the same desire to be remembered and admired that drives Achilles and Hector.

It is their inability to practice the same self-denial that gets many of Odysseus’ men killed. Their first mistake is insisting on eating the cattle of the Kikones right now, refusing to wait until they have safely withdrawn from the scene of their recent victory. The scene repeats itself again and again as Odysseus’ men surrender to temptation, eating Kirke’s food, opening the bag of wind Aiolos gives to Odysseus, or eating the cattle of Helios.

Paradoxically, though, it is Odysseus’ ability to deny himself that ultimately leads to his fulfillment. For what Odysseus wants, above all things, is to live, to survive, even if it means hunkering down with an empty stomach, covering himself in a pile of leaves, and sleeping until tomorrow, trusting that something better will come along. During his journey he is constantly confronted with the temptation to dwell in "unlifelike" places - the island of the Lotos Eaters or the Island of Calypso, or even Skheria, the island of the Phaiakians. Ultimately, he rejects the forgetfulness, slothfulness, life-denying nostalgia, even immortality, those places represent and instead chooses life, with all its pain and change, an unending struggle that makes him "a man of constant sorrow."

Continually, Odysseus chooses life, which sets him in stark contrast to Achilles, who kills Hector with the full knowledge that in doing so he brings his own death closer, and who constantly behaves as though he were not a mortal at all. Odysseus, in his behavior, recognizes his human limitations in a way that Achilles never does. The Odyssey affirms Odysseus’ choice as the correct one when, during his journey to the Land of the Dead, Odysseus attempts to comfort the ghost of Achilles. “[Y]ou need not be so pained by death,” he tells Achilles, for there was never a man “more blessed by fortune than you” (XI.541, 536-

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7). Achilles’ chilling reply speaks volumes about how important the ancient Greeks’ view of the afterlife was to their values:

Let me hear no smooth talk Of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils. Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand For some poor country man, on iron rations, Than lord it over all the exhausted dead.

Put simply, Achilles would rather be a live dog than a dead lion. Odysseus, in his capacity to survive, is, in the world of the Odyssey, a far better model for human behavior than the eternally dissatisfied Achilles.

Odysseus is set apart from Achilles and Hector not only in his capacity for self-denial. A more obvious difference is Odysseus’ keen intelligence. Throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, Odysseus’ defining quality is his capacity to think his way out of problems; watch how Odysseus himself draws attention to this ability as he tells his stories to the Phaiakians. We’ll explore this cunning in more depth as we look more deeply at the character of Odysseus below.

View of the Divine

The gods of the Odyssey are the same as the gods of the Iliad— limited, capricious, and immoral. However, perhaps because of the Odyssey’s more narrow focus on Odysseus and his son, and because both heroes are materially assisted by Athena, the overall impression of the gods in the Odyssey is that they are more benevolent and kindly disposed toward humans. Poseidon, Odysseus’ principal enemy among the gods, is mostly absent from the narrative, and seems more like an impersonal force whipping up monsters and storms than a personal god. Athena and Odysseus share a love for disguises; both of them use disguises to put others at a disadvantage. When Odysseus finally returns home to Ithaca, he disguises himself in order to investigate what’s happening at his house. Encountering the disguised Athena but failing to recognize her, Odysseus contrives one of his many masterful lies. Athena listens, enjoying the performance, then interrupts him, obviously amused:

Only a master thief, a real con artist, Could match your tricks—even a god Might come up short. You wily bastard, You cunning, elusive, habitual liar! (13:299-302 in Lombardo)

As Sheila Murnahan points out in her introduction to Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Odyssey, Athena is Odysseus’ divine double, a warrior-goddess noted both for her mastery of warfare and her cunning intellect. Given the obvious affection and admiration that Athena feels for Odysseus, their relationship seems more like a partnership of equals than one of goddess and worshipper.

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Artistic/Aesthetic Beyond the change in tone, the Odyssey shares a great deal in

common with the Iliad. We see again the use of the extended “Homeric” simile, which uses the natural world to describe the heroic world, again the rapid-fire narrative shifts between Homer’s descriptions of the gods’ interactions and those of men. Both share the same meter in Greek (dactylic hexameter). The ancient Greeks thought of them as a pair and assumed both were by the same author.

As we have noted, the Odyssey pays far more attention to the domestic and places a higher value on civilization and survival than on warfare and destruction. Consider the scene of Nausikaa asking her father for permission to take her chariot and wash clothes. His loving indulgence of her scolding and his awareness that her real desire is not to clothe him or her brothers, but to get a husband, are delicately, comically handled. This kind of tender domestic scene, and the gentle humor that suffuses it, are almost entirely absent from the Iliad.

Of course, not all of the humor of the Odyssey is as delicate. The Iliad contains nothing quite so corny and juvenile as Odysseus’ practical joke on Polyphemos (“Who has hurt you?” “Nobody! Nobody has hurt me!” “Oh well, quit complaining then.”) Perhaps this sort of humor knocked them dead back in the Bronze Age, but one suspects that jokes of this nature were tired even in Homer’s day. That the Odyssey makes use of them anyway is part of its comic charm. Like the later comedies of Shakespeare, the Odyssey is filled with treatments of love, of disguise, of mistaken identity, and concludes with a happy ending. One senses an older Homer at work, the youthful thunder and lightning of the Iliad out of his system, more amused than disgusted, laughing and enjoying the spectacle of life more than he did when he was younger. View of the World

The long wanderings of Odysseus show how the world was, for the Greeks, a larger and more wondrous place than it has become for us. Uncertain that there were any limitations or end to the world, the possibility of novelty and discovery were high. Who knew, after all, but that there might not actually be some place where the inhabitants were one-eyed giants? Not that the Greeks were entirely innocent to the possibility that travelers might return with tall tales. The gentle humor of Alkinoos’ reply to Odysseus’ wild stories certainly suggests the Phaiakians had heard a few whoppers before:

From all we see, we take you for no swindler— Though the dark earth be patient of so many, Scattered everywhere, baiting their traps with lies Of old times and places no one knows. (11:399-406)

We believe you, Odysseus. Honest. Whether this speech is in earnest or another example of the civility and politeness of the Phaiakians I will leave to the reader’s judgment. But it does show that the Homeric

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Greeks, however little they might have known about the larger world they inhabited, were not entirely credulous simpletons when it came to the tall tales of travelers.

They were aware, however, that the world outside their small communities was an extremely dangerous place, one in which the traveler has no help from police, banks, public transportation or even accommodation. Travel was dangerous, slow, unpredictable, and dependent on the whims of nature. That the Greeks would eventually embody these dangers of the larger world in the form of monsters—the vampires, witches, giants, and angry sea monsters who populate the lands where Odysseus wanders—is hardly surprising. One must struggle to survive in this world and constantly be on guard, for a moment's forgetfulness can be fatal. The narrow escapes of Odysseus from the Kyklops, the Laistrygonians, the Skylla and Charybdis, come always at a terrible cost, generally in the lives of his men, all of whom are dead by the time Odysseus washes ashore at the beginning of Book 4 (though they are temporarily “revived” as Odysseus tells his stories).

If the world was full of more obvious physical dangers like giant blood-sucking cannibals, Odysseus’ stories also suggest that it is full of more subtle dangers as well. Especially dangerous are the various temptations embodied in Odysseus’ encounters with powerful women; the temptations of “sloth,” that deadly sin which transforms men into animals, seem powerfully incarnated in the episode of Kirke. At the moment of their transformation back into human beings, Odysseus’ men are filled with unbearable sorrow, since they must now face the pain and trials of being fully human again:

Their bristles fell away, The coarse pelt grown upon them by her drug Melted away, and they were men again, Younger, more handsome, taller than before. Their eyes upon me, each one took my hands, And wild regret and longing pierced them through, So the room rang with sobs, and even Kirke Pitied that transformation.

It is one of the strangest and most beautiful moments in classical literature, suggesting that most people are content to be animals, feeding and sleeping, “hogs who rut and slumber in the earth,” rather than face the pain of being fully human. A hero like Odysseus, on the other hand, when offered the possibility of surrendering his humanity, repeatedly refuses. Kirke and Calypso offer immortality, a life utterly free from hunger, cold, and want; Nausikaa offers youth, beauty, and wealth. Somehow, Odysseus prefers his aging wife, the rocky soil of Ithaka, the uncertainties of returning home after twenty years to a house full of dangerous strangers, to any of these temptations. The Odyssey, like The Wizard of Oz, confirms a very old truth: there’s no place like home.

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Particularly distant from the charms of home is the Land of the Dead, here represented not as an “underworld” (although the ancient Greeks generally understood it as such), but as a physical “on-the-map” location. Homer's dark and terrifying picture of the afterlife is unmatched even in Dante. The “ghosts” of the dead are spiritless, miserable shadows longing for nothing so much as to return to the land of the living again. Odysseus’ trip becomes all the more terrifying because he knows that his choice to leave Calypso means that he will have to join these spirits himself eventually.

Character of Odysseus Like Achilles or Hector, Odysseus is essentially static or

unchanging. He is the same clever, self-possessed, courageous, resourceful, determined man in the last book of the Odyssey that he is in the first. For example, Odysseus shows the same wiliness that helped him survive Troy at his first appearance in the Odyssey in Book 6. He quickly takes the measure of Nausikaa, decides how to approach her, what to ask for, and flatters her with a pickup line that was probably tired even in the Bronze Age: "Mistress, please, are you divine, or mortal?” Shortly afterwards, Nausikaa says to her maids:

I wish my husband could be as fine as he And glad to stay forever on Skheria.

Odysseus reads her age and station in life perfectly, and then addresses her accordingly, knowing that as beautiful as she is she must be slightly vain and must be thinking about marriage, which of course the reader already knows is the case.

Still, it is also true that over the course of his final adventures, Odysseus is changing somewhat as well. By moving Odysseus through a series of transitional spaces ruled over by women (Arete, Kirke, Calypso), Homer shows how Odysseus moves toward a more domestic and peaceful frame of mind, preparing him to make the transition from the bloody “death world” of the Trojan War to the domestic world of Ithaka. The land of the Phaiakians in particular seems a perfect preparation for his return home; his emergence, naked, bruised, and covered in brine into the midst of a party of terrified young girls suggests at the beginning of this episode how poorly prepared Odysseus is for this world. Odysseus, the hero of Troy, legend all over the world, emerges from the woods with a branch over his privates to cast himself at the feet of a teenage girl. As the episode unfolds, Odysseus is slowly restored to his rightful appearance and place as he washes, dresses, competes successfully in athletic contests, and tells the stories that establish his identity as the famous man he finally reveals himself to be.

The transition is a slow one. The refusal of Odysseus to accept Prince Laodamas' invitation to join in the athletic games suggests Odysseus is still not ready to rejoin the domestic, orderly, peaceful post- Troy world. Instead, like a warrior, he awaits a challenge and an insult,

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and then responds with a vehemence that seems to embarrass the Phaiakians. Alkinoös smoothes over the tension with a gracious and self-effacing speech (unlike anything in the Iliad) that identifies the characteristics of the Phaiakians as the domestic arts of peace: singing, dancing, warm baths and changes of clothes. Odysseus’ tearful response to the songs of Demodokos, which sets him apart from everyone around him, suggests that he is not yet far away enough from the traumatic events of the Trojan war to be able to respond with pleasure and joy to its transmutation into art.

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Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Introduction General

Aeschylus is the first known practitioner of the drama and the earliest of the great Greek tragedians, producing his work around 500 B.C, the high water mark of Athenian artistic and cultural development. Most of Aeschylus’ plays were written and performed in the years before the establishment of an Athenian empire. Greek drama (according to Aristotle) has its origins in religious rituals performed in honor of Dionysus, god of wine, intoxication, madness, and release from consciousness. Early choral performances in honor of Dionysus later developed into artistic contests with prizes. At first, the cast of Greek drama consisted only of a chorus and one “actor.” The chorus and actor engaged in some kind of spoken or musical dialogue with one another. When a second actor was added, the art form we call the drama was born. Aeschylus added a third actor, but seldom exploits the dramatic possibilities a third actor offers. For example, in Agamemnon, Cassandra is on stage while Agamemnon and Clytemnestra talk, but never interrupts.

Three playwrights were chosen for each three-day competition. Each day, one playwright staged three tragedies and then a comic satyr- play. In the first half of the fifth century, each day’s three plays were generally part of a single narrative unit. This is the case with Agamemnon, which is the first play of a trilogy often referred to as the Oresteia, since it mainly concerns Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. The Oresteia is the only complete surviving trilogy, although many of the other surviving Greek tragedies were probably originally performed as part of larger narrative units. The vast bulk of Greek tragedies have been lost.

Aeschylus was a highly public figure. He fought in Athens' most significant battles against the Persians and was a well-known and highly respected participant in the public life of the city-state. Just as Aeschylus was a highly public figure, so was Greek tragedy a highly public genre, far more public and culturally central than the drama of our own day. Tragedies were not performed in private theaters, but in large public outdoor amphitheaters that held thousands. The tragedies were performed as part of a dramatic contest, which took place during Athens’ annual festival honoring the god Dionysus. All public business stopped so that citizens could attend. (No one knows if women or non- citizens attended.) Wealthy benefactors chosen by lot financed the productions. The state subsidized attendance for poor citizens. In short, everyone of political importance in Athens would have attended these performances, and they were considered a critical forum for addressing issues of public interest.

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The staging in Greek drama underlines the public nature of the genre. There are almost no indoor scenes in any Greek drama, the action generally taking place in front of a “skene,” a false background that could serve dramatically as the front of a temple or palace, or, occasionally, the mouth of a cave. Such conventions were forced by the fact that no indoor theater of the necessary size could have possibly had adequate lighting. It is also true that in the balmy Mediterranean climate, a great deal of public business was conducted outdoors. Still, the convention stresses that the actions on the stage are taking place against a public backdrop, by public figures, with a public audience.

The chorus, which sang and danced its part throughout the play, serves as a surrogate audience for the actors. Played by young men, who, like the actors, wore masks throughout the play, the Chorus might in any given play be asked to represent a group of “old men of Argos,” “Theban priests of Apollo,” or even “Corinthian women.” But in each case, the chorus is dramatically understood as a kind of voice of the people, or voice of common sense, balanced against the often-extreme claims and actions of the actors.

View of the World Taken by itself, outside of the context of the other two plays in the

Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon might seem to suggest a chaotic world without clear boundaries for human behavior. Clytemnestra murders her husband and announces it publicly immediately afterward, and the Chorus cries out that the gods will have vengeance on her for this terrible act. But as the play ends, justice is incomplete: Agamemnon has been punished for his misdeeds, but his murderer still walks free. Clytemnestra seems to have gone unpunished.

Yet the establishment of justice is a primary theme in the play. The Athenians were proud of the fact that they had, as a city-state, established institutions to dispense justice as an alternative to tribal or personal vengeance. Prior to the establishment of courts and policing bodies, if one person was wronged or murdered by another, the only mechanism of justice was personal or tribal revenge. If a person from family A murders someone from family B, someone from family B will have to take revenge on someone else from family A. Unfortunately, now family A has to revenge that murder, and the cycle goes on endlessly.

This is the problem that faces Clytemnestra as the play begins. Agamemnon, her husband, is responsible for the death of her daughter Iphigenia, who was sacrificed to the gods during the Trojan War. Clytemnestra is, not surprisingly, furious, and plots revenge during Agamemnon’s absence. Unfortunately, her desire to kill her husband is also motivated by her having taken a lover during his absence. The lover, Aigisthus, has his own complex reasons for desiring revenge on Agamemnon. Even without the soap opera complications,

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Clytemnestra’s situation is precarious for the simple reason that in order to avenge a family murder, she has to commit a family murder. So Clytemnestra faces two limitations on her vengeance: One, she cannot cleanse Agamemnon’s pollution from Argos without becoming polluted herself by murdering her own husband. Two, she is not personally fit to be an objective instrument of justice because she has a personal, selfish interest in the death of Agamemnon, which will free her to carry on her affair with Aigisthus.

The play embodies a critical problem of the old system of justice. Under the old system, the avenger must be the closest blood kin to the victim. Clytemnestra is the closest blood kin of Iphigenia, her murdered daughter. Aigisthus is the closest kin of his murdered brothers, and Agamemnon is the closest kin of their murderer (Agamemnon’s father Atreus). Thus both are under some obligation to take revenge on him. Unfortunately, neither is taking revenge out of pure motives, and even if they were, both must violate serious taboos in order to take revenge: Clytemnestra by murdering her own husband, Aigisthus by murdering his “host,” Agamemnon. Both, in other words, must become the subject of someone else’s blood revenge. That “someone else” is, in this case, Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Although Orestes never appears on stage during this play, his presence hangs over it, since the audience knows that eventually, Clytemnestra will herself be murdered by him. Needless to say, this murder won’t be the end of the problem, because this blood avenger, although acting with purer motives than Clytemnestra or Aigisthus, is still staining himself with the blood of his mother, and must thus be the target of someone else’s vengeance. When no one steps forward to avenge Clytemnestra, a group of goddesses called the Furies takes over. They are ancient tribal deities, here embodying a kind of impersonal cosmic justice. By the end of the trilogy, Athena turns aside their wrath at Orestes by making them the guardians of a court established in Athens; thus, a new communal justice is established capable of putting an end to the cycle of vengeance by putting the punishment of crime in the hands of the state rather than in the hands of individuals.

Interestingly, then, at the end of the Oresteia, justice is taken out of the hands of the divine actors, the Furies, and placed into the hands of a human institution: the Athenian court. We have noted that the Greek gods are not creators and that they are subject to the order of the world rather than existing outside that order. If “sin” for the Greeks is acting “unnaturally,” that is, in a way that somehow violates the orderliness of the world, then “sin” is not an offense against a personal God, as it is in the Christian worldview, but is rather a violation of the world’s structuring principles: sons don’t murder fathers, wives don’t murder husbands, guests don’t murder hosts, and so on. Presumably punishment follows from such behavior without regard to motivation,

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since violating the laws by which the world operates is like jumping off a 20-storey building. One might have the best motives in the world, but one still falls and dies. Orestes has the finest possible motives for murdering his mother, but the Greek concept of cosmic justice, embodied in the Furies, means that he must be punished. Under this scheme, then, the human justice of the Athenian court seems a good deal more just than divine justice, which is incapable of taking motivation or circumstance into consideration.

Artistic/Aesthetic Notes Unlike the epic, tragedy is focused primarily on the human world.

Where Homer moves back and forth between the world of humans and of gods, in tragedy we are fully fixed on the human world with the divine world only rarely making an appearance. The form itself here makes our understanding more limited and more focused on the human. In tragedy, we generally see man’s problems from man’s more limited perspective. Aeschylus underlines this by having all of his major characters claim to act in the name of justice: Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Aigisthus all claim to have deeper insight into the workings of justice than the people around them. Yet the play finally affirms that none sees more than a small part of the pattern. Only Cassandra sees clearly, but because of the curse of the gods, she is not believed. Her prophecies again underline the limitedness of all the characters.

The poetic language of Greek tragedy is rich and strange, nowhere more so than in the long choral odes between “scenes.” These odes, which often range free from the immediate concerns of the characters on stage, place the action of the play into a much larger philosophical framework. The language and imagery are sometimes so dense and suggestive that translation becomes simply an educated guess; scholars are still puzzled by many lines in choral odes. Other images and metaphors, when rightly understood, suggest far greater range and significance to the actions of the play. Consider, for example, the Chorus’ description of the Greek armies marching to war:

Ten years gone by, ten to the day our great avenger went for Priam . . . Atreus’ sturdy yoke of sons launched Greece in a thousand ships, armadas cutting loose from the land, armies massed for the cause, the rescue—

[From within the palace Clytemnestra raises a cry of triumph] the heart within them screamed for all-out war! Like vultures robbed of their young, the agony sends them frenzied, soaring high from the nest, round and round they wheel, they row their wings,

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stroke upon churning thrashing stroke, but all the labor, the bed of pain, the young are lost forever.

The chorus begins with a more or less straightforward description of the Greek army setting out from Troy to avenge the kidnapping of Helen. Suddenly, they are interrupted by a scream of triumph from Clytemnestra, still offstage. (The stage directions, here and throughout the play, are imaginative reconstructions of the action on stage. We really have no very clear idea of how the plays were acted.)

Clytemnestra’s “cry of triumph” marks the moment at which the chorus’ imagery becomes far more dense and suggestive, perhaps because her scream reminds them of some of the more disturbing implications of what they are saying. The simile (“Like vultures robbed of their young . . . “) describes not only the mindset of the Greek army as it set out for war bent on revenge because of the robbery of Helen, but also the mindset of Clytemnestra as she waits for Agamemnon to return, bent on revenge because of the “robbery” of her daughter Iphigenia. The comparison to vultures, eaters of the dead, is hardly flattering to the Greek army or to Clytemnestra; the simile, particularly toward its end as it stresses the ultimate failure of the vultures to regain their stolen young, captures the sense of retributive justice as an inescapable trap which is the theme of the play. In setting out to Troy to revenge one sin, the Greeks commit many more that will require revenge in their own turn, just as Clytemnestra will lay a trap for herself when she murders her husband. Escape seems impossible.

Note that in all Greek tragedy, violence occurs offstage. However, we usually get a description of the events there (Greek dramas are full of generic “messengers” who show up to describe what has happened offstage), then the bodies are usually displayed onstage. Our English word “obscene” comes from the Greek term “ob-skene,” meaning, literally, “offstage.” The reticence of the Greeks to show violence on stage is in interesting contrast to their obvious fascination with violence and willingness to hear about it in all its gory details. Remember Odysseus’ description of the blinding of Polyphemos (which will pale next to the messenger-borne descriptions of Oedipus putting his own eyes out or the princess and Kreon melting together after being poisoned by Medea.) Still, the ancient Greeks seem to have believed that some things should not be seen, in sharp contrast to our own culture where rape, torture, self-mutilation, and serial murder are nightly offered up as “entertainment” on our televisions. The Greek restraint in this matter may seem jarring.

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View of the Divine Agamemnon’s gods, especially Zeus, seem more distant from the

world of men and more mysterious than Homer's. (No divine characters appear in this play, though they will later in the trilogy.) Also, as we have noticed, though most of the characters in the play speak as if they were certain of the will of Zeus, and even claim to have acted in his service, the play itself never affirms these claims. In fact, Agamemnon (especially when it is viewed together with the other plays of the trilogy) strongly suggests that all of these characters have an extremely limited (and often self-serving) view of what the gods are doing in their lives.

On the other hand, the gods in Agamemnon may ultimately be more benevolent than those of Homer. In Book 24 of the Iliad, Achilles comforts the grieving Priam with an allegory involving Zeus. Zeus, says Achilles, has two “great jars” that stand by his door—one full of miseries and the other full of blessings. No one, says Achilles, gets anything from the good jar without also having some bad things mixed in, and uses his own father as an example. He suggests then that Zeus is more or less neutral toward humans, mixing good and bad fortune together. Suffering happens when an indifferent Zeus decides to bring it on.

Though both Homer and Aeschylus make the inevitability of suffering a principal theme, Aeschylus goes on to claim that that suffering produces some kind of positive result. The chorus, which generally places events in a larger perspective, claims that there is a bigger picture behind the seeming randomness of events, that the suffering these characters experience actually has been contributing to something larger than any of them in particular.

[Zeus] has led us on to know, that Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth.

This “proto-providential” view of the gods will emerge more strongly in Virgil. In the case of these plays, the "larger cause" moving behind seemingly random events is "the will of Zeus" that Athens establish a court that will resolve the human suffering caused by tribal justice.

The view of God's total control is probably closely related here to the rise of Athenian political power. Is Athenian supremacy merely a product of random events? Or does it express some deeper purpose of the gods to bless mankind via the rule of Athens? The second, “providential” belief will come full flower under Roman rule in the Aeneid, where all of history is visualized as a kind of prelude to the establishment of the Roman Empire.

View of Man

To the extent that Clytemnestra and Agamemnon are meant to be representative types in this play, it would be safe to say that Aeschylus saw humans as shortsighted and frequently inclined to assume a

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knowledge of the will of the gods that they do not actually have. The danger of this, as Aeschylus saw, is that those claiming such knowledge tend to use the claim in self-serving ways. Agamemnon, “hoisting the pickaxe of Zeus,” brings ruin on the Trojans as an expression of divine justice—which just happened to make him very rich. Clytemnestra, certain that divine justice demands the death of Agamemnon, murders him—which just happens to set her free to pursue her affair with Aigisthus.

Of course, from another point of view, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon are anything but representative types. They are fabulously wealthy and powerful, born into ancient noble families and accustomed to rule. Classical literature will concern itself almost exclusively with such characters, showing very little interest in the speech, actions, or character of common people. “Average” characters, like the Watchman, where they do appear, are generic and insignificant to the action of the play. The members of the chorus are a bit less anonymous; they are equipped with a good moral compass and worthy of some attention, if not individually then collectively. This is not surprising given that Athens is the birthplace of democracy, founded on the principle that the average guy has some concept of what's best for society.

Character of Clytemnestra From the very beginning of the play, there is much to suggest that

Aeschylus and his audience found Clytemnestra a disturbing and unnatural figure. Agamemnon begins, like Hamlet, in darkness, with the revelation that something is rotten in the city-state of Argos. The land over which Clytemnestra rules is a place of darkness, nightmares, and terror. The watchman calls Clytemnestra "that woman" who, he says, "maneuvers like a man." After Clytemnestra’s speech of triumph regarding the sacking of Troy, the chorus pays another backhanded compliment to her by telling her it was "spoken like a man."

Clytemnestra throughout the play demonstrates a ferocious, almost infernal energy, striding out and taking charge of events, sacrificing animals, preparing, manipulating, and speechifying. She is an overwhelming presence, devious, cunning, and a master of doublespeak. For example, as she tells Agamemnon of the terrible time she spent waiting for him to return, Clytemnestra laments that their child is not with them to see the happy day.

And so our child is gone, not standing by our side, the bond of our dearest pledges, mine and yours; by all rights our child should be here . . . Orestes. You seem startled.

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Agamemnon is startled, since he obviously thought the “child” she was talking about, the “bond of our dearest pledges,” was Iphigenia. The exchange is chilling; Clytemnestra is not only planning a murder, she’s playing with her intended victim like a cat with a mouse. She indulges in the same kind of sadistic doublespeak when she insists Cassandra come inside the palace:

Do it now!— I have no time to spend outside. Already the victims crowd the hearth, the Navelstone, to bless this day of joy I never hoped to see!!— our victims waiting for the fire and the knife … (1053-1057)

Clytemnestra speaks as though the “victims” she speaks of were animals, but the audience (and Cassandra) know that Clytemnestra’s victims will be human.

Despite her love of such sadistic play, Clytemnestra still somehow manages to put the rather thickheaded Agamemnon off his guard. She accomplishes this in part by heaping flattery on him, then convincing him to commit an act of overwhelming pride by walking on dyed tapestries. The Greeks called this kind of act “hubris” and Greek mythology is full of tales of people committing prideful acts—Arachne comparing her weaving to Athena’s, for example—and then being punished for it. Clytemnestra wants to be sure the gods are on her side by having Agamemnon commit some terrible misdeed and then killing him shortly afterward.

As Agamemnon treads down the priceless red tapestries, Clytemnestra engages in a particularly revealing bit of her characteristic doublespeak:

Quickly - let the red stream flow and bear him home

To the home he never hoped to see - Justice

lead him in!

Leave all the rest to me

The spirit within me never yields to sleep.

We will set things right the with gods' help.

We will do whatever Fate requires. (902-907)

Again, this master manipulator of people and language shows her skills, particularly in her promise to “set things rights” and “do whatever Fate requires.” The audience, of course, knows what she means, though neither the chorus nor Agamemnon do. The speech also reveals a key aspect of Clytemnestra’s personality: her insistence that she is acting in the defense of impersonal justice.

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Clytemnestra’s claim to be an impersonal minister of justice is, of course, at odds with the obvious relish she shows for the murders she is about to commit, or to her chilling exaltation once the murders have been performed:

Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment— Now it makes me proud to tell the truth. How else to prepare a death for deadly men who seem to love you? How to rig the nets of pain so high no man can overleap them? I brooded on this trial, this ancient blood feud year by year. At last my hour came.

Here I stand and here I struck and here my work is done. I did it all. I don’t deny it, no. . . It is right and more than right . . . Here is Agamemnon, my husband made a corpse by this right hand—a masterpiece of Justice. (1390-1400, 1420, 1429-1430)

As she speaks, the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are brought on stage, perhaps on a wheeled platform, and displayed to the audience. Her sense of triumphant relief is palpable and she seems genuinely taken aback that the Chorus would question her behavior, accusing them (with some justice) of using a double standard, since none of them condemned Agamemnon for the sacrifice of his own daughter.

Most importantly, in her dialogue with the chorus, Clytemnestra disavows personal responsibility for the murder of her husband, claiming to be a kind of disembodied spirit of vengeance:

You claim the work is mine, call me Agamemnon’s wife—you are so wrong. Fleshed in the wife of this dead man, the spirit lives within me, our savage ancient spirit of revenge. (1527-1530)

Note, too, that Clytemnestra identifies this spirit of vengeance with the deep past, referring to it as “savage” and “ancient.” The next two parts of the play will deal with the establishment of a new form of civic justice, administered by the state rather than by family or tribe.

The Chorus responds to Clytemnestra’s claim by pointing out that if Agamemnon’s behavior was worthy of revenge, then so is Clytemnestra’s:

And you, innocent of this murder?

And who could swear to that? and how . . .

and still an avenger could arise,

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bred by the father’s crimes, and lend a hand. (1534-1537)

In other words, it is entirely possible that someone will come and take vengeance on Clytemnestra. As the play ends, she and Aigisthus are threatening the old men of the chorus, behavior that does not bode well for the future of the community they hope to lead.

Character of the Chorus As the play begins, the members of the chorus identify themselves

as the old men left behind by the war party that went to Troy. We are the old, dishonored ones, the broken husks of men. Even then they cast us off, the rescue mission left us here to prop a child’s strength upon a stick. (79-83)

They present some of the strongest anti-war sentiments in all classical literature, particularly in their clear-eyed identification of the cause of the Trojan war: Helen, the “woman manned by many” for whom “the generations wrestle, knees / grinding in the dust, the manhood drains, / the spear snaps in the first blood rites” (68-72). Given that the members of the Chorus were too old to go to war ten years ago, they must be ancient now, but still seem to feel some sting at having been “dishonored” by being left behind. With the costs of the war so clearly before them, perhaps they are entitled to some cynicism.

The members of the chorus seem easily excited, but on deeper thought often end choral odes doubting the claims they made at the beginning. Like most choruses, they seem oddly ineffectual to contemporary audiences, seeing terrible events taking place but never interfering to stop them. Fear makes them reluctant to speak out. They clearly attempt to nerve themselves up to warn Agamemnon’s herald of the danger they suspect awaits him (Clytemnestra’s affair with Aigisthus is an open secret), but cannot seem to work up the nerve to do so. So too do they fail to warn Agamemnon himself of the danger he faces. They manage only to bid him to "Search, my king and learn at last/who stayed home and kept their faith/ and who betrayed the city" (791-793). Though they are deeply suspicious of Clytemnestra and filled with foreboding when she and Agamemnon enter the palace after his walk across the tapestries, they still do nothing.

They are sympathetic to Cassandra, a slave and stranger, but their dimwitted inability to understand her prophecies infuriates us, even when we know that Apollo has decreed that no one will ever believe Cassandra’s prophecies.

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Character of Agamemnon Like his wife, Agamemnon views himself as the instrument of

impersonal revenge, acting only as the agent of Zeus' revenge on Troy, a view evidently shared by some others—for example, the Herald, who claims that Agamemnon "hoisted the pickaxe of Zeus, who brings revenge" (515-522). Like a Bronze Age Hell’s Angel, Agamemnon arrives in his chariot, his plunder carried before him, Cassandra riding in the back. He has clearly benefited richly from the sack of Troy: "The storms of ruin live!/ [Troy’s] last dying breath, rising up from the ashes/ sends us gales of incense rich in gold" (804-6), then immediately claims his success is the working out of justice, that he was not seeking his own ends.

Agamemnon is smart enough to know that walking on the tapestries is an act of hubris (913-925), but stupid enough to allow himself to be convinced to do so, even though he fears being struck down. His success has clearly gone to his head and robbed him of his native wit, or he would never do such a thing.

In presenting Agamemnon as a self-righteous nitwit, Aeschylus actually helps the audience to keep its focus on the larger thematic issues of the play. We never sympathize very deeply with Agamemnon, and we are expected to recognize that there is some justice behind Clytemnestra’s murder. By keeping us from focusing too much on the individuals involved in this murder, Aeschylus gives us enough critical distance to consider the murder as a complex, flawed act of vengeance that will ultimately create great chaos because there is no institution for resolving the endless cycle of revenge.

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Sophocles’ Oedipus Introduction General

Like Aeschylus, his fellow playwright, Sophocles was a prominent man deeply involved in the public affairs of Athens. In addition to being a successful and prolific playwright, Sophocles was a military leader and elected official. Sophocles’ life thus exemplifies the Greek ideal for artists as full participants in public life. The ancient Greeks did not consider artists to be “set apart” or different from others. This integration of art and artists into the public life of the state was also reflected in the status of the Athenian theatre, which was not a marginalized activity patronized by a tiny intellectual elite (as it is in twenty-first century America), but a public genre. It was supported by public funds and attended by nearly everyone in the city-state. It thus became a forum for exploring issues of importance to the community.

Oedipus Rex was produced during the final years of Athens’ war with Sparta; the war had been a terrible mistake for the Athenians, who were by this time trapped inside their own city walls by marauding Spartan armies. A plague swept through the city, killing thousands. An oracle from Apollo’s shrine at Delphi had predicted the ultimate defeat of Athens, but many were inclined to disbelief, if only because the news was so bad they did not want to believe. Sophocles’ work becomes an exploration of the consequences of this attitude. Sophocles asks the questions: Is prophecy real? Can anyone see into the future? What if prophecy is impossible? What are the consequences for the culture if we stop believing in prophecy?

In the way it answers these questions, Oedipus Rex represents the extreme conservatism that is one way of responding to spiritual and intellectual crisis. Sophocles’ play, while a stunning artistic achievement, also expresses his conservative agenda for promoting the gods’ moral integrity, that indeed they did punish evil and reward good.

View of the World

Oedipus Rex begins with a crisis that closely resembles the beginning of the Iliad; a chorus of Athenian priests appears before King Oedipus to ask for guidance in responding to a plague raging through Athens. The play thus begins with the assumption by the chorus that if there is a plague, there must be a cause for it. Sophocles here promotes the idea that a definite, though sometimes mysterious and hard-to- fathom, relationship of cause to effect exists. Detective work, it is assumed, will uncover the truth. The plague is assumed to have a cause; this is why the chorus of priests asks Oedipus to send to the oracle at Delphi for an explanation of the source of the plague.

Even though the play affirms an orderly world, it is an orderliness that is very difficult to uncover; man is generally blind to it, a point

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Sophocles makes through his repeated use of the imagery of blindness in the play. Ironically, the one character who is literally blind at the beginning of the play, Tiresias, is most capable of figuratively “seeing” the source of the plague, whereas Oedipus, who can literally see, is figuratively blind— not only to his own responsibility for the sickness, but also to his tangled relationships with his wife and children. Like Hector, he does not “see” his own place in the world until too late. Here, Tiresias, the blind “seer,” or prophet, identifies the killer:

Blind who now has eyes, beggar who now is rich, He will grope his way toward a foreign soil, A stick tapping before him step by step.

The speech is a kind of riddle, the significance of which is understood by the audience but not by anyone else on stage except Tiresias. Oedipus himself obviously does not even understand the riddle at this point. The chorus too is reluctant to believe Tiresias’ claims about Oedipus. Sophocles here uses the literary device called dramatic irony, where the audience knows more than the characters on stage.

One of the most difficult issues for many students of the play is Oedipus’ “punishment.” Why must Oedipus be punished, even when he was not aware that he was committing such great crimes? After all, he did not know he was killing a king, did not know he was killing his father, and did not know that he was marrying his mother. So why must he suffer if his crimes were unwitting? To understand why Oedipus suffers, it is important to understand that for the Greeks, moral law (the rule that people who do bad things suffer as a result) was a natural function of the world (like gravity) that took no account of motivation or circumstance and was administered in an impersonal way. For the ancient Greeks, to “sin” was to violate the natural order of the world. For the Hebrews, on the other hand, to “sin” was to commit an act in violation of the character of a God with personal qualities—one who felt anger, pity, and love. For the Greeks, to “sin” was to break a natural law like the law of gravity.

Punishment for killing a king, marrying your mother, and so on, came impersonally from the fabric of the universe and was “administered” as impersonally and surely as a person falls who jumps off a nine- story building. Because the Greek gods did not create the universe, they did not “build” its moral fabric; to a certain extent, the gods themselves are subject to the laws of the universe, which they are inside (for example, they cannot be in more than one place or time at once). Thus, one does not sin against a personal god (as the Hebrews do) who might have the power to judge motivation and circumstance. Instead, one sins against an impersonal universe, which has no more interest in motivation or circumstance than the law of gravity does.

The fact that Oedipus does not mean to violate the two most sacred relationships is irrelevant. He must be punished because he did a bad

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thing. The certainty of this punishment becomes, for the Greek audience, the guarantee that the universe is an orderly place. The chorus longs for the punishment of Laius’ murder as an affirmation that the world makes sense; after expressing their belief in “great laws” that “tower above us, reared on high,” the Chorus explains that these great laws require the punishment of evil:

But if any man comes striding, high and mighty in all he says and does, no fear of justice, no reverence for the temples of the gods— let a rough doom tear him down, repay his pride, breakneck, ruinous pride! (972-980)

But the Chorus also expresses a sense of outrage, because if the oracle of Apollo is correct, someone murdered their king and got away with it, escaping punishment. The dissonance between what they believe— sinners are punished—and what they see happening—sinners going unpunished—causes a crisis of belief:

Can such a man, so desperate, still boast he can save his life from the flashing bolts of god? If all such violence goes with honor now why join the sacred dance? (981-984)

These rhetorical questions imply what the rest of the ode makes perfectly clear: if evil goes unpunished, there’s no point in engaging in religious activities. The world is random. The gods do not exist.

View of Man Like Homer, Sophocles emphasizes the limitedness of man. The play suggests that man’s perspective is so small that, like a flea crawling through an oriental carpet, he is incapable of seeing the larger pattern around him. Oedipus is certainly heroic in his determined quest to find this larger pattern and understand his own place in it, but for all his heroism he is also representative; his quest for order is every man’s quest. Oedipus’ desire to understand the pattern of the world and his own part in the pattern is universal, because God built man to live in an unfallen world. As God’s creatures, we immediately recognize in disease, death, and oppression that something is wrong, even if we do not always understand what that something is.

It is worth remembering that, for the ancient Greeks, the most powerful of the gods, Zeus, was not the creator of men. According to Greek myth, Zeus did not create the world and so does not govern its most basic "built-in" laws. Because Zeus did not create men either, he is neither expected to know very much about humans nor to care very deeply for them. The Bible insists, on the other hand, that man is “fearfully and wonderfully made” by his creator, and that God knows

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“our inmost hearts” (Psalm 119) from the moment he created us. Christianity makes much bolder claims about the place of man in the world—that we are created in the image of God and given stewardship over creation, for example—than Greek myth.

View of the Gods Unlike the epics, tragedies are told from a man's-eye view of the

world. In Greek tragedy, there is no overarching narrator to explain what the gods are doing or thinking. Tragedy is thus a much more human- centered art form than the epic. Tragedy, much more than epic, embodies man's sense of bewilderment at the actions or inactions of the divine powers. The workings of the gods are far more mysterious and terrifying here than in Homer. The gods in Oedipus seem to be less the personal deities that they are in Homer and are rather more abstract enforcers of moral law. Apollo's sudden and unexplained punishment of Thebes is one good example of the inscrutable behavior of the gods. We do not travel to Mount Olympus with the narrator, as Homer would have us do, to hear Apollo explain to Athena why he is sending a plague on the Thebans. Instead, Sophocles lets us puzzle out Apollo’s motivations through prophecies delivered by fallible humans who, as Oedipus notes, might be inclined to lie in order to advance their own interests.

In the life of Oedipus, the workings of the divine powers are even more mysterious and inexplicable. Why is Oedipus fated to do such terrible things? He suffers under no generational curse like Agamemnon, nor, beyond his impious speech, does he seem to have committed any particular act of outrage against the gods. His suffering more closely resembles that of Job than that of Achilles or Agamemnon, whose afflictions can be neatly traced back to single acts.

Literary Qualities Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy, the most influential work of

literary criticism in the western tradition, uses Oedipus Rex as a touchstone of literary excellence. From the beginning, Oedipus Rex has been the tragedy against which all other tragedies must be judged. Later critics, particularly during the Enlightenment, extrapolated a set of classical “rules” from Oedipus that they called “the three unities,” relating to time, place, and action. According to these rules, the play must unfold in “real time.” Thus, in Greek tragedy characters never walk on stage in the middle of the play announcing that three years have passed since the last scene. In a sense, all of Oedipus Rex is one long scene with no breaks. This compression into real time means certain unlikely events and coincidences are necessary. When the chorus asks Oedipus to send for an oracle from Apollo, he announces that he has already done so, and Creon arrives almost immediately, back from his

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long journey. Messengers arrive from Corinth with the news that Oedipus’ father is dead at precisely the correct moment in the plot. The messenger who comes happens also to be the only person in Corinth who knows that Oedipus was not Polybus’ son. Such coincidences pile up, but the plot moves so quickly that the audience hardly notices. In addition to the “unity of time,” these “rules” dictate that the play must also unfold in one place, never changing settings. Finally, the play must follow one action from its beginning to its logical ending. Not all Greek tragedies follow these rules as closely as Oedipus Rex does, but these aesthetic features have exerted a powerful influence on later generations of playwrights.

Aside from observing the three unities, the most outstanding aesthetic feature of the play is its insistent, repeated use of dramatic irony. Sophocles plays on the fact that the audience, already familiar with the myth of Oedipus, knows much more about what is happening and what will happen than the characters do, so that characters frequently say things that are more meaningful to the audience than they are to the speakers. For example, Oedipus’ ironic promises (I'll do everything God asks! I'll punish the man who's responsible! I'll make him pay! I'll banish the murderer!) put the audience in the position of knowing more than Oedipus does. All his statements are true, but they are true in a way that Oedipus himself does not understand, and the audience knows that all these statements will come back to haunt Oedipus later. At one point, Oedipus (still unaware that Laius is his father or that he is Laius’ murderer) imagines that his obligation to find the murderer of Laius may be deeper than that of a king searching for the cause of his people’s suffering; Laius might have been Oedipus’ kinsman:

Why, our seed might be the same, children born of the same mother might have created blood bonds between us if his hope of offspring hadn’t met disaster— but fate swooped at his head and cut him short. I will fight for him as if he were my father stop at nothing, search the world to lay my hands on the man who shed his blood. (296-303)

The layers of irony in this speech are almost too thick to explain since they involve the tangled, chaotic net of kinship relations Oedipus creates when he fathers children by his own mother. “Children born of the same mother” have created blood-bonds between Oedipus and Laius since Oedipus’ children are also Laius’ grandchildren (by his own wife!). When Oedipus says that Laius’ “hope of offspring . . . met disaster,” he means that Laius had no children, but of course Laius had Oedipus, so the speech is true in an ironic way, since Laius’ offspring Oedipus did bring disaster on Laius (by “cut[ting] him short” and marrying his wife). Oedipus’ promise to fight for Laius as if he were his own father is also

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ironic, since Laius is Oedipus’ father. Finally, Oedipus’ promise to “lay [his] hands on the man” who shed his father’s blood will also come to pass in an unexpected way when Oedipus puts out his own eyes.

Given that the audience already knows the horrible truth about Oedipus and what is going to happen to him, there is no plot tension. Instead, Sophocles’ consummate skill as a dramatist is displayed through his careful unfolding of events. We see Oedipus learning the truth bit by bit, putting together the pieces. Oedipus’ role in the murder of Laius comes clear first, but the true horror of Oedipus’ parentage is revealed later in the play as it moves toward its truly horrific climax. The persistent irony of the play is everywhere evident, not only in the speeches of the characters but in the unfolding of events. For example, as Jocasta tells a story that she thinks will convince Oedipus to ignore prophecy (Laius was prophesied to die at the hands of his son, but died instead at the hands of thieves), she unwittingly drops a critical piece of information: Laius was killed at a place where three roads meet. Suddenly, Oedipus remembers his own violent encounter with a stranger at a place where three roads meet, an encounter that took place shortly before his arrival in Thebes. In other words, Jocasta’s attempt to comfort Oedipus ironically reveals that Oedipus’ deepest fears are true.

Oedipus' Character

Oedipus is a hero to the Thebans, who proclaimed him king after Laius, their former king, was found murdered. Oedipus is given the office of king, despite being unknown in Thebes, because he destroys the Sphinx, a monster that was terrorizing Thebes by blocking the roads leading in and out of the city. The Sphinx accosted travelers, demanding they answer a riddle. Those who could not were tossed off a cliff. The riddle is this: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening?” The answer is, of course, man, who crawls at birth, walks in his prime, then hobbles along with a cane in old age. When the quick-thinking Oedipus answered the riddle correctly, the Sphinx, in a towering snit, threw herself off the cliff.

Oedipus’ actions early in the play show that he is a good king, aware of his people’s crisis and eager to respond. His respect for the elderly priests contrasts with Clytemnestra and Aigisthus' treatment of the old men of Argos in Agamemnon. He has deep love and pity for his people:

My children,

I pity you. I see—how could I fail to see

what longing brings you here? Well I know

you are sick to death, all of you,

but sick as you are, you are not as sick as I. . . .

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. . . my spirit

grieves for the city. (69—89)

Nor is all of this mere flapdoodle from a man who, admittedly, thinks a great deal of himself. His actions show that he is intent on identifying the pollution in Thebes and eliminating it, even if he is himself the source of the corruption.

On the other hand, Oedipus’ punishment is not entirely undeserved. He has certain qualities of character that in some ways make him responsible for his own punishment. For example, Oedipus’ self-confidence borders on hubris. At one point, Oedipus interrupts the chorus to ask why they are praying to the gods when they could just as well be praying to him: “You pray to the gods? Let me grant your prayers” (245-260). The speech displays an incredible degree of self- confidence, though it may be justified given his past, especially his defeat of the Sphinx. Oedipus prides himself on being a self-made man, and it is no small part of his tragedy to discover that fate may have had a significant role in making him who he is— a point that is intensified by his discovery that he is not a rootless self-made man, but an old guy still living at home! With his mom!

Oedipus is quick-tempered. When, rightly fearful, Tiresias refuses to speak, Oedipus gets angry very quickly:

Nothing! You, you scum of the earth, you’d enrage a heart of stone! You won’t talk? Nothing moves you? Out with it, once and for all! (380-383)

Shortly afterward, Oedipus accuses Tiresias of involvement in a plot to kill Laius, then transfers his fury from Tiresias to Creon, accusing Creon of attempting to take power from him. Such scenes can only be meant to make us see Oedipus’ weakness, since we already know Tiresias and Creon are both innocent of the charges that Oedipus makes against them.

His short temper and paranoia are ultimately of less importance than his impiety toward prophecy and the gods. It is this final straw that seems to break the camel’s back. Oedipus’ full punishment follows very soon after he joins Jocasta in mocking the very idea of prophecy. When the messenger from Corinth brings news of the death of Polybus (the man Oedipus thinks is his father), Oedipus exults, thinking that he has escaped prophecy:

So! Jocasta, why, why look to the Prophet’s hearth, the fires of the future? Why scan the birds that scream above our heads? They winged me on to the murder of my father, did they? That was my doom? Well look, he’s dead and buried, hidden under the earth,

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and here I am in Thebes, I never put hand to sword . . . But now, all those prophecies I feared—Polybus packs them off to sleep with him in hell! They’re nothing, worthless! (1054-1063)

In a sense, Oedipus has mocked prophecy his whole life. He ran away from Corinth trying to escape a prophecy of Apollo. He mocks Tiresias, who, according to Oedipus, could not defeat the Sphinx. But all these actions simply tie him up more tightly into the net of his fate. Character of Jocasta

Jocasta appears at first as an indulgent, good-tempered wife who seems accustomed to dealing with her husband's petulance and mood swings. Her attempts to make peace between Creon and Oedipus, who are fighting like schoolboys, is disturbingly similar to the behavior of a mother with her misbehaving children.

More disturbingly, from the beginning Jocasta is openly skeptical of prophecy. She has had experience with prophets before when she was told that her son would murder his father. She believes she has escaped this prophecy, and cites it proudly when Oedipus grows despondent over Tiresias’ claim that Oedipus is himself the murderer of Laius. After word comes that Polybus has died, Jocasta, in her exultation, makes even more explicit her rejection of the whole concept of prophecy, and, by extension, the very idea of the world’s orderliness that prophecy underwrites: “You prophecies of the gods, where are you now?” (1036). Jocasta also makes clear the shocking implications of her disbelief in prophecy:

It’s all chance, chance rules our lives. . . . Better to live at random, best we can.

In other words, if there is nothing divine overseeing the course of human events, no one who knows what will happen tomorrow, then there is nothing to punish evil men—no good or evil at all, really. We can live in any way we want, and do anything we want, and there will be no reward or punishment from beyond.

Sophocles wrote Oedipus as an explicit rejection of this claim. The play insists that we cannot “live as if there’s no tomorrow,” that the evil that men do catches up with them. As his “test case,” Sophocles chooses Oedipus, a man who, though unwittingly, has done the very worst things a man could possibly do: kill his own father and marry his own mother. Even the most sophisticated moral hair-splitter would have to be shocked by these actions. If a man can do these things and get away with them, then it seems like a reasonable inference that the gods do not exist. Through Oedipus’ suffering, Sophocles suggests that he still believed in moral equity and retribution for sins against the universal moral order.

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Character of the Chorus The chorus in Oedipus is composed of Theban citizens. They make

quiet attempts to mediate between the angry Oedipus and the prophet and are later reluctant to confirm to Creon that Oedipus has been making charges against him. They seem meek and mostly want to stay out of the way of the titanic characters, all of whom seem much larger than life.

They are a pious lot, making frequent prayers and expressing shock at the blasphemous speeches of Jocasta and of Oedipus as they exult in the “failure” of prophecy. We have seen already that the chorus affirms a “common sense” view of the orderliness of the world and the existence of laws that go beyond any man. But for all their piety, the chorus recognizes the consequence of unfulfilled prophecy; reverence for the gods will disappear: Never again will I go reverent to Delphi, the inviolate heart of Earth or Apollo’s ancient oracle at Abae or Olympia of the fires—

unless these prophecies all come true for all mankind to point toward in wonder. King of kings, if you deserve your titles Zeus, remember, never forget!

A great deal is at stake in the fate of Oedipus. As terrible as his punishment is, the ending is ultimately happy in its affirmation of the orderliness of the world.

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Introduction to Virgil's Aeneid General

Virgil lived through Rome's most tumultuous years to see the re- establishment of an ordered community unified under the leadership of Octavian (later called Caesar Augustus) after a bloody civil war and the division of the empire. Virgil was a personal friend of Octavian and may have been commissioned by him to write a patriotic epic celebrating the history and character qualities of Rome, a work that became the Aeneid. Virgil is constantly aware of the fact that he is writing in the shadow of Homer and both imitates him and moves beyond Homer to write a Roman epic, exemplifying and encouraging Roman views of nationhood, personal heroism, and history all differing radically from those embodied in Homer’s works.

The Aeneid can be viewed as a kind of Roman imperial propaganda, an attempt to encourage the values necessary for the creation and preservation of the Roman empire: self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, a willingness to sacrifice present happiness for the sake of a (sometimes very distant) brighter future, a willingness to sacrifice individual happiness and self-development for the greater good of the community. Community and future always trump individual and present in the Aeneid; as such, the work obviously promotes a very different set of personal priorities than those which characterize Greek heroes like Achilles, Hector, or even Odysseus. The state has now become more important than the individual. The truly heroic man is the one willing to make sacrifices for the good of Rome.

Consider, for example, Virgil’s description of Aeneas’ refusal to accept Dido’s supplication that he remain in Carthage for a few days before leaving her:

[Dido] pleaded in such terms, and such, in tears . . . [but] no tears moved him, no one’s voice would he Attend to tractably. The fates opposed it; God’s will blocked the man’s once kindly ears. And just as when the north winds from the Alps This way and that contend among themselves To tear away an oak tree hale with age, The wind and tree cry, and the buffeted trunk Showers high foliage to earth, but holds On bedrock . . . just so this captain, Buffeted by a gale of pleas . . . Felt their moving power in his great heart, And yet his will stood fast; tears fell in vain. (IV 582-596)

Contemporary readers often condemn Aeneas for his hardheartedness in these final exchanges with Dido. Yet as the simile makes clear, Virgil intends for his readers to admire Aeneas’ manly firmness in refusing the pleas of Dido, because he refuses her in the name of duty. Aeneas’ duty

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is, of course, to the future and to the state: the founding of Rome that the gods have revealed to him. This positive depiction of Aeneas’ refusal of a lover's pathetic supplication embodies a worldview that is quite different from that of Homer or the Greek tragedies; for where the Greeks highly value human relationships like the guest-host relationship, the suppliant relationship, or even the relationship of husband and wife, in the Aeneid all human relationships are subordinated to larger public responsibilities. Think of the chaos and misery that result from Agamemnon’s violation of the suppliant relationship or Paris’ violation of the guest-host relationship or Oedipus’ unwitting violation of a whole series of family and personal relationships. In the Aeneid, violations of such relationships are not punished. In fact, human relationships are represented here as a hindrance to the performance of the civic duties the gods have in mind. Aeneas violates nearly all of these human relationships, but Virgil holds him up as the paragon of duty.

At the time Virgil began the Aeneid (roughly 30 B.C.), the Romans had effectively controlled Greece for over one hundred years. Despite the Greeks’ status as a conquered people and the presence in Rome of thousands of Greek slaves, the influence of Greek culture on Rome was profound. Roman law, architecture, sculpture, and literature had all been affected by Greek models; even more significantly, Greek religion and mythology had been adopted, more or less wholesale. The Greek pantheon or roster of gods was simply taken over and renamed, but otherwise remained almost exactly the same:

Zeus becomes Jupiter Hera becomes Juno Aphrodite becomes Venus Athena becomes Minerva Hephaestus becomes Vulcan Poseidon becomes Neptune Hermes becomes Mercury

Virgil’s reworking of Greek mythological materials suggests that the Romans felt some anxiety about this cultural debt; after all, the great imperial Romans could hardly be indebted to a race of slaves. So Virgil takes the Greek mythic past and writes Roman history into it, but does so in order to suggest that the Romans are not descended from the Greeks at all, but rather from their arch-enemies the Trojans. (The English will, many centuries later, also claim Trojan ancestry, as we will see in the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.) The Aeneid lays out the mythic origins of Rome and the Roman people in the heroic exodus of the Trojan warrior Aeneas and his small band of followers, who travel from Asia Minor to Italy and found Alba Longa, the city that will produce Romulus and Remus, the eventual founders of Rome. Aeneas’ account of the fall of Troy emphasizes the cunning, deceit and cruelty of the Greeks as opposed to the nobility of the Trojans.

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The Aeneid’s View of the World Like Odysseus, Aeneas takes what becomes for the epic hero an

obligatory trip to the underworld. For purposes of comparison with other treatments of this subject, note that Aeneas has a guide who takes him down into a dark underworld guarded by allegorical figures of all the things that cause death, a place full of demons and monsters. Aeneas, like Odysseus before him and Dante after him, mistakes shadows for substance, attempting to embrace the shades of people familiar to him. He encounters a ferryman, Charon, and finds that the dead must cross over a river to reach the underworld, and that the dead actually desire to cross this river and reach their appointed place. This desire is thwarted for those who are not buried. Their souls are banished from the world of the dead for one hundred years and they wander on the wrong side fo the river. Like Odysseus before and Dante after him, Aeneas spots a friend, in this case Palinurus, who confirms a fulfilled, though very tricky, prophecy that said Palinurus would come unharmed to Italy. Palinurus reveals that he had made it to Italy after washing ashore, but was immediately killed by the savages living there.

In the Aeneid, the dead are slightly more organized than they are in the Odyssey. The most innocent among them, infants and the falsely accused, seem to live the closest to the external world and are thus encountered first by Aeneas as he travels into the underworld. The travellers then encounter King Minos, the judge of the dead, then suicides wishing to be alive again, then finally those who died for love. Aeneas sees particular figures from myth in this group, then focuses on a single one, a pattern Dante will reuse.

The long description of Aeneas’ armor is obviously modeled on Homer’s treatment of the parallel episode in Book XVIII of the Iliad. However, a careful reading of the shield of Aeneas reveals a Roman view of history that contrasts sharply with the Greek view embodied by the shield of Achilles. The repetition of events in a circular pattern on Achilles’ shield suggests a circular view of history as an unchanging cycle of peace and war, starvation and plenty, sowing and reaping, and so on. Aeneas’ shield, on the other hand, suggests a linear history, depicting not generic objects or events like a “city at war” or “wine-making,” but easily recognizable specific historical events that lead toward the foundation of the Roman Empire. The shield is especially detailed in its depiction of the sea battle at Actium when Octavian defeated Marc Antony and his ally Cleopatra of Egypt. For Aeneas, the events depict a distant future that his present sufferings will make possible. For Virgil and his readers, the events depicted on the shield had already taken place, and they would have been generally recognized as the most significant events in the development of the Roman Empire. The final scene on the shield, which shows representatives of the entire world passing before Augustus in triumphal procession, suggests that all of human history has been a linear process pointing toward the

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establishment of a single world government under the leadership of Rome. The images viewed together imply that the destiny of the entire world is to be united under Roman leadership.

The Aeneid's View of Man

The Greek heroes’ blind pursuit of personal glory is never deeply criticized by Homer, though the later Athenians, who are perhaps more civic-minded and less individualistic than Homer and his audiences, certainly suggest some criticisms of the heroic ideal in works like Agamemnon, Oedipus Rex, and Medea. These moderate criticisms aside, the Roman model of personal heroism is far more self-sacrificing and future-oriented than the Homeric model. Aeneas is called on to be a very different kind of man than Achilles or Hector. In the Aeneid, Aeneas’ personal glory must always be secondary to the establishment of the Roman empire and the pleasure of the present must be sacrificed to preserve the best features of the past and to secure the future of Rome.

Consider Aeneas’ tale of the destruction of Troy. Over and over again, the gods warn him to leave Troy because Troy is finished; but Aeneas finds himself unable to obey the gods, so firmly set is he on revenge against the Greeks and on the personal glory to be won in battle. Like Hector, whose decision to die in battle with Achilles rather than flee inside the walls of Troy dooms his family and city, Aeneas would rather win personal glory for himself in the present than sacrifice it for the future good of the community. Obviously, this kind of attitude is not the ideal for the soldier of empire, who might spend half a lifetime guarding some lonely outpost in Gaul or North Africa rather than enjoying the benefits of Roman citizenship. The ideal Roman citizen needed to be committed to preserving the Roman heritage embodied in its past and to securing Roman prosperity for the future.

Virgil provides us with a visual symbol for this orientation away from the present and toward both the glorious past and promising future when Aeneas flees from Troy with his family. He is carrying his father Anchises on his back, a symbol of the weight of the past and tradition, and holding the hand of his son Iulus, symbolizing his commitment to the future; his wife Creusa, symbolizing present pleasure, follows behind and is ultimately lost in the burning city. Aeneas’ return into the burning city to look for Creusa is the first of many indications in the first half of the Aeneid that Aeneas is not yet fully emotionally committed to the future laid out for him by the gods. His love affair with Dido and his desire to remain in Carthage are also indications that Aeneas desires some other future for himself than the one the gods have laid out for him.

Given this necessity for sacrificing the present, it is no surprise that Virgil takes a very dim view of romantic love; of course, the Greeks were not especially enamored of romantic love either – (see the choruses’ prayers to Aphrodite in Agamemnon and Medea for moderate love or no

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love at all). Here, romantic love is an insanity and a curse. Dido becomes a model for what Aeneas might become if he surrenders his devotion to duty. Virgil repeatedly depicts the immoderate love of Dido as a wound or a destructive inward fire that causes her to break a public oath never to remarry after the death of Sychaeus, her first husband. The consequences for Dido are obviously grave, since her immoderate love leads directly to her death. But they are no less grave for the citizens of Carthage, whose heroic efforts at city-building win such admiration from Aeneas when he arrives in Carthage. After Dido’s love for Aeneas begins to distract her attention away from her responsibilities to the community, the city-building taking place under her direction stops:

Towers, half-built, rose No farther; men no longer trained in arms Or toiled to make harbors and battlements Impregnable. Projects were broken off, Laid over, and the menacing huge walls With cranes unmoving stood against the sky. (IV: 114-120)

If devotion to the state and its projects is the highest good in the Aeneid, then the interruption of the state’s construction and expansion is a terrible consequence of the private pursuit of romantic or passionate love.

Aeneas, during his visit to the underworld, is shown a pageant of great men of the future, the men who will be most instrumental in the success of Rome and its eventual bid at world empire. Romans, far more than the Greeks, were willing to hold up individual “great men” as models of civic behavior for emulation. Works like Plutarch’s Lives were written for a younger generation who would imitate the virtues and avoid the vices of great figures of the past. Unfortunately, this admirable practice of remembering past heroes ultimately shaded into idolatry and finally into ancestor and emperor worship.

View of the Gods The gods as they are represented in Virgil are nearly identical with the gods in Homer or Greek tragedy. They have the same kind of presence and power, the same limitations. They still play favorites. Hera/Juno is especially likely to try to thwart the will of fate. Zeus/Jupiter never does so, but sometimes allows others to temporarily "put off" some fated event. Juno loves Carthage and wants it to be the ruling city of the world (her devotees are often granted political power) but knows the prophecy that Troy's ancestors (the Romans) are fated to destroy Carthage. Knowing this, but still angry at the Trojans for losing the beauty contest, Hera seeks for as long as possible to prevent the founding of Rome. It is partly through her intervention that Dido and Aeneas have the affair that slows

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Aeneas’ journey to Italy. If Hera seeks to thwart fate, Jupiter ultimately intervenes in Book IV to ensure that fated events do happen, sending Mercury to Aeneas with the message that he must leave Carthage at once and get on with his duty to go to Italy and found Rome.

The gods certainly do not occupy any higher ground morally in Virgil than they do in Homer. They directly participate in the deceit used by the Greeks to overthrow Troy, particularly in the false omen they give after Laocoon casts a spear at the side of the “sacred” wooden horse. Two snakes appear, swimming from Tenedos (the island where the Greek fleet is hidden) and kill Laocoon and his two sons. Everyone who sees this horrible event assumes Laocoon deserved it for desecrating the horse, a conviction that only grows stronger after they see the snakes curling at the feet of the statue of Minerva. As in Homer, the gods work at cross purposes, deceive one another, and use humans for their own ends. The conspiracy of Venus and Juno in encouraging the love affair between Dido and Aeneas is a particularly shameful example of this kind of malicious behavior on the part of the gods. Juno thinks a marriage between Dido and Aeneas will guarantee peace between Troy and Carthage. Venus, who has had the future more clearly explained to her, allows the marriage to go on as a way of purchasing safe harbor for Aeneas. Both are participants in the destruction of Dido.

Artistic/Aesthetic Qualities The Aeneid is a self-conscious attempt to write in Homer's epic tradition. Consider this very brief and incomplete list of similarities between Virgil’s epic and Homer’s epics:

• As the anger of Poseidon keeps Odysseus and his men wandering, so does the anger of Juno keep Aeneas and the remnants of Troy wandering.

• As Odysseus is shipwrecked on Phaiakia, a highly civilized place where he is taken in and treated royally, so Aeneas is shipwrecked near Carthage, arriving completely unknown, and yet is taken in and treated like a king

• As Odysseus' past adventures are primarily related through his own storytelling, so Aeneas’ experiences in Troy are related through the stories he tells during a banquet in Carthage

• As Achilles has the goddess Thetis for his mother and protector, so does Aeneas have Venus

• As Phaiakia becomes an attractive, highly civilized alternative to wandering, with sexual overtones (Odysseus is clearly offered the princess Nausikaa), so Carthage is an attractive, civilized alternative to establishing a city in the wilderness, and Dido’s sexual attractions are such that

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Aeneas can only with the greatest difficulty pull himself away from Carthage to continue his voyage

• Virgil makes frequent use of “Homeric similes” • As Achilles is armed by a goddess mother (Thetis) who goes

into Heaven to ask for a set of armor from the god of the forge (Hephaestos), so is Aeneas armed by a goddess mother (Venus) who goes into Heaven to ask for a set of armor from the god of the forge (Vulcan)

• Both Homer and Virgil include long and detailed descriptions of the shield forged for their respective heroes.

• The rivalry and struggle of Aeneas and Turnus is very similar to the struggle between Achilles and Hector. Turnus kills Pallas, a youth entrusted to Aeneas by his father; Turnus takes and wears Pallas’ belt as a token of victory, just as Hector takes Achilles’ armor from Patroclus.

• As Hector is deserted by his "brother" during his final battle with Achilles, so is Turnus deserted by his sister Juturna during his final battle with Aeneas

Like Homer, Virgil begins with an announcement of his subject, but Virgil has two subjects rather than one: warfare and wandering. These are the two great Homeric subjects, with warfare as the central subject matter of the Iliad and wandering as the central subject matter of the Odyssey. Virgil’s first lines indicate that the two great Homeric subjects will be united in the Aeneid, and indeed the structure of the epic seems to bear this out; roughly the first six books of the Aeneid are concerned with the wanderings of Aeneas and the Trojans and the second six are concerned with the wars the Trojans fight to establish themselves in Italy among hostile tribes.

Unlike Homer, whose narration moves back and forth between the Greeks and the Trojans and who never really takes sides in the dispute between them, Virgil has an axe to grind against the Greeks; as a consequence, Virgil puts his literary skills to work in order to manage our emotional response to the fall of Troy in such a way that we end up admiring the Trojans and despising the Greeks. Virgil allows us to experience the disastrous fall of Troy through Trojan eyes, with an emphasis on Greek dishonesty and duplicity. Unable to defeat the Trojans in open battle, they fall back on deceit as a means of taking the city. Sinon’s deception of the Trojans is particularly disturbing, since it works only because he knows the Trojans to be fair-minded, softhearted and hospitable. Knowing the upright Trojans will take pity on an outcast, he takes advantage of those good qualities to trick them into believing his story. As Aeneas tells the story to the Carthaginians, he is careful to emphasize the naïve innocence of his fellow Trojans:

Burning with curiosity

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We questioned him [Sinon], called on him to explain— Unable to conceive such a performance, The art of the Pelasgian.

As the tale goes on, Virgil makes it plain that deception is not a quality of some Greeks, but of all; they are all deceptive by nature.

On a more subtle level, it is worth remembering the irony of Aeneas’ position as he recounts this story. Like Sinon, he has just wound up friendless and unknown among a foreign people, yet through his stories and laments, he has won their pity and friendship. The tale he tells of Sinon’s deception of the Trojans should warn the Carthaginians about the dangers of being overly hospitable or overly credulous. It was precisely these two qualities that led the Trojans to believe the story of Sinon; this belief resulted in their destruction. And, as Virgil makes clear, the overly trusting Carthaginians will themselves be destroyed, though not for many generations, because of taking in the stranger Aeneas. This generous act of hospitality ultimately results in the dying curse of Dido, who prays to the gods for unceasing warfare between Aeneas’ people (the Romans) and the Carthaginians.

Aeneas' Character Like Odysseus, Aeneas is established from the first lines as a man

of suffering and a victim of cosmic rage. But unlike Odysseus, who is heading for home, Aeneas is leaving home and has only pain and suffering ahead of him. Nevertheless, Aeneas has a glorious future, since he will found Rome and be worshipped as a god.

Still, Aeneas’ character will have to develop and change over time. He is not committed at first to the task that the gods have laid out for him. His first response to the loss of his old life during the destruction of Troy is suicidal despair. Because his fate is to found Rome, the city that will carry on the noble heritage of Troy, the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas in a dream, warning him to leave Troy:

Ai! Give up and go, child of the goddess, Save yourself, out of these flames. The enemy Holds the city walls and from her height Troy falls in ruin. Fatherland and Priam Have their due; if by one hand our towers Could be defended, by this hand, my own, They would have been. Her holy things, her gods Of hearth and household, Troy commends to you. Accept them as companions of your days; Go find for them the great walls that one day You’ll dedicate, when you have roamed the sea. (II:378-388)

Aeneas wakes to find the city in flames; his first response, despite the warning from Hector’s ghost, is to go into the flames and find a glorious

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death: “…it came to me,” he tells his Carthaginian audience, “That meeting death was beautiful in arms” (II:415-6). Later, when he encounters other Trojans still fighting in the burning city, Aeneas tells them, “You defend / A city lost in flames. Come let us die” (II:458-9). Aeneas’ decision to pursue death rather than undertake the task assigned to him suggests that Aeneas’ heroism is still very similar to that displayed by the Homeric heroes; like Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and Medea, when the chips are down, the early Aeneas chooses personal glory even when it means the destruction of the family and the death of the future. The city itself is in absolute chaos; there is nothing left to defend. The soldiers fight only for personal glory and revenge.

The graphic picture Virgil creates of the rape of Troy is unforgettable. The towers of the city, wrapped in smoke and flame, crash down into the blood-soaked streets. The screams of dying men and women fill the night air. Groups of warriors appear and disappear in the smoke-filled streets. Chaos reigns; Trojans dress as Greeks and are killed by their own colleagues. The Trojans themselves participate in the destruction of their city, tearing stones and timbers out of buildings to throw down on the Greeks below them. Particularly tragic and gruesome is the death of old Priam, his trembling hands barely able to lift the sword he attempts to wield against Achilles’ son, the degenerate Pyrrhus. The sight of old Priam's death reminds Aeneas of Anchises, his own father. Recognizing that to die in Priam’s palace would be selfish when his father, wife, and son are in danger, Aeneas leaves and heads toward home.

Before he can escape Priam’s palace, Aeneas spots Helen, the woman he holds responsible for the war and its destruction. Just as he is about to kill her, he is stopped by his mother, Venus, who scolds him for neglecting his own family, then grants Aeneas a vision. This vision reveals that the gods themselves are participating in the destruction of Troy:

Look over there; I’ll tear away the cloud That curtains you, and films your mortal sight . . . Neptune is shaking from their beds the walls . . . Juno in all her savagery holds The Scaean Gates . . . The Father himself empowers the Danaans, Urges assaulting gods on the defenders. (II:767-781)

The theophany serves two purposes in the narrative. The first is to convince Aeneas of the futility of continuing to fight for the city. The second is to establish that Troy was not actually destroyed by the Greeks, but by the gods and (as we have seen) the Trojans themselves. The Greeks can thus take very little credit for sacking Troy.

Even after this vision, Aeneas is still not fully committed to obeying the gods’ command that he leave Troy. After meeting with some resistance from his father, who wants to die in Troy, Aeneas determines

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to go back out and fight again. At this point, the gods send yet another portent: a fire appears burning over Ascanius' head. Still unconvinced, Anchises asks the gods for another sign that they desire him to leave. A comet suddenly appears out of the night sky, crashing down into the city. This convinces both Anchises and Aeneas, and he takes up his father on his shoulders and takes his son by the hand. With Creusa following behind, they leave Troy but lose Creusa in their flight. Aeneas, still not reconciled to the sacrifice of present joy the gods have decreed for him, rushes back into the city to look for his wife; despite all the visions, messages, and portents, Aeneas is still not fully committed to the future. Finally, Creusa's ghost appears to him, revealing to him yet again his destiny:

For you Long exile waits, and long sea miles to plough. You shall make landfall on Hesperia Where Lydian Tiber flows, with gentle pace, Between rich farmlands, and the years will bear Glad peace, a kingdom, and a queen for you. (II.974-979)

In a heartbreaking scene, Aeneas makes three attempts to embrace her, but his hands pass through her ghost.

Nor does this mark the end of Aeneas’ struggle against the future chosen for him by the gods. The city of Carthage is a powerful attraction to the weary traveler, especially after Dido falls in love with him. For a season, Aeneas seems to forget all about his destiny and settle into the life of Carthage, acting as Dido’s common-law husband until the gods send him a very forceful and direct reminder in the person of Mercury. Mercury finds Aeneas overseeing construction in Carthage, basically doing there what he is supposed to be doing in Rome. To make matters worse, he is dressed in clothes that Dido has given him. Mercury scolds him for forgetting his own destiny:

Is it for you To lay the stones for Carthage’s high walls, Tame husband that you are, and build their city? Oblivious of your own world, you own kingdom! . . . If future history’s glories Do not affect you, if you will not strive For your own honor, think of Ascanius, Think of the expectations of your heir, Iulus, to whom the Italian realm, the lands Of Rome, are due. (IV.344-358)

It will be long after he leaves Carthage before Aeneas finally commits fully to the destiny set before him by the gods. His struggle to submit himself to this destiny (clearly not what he would have chosen for himself, as he reminds Dido in their last meeting) is one of the most interesting artistic features of the Aeneid.

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The reward Aeneas receives for his piety is the vision of Rome’s future granted to him during his trip into the underworld. Here he sees what he’s sacrificing himself for: the creation of a world empire, one made up of all tribes and languages and people from every nation on earth. But the vision is for the future. Aeneas, without fully understanding, sees and marvels, knowing that his sacrifices in the present will make this glorious future possible.

Aeneas is often accused of coldness because of his abandonment of Dido. In Virgil’s ethical cosmos, Aeneas’ “mistake” is having submitted to the advances of Dido in the first place. Leaving her, though painful, is meant to be seen as one of the most heroic acts that Aeneas commits. As Maynard Mack suggests, what saves the Aeneid from being “mere propaganda” for the inculcation of Roman virtues is Virgil’s clear-eyed recognition that the foundation of empire comes at a tremendous personal and emotional cost.

Dido's Character When the shipwrecked Aeneas observes the scenes of the Trojan

War carved on the side of a temple, he sees there Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons, a group of women warriors allied with the Trojans. Immediately afterward, Dido appears. Virgil draws our attention to the similarities between these women. Like Penthesilea, Dido is a tall, powerful, beautiful woman doing a man’s work. Virgil compares Dido to another powerful woman, the goddess Artemis:

As on Eurotas bank or Cynthus ridge Diana trains her dancers, and behind her On every hand the mountain nymphs appear, A myriad converging; with her quiver Slung on her shoulders, in her stride she seems The tallest, taller by a head than any, And joy pervades Latona’s quiet heart: So Dido seemed, in such delight she moved Amid her people, cheering on the toil Of a kingdom in the making. (II:107-117)

The comparisons here are meant to make a simple point: when Aeneas arrives in Carthage, Dido is entirely in her element—confident, in charge, respected, beautiful, and in the prime of life. We see her judging her people, organizing them, making orders and assigning work. In addition to all her other qualities, Queen Dido is a gracious host. When Ilioneus makes a supplication to the Dido that he and the other Trojans be allowed to stay in her kingdom while they repair their ships, she accepts.

We learn shortly after her first meeting with Aeneas that she has made a public vow never to remarry after death of Sychaeus, her first husband. Dido knows at this point that an affair with Aeneas would be

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an affront to the laws of heaven and earth, but makes the mistake of conferring with a bad counselor, her sister Anna, whose advice is closely akin to Jocasta's: forget the vow! “Do you believe this matters to the dust, to ghosts in tombs?” she asks Dido. Anna ultimately convinces Dido to surrender to her love for Aeneas by appealing to her sense of public duty. She reminds her sister that the mighty Aeneas can protect her from the savages surrounding Carthage. Dido and Aeneas, with a bit of conniving from the gods, find themselves alone together in a cave during a rainstorm. There they consummate their relationship and begin living together as husband and wife, though there has been no formal marriage ceremony. As soon as Dido begins living openly with Aeneas, she loses the respect of her people, who remember the vow she made. Rightly assuming that their Queen has lost control over herself and her own sense of dignity, the people lose respect for her and the construction of the city stops.

Dido’s shameful end clarifies the danger posed by the individual’s pursuit of romantic love, particularly when that love is allowed to interfere with duty to the state. Dido’s discovery that Aeneas is planning to leave her precipitates a crisis that causes Dido to bring even greater public shame on herself: “Furious, at her wits’ end, / She traversed the whole city, all aflame / With rage, like a Bacchante drive wild” (IX 226- 228). Reduced to begging Aeneas to stay, Dido is tormented by the recognition that her passion for Aeneas has cost her more than her own self-respect:

Because of you, Libyans and nomad kings Detest me, my own Tyrians are hostile; Because of you, I lost my integrity And that admired name by which alone I made my way once toward the stars. (IV: 254-258)

Having seen Dido at her best, it becomes all the more painful to watch her descent into suicidal madness. Love turns to bitter hatred as Dido curses Aeneas, promising to haunt him after death.

Dido, like Medea, is a scorned woman who turns to witchcraft and black magic, bringing in a witch-priestess to preside over her death ritual. Dido builds a funeral pyre, climbs atop, lights it, and then stabs herself with Aeneas’ sword.

Her final prayer embodies a truth about the classical understanding of Fate that is worth some attention. For the Greeks and Romans, Fate is an end-point at which one must eventually arrive. The existence of this fate does not mean that man’s life is utterly determined ahead of time. Instead, one mostly controls how one gets from Point A to Point B. One can do it gloriously or shamefully, willingly or kicking and screaming. One will eventually arrive at Point B if Point B is one’s destiny, but one can reach that point via a variety of pathways. Notice the wording of Dido’s curse on Aeneas, where she makes clear that she is

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not praying that the gods alter Aeneas’ destiny, but she is praying that they curse the “non-destined” parts of his life:

If by necessity that impious wretch Must find his haven and come safe to land, If so Jove’s destinies require, and this, His end in view, must stand, yet all the same When hard beset in war by a brave people, Forced to go outside his boundaries And torn from Iulus, let him beg assistance, Let him see the unmerited deaths of those Around and with him, and accepting peace On unjust terms, let him not, even so, Enjoy his kingdom or the life he longs for, But fall in battle before his time and lie Unburied on the sand! (IV.820-832)

Just as the Cyclops Polyphemus in his prayer to his father Poseidon recognizes that Fate might require that Odysseus eventually make it home, so Dido recognize that Aeneas’ success in founding Rome might be inevitable. But there is still plenty left to curse and ruin. Dido recognizes that certain issues (i.e. what is fated) are not open to change and thus are not suitable for prayer. As we have seen in the death of Hector, the gods have no real control over fate.

Dido’s final prayer also explains for Virgil’s readers the source of the ultimate rivalry between Carthage and Rome that will result in the Punic Wars and in Rome’s final complete destruction of Carthage:

Then, O my Tyrians, besiege with hate His progeny and all his race to come: make this your offering to my dust. No love, No pact must be between our peoples; No, But rise up from my bones, avenging spirit! Harry with fire the Dardan countrymen Now, or hereafter, at whatever time The strength will be afforded. Coast with coast In conflict, I implore, and sea with sea, And arms with arms: may they contend in war, Themselves and all the children of their children!

Dido, in her life and especially in her final prayer, becomes a kind of negative alternative for Aeneas. If he chooses to pursue present pleasure rather than the preservation of the community and the future, he may not only lose his honor and self-respect as Dido does; he may ultimately curse the future, consigning his own heirs to destruction as Dido does in her last prayer. Thus, Dido in her life embodies the flip side of the self- control, future-orientation, and community concern that are required for the foundation and preservation of empire. Her death is a warning to all who stray away from these virtues.

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Works Cited

Mack, Maynard. Introduction. Aeneid. Norton Anthology of World Masterpices, Volume 1, Fifth Edition.

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The New Testament Introduction

The New Testament is made up of four gospels, one book of history, twenty-one letters, and one book of prophecy. Most of these writings seem to have been regarded by Christians as sacred from a very early date. For example, 2 Peter 3:16 laments that some are distorting Paul’s writing “as they do the other scriptures,” implying that Paul’s epistles had for the early church the same authority as other scriptures. Many early churches developed lists of sacred books approved for use in worship. These lists are by and large identical, particularly with regard to the four gospels and Paul’s letters. There was some early controversy regarding James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Revelation, and Hebrews, but these books were gradually accepted as sacred. All the books that currently make up the New Testament were officially “canonized” by the Council of Carthage in 397.

Christ and his disciples probably spoke Aramaic among themselves, Aramaic having replaced Hebrew after the Babylonian captivity as the common language of Israel. However, all of the books of the New Testament are written in Greek. The expansion of the Macedonian Empire under Alexander the Great three centuries before Christ meant that Greek was recognized widely throughout Palestine, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Italy. The apostles’ use of this lingua franca, recognized across most of the known world, signals to us the evangelical ambitions of these authors. The Greek scriptures could travel easily from province to province and into the heart of Rome itself.

And travel they did, aided not only by the apostles’ use of Greek, but also by the good system of Roman roads, the relative safety of travel under Roman rule, a common currency, and Roman-established trade routes crisscrossing the empire. Though the inhabitants of Israel in Christ’s day deeply resented the Roman presence in their ancestral home, the Romans provided the infrastructure that made the spread of Christianity possible.

View of God Like the Old Testament, the New Testament teaches that God is

the “most real” thing. However, this most real thing is now knowable and approachable through His embodiment or incarnation in Christ Jesus. As the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), the Jesus Christ of the New Testament is far more than a “wise teacher” or “great philosopher,” as he has been called by some. He is God embodied, a God who knows our pains, fears, and temptations, having experienced all of them firsthand.

In our readings from the Sermon on the Mount in the book of Matthew, Christ clearly identifies himself as God by his willingness to

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teach “as one with authority” (Matt. 7:29), not as an interpreter of the law, but as creator or maker of the law. Consider Christ’s teaching on adultery in Matt. 5:27: “You have heard it said ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Christ begins by stating the seventh commandment, then, rather than contradicting it or canceling it, adds to it. So Christ’s words here embody his claim to an authority to append to the Law—the Law which came directly from God.

View of Man

But note too how Christ appends to the law: by making its observation even more difficult. Now man not only has to avoid the act of adultery, but cannot even think about adultery without sinning. In light of the impossibility of meeting this standard, calling Christ a great ethical teacher seems misguided. After all, Christ sets an impossible standard and then tells his audience they cannot be saved without surpassing that standard: “For I tell you,” Christ warns his listeners, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:20). Even the most apparently righteous, he says, are not righteous enough to stand before God.

The impossibility of meeting this standard means that man’s moral efforts on his own behalf will never be sufficient to win him the kind of righteousness that will allow him to “enter the kingdom of Heaven.” There is no hope for man to achieve saving moral righteousness on his own. But if man will accept Christ’s sacrifice on his behalf, the righteousness of Christ will be “imputed” to him. Man’s motivation for moral behavior is thus transformed. Christian man does not behave morally in order to win God’s love or approval, for he has this approval already through Christ’s imputed righteousness. Instead, man acts righteously out of gratitude toward the God who freely offers salvation from sin and death.

The New Testament holds up Christ as a new model of Christian heroism for our imitation. Christ tells his disciples “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Likewise, Paul exhorts the Ephesians to be imitators of Christ, living “a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2). Man’s model for imitation is no longer the independent warrior, but the Lamb of God, whose love for the world and willing obedience to the Father cost him a painful death on the cross.

This Christ is very different from the other models of heroism we have seen thus far. He is not visibly a warrior, though many hoped that he would be. He engages in a struggle that is primarily spiritual rather

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than physical, winning man’s salvation through his acceptance of suffering, torture, and death rather than through physically overcoming a monster or a powerful enemy. His followers are likewise exhorted to meekness, humility, and forgiveness. Unlike the heroes of classical mythology, Christ is deeply concerned with ordinary men: the poor, the weak, and the sinful. His story is not a tale of triumph over human enemies or monsters, but over death and the grave.

The picture of man that emerges from the New Testament is very different from the picture of man in classical literature. Man is no longer potentially a source of wonder to the gods, who watch the battle for Troy with amazement and express dismay at Achilles’ brutal treatment of Hector’s body. However, this does not mean that God ignores man. Rather, God mercifully attends to man, who is dependent on Him for everything. It is this quality of mercy in God that makes man’s dependence a source of comfort rather than of fear: “Therefore I tell you,” Christ preaches, “do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink . . . But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and these things shall be yours as well” (Matt 6:25ff ). Christ comforts his followers with the assurance that because they are entirely dependent on the goodness of God, they need not worry about the pursuit of earthly wealth or glory.

Not only is New Testament man utterly dependent on God, but he is also morally inferior to Him. Where in classical literature men and gods are motivated by the essentially the same human drives (love, compassion, vanity, greed, thirst for revenge, and so on), the New Testament makes plain that man is morally inferior to God. In fact, “inferior” is not the correct term, since it implies a continuity of moral righteousness stretching from man up to God. The New Testament insists that man’s moral nature is qualitatively different from God’s moral nature; man is completely fallen by nature from birth, needing to bring his own physical, mental, and spiritual being into harmony with God. Paul writes that men are, “by nature, enemies of God” (Romans 5:10), subject to death of body and soul (Romans 5:12-14), and slaves to the cravings of our spiritual nature and thus subject to eternal punishment (Eph 2:3).

In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ opposes worldly wisdom to what might be called “kingdom wisdom:” “Blessed are those who mourn, / For they will be comforted./ Blessed are the meek, / for they will inherit the earth.” From a worldly or temporal perspective, mourning and meekness are not qualities likely to make a person “blessed” in any normal sense of the word. Christ’s claims only make sense against the backdrop of the coming kingdom of God and of the eternal life promised to believers in scripture. Against this backdrop of a coming kingdom of reward for the righteous, Christ can teach an unprecedented set of

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ethical principles: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Christ never promises that enmity and persecution will stop if his disciples return love for hate; instead, he promises an eternal reward. “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” Christ’s teachings likewise embody the principle that those who are not found righteous will be punished in the afterlife. Christ warns that not only will cursing one’s fellow man put one in danger of the civil authorities, but of eternal punishment from God: “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” Christ’s teachings on the avoidance of sin likewise embody an insistence on an afterlife in which punishment is as real an alternative as reward: “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” View of the World The Biblical view of history, like the Roman view, is linear or teleological, that is, moving toward a particular pre-determined end point. In Christian writers, the passage of time is assumed to be taking us toward the outworking of God’s plan for the world and ultimately toward the end of history in God’s judgment and renewal of the creation.

The New Testament authors register their awareness that they are writing against the backdrop of the imperial Roman view of history embodied on Aeneas’ shield. At the beginning of Luke 2, for example, Luke sets the nativity story into a Roman historical context: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Luke establishes his historical framework by referencing events related to Rome and its administration of Palestine. But rather than placing Caesar Augustus and the Roman Empire at the center of the events it narrates, the New Testament moves Rome and its emperor to the periphery of the real main event: Christ’s entry into the world. Caesar Augustus is just one more ruler in a long string of rulers, Rome just one more empire in a long string of empires that have briefly governed Israel. Neither is of sufficient importance to detain the narrator for any length of time. Artistic / Aesthetic

The New Testament is made up of four genres: gospel, history, epistle, and prophecy. Embedded in each of these “genres,” or “types,” there are other “types” or “modes” of writing as well: parables, orations, proverbs, hymns, lyric poetry, and others. Given this wide variety of

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literary types, each operating according to different rules, it is difficult to specify a single set of qualities possessed by all the writings in the New Testament.

Nevertheless, if we restrict ourselves to broad observations, such a list is possible. Leland Ryken, in Words of Life: A Literary Introduction to the New Testament, suggests a number of features that characterize New Testament writing. The first is “experiential concreteness.” Rather than stating abstract ideas in propositional language, the New Testament writers generally embody, or incarnate their meanings in concrete images and stories drawn from everyday life. Ryken points out that this impulse to “image the truth” is found not only in New Testament stories but in Christ’s preaching as well, which is heavily anecdotal and makes liberal use of concrete images (17).

He gives as an example this exhortation from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount in Matthew: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19-20). Notice the abundance of specific detail and Christ’s use of the image of “storing treasure” both literally in reference to this world and metaphorically in relation to eternity. (We cannot, of course, literally use heaven as a storage place for earthly wealth.) Christ’s point here can perhaps be stated in abstract, propositional language; one meaning might be that “man should be concerned with the eternal things of God rather than with the ephemeral things of this world.” But reducing the exhortation to propositional language robs Christ’s words of the emotional and imaginary impact Christ achieves by appealing to the imagination, creating “word pictures” in our minds to make his point more memorable. This principle is at work in almost all Christ’s teachings, but especially in the parables, one of his favorite forms.

The New Testament writings are also characterized by the use of artistry and technique. Artistic patterning exists at every level, from parallelistic single lines all the way to patterns at work in entire books. Matthew, for example, when read as a whole, regularly alternates blocks of narrative with blocks of teaching. The Sermon on the Mount contains smaller sections of highly patterned language.

Consider, for example, the section of the Sermon that runs from Matthew 5:17 through 5:48. Christ begins by announcing that He has not come to abolish the Law and that the Law is still in force. He then begins a series of six illustrations of his point: 5:21-26, where Jesus teaches about the dangers of anger and lawsuits; 5:27-30, where Jesus teaches about lust; 5:31-32, where Jesus teaches about divorce; 5:33-37, where Jesus teaches about vows; 5:38-42 where Jesus teaches about revenge; and 5:43-48, where Jesus teaches about loving our enemies.

Christ begins each of these sections with the words “you have heard that it was said” (or something very similar), followed by a direct

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quotation of some item of the Law from the first five books of the Old Testament (verses 21, 27, 31, 33, 38, and 43). Then Jesus goes on to contrast his own teaching with those the people heard from the Old Testament: “But I tell you” (verses 22, 28, 32, 34, 39, 44). But generally the contrast is not in quality but degree. Christ’s refinement of the Law does not overturn the old Law; rather, Christ’s “refinement” makes the Law even more difficult to uphold. If, for example, the old Law forbids adultery, Christ forbids even thinking adulterous thoughts. If the old Law says “don’t murder,” Christ forbids even speaking angry words. The pattern repeats itself six times.

The passage, in addition to its formal patterning, embodies several critical abstract points. Christ’s appending to the Law is part of how He announces himself as God rather than as a mere teacher or rabbi. Where a rabbi might interpret the Law, only God has the power to alter the Law. The passage also clarifies that Christ’s mission is far more than ethical teaching; though Christ seems to be “raising the bar” ethically speaking in these passages, in fact He is setting a standard that is plainly impossible for sinful man to reach. What person ever lived who never thought an adulterous thought or was never angry? If Christ sets impossible ethical standards, then his teaching must be either insane or have a deeper meaning. Though Christ is an ethical teacher, he does not make us righteous through his ethical teachings. Christ sets an impossible standard because Christ’s ultimate mission is to call men to an awareness of their own inability to live up to God’s standards, to the repentance that follows from that awareness, and to the forgiveness and reconciliation with the Father that His death on the cross makes possible. He is himself the fulfillment of the Law, setting free from the Law those who believe in Him. Works Cited: Ryken, Leland. Words of Life: A Literary Introduction to the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI. Baker Book House, 1987.

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Augustine’s Confessions Introduction

General Intro Augustine was born in Tagaste, a city in northern Africa during the

late years of the Roman Empire. By 354 A.D., the year of Augustine’s birth, the Roman Empire (to which Tagaste along with most of the rest of Northern Africa belonged) had become at least nominally Christian after the conversion of Constantine. At the time of Augustine’s birth, the entire empire was under terrible pressure from invading Germanic tribes and was near political and economic collapse. Augustine was born into an upper-middle-class family. He had a pagan father and Christian mother. Augustine’s parents had ambitious plans for their son, who was sent to school in Carthage to train as a rhetorician. During these years (and with the approval of his parents) Augustine took a common-law wife with whom he had a son. He later “dismissed” her at the prospect of an economically and politically advantageous marriage. In the end, the marriage never took place, but Augustine’s account of his own suffering in leaving this first love is heartrending.

Augustine performed very well in his studies and became a teacher of rhetoric in Milan, a wealthy city in Italy. However, despite his worldly success, he found himself dissatisfied with the fashionable Manicheism he had embraced as a scholar. His interactions with Bishop Ambrose of Milan and with his Christian mother, together with his readings in Scripture were affected him deeply. After some years of struggle, Augustine finally decided to be baptized and become a Christian. This was not an easy decision for Augustine. His understanding of the faith led him to sell all of his possessions and give the money to the poor, dedicating himself to a life of poverty, prayer, and study. He could give up all hope of advancement as a scholar or as a government functionary. Augustine never sought ordination to the ministry, but was obliged to accept ordination in the city of Hippo in 391. He was eventually made Bishop of that city, a demanding position he held for 34 years until his death in 430. Augustine was deeply involved in the establishment of church doctrine. His later years were consumed with combating various heresies arising in the church. At his death, the Roman Empire was in ruins, and his own city was under siege by the Vandals and Goths, who had already sacked Rome. Augustine never lost his faith, working to establish an orthodox Biblical understanding of basic doctrinal matters until his last hours.

View of Man Augustine’s Confessions embodies a shift in the concept of heroism

away from the pagan values animating classical heroes to the Judaeo- Christian values characteristic of Old Testament heroes like Joseph or

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Jacob. Augustine’s primary struggle is not external, but internal and spiritual. The primary motivation of the hero shifts here away from a pursuit of outward glory toward an inward examination of the soul. Nor is the “hero” of the Confessions outstanding in any way. He is not, like Achilles or Aeneas, a child of the gods or a prince or even a mighty warrior. He is an ordinary man. In fact, his ordinariness is critical to the message of the Confessions, since Augustine means for his own experience to be exemplary of all human experience. To the extent that Augustine has critical “heroic” action to take, he does so by putting complete trust in God rather than in himself. Ultimately, the Confessions does not embody Augustine’s overcoming external obstacles in the manner of the classical hero, but rather his surrendering internally to the overwhelming love of God.

This surrender, and the related idea that man is absolutely dependent on God, is one of the primary themes of the Confessions. Contemporary readers might expect the autobiography of a great man to detail how the writer achieved greatness through his own efforts. Instead, Augustine speaks from the beginning of his dependence on God: “the gifts your mercy had provided sustained me from the first moment.” He speaks of the mother’s milk he received as an infant as having come not from the women who nursed him, but instead from God, who both gave them the milk and the will to nurse the infant. When Augustine speaks of his parents, it is generally to criticize their folly and sinfulness and to express wonder and gratitude toward the God who used that folly and sin to bless him.

In much of his work, Augustine helped to clarify the basic Christian doctrine of original sin. This doctrine says that man is born with a depraved will and is thus incapable of doing any good on his own. God can certainly work out His good will through man's evil, but man cannot take any credit for having done good. Augustine was faced during his lifetime with the spread of a heresy called Pelagianism. Pelagius taught that man was capable of working for salvation and earning merit. Augustine’s Confessions must be understood as, in part, a response to the teachings of Pelagius.

Augustine taught that those who wish to see God must face the weight of evil within themselves. Confession of sin, a sacrament in Augustine’s church, exists to remind the Christian of how far short of the standard of God’s holiness he has fallen. Only by facing his own sinfulness through confessing it can the Christian truly recognize his need for Christ and his dependence on God for righteousness. Augustine’s confessions are a model to us, then, not only of how a life is to be lived, but also how it is to be examined—carefully, painstakingly, with much prayer and careful contemplation, with the Christian ever ready to find and confess his own evil and shortsightedness.

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View of God Augustine’s view of God is consistent with other writers in the

orthodox biblical tradition. He is a single God, assumed to have absolute power over all events, and to behave in consistent and loving ways. He is revealed through the Bible; quotations from Scripture permeate the Confessions. Because He is entirely pure, and thus morally superior to man, He is approachable only through man’s humble confession of sin and the forgiveness made possible through Christ’s atoning sacrifice. The book itself embodies this principle. Augustine writes as a spiritual exercise that draws him closer to God. As readers, we overhear a conversation between a devout man and his God.

View of World Augustine’s most influential work with regarding the nature of the

material world is the massive City of God. In this work, Augustine defends Christians against the charge that the downfall of Rome was a result of the anger of the pagan gods at Rome’s apostasy. Remember, Rome had become officially Christian after Constantine’s conversion around 340. In 410, eleven years after Augustine’s ordination as Bishop of Hippo, Rome was besieged and then sacked by the Visigoths. The entire Roman world was deeply shocked at this event. Rome was, after all, understood as the “eternal city,” so how could it now be at the mercy of the barbarian hordes? The most obvious answer seemed to be that the pagan gods were angry because of the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the empire.

Romans for centuries had interpreted the successes of their city as a reflection of the favor of the gods; in the Aeneid, Virgil argues that the successes of the Roman empire were evidence of the providential intent of the gods to establishing Rome as the central power of the world. Virgil’s understanding of Rome as the end of history was profoundly influential on later generations; after all, for many centuries the Aeneid was treated as a kind of Roman Bible. It was used as a key literary work in the education of the empire’s elite; Augustine’s account of his own education stresses the important role played by the Aeneid in shaping the outlook and opinions of educated Romans. The Aeneid encouraged Romans to think of their empire as the culmination of a providential world history, the ideal end point toward which the whole pageant of human history was directed. The gods, according to this interpretation of history, had manipulated and controlled events so that Rome would unite the world under one civilized central political unit.

However, the falling fortunes of Rome in general and the sack Rome in 410 in particular led many to assume that Rome no longer enjoyed the special favor of the gods. Friends complaints to Augustine that the sack of Rome was evidence of the anger of the pagan gods. Augustine’s response in the City of God was to reassert one of the most basic biblical truths: worldly success

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does not necessarily imply the favor of God. This is the very point of Psalm 73, where we began our study of a Christian view of literature. The psalmist begins by complaining of the success of the wicked and the apparent failure of the godly, but is assured that this state of affairs does not reflect God’s ultimate intentions. Thus, we cannot assume that worldly prosperity reflects the approval or favor of God toward the prosperous.

Augustine proposed that while Rome was establishing itself as the political center of the world, a parallel but far less visible development: the establishment of a spiritual city, the collective expression of the love of God’s people for their creator. History is linear, but it points not toward the establishment of an earthly empire, but rather toward the establishment of God’s kingdom, the heavenly city: “ Two loves had built two cities—love of self to the despising of God had built the earthly city; love of God to the despising of self the heavenly city. (qtd. in Brown xxviii)

Artistic / Aesthetic

Augustine writes his Confessions as a kind of a love letter to God or an extended prayer modeled on the Psalms. Confessions is great literature rather than mere polemic because, rather than simply stating his theological ideas as propositions, Augustine embodies these truths in solid, concrete stories and images. The abstract theological principle of total human depravity has seldom had a more effective literary embodiment than the Pear Tree episode Augustine relates from his own childhood. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine gives us examples from his own experience that confirm the more abstract theological claims of the work.

However, despite the literary qualities of Augustine’s Confessions, Augustine’s attitude toward literature in general is often unfriendly. Recounting his early education, he reflects with displeasure on how reading the Aeneid and other works in Latin led him to pity fictional characters but to neglect his own pitiable state, separated as he was from the love of God. It was only the study of reading and writing that was useful, says Augustine; the stories themselves were empty vanities. Augustine also expresses a deep suspicion of drama. Where Aristotle had argued that the sight of tragic actions on stage has a salutary effect on man’s emotional life, purging him of unpleasant emotions like pity and fear, Augustine’s theory of the love of tragedy is very different; he labels it “wretched lunacy” to desire to feel the sorrow of others. However, Augustine is also ready to admit that the best classical literature can have a salutary effect. Augustine credits Cicero with beginning him on “that journey upward by which I was to return to [God].”

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The church sacrament of the confession becomes the occasion for Augustine to reflect on his spiritual life. Thus, the first autobiography in the western tradition is born of the Christian worldview, which tells believers that the individual soul is of value and important. Augustine talks directly with God in a frank and friendly manner, as though assured of God's favor and goodness toward him. He doesn't have to be meticulous and careful, but can pour out his heart in absolute trust: this was obviously unthinkable for the Greeks, for whom the gods were capricious, jealous, and generally uncaring. Works Cited. Brown, Peter. Introduction. Augustine, Confessions. Trans. F. J. Sheed. Indianapolis / Cambridge. Hackett, 1993.

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Early Medieval Literature Chapter Draft: Beowulf Introduction

The anonymous Anglo-Saxon author of Beowulf was born into a culture that had only recently embraced Christianity. Although the tale is set before the Anglo-Saxon conversion (which began around 600), it was written afterward, perhaps about 850. As a result, the Christian values of the narrator are in tension with the pagan behaviors of the characters and he reflects on these behaviors with some disapproval. When, for example, the Danes pray to the pagan gods for protection from Grendel, the narrator writes:

At times they vowed sacrifices at heathen temples, with their words prayed that the soul-slayer would give help for the distress of the people. Such was their custom, the hope of heathens; in their spirits they thought of Hell, they knew not the Ruler, the Judge of Deeds, they recognized not the Lord God, nor indeed did they know how to praise the Protector of Heaven, the glorious King. Woe is him who in terrible trouble must thrust his soul into the fire’s embrace, hope for no comfort, not expect change. Well is the man who after his death-day may seek the Lord and find peace in the embrace of the Father.

These expressions of disapproval are so rare, many critics have argued that they are “interpolations,” material inserted into a pagan work by a later Christian copyist, perhaps a zealous monk.

However, aside from these expressions of disapproval, there are other textual features of Beowulf that suggest its original author was a Christian. For example, the narrator condemns pagan polytheism, which he identifies as worship of demons, and gives Beowulf and Hrothgar some conventionally pious speeches about trusting a monotheistic God. Several characters speak about man facing judgment after death, a concept alien to paganism. There are a few direct Biblical allusions, notably to the creation and to the story of Cain and Abel. Finally, the narrator places Grendel within a Judeo-Christian context by identifying him as one of the demonic offspring of Cain.

However, if the writer was a Christian, his views are not entirely consistent with those held by other writers in the Christian tradition. Beowulf the man embodies many of the pagan heroic qualities, such as boasting, reliance on physical strength and courage, and pursuit of individual glory, that are largely rejected by Christian authors. Furthermore, the only biblical allusions used by the author come from the Old Testament; there is no mention of Christ or his sacrifice, but only assurances of the providential oversight of a monotheistic God. The values and attitudes embodied in Beowulf are thus a strange mixture of pagan and Christian influences, suggesting that the process of cultural transformation following the pagan embrace of Christianity was gradual.

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The hero, Beowulf, appears to be solely the creation of this author. Nearly every other character in the story is mentioned elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon chronicles or literature. Beowulf appears only in this manuscript. View of the World

There is no fondness for nature in Beowulf; one finds no green pastures or still waters. The natural world is instead depicted as a terrifying, hostile, implacable force against which man must struggle constantly. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, who enjoyed a sunlit, temperate climate in a land where nature had long been “tamed” by civilized man, the Germanic tribes that settled the shores of England in the 5th and 6th centuries lived in an unpopulated, cold, rainy, heavily- forested world alive with bears, wolves, snakes, and other dangerous animals. Settlements generally consisted of a cleared space in the forest with the mead hall as its center and a few houses around it. All around them in every direction was darkness, danger, and the unknown. No wonder the natural world was terrifying to them!

Against this backdrop, heroism is largely a measure of how bravely and successfully man pits himself against the natural world. When the drunken Unferth doubts Beowulf’s capacity to defeat Grendel, Unferth cites Beowulf’s loss of a swimming contest as evidence of Beowulf’s weakness. Beowulf sets him straight; he won that contest, Beowulf assures his audience, swimming on the ocean five days and nights and killing a whole slew of sea-monsters besides. This tale of swimming and thus figuratively conquering the ocean becomes an important item on Beowulf’s resume, establishing his credibility as an opponent for the undefeated Grendel. Later, when a group of warriors leaves Heorot to travel to the lair of Grendel’s mother, out among “the wolf-slopes, the windy headlands, [and] the dangerous fen-path where the mountain stream goes under the flood of the earth,” they find a terrifying lake of boiling blood covered with “sea-serpents,” “water-monsters,” and “wild beasts.” There is no sentimentality about the natural world in Beowulf. It is alien and threatening.

Grendel and his mother are the story’s chief embodiments of the danger of the wilderness. Grendel, we are told, is a “rover of the borders, one who held the moors, fen and fastness.” He is never very clearly described, which perhaps adds to his fearsomeness. We do learn that he has scales, claws, and big teeth. We are told a good deal more about his habitat than his appearance; Grendel lives outside the charmed circle of the mead-hall, in the dark and lonely wilderness beyond. Grendel’s mother has to be sought in her lair under a boiling lake. In a sense, Beowulf’s defeat of these monsters is admirable because it represents man’s ability to overcome a threatening and dangerous natural world.

Though written in English for an audience in England, Beowulf recounts the deeds of the Danish and Geatish ancestors of its audience.

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The events in Beowulf are thus in the audience’s distant, pre-Christian past, so the characters are also necessarily pagan. Not surprisingly, there are two different views of history at work in the poem: one cyclical and hopeless, fate-governed, belonging to the pagan characters, and another linear and providential belonging to the narrator and his audience. Beowulf seems to occupy a middle ground between these two, sometimes advocating trust in a providential God, while at other times simply saying “Fate always goes as it must.” View of Man

Against the backdrop of their terrifying view of nature’s power and hostility to man, the civilized world seemed delicate in comparison. Heorot, the mead-hall, represents the height of civilization in Beowulf. It is the center of the community’s civilized life: its story-telling, ring-giving, feasting and mead-drinking. The Danes wrested it up out of the wilderness, but as Beowulf begins it has been reclaimed by Grendel, the representative of that wilderness. Grendel despises the expressions of civility taking place in Heorot: “Then the fierce spirit painfully endured hardship for a time, he who dwelt in the darkness, for every day he heard the loud mirth in the hall; there was the sound of the harp, the clear song of the scop.” Even Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel will only reclaim the mead-hall for a short time. The poet makes clear that Heorot will eventually be completely destroyed in an attack that happens after the action of the poem.

Human relations are equally delicate among these touchy warriors. In the celebration that follows Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, the scop (a bard or professional storyteller) tells the gloomy (and complicated) tale of an uneasy truce between the Jutes and the Danes that ultimately ended in bloodshed. This reminds readers of the fragility of political and family relationships among these tribes. The code of loyalty and vengeance that animates this warrior society makes lasting peace nearly impossible. There is very little possibility for escape from the cycle of violence. The narrator expresses a pessimistic outlook regarding human relationships that is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon literature.

Despite this pessimistic outlook, it is also plain that, for all the weaknesses of the community, man belongs within it and has no meaning outside of it. A good king is one who is able to cement his thanes together into a mutually loyal community. Much of this is accomplished through the giving of treasure, which becomes a public way of recognizing the warrior’s value to his tribe. The narrator of Beowulf spends a good deal of time describing the swords, cups, rings, and so on, that Hrothgar gives to Beowulf, insisting that a good king is generous with such things. As a negative example, the scop tells the story of Heremod, a bad king who ruined his people by his greediness and isolation. Likewise Heorot, with its hearth-fires, flagons of ale and mead-benches becomes the perishable symbol of the (short-lived)

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success of the Geats in establishing civil relations and in overcoming the threat of the natural world.

The monsters in the story are characterized by greediness, isolation, and a hatred for community. Over and over the narrator stresses the isolation of Grendel, who despises the communal celebrations at Heorot, preferring instead to wander alone in the woods and marshes, sneaking in at night to consume sleeping warriors. He is a cosmic party-pooper, embodying all the destructiveness of the natural world and its seeming opposition to the establishment of an orderly community. His mother shares all of his bad qualities, as does the dragon Beowulf fights in the last section of the poem.

View of God

The view of God embodied in the tale also seems to be in transition from pagan to Christian. On the one hand, the god of the poet is plainly the God of the Bible: a single creator-God, loving and just, protecting those who love Him, governing events. The poet gives God many traditional Christian epithets: “lord,” “father,” “almighty,” “ruler of men,” “king of glory,” “shepherd of glory,” and so on. On the other hand, there are no mentions of Christ, the cross, the church, or any epithets denoting “savior.” There are also disturbing remnants of pagan theological concepts, particularly the idea of “fate,” or wyrd. As Beowulf explains his decision to face Grendel without weapons, he comforts his audience with the observation that “fate always goes as it must.” Therefore, there is little to be gained by acting in self-protective ways. The concept of life after death in Beowulf also contains some pagan elements. For example, the ship burials described at the beginning and end of Beowulf suggests the pagan possibility of “taking it with you.” The practice looks forward to a common afterlife for all men that follows the same basic rules as this life, where the deceased will need treasure, weapons, ships, and so on. Beowulf at his death receives the same kind of grand send-off, buried with the treasure he rescued from the dragon that gave him his death-wound.

On the other hand, the narrator also suggests a more conventionally Christian understanding of judgment after death followed by a division of good men from evil men for an afterlife of reward or punishment. As he responds to Unferth’s challenge, Beowulf reminds Unferth that not only has he not done anything to make his own name famous, he has committed acts that have actually made him infamous by killing his own kin: “I have not heard say of you any such hard matching of might, such sword-terror. . . . [Y]ou became your brother’s slayer, your close kin; for that you will suffer punishment in Hell, even though your wit is keen.” Beowulf is Christian in his understanding of a coming judgment and the afterlife as an eternal outcome of that judgment.

On the other hand, Beowulf’s response to Unferth also clarifies the essentially pagan underpinnings of his grounds for moral behavior.

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According to Beowulf’s understanding, one behaves morally or immorally on the basis of fear of punishment in the afterlife or expectation of reward there. Unferth is going to Hell because he slew his own kin. This is certainly a step above the pagan understanding of moral behavior as a potential way of winning this-worldly favor from the gods. But the reformed tradition insists that true righteousness, the kind that makes men acceptable to God, comes only through the imputed righteousness of Christ, a concept which, as we have seen, is entirely absent from Beowulf. In the reformed tradition, Unferth would go to Hell because of his fallen nature and his inability to behave with perfect righteousness on his own. Artistic/Aesthetic Beowulf is poetry, though in the original Old English it employs neither rhyme nor meter. Instead, the poet uses lines of irregular length (normally eight to twelve syllables), each with a pause somewhere in the line. Each of the line-halves has two strong stresses. Sometimes the sentence ends at the pause, sometimes at the end of the line, and sometimes neither. Sentences do not end between pauses. The two line- halves created by the pause are always linked together by alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant or vowel sounds. The first stress of the second line-half cannot alliterate with the second stress of that line-half, but must alliterate with one or both stressed syllables of the first half- line. The form is nearly impossible to use in modern English, so most translators rely heavily on alliteration without using the more complex features of Old English poetry.

Aside from its heavy reliance on alliteration, another feature of Beowulf that may act as a barrier to understanding is the poet’s use of “included narratives.” These stories often seem like digressions to modern readers; the poet is describing the celebration of Beowulf’s victory over Grendel, then suddenly he slows to tell a long and gloomy story about Hnaff and Finn, characters who seem to have very little to do with current events in the narrative. However, the author almost always uses these included narratives to illuminate a central theme or character trait. The story of Hnaff and Finn, for example, offers a marked contrast to the peaceful nature of the Geats’ visit to the Danes. Another example is Beowulf's amazing tale of his swimming feat, which both refutes Unferth's disparaging remarks and reinforces Beowulf's fitness to undertake the battle with Grendel. The “included narrative” is, in other words, an important item on Beowulf's résumé. The fear of the natural world in Beowulf and other early medieval works from western Europe does not translate to disdain for the physical world. There are careful descriptions in Beowulf of swords and jewelry and other physical objects, an attention to specific detail for its own sake that is not found in early Hebrew literature. Though they feared the natural world more than we do, the Anglo-Saxons were not haters of the

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material world. They were, instead, lovers of art, man’s manipulation of physical material. Archaeological finds confirm the love of art and artificial objects expressed in Beowulf. A series of burial mounds uncovered at Sutton Hoo in England and dated at around 620 A.D. yielded complex and sophisticated art objects, some of foreign origin, many of which were at least 150 years old when they were buried. A large silver dish, for example, bears the mark of the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius, who ruled about 490-518 A.D.

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Dante, The Inferno Intro

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy. The Roman Empire was a distant, glorious memory and Italy had split into dozens of principalities and city-states and would not be reunited for centuries. However, unlike much of the rest of Europe, Italy still had many large cities which were flourishing culturally and economically, especially toward the end of the Middle Ages.

Although Dante's Florence was one such thriving metropolis, it was torn by sectarian strife, a dangerous place of shifting loyalties to clan and political faction. Dante was heavily involved in partisan politics in Florence and achieved some genuine, though short-lived, influence. During the summer of 1300, when Dante’s party was in power, he was named as one of the seven priors of Florence. When his party fell out of power a few months later, he lost his position. Dante traveled with a party delegation to Rome and during his absence his political enemies moved against him, trying him on trumped-up charges and sentencing him to death in absentia. The effective result of this sentence was that Dante was exiled from Florence for the rest of his life, unable to return for fear that the death sentence would be carried out. Dante lived out the rest of his days in poverty and exile, moving frequently from city to city. He took revenge on many of his political enemies by including them in his descriptions of the damned in Hell. Dante died in Ravenna, Italy, in 1321. View of Man In his essay "What is Art?," Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy outlines the profound reversal in heroic ideals embodied in the teachings and life of Christ:

The Christian ideal changed and reversed everything so that, as the gospel puts it, "that which was exalted among men has become an abomination in the sight of God." The ideal is no longer the greatness of Pharaoh or of a Roman emperor, not the beauty of a Greek nor the wealth of Phoenicia, but humility, purity, compassion, love. The hero is no longer Dives, but Lazarus the beggar; not Mary Magdalene in the day of her beauty, but in the day of her repentance; not those who acquire wealth, but those who have abandoned it; not those who dwell in palaces, but those who dwell in catacombs and huts; not those who rule over others, but those who acknowledge no authority but God's.

The character qualities Tolstoy identifies as Christian ideals—humility, purity, poverty, obscurity—are diametrically opposed to those qualities of character Homer asks us to admire in his heroes: the strength and self-confidence of Achilles, the wily resourcefulness of Odysseus, the wealth and majesty of Agamemnon. Of course, as we have seen in our readings in the Old Testament, Dante doesn't so much reverse the classical view as restore the Biblical view; his view of heroism is closely consonant with both Old and New Testament models for heroic behavior. The Christian view of heroism differs from the classical view of heroism most critically in that Christians believe that man is powerless to save himself. He is, in the most significant battle of all, utterly dependent on the courage and strength of someone else. So the initiative, courage, and activity that make Achilles or Odysseus heroes are now replaced with passivity, dependence, and waiting.

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This passivity can be shocking to those familiar with the classical model of heroism. Consider the first scene of The Divine Comedy: lost in the Wood of Error, Dante confronts three wild beasts. His response is not to attack and kill them as Achilles would, nor to defeat them through Odyssean stratagems. Instead, overcome with fear, Dante retreats from this danger and gives up his quest. This is certainly not the kind of behavior we have come to expect from our epic heroes; without divine intervention, Dante’s epic quest would end in the first canto.

The contrast between Christian and classical heroism is treated explicitly; Dante openly encourages us to recognize the difference between the behavior of past epic heroes (the creator of the Aeneid is, after all, his guide through the underworld) and the character Dante. Dante is constantly helped along by Virgil. Dante hesitates and often doubts his own worthiness, particularly in light of what he knows about heroes of the past. After noting that Virgil is the poet of Aeneas, the Trojan hero credited with the foundation of Rome, which, as Dante notes, was "founded and foreknown/ as the established Seat of Holiness/ for the successors of Great Peter's throne" (II: 22-24), and that Paul is another in the line of heroic Christians, Dante protests his own unworthiness:

But I--how should I dare? By whose permission? I am not Aeneas. I am not Paul. Who could believe me worthy of the vision? (II: 31-33)

Virgil responds by telling Dante that he isn't worthy of the vision, but that Beatrice's pity for him prompted her to send help so that Dante's soul would not be lost. Dante’s point here is that God’s saving grace is not based on man’s worthiness, but rather on the divine love that God has for man despite his unworthiness.

Despite his awareness of the divine sanction for his journey, Dante the character rarely displays anything like traditionally heroic behavior. As early as Canto III, Dante swoons with terror at the first sight of Charon the boatman and has to be carried by Virgil to the next destination. He faints again out of pity for Paolo and Francesca after they tell their sad tale. At many later points, Dante simply gives up hope and has to be urged on by Virgil, sometimes gently and sometimes with great ferocity. For Dante the character, opportunities for virtuous behavior in Hell are limited either to refusing to feel pity for the souls of the damned (doing so, Virgil explains, is equivalent to questioning God's judgment) or to adding to the torments of the damned. When Dante expresses a wish to see his old enemy Fillipo Argenti punished more fully, Virgil smiles indulgently, telling him, "This is a wish that should be satisfied" (VIII.54). Otherwise, Dante does very little to advance the journey. He follows where Virgil leads and obeys Virgil’s orders.

Despite his repeated emphasis on man’s incapacity to save himself, Dante still has profound respect for human reason and treats it as one of the most important channels of God’s grace. Virgil, Dante’s guide through Hell, is a symbol of human reason, with all its creative glory and courage, but also with all of its weakness; Virgil is capable of helping Dante recognize sin and learn to hate it, but is not capable of helping him overcome it. Consider Dante and Virgil’s crisis outside the gates of Dis in Cantos VIII and IX. They are confronted there with a crew of Rebel Angels, the same group that stood with Satan in his uprising against God; as such, they represent pure evil, which, as Augustine so memorably pointed out in the “Pear Tree” episode of his Confessions, does not operate according to rational principles. According to Augustine, man does evil because by his nature he loves evil and only secondarily for any rational benefit he might

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receive from the act. The Rebel Angels cannot be reasoned with because they are creatures of pure evil; therefore, Virgil, the symbol of human reason, is powerless against them. Virgil’s powerlessness becomes more poignant when we remember how easily he defeats the other monsters in Hell: Cerberus, Plutus, Minos, Charon, Phlegyas, and others who threaten Dante. Dante and Virgil are forced to wait at the gates of Dis for the arrival of an angel who opens the gate without effort.

Dante’s point in using Virgil as a guide through Hell is simple: God gives reason in order to help man to recognize sin. Romans 1 and Psalm 19 both make clear that using reason to observe the created world will reveal enough about God’s character to allow us to know right from wrong so that even the heathen “are without excuse.” By following Virgil, Dante uses as his guide the one man he believed embodied the highest achievement of unregenerated human reason. This reason is sufficient to help him learn to recognize and hate sin, but it is also limited, as we have seen, in its effectiveness. Dante’s view of reason owes a great deal to Aquinas: reason here is not opposed to faith, but is rather a supplement to it, strengthening and guiding it. Dante’s journey through the underworld is meant to symbolize a process of moral development, with Dante’s behavior and attitudes changing over the course of the trip, especially in his ever-hardening response to the sinners. Dante begins his journey in a state of great sympathy for the sinners. Consider his response to Paolo and Francesca, the lovers who stop to tell their story; Dante weeps and faints with pity for them. Over time, as he sees more and more sin, Dante uses his reason to pass through the first stage of salvation: recognition of sin. As he does so, he becomes less sympathetic toward those suffering until he reaches the point in the last circle where he is willing to add to their punishment. Dante’s treatment of romantic love is ambiguous. In its purest Platonic form (represented here by Dante’s love for Beatrice) it can, via the detached contemplation of physical beauty, lead the mind upward toward the ultimate spiritual beauty: God. According to his autobiographical work La Vita Nuova, Dante’s lifelong unconsummated love for a woman named Beatrice supposedly led him to renounce the world; in his epic, he credits the same love with leading him toward God. Yet romantic love can also be, in its physical and sexual aspects, a mortal sin that can lead men away from God, and as such it is punished in its own circle in Hell. Still, Dante, the brokenhearted lover, puts the lovers very near the top of Hell, among those who are least subject to the wrath of God. He weeps and faints with pity at the sad tale of Paolo and Francesca. View of the World

One of the most central intellectual features of medieval European thought was the integration of life around a Christian worldview. Medieval artists and philosophers sought to synthesize Greek philosophy and mythology with Christian revelation, an approach hammered out most clearly in the work of Thomas Aquinas. Dante’s work embodies this synthesis in many ways. For example, Dante includes monsters and human characters drawn from classical mythology into his very Christian underworld; Dido, Achilles, and Cerberus rub shoulders with Caiaphas, Nimrod, and Judas. Dante shows his deep respect for the accomplishments of the ancients by creating a “limbo” for the virtuous pagans, where Homer, Ovid, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and other master

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souls of pagan antiquity spend eternity. Even Dante’s choice of genres is a bow toward the most influential art of the classical past: the great epics of Homer and Virgil. Yet Dante is also careful to subordinate this classical world to Christian revelation. Many of the monsters of pagan antiquity serve as a kind of bureaucracy of Hell, keeping Hell orderly by sorting and punishing the sinners according to the divine plan. Dante also suggests that, to the reasonable man, these monsters have lost most of their ability to terrify or intimidate. Most of them simply collapse into a heap when Virgil rebukes them. The only monsters that genuinely frighten Virgil are the Rebel Angels. Reason is powerless against the true evil they represent because pure evil is not rational. Medieval Christianity is often criticized as Platonist, viewing the physical world as an irredeemably evil place, the only purpose of which is to provide man with a backdrop against which to prepare himself for an eternity in the spiritual world. Dante’s work embodies this Platonist strain of medieval Christianity very strongly. Only the first two cantos take place in the external, physical world. The rest of the Divine Comedy, all ninety-eight remaining cantos, takes place in the world of the afterlife—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The physical world of the here-and-now is characterized in the Divine Comedy only as a dark, gloomy, pathless wood from which the weary pilgrim longs to escape. In addition, the first two cantos place a greater weight on the spiritual world by using the physical world mainly as a symbol of the spiritual. Every material object is shot through with a significance that points beyond itself. In the opening scene, the dark valley, the high mountains, the three beasts, Virgil as a guide through the underworld, and even the journey itself, are all physical pieces in an allegorical puzzle designed to reveal spiritual truth. To the extent that the physical world does exist in the Divine Comedy, it is only a prelude and pointer toward the real world of eternity. Contrast this with Homer and Virgil, both of whom take heroes to the land of the dead. In both cases, the afterlife sections of the Odyssey and the Aeneid are brief diversions, sideshows to the real action taking place in the physical world. Dante’s work will reverse this pattern of emphasis completely, focusing only briefly on the physical world and spending almost all of its time on the afterlife. Because the physical world appears only very briefly, the tiny physical space it occupies in the poem is analogous to the tiny temporal space it occupies when placed next to eternity. For the Greeks, the physical world was the main event, followed by an empty, lifeless, colorless afterlife. For Dante and most medieval Christians, the poles reversed themselves, so that his picture of "this life" in the first two cantos is dreary, pleasureless, and confusing, where his pictures of the afterlife are among the most vibrant and vital of any writer in history. View of the Divine Dante’s God is utterly transcendent. Unlike the gods of classical literature, Dante’s God does not appear himself in the Inferno and only makes his presence known via intermediaries like Virgil, Beatrice, or the Angel who opens the gates of Dis. Dante’s God is utterly just. The justice of God is a repeated theme of the Inferno. In Hell, the punishment always fits the crime. At each new circle, Dante sees the symbolically just torments of those who have rejected God. The Lovers, who allowed themselves to be blown about in life by every wind of passion, are now in death continually blown about the second circle by howling winds. The Thieves, who stole

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from others in life, in death can keep nothing of their own, not even their own bodies, which they must continually steal from one another. The Sullen are buried in mud. The Flatterers are immersed in excrement. The justice of this punishment could hardly be more obvious: They slung it in life; in death, they are slung into it. Part of the fun of reading the Inferno for the first time lies in watching the fertility of Dante’s imagination as he dreams up fitting punishments.

Another principle of God’s justice in Hell is that those who are suffering there are generally getting what they wanted. The Lovers are a good example. In life, they chose to exercise no control over their bodies, instead giving themselves over to the control of their passions; in death, they continue in that state of powerlessness, blown about by the winds. When Dante asks to speak to some of them, Virgil instructs him to call out to them not in the name of God, but in the name of Love, the only power to which they will respond. Their natures, in other words, have not changed; they are still surrendered to their romantic passions rather than by God’s will. It is so with all the damned in Hell. Thieves continue to steal forever. Blasphemers go on blaspheming. These are all people who have chosen to be in hell and most continue to choose to be in hell, remaining in their sins, or a symbolic re-enactment of them, forever. Dante’s God is utterly rational and orderly. God’s administration of justice is, in the Inferno, the highest embodiment of his rationality; the damned are not thrown willy- nilly into a lake of fire but are all in their appropriate places, not only according to the specific sin for which they are damned, but also according to how that sin fits into several larger categories of sin. As Virgil explains, God divides types of sin into three large categories, each punished in its own subdivision of Hell. In the first of three “subdivisions” of Hell (Circles 3-6), God punishes the Incontinent, those lacking in self- control, such as the Lustful or the Gluttons. Farther down (Circle 7), and thus more subject to divine wrath, are the Violent, who are further subdivided. Then, at the lowest level of Hell (Circles 8 and 9) are the Fraudulent. Divine orderliness is further underlined by the fact that all arrangements in Hell are hierarchical. Punishments progress in harshness from better to worse until, at the bottom of the pit of Hell are those who are most actively subject to the wrath of God: those treacherous to their patrons or benefactors. Here we find Brutus and Cassius, leaders of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar, Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Christ, and, of course, Satan himself, who rose against his creator and rightful sovereign. Furthermore, the order Dante embodies in the Inferno is only a small piece of a universal order, a perfect hierarchy of creation arranged in a great chain that culminates in God.

It is also worth noting that Dante’s God differs from the divinities of Greece and Rome in that He is no longer interested only in a few important mortals while more or less ignoring the rest. Here, God's attention is focused on every man, including a nobody like Dante, whose unworthiness by conventional standards of heroism (“I am not Aeneas”) only serves to underline the universality of God’s love for human beings. In Dante, God's standards of ranking men are not based on the wealth, power, and kinship ties used by Homer’s readers to judge men, but rather on obedience to His Word.

Artistic/Aesthetic Despite the historical, artistic, and theological complexities of the Inferno, the work has had a broad popular appeal from its very beginnings, mainly because Dante’s

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style is highly visual—almost cinematic. Though Dante relies heavily on allegory and symbol, his work is understandable and enjoyable even for average readers who know nothing of Florentine politics or papal history. Dante embodies the history and theological debates of his time in lively dialogue and specific, concrete images that remain with most readers long after they have forgotten footnotes about Celestine V or the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Who can forget the Simonists’ burning feet poking up out of the fiery baptismal fonts or the awful mutilations inflicted on the Sowers of Discord? In addition to his powerfully imagined vision of the physical space of Hell and the torments of the sinners therein, Dante includes a great deal of other material that makes his work both instructive and pleasing. Nearly every sinner has a story to tell; characters gossip. Dante faces monsters and demons at almost every turn. Dante even uses a good deal of low-brow humor in certain sections of the Inferno, including groups of demons signaling back and forth to each other via thunderous flatulence. We pass each group of tormented sinners with the same kind of fascinated attention that makes us slow down as we pass a wreck on the highway. One of Dante’s boldest aesthetic choices in the Divine Comedy is his use of vernacular Italian rather than Latin or Greek. The choice reflects not only his willingness to move beyond the classical tradition, but also points to the beginnings of a wider attraction to national languages taking place among artists and politicians all over Europe at the time. The use of the vernacular eventually served not only to undermine the universality of the Catholic Church, which resisted this trend throughout the Renaissance and Reformation, but also built up a sense of national identity as different European countries began to create literatures in their own languages. Dante includes the biggest plug yet for the power of poetry: God likes it! There is a special and not at all unpleasant part of the underworld set aside for the pagan poets of classical antiquity. Dante, who may be modest about his worthiness to undertake a journey through Hell, is not a bit modest about his poetic skills. The great pagan poets accept him as one of their number. In the Odyssey, Demodokos' poetry may have gladdened the heart of man, but in Dante poetry is pleasing even to God Himself.

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Chaucer Canterbury Tales Introduction General

Few men were better prepared than Chaucer to create the comprehensive portrait of English life in the Middle Ages that is The Canterbury Tales. Born about 1340 into a wealthy merchant family, Chaucer would from very early in life have been in daily contact with people from all professions and social classes. He evidently had a very good education and was made a page in a noble household as a teenager. From that point on, Chaucer spent the rest of his life attached to the nobility in various capacities. He was captured in battle in France and ransomed by the king. In adulthood, he was in charge of customs for part of London, a justice of the peace, a member of Parliament, and participated in various missions to France and Italy. It was during these diplomatic missions, especially those to Italy, that Chaucer came into contact with the works of some of the great masters of medieval vernacular literature including Bocaccio and, of course, Dante.

A brief comparison of Chaucer with Dante can be instructive. While both were public men and officeholders, Chaucer seems to have had few enemies despite living in highly divisive times, where Dante made powerful enemies who eventually exiled him from his native city. The same self-effacing modesty that helped Chaucer thrive probably also influenced his writing; where Dante makes himself the protagonist of his own epic and includes himself in a circle of the six greatest poets of all times, Chaucer, also writing in first person, barely mentions himself in Canterbury Tales. We have no clear idea if Chaucer’s political patrons were even aware that he was a writer; there is no evidence that his writing contributed at all to his social and economic advancement. If Chaucer had any particularly strong religious convictions, he makes no mention of them in Canterbury Tales, though there is an implied criticism of the church in his portraits of crooked clergy members. Where Dante is a stern moralist, sitting in judgment on the sins of his characters, Chaucer is a gentle satirist, a man who takes people as they are and seems more amused than disgusted at their misbehaviors. Both write works with a large cast of characters, but where Dante’s characterization is simple, direct, and flat, Chaucer’s characters often seem quite complex.

Despite being closely attached to the household of Richard II, Chaucer weathered the deposition and later assassination of that king very well. Attached by marriage to John of Gaunt, the father of the new king Henry IV, Chaucer suffered no ill effects from the downfall of his former patron. By the time of his death, Chaucer’s adroit service to the members of the nobility seem to have assured his family’s eventual rise into their ranks; his granddaughter died a duchess.

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Artistic/Aesthetic Chaucer, like Dante, chose to write in the vernacular language of his country--this at a time in England when most members of the nobility were still speaking and reading mainly in French. Within the Church, Latin was the official language. English, for centuries after the Norman invasion, was the language of the common people, but using it did not guarantee Chaucer’s popularity. Not only were most of the common people illiterate, but English was still fractured into many mutually incomprehensible regional dialects; had Chaucer been aware of the existence of the Gawain poet (there is no evidence he was), he probably would have understood very little of what he said or wrote. Yet a growing spirit of nationalism meant that the English language was becoming more acceptable at court, in business, and in literature.

Identifying the genre of The Canterbury Tales is notoriously difficult. Rather than embodying a single genre, The Canterbury Tales seems more like a collection of practically every popular genre of the Middle Ages: romances, dirty jokes, lives of saints, exemplary moral tales, sermons, and satires. Collections of tales had appeared before. Some of these collections employed framing devices like the storytelling contest and pilgrimage that Chaucer uses to introduce his tales. Bocaccio’s Decameron, for example, was a collection of tales supposedly exchanged by a group of noble young men and women to pass the time as they sought refuge in the Florentine countryside from an outbreak of the plague. The tales in A Thousand and One Nights are unified by a single storyteller, Scheherezade, who tells her stories to a single listener to keep herself alive.

Chaucer, however, does new things with the form. In none of these earlier collections had the tales come from such a wide cross-section of humanity, from lowly Millers to lofty Knights, or from such a wide variety of genres. Nor had any earlier authors so expertly tied the tale to the teller, so that in almost every case the story reflects the personality of its teller. Finally, the tales become part of the dialogue between these characters and reflect the drama of the pilgrimage as narrators choose stories to score points against one another or as examples to support a point of view in an argument. For example, the Miller tells his tale to “quit” the Knight’s tale, offering a bawdy and improper story that serves as a kind of counterpoint or answer to the Knight’s genteel courtly romance.

Studying The Canterbury Tales may act as a healthy warning against oversimplifying “the medieval worldview.” These tales remind us that in any age beliefs and opinions vary widely depending on gender, social class, experience, age, and personality. Chaucer’s character portraits are so adroit, and his use of these characters’ voices to tell their own stories is so consistent, that each story seems to embody its own peculiar and often highly individualistic worldview. What we can say is that all of these characters display remarkable unanimity on a certain

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number of points: all accept that there is a hierarchy of social stations within the culture (no one, for example, disputes that the Knight is “better” than the Miller, although the Miller in his drunken state clearly does not feel obliged to be particularly polite to his “betters”); all accept the existence of the Creator God of the Bible and at least verbally claim allegiance to Him; all accept that one true Church represents the will of this Creator God in the world (though none are blind to the faults of this institution); all are nominally Christians.

We noted that in The Inferno, the physical, material world occupies a relatively small portion of the work and suggested that this was a reflection of medieval Platonism, a mode of thought that elevates the spiritual at the expense of the physical. Chaucer’s work displays the new Renaissance interest in the physical world by rendering it in a closely detailed and accurate way. No longer do we find ourselves on “a road” near “a mountain,” objects important only for their spiritual equivalents in Dante’s allegory. Now we find ourselves at Southwark, near the Tabard tavern on the road toward Canterbury—a real place. And the pilgrims on that road are rendered in a wealth of detail that makes them seem profoundly real, from the Nun’s broach that reads “Omnia vincit amor” to the great hairy wart on the Miller’s nose.

Because each of the tales seems to display its own worldview, I’ll depart slightly from my normal organization in this chapter and explore each part on its own rather than as part of a larger pattern.

Prologue The justly famous “Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales is an

example of a medieval genre known as estates satire, a descriptive poem that includes representative examples of all the “estates,” or classes and occupations, which together composed medieval society. These collections of portraits were generally drawn with satiric emphasis on the vices popularly ascribed to each “estate” in life: millers were thought to be thieves, monks high-living bon vivantes, pardoners conniving thieves, and so on. (Remember, in our own day, the kinds of preconceptions people carry about certain occupations: used car salesmen, postal employees, lawyers, politicians, and so on.) Chaucer uses this form for his prologue, but makes his characters both representative of a type and highly individualized. So, for example, the Miller is not only a typical thieving Miller, (Chaucer notes that he steals corn and overcharges his customers) but Robin the Miller, a huge man with a bristling hairy wart on his nose who likes wrestling, breaking down doors with his head, and cursing through his huge furnace-like mouth. Chaucer's pilgrims represent a wide range of social levels, ages, and occupations, gathered together to participate in the only medieval institution that would allow for such a diverse mix: the pilgrimage. As

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Chaucer describes it in the first lines of the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrimage was a kind of ritual of spring, like baseball or house-cleaning, something that people naturally began to think of when the weather turned:

As soon as April pierces to the root The drought of March . . . Life stirs and tingles in them so, Then off as pilgrims people long to go.

Pilgrimages like this were a fact of medieval life and were for most participants probably more of a holiday than a religious observance. Certainly there is little to suggest that Chaucer’s pilgrims are motivated primarily by religious piety. A holiday mood prevails. The pilgrims take their time along the way, eating, drinking, joking, and story-telling. They pass a number of miraculous shrines on their way to Canterbury (including St. Thomas’ miraculous shoe) without stopping. Most of the members of the company seem far more interested in enjoying themselves than in engaging in the kind of soul-searching pilgrimages were supposed to encourage. Instead, they squabble, get drunk, tell tales that make even the broad-minded narrator uncomfortable, and generally behave like a bunch of cretins. Pardoner’s Tale:

A Pardoner made his living by raising money for religious institutions through begging and through selling pardons. These pardons, according to official church doctrine, could release one from punishment for sin, though not from the guilt of the sin, which could only be pardoned through Christ’s blood. This fine theological distinction was evidently lost on most churchgoers and probably on most Pardoners as well, who promised, as Chaucer’s Pardoner does, that their pardons could absolve sin altogether, effectively offering the opportunity for Christians to buy a place in Heaven.

The figure of the Pardoner becomes an indictment of a thoroughly corrupt church structure that preyed on the ignorant and credulous. This the Pardoner makes clear when he says that his own bad motivations merely reflect the bad motivations of other church representatives:

Truth is that evil purposes determine,

And many a time, the origin of a sermon: Some to please people and by flattery To gain advancement through hypocrisy, Some for vainglory, some again for hate. (1575)

The Pardoner, like his fellow church representatives, relies on Latin to keep his ignorant audience in awe: “I say in Latin some few words or so,” he tells his fellow pilgrims, “[t]o spice my sermon; it flavors my appeal / And stirs my listeners to greater zeal” (1573). Remember, the average

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churchgoer did not understand a word of the Latin used in church services and had no personal access to the Bible in Latin or English. In fact, the Bible would not be openly and fully translated into English for over 200 years after the Canterbury Tales were written.

In this state of near-total ignorance regarding the scripture, churchgoers were forced to rely solely on the authority of the clergy, who are represented in the Canterbury Tales as almost entirely corrupt. Of the many “church professionals” described in the Prologue, only one, the lowly Parson, is represented as a true and faithful servant of God. The rest are materialistic social climbers and hypocrites. As the Pardoner begins his own tale, he not only boasts about the power he exercises as a churchman over his awestruck audience, he cites other church authority figures to support his claims: “I display my papal bulls . . . I show my license . . . Bulls in the name of cardinal and pope, / Of bishops and of patriarchs I show” (1573). These “bulls” are, one and all, testaments to the holiness of an absolute scoundrel. So much for the reliability of church authority.

Still, Chaucer makes the Pardoner an interesting and even sympathetic character by making him so candid about his own corruption. If he is a scoundrel and a liar, at least he’s honest about it to his fellow pilgrims. He admits that he is vicious, that he steals money from the poor, that he sells false relics and pardons, and that he cares nothing at all for the spiritual well being of the people to whom he preaches. And yet, somehow, the sermon that he preaches is a stunningly effective diatribe against greed. The Pardoner recognizes that he probably does some good despite himself:

But though that sin [avarice] is lodged in my own heart, I am able to make other people part From avarice, and sorely to repent, Though that is not my principal intent. (1575)

Some readers see the Pardoner as a tragic figure, fully aware of his own limitations and yet incapable of rising above them. Others see him only as a hypocritical villain. In either case, the Pardoner’s character and bad intentions serve as an ironic frame of reference for the tale he tells. The Pardoner begins his tale, a stern warning against the dangers of gluttony, by popping into a tavern for some food and booze. Before he begins his story (a sermon he has preached so many times that he has it memorized), the Pardoner gives a number of other examples of people undone by avarice. The examples are a strange (for us) mix of Biblical characters and quotes from or allusions to classical literature. This first section of the Pardoner’s tale is a good example of the mix of Hebrew and Greek influences on medieval thought that culminated in Thomas Aquinas’ attempts to integrate the two in a form of thought that would eventually be called Christian Humanism. Other examples can be found earlier in Dante and later in Milton.

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The tale itself involves three young men earnestly engaged in what medieval theologians referred to as “the tavern sins:” drinking, gambling, and swearing. Hearing a passing funeral procession, they learn that the dead man is an old friend killed by dangerous character named Death, who has been up to no good in the area. They are warned by their servant and by the innkeeper that Death is dangerous and that they should always be prepared to meet him. The character of Death is allegorical; he is meant to be understood by readers as both a human character in the story (a guy named “Death”) and as symbolic representation of human mortality. Anything the characters say about “Death” will thus be true in a way that makes sense both in the world of the story, where Death is a character, and also in a more abstract or philosophical context. For example, when a servant tells one of the young men how his friend died, he identifies the killer as Death:

A sly thief, Death men call him, who deprives All the people in this country of their lives, Came with his spear and smiting his heart in two Went on his business with no more ado. A thousand have been slaughtered by his hand During this plague. And, sir, before you stand Within his presence, it should be necessary, It seems to me, to know your adversary. Be evermore prepared to meet this foe. My mother taught me thus; that’s all I know. (1580)

The claim makes sense both on a literal and a symbolic level. The young men all make a vow to take revenge on death and to remain true to one another until they accomplish their goal. The vow is triply blasphemous, in that the young men are 1) using God’s name idly; 2) vowing to do that which only Christ can do (i.e. defeat Death) and 3) making two promises that they will not keep—they neither defeat Death nor remain true to one another. All the rest is merely detail. An old man (perhaps Death himself?) they meet and mistreat along the way directs them to a tree, where, he says, they will “find Death.” Expecting a human enemy, they find instead a chest of gold and immediately begin plotting how each may have more than his fair share. In the end, all of them die. Thus, they do find Death under the tree—not the character, but the abstraction. By the end of his tale, the Pardoner has become so heated and enthusiastic that he seems to forget that he’s already told the pilgrims his relics are counterfeit. Or perhaps he is merely attempting to amuse the company by showing them his usual finale. In any case, he invites the pilgrims to step forward, kiss his relics, and leave a healthy offering. The Host is not amused. He suggests castrating the Pardoner and “enshrining” his testicles in a hog turd. The Knight, one of the few genuinely noble souls on the pilgrimage, comes between the Pardoner

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and Host and insists they kiss and make up. They agree and the pilgrimage goes on its merry way. Miller’s Tale The Miller’s tale has been shocking and amusing readers for centuries. It is, basically, a medieval dirty joke, part of a genre called the fabliau (plural: fabliaux). The fabliau is defined in The Riverside Chaucer as “a brief comic tale in verse, usually scurrilous and often scatological or obscene. The style is simple, vigorous, and straightforward; the time is the present, and the settings real, familiar places; the characters are ordinary sorts -- tradesmen, peasants, priests, students, restless wives; the plots are realistically motivated tricks and ruses” (7). In many ways, the fabliau presents a kind of mirror image to the courtly romance of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In fact, the Miller tells his tale to “even up the score” (1534) after the Knight tells his tale—a courtly romance in the “Sir Gawain” tradition. Where the courtly romance concerns itself with the long ago and far away, the fabliau focuses on the now and the nearby. Where the courtly romance treats of the extraordinary doings of knights, kings, queens, and fabulous monsters, the fabliau tells of the “everyday dirt” of peasants, millers, carpenters, students, and bored housewives. If the subject matter differs, the worldview that the fabliaux embody differs still more. The courtly romance almost unfailingly underwrites a “providential” view of the world—good wins out over evil. Characters ultimately get justice and God seems to be overseeing events. In the fabliaux, on the other hand, the world seems to operate according to very different rules. As The Riverside Chaucer explains:

The cuckoldings, beatings, and elaborate practical jokes that are the main concern of the fabliaux are distributed in accord with a code of "fabliau justice," which does not always coincide with conventional morality: greed, hypocrisy, and pride are invariably punished, but so too are old age, mere slow-wittedness, and, most frequently, the presumption of a husband, especially an old one, who attempts to guard his wife's chastity. The heroes and heroines, invariably witty and usually young, are those whom society ordinarily scorns— dispossessed intellectuals, lecherous priests, wayward monks, penniless students, clever peasants, and enthusiastically unchaste wives. Their victims are usually those whom society respects— prosperous merchants, hard-working tradesmen, women foolish enough to try to remain chaste. The fabliau, in short, is delightfully subversive—a light-hearted thumbing of the nose at the dictates of religion, the solid virtues of the citizenry, and the idealistic pretensions of the aristocracy and its courtly literature, which the fabliaux frequently parody, though just as frequently they parody lower-class attempts to adopt courtly behavior. (8)

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In the fabliaux, the world operates according to short-term “common sense” values rather than eternal moral values. Fabliaux thus embody the value system of the first half of Psalm 73, where the prosperous are those who look out for themselves regardless of morality.

And yet for all its subversion of conventional moral values, the Miller’s tale teaches a valuable lesson about the dangers of Biblical illiteracy and complete reliance on church authority, characteristics encouraged by the medieval church. John, the wealthy but aged carpenter, shows his ignorance in marrying a wife much younger and better looking than himself. He shows it again by leaving her alone with his young, attractive lodger Nicholas. John actually seems a bit proud of his ignorance; upon learning that Nicholas has fallen into a fit of madness over his books, John exclaims

Aye, blessed is the ignorant man indeed, Blessed is he that only knows his creed! (1541)

John’s assumption is that man is better off not looking into or knowing the things of God, an attitude propagated by church workers like the Pardoner who longed to keep laypersons like John in ignorance and awe. The effectiveness of this procedure is amply demonstrated in Nicholas’ ability to hoodwink John. Remember, Nicholas, as a medieval student, is on his way to becoming a clergyman, so John is already inclined to believe whatever the learned Nicholas tells him. But Chaucer makes the point far clearer here by having Nicholas tell a lie that almost anyone with the sketchiest biblical literacy could spot: Noah’s flood is coming again, a claim that is explicitly contradicted by God’s promise to Noah that He will not destroy the earth by flood again (Genesis 9: 8-17). John, knowing only his creed, is left at the mercy of this manipulative, all-too- human clergyman-to-be. John has little choice but to believe Nicholas, having no other source of authority to consult on the matter, and having been told all his life to accept the authority of religious professionals. He ends up not only cuckolded, but badly injured and accused of insanity by his neighbors. So much for the reliability of church authority.

John is not the only fool in the story. In fact, nearly everyone but Alison is punished in some way by the end. Absolom, whose foolishness is manifested in his polite, mannered, and indirect wooing of Alison (he’s apparently been reading too many courtly romances), ends up humiliated and farted on. Remember, this is a man Chaucer identifies as “a little squeamish toward a fart” (1539). Nicholas, for all his slyness, apparently does not know when to let a joke die; his attempts to play Alison’s trick again get him the “red hot poker” treatment. Alison, simple, ignorant, and apparently powerless, is the only one who gets what she wants and emerges unpunished. She possesses the kind of worldly wisdom that is rewarded in the context of the fabliaux.

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Luther’s “Commentary on Galatians” Introduction

General Introduction Though Martin Luther is generally credited with beginning the

Reformation, European corporate Christianity was dissolving well before Luther’s new understanding of scripture made a break with the medieval church inevitable. In politics, a rise of nationalistic feeling had, as we have seen, manifested itself in the appearance of vernacular literatures in the national languages of Europe. Dante and Chaucer are some of the earliest examples of writers choosing national languages rather than Latin for literary expression. In society, the stability of the feudal system was undercut by the growing middle class, by the rise of town trading centers, and more directly by an increasing number of peasant revolts. In technology, the printing press made it possible to publish and distribute the works of reformers like Luther very easily, even if they were under papal ban. In culture, early humanists valued classical learning far more highly than the medieval scholastic theologians had. Clearly, then, the ground was ripe for change.

Nowhere was the need for change more apparent than in the institutional church, which had become so corrupted that writers like Dante and Chaucer felt compelled to criticize its materialism and entanglement with secular politics. Both writers clearly believed that the church was out of touch with the common people, often holding them in contempt and keeping them ignorant of theology and scripture. Luther’s dispute with the institutional church arose over one egregious example of church corruption: the sale of indulgences, a profitable sideline for the church. Was the Pope empowered to sell “pardons” for sin? Luther argued that the indulgences issued by the Pope could release people from church discipline for misbehavior, but had no effect on the sinner’s standing before God. Luther’s claim, founded on scripture, was that any “pardon” the Pope offered could only be temporal, not eternal. This small claim started the controversy that ended in Luther’s excommunication and the birth of the Reformation.

Born in 1483, Luther was the son of a peasant who had become wealthy in the copper-mining industry and married a woman of some social standing. Luther spent his early years in Thuringia, a mining district of Germany, but after 14, he was seldom at home. His father desired for him to be a lawyer, so he got very good schooling, receiving a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Erfurt.

While traveling home from the university, Luther was caught in a terrible thunderstorm. The storm frightened him so badly that he vowed to St. Anne that if he survived, he would become a monk. Luther entered a monastery two weeks later over the strenuous objections of his father. His first two years in the monastery seem to have been quiet, at least

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from an external point of view. Internally, though, Luther was not at peace. He struggled to acquire holiness sufficient to allow him to stand before God and receive grace. His zeal annoyed his fellow monks, especially his frequent, detailed confessions.

Encouraged by his monastic supervisor to study the scriptures as an antidote to his spiritual crisis, Luther was transferred from his monastery to the University of Wittenberg in 1511, taking his doctorate in 1512 and beginning to teach immediately. Sometime around 1513 and 1519, Luther came to a revolutionary new understanding of the gospel, which he taught over several years in classes on Romans, Galatians, and the Psalms (among others). The lectures on Galatians were delivered in 1516 and 1517. Despite their revolutionary character, Luther’s lectures and writings did not attract much attention until 1517, when Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences, an important source of income for the church. Apparently, church authorities were more willing to countenance heresy when it did not threaten their power or profits. Once Luther openly attacked church authority and tradition, the battle was joined. The Pope demanded Luther come to Rome to answer the charge of heresy. Luther’s cause was taken up by the Elector Frederick, who, like many European rulers, sought greater local freedom from Roman church authority. Frederick demanded the issue be debated in Germany rather than Rome.

Luther appeared before the young Emperor Charles V in March of 1521. His refusal to recant his works, based on a ringing endorsement of the authority of the individual conscience guided by Scripture, is the appropriate beginning point not only for the Reformation, but perhaps for modernity itself. In response to a spokesman for the emperor who demanded to know if Luther intended to recant or not, Luther replied:

Unless I am convinced by the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. (from “Luther at the Diet of Worms,” LW (Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-1976) 32:103-31; qtd in Noll Turning Points 154)

The weight of individual conscience, guided by scripture, is placed here against all other manner of earthly authority.

His Majesty was not amused, nor was the Pope. Put under papal ban and threatened with imprisonment, Luther was taken into protective custody by Frederick at Wartburg Castle. Luther, more and more convinced of the need for limits on papal power, churned out books with astonishing speed. (Luther’s collected works run to fifty-five volumes and he published something—a sermon, a commentary, a tract—roughly

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every three weeks for his entire adult life.) Much of Luther’s later career was spent writing, preaching, and rearranging the life of the church, which was dramatically altered in those locations where his teachings on scripture were embraced. For example, when, based on scripture, Luther denied that monasticism was a higher calling than any other, the foundations for the monastic system collapsed. Thousands of monks and nuns left the monastery. Luther married one of these, a woman named Katherine von Bora.

View of Man The young man Luther, who began his studies as a legal scholar,

was anxious to understand the legal relationship of man to God: how can man become worthy of receiving the grace of an absolutely righteous God? How could a mere human “measure up” to God’s perfect standard? Failing to measure up, did man not deserve damnation? Luther’s first impulse, when confronted with his own mortality during a thunderstorm, was to pursue righteousness via the most acceptable path he knew— entering a monastery. Being a monk was, in the eyes of the medieval church, a special way of being pleasing to God, storing up righteousness not only for one’s self but for others as well. (In Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” which we’ll read later, an Anglican is baffled by a Catholic’s explanation of this doctrine.) But as Luther studied the scriptures carefully, he found that God never intended for man to “earn” his own salvation (much less the salvation of others) through obedience to God’s law. Luther instead argues that the Law exists only as a way of exposing man’s unrighteousness and pointing him toward his need for salvation through Christ. The Law was never intended as a guide for earning merit. Instead, it was intended to increase man’s sense of his own sinfulness and worthlessness, thereby driving him toward the “imputed” righteousness available through Christ’s atoning death on the cross. Man’s proper motivation for obedience to God’s Law comes not through a desire to increase our own righteousness or earn salvation, but through gratitude. Luther writes:

There are two classes of doers of the Law, true doers and hypocritical doers. The true doers of the Law are those who are moved by faith in Christ to do the Law. The hypocritical doers of the Law are those who seek to obtain righteousness by a mechanical performance of good works while their hearts are far removed from God. . . . Instead of doing the Law, these law-conscious hypocrites break the Law. They break the very first commandment of God by denying His promise in Christ. They do not worship God in faith. They worship themselves.

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No wonder Paul was able to foretell the abominations that Antichrist would bring into the Church. That Antichrists would come, Christ Himself prophesied, Matthew 24:5, "For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many." Whoever seeks righteousness by works denies God and makes himself God. He is an Antichrist because he ascribes to his own works the omnipotent capability of conquering sin, death, devil, hell, and the wrath of God. An Antichrist lays claim to the honor of Christ. He is an idolater of himself. The law- righteous person is the worst kind of infidel.

Man’s fallen nature means fallen man is incapable of working for his salvation, which is now available only through Christ’s righteousness. The regenerated Christian man did not need to earn righteousness because he was already invested with Christ’s complete righteousness. This makes any attempt to earn righteousness via obedience to the Law not only unnecessary, but, as Luther suggests, a grievous sin.

View of God Luther’s central contributions to Christian theology can be

summed up in two Latin phrases: sola scriptura (scripture alone) and sola fides (faith alone). These two principles unite all the varying forms of Protestantism and set them apart from the Catholicism they rejected.

The first phrase, sola scriptura, is Luther’s identification of the source of authority for matters of theology and church governance. Luther rejected the Catholic argument that church tradition had any authority for determining the correctness of church practices or teachings. Instead, all authority in such matters rested in the scripture itself. Although Luther does not make this argument openly in “Commentary on Galatians,” the commentary does embody the principle. When Luther has an argument to make, he references nothing but scripture to prove his points, never church tradition or other ancient sources. The second phrase, sola fides, indicates Luther’s insistence that man’s salvation came to him through faith alone rather than through good works or through a combination of works and faith. The medieval Catholic church taught that man could stand before the righteousness of God by a combination of serious intentions, good works whose imperfections are met by grace, and the sacraments. Man’s salvation was achieved through a combination of God’s grace, the intervention of the institutional church, and the best acts of men.

Luther rejected the last two of these as channels of salvation, insisting instead that man was saved only through believing God’s promise of salvation through Christ. Luther’s key passage, one to which he returns frequently in his writings on the subject, is Genesis 15:6 “And

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he [Abraham] believed in the Lord; and he [the Lord] counted it to him for righteousness.” In Luther, the emphasis is no longer on God’s grace in enabling man to be righteous in his behavior and attitudes. God’s grace, which is his righteousness, is shown as treating man as righteous whatever his state of life. God’s righteousness is not infused into man, but imputed to him through faith in Christ. Acceptability is imputed to man; righteousness is ascribed to him. Man now stands before God only through grace. Grace is not gained from the sacraments or earned through good behavior. View of the World Luther’s transformation of theology does not extend as forcefully into the Christian approach to the material world. Protestants, like Catholics, believe in a providential God ultimately in control of human history, moving it toward a predetermined end-point. However, by elevating scripture as the primary source of authority for determining how the church should be governed, Luther did break with Catholic tradition regarding the importance of history. Catholics argued that church history and tradition should have equal authority with scripture in determining the appropriacy of such extra-biblical church practices as the office of the Pope or the veneration of Mary. Luther insisted that where there was no biblical foundation for these practices, church tradition was simply wrong. Luther thus reduces the significance of church history in relation to scripture. The Reformation also emphasized the physical world in a way that pre-Reformation Catholics had not. Luther and Calvin both emphasized the idea that any human vocation could be a “calling” established by God, making the farmer no less exalted or holy than the preacher. This breakdown of the pre-Reformation division between sacred and secular also produced a new emphasis on the goodness of the created world. Post-reformation artists would re-engage with the particularity of the world in new ways. Renaissance artists like Shakespeare will no longer be content to create character “types” or to use the physical world merely as a symbol for the spiritual, but will instead explore human personality and the material world as interesting for their own sakes. It is not an exaggeration to say that Shakespeare’s work would not have been possible without Luther. Artistic / Aesthetic Luther never shied away from strong, forceful language in order to make his points. As his controversy with Catholic authorities heated up, Luther became still more forceful. By the time he published his “Commentary on Galatians” in 1539, Luther had long been excommunicated and the Reformation was well under way. He was thus free to give vent to his anger and contempt in ways not always evident in his earliest writings. Luther, for example, writes, “The Pope is the

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Antichrist, because he is against Christ, because he takes liberties with the things of God, because he lords it over the temple of God.”

Luther’s gift for figurative language is on dazzling display in his “Commentary on Galatians.” Consider this description of the “civil” purpose of the Law: “As a wild beast is tied to keep it from running amuck, so the Law bridles mad and furious man to keep him from running wild.” A brief list of other similes or metaphors Luther employs to describe the Law suggest some of the figurative power of his writing; the Law is a hammer of death, the thunder of hell, the lightning of God’s wrath, a sledgehammer, a prison, a hell, a mirror, an usher, and, finally, a schoolmaster. In each of these cases, Luther takes some familiar object—a hammer, a mirror, lightning, an usher—and uses it to “make familiar” to his readers the aspect of the Law he wishes to describe. He is generally careful to unfold the areas of comparison he wishes to illuminate, doing most of the interpretive work for his readers. For example, when Luther describes the Law as a schoolmaster, he explains at some length:

This simile of the schoolmaster is striking. Schoolmasters are indispensable. But show me a pupil who loves his schoolmaster. How little love is lost upon them the Jews showed by their attitude toward Moses. They would have been glad to stone Moses to death. (Ex. 17:4.) You cannot expect anything else. How can a pupil love a teacher who frustrates his desires? And if the pupil disobeys, the schoolmaster whips him, and the pupil has to like it and even kiss the rod with which he was beaten. Do you think the schoolboy feels good about it? As soon as the teacher turns his back, the pupil breaks the rod and throws it into the fire. And if he were stronger than the teacher he would not take the beatings, but beat up the teacher. All the same, teachers are indispensable, otherwise the children would grow up without discipline, instruction, and training.

Just as Christ explained his parables to his students, Luther is a patient teacher, drawing out the terms of the simile.

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Machiavelli’s The Prince Introduction General

Machiavelli was born in 1469, two hundred years after Florence’s most famous son, Dante. Like Dante, Machiavelli was a prominent public figure, deeply involved in the complex and dangerous politics of Renaissance Italy. Between 1498 and 1512 he served an official for the republican government of Florence, traveling with diplomatic missions to Cesare Borgia (son of Pope Alexander VI), to Pope Julius II, to the Emperor Maximilian, and twice to Louis XII of France. He had first-hand experience with warfare and knew most of the great men of his day.

Unlike Dante, however, Machiavelli did not escape punishment when his own party fell from favor. After the fall of the republican government which he supported, Machiavelli was, for a season, imprisoned and tortured by the Medici when he was suspected of involvement in a plot against them. Once released, Machiavelli spent the better part of the rest of his life trying to win patronage and favor from the same Medici family that had tortured him. The Prince, a book of advice for young rulers, was dedicated originally to Giuliano de’ Medici, and then, after his death, to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Machiavelli’s efforts to curry favor with the Medici were unsuccessful. His hopes were raised briefly by the re-establishment of republican government in Florence, but were dashed again when he found himself labeled a Medici sympathizer. Machiavelli was a victim of his own bad advice. He died shortly thereafter in 1527.

View of the Divine Machiavelli has almost nothing to say about God, particularly

when he deals with the ethics of rulership. His silence on this point speaks loudly, for almost no European thinker before him would have begun to consider man apart from his relationship to his creator. The silence is less surprising when one remembers that the church and its rulers had reached such a pitch of corruption in Machiavelli’s Italy that Machiavelli could assume his ruling-class readers would share his cynicism toward religion. When Machiavelli gives examples of how treachery, lying, or belligerence can serve the needs of “princes,” or earthly rulers, he includes popes and archbishops along with kings and generals as though there were no distinction between them. Indeed, in Machiavelli’s day, the line between ecclesiastical and political power had disappeared; popes led armies and played politics like any other secular rulers and were generally members of the same set of powerful families.

Although Machiavelli never says God does not exist, or that religion is only a tool in the hands of the powerful to keep the weak in slavery, he strongly suggests these things by treating “goodness” as valuable only for

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how its appearance can serve the ends of the prince. The prince, says Machiavelli, should be good when it serves his interests and helps to keep him in power. But when it does not he must learn how to avoid actions that otherwise seem virtuous: honesty, patience, or generosity. There is no appeal in Machiavelli to any standard outside man for measuring whether any action is good or evil; these categories in Machiavelli exist only relative to whether the action serves the interests of the prince or not, whose interests are presumed to coincide with those of the people. If an action serves the prince’s interest, it is good; if not, it is bad.

In our reading, one of Machiavelli’s only direct references to a divine power happens as he claims that the time is right for a prince to unite Italy:

…we have before our eyes extraordinary and unexampled means prepared by God. The sea has been divided. A cloud has guided you on your way. The rock has given forth water. Manna has fallen. Everything has united to make you great. The rest is for you to do. God does not intend to do everything, lest he deprive us of our free will and the share of glory that belongs to us. (1721)

Machiavelli suggests here that God has arranged matters so that a Medici prince could unite Italy, but has no particular interest in the means the prince might use to accomplish that end, and, further, that God intends to share His glory with the glory of this prince. The last sentiment would have come as a great surprise to Jehoshaphat, or to Joseph, or to any of those close to the heart of God, who have long understood that any glory man wins for himself is merely a reflection of the glory of God, not a quality man shares with God. By insisting that the prince’s behavior must be based solely on self-interest, Machiavelli begins a tradition of thought that will ultimately undermine the medieval concept of monarchy and transform European social relations. By assuming that the highest “good” toward which a ruler can strive is the preservation of his own power, Machiavelli releases the ruler from any responsibilities toward God. Furthermore, he implies that rulership does not come from God, but rather from the prince’s efforts on his own behalf. Ironically, by rejecting the Christian tradition that rulership comes from God, Machiavelli will open the door to new philosophies that will undermine the authority of all princes by arguing that authority comes not from God but from the consent of the governed.

View of Man At first glance, it might seem that Machiavelli belongs to the Augustinian Christian tradition that insists on the absolute fallenness of man. He certainly has nothing good to say of man in a collective sense:

one must say of men generally that they are ungrateful, mutable, pretenders and dissemblers, prone to avoid danger, thirsty for gain.

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So long as you benefit them they are all yours. . . . they offer you their blood, their property, their lives, their children, when the need for such things is remote. But when the need comes upon you, they turn around. (1715)

This wickedness of other men is one of the principal reasons Machiavelli offers for the necessity of the prince learning “how not to be good.” But there is a key premise that distinguishes Machiavelli’s view of man from Augustine’s. In Augustine’s view, man does evil for its own sake, a principle embodied in the pear tree episode. In Augustine, the evil of man is ultimately motivated only by man’s love of doing evil. In Machiavelli, on the other hand, man’s behavior is ultimately motivated by his own self-interests without regard to moral categories like good or evil. Men might do “good,” or they might do “evil,” depending on what will serve them best in any given set of circumstances. But regardless of circumstance, the wicked deeds of man are always motivated by self- interest. Despite the dim view Machiavelli takes of the average man, he expresses an admiration for the extraordinary man’s potential to re-make himself through the exercise of his will. The Prince, is, after all, an early form of the self-help book so popular in our own era. Many of the first books designed to serve as models or guides for human behavior appeared during the Renaissance, particularly works like Castiglione’s The Courtier, Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, and Spenser’s English epic The Faerie Queene, which has as its announced purpose “to fashion a gentleman or noble person.” The sudden appearance of these works suggests the Renaissance’s high estimation of man’s potential. Suddenly, rather than passively accepting the estate into which he was born, man had some freedom to “make himself.”

This more exalted view of man’s potential is based largely on man’s ability to use his own reason. In The Prince, reason is left to operate freely without being restricted by religious considerations. Note that when Machiavelli wants to prove a point, he appeals for evidence to the authority of reason bolstered by observation and experience. To make his case, Machiavelli draws on a wide range of examples from classical and more recent history. He points to exemplary events from the lives of Caesar, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Charles V, to name only a few. He asks readers to recall how the French cavalry defeated the Spanish at a recent battle.

But where Machiavelli will point to historical events to bolster his case for how the prince should behave under particular circumstances, he never appeals to scripture for authority. Machiavelli’s refusal to recognize a scriptural foundation for human leadership not only reflects the contempt for the church felt by Machiavelli and his audience, but a high regard for human reason as a sufficient guide for conduct. Remember, as much as Dante respects reason, he insists that it is only

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sufficient for recognizing sin, not for overcoming it. Dante reflects the medieval synthesis of reason and faith hammered out by Aquinas, which held that where reason and faith seem to conflict, faith wins out. View of the World

Prior to the Renaissance, most Europeans had a “regressive” rather than a “progressive” view of history. This means that, rather than imagining themselves traveling forward toward some later and greater perfection (as we tend to do in the modern era), they instead imagined themselves traveling backward away from an earlier perfection. Since Eden, according to the “regressive” view of history, mankind has moved farther and farther from God’s original plan, “regressing” away from his original state toward greater and greater sinfulness.

Such a worldview, not surprisingly, is profoundly conservative and tends to discourage innovation or novelty. Medieval artists tended to look toward the great works of the past as models for their own work (remember Dante’s profound respect for Virgil and the “pagan poets”) and to see themselves as inferior to both the Biblical and classical writers. Understanding this view of history may help us to understand why medieval thinkers were so heavily dependent on tradition and authority, often citing ancient authorities in the most uncritical ways. Aquinas, for example, in his Summa Contra Gentiles, cites without question the existence of an eighteen-inch fish capable of immobilizing the largest ships(Roston 4), a patently ridiculous claim but sacred for Aquinas because it came from an ancient authority. This view of history also helps to account for the medieval church’s own insistence on apostolic traditions regarding papal and clerical powers and the nature of the sacraments, even where they were not explicitly supported by scripture. The assumption was that thinkers in the past, being closer to the original perfection of creation, were far more likely to be right about such matters than contemporary thinkers like Luther or Calvin.

Understanding this view of history also helps to account for Machiavelli’s defensive tone regarding his own break with tradition: “People will call me presumptuous because I am breaking with tradition” (1712), he fears, but defends himself on the grounds that he is more interested in being useful than in being faithful to the traditions of the past. The Reformation was only beginning to make its anti-authoritarian claims heard across Europe, so Machiavelli’s open willingness to break with the tradition of the past probably has its roots in the scandalous corruption of the Italian church. At any rate, this willingness to think in new ways and to reject the reverent acceptance of old sources demanded of medieval scholars would eventually come to characterize much of the new thought of the renaissance. Many scholars trace the birth of the “modern” era to this new concept of the present as radically broken or separate from the past, which brings with it its own demand for novelty in philosophy.

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Some of the consequences of this “modern” idea of the present as radically separated from the past are unarguably positive. Freedom from the weight of the past has encouraged western thinkers to embrace innovation, technological development, and freedoms of speech and thought, and to value individual initiative and human freedom. On the other hand, the same ideas have led to the breakdown of traditional communities and values. Discontinuity with the past makes old people irrelevant and inspires in the young far less faith in the sustaining truths of earlier generations. This will ultimately lead many western intellectuals toward the rejection of Biblical truth altogether as part and parcel of an irrelevant past.

Artistic/Aesthetic Strictly speaking, there is very little “literary” value in Machiavelli’s work; it is, in the main, an abstract political treatise using few narratives and very little figurative language. But Machiavelli’s influence on western literature and thought has been so profound that The Prince cannot be ignored by the serious student. Works Cited: Roston, Murray. Sixteenth-Century English Literature. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

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“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Introduction

General

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” belongs to a genre called the “courtly romance” and takes as its subject the doings of long-ago far- away knights, ladies, kings, queens, and wizards against a backdrop of enchanted castles and forests filled with fantastic monsters. As such, it is the antithesis of fabliau like Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” which happen in the here and now and involve low, common characters doing low, common things. The romance is not bound by the literary law of probability; anything can happen: trees talk, knights fall under evil enchantments, men are beheaded and live to tell about it, and so on. At the beginning of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Arthur and his knights sit at a Christmas banquet waiting to see a wonder, and in rides the Jolly Green Giant on a big green horse. Such is the logic of the romance.

The poem is “courtly” because it was produced for a court audience—a group of highly educated, sophisticated people whose advancement in life depended largely on their wit and charm. The ability to write beautiful poetry was a skill (like dancing, fencing, or riding) that marked its possessor as genteel and worthy of notice. Courtly poems were generally circulated in manuscript among courtiers as a display of the authors’ sophistication and skill. This was probably the case with “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which was “discovered” in only one manuscript among a collection of three other poems generally believed to have also been written by the same author; unlike the Canterbury Tales, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” was not widely known for many centuries. Yet its beauty is such that, upon discovery, it was almost immediately admitted into the canon of truly great English poetry.

The poem was probably written about 1380, almost exactly the same time Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales. Yet these two giants of medieval English literature were probably unknown to one another. Chaucer lived close to the royal court in London; the anonymous Gawain-Poet wrote in a provincial court in the northwest Midlands, far from the centers of power and influence. Even if they had known of one another, they might have found one another’s speech and writing incomprehensible, for each wrote in a different dialect; Chaucer’s dialect led directly to contemporary English. The Gawain-Poet’s did not. View of the Divine The Christianization of England had been more or less complete for several hundred years by the time the Gawain poet set down his tale. Neither God nor theology plays any explicit part in the tale. This is not

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surprising, given that everyone in the story, including the Green Giant, acknowledges the lordship of the same God, leaving little room for theological controversy or exposition. This is not to say that theology is not important in the story; indeed, the poem’s primary theme is theological, for the narrative embodies a very important point regarding man’s relationship to God, more fully described in the section “View of Man” below.

View of the World Obviously, the Gawain Poet was not attempting to produce what we would call a “realistic” work of art. The world his characters occupy is enchanted, full of wonders like giants, dragons, witches, and talking heads. This world follows different rules from the real world. A knight traveling in any random direction will certainly find adventure - ogres, castles, damsels in distress, and the like. Yet there can be little doubt of God’s providential presence in this world. Despite his own doubts and those of his fellow courtiers, Sir Gawain is saved from what seems like certain death at the hands of the Green Knight. The Gawain-Poet uses the natural world of forest and mountain as a contrast or counter-point to the artificially elaborate and perhaps overly-sophisticated world of the court. In the midst of the highly- civilized Christmas celebrations at Camelot, the disturbing intrusion of the Green Knight with his sprig of holly, his green axe, his green horse, his green clothes, and his brutal “beheading game” (along with the unforgettable scene of his severed head rolling along under the table across the feet of the banqueters) are reminders of the fact that however civilized and sophisticated man may become, he is still a part of the natural world, possessed of a body and natural urges to use it. The poet uses the hunting scenes to similar effect in the third section of the poem. As Gawain lies in bed virtuously resisting the advances of Sir Bercilak’s wife, the poet cuts in graphic descriptions of the slaughter and disembowelment of several animals at the hands of Bercilak and his hunting men. The poet’s point seems to be that while Gawain’s knightly code of behavior forces him to behave as though he were not disturbed (or even tempted) by the improper advances of Bercilak’s wife, he is still possessed of a body like any other body, still a part of the natural world even if he wants to believe he has risen above it. Gawain may be the embodiment of knightly aspirations toward angelic perfection, but he hasn’t left the green earth and his body yet, as he learns to his great dismay at the end of the tale. View of Man The message of the “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is, ultimately, theological, pointing toward the universal sinfulness of man, the same theme embodied in St. Augustine’s “Pear Tree” episode. The

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Arthurian tradition, despite being adapted by Christian writers and readers, rests on the idea of the perfectibility of man. The knights who gather around Arthur to form his Round Table seek to perfect their own behavior in every way. The five-pointed star on the shield of Sir Gawain, which he takes up in Part II as he leaves Camelot to seek out the Green Knight, is a powerful symbol of this aspiration toward perfection, suggesting that its bearer possesses physical, spiritual, and moral perfection. Arthurian knights, the poem suggests, would like to behave as if they were no longer in the natural world at all. They are not only careless of physical danger, but also adherents to a code of ethics that demands from them superhuman perfection in morals and manners. The problem with such a model for human behavior is that it leaves no room for human weakness. Ultimately, even though Sir Gawain is the best knight, he still fails in his test. To underline this theme, the Gawain-Poet has the Green Knight explicitly question the aspirations toward perfection of Arthur's knights. For example, on his arrival at the Christmas feast, the Green Knight explains to Arthur that he has sought out the court at Camelot because

…the praise of you, prince, is puffed up so high, And your court and company are counted the best, Stoutest under steel-gear on steeds to ride, Worthiest of their works the wide world over, And peerless to prove in passages of arms, And courtesy here is carried to its height. (258-264)

Clearly, the Green Knight’s game is meant to take them down a peg or two. When no one immediately takes up his challenge to the beheading game, he taunts Arthur and his knights by reminding them of their high reputation.

“What, is this Arthur’s house,” said that horseman then, “Whose fame is so fair in far realms and wide? Where is now your arrogance and your awesome deeds, Your valor and your victory and your vaunting words? Now are the revel and renown of the Round Table Overwhelmed with a word of one man’s speech, For all cower and quake, and no cut felt!” (308-315)

The excitement among the occupants of Sir Bercilak’s castle on the arrival of Gawain also suggests how “puffed up” the reputation of the Arthur’s knights has become, not only in physical courage, but also in “courtesy,” or courtliness, the code of behavior governing knights and ladies:

“Now displays of deportment shall dazzle our eyes And the polished pearls of impeccable speech; The high art of eloquence is ours to pursue Since the father of fine manners is found in our midst.” (916- 919)

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Against the backdrop of such high expectations, Gawain’s failure becomes all the more poignant. If this man, with such a high reputation for physical courage and good manners, fails in his test, then so must we all; “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” ends by universalizing the weakness and failure of Gawain as all the other members of Arthur’s court begin wearing the green belt themselves. Gawain, who set out with a shield that symbolizes human perfectibility, returns wearing a green belt that symbolizes human weakness and shame. Friends adapt the belt as a gentle reminder to Gawain and to themselves of the universality of human sin and weakness, and presumably, the need for humility in the face of this knowledge. We have noted in our discussion of the story of Joseph and of the Inferno that the Christian model for heroism is in some ways diametrically opposed to the model as it appears in classical literature. The Gawain Poet seems to be aware of this Christian tradition, as he focuses almost exclusively on the meekness and passivity of Sir Gawain rather than on his conventional heroic attributes. Aside from his chopping off the Green Knight’s head in the first section, Gawain’s heroism mainly involves passivity and waiting. For example, at the end of the first section, Gawain faces the daunting prospect of waiting an entire year before he can face his (probably fatal) trial. The narrator exhorts him not to lose his nerve:

Now take care, Sir Gawain, That your courage wax not cold When you must turn again To your enterprise foretold. (486-490)

For a man of action, the poet suggests, waiting may be one of the hardest trials he will have to face. Gawain's greatest apparent trial involves avoiding the advances of a woman. The descriptions of Sir Gawain in his bedclothes peeking from under the covers or feigning sleep at the entrances of Sir Gawain's wife are hilarious precisely because they are so far from what we expect of a traditional knight, whose adventures should take place outside, in public, in armor. His "battlefield" here is a bedroom and his deadly opponent is a beautiful woman. His "victory" here would have been simply the avoidance of sin. Instead he fails by accepting the green belt and then not giving it to Sir Bercilak in accordance with their earlier agreement. Even his physical trial is passive – he has to stand still while the Green Knight takes a swipe at him with a gigantic axe; he fails at this trial as well. In both failures, Gawain’s motivation is perhaps the most forgivable of all human weaknesses: the desire for self-preservation. Sir Bercilak, now revealed as the Green Knight, is far less judgmental of Gawain’s shortcoming than Gawain is of himself:

…you lacked, sir, a little in loyalty there, But the cause was not cunning, nor courtship either,

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But that you loved your own life; the less, then, to blame. (2366-2368).

The narrator seems uninterested in reporting on Gawain’s traditionally heroic behavior. He passes quickly over those parts of the story involving physical courage as if they were utterly unimportant, warranting very little space:

At each strand or stream where the stalwart passed ‘Twere a marvel if he met not some monstrous foe, And that so fierce and forbidding that fight he must. . . . Now with serpents he wars, now with savage wolves, Now with wild men of the woods, that watched from the rocks, Both with bulls and bears, and with boars besides, And giants that came gibbering from the jagged steeps. (715-723)

Note that this is all the space that the poet devotes to Gawain’s acts of physical courage. Compare this with the space devoted to any of the three days Gawain spends attempting to avoid the insistent wife of Sir Bercilak, and one gets some sense of where the Gawain-Poet’s priorities lie in telling this tale. Artistic/Aesthetic The verse form used in “Sir Gawain” employs stanzas of various lengths, composed of alliterative lines. These “alliterative” lines each contain four stresses, at least three of which usually fall on words beginning with the same sound: “The knight that had knotted the nets of deceit,” for example. This repetition of initial consonant sounds within the same line is called “alliteration.” This alliterative verse was probably deliberately archaic even for its original fourteenth-century audience, meant to invoke for them a sense of the distant Arthurian past by reminding them of much older alliterative works like Beowulf. Each stanza is capped off by an elegant five-line verse called a bob and wheel. The fairy-tale quality created by the archaic verse form is strengthened not only by the setting (long ago, far away) and subject matter (knights, ladies, battles with monsters, etc.) but by formal elements as well, especially the use of three-fold repetition with the climax on the third repetition. Just as fairy tales like Goldilocks or Little Red Riding Hood are dependent on repetitions of three (“this porridge is too hot, this porridge is too cold, but this porridge is just right”), many episodes of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” are structured according to this rule. For example, Sir Bercilak goes hunting for three days while Sir Gawain resists Bercilak’s wife, Bercilak’s wife offers Gawain three gifts before he accepts one, the Green Knight takes three axe swings before Gawain escapes him. Finally, though the poem is in four parts, it displays a remarkable thematic unity. The poem begins and ends at Christmas. This is

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especially appropriate since Christmas celebrates the birth into the world of the One who saved man from having to be perfect. By being a perfect man, living the kind of life to which Gawain and the other Knights of the Round Table unrealistically aspire, Christ became the sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world—yours, mine, and Gawain’s.

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Shakespeare’s Hamlet General Introduction

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the English village of Stratford-upon-Avon. His father was a prominent merchant, craftsman, and moneylender. He was involved in local government and even elected bailiff, the equivalent of mayor, though he evidently fell into debt a few years later. Shakespeare was probably educated in Stratford’s excellent grammar school, where he learned Latin, some Greek, and received a solid grounding in classical literature which he put to good use in his plays. Sometime during the 1580’s, Shakespeare went to London to work as an actor and writer.

The ordinariness of Shakespeare’s birth and education, coupled with his dazzling literary and dramatic talents, have stimulated some to propose other persons as the secret author of Shakespeare’s plays: Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, even Queen Elizabeth. Adherents to these theories, sometimes referred to as “anti-Stratfordians,” argue, often with great vehemence, for the existence of widespread conspiracies of silence among Elizabethan authors and critics regarding the true author of the plays. Most of these theories, however, have weaknesses at least as difficult to accept as the fact that Shakespeare wrote his own plays. For example, if it is hard to believe a grammar-school-educated Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, it is harder still to believe the Earl of Oxford referred in Macbeth to events which occurred after he died.

We know very few details about Shakespeare’s life, especially when compared to other authors of his era. We have no letters, very few public records, and only one signature. The lack of documentary evidence about Shakespeare’s life suggests he must have been a quiet man, rarely in the kind of scrapes with the law that characterized the lives of many of his contemporaries—notably Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and Ben Jonson. The plays themselves, both in their complexity and number, suggest a disciplined man with a good work ethic. By the end of his life, Shakespeare was evidently making a great deal of money, enough to buy a large new house for himself, another for his daughter, and to buy a coat of arms for his father, effectively moving himself into the nobility. He died without a male heir in 1616.

Like the medieval pilgrimage, the Elizabethan theater brought together men and women from nearly every social level in what was otherwise an extremely hierarchical culture. People of all classes attended the Elizabethan theater, from the “groundlings” who paid a penny to stand in the open space before the stage to members of the nobility who sat in private boxes or even directly on the stage. The English allowed women to attend the theater, though not to act on stage. Women’s parts were played by boys until almost 50 years after Shakespeare died.

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None of this is to suggest that the political or religious authorities smiled on the theater. Elizabethan political authorities temporarily shut down the theaters whenever the number of plague deaths in London reached a certain level, perhaps on the assumption that the sight of such idleness infuriated God. Any play performed on the English stage had to be approved by a government censor who was free to remove or rewrite scenes or even to refuse the play altogether. The theater itself was attacked by Puritan reformers as lewd, immoral, and a waste of valuable time. At the outbreak of their hostilities with the Anglican royalists in 1640, the Puritans would close down the English theaters for twenty years. Given the suspicion with which those in authority held the theater, writing plays was understandably not a prestigious occupation in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare probably did not seek publication for his plays (in part because the lack of copyright laws meant other acting companies might steal them). The only works it seems likely Shakespeare did print on his own were two lyric poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Popular by Elizabethan standards (Venus and Adonis was reprinted nine times between 1593 and 1602), these works no longer attract many readers. Though Shakespeare’s lyric poems are far less accessible than his plays, lyric poetry was considered a “higher” or more reputable form of writing than drama. Renaissance readers (there were not many) favored allusive, complex, and witty verse designed to display the education and sophistication of its author and its small audience. Because of its small audience, renaissance poetry was often circulated in manuscript rather than printed and was designed to build the reputation of the poet and, in the case of less wealthy poets, to attract the attention of a wealthy patron. Most renaissance lyric poets therefore wrote with a small, highly-educated audience in mind. The plays, on the other hand, were written to appeal to the broad spectrum of Elizabethan playgoers, who, as we have noted, came from all levels of society. The plays made money through performance rather than publication. View of Man

The renaissance brought a new interest in man as an object of wonder and study. While many writers in the classical tradition had a very high estimate of man and his possibilities, the literature of the Middle Ages was characterized by a stress on man’s limitations. Works like The Inferno or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight emphasize man’s inability to achieve true goodness or perfection without divine intervention. However, writers of the renaissance express a renewed sense of wonder at man’s seemingly unlimited potential to learn and create. “What a piece of work is a man!” exclaims Hamlet. “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—

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the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” Yet Hamlet’s admiration is also mixed with disgust: “And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?” he asks. His words are reminiscent of the sense of wonder David expresses in Psalm 8 when he asks “what is man that thou art mindful of him?”

In addition to their celebration of man’s potential, Shakespeare’s plays also exhibit a very new interest in the complexity of man’s inner world, a subject that attracted little attention from either medieval or classical artists. Homer’s interest in psychology seems limited to describing how characters choose between two alternative courses of action. The author of Beowulf seems to have almost no interest in his hero’s inner life; Beowulf never doubts or second-guesses himself and exhibits no self-consciousness. Chaucer’s characters have unforgettable exteriors, described for us in careful detail, but their inner conflicts and complexity seem to have been of little interest to Chaucer or his readers.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems fascinated by the inner world of man, perhaps a reflection of the growing humanism of the renaissance. Not only does Shakespeare create over a thousand sharply- drawn unique characters recognizable through their speech and behavioral patterns, but he presents the interior world of his central characters in unprecedented detail and complexity. This is no easy feat in drama, where playwrights are dependent entirely on speech and action to convey characters’ internal states. Shakespeare solves the problem largely through his extensive use of the soliloquy, speeches delivered when the character is alone designed to reveal his state of mind. Hamlet’s soliloquies, particularly his “To be or not to be” speech, are among Shakespeare’s best-known passages.

Shakespeare’s techniques of characterization are thus a quantum leap beyond previous literary efforts at representing the complex inner world of man. Hamlet is perhaps the best of all Shakespeare’s plays for observing these new techniques of “internal” characterization, since the central mystery of the play involves the complex inner world of Prince Hamlet. Throughout the play, every major character (including Hamlet himself) wants to understand the deeper motives behind Hamlet’s bizarre speech and behavior. Is he mad? If so, what is the source of his madness? If not, why is he pretending to be mad? Is he angry because of thwarted ambition? How much does he know about how his father died? Is he planning revenge? Viewers, privy to Hamlet’s intention to “put on the antic disposition,” are encouraged to ask another set of questions about Hamlet: Which of his actions are real and which are “played”? Is his cruel treatment of Ophelia an act? Does Hamlet suspect that Claudius and Polonius are watching as he speaks to her? Or is he pretending to be mad so that she’ll go back and report his madness to her father? Even Hamlet himself seems mystified by his own complexity, at one point lamenting that he does not himself understand why he has not acted to revenge his father’s murder: “I do not know / Why yet I live

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to say ‘This thing’s to do,’ / [Since] I have cause, and will, and strength to do’t.”

Searching for answers to questions about Hamlet’s inner state is tantalizing because Shakespeare creates characters in such a way that what we see on stage seems only the tip of the iceberg. It is almost impossible to treat Shakespeare’s characters as literary constructs because they seem so real, so like us, particularly in their depth and mystery. “I have that within” says Hamlet to his mother, “which passes show.” The various attempts within the play to understand Hamlet’s behavior are doomed to failure because, the play suggests, humans are so complicated they may not be understandable, even to themselves. When Guildenstern attempts to “draw out” Hamlet to reveal the source of his madness, Hamlet first asks Guildenstern to play a pipe. When Guildenstern protests that he cannot, not knowing the instrument, Hamlet responds:

Why look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me . . . you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. . . ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play upon me!

The warning is as much for readers and audience members as it is for Guildenstern. Generations of readers have been attempting to “pluck out the heart” of Hamlet’s mystery, but no consensus has emerged. It is perhaps this mystery that most attracts readers to this play. View of the World

Hamlet’s world is as mysterious as his character. If the characters around Hamlet are trying to understand him, Hamlet has his own set of mysteries to solve: What, exactly, is rotten in Denmark? Why the preparations for war? Why the ghosts walking around at night? Was his father murdered? If so, by whom? After his encounter with the Ghost answers some of these initial questions, Hamlet is faced with a whole new crop of mysteries: Is the Ghost honest, or sent to lure him to his damnation? Which of the people around him are true friends and which are spies of Claudius? How and when can he best take revenge on Claudius? Does his mother bear any responsibility for the death of his father? And, over time, perhaps the deepest mystery of all: why does it take Hamlet so long to get revenge?

Hamlet is certainly weary of the hypocrisy, lying, and gluttony around him. In his first soliloquy, even before he has learned that his father was murdered, he expresses a powerful hatred for the world he inhabits. His hatred of the world is so strong Hamlet wishes for complete physical annihilation and expresses some regret that God’s law forbids suicide:

Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt,

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Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the everlasting had not fixed His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! Oh God, Oh God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world.

Hamlet’s suicidal funk, his inability to choose between being and not being, is closely related to his view of the world as “an unweeded garden,” possessed by things “rank and gross in nature,” “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.” But the play itself may not embody Hamlet’s claims that his world is irredeemably ruined by hypocrisy, greed, and lies. Horatio remains a true friend to Hamlet throughout the play, even when Hamlet is betrayed by Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and, to a certain extent, Ophelia. Gertrude and Claudius are both tormented by conscience over their misdeeds. Most importantly, the world ultimately shows itself to be just in Hamlet when, at the end, Hamlet revenges himself on Claudius, cleansing Denmark of its pollution. View of God

Though Shakespeare’s characters express all kinds of opinions about religious, philosophic, or political matters, it is difficult to know exactly what Shakespeare himself believed. Some of the difficulty is inherent in drama, since it is often impossible to know which (if any) characters speak for the author. This difficulty is exacerbated by our lack of biographical information about Shakespeare.

Finally, the age itself militated against the expression of strong religious opinions. Consider that in the fifty years before Shakespeare’s writing career began, England had been Catholic, then “Anglican” with strong Catholic tendencies under Henry VIII, then Anglican with far stronger Protestant tendencies under Edward VI, then virulently Catholic again under Mary, then Anglo-Protestant again under Elizabeth. Each of these regime changes brought with it heresy trials, denunciations, beheadings, and burnings at the stake. There was every danger that Elizabeth would die with no male heir and great uncertainty as to what would happen afterward. Through 1588, the danger of invasion by Catholic Spain was very real. Under such circumstances, the careful man kept his mouth firmly shut regarding religious issues.

Hamlet presents a plethora of religious puzzles but few real answers. Examining the appearance of the Ghost in Act I shows how such questions tend to multiply. In the first act, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to many characters. After this point, the Ghost reappears only once, as Hamlet is confronting his mother. In that scene, only Hamlet can see the Ghost, not Gertrude. Has the nature of the Ghost changed somehow? Why is it visible to Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio at the beginning of the play, but invisible to Gertrude in the middle of the play?

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Alone with Hamlet, the Ghost calls for Hamlet to revenge his father’s murder. Christians, however, are clearly enjoined by the Bible not to seek revenge. Is the Ghost revealing himself as an agent of Satan? Furthermore, the Ghost describes his condition in a way to make clear that he is suffering in Purgatory. However, Shakespeare’s patriotically Protestant audience presumably did not believe in Purgatory, not only because the belief had no Biblical foundation, but because the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith made Purgatory unnecessary. Furthermore, the Geneva Bible, the one used by Shakespeare, expressly forbids consultation with the dead in Deut. 18:10-12: “Let none be found among you that . . . asketh counsel of the dead.” The story of Saul’s consultation with the Witch of Endor and the raising of Samuel’s ghost would have been very familiar to Shakespeare, as would the notes in the Geneva Bible arguing that the “ghost” Saul saw was only a demon sent to deceive him. Hamlet seems to be aware of the possibility that the Ghost is a demonic agent. “The spirit that I have seen” he tells Horatio, “May be the devil, and the devil hath power / T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps / . . . Abuses me to damn me.” Hamlet’s doubts about the origin of the Ghost are apparently put to rest by Claudius’ response to the play-within-the-play staged by Hamlet in Act 3. But is Hamlet too quick to assume that the guilt of Claudius implies the divine origin of the Ghost’s call for revenge? In other words, does it follow from Claudius’ guilt that the Ghost’s call for revenge is from God?

Artistic / Aesthetic Hamlet, like all of Shakespeare’s plays, is written in a combination of prose and “blank verse” or unrhymed iambic pentameter. Although most readers today do not recognize “meter,” it was the defining characteristic of almost all English poetry until the beginning of the twentieth century. The term “meter” describes the number of syllables in a single line of poetry and the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in the line. “Iambic” means that the line is arranged into a pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable: duhDA. This “unit” of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable is called a “foot.” Because the ten-syllable line of much English poetry is made up of five of these two-syllable “feet,” it is called “pentameter,” with penta- here meaning “five.” The iambic pentameter line sounds like this: duhDA duhDA duhDA duhDA duhDA. Here, for example, are two lines from Hamlet’s warning to Horatio and Marcellus that he may in the near future pretend to be crazy. The “U” shape above a syllable indicates that the syllable is unstressed, where the “\” shape indicates a stress:

U \ U \ U \ U \ U \ . . . As I perchance hereafter shall think meet

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U \ U \ U \ U \ U \ To put an antic disposition on . . .

Note that there are a total of ten syllables in both lines and that the syllables are arranged in a pattern of five “iambic feet,” that is, five units of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Note also that where the reader or actor have some choice about whether to read a single-syllable word as stressed or unstressed, multi-syllable words like “disposition” or “hereafter” can only be read according to standard English pronunciation: “DISpoSItion” or “hereAFter.” Thus, multi- syllable words often serve as a clue to meter. There are other ways to arrange English verse. Aside from the iambic foot, the next most common foot is the “trochaic” foot. The trochaic foot simply reverses the pattern of the iambic foot and so is one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: DAduh. Here is the first line of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven:”

\ U \ U \ U \ U Once upon a midnight dreary \ U \ U \ U \ U While I pondered weak and weary

This is trochaic “tetrameter” because there are four feet instead of five. The lines should sound like this: DAduh DAduh DAduh DAduh:

ONCE upON a MIDnight DREAry WHILE i PONdered WEAK and WEAry

Notice that the stress here comes on the first syllable of the two-syllable “foot” rather than on the second as it does in an iambic line. Note again that multi-syllable words can only be stressed according to standard English pronunciation; “dreary” cannot be read as dreaRY or “pondered” as ponDERED. Finally, note that the full trochaic tetrameter line is only eight syllables long rather than the ten syllables of iambic pentameter. There are other kinds of meter, including lines with more or fewer feet and feet with three syllables rather than two. However, this brief introduction to English meter should help with much of the poetry we will read over the next two semesters. Though Shakespeare did not invent blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, he certainly raised the standard for its use over the course of his career. As Shakespeare’s poetic skills developed, his use of the blank verse line became far more natural and supple. In his early plays, Shakespeare uses blank verse in the same way Marlowe and other earlier playwrights had: most of his lines are “end-stopped,” meaning

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phrases and sentences tend in these plays to be of the same length as the lines themselves. Phrases and sentences end when the line ends. Consider the following lines from the opening speech of Richard III, one of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. Richard laments how England has passed from an earlier time of heroic, manly warfare to a time of effeminate peace and civility:

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our bruised arms hung up for monuments, Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front, And now—instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries— He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. (I.i.3-13)

Notice that most of the lines end with a period or a comma. The absence of internal punctuation indicates that none of the lines has any internal pauses or breaks. The language is ornate, full of rhetorically-balanced antitheses (stern alarums v. merry meetings, dreadful marches v. delightful measures), and on the whole sounds stiff and artificial to the modern ear. Now consider Hamlet’s speech from Act V, scene ii, when he explains to Horatio the origin of his suspicion that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were taking him to England to be executed:

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly— And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will— (V.ii.4-11)

Notice the frequency of punctuation within the lines. Five of the eight lines have some form of internal punctuation including two periods, or “full stops,” that come near the ends of the second and third lines. Only two of the lines have any punctuation at the end of the line, making most of the lines “enjambed,” or running over from one line to the next. The language here is also simpler, less ornate or self-consciously poetic. There are not balanced antitheses or other rhetorical fireworks. The effect is far more realistic and natural. Shakespeare, unlike his predecessors, creates plays that are a mixture of prose and poetry. Shakespeare uses shifts between prose and poetry to indicate shifts in subject matter and emotion. Lower-class characters (like the gravedigging Clowns of V.i) or fools (like the foppish courtier Osric in V.ii) generally speak in prose, as do the higher-class characters when they are expressing “low” sentiments or speaking to low

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characters. Characters shift into verse when they are expressing deep or lofty ideas. All of the soliloquys, for example, are in verse. The use Shakespeare makes of these shifts is a strong indication that Shakespeare’s audience, unlike most modern audiences, could hear the shift from iambic pentameter to prose, and thus the shift could be used to underline a change in emotional tone. Hamlet’s Character

Given Shakespeare’s fascination with character and his deep awareness and use of the Bible (a 1993 catalogue of biblical quotations, allusions, and echoes in Shakespeare’s plays runs to three volumes), it is not surprising that Shakespeare takes a very biblical approach to character development. His characters change and grow on stage.

Hamlet returns from his sea voyage transformed. The intense, inward, skeptical, and ironic Hamlet of the first four acts, the Hamlet who busies himself devising plots and stratagems to avenge his father’s murder, is a different man when he returns to Denmark. (In Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film version of Hamlet, Branagh underlines the change by having the “post-transformation” Hamlet appear dressed in dazzling white, having worn black through the first four acts.) The speech quoted above from V.ii marks the change. Hamlet suddenly becomes a man who believes in the power of God’s providence to protect him and to avenge his father’s murder. When Horatio warns Hamlet that Laertes’ challenge may be a trap, Hamlet responds by assuring Horatio that he does not fear death because God’s plans cannot be altered by evil plots: “There’s a special providence,” Hamlet says, even “in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all” (V.ii.157-160). Hamlet, in other words, no longer needs to work out any plan for revenge, but can simply wait for God to provide the opportunity for open, public revenge. That opportunity comes in the last scene of the play when Hamlet faces Laertes, and, by proxy, Claudius himself. Works Cited Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Comedies. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993. ---. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s History Plays. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1989. ---. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987. Recommended: Bate, Jonathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human Honan, Park. Shakespeare: A Life. New York, Oxford UP, 1999. Marx, Steven. Shakespeare and the Bible. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

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John Milton’s Paradise Lost Introduction General Introduction

John Milton was born in London in 1608, a few years before Shakespeare retired to Stratford. Milton’s father was a wealthy merchant who spent generously to ensure that his sons John and Christopher had the best possible education. Milton enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge, intending (like most college students of his day) to become an Anglican clergyman. Milton does not seem to have gotten along very well with his fellow students, many of whom were younger sons of the nobility entering a religious vocation for lack of any other means of self- support. In Milton’s judgment, these were not pious men, but “lewd hirelings” who entered the Anglican Church not out of love for God but out of desire for money. Milton developed a strong dislike for the Anglican Church, Anglican clergymen, and the nobility which would, together with his prodigious reading in the Bible, turn him in a more sharply reformed direction.

Milton was notorious for his study habits, which often kept him up until the early hours of the morning. According to Milton’s brother Christopher "When he [John] went to Schoole, when he was very young he studied very hard and sate-up very late, commonly till 12 or one a clock at night." After the age of twelve, the young Milton "rarely retired to bed from my studies until midnight.” Upon graduation, rather than entering the Anglican Church with most of his classmates, Milton retired to a country estate to study for five more years, then took a lengthy tour of France and Italy. By the time his education was completed, Milton knew the classical writers more completely than any other man of his time. He spoke and wrote Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, and German. His intellect was stupendous.

When Milton returned to England, however, it was not to continue his studies. Already the Puritan Revolution was underway and Milton was caught up in the excitement. He began writing political pamphlets, most of them vigorous intellectual defenses of Puritan theology and politics. By 1649, Milton was appointed the “Secretary for Foreign Tongues” for Oliver Cromwell, specializing in Latin correspondence with other nations. Milton went blind in 1652, the same year his first wife died. He dictated his writings (including Paradise Lost) to literary secretaries for the rest of his life.

After the Restoration, Milton went into hiding. He was found, arrested, imprisoned, and nearly executed. Even after his release, Milton was in fear of assassination. His political writings had made him many powerful enemies. Under these inauspicious circumstances—blind, exiled, poor, and in danger of his life—that Milton wrote his masterpiece, Paradise Lost.

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Despite his political involvements, Milton had from a very early age desired to become the great English poet and had trained himself well for the task, reading nearly everything available in Greek, Hebrew, or Latin, especially the Bible, Homer, and Virgil. Like many great poets before and after him, Milton understood the crowning achievement of any poetic career to be the creation of an epic, which was understood to be the loftiest and most noble of all poetic forms. But despite borrowing a traditionally classical form, Milton would reject classical subject matter. Milton insists instead that his subject: “Man’s first disobedience,” was a subject

Not less but more heroic than the wrath Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused; Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s that so long Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea’s son . . . (IX.12-19)

In this passage, Milton alludes to the three great classical epics: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, but insists that his Biblical subject was far more elevated than those chosen by the great poets of the past. Milton uses, but constantly undercuts, the classical tradition, either denouncing it as lies or subordinating it to the Christian tradition. In his invocation in Book I, Milton announces that his poem “with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th’Aonian mount” (I. 14-16). This “Aonian mount” is Helicon, the traditional home of the Muses, the goddesses who supposedly inspired Homer and Virgil. When Milton does include classical material, he compares it unfavorably with his own material. For example, when Satan looks about him and sees the beauty of Eden, Milton tells us with a series of “nots” and “nors” how Eden surpasses all the gardens of classical literature: “Not that fair field / of Enna . . . / … nor that sweet grove / of Daphne . . . / …Might with this Paradise of Eden strive / nor that Nyseian isle . . . / … Nor where Abbasin kings their issue guard, Mount Amara” (IV.267-281). View of God

Though Milton’s representation of God is in most respects orthodox, most readers come away from Paradise Lost unimpressed with God as a character. In the books in which God the Father appears, particularly Book III, He sounds petulant, long-winded, self-defensive, and disturbingly passive in the face of events taking place on Earth. The Father expends a great deal of rhetorical energy defending the laissez- faire policy He takes with respect to the fall: God watches without intervening as Satan convinces Eve to commit the first sin. In fact, Milton insists at many points in the epic that Satan does nothing without God’s leave. Still, given God’s refusal to intervene in man’s fall despite foreseeing it and Milton’s stated purpose to “justify the ways of God to

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men,” Milton needs to allow God to explain himself; in a long dialogue between the Father and the Son, the Father defends himself at length. The points God makes are of great theological importance to the full argument of Paradise Lost, but they make for a dull interlude between the dynamic excitement of Books II and IV. Even if one agrees with Milton’s theology, God the Father comes off as colorless, long-winded, and static, particularly when compared to the Satan who has absorbed our interest for the first two books of Paradise Lost.

There is some scholarly debate over Milton’s religious views, especially with regard to the trinity. The Christian Doctrine (not published until 1825) is supposedly Milton’s most systematic statement of his own theology, though his authorship of this work has not been fully established. The Christian Doctrine makes the unorthodox claim that the Son and the Spirit are subordinate to the Father, a position some claim to have detected in Milton’s work. Others, among them C.S. Lewis, argue for Milton’s orthodoxy on this question. View of Man

Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” makes much of God’s having given Adam and Eve reason and free will. When, in Books V through VIII Raphael explains God’s full plan to Adam and warns him of Satan’s approach, he sets out Milton’s doctrine of the necessity for Adam and Eve to choose obedience:

That thou art happy, owe to God; That thou continu’st such, owe to thyself, That is, to thy obedience; therein stand. . . . God made thee perfect, not immutable; And good he made thee, but to persevere He left it in thy power, ordain’d thy will By nature free . . . (V.520-529)

Milton’s God wants free worship and love from Adam and Eve, not enforced or fated obedience. Otherwise, their love for God would simply be an unalterable, robotic response to necessity, meaning nothing.

Given Milton’s stress on man’s freedom before the Fall to choose good or evil, it would seem strange for him to adapt a Calvinist position toward man after the Fall, denying him any freedom of will whatsoever. Milton’s position on the absolute fallen-ness of postlapsarian man is a subject of some scholarly debate, but it is clear that Milton intends for Adam and Eve’s personal responsibility for their own damnation to be representative of the position of every man before God.

The God who gives man freedom of choice invests him with reason to make that choice possible. Milton shows that reason is a powerful force in Eden by giving many examples of unfallen reason at work. Consider, for example, Adam’s first speech to Eve, overheard by Satan in Book IV. Adam looks around him at the bounty of Eden, then sets his reason to work:

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. . . needs must the power That made us, and for us this ample world, Be infinitely good, and of his good As liberal and free as infinite, That raised us from the dust and placed us here In all this happiness, who at his hand Have nothing merited, nor can perform Aught of which he hath need . . . (IV. 412-419)

Adam is led by his observation of the natural world toward a deep and accurate knowledge of the character of the creator. He thus embodies unfallen reason, observing the natural world and inferring the character of God from his observations. Armed with this reason, man is capable of recognizing the traps of Satan, if only because they will be at odds with God’s sole command, what Adam calls “this one, this easy charge:” do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Of course, as Raphael warns Adam, reason can fail, but it does so only in the face of deceptive appearances, which do not exist in Eden until Satan arrives. Eve’s reason is subverted by Satan’s disguise as a serpent possessing human wisdom and speech. Of course, even if reason fails, Adam and Eve can always fall back on obedience. Warning that Satan will attempt to lead them into sin, Raphael in Book VIII leaves Adam with this stern admonition: “God has done his part, you do yours.”

The marriage of Adam and Eve is a hierarchy with Adam unequivocally in charge. Satan, viewing the pair for the first time, notes that everything about Adam’s appearance declares “absolute rule,” and everything about Eve’s appearance suggests “subjection.” Difference in gender implies different levels of authority within the marriage relationship based on different levels of intimacy with God:

Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed; For contemplation he and valor formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace; He for God only, she for God in him. (IV.296-299)

Milton’s insistence on a gender-based authority system in the unfallen marriage relationship has attracted criticism from modern feminists, but his views on marriage were considered quite radical in his own day, particularly in his ideal of companionate marriage, a relationship based not on economics, family politics, or sexual convenience, but on what Shakespeare had, a generation earlier, called a “marriage of true minds.” The conversations between Adam and Eve in Eden, especially at the beginning of Book IX, suggest that their pairing is an “intellectual and spiritual partnership” and that they genuinely enjoy one another’s company. Milton’s views on sex were also controversial. His insistence that sexual pleasure is at the center of the unfallen marriage contradicts the teachings of some church fathers on sexuality even within marriage as “a necessary evil.”

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One of Milton’s most consistent themes in Paradise Lost is that the mind makes its own place. Though Milton treats Heaven, Paradise, and Hell, as very real geographic locations, they are also psychological states, reflecting the Renaissance fascination with man’s imagination and internal world. Satan repeatedly expresses this idea, discovering that his “escape” from Hell has not freed him from his own hellish internal state. For example, as Satan enters Paradise for the first time in Book IV, he is momentarily enchanted by the beauty there, but is immediately returned to his emotional misery:

…Horror and doubt distract His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir The Hell within him; for within him Hell He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place. (IV. 18-23)

Satan’s entry into Paradise brings him no joy because he carries Hell within him. Satan will later lament: “Which way I fly am Hell; myself am Hell . . . “(IV.75).

The disorderliness of Satan’s internal world becomes outwardly visible when he thinks he is unobserved by others. His soliloquies, for example, show his internal divisions as he argues with and contradicts himself. During one of these soliloquies, he is discovered in Eden by the guardian angel Uriel when Satan’s undisguised face shows the changing passions within him: “Thus while he spake, each passion dimmed his face,/ Thrice changed with pale—ire, envy, and despair;/ Which marred his borrowed visage, and betrayed/ Him counterfeit if any eye beheld” (IV.114-116). Such passions move neither the angels nor Adam and Eve, who, while experiencing emotion, are under the control of reason while in their unfallen state.

After their fall, Adam and Eve will experience this same disordered internal state and Milton will make explicit the comparison between the external and internal fall.

They sat them down to weep; nor only tears Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate, Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore Their inward state of mind, calm region once And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent. . . (IX.1121-1126)

Thus, though they have not yet been cast out of Eden, they are experiencing Hell internally. But if the fallen psyche becomes its own Hell, so too can the redeemed psyche become its own Heaven. The archangel Michael, sent by God to explain to Adam the consequences of his sin in Books XI and XII, assures Adam that, through the presence of the Spirit and the practice of Christian virtues, he and his progeny shall “possess / a paradise within thee happier far” (XII.586-7).

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It has been argued that Satan is the real hero of the epic because of his heroic qualities. He is defiant, independent, and active, defying impossible odds to take revenge on God. He thus embodies many of the character qualities of heroes in the classical tradition, particularly in seeking after his own glory. Just before he deceives Eve, Satan congratulates himself and reveals his own primary motivation in destroying Man:

To me shall be the sole glory among The infernal Powers, in one day to have marred What he, Almighty styled, six nights and days Continued making . . . (IX.135-138).

When Satan returns to Hell, he boasts of having accomplished the corruption of Man and Earth armed only with an apple. Such boasting and self-seeking are characteristic of classical heroes like Achilles or Odysseus. It is little wonder that many readers of Paradise Lost, particularly those best-versed in the classical tradition, have found much to admire in Satan.

However, such readers ignore Milton’s apparent rejection of Satan’s heroism. Milton undercuts Satan’s independence by reminding readers that Satan is always under God’s supervision. For example, just before Satan pulls himself out of Hell’s lake of fire in Book I, Milton describes his stupendous size, then immediately notes that Satan only rises from the lake because God permits it.

So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay Chain’d on the burning Lake, nor ever thence Had ris’n or heav’d his head, but that the will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others, and enrag’d might see How all his malice serv’d but to bring forth Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shown On man by him seduc’t, but on himself Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour’d. (I. 209-220)

The passage also shows a second Miltonic theme which undercuts Satan’s heroism; Milton insists that Satan’s actions only make his own state worse and advance God’s plan. Satan believes himself an independent operator. Milton shows that Satan’s self-understanding is mistaken. He works for God despite himself, unleashing a flood of love and mercy shown toward man that thwarts all of his plans.

Finally, Milton insists, along with many other writers in the Christian tradition, that Christianity changes the very nature of what constitutes heroic action. In the invocation that begins Book IX, Milton rejects the warlike heroism of the older epics, lamenting that the “better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom” (IX.31-32) have been

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ignored by earlier writers. The Archangel Michael, as he explains the future to Adam in Book XI, likewise reflects with disapproval on the values of the warlike ages to come:

For in those days Might only shall be admir’d, And Valor and Heroic Virtue call’d; To overcome in Battle, and subdue Nations, and bring home spoils with infinite Man-slaughter, shall be held the highest pitch Of human Glory, and for Glory done Of triumph, to be styl’d Great Conquerors, Patrons of Mankind, Gods, Sons of Gods, Destroyers rightlier call’d and Plagues of men. Thus Fame shall be achieved, renown on Earth, And what most merits fame in silence hid. (XI. 689-697)

The final line shows the Archangel’s true attitude toward such heroism, which Milton rightly understands as unbiblical. View of the World

Milton’s universe is a hierarchy, with Hell at the bottom, Chaos a bit higher, then Earth still higher. The Earth is suspended by a golden chain from Heaven, which sits at the top of creation. Satan traverses much of this space during his “escape” from Hell in Book II. This cosmic hierarchy is reflected at every level of the creation, from Man’s relationship to the animals, to Adam’s relation to Eve, and finally to the internal world of Adam and Eve, where, ideally, reason reigns supreme over “fancy” or “imagination.” When this hierarchy is subverted or overturned, trouble results.

Satan’s rebellion against God is an offense against this hierarchical structure of the universe. Satan, unsatisfied with his place as the brightest angel in Heaven, aspires to move still higher on the scale of being and usurp the place of God. His disrespect for hierarchy is part of Satan’s fallen nature, on display in his escape from Hell, his proper place, and his entrance into Paradise, where he does not belong. Satan is also willing to move down on the chain when it is necessary in order to execute his revenge. He voluntarily takes the form of a serpent, though he recognizes that he is demeaning himself:

O foul descent! That I, who erst contended With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained Into a beast, and, mixed with bestial slime, This essence to incarnate and imbrute, That to the height of deity aspired. (IX.163-167)

Eve’s offense is essentially the same as Satan’s. He seduces her by appealing to her desire to move out of her assigned place in the Great Chain of Being. “Look at me,” Satan says. “I ate and gained the powers of reason and speech, denied to all the other animals. Just imagine what will happen to you.” Eve reasons that if the serpent ate and achieved

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speech and reason, faculties hitherto reserved to man, then she will likewise rise to possess faculties hitherto reserved to God. Adam’s fall differs only slightly. He puts his desire to remain with Eve ahead of his desire to be obedient to God. A central theme of Paradise Lost involves the meaning of human history and its relationship to God’s providential purposes. This issue must have been much on Milton’s mind during his last years as he saw all that he had worked for overturned and himself in poverty and disgrace, blind, poor, and in constant danger of imprisonment, execution, or assassination. In spite of all this, Milton, like all writers in the biblical tradition, affirms that history has a purpose, though that purpose is not always visible to men. Before Adam and Eve are cast out of Paradise, God sends the Archangel Michael to show to them a pageant of human history. Adam sees firsthand the terrible consequences of his sin for his offspring, but after hearing about Christ’s atoning sacrifice for the sins of all men, including his own, Adam exclaims:

O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By mee done and occasion’d, or rejoice Much more, that much more good therof shall spring, To God more glory, more good will to Men From God, and over wrath grace shall abound. (XII.469-478)

Satan’s sin and man’s sin have thus only increased the outpouring of God’s love on his people. Sin cannot ultimately subvert the purposes of God, and all creatures, including Satan, ultimately serve his plans. Michael goes on to explain that after the final judgment God will create “New Heav’ns, [and a] new Earth, Ages of endless date / Founded in righteousness and peace and love” (XII.549-550). Artistic /Aesthetic

Paradise Lost is the most respected, admired, and hated poem in the English language. It has evoked both admiration and denunciation, occasionally both at once. Samuel Johnson, one of Milton's first critics, begins his essay on Paradise Lost by admitting that in regards to its design, Paradise Lost is the finest production of the human mind. Later in his essay, Johnson writes that "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions." In Milton's defense, much the same is said of the Bible.

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Most readers will agree with Johnson’s complaint about the difficulty of Milton’s style; his biblical and classical allusions, his use of neologisms (newly invented words), creative misspellings, and Latinate syntax make demands on readers that require an abundance of explanatory footnotes in most editions. Despite these difficulties, most readers have been able to understand Paradise Lost sufficiently to have made it one of the most popular inspirational Christian works in history. Through the nineteenth century, almost any Christian home in England would have possessed a copy of this marvelous work, and it still inspires readers today.

Milton was not only aware of his singularity, he was proud of it. A lifelong rebel against complacency and tradition, Milton considered his departures from traditional poetic practice an example of poetic heroism. For example, though Milton did not invent blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentamenter) he uses (it was introduced into English in 1554 in a translation of Virgil), he defends the relatively new form. In a letter appended to the second edition of Paradise Lost, Milton identifies rhyme as “the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter.” The reader, says Milton, should therefore consider the blank verse of Paradise Lost as “an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic [poetry] from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.” Paradise Lost can be usefully viewed as an example of the baroque style in literature. It is the most dynamic poem in English, frequently shifting its setting from Earth to Heaven to Hell and its narrative perspective from God to Satan to Adam and Eve to the poet himself. Hardly ten lines pass together in the entire epic that do not have some movement up or down, literal or figurative. Paradise Lost also shares baroque art’s love of elaboration, from its extended similes (some with two tenors and two vehicles), its multiplication of classical allusions and long periodic sentences with tangled diction.