Abstract
So far, to some degree I have posed the question of what philosophy would look like if it were a person, from a humanist point of view; of what its moods and aspects would be; and what would be its general attitudes to life. I have maintained that philosophy would be a melancholic person, sad enough in the face of human mortality and folly, but one inclined to laughter over tears, contemplative but not morose. Philosophy would be wide ranging and material in his or her interests, and practical, not taken up with abstruse considerations. Philosophy would be critical in his or her disposition, but mostly genially and ebulliently so. I have proposed different models for describing this personality, fleshed out as real people but, in fact, somewhat more like the artistic figurines of Aesop adorning the title page of his Fables. Now I propose to examine philosophy as if it were a thing, or, more precisely, a contained space, or a framework if you will. Bearing in mind Saint Augustine’s conceit of the human anatomy, this chapter will look for the shape of philosophical contemplation through that structure, not literally, but as a formal artistic conception or an organizing principle. The idea is suggested by the humoral opposition of Democritus and Heraclitus, which was used in the Renaissance to define the world as a physical entity made up of nonphysical moods and dispositions.
Herein specially consisteth our senses’ defect and abuse, that those organical parts which to the mind are ordained ambassadors, do not their message as they ought, but by some misdiet or misgovernment being distempered, fail in their report, and deliver up nothing but lies and fables.
Thomas Nashe, Terrors of the Night (217)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
A. Alvarez, “Let Me Sleep On It: Creativity and the Dynamics of Dreaming,” Times Literary Supplement No. 4786 (December 23, 1994): 14.
Virginia W. Callahan, “The De Copia: The Bounteous Horn,” in Essays on the Works of Erasmus, ed. Richard I. DeMolen (New Haven: Yale, 1978), 108, links Alciato’s emblem of two cornucopias flanking a caduceus to rhetorical “Double Copia.” A similar emblem in Wither, with the motto “Good-fortune, will by those abide,/In whome, True-vertue doth reside,” has this epigram: “The Sages old, by this Mercurian-wand/(Caduceus nam’d) were wont to understand/Art, Wisedome, Vertue, and what else we finde,/Reputed for edowments of the Minde” (2.26). An emblem of night and blindness, with a bespectacled owl between torches and candles in broad daylight, standing for the owl’s blindness in daylight, concludes: “For, what are lights to those, who blinded bee?/Or, who so blinde, as they that will not see?” (4.45). For emblematics of night and contemplation, see also Valerianus 46.20, 493C; 53.12, 562F.
Du Bartas reveals humanist interest in such symbols; for example, the “forkéd Y” (Les Semaines 1.5.871), the letter of moral choice thought to be represented by natural forms, such as the flights of cranes and geese. Browne discusses the moral function of this symbol in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica (oddly, in connection with questions of errors about Diogenes’ tub and Christ’s cross—presumably both as moral or symbolic objects): “We should be too critical to question the letter Y, or bicornus element of Pythagoras, that is, the making of the horns equal: or the left less then the right, and so destroying the Symbolical intent of the figure; confounding the narrow line of Vertue, with the larger road of Vice; answerable unto the narrow door of Heaven, and the ample gates of Hell, expressed by our Saviour, and not forgotten by Homer, in that Epithete of Pluto’s house” (378). This safe approach to Pythagorean symbolism, which explains why the left side of the letter “Y” is more pronounced than the right in typography, is relevant to the dualities considered in this chapter. Justus Lawler, The Celestial Pantomime: Poetic Structures of Transcendence (New Haven: Yale, 1979), 51, cites an analogous passage in Chapman.
Similarly, for Aquinas, “Man cannot understand without images (phantasmata); the image is a similitude of a corporeal thing, but understanding is of universals which are to be abstracted from particulars” (Steadman, Lamb and the Elephant, 132). Steadman (132–3), following Yates’ Art of Memory, links this to the art of memory, which incorporates many particular images; Yates says: “ … principles of artificial memory, as understood in the Middle Ages, would stimulate the intense visualization of many similitudes in the intense effort to hold in memory the scheme of salvation, and the complex network of virtues and vices and their rewards and punishments … ” (Lamb and the Elephant, 133). William Perkins, The Art of Prophesying, The Works of William Perkins (Abingdon, England: Sutton Courtenay, 1970), 344, dismisses the “animation of the image” in fiction and everyday life. Taking up the quasi-Pythagorean quality of memory, he warns Protestant preachers against memorizing by imprint of memory, for it contains something of the lascivious power of trifling wit and fables (344ff.). Thus, when Hamlet swears to imprint only the Ghost’s words in his book of memory, he professes to make an image of an image that is against the spirit of Perkins’ form of religious iconoclasm, not to mention his own ambivalence about art.
Hesiod’s land of the dead is haunted by Night, Sleep, and Death and enclosed by great the “glistening gates and threshold of natural bronze set/Fast and immovable” (Theogony, 736ff., 768ff., 807ff.; trans. Daryl Hine, Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns [Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005], 80).
Howard Clarke, ed., Virgil’s Aeneid in the Dryden Translation (University Park, PA, 1989), 178.
Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, 1901), 622, encapsulates the ancient wit: “This whim depends on two Greek puns; the Greek for horn is keras, and the verb krano or karanoo means ‘to bring to an issue,’ ‘to fulfil;’ so again elephas is ivory, and the verb elephairo means ‘to cheat,’ ‘to deceive.’ The verb kraino, however, is derived from kra, ‘the head,’ and means ‘to bring to a head;’ and the verb elephairo is akin to elaăchus, ‘small.’ ”
Erasmus praises this dialogue in a letter to Christopher Urswick: “You’ll find in it Gallus the cock conversing with the cobbler more comically than any professional jester could, but with more sense, none the less, than the herd of theologians and philosophers often show when they dispute in the schools with great pomposity about great trivialities” (trans. Robert Parker, in English Humanism Wyatt to Cowley, ed. Joanna Martindale [London: Croom Helm, 1985], 115).
Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Oxford, 2002), 2.
Saint Basil, Exegetic Homilies, trans. Sister Agnes Clare Way (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1963), Homily 5, 80–1.
The quotation is from a marginal gloss in Sylvester’s translation of Les Semaines, 169. The other famous antecedent of Du Bartas’ Cave of Sleep is Boccaccio’s House of Sleep in the Genealogia Deorum 1.31 (1494; reprint, New York: Garland, 1976), 15. Boccaccio stresses the mixture of “false future things with true”: There is before the Cimmerians a crater of great depth, a mountain chambered with the rooms of the house of Sleep, into which lodging never may enter orient rays or the light of the sun at its zenith, and it is full of the obscurity of clouds. From the earth is exhaled a silent dawning of doubtful light …. There is neither savage beast nor domesticated, neither branch of tree stirred by the wind nor human tongue; by these forms of language Sleep holds on to a hushed repose. All the while there courses a little river from the rock, which sings with noisy thirst stirred by the singing of the pebbles. The setting is a shrine where the bird of night neither sings nor interrupts the “fields of silence,” and there is no sound of dog barking with dog. In this setting, sleep generates diverse forms of vision. Boccaccio speculates as to why Sleep is the son of Erebus and the Night, as Virgil says, and this leads to moralizing: “Sleep and Repose is called son of the Night because he is made of humid vapours rising from the stomach …. But if we want to know about Sleep and Mortal Repose there will be no difficulty explaining the cause of its parentage. For it is clear enough that when we have lost the warmth of charity and have left the path of reason, it is necessary for us to go to Sleep and lethal and mortal sleep.” See also Chaucer’s House of Fame (66–110), which represents a pageant of literary art in its description of the House. A. S. Cook, “The House of Sleep,” Modern Language Notes 5 (1890): 10–21, lists examples of the House of Sleep from antiquity to the Renaissance.
Cf. Wither, 1:23. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 91n., instances uses of the device in Renaissance art, citing parallels in Bacchus discovering honey and Silenus being stung by wasps. For Phantastes’ chamber, fantasy, and artistic visualization, see Judith Dundas, Pencils Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting (Newark: University of Delaware, 1993), 102–8. Schoenfeldt discusses the Castle of the Body in Book Two of the Faerie Queene, including the Phantastes scene, in a chapter on “Fortifying inwardness: Spenser’s castle of moral health,” 40–73.
The original reads: “Ils volettent sans bruit et semblent proprement/Les atomes legers qu’un confus movement/Tourneboulle sans fin dans le ray qui penettre/en un logis obscure, par un trou de fenestre” (Vocation 495–8). Cf. De Rerum Natura 2.80–141, in which Lucretius describes the motion of dust particles in the sunbeam: “To some extent a small thing may afford an illustration and an imperfect image of great things” (63). Cf. also Polydore Vergil, On Discovery 1.2.2, 39. See Stuart Gillespie’s analysis of the paradoxical aspects of Du Bartas’ use of Lucretius’ philosophy in “Lucretius in the English Renaissance,” in Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2007), 242–53. See also V. K. Whitaker, “Du Bartas’ use of Lucretius,” Studies in Philology, 33 (1936): 134–46.
See John Carey, ed., Complete Shorter Poems (London: Longman, 1968), 140 n., for the identification of these poems with Du Bartas; of special relevance, though not mentioned by Carey, is this portraiture of sleep and dreams in Il Penseroso: “There in close covert by some brook,/Where no profaner eye may look,/Hide me from the day’s garish eye,/While the bee with honeyed thigh,/That at her flowery work doth sing,/And the waters murmuring/With such consort as they keep,/Entice the dewy-feathered Sleep;/And let some strange mysterious dream,/Wave at his wings in airy stream,/Of lively portraiture displayed,/Softly on my eyelids laid” (139–49).
Henry More, Democritus Platonissans (1646; reprint, introd. P. G. Stanwood, Los Angeles, 1968), 1–18. On the incompatibility of More’s Democritean world view with his Platonic world view and his attempts to reconcile them, see Stanwood’s introduction. For discussion of More’s appropriation of atomism, see Dick, 50ff.
Alfred Einstein, “Some Musical Representations of the Temperaments,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1 (1937): 177–80.
Copyright information
© 2012 John L. Lepage
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lepage, J.L. (2012). Divine Madness, Literary Fancy, and Dreams. In: The Revival of Antique Philosophy in the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316660_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316660_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44832-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31666-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)