November Reflections

Wan gray skies and a room full of books.

Opening Joseph Epstein's A Literary Education to the title essay,  I almost immediately came across a quotation by Duff Cooper, Britain's one-time ambassador to France, now largely forgotten:

"Had I devoted as much time to my school work as I did to promiscuous reading I might have obtained some scholastic distinction. But I had a stupid idea that hard work at given tasks was degrading."

For myself, I was never afraid of a little hard work, but in college I found it hard to bear down on any specific subject long enough to produce anything worthwhile. Decades later, I haven't changed: roving interests, little accomplishment. Yet I still take pleasure in reading academic works like the ones that we were required to read in college; of course, now I can take my time, read them at my leisure, and drop them at will.

That might explain why I was attracted to a recent acquisition, The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200. It's short and the gray days of November are well suited to medieval study. Also, the title seemed absurd to me and I wanted to see where the author was going to take it. Could anyone possibly believe that prior to 1050, Europeans had no awareness of themselves or their neighbors as individuals but conformed unthinkingly to rigid social norms, like ants? 

It seems Morris does. In his introduction he dismisses the many individualistic elements in Greek culture by citing a single remark of Aristotle that man is a political animal. It would have been more convincing to cite the fertility cults of the Hellenic world, which we know little about because their rituals and beliefs were secret. My thoughts took another step backward, to the most popular book of ancient times, The Iliad. It begins with the word "wrath." Achilles is upset because he didn't get the young woman he preferred as a battle prize, and he sulks off to his tent for the first half of the book, indifferent to the outcome of the dire conflict his "people" are in the midst of. He's a striking individual, but not much of a team player.      

And what about Heraclitus's one-liner: "One man is a good as a hundred, if he's the best," or Sappho's deeply personal and erotic love poetry? Or Archilochus, the self-sufficient mercenary soldier, leaning on the only thing he really values: his trusty lance?

No, the Greeks were a profoundly individualistic bunch. They valued their community—their polis—but even here it was one against the other, and the ultimate aim of life was to cut a good figure, stand out from the masses, and be remembered. That was the closest thing anyone could think of to immortality.

Morris is on slightly firmer ground when he suggests that during the dark ages, individualism of this type was replaced by a more socially-minded ethos, yet this view doesn't square with what we know of the people who lived at that time—the Celts. In Celtic society great emphasis was placed on the position one was given at the feasting table following a successful hunt, raid, or battle. If you weren't happy with the spot you'd been given, you might be inclined to challenge one of your comrades who was seated closer to the lord to single combat. To the death. Cheerfully.

No, the dark ages weren't short of individualism. What they largely lacked was literacy—and paper. The bards of the era recited the exploits of heroes, and the lord and his retainers listened, probably imagining that they were no less valorous themselves.

The bond between lord and vassal was often strong, as was the despondency of those who had lost that connection. Here is an early (950?) and famous expression of lonely exile.

THE WANDERER

This lonely traveler longs for grace,

For the mercy of God; grief hangs on

His heart and follows the frost-cold foam

He cuts in the sea, sailing endlessly,

Aimlessly, in exile. Fate has opened

A single port: memory. He sees

His kinsmen slaughtered again, and cries:

“I’ve drunk too many lonely dawns,

 Gray with mourning. Once there were men

To whom my heart could hurry, hot

With open longing. They’re long since dead.

My heart has closed on itself, quietly

Learning that silence is noble and sorrow

Nothing that speech can cure. Sadness

Has never driven sadness off;

Fate blows hardest on a bleeding heart.

So those who thirst for glory smother

Secret weakness and longing, neither

Weep nor sigh nor listen to the sickness

In their souls ...

In short, the dialectic between individual and group is active in every age and era, including our own. We tend to take an interest in those who stand out, rather than merely "acting out." They inspire us, kindle our souls, and give us something to revere and emulate. An important wrinkle is added to this process by the fact that some notable individuals rise above the crowd and inspire others by virtue of their selflessness, social awareness, and compassion rather than their genius or swagger.

Morris would no doubt agree to much of this. The book is more nuanced than the title, which recalled to my mind—and that was perhaps Morris's intention—part II of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which carries the title "The Development of the Individual." Morris simply wants to slide the bar back a few centuries, following the lead of Walter Ullmann (The Individual in Medieval Society, 1966), Charles Haskins (The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 1927), and other scholars of bygone eras whom he mentions in his introduction.

And I was willing to go along with him, in hope of refreshing my memory and learning a few new things about that obscure era along the way. Here are a few of his observations that I found especially interesting:

"It is a remarkable fact that in the first thousand years of the Church's history, years in which death was often close and threatening to most men, the figure of the dead Christ was almost never depicted."

"The interesting feature of the development [of personal confession] is that it was an attempt to introduce the idea of self-examination throughout society; at this point, at least, the pursuit of an interior religion did not remain the property of a small "elite," but entered every castle and every hovel in western Europe."

"The revolution of thought in the thirteenth century created, at least in principle, the possibility of a natural and secular outlook, by distinguishing between the realms of nature and super-nature, of nature and grace, of reason and revelation."

All three of these remarks offer insights that would occur only to those who, like Morris, have spent a lifetime examining the relevant material. The first, that the suffering Christ is largely absent from the iconography of the first millennia of Christian history, is, indeed, remarkable. But it seems to underscore the fact (is it a fact?) that Christians of the dark ages had little grasp of the nuances of Christianity, and perhaps more often considered it a talisman for military victory than an avenue to personal salvation.

The second statement, about the rise of personal confession, highlights a theme that Morris seems to be overlooking throughout the book. What he is actually prodding his way toward isn't "the discovery of the individual" or even the discovery of "individuality," but the growing interiority of art, personal expression, and conscience during the period under review.

In the early going it was largely a group interiority, I think, fueled by plainsong and Latin phrases that few of the faithful could understand. And having written these lines, I leap from my dilapidated and uncomfortable office chair and put of CD of the Hilliard Ensemble singing Pérotin onto the stereo. This music dates from the very end of the period Morris is exploring, but it's the earliest I have at hand.

Viredunt omnes fines terrae salutare Dei nostri

It suits this bright November morning.

Hilary and I came upon a striking example of this group interiority when we were in Ireland a few months ago. We drove out from Dingle across empty fields to see the Gallarus Oratory, alleged to be a 7th century structure, though it was probably built five hundred years later. We took it to be a place of worship, but here once again, archaeologists suggest it's more likely to be a refuge built for pilgrims and other passing strangers. There isn't much room or light inside.

Morris's the third statement refers to St. Thomas's complex analysis and differentiation of the natural (Aristotelean) and supernatural (Christian) realms. He claims that Aquinas thereby "created the possibility of a natural and secular outlook."  Yet very few individuals read St. Thomas Aquinas during the middle ages or at any time since, and people have always known that nature is all around them. The interesting question in this or in any age is: in which direction, if any, do individuals move beyond that secular view? Toward magic, witchcraft, and science? Toward spiritual devotion and service to a higher end? Toward superstition and ancestor worship?

In later chapters Morris reviews the literary heritage of the era. It quickly becomes obvious that he doesn't think much of the troubadours, who often celebrated their love for seemingly unattainable females. In an interesting aside, he analyses the marriage contracts of the day, finding them typically shaky and often revoked or annulled as property changed hands and political alliances were made and broken. In such a context, the celebration of fin amor and the proffering of elaborate praise for a "high-born" woman considered in her own right, might be taken as a breakthrough in the "discovery of the individual" with profound gender implications. Yet Morris refers to the works of the troubadours as "brittle"—twice in a single paragraph! And he suggests in the introduction that they have been given far more attention than they deserve. Hmmm. I wonder if he prefers the French fabliaux, those bawdy, primitive tales of cruelty, cuckoldry, chicanery, and obscenity.  

Morris finds the expressions of friendship between monks more interesting than the amorous expostulations of the troubadours, though he has the perspicacity to observe that the sentiments expressed in espousals of friendship were often lifted from De Amicitas, Cicero's treatise on friendship. He also notes that such friendships were often merely epistolary. The men who cultivated them rarely met one another face to face.

Reaching the conclusion to this short work, I cringed to find Morris clinging to the inadequate phrase with which he began, "the discovery of the individual." He writes:
"The discovery of the individual was one of the most important cultural developments in the years between 1050 and 1200."

In fact, Morris is tracking the development of interiority, reflection, exuberant love and shared private space. Farther on in his concluding chapter Morris describes this cultural development, more astutely, as "a concern with self- discovery; an interest in the relations between people, and in the role of the individual within society; an assessment of people by their inner intentions rather than by their external acts."  

Well put.

Morris might have advanced his case more forcefully by offering a few points of contrast. Once I'd finished the book, I was moved to take another look at the Icelandic sagas, which are focused almost entirely on individuals, but unfold within a world that has little interiority. Here is a typical passage, less gruesome than some:

"Sel cast off his burden and lunged with a bear-hunter's knife at Halfdan, who parried with his sword and sliced the knife handle in two, cutting off all the fingers of one of Sel's hands as well. Sel picked up a rock and flung it at Halfdan, but he dodged out of its path and, getting close enough to Sel, managed to take a grip on the tooth jutting from his snout. Sel started away so violently that the tooth came out, and Halfdan gave him such a blow on the nose with it that it broke both the nose and the whole row of front teeth. The giant looked like nothing on earth—apart from himself, that is."

I then pulled an anthology of medieval philosophical works from the shelf and was lucky enough to hit upon exactly what I was looking for—Peter Abélard's analysis of whether an act or the intention to commit that act constitutes the sin. It's pretty dry stuff, I didn't get far, and soon enough it all began to sound casuistic.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that the author had entirely overlooked Marie de France, whose fables fall squarely within the period he's describing. More elevated than the fabliaux and more richly symbolic than many of the troubadour lyrics, Marie's narratives occupy a zone of expression well worth examining.  

But it would hardly be fair to praise someone for the brevity of his work and then criticize him for the things he's left out.