François de Selignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Ordained in the French Catholic Church in 1675, François de Selignac de la Mothe-Fénelon served as tutor to the seven-year-old Duke of Burgundy, grandson of Louis XIV. He fell from favor after the publication in 1697 of his Maxims of the Saints on the Inner Life, in which he argued that the highest practice of Christianity consists of a prolonged noetic apprehension of the Holy Spirit, leading to a life of contemplation not action with no expectation of divine reward or punishment. Given the clear Gospel command to spread the Gospel (“faith without works is dead”) and the equally clear promise of eternal reward, it would have been difficult for the Catholic Church not to condemn the work, which it did in 1699. The same year saw the unauthorized publication of Telemachus, which Professor Riley calls “the most read literary work in eighteenth-century France (after the Bible),” a success that infuriating the Sun King, who rightly considered it an unsparing critique of absolute monarchism generally and of his own rule in particular. More than a period piece, it became a favorite of the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who incorporated many of its themes in his Emile. As Riley remarks, Fénelon’s resolute rejection of what’s now called ‘eudaimonism’ in morality would find its most rigorous expression in the theory of Immanuel Kant.
Contemporaries of Fénelon would have regarded the Telemachus as a historical novel insofar as they took the Homeric heroes to have been real persons, even as they declined to worship the gods of the Greek pantheon. The story begins with goddess-nymph Calypso, who “remained inconsolable for the departure of Ulysses,” her lover of seven years, whom she had permitted to leave her island only after receiving a command from Jupiter to let him go (I.1). Her very immortality worsened her melancholy, which now seemed likely to endure forever. Her mood brightened when she saw Telemachus, shipwrecked on her island, accompanied by the elderly Mentor, his friend and adviser in his voyages in search of his father. Mentor is really Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, whom Calypso doesn’t recognize because “the superior gods conceal whatever they please from the inferior deities” (I.4). As superior gods are to lesser ones, gods generally are to mortals; Calypso herself conceals “the joy in her heart” at seeing the young man, “so much the image of his father” (I.4). “Come to my habitation, where I will receive you as my own son; come, you will be my consolation in this solitude, I will crown you with happiness, provided you know how to enjoy it” (I.5) Admiring “the splendor of her beauty,” Telemachus readily follows her, followed by “Mentor, with down-cast eyes” (I.5). Mentor’s foreboding will prove correct.
Decorated entirely with natural objects, Calypso’s grotto contains no artifacts other than clothing, articles of bodily adornment; she is a nature-deity, even as eudaimonism is a naturalistic form of ethics. Telemachus himself is given over to natural sentiments—first for Calypso, then for a white tunic and a purple robe embroidered with gold—royal colors—Calypso has laid out for him. He “surveyed this magnificence with those emotions of pleasure so natural to the mind of youth” (I.6). Mentor disapproves, appealing to logos and especially to thumos against material eros. “A young man who delights in gaudy ornaments like a weak woman, is unworthy of wisdom and of glory; glory is the portion of that heart alone which can endure affliction, and spurn pleasure with disdain” (V.6). Telemachus protests (“No, no; the son of Ulysses shall never be vanquished by the charms of a base effeminate life”) but Mentor doubts his conviction. “You have more reason to dread [Calypso’s] deceitful caresses than those rocks and shallows on which our vessel was wrecked; shipwreck and death are less fatal than those pleasures that attack virtue,” pleasures to which youth, “presumptuous and self-sufficient in all things,” weak while “believ[ing] itself all-powerful,” tends not to fear (I.7). He exacts a promise “never to take any resolution without first waiting for my advice,” i.e., without submitting to the rule of wisdom (I.7). But mere words will hardly restrain young Telemachus.
Calypso has her own words for him. She laments the “blind passion” of his father, who preferred to reject her promise of immortality and to return “to his miserable country” instead of staying on her island of pleasure (I.8). “Profit by such a melancholy example!” now that you have “nothing more to hope, neither to see him again, nor to reign his successor in the island of Ithaca”; “you here find a divinity ready to make you happy, with a kingdom in your reach” (I.8). She is lying: In the Odyssey, Mercury tells her that Ulysses will return to Ithaca and reunite with “his loved ones,” which must include not only with his wife, Penelope, but Telemachus; if Calypso does not release him, she will feel Zeus’s anger. But of course Telemachus knows nothing of this. Confident that she can deceive the not-so-wily youth, she worries instead about Mentor, in whom she glimpses “something divine” beneath is “appearance” (I.9). An Olympian might well know the real destiny of Ulysses.
The first six books of the Telemachus present this first temptation of the hero, the temptation of sexual eroticism. If considered alongside the Emile, these chapters correspond with Book V, which concerns Emile’s own erotic education, also managed by his ‘mentor,’ the “governor” or tutor. Both Emile and Sophie read the Telemachus and profit from it, although part of Rousseau’s intention is to educate not a future king but a young aristocrat, primarily in the way not to rule in any formal way. Nor does Rousseau avail himself of a deus ex machina; though wise, Emile’s mentor is fully human.
Knowing how much, and how long, men will talk about themselves if what they can say might impress a woman, Calypso has Telemachus tell the story of his adventures and hardships before the shipwreck. With these accounts, Fénelon begins a lesson within the lesson, a teaching on ‘comparative regimes’ parallel to Emile’s travels in the final part of Rousseau’s Book V.
With Mentor’s help, Telemachus escaped a Trojan flotilla only to be captured by Trojans on Sicily. King Alcestes ordered them to be sacrificed to the gods but Mentor stayed the execution by appealing not to the king’s “compassion” but to his “own interest,” warning him of an impending barbarian attack (I.12). When the attack occurred, Alcestes gratefully announced, “I forget that you are Greeks. Our enemies have now become our faithful friends: the gods have sent you to save us from destruction: I expect no less from your valor than the wisdom of your advice; make haste and fly to our assistance.” (I.13). This the battle-ready young man happily did, his “eyes sparked with” the “vivacity of courage as confounds the boldest warriors” (I.13). The combined forces routed the barbarians, a triumph of wisdom and martial valor over hostile savagery. Thus, the first political comparison Fénelon offers is the elementary one between civilization and barbarism, between political life (shared and prized by both Greeks and Trojans, despite their mutual animosity) and the life of the clan.
As a civilized man, the king rewarded Telemachus and Mentor with safe passage out of Sicily on a ship manned by Phoenicians, a people who, “as they carried on an open trade with all the world, had nothing to fear” from any of the rivals in the Trojan War (I.14). There is nonetheless a problem with a commercial regime, the regime that attempts to elide the differences among other regimes on the grounds that every regime needs stuff. Every regime needs a physical place, a geographic location. Phoenicia has a capital city, Tyre, built on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean in today’s Lebanon. The Tyrians were prideful, Telemachus relates; “the riches they had acquired by commerce, and the strength of the impregnable city of Tyre…had inflated the heart of those people” (II.15). King Sesostris of Egypt had imposed a tribute upon them, had provided troops for his rival brother, who had intended to assassinate him. Sesostris prudently made no attempt on Tyre itself but “resolved to interrupt their commerce in all the seas” (II.15). If a commercial regime becomes rich it may become arrogant; if arrogant, it may provoke the anger of one or more nearby regimes, which will undertake to humble it, to bring it to heel, by attacking the source of its wealth, its commercial shipping.
Telemachus had hoped for safe passage to Ithaca. An Egyptian ship intercepted the Phoenician vessel and takes the Greek passengers in the opposite direction, to Egypt, where they could observe the regime of a wise and just monarch, the sort of king Louis XIV should be. In her guise as Mentor, the goddess of wisdom invoked the beatus illi theme: “Happy are the people governed by a sage monarch! They live happy in the midst of abundance, and love him from whom their happiness is derived.” (II.16). This is how you should rule, Telemachus, when you accede to the throne of Ithaca. “Love your subjects as your own children”—as indeed the Aristotelian king does—enjoy “the pleasure of being beloved by them”—not the bodily pleasures of the self-indulgent monarch, who is a tyrant—and “behave in such a manner that they shall never be sensible either of peace or happiness without remembering that it is their good king to whom they owe these rich presents” (II.16). Contra Machiavelli, who deems it better to be feared than loved, because fear is within the prince’s power to inspire, whereas love is reciprocal, offered freely, Mentor teaches that “kings whose sole endeavor is to excite the fear of their subjects, that in being depressed they may become more submissive, are the plagues of the human race” (II.16). Human beings, however oppressed, retain their freedom of will; fear-inspiring monarchs “are hated, detested, and have still more cause to dread their subjects, than their subjects have to be afraid of them” (II.16).
Telemachus, however, is in no more mood to listen to such wise maxims of statecraft than the Machiavellian state-builder Louis XIV proved to be. He despairs of returning to Ithaca. “Let us die, Mentor, we have nothing else to think of; let us die, since the gods have no pity on us” (II.17). ‘Mentor’ knows more about the sentiments of the gods than the mortal does, rebuking him: “Know that you will one day return to Ithaca and see your mother Penelope” and “the invincible Ulysses” himself, “in his pristine glory,” a man “whom adverse fortune never could depress, and whose disasters, still greater than yours, ought to teach you never to despair” (II.17). How ashamed he would be were he to learn that “his son does not know how to imitate either his patience or his courage” (II.17). Mentor thus instructed Telemachus on the true legitimacy of the succession of rule in a monarchic regime: not mere ‘bloodline’ or inheritance but the succession of virtue, which is learned by imitation and not passed on by birth. It is a point that should not have been lost on the Bourbons.
Mentor went on to teach Telemachus about kingship, the good form of monarchy. He “made me remark the joy and abundance that overspread the whole country of Egypt,” a happiness following from “wise policy,” most noticeably “justice exercised in favor of the poor against the rich,” “the proper education of the children” in the virtues of obedience, labor, and sobriety, “the love of arts and literature, and the care with which “ceremonies of religion were performed” (II.17). The wisdom of this set of policies inculcated the moral sentiments of disinterestedness, love of honor, honesty in dealing with men, and reverence for the gods. In making his people happy, the king makes himself “happier still,” finding “his reward in his own virtue,” loved instead of feared, “not only obeyed” but “king of all hearts” (II.17). “Each individual, far from wishing to be rid of his dominion, would lay down his own life for him” (II.17).
King Sesostris gladly met with the two foreigners. Given his fatherly love for his subjects, he considered strangers as persons from whom he “should always learn something useful,” as “the manners and customs of remote countries” might have something in them that could be adapted for the good of Egyptians (II.18). Devoting his days to ruling, and especially to “administering impartial justice” over his subjects, Sesostris accordingly spent his evenings not in self-indulgence, in Phoenician luxury, but in “hearing the discourses of learned men, or in conversing with the most virtuous individuals, whom he well knew how to choose, as companions worthy to be admitted into his familiarity” (II.18). His error consisted in “having triumphed with too much pride over the kings he had vanquished” and in choosing one malicious adviser (II.18).
This adviser, Metophis, “deceitful and corrupt,” “perceived that Mentor’s answers” to the king’s questions “savored more of wisdom than mine”; he “looked upon him with aversion and distrust” since “the wicked are always incensed against the good” (II.19). He separated tutor from pupil with the intention of tricking Telemachus into whatever secret Mentor might be concealing. “He did not really desire to know the truth; but wanted to find some pretext for telling the king that we were Phoenicians, that he might be able to make us his slaves” (II.20). In this he succeeded, which provides Telemachus with an opportunity to draw a lesson intended for the Bourbons, and indeed kings everywhere: “Alas! to what [misrepresentations] a king is exposed! Even the wisest are often deceived.” (II.20). Even a king who sets out to learn from the learned and the good is prey to manipulation by the deceitful and corrupt, who feign learning and goodness.
Separated from Mentor and again despairing, Telemachus, reduced to the status of a shepherd tending Metophis’ sheep, heard a divine voice, admonishing him again to emulate his father. And more, “when thou shalt master of the lives of other men, remember thou thyself hast been as weak, and poor, and miserable as they”; in your compassion, “take pleasure in relieving their burdens” (II.21). In listening to this divine revelation, Telemachus experienced a conversion: “I calmly rose, and kneeling with uplifted hands, adored Minerva, to whom I thought myself indebted for this oracle. At once I found myself a new man; my mind was enlightened by wisdom; and I felt within me an agreeable energy sufficient to moderate all my passions, and restrain the impetuosity of my youth” (II.21. From then on, “my affability, patience, and the exact discharge of my duty appeased at last” even his cruel slave master (II.21). Without being a philosopher, he had “philosophy enough to be satisfied with the sweets of an innocent life” (II.21). Unlike Rousseau’s Emile, however, he lamented the absence of books.
A priest of Apollo gave Telemachus a vocation among the shepherds. Giving him books “to console me,” Termosirus told him the story of Apollo, exiled from Olympus, teaching the arts to shepherds who had “led a brutal and and a savage life” hitherto (II.23). At the same time, Apollo did not ruin them by inducing them to move to a city but “taught the swains to know the charms of a country life, and to enjoy every delight which simple nature can produce” (II.23). Perhaps it takes a god to reconcile civilization and nature; Rousseau is more skeptical of such efforts. “Since you are now in the same station which Apollo filled, cultivate this wild land, like him make the desert flourish, and teach all those shepherds the charms of harmony; soften their savage hearts; display the amiable side of virtue, and make them feel how happy it is to enjoy, amidst their solitude, those innocent pleasures which nothing can deprive them of. One day, my son, one day, the pains and cruel cares that environ royalty, will make you think with regret of a pastoral life, even while you sit upon a throne.” (II.24). That is, a future king is best educated when he is ‘down and out,’ as in that condition he will see and remember the natural standard to be superior to the civil-conventional standard and to the authoritative offices charged with enforcing the laws of the kingdom.
A subsequent Hercules-like act of heroism, protecting the shepherds from an attacking lion, brought Telemachus to the attention of King Sesostris, who recalled him to court, discovered Metophis’ treachery and deceit, jailed him and promised to allow Telemachus to proceed to Ithaca. But the elderly king died and his son “possessed neither his humanity towards strangers, nor his curiosity for the sciences, nor his esteem for virtuous men, nor his love of glory,” nourished as he was “in effeminacy and brutal pride,” “count[ing] men as nothing, believing that they were only made for him, and that he was of another nature than they” (II.26). Unsurprisingly, King Bocchoris released Metophis from prison and confined Telemachus, but after a joint Phoenician-Cyprian naval attack on Egypt the country descended into civil war. The young king, “naturally good” but “poisoned by the flattery of his masters” and “believ[ing] that all things ought to yield to his impetuous desires,” came to behave “like a savage beast” (II.28). Unlike Telemachus, “he had never been taught by ill fortune” (II.28). “Abandoned by his natural good humor, as well as by his rational powers,” he lacked the wisdom Telemachus had come to revere,” lost the loyalty of his best servants, and was overwhelmed by the invaders (II.28). “If I ever reign,” Telemachus tells Calypso, “I shall not forget after so happy an example, that a king is only worthy to command, and happy in his power, in proportion as he himself submits to the restraints of reason” (II.28). Calypso “listened with astonishment to such wise words” (III.29), and particularly at the young man’s self-criticism (II.29). She loves him more intensely still, but in her increased passion she fails to see that he has told her why he will not stay with her.
Saved from the Egyptians by the friendly Phoenicians, Telemachus made the acquaintance of the ship captain, Narbal, a “naturally generous and sincere man,” “touched by my misfortunes” and impressed when he learned he was speaking with the son of Ulysses (III.30). A pious man as well, Narbal acknowledges “that you are beloved by the gods whom I have always served,” whose “pleasure” it is “that I should likewise love you” (III.31). He offers Telemachus advice, on condition that he keep it secret. It happened that Telemachus had acquired this habit, “the foundation of the wisest conduct…without which all other talents are useless,” from his father. Before leaving Ithaca for the Trojan War, Ulysses had told him that “whoever cannot keep his own counsel, is unworthy to govern” (III.31). In the increasingly dangerous household of his mother, Penelope, infested as it was with unworthy suitors in the absence of her husband, Telemachus had the opportunity, not to say the necessity, of learning to keep confidences. That is, Telemachus grew up in a royal household not unlike the one at Versailles, where intriguers were everywhere and one needed to learn whom to trust in order to survive.
Hearing this, Narbal entrusted him with the secret of “the power of the Phoenicians” (III.32). It is true, he says, that the Phoenician navy makes them formidable to “all the neighboring nations”: it is true that they derive their wealth, which “surpasses that of the most flourishing nations,” from their skill at seafaring; it is also true that they “were too rich and powerful to bear patiently the yoke of subjection” under Egypt, and so “recovered our liberty” and then vindicated it thanks to the death of the wise Sesostris and the passing of his power to Bocchoris, “who was totally destitute of wisdom” (III.32). But the ruinous secret is that “while we deliver others, we are slaves ourselves,” ruled by a tyrant, Pygmalion, who “persecutes the rich and fears the poor” (III.32). “Virtue condemns him; he hates and reviles her in return. Everything disturbs, frets, and disquiets him; he is afraid of his shadow, and sleeps neither night nor day: to complete his misery, the gods heap riches upon him which he dares not enjoy. What he seeks in order to be happy is precisely what prevents his being so.” (III.33). “Alone, sad, immured in the most secret part of his palace” for fear of being assassinated, he hides in secret because he cannot trust anyone with his secrets; he is a foreigner to his own human nature, “a stranger to every sweet enjoyment,” including friendship, “the sweetest of all” (III.33). “Fool! not to see that the cruelty, in which he trusts for his safety, will one day prove his ruin!” (III.33). Narbal feared the gods, not men, but he feared the tyrant enough to swear Telemachus to secrecy, telling the young man never to let Pygmalion know that he is the son of Ulysses, as Bocchoris surely would hold him in prison, for ransom. Telemachus followed that advice after landing in Tyre, where he confirmed the accuracy of Narbal’s judgment: Pygmalion “seems to command all other men, and yet has not the command of himself, for he has as many masters and executioners as he has violent desires” (III.34). Comparing this miserable tyrant to the good Sesostris, he recalled that the Egyptian “feared nothing, and had nothing to fear,” whereas Pygmalion “fears all, and has all to fear,” exposed as he was to “a violent death, even in his inaccessible palace, in the midst of his guards” (III.34). To be sure, the good Egyptian king was deceived for some time by a malevolent courtier, but he had the capacity to distinguish good from bad, and eventually found him out. In his fearful unwisdom, Pygmalion can do no such thing. He was a wrong-headed egalitarian. He think all men are indeed created equal, but only in lacking any “sincere virtue”; if anything, the supposedly good ones were worse, having added pretense of goodness to their other vices (III.35).
Repelled by the tyrannical regime of the Phoenicians, Telemachus nonetheless admires their commercial way of life. (In this, his reader Rousseau will depart from him.) The “great city” of Tyre “seems to float on the surface of the waters, and to be queen of the sea.” (III.36). It is a cosmopolitan place, seeming to belong “not to one people in particular, but to all nations in general,” thronged as it is with traders from so many countries (III.36). The Phoenicians are industrious, as “all the citizens apply themselves to commerce, nor do their great riches ever produce in them an aversion to the labor necessary to increase their store” (III.36). “I could never tear my eyes away from the magnificent spectacle of that great city, where all was in motion,” the men loading and unloading their ships, transporting and selling merchandise, keeping their accounts with trading partners; the women too were busy, “never ceas[ing] to spin wool, or make designs for embroidery, or fold rich stuffs” (III.36). How did this people come to follow this regime, this way of life, which made them “masters of the whole commerce of the world, thus enriching themselves at the expense of all other nations?” (III.36).
Narbal explained. First, Tyre has the right geographical location, “happily situated for commerce”; second, “we have the glory of having invented navigation,” the first men “who ventured to sea in ships,” long before Greece’s Argonauts; third, we learned astronomy from Egyptians and Babylonians, putting that science to good use for navigation, enabling us “to unite so many nations whom the sea had separated” (III.37). Fourth, we have the virtues necessary for commerce, not only industry but patience, willingness to work, cleanliness, sobriety, and frugality; having combined these moral virtues with “well-regulated administration” and civic peace, “never was there a people more firm and steady, more candid, more loyal, more trusty, or more kind to strangers” (III.37). Should we lose these qualities, “you would soon see this power, that now is so much the object of your admiration, dwindle away to nothing” (III.37). This is likely the cause of his concerns about the tyrant, who so evidently undermines all that Phoenicians have established.
How can I establish such commerce in Ithaca? Telemachus wanted to know. Give foreign traders safe haven, Narbal replied—assure their “security, convenience, and entire liberty” while “never suffer[ing] yourself to be blinded by avarice or pride” (III.37). “The true secret to gain a great deal, is never to grasp at too much, and to know how to lose suitably,” “steadily observ[ing] the rules of commerce,” making them “simple and explicit” and “accustom[ing] your people to adhere to them invariably” by severely punishing mercantile fraud and “even remissness and extravagance,” as “these ruin commerce, by ruining those who carry it on” (III.37). “Above all things beware of cramping trade in order to make it favor your views” as the king; that is, “leave the whole profits of it” to your subjects”; by enhancing the wealth of the people, your country will grow stronger, and its king with it (III.38). One of the tyrant Pygmalion’s worst policies has been heavy taxation. “Thus our commerce begins to languish and decline” (III.38). “If Pygmalion does not alter his conduct, our power and glory must soon pass from us to a people better governed than we”; indeed, as Narbal had already mentioned, Dido, Pygmalion’s sister, had already escaped Tyre and founded “a noble city, Carthage,” the next great commercial power of the Mediterranean (IIi.32).
But how did the Tyrians render themselves “so powerful by sea”? (III.38). We obtain ship timber from the forests of Lebanon, taking care to conserve this resource by prohibiting its use for any other purpose. We employ the most skillful workmen to build the ships, culling them from the sturdy population of the countryside and rewarding them well. More generally, “here we treat with honor those who excel in the arts and sciences that contribute to the improvement of navigation”—geometers, astronomers, pilots, carpenters, rowers (III.39). “Authority alone will never do, nor is a bare submission sufficient; men’s hearts must be one, and they must be made to find their advantage in a compliance wherever their service is wanted” (III.39).
Pygmalion soon put Telemachus’ habit of secrecy to the test. Suspicious as ever, he had the young man arrested, intending to question him closely. The alarmed Narbal assured him that “there is nothing that is not innocent” in a lie told to such a man; “the gods themselves cannot condemn it; nobody will suffer by it, and it will save the lives of two innocent persons,” namely, you and me (III.40). If you insist on telling the truth to a tyrant, “you carry the love of virtue and the fear of wounding religion too far” (III.40). Not so, replied high-minded Telemachus: “falsehood is falsehood,” and “he who injures the truth offends the gods, and even himself, by speaking against his conscience” (III.40). He will rely not on human prudence but divine protection. “If the gods have pity on us, they will know how to deliver us: if it is their will that we should perish, we shall then fall victims of truth, and leave to mankind an example that unblemished virtue is to be preferred to long life” (III.41). In the event, the gods did protect them, using as their instrument the tyrant’s mistress; spurned by another young man with whom she was infatuated, she pretended that he was Telemachus in order to get him killed, meanwhile advising Narbal to get the real Telemachus out of the city. Thus did Pygmalion become “the sport of a woman lost to all shame” while the virtuous men were rewarded for their sincerity by “the goodness of the gods” (III.42).
A goddess herself, but perhaps rather lacking in shame, Calypso lets Telemachus and Nestor rest, not before feasting him on flattery by telling him that he is the superior of Hercules, Theseus, Achilles, and father Ulysses in wisdom and courage. Once they are alone, Mentor brings his pupil up short, rebuking him for seducing himself, taking pleasure in telling his life story and thereby “charm[ing] the goddess,” “more and more inflam[ing] her passion, and prepar[ing] for yourself a dangerous captivity” (IV.45). “The love of vainglory has betrayed you into speaking with imprudence,” “inform[ing her of all she wanted to know; such is the art of deceitful and passionate women” (IV.45). You have temporarily forgotten the habit of secrecy you learned from your father, the habit which won you the confidence of Narbal and so enabled you to escape the tyrant of Tyre. I, Mentor, “am the only one who knows you, and who loves you so, as to warn you of all your faults,” rather than exploiting them for my own purposes (IV.46). At this point, you may as well continue your story, but do it in such as way “as to excite her compassion alone,” not her lust (IV.46). For example, you might have told her, simply, that you had been a prisoner in several countries; “this would have been enough; the rest has served only to increase the poison that burns her heart” (IV.46). In continuing your speech tomorrow, “give her an account of what further the gods have done in your favor, and learn another time to speak more moderately of what you may have done deserving in any measure of praise” (IV.46). Telemachus takes the point.
And so for his next story he tells of a vision of Venus he had had on his voyage from Tyre to Cyprus, not far from the Phoenician coast; he had intended Cyprus to be his first stop on the way home. In the dream, Venus called Cyprus part of her “empire,” the “native seat of pleasure, mirth, and frolic” (IV.47). Do not resist me, “the most powerful of goddesses, who wants to make you happy” (IV.47). Venus’ son, Cupid, tried to shoot him with an arrow, but Minerva protected him—a telling hint to Calypso, and more than a suggestion that Venus is not the most powerful goddess. “Get you gone, rash boy,” Minerva commanded Cupid; “never will you subdue any but effeminate souls who are more enamored of your shameful pleasures than of wisdom, virtue, and glory” (IV.48). Upon awakening, Mentor immediately told him to “flee this cruel land, this pestilent isle, in which they breathe nothing but voluptuousness” (IV.48).
Still at sea with a Cypriot crew, Telemachus took the helm when a storm whipped up, as the “effeminate men, devoted to pleasure, lack[ing] the courage to face danger” succumbed to “bitter wailings and lamentations” and “vain promises to sacrifice to the gods, provided they would bring them safe to port,” lacking “the presence of mind either to direct or execute the steps that were necessary for our preservation” (IV.49). That is, whereas the gods protect the virtuous truth-tellers endangered by tyrants, they do not protect those weakened by the vices unregulated commerce can foster. Telemachus guided the ship through the storm, and “this deliverance appeared like a dream to all those whose lives I had saved; they gazed on me with amazement” (IV.49).
Unsurprisingly, when he arrived on Cyprus Telemachus found that the Cypriots didn’t work, much. The girls on their way to the temple of Venus lacked “that noble simplicity” and “amiable modesty” which constitute “the great charm of beauty” (IV.50). Nonetheless, Telemachus gradually yielded to the ethos of the Cypriot regime. “At first, I could not behold these things without abhorrence, but that wore off insensibly. Vice no longer shocked me: every company inspired me with a greater propensity to debauchery, by mocking my innocence; for my continence and modesty served only for subjects of mirth and ridicule to that abandoned people” and “the virtuous education I had received was no longer able to support me” (IV.51). A regime and its way of life can overpower the habits of mind and heart in a young man educated but not fully habituated to the way of life of his own regime. Eventually, “I could neither recover the use of my reason, nor recall the memory of my father’s virtues,” as “a secret soothing languor took possession of my soul,” symptomatic of “the agreeable poison that insinuated itself from vein to vein, and penetrated to the very marrow of my bones” (IV.51).
Mentor rescued him, having arrived unexpectedly on Cyprus. He wasted no time denouncing “infamous effeminate pleasure,” which “suffers no virtue to exist,” and in commanding Telemachus to flee this country, where “the very air you breathe is poisoned) IV.52). With this, Telemachus undergoes a turning-around of his soul, similar to that described by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. “He spoke, and immediately I perceived, as it were, a thick cloud dissolve from my eyes and disperse, so that I beheld the pure light: a gentle joy, and an undaunted resolution sprang up again in my heart. It was a joy very different from the childish, effeminate delight with which my senses had been intoxicated: the latter is a drunken, troubled joy, shot through with furious passions, and cutting remorse; the former is a rational joy, fraught with something blissful and divine; it is always pure, even, and inexhaustible: the more it is indulged, the more delightful it is: it ravishes the soul without disquieting it” (IV.52-53). Now he understands the beatus illi theme Mentor had sounded in Egypt: “Happy are those men who have behold virtue in all her charms! For they who see her, must love her, and they who love her, must be happy.” (IV.53).
This happiness immediately came under threat when Mentor announced that they must separate again. His former slave masters sold him to a Syrian, Hazael, in whom Mentor has piqued curiosity about Greek moeurs, especially as instanced on the island of Crete, where Hazael intended to study “the wise laws of Minos,” Crete’s founder (IV.53). They only stopped at Cyprus because the prevailing winds compelled them. Telemachus immediately went as a suppliant to Hazael, begging him to take him along as his slave to Crete, as well. With “looks of good nature and humanity,” Hazael accepted the offer, while explaining that in Mentor he found not a slave but “a faithful friend”—the “most valued of any I have on earth” (IV.55). As with Telemachus, so with Hazael; Mentor “found wisdom” with him, “and to him I am indebted for the love I bear to virtue” (IV.55). In gratitude he declared both men free. At this, Hazael and Mentor “began to discourse together of that supreme power that formed heaven and earth,” the “simple, infinite, unchangeable light” that is “eternal reason” (IV.55-56). Reason is, “as it were, a vast ocean of light, and our souls are a sort of little rivulets, that issue from it, and that afterwards return to it, and are lost in its immensity” (IV.56). Fénelon’s pagans thus resemble Neoplatonists on the cusp of perceiving the Logos of the Gospel of John.
They disembarked on Crete, whose regime differed not only from that of hedonistic Cyprus but also from commercial Tyre. Under Minos’ laws, Cretans practice agriculture, exhibiting the truth that “the more people there are in a country, the greater plenty they enjoy, provided they are industrious” and moderate in their desires (V.59)—a point Rousseau reprises in the Emile. Mentor calls Minos “the wisest and best of all kings”: “the education he ordained for children renders their bodies healthy and robust,” as they are “early accustomed to a simple, frugal, and laborious life” (V.59). Rejecting “sensual pleasure of every kind” as enervating to “body and mind,” the Cretans have become “invincible through virtue” (V.59-60). For them, courage consists not only in “despising death amidst the dangers of war, but also in disdaining excessive wealth, and shameful pleasure” (V.60). The punish three vices “which remain unpunished in other countries: ingratitude, dissimulation, and avarice” (V.60).
The regime is a monarchy, and Telemachus asked what the king’s authority consists. Mentor explained that the king “can do anything to the people, but the laws can do anything to him” (V.60). He thus has “an absolute power in doing good, but his hands are tied from doing wrong” (V.60). “The intention of the laws is that one man by his wisdom and moderation should promote the happiness of such numbers and not that such numbers by their misery and abject slavery should serve only to flatter the pride and luxury of a single man” (V.60). Among his people, he ought to be the most virtuous of all; abroad, “he is to defend his people and command their armies” (V.61). The line of succession extended from Minos to his children, but only “upon condition that they observed these maxims,” given that the founder “loved his people even more than his own family” (V.61). “It was by such wisdom and moderation that he rendered Crete so powerful and happy, and eclipsed the glory of all those conquerors, who were for making the people serve only to promote their own glory, that is, their vanity: in fine, it was through his justice that he became one of the judges of the dead in the regions below” (V.61).
Crete’s current king, Idomeneus, fought with his fellow Greeks at Troy. He has fallen into calamity. During a storm at sea on the return voyage he promised the gods he would sacrifice the first person he saw upon his return, if they would grand him safe passage. This first person he saw was his son. Although advised by “old Sophronimus” (“Wise One”) that he need not follow through on such an “imprudent” vow (“the gods will not be honored by cruelty”), and that an animal sacrifice will do, his son averred that he’s ready to die, “if by my death your life may be secured” (V.63). “Torn by the internal furies,” he killed his son and would have killed himself, had his attendants not prevented him (V.63). It is of course a pagan version of the story of Abraham and Isaac, but here no god prevents the son’s sacrifice and the result isn’t the reinforcement of the laws but the compromise of monarchic rule, as the people viewed “with horror” the “barbarous act of the father, exclaim[ing] that the just gods had abandoned him to the furies” (V.63). Civil strife erupted, and Idomeneus had to flee to the Hesperian coast, where he and his friends “have just founded a new kingdom in the country of the Salentines’ (V.63). His misrule on Crete shows that the rule of law depends upon the gods, the rule of gods acts through human vows, but such vows must be understood in accordance with the intention of the law—that is, the lawgiver. Reasonable laws require reasonable interpretation, adaptation to given circumstances—equity, as modern judges would say.
The Cretans now needed to elect a new king, and here they will exhibit exactly such prudential reasoning based on Minos’ laws. At the invitation of the Cretans, Telemachus participated in the games organized for the occasion, winning three competitions. The people then retired to “an ancient and sacred wood,” where their sages consulted the laws of Minos (V.66). “Wisdom alone acted in them, and the fruit of their long virtue had so well defeated their humor that they enjoyed without pain the sweet and noble pleasure of reason”—so much so that Telemachus “wished it had been in my power to forego a part of my life, in order to arrive speedily at so estimable an old age” (V.66). Acknowledging that “it is the laws” of Minos, “and not men, that ought to reign,” the president of the council of sages proposed three questions “to be determined by the maxims of Minos” (V.67).
First, who is the freest of men? Opinions ranged from the king “whose authority is absolute” (rather like Louis XIV) to the rich man who can “gratify all his desires” to the bachelor who travels from country to country, “without subjecting himself to the laws of any” to the savage who lives in the woods, “a stranger both to need and to government” to the freed slave, who enjoys more than any other the value of liberty” to those about to die, “because death deliver[s]” them from all earthly powers (V.67). But Telemachus knew the right answer, having learned it from Mentor: “The freest man is he who can be free even in slavery,” who “in whatever country or condition” he finds himself, “fears the gods, and them only”; “the truly free man is he who, detached from all, is to bid defiance to fear and all desire, is subject only to the gods and to his reason” (V.67). This, the sages agreed, was Minos’ answer, as well—Minos and Telemachus both having had Minerva as their teacher.
Second, who is the most wretched of all men? A sage from Lesbos claimed that the most unhappy man is the one “who thinks himself so,” the one who “lacks patience in suffering” (V.68). Telemachus, again following Mentor’s teachings, proposes a more kingly answer: “The most wretched of all men is a king who thinks himself happy in making others miserable,” being “doubly wretched, in being so blind as not to see his misery,” lacking in self-knowledge and therefore prey to “a crowd of flatterers” and “tyrannized by his passions”; “the gods will at least confound him through an eternal punishment” (V.68).
Third, which is better, a king who wins all his wars (as Louis XIV had done, at the time Fénelon was writing) or “one without any knowledge or experience in the art of war, but well qualified to govern a nation in time of peace”? (V.68). Most of the Cretans preferred the warrior-king. But Telemachus replied that both the warrior-king and the pacific king are only half-kings, the pacific king is the better half. “A king who is entirely for war would be always for extending his glory and dominions, and would ruin his people,” making them miserable; “when war has set a country all on fire, the laws, agriculture, and the arts languish” (V.69). Why win your wars if you cannot enjoy the apparent fruits of victory? The pacific king, however, will never threaten his neighbors; “his allies will love him,” not “fear him,” and neighboring kings will call upon him to serve as “the arbiter of all the states which surround his” when they quarrel amongst themselves (V.70). Unburdened by unnecessary wars, his people will prosper, and will defend the regime if threatened; indeed, “the gods themselves would fight for him” (V.70). Once again, the sages declared that “Minos was of the same way of thinking as I” (V.71).
More, Minos had consulted a god who had told him that a stranger would come to Crete one day, “to put the laws in force” (V.71). Can this person be any other than Telemachus, “who understands the laws of Minos better than any other person”? (V.71). Telemachus might well have accepted this interpretation of the prophecy, had Mentor not reminded him that he must not “renounce your country,” forgetting your mother and father, “whom the gods intended to restore to you” (V.71). Telemachus thinks of a supremely prudent, diplomatic answer: Yes, the oracle stated that Minos’ line will cease to rule Crete when a stranger arrives to enforce Minos’ laws, but the oracle “does not say that the stranger will reign” (V.71). I am indeed a stranger, and I have in fact “enforced” the laws of Minos by showing “the true sense” of them, so that they will rule the king you choose, but “for my part, I prefer my country, the poor, little island of Ithaca, to the hundred cities of Crete. Allow me to fulfill my destiny.” (V.72). “I had rather execute the commands of my father Ulysses, and console my mother Penelope, than be sovereign of the whole universe” (V.72). With this statement of filial piety, he extricates himself from the invitation without offending his hosts. It is the mirror-image of his refusal to lie to the tyrant Pygmalion at Tyre: there, he displayed rectitude in the face of punishment; here, he displayed rectitude in the face of the highest earthly reward.
The Cretans then asked him to choose the next king. Telemachus deferred to Mentor, who also declined the honor but defined the qualities of such a man before identifying him. “I would have you choose one who knows you well, since he must govern you, and who fears to govern you,” inasmuch as “he who desires royalty does not know it,” does not know the burdens of rule (V.73). Mentor chose Aristodemus, now living in an out-of-the-way part of the island, cultivating “his small farm with his own hands” with the help of his devoted sons (V.75). Frugal and industrious, his family enjoyed a surplus of goods, which they shared with sick and impoverished neighbors—rather as Rousseau would have rightly-educated aristocrats do. He is “the father of every family” in the region (V.75), and he also had experience in war. “There is your king, if you want to make the laws of the sage Minos reign” (V.75). Called to the kingship by his fellow citizens, Aristodemus consented on three conditions: that he would resign after two years “if I cannot make you better than you are at present, and if you resist the laws”; that he would be “free to continue my simple and frugal life,” with no obligation to display royal pomp; and that “my children shall not be entitled to any rank and that after my death, they shall be on the same footing with the other citizens, and treated according to their merit” (V.76). The Cretans agree; Telemachus and Mentor left the island.
It was well that Telemachus declined the kingship, and not only because his destiny and his filial piety draw him back to Ithaca. He had learned the maxims of Mentor-Minerva. He had yet to integrate them into his soul, as he demonstrated on Calypso’s island after he finished his account of his adventures.
At sea, they survived another storm, one commanded by Neptune at the behest of Venus, who remains angry at Telemachus’ resistance to her on Cypress. By this point in Telemachus’ series of stories, Calypso suspected Mentor of being “a divinity under the form of a man”; she separated him from Telemachus and cross-examined him, but he has didn’t know that Mentor is Minerva, and so could honestly mislead his inquisitor (VI.81). When she interrogated Mentor she got nowhere, since Minerva is the more powerful goddess. She then found an ally in Venus, who left her son Cupid with her. Calypso found herself beginning to desire him, and so handed him off from one of nymphs, Eucharis. “But alas! how heartily did she afterwards repent of having done it!” (VI.83). For Cupid is a mischief-maker, a “false malicious child [who] caressed only to betray, and never laughed but on account of the cruel evils he had done or wished to do” (VI.83). He soon had all of Calypso’s nymphs secretly pining for him.
Telemachus watched this with ambivalence. He “was struck by [Cupid’s] beauty and good humor,” and he finds the nymphs charming (unlike the Cypriot women), “but he soon felt an uneasiness, the cause of which he could not discover” (VI.83). As usual, Mentor did not hesitate to lay it out: “O Telemachus: the dangers of the isle of Cypress were nothing, when compared to those of which you have not the least awareness at present. Gross vice excites abhorrence, but modest beauty is much more dangerous: in loving it we imagine we love only virtue, and thus are insensibly caught by the delusive bait of a passion of which we are seldom aware until it is too late to extinguish it” (VI.83). As for that winsome boy, he is Cupid, “brought here by his mother Venus to take vengeance on you for despising her cult” at Cypress (VI.84). When Telemachus tried to talk Mentor into staying, Mentor showed the link between the capacity to reason and erotic passion; “blind passion” makes us find ingenious arguments to justify it (VI.84). Threatening to leave him behind, Mentor chastised him as the “base son of so wise and generous a father”—contemptuous words that “stung Telemachus to the heart” (VI.84). “What then,” the youth pleaded, “do you count the immortality offered me by the goddess as nothing?” (VI.85). “I count as nothing whatever is contrary to virtue, and to the will of the gods”; virtue beckons (“call[ing] you to your native country”) and prohibits (“forbid[ding] you to give way to a foolish passion”) (VI.85). If you give way to “that shameful tyrant,” bodily eros, offered by a goddess who offers you bodily immortality, “what would you do with an immortal life, without liberty, without virtue, and without glory,” a life that “would only be so much the more miserable in being immortal, inasmuch as it would never end”? (VI.85).
But at this stage of passion, speeches wouldn’t work with Telemachus. Reason by itself has authority only in souls prepared to heed it. Knowing that Telemachus “no less loved the young nymph Eucharis” than Calypso loved Telemachus, Mentor “resolved to excite the jealousy of Calypso” (VI.85). That is, to defeat the love-god Cupid, Minerva intended to use love’s effects against love, “employ[ing] against the god of love the jealousy inseparable from love itself” (VI.87). Raging at her beloved, Calypso ordered him off the island, threatening revenge: Neptune prepares “more storms for thee”; you shall see your father again, but not recognize him; and you shall rejoin him in Ithaca only after “having been the sport of the most cruel, unrelenting fortune” (VI.90-91).
Horrified by Calypso’s ugly rage, Telemachus could only turn to Mentor, who drew the lesson his pupil could finally understand in his heart, not only in his head. He suffers because the gods have willed him to suffer. The gods have willed him to suffer because “he who has never felt his own weakness and the violence of his passions, cannot be said to be wise; for he is unacquainted with himself, and knows not how to distrust himself. The gods have led you, as it were, by the hand, to the very edge of the abyss, to show you the depth of it, without letting you fall into it. Understand now what, without experience, you never would have comprehended.” (VI.92). This “inspir[ed] Telemachus with a courage that he had never experienced since he came into the isle” (VI.94). They escaped Calypso and her posse of nymphs. “In proportion as Telemachus got away from the island, he found his courage and his love of virtue revive. ‘I now experience,’ he said, ‘the truth of what you told me, and which, for lack of experience, I could not believe: namely that vice can only be conquered by flight…. I now fear neither storms, winds, nor seas; i only fear my passions. Cupid alone is more to be dreaded than are all shipwrecks.'” (VI.96).
This ends the first part of Telemachus’ education in kingship, which begins where Locke leaves off—at the time when a young man confronts his own sexual passion, and when a future king must begin to consider the ways of ruling. The two are closely associated. As Louis XIV’s example shows, an absolute monarch, being unconstrained by natural or civil law, likely will multiply his amours because, as a later chief executive put it, he can. His appetite for the bodies of women will often be matched by his appetite for rule over others—not only his own subjects but foreign peoples over whom he will seek to extend his imperial rule.
This education has consisted of a series of lessons in love and friendship, ruling and being ruled. At the beginning of their stay on Calypso’s island, Mentor warned Telemachus of Calypso’s deceit. Telemachus understood the danger notionally if somewhat vaguely, reciprocating her hospitality by telling her of his voyages. During them, he visited five cities, each with a distinct regime. The Trojan king of Sicily, initially hostile to the young Greek, sought his alliance when attacked by barbarians; on Sicily, the conflict wasn’t between regimes as between civilization and savagery. The king released the Greeks out of respect for the law of nations which all civilized peoples recognize. At Tyre, Telemachus saw a monarchy with a commercial way of life; such regimes are susceptible to pride and decadence unless the people remain industrious, as Narbal the sea captain carefully explained. In Egypt, Telemachus saw a monarchy that is justifiable when its king loves his subjects as a father loves his child; under such rule, his ‘children’ will reciprocate his love. In this way, it is better to be loved than feared. The good king also loves learning, not for the sake of noetic apprehension, as a philosopher does, but as one mode of parental care, of learning foreign practices which may serve useful to his subjects. But even good kings can be deceived, and there is no guarantee that a good king’s son will be good.
Cyprus was under a tyranny, but seems not to be ruled by anyone but the goddess Venus. Her love is anything but parental. She rules her subjects for her own amusement, and that of her impudent son, Cupid. The regime of Cyprus might, then, also be described as no-regime, a realm of erotic anarchy.
Finally, the best practicable regime Telemachus had visited was Crete, an agrarian not a commercial monarchy founded by Minos, who left it with a sound set of laws. An agricultural way of life is better than a commercial one because it requires the virtue of industriousness all the time. There is no making a profit and then indulging oneself in spending it. Farmers spend their profits on seed and equipment for the next season or, as in the example of Aristodemus, charity towards neighbors. Crete’s king, Minos’ grandson, fell away from those salutary laws by making a foolish vow to the gods. Laws need prudential interpretation, and Crete has a set of ruling elders who can provide it.
Calypso’s regime is almost the same as that of Cyprus, except that Venus and Cupid rule indirectly. As in Cyprus, the only remedy for the temptation of a regime of physical eros is escape. Temptation is impossible to withstand forever, but to flee it one must recognize it for what it is and for how it insinuates itself into human hearts and minds. As in Rousseau’s Emile, virtue is above all a struggle, a struggle to claim or to reclaim the good for the human soul, a good without which monarchs cannot well rule themselves or their people because only parental love, love for the good of his ‘children’ or subjects can result in right rule. Emile, however, is no monarch; by Rousseau’s time the monarchy Fénelon sought to reform was failing, and a new regime would need to be founded.
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