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    Donne’s Candle for Saint Lucy

    by

    John Donne: “A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, being the shortest day.”

    Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, December 1994.

     

    The year’s midnight is the winter solstice. It is the end and the beginning of every natural year, as is every day’s midnight the end and the beginning of a day, and so constitutes a kind of middle. The sun ‘goes south’ to the Tropic of Capricorn, the “Goat” to which the sun has “runne.” It is the shortest day of the year. From then on the days lengthen. Spring is returning with the sun, although it will not seem so for a long time.

    Saint Lucia’s commemoration on December 13 marked the solstice on the old Julian calendar. In The Golden Legend Jacobus de Voragine teaches that lucia means light, light means grace and the chastity of the virgin guided by grace. The lucia via, the way of light, leads to God.

    Lucia began her journey on that way in the fourth century of the Christian era. She guided her sick mother to the tomb of Saint Agatha, a martyr and also a virgin to whose name de Voragine ascribes five meanings: saint of God; goddess without a love of earthly things; speaking with perfection; slave of God; solemnly perfected or ended, buried by angels. Speaking perfectly, Agatha told her persecuting, imperial questioner, slavery to Christ is the true nobility. Christ, acting through Saint Peter, cured her torture-wounds. De Voragine calls Agatha “an honor to God and the savior of her country”—Catania, in Sicily.

    Lucia’s mother recovered her health by the grace of God through Saint Agatha. The women, of noble family, resolved to give their earth-riches to the poor. Thus following Christ’s command to the wealthy young man, she violated Roman law; betrothed to a noble man, and therefore already his property under that law, she was giving away what was his. “Lucia was a Christian and did not obey the laws of the Empire,” de Voragine writes. She belonged to God and not to any man. To claim her if not her dowry, her betrothed too would have to give himself to Christ, and join her in Christian marriage.

    His anger prevailed, instead. After he denounced her to the Roman consul, she said she feared God, not the imperial rulers. When the consul threatened to send her to a brothel, she replied that if her body were violated without her consent, “my chastity will be doubled.” Martyred by the consul’s sword, she spoke miraculously, perfectly prophetically—prophesying the Emperor’s fall that day—before her body died. As Agatha had been, so Lucia became the patron saint of her native city, Syracuse, also in Sicily, where the great military expedition of the Athenian empire had foundered almost seven centuries before.

    In 1617, John Donne’s wife, Ann, died. This poem was written in December of that year. Saint Lucia’s day is mostly night, and he calls his poem a nocturnal—at once a night religious service and meditation, in verse and therefore in music, on darkness. He meditates on the short time of light in the middle of the long time of night, in the middle, the end and the beginning, of the year. In one version of the story, Lucia’s eyes were miraculously restored after she had plucked them out and presented them to her treacherous betrothed. A lady’s eyes, twin suns, shine light on her lover, and in northern Europe Christian maidens mark Saint Lucia’s Day by marching in church wile crowned with candelabras on this night when the sun ends its distancing and begins its return to the earth. Without grace, there is nothing new under the sun.

    Seven hours: Donne never lived so far north, that he would have seen a solstice day of only seven hours. He chose seven. There are seven canonical hours in the day, the times set apart from ordinary time, for prayer. The Greek medical authority, Hippocrates—before Donne, before Lucia, before the Roman Empire—had associated the number seven with the bringing-into-being of all things, with life-giving metamorphosis. Seven is three, the number symbolic of Heaven and of the Christian God, plus four, the number of the earth, with its four elements, four winds, four directions. Seven unifies heaven and earth, God and man, spirit and nature. The “Nocturnall” consists of 45 lines, nine times five, lines grouped in five stanzas. The number five means growth, the fullness or perfection of life, the ripeness that Lear considers all. The number nine means the triplication of the triple, the end-limit or numerical solstice of the numerical series before its return to unity, the number 10, which starts with ‘1.’ For the Jewish faithful it symbolizes truth; for Christians it suggests the trinity, the number of God, reproducing itself. In Hippocratic symbolism, it represents triple synthesis, the unity of corporal, intellectual, and spiritual.

    Donne sees the world dried up in winter, the sap sunk to the roots, even as life was then believed to sink at last to the feet of the dying. For the Christian Donne, life departs from the head, down. For the philosopher, Socrates, life departs from the feet, up, as his friends feel the cold of death first in his limbs; his lips are the last part of his body to stop moving. Or is it simply that, as the Greek Hippocrates taught, the dying man writhes in bed and end up with his head at foot of the bed, the reverse of natural sleep, restorer of life? Donne calls himself the Epitaph of the dead world, the dry earth. As does that most admonitory of writings, the epitaph, Donne speaks to future lovers, the lovers of the next spring; Socrates speaks also to corporeal lovers as a kind of doctor of eros. The god, Love, or Cupid, had, by his divine arts and science, his alchemy, made nothing out of something: He made Donne into the hungry, longing, despairing lover, ruining a man created in God’s image. Love deranged Donne’s nature, separating him from the way of all natural things, which draw all that’s good from each other.

    The twenty-third or middle line of the poem, the middle line of the middle stanza, remembers how “we too wept.” Like Christ, Donne and his beloved wept and did not laugh, unlike Socrates, who laughed and never wept. They wept a flood, drowned the whole world, as God did in nearly destroying the things of this world. In so doing, God renewed the world, mimicking His own creation of the world, out of nothing. Donne’s memory of his wife’s and his weeping, their disorder, also has a unity at its core: “We two.” Lovers weep when separated. They become “two Chaosses” when apart, when showing “care to naught else” but one another. Their flooding of the world opposes the winter’s dryness as an equally destructive extreme. But in their separation they are united in a shared act, and in their physical separation their souls withdraw from their bodies in shared thought.

    Death makes final the physical separation of soul from body, lover from beloved. Donne calls himself, now, “of the first nothing,” the nihilo from which God created the seven, the heaven and the earth, and the five, the fullness of their being (“and He saw that it was good”). The death of his beloved removes Donne from all the things under the sun. His sun, his light or Lucia, her eyes shining with love, will not renew with the earth in the next spring. To the lovers who will enjoy the next summer in eros, this epitaph speaks an ironic toast. If you love bodies, you love what will die, circle away, as will your life. But

    Since shee enjoyes her long nights festival,
    Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call
    This houre her Vigill, and her Eve, since this
    Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.

    Conventionally, the night should not be a festival. The feast is during the day, the vigil at night. Donne’s beloved is dead, of the night, but living, bright in his memory, in his mind’s eye and, if Christianity is true, in Heaven. If ripeness or perfection is all, readiness is the lucia via to it. Donne calls this solstice hour her vigil, for remembrance, and her eve, for anticipation. In his wit, he also ‘calls her Eve’ and identifies himself as Adam—woman and man, united at the genesis of the human race before the Flood, before even the expulsion from the Garden. Donne deliberately gives names to the moment—two names, of course—transfiguring time (hour) and word (call). The act of making the poem reenacts Donne’s thought, his intention, to “prepare towards her,” to act in spiritual parallel to the bridegroom on his wedding night, that night when erotic and spiritual love are both consummated. Donne’s quest imitates God’s thought-act of creation, insofar as a creature made in the image of God can imitate his creator without aspiring to godhood. The poetic act imitates the lovers’ reunion, which is why chaos or weeping comes together with unity-in-twoness at the poem’s middle, its solstice.

    The story of Lucia is the story of the Roman maiden, Lucretia, baptized or reborn, converted or metamorphosed. Lucretia precipitated the founding of the Roman republic, the republic that rested on martial virtue, not commerce. Violated by the son of a tyrant, threatened with dishonor, she committed suicide in order to prove her innocence of adultery. She swore her father and husband to an act of just vengeance. Her husband’s friend, Lucius Brutus Tarquinus, a cousin of the rapist, seized this chance to overthrow the tyranny, converting his friends’ and hi people’s grief into righteous anger. Fortunately, the previous monarchs had not been tyrannical; Livy praises “the tranquil moderation of the kings,” which nourished the polity so that “its virtues being now ripened… was capable of producing the good fruit of liberty.” Had Brutus acted in “an immature desire for liberty,” he would have done “the greatest injury to the polity.” Brutus was a reverse Lucretia, having survived the rule of his tyrannical uncle by feigning stupidity, that is, by courting and enduring dishonor, while seeking the great honor that accrues to the successful liberator and founder of a just regime.

    Lucia’s honor depends not upon human witnesses but upon the all-seeing God. She need not commit suicide to prove her virtue, nor submit to rape in order to vindicate it. She foresees the emperor’s fall (prefiguring the fall of the Roman Empire itself), and needs no prudent Brutus to avenge her death. She shares her honor not with a mortal man (even so extraordinary man as Brutus, who interpreted the Delphic oracle’s prophecy–as an instruction not to rush home to his human mother but to kiss the mother of all, the earth. She shares glory with the divine Archegos or Founder, Jesus the Christ, Son of the universal Father, In His authority she becomes patroness of her city.

    We now live quietly in the shadow of another founder, one who ‘interpreted’ Brutus’ prudent kissing of the earth as a call for philosophers to put aside the heavenly and the meditative. Niccolò Machiavelli sought philosophers who were down-to-earth, spirited but astute tyrants of the mind who would rule in the guise of republicanism. “For Fortune is a woman,” he wrote, “and it is necessary… to hold her down.” This vast project, greatly augmented by the techno-scientific modes and orders founded by Francis Bacon, whom Donne would have known—a project assimilated but also to some degree corrected by the Founders of the United States—has gradually come to rule far greater stretches of the world than the Roman Empire ever did. (Or the British Empire, whose genesis Donne saw under the rule of that modern Lucretia, Elizabeth, she who maintained her authority by resisting not violation but marriage.) This project does not kiss the earth but dominates it, and extracts the secrets of nature by methods that Bacon, following Machiavelli, did not hesitate to compare to torture.

    Against these new modes and orders, Donne affirms a different empire, the empire of Christendom, in which sacramental marriage symbolizes, but also enacts, the balanced union of physical, intellectual, and spiritual love.

    Benda’s Dubious “Clerks”

    by

    Julien Benda: The Betrayal of the Clerks. Richard Aldington translation. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1959 [1928].

    Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, January and February 1994.

     

    The Intellectuals’ Self-Betrayal

    Since the late 1960s, the word ‘disinterested’ has come to be used to mean ‘uninterested,’ indifferent. The original meaning of ‘disinterested’ has nearly disappeared from public debates. We are told that no one is or can be disinterested or impartial. We’re all partisan, self-interested. Perhaps as a result of believing this claim without qualification, many of us really are disinterested in the newer sense: Withdrawn from public debate, bored by it, and distrustful of it, refusing even to vote in elections. With their typical profundity, politicians and pundits attempt to solve the problem by making voter registration easier. If people don’t want to vote, why register them? If registered, why vote?

    The diagnosis of this problem was made in France and published in 1927 by the philosopher Julien Benda. Translated as The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, La trahison des clercs, enjoyed some popularity in the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. It is no longer much read today, least of all by those who’d most benefit from it: journalists, academics, and other soldiers in today’s culture-wars.

    Those wars are characteristically bitter. Political hatred is nothing new, Benda observes. Intellectuals, also, have been with us for some time. But “the intellectual organization of political hatreds” is new, a product of the late nineteenth century that reached its apogee in the twentieth.

    Looking at a Europe beginning to be populated by followers of Mussolini and Lenin, men who throve on the exacerbation of national and class struggles, Benda found it both astonishing and ominous that poets and professors had joined their ranks. “One cannot imagine the Roman Republic feeling that the moral support of Terence and Varro was of value to it during the war with Carthage or the government of Louis XIV finding that the approbation of Racine and Fermat gave it additional strength in the war with Holland.” Not only did the new dictators require such support, the new intellectuals gladly offered it.

    For centuries, intellectuals had embodied a universal culture, both religious and secular. This culture extended throughout Europe, and did not exclude study of the civilizations of Asia. It exhibited a fascination (if a somewhat naïve one) with Amerindian societies as well. It was not ‘internationalist’—both capitalists and communists were that—nor was it ‘cosmopolitan’ or dilettantish. The universal culture was humanistic in the original meaning of the word—founded upon the recognition and cultivation of human nature seen as always and everywhere the same.

    This conception of the universality of human nature was shared by the Christian Bossuet and the atheistic Voltaire, although each of course had sharply different ideas about what constituted the good for human nature. From Judaism on, religionists insisted on the universality of human nature even as they contended bitterly over what human beings should believe and how they should behave. Philosophers who contested each others’ theories and fully recognized the immense variety of customs and beliefs in the world never supposed that there was no identifiable core of attributes that are distinctively human, nor that foremost among these is the capacity to reason, which makes philosophy possible.

    That is how thought could be disinterested or impartial. Thought was conceived as the quest for the truth about things transcending particular political societies: God, the cosmos, human beings. Benda calls this “disinterested intelligence,” and he deplores its near-disappearance in the twentieth century.

    Even the most cynical politicians of the past never claimed to be doing more than working for their own or their country’s interests. Politicians might violate morality but they did not attempt to change it. The new politicians were more pretentious. They claimed that their antagonisms were apocalyptic, that partisan struggle determines not merely a political but a moral succession. In this respect, the ‘Master Race’ of fascists is indistinguishable from the ‘New Man’ of communism. Whether the struggle is over nationality, race, class, or some other particularism, the universality of human nature is scorned as a myth.

    Benda does not so much deplore political men holding up such idols. He deplores intellectuals who salute them, even fashioning them for political use. As a result of such efforts, “humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes.”

    Can we say we had that war, the Second World War? And can we say we survived it?

    Benda Today

    In the Second World War an alliance of commercial republics and a leftist tyranny defeated an alliance of rightist tyrannies and a theocratic empire. Benda had witnessed representatives of all these political orientations in the France of 1927—parliamentarians, communists, and that odd combination of fascistic and theocratic beliefs called Action Française, whose spokesman was the writer Charles Maurras. (It isn’t too much to call Action Française the French Catholic equivalent of Japanese imperialism, so long as one understands that many French Catholics vehemently opposed the Maurrasiens.

    After the defeat of the totalitarians and imperialists of the ‘Right,’ there remained the totalitarians and imperialists of the ‘Left.’ Their confrontation with the commercial republics in Europe, North America, and elsewhere threatened a still greater and more nearly perfect war. In this confrontation Benda, who lived until 1956, surely would have recognized the continuation of the disease he had diagnosed in the 1920. Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France numbered among hundreds of intellectuals-turned-ideologues, apologists for tyranny. In the commercial republics there was also a subordination of intellect to practical aims the Cold War made necessary, from planning to polemics, although in those regimes dissent didn’t land you in prison.

    In the Soviet Union the tyranny eventually collapsed, resoundingly, only to be replaced by a sort of elective monarchy. The ‘Left’ remains in power on mainland China, well-financed after having relieved itself of Maoism and more dangerous to the rest of the world for it.

    Benda’s critique stands. Some modern political regimes have changed, but modern intellectuals have not. Careerism, materialism, and the organization of political passions, secular beliefs urged with a fervor once reserved for religiosity (Benda calls this “divinized realism” in which “the State, Country, Class, are now frankly God”), the scorn for reasoned argument, the demand for ‘activism’ for social-justice warfare: All are familiar to us today, wherever ‘the politics of race, class, and gender’ replaces the simpler doctrines of nationalism and class-war. Religion still gets into the act, too. Yesterday’s Action Française finds its echo in today’s Catholic-leftist ‘Liberation Theology,’ a moderate form of which finds itself raised to the apex of the Vatican. And then of course ‘Islamism’ ardently seeks the explosion of its many enemies.

    The huge public and private bureaucracies that attempt to ‘manage’ the modern societies complicate the intellectuals’ situation still more. Today’s bureaucracies rule by claiming to serve. They ‘deliver’ goods to customer/constituents who are less citizens than they are ‘consumers.’ In these structures intellectuals serve their masters as wizards of data and conjurors of images. The bureaucracies often find opposition among academic and ‘counterculture’ intellectuals, but as often they coopt or manipulate them; protest songs of the ‘Sixties end up as ad jingles.

    The greatest and most perfect war need not involve violence at all. This war may turn out to be a mind-battle of rival culture-networks, powered by computers. Were he still alive, Benda might warn that the so-called culture wars rarely concern true culture, the cultivation of human nature. In the names of equality and liberty (both misunderstood as self-satisfaction) the antagonists race toward human nature’s systematic debasement. As a handicapper, I put my money on the dim, plodding corporate tortoise, not the hare-brained, erratic erotics of academe.

    Benda traces the origin of the intellectuals’ self-betrayal to G. W. F. Hegel, the great philosopher who replaced contemplation of the eternal with the apprehension of the history of thought. “Need I point out that this conception inspires the whole of modern thought” Benda asks, rhetorically. Hegel presented a well-articulated historicism that ranged from concrete particulars to the most abstract generalities. His leftist inheritors (Marx in particular) vulgarized historicism, made it into a form of materialism, and therefore made it popular, a political instrument in an age of democratic politics. Hegel’s rightist inheritors rejected materialism at first—Nietzsche despised it so much he called it English—but eventually succumbed to mass-movement politics as well.

    ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ came to exalt action over contemplation, willing over thinking. This encouraged the militant personality—the bellecist general and the pacifist ‘demonstrator’ alike. The genuine intellectual disappears; his “defeat begins from the very moment when he claims to be practical.” If humanism ‘goes political’ in a thoroughgoing way, the logical result will be the world-state, a universal bureaucracy ruling a humanity united in order to exploit the earth: “But,” Benda writes, “far from being the abolition of the national state with its appetites and its arrogance, this would simply be its extreme form…. Humanity would be united in one immense army, one immense factory, would be aware only of heroisms, disciplines, inventions, would denounce all free and disinterested activity, and would cease to situate the good outside the real world, would have no God but itself and its desires…. And History will smile to think this is the species for whom Socrates and Jesus Christ died.”

    Sinyavsky and the Bearable Heaviness of Dissent

    by

    Andrei Sinyavsky [“Abram Tertz”]: Strolls with Pushkin. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

    Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, August 1994.

     

    Andrei Sinyavsky rivals Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s most eminent living writer, although Solzhenitsyn is far better known in the United States. Like Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavksy spent time in a Soviet jail (for “anti-Soviet agitation”) and in exile. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he is that rare bird, a Russian liberal democrat. He often uses the pen name “Abram Tertz”—camouflage he assumed under the Soviet regime.

    Aleksandr Pushkin, more or less unanimously acclaimed as the Russian poet of the nineteenth century, had his own run-ins with the political authorities of the day, suffering the humiliating semi-protection of Czar Nicholas. Pushkin died in a duel wherein he had the good fortune to be shot by a foreigner, thereby arousing strong patriotic passions in his countrymen, passions that have attached themselves to his name ever since. From the Christian Czarist Fyodor Dostoevsky to propagandists in the pay of the Comintern, Russians routinely appropriate Pushkin for their (cross-)purposes.

    In writing on Pushkin, Sinyavsky continues this tradition and addresses two principal themes, relevant both to Pushkin’s circumstance and his own. What constitutes freedom in Russia? What constitutes Russianness?

    As Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy writes in her informative introduction, Synyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin continues his closing speech at his 1966 trial. She notes that Pushkin, a political dissident, a probable atheist, a devotee of French culture who had an ancestor who was an Abyssinian prince, does not at first appear to be a prime candidate for First Icon of Russian Literature. But such is the freedom of artistic plasticity that he has become that, in the hands of writers who would have loathed him in life.

    Sinyavsky wants to save Pushkin from the hands of self-serving political cultists. Sinyavsky doesn’t want to worship Pushkin; he wants to stroll with him, an activity Pushkin himself would have much preferred to gestures of adoration. Strolling is leisurely, convivial, free—everything Russian politics so notoriously is not. Sinyavsky’s Pushkin is “an elusive and ubiquitous No Man”—that is to say, a comic Odysseus, not a tragic Achilles. “Lightness is the first thing,” the “condition of creativity”; Pushkin “turned lolling about into a matter of principle.” (Work is the opiate of the masses: You can’t subvert Marxism-Leninism more radically than that. Hence Sinyavsky’s funny line in a 1959 essay, What Is Soviet Realism?: “There is nothing to be done”—a dig at Lenin’s famous pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?). Flighty, womanizing, frivolous, Pushkin “touched on forbidden topics and secret subjects with free and easy grace.” He is the antidote to heavy, Russian sober-sidedness, from Dostoevsky/Solzhenitsyn in literature to Lenin/Stalin/Brezhnev in politics.

    Sinyavsky’s Pushkin is an anti-Machiavelli. For all his lightness of touch, Machiavelli proposed a grim project, the conquest of Fortune by means of tyrannical princes and contentious republicans unassisted by God. Villainy, Sinyavsky writes, “originates in vain attempts to correct fate arbitrarily, to impose the principle of envy on fate through blood and deception,” force and fraud. “The free man strolls,” Pushkin said, he does not seek domination. Pushkin is a Russian Epicurean.

    The problem with too-serious people, Sinyavsky argues, is that they have too damn many purposes or, worse still, one overriding one. In order to free himself from the tyranny of other people’s purposes, Sinyavsky’s Pushkin advances no cause, imposes no goals and indeed proposes none. He writes about nothing or, what is the same thing, about everything that is a trifle. Life is flux, but orderly flux—the change of seasons more than the shuffling or clash of atoms. Pushkin “became a poet the way some people become tramps,” with no grand project in view, “prefer[ring] solitude under shady bows to heroic deeds,” living the life of the “parasite and renegade.” “Pushkin all his life remained a lycée student,” hanging out with the guys and chasing girls. “Parasite” and “renegade” have been standard terms of abuse under the Soviet regime, as in “social parasites” (the bourgeoisie and its sympathizers, real or alleged) and “the renegade Trotsky,” targeted for murder by agents of Joseph Stalin, Man of Steel.

    Sinyavsky’s book is delightful (although, predictably and perhaps even designedly, it gives Solzhenitsyn indigestion). It also poses a (pardon the word) serious problem with respect to Russian liberalism.

    “Pushkin was the first civilian to attract attention to himself in Russian literature. A civilian in the fullest sense of the word, not a diplomat, not a secretary, a nobody. A goldbricker. A deadbeat. But he made more noise than any military man.” True, but a private noisemaker is likely to be heard and thus no longer private. Nor is he yet a citizen. A poet produces forms, makes something, and therefore implicates himself in the practice of ruling—if only indirectly, by influencing the cultural atmosphere—whether he wants to or not. “The poet is a czar,” Sinyavsky’s Pushkin recognizes. Poetry is a “despot.” It ordains. Religion traditional serves as a frame for governments, a subject for poetry; in a secularized society art becomes a substitute for religion.

    Yet Sinyavsky doesn’t want art to rule. He wants it to stroll, he wants it as an expression of freedom. He needs to set Pushkin free of all his cultists, but also needs to set him free of Sinyavsky. He wants freedom from the tyranny of all purposes. His policy amounts to a comprehensive détente or relaxation, in the hope that vigilant despots will also relax, loosen their Machiavellian grip on their subjects. His kind of declaration of independence might not provoke a war for independence in which his side would be defenseless against the Soviet regime.

    This may be possible for Rousseau, in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, precisely because he is solitary, outside of civil society. But take a convivial stroll with someone, even so free a spirit as Pushkin, and a destination will creep in, rules of engagement will be formulated. Solitary freedom will inevitably give way to civil liberty.

    Without an idea of civil liberty, Russian liberalism does not know how to govern. Which is why Russian liberals will always be an endangered species.

    It may be that Sinyavsky wants first to help Russians recover the experience of freedom simply, before going on to think about civil liberty and republican government. It is not easy to see, however, that he can get there from here.