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.

William R. Stevenson, Jr.: : Christian Love and the Just War: Moral Paradox and Political Life in St. Augustine and His Modern Interpreters. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 27, 1988.

 

Many early Christian theologians abhorred war and embraced pacifism. One of the greatest minds of the early Church, and one of the most humane men who ever lived, Origen of Alexandria, taught that the Gospels prohibit all violence. He constructed an elaborate system of allegory to explain—some would say explain away—the God-commanded battles of the Pentateuch.

With the professed conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, Christians found themselves politically responsible for the first time. They had to decide whether or not to defend themselves forcefully with the legions they inherited from pagan Rome.

Rome already had a doctrine of just war, elaborated by Cicero centuries before. Augustine as it were baptized Cicero’s teaching, a transformation Professor Stevenson says nothing about. But errors of omission, or of commission, rarely shadow this scrupulous essay, conducted with sensitive intelligence and firm scholarly justice.

How can the religion of spiritual love go to war with carnal weapons? Augustine answers that it can do so because human nature and its condition itself embodies tensions and even contradictions. Their nature mixing goodness and sin, men cannot escape paradox in any action, or even in thought. “The actualization of even a diluted sense of justice in the world was for [Augustine] an intensely complicated and inevitably tragic process.” War’s extremities only heighten the fundamental paradoxes of human life itself.

Observing that “Augustine’s thoughts on war cannot be divorced from his thoughts on God,” Stephenson presents a well-considered, concise reading of Augustinian theology. His familiar doctrine of the “two cities,” heavenly and earthly, serves as an image of every human being’s “most important decision,” the “choice between turning toward and turning away from God,” of loving the Creator or loving His creations, bodily or intellectual. Because these two cities will intertwine until the Day of Judgment, Augustine finds “no true justice in this life.” In the true sense, there is no more a just ‘carnal’ or earthly war than there is any just earthly peace. Constantine’s conversion didn’t perfect the Roman Empire, although it made it more hospitable to Christians.

Still, men rightly cherish earthly peace, here and now. It “both moderates the misery [of this life] and provides an atmosphere for necessary contemplation of God’s presence.” There may be no atheists in foxholes, but neither are there saints. War can be a tragic necessity in order to attain this modest peace. “The polity’s ‘moral’ purpose, while very real,” is for Augustine “only indirect: to keep the peace.”

Political authority issues from God’s providence, the intelligent direction of His agape. This does not free such authority from the perversity of the human will. Decisions to wage war are often unjust even by the modest standards attainable on earth. The injustice of many wars does not excuse disobedience to rulers; no sentimental populist, Augustine regards subjects as corrupt as rulers, and he requires their obedience in all but extreme cases. The only example he gives is not war but state-enforced idolatry.

“For Augustine, war was justifiable only as an action arising out of right love”—love of God and of neighbor for the sake of the divine image in him. “To love one’s fellows is not to condone their wrongdoing. Rather, it is to distinguish between the person and the wrongdoing.” War does not necessarily prevent the love that brings this distinction to light. Indeed, “if circumstances are appropriate, love [agape] requires rebuke,” including physical coercion. A father punishes lovingly, and a ruler may order war lovingly; Augustine himself made no objection to the military defense of besieged Hippo, where he served as archbishop. This stern ardor has nothing to do with romance or sentimentality, which accounts for its near-implausibility to modern sensibilities.

Augustine recognizes a problem with agapic love. Original sin clouds our thoughts, including our introspection. Even rules or principles do not suffice; they are all-too-human. How does a statesman who goes to war know his motives to be right? He doesn’t. He remains in need of God’s unmerited grace, as do all human beings; his weaker and fallible agape calls forth God’s all-powerful and perfectly wise agape.

Stevenson concludes with a chapter on two twentieth-century just-war theorists who take Augustine as their guide. Paul Ramsey departs from Augustine in his optimistic opinion that a just war is a positive good, not a necessary evil, seen in both his confidence in reason to discern right conduct and in his absolute prohibition of the deliberate killing of innocents. Reinhold Niehbuhr, though a Protestant, in Stevenson’s view comes closer to Augustinian pessimism, always a product not of despair but of humility. Reason does not suffice because thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction fails to address the irremediably contradictory character of human life and also because reason too, ruled by perverse human will, cannot ascend from the cave that is the earthly city.

Although the machines generated by modern scientific rationality wax more formidable with every year, “war remains a contest of human will.” Both Ramsey and Niebuhr, following Augustine, see this. And in following Augustine with fidelity, Stevenson helps readers see Augustine’s thoughts with near-prelapserian clarity—so much so that I am tempted to think his book calls into question the anti-rational pessimism it conscientiously portrays.

Joseph B. Soloveitchik: The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought. New York: Seth Press/The Free Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, May 10, 1988.

 

The non-Jewish majority of mankind, including the majority of those called ‘intellectuals,’ know almost nothing of Jewish thought, ancient or modern. Anti-Judaism, and later anti-Semitism, discouraged such knowledge in the past; it is no excuse today. Yet formidable obstacles remain.

Because Jewish thought emphasizes the Law, the Halakhah, it cuts against the libertarian and indeed libertine instincts of our time and place. Christian thought, which criticizes Jewish ‘legalism’ and attempt to summarize the Law by the commands to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, also discourages careful inquiry. For their part, Jews themselves have never much proselytized; orthodox Judaism intentionally discourages too-curious ‘outsiders.’ Lawgivers command; study of the law serves obedience, and is not to be undertaken from an attitude of ‘mere curiosity.’

This latter difficulty need not prove insuperable. Great rabbis have written books accessible to conscientious non-Jews. Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed remains the paradigm of these. But Maimonides was and remains a controversial and complex figure, his understanding of Judaism tinctured by Greek and Arabic philosophy. Modern readers will need a mastery of those philosophers before they can approach Maimonides.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik speaks in terms more familiar to us. Educated at the University of Berlin, he knows the writings of Kant, Hegel, and the major German theologians. As a member of a distinguished rabbinical family, he began serious, disciplined academic training in childhood. This background makes him a lucid and profound commentator on a conflict that very nearly defines Western culture: the conflict between Jerusalem and Athens—more specifically, Jewish tradition and modern philosophy (call it ‘Berlin’).

The Halakhic Mind complements Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man, published five years ago. In Halakhic Man, he distinguishes the man governed by Jewish law from the more familiar Homo religiosus, whose emotionalism and quest for transcendence inclines toward mysticism. In The Halakhic Mind Soloveitchik distinguishes the thought of Halakhic man fro modern philosophic thought.

Under pressure from the discoveries of twentieth-century physics, Soloveitchik observes, modern philosophy has split into two major factions. Logical positivists attempt to evaluate all realms of human life by the criteria of modern scientific method; apart from the fact that this simply rules morality, politics, and religion out of philosophic inquiry, it does not have much explanatory power. This leaves the field open to various philosophers who, deriving their thought from Hegel, do not reject scientific method but do not suppose it the last rational word on the nature of reality. “Epistemological pluralism” results—the selection of a rational method of inquiry appropriate to the object of the inquiry. Unfortunately, like its practical counterparts, moral relativism and political pluralism, cognitive pluralism tends toward chaos, an egalitarian stew wherein all the ingredients look and taste the same.

Soloveitchik wants to redeem the common sense behind epistemological pluralism—that the criteria of knowledge in physics differ from the criteria of knowledge in religion, for example—without sacrificing cognitive and ethical hierarchy. He insists that any psychical act has a logical shape to it; even the most passionate lover must apprehend his beloved. Thus Homo religiosus “substitutes neither belief for knowledge nor faith for critical reasoning; no less than the philosopher himself, he is an enthusiastic practitioner of the cognitive art.”

Soloveitchik sees the problem: “apprehension” here can mean false perception or misunderstanding as easily as true, and lovers of God do not always much care for rationality. Soloveitchik rejects religious sentimentalism as a “pretentious and arrogant” attitude that “frees every dark passion and every animal impulse in man.” “It is of greater urgency for religion to cultivate objectivity than perhaps for any other branch of human culture.”

This returns him to the importance of law. Law makes religious love and religious thought manifest. It makes subjectivity objective, susceptible to rational inquiry. “Subjectivity cannot be approached directly; it must first be objectified by the ‘logos,'” the word of God.

It should be needless to say that for Rabbi Soloveitchik “objectification reaches its highest expression in the Halakhah”—which Law, he cautions, one must not confuse with the causal natural law of scientists. To confuse halakhic law with natural law would be to deny free will to human beings, and therefore to deny any merit to our obedience to God’s laws.

As for religious liberalism, it “has traveled in the wrong direction—from objectivity to subjectivity,” sacrificing religiosity to liberalism along the way. Aiming at objectivity will yield a different result: “Out of the sources of the Halakhah, a new world view awaits formulation.”

Rabbi Soloveitchik’s pair of books will remain an indispensable introduction to Jewish thought and its response to modern philosophy.