Chaos from the Ancient World to Early Modernity: Formations of the Formless 9783110655001, 9783110653694

Citation preview

Chaos from the Ancient World to Early Modernity

Chaos from the Ancient World to Early Modernity Formations of the Formless Edited by Andreas Höfele, Christoph Levin, Reinhard Müller and Björn Quiring

ISBN 978-3-11-065369-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-065500-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-065398-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943148 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Pörtner & Tröger GbR, Würzburg Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Image Credits Introduction

1 3

Glenn W. Most The Invention of Chaos

11

Stefan M. Maul Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung Die babylonischen Lehren von der Dialektik des Werdens der 23 Welt Christoph Levin Paradise Established The Foundation of Kosmos versus Chaos according to Genesis 1 – 3 41 Reinhard Müller Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7) Ein Zeugnis althebräischer Gerichtsprophetie und seine politischen 59 und religionsgeschichtlichen Hintergründe Beate Kellner Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring und Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung 81 Florian Mehltretter Mixed Abysses Chaos and Heterodoxy in Romance Philosophical Poetry of the Late Renaissance 111 Andreas Höfele “Come to Great Confusion” Chaos in King Lear

129

VI

Table of Contents

Verena O. Lobsien Sympathy Lost Pastoral Responses to Chaos

149

Gordon Teskey The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

171

Björn Quiring The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

201

Karsten Fischer Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order On the Ideological Iconography of Authoritarianism in Hobbes Index of Authors

235

219

Image Credits Introduction Fig. 1: Robert Fludd: Chaos, in Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atqve Technica Historia: In duo Volumina secundum Cosmi differentiam diuisa (Oppenheim: Theodor de Bry, 1617), 26. Staatliche Bibliothek Regensburg, 999/ 2Philos.787(1/2, S. 26, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11057771 – 1. Fig. 2: Detail of fig. 1. Chaos, in Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atqve Technica Historia: In duo Volumina secundum Cosmi differentiam diuisa (Oppenheim: Theodor de Bry, 1617), 26. Staatliche Bibliothek Regensburg, 999/2Philos.787(1/2, S. 26, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11057771 – 1. Beate Kellner: Abb. 1: Heinrich Wittenwiler, Der Ring, Prologseite, aus: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Cgm 9300, fol. 1v. Karsten Fischer: Figs. 1 and 2: Wenceslaus Hollar: Chaos, n.d., the Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, University of Toronto with permission of the Fisher Library Toronto, Chaos (1) Hollar_k_0008 and Chaos (2) Hollar_k_0009. Fig. 3: Wenceslaus Hollar: Creation of Sun and Moon, n.d., the Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, University of Toronto, with permission of the Fisher Library Toronto, Hollar_k_0014. Fig. 4: Wenceslaus Hollar: Creation of Man and Beast, n.d., the Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, University of Toronto, with permission of the Fisher Library Toronto, Hollar_k_0017. Fig. 5: Wenceslaus Hollar: Civilis Seditio, 1643, the British Museum, London, Q,6.23 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 6: Abraham Bosse: Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. Fig. 7: Wenceslaus Hollar: A Comparison Between the Bohemian and English Civil Wars, c. 1659, Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, with permission of the Fisher Library Toronto, Hollar_k_0632. Fig. 8: Jean Matheus: Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 1642, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Call Number: *EC65 H6525 642e. Fig. 9: Adriaen Collaert: Amerika, c. 1595 – 1600, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Inv.Nr. BI: 6060. http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.collect. 96928.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-001

Introduction [H]ujus materiae sedulus perscrutator Anaxagoras fuit, qui post multos in hoc studio exantlatos labores, materiam rerum primam rudem esse & indigestam molem, Chaos dictam, opinatus est, cui etiam Poëta in metamorph. videtur assentire.¹

Before the creation of the world there was, according to the English cosmologer Robert Fludd (1574– 1637), a “raw and undigested mass called Chaos.” Drawing on Anaxagoras, Ovid and a host of other authorities, Fludd describes “this first matter, the primordial entity” as … infinite, unformed, with a potential for something as for nothing. Of no quantity or extension, it can be called neither small nor big. Of no quality, it is neither delicate nor firm, nor perceptible. Of no property and no inclination, it is neither moving nor resting, without any colour or elementary quality; yet of all action the passive beginning and capable of all things. Hence it is called the mother of the world: the heavenly orbs, adorned with their golden fires, and the four elements, suspended near the centre underneath, are comprehended in its womb.²

The gist of the passage emerges from its surplus of negatives. Chaos has the potential for anything and everything, but no actual shape, size or texture. Surprisingly, Fludd proposes to depict it anyway: “We have drawn here,” he writes, “an imaginary effigy of this formless matter in the shape of blackest smoke or vapour, of frightful shadow or the gloomy deep, […] a rough mass, disordered and imperceptible.”³ The image we find when we turn the page of Flood’s book is no doubt striking, but it is neither infinite nor unformed, and it is most certainly not imperceptible. Chaos is rendered as a black square, each of its four sides captioned with the words: “Et sic in infinitum” – and so on to infinity. Representation imposes form on the formless. It subjects the unrepresentable to the format of its carrier medium: a page in a printed book. Given this medium, the idea of infinity and formlessness might have been equally well – perhaps even better – expressed by a completely empty white page. Fludd himself might have thought so too had he adhered to the notion of primordial chaos as a void, a yawning chasm

 Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atqve Technica Historia: In duo Volumina secundum Cosmi differentiam diuisa (Oppenheim: Theodor de Bry, 1617), 24. Retrieved from https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/ bsb11057771_00026.html?zoom=0.8000000000000003, accessed 1 April 2020.  Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi […] Historia, (see above note 1), 25 (my trans., AHö).  Ibid. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-002

4

Introduction

Fig. 1: Robert Fludd, Chaos, in Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica Atqve Technica Historia: In duo Volumina secundum Cosmi differentiam diuisa (Oppenheim: Theodor de Bry, 1617), 26.

of nothingness. But such a notion and the concomitant idea of creatio ex nihilo would hardly have appealed to him. His hermetic-alchemical mindset chooses something over nothing. Fludd’s chaos, though without quantity or extension, acquires an almost physical tactility when he calls it massa (dough or lump) or moles (a heavy mass). Like Aristotle’s hyle (ὕλη), this ‘dough’ is raw material, formless but shapeable, the ur-stuff of creation. For Fludd as a writer it seems natural to choose a thick blob of printing ink as the image of the ‘stuff’ from which the myriad letters of his book-worlds were drawn. However, looking more closely at Fludd’s black blob we find that, far from being uniformly black, the square is only almost black and far from undifferentiated. It is, as we can see, a thicket of finely cross-hatched lines. This too betrays its intended formlessness as a product of ‘formation’, imprinted with the traces of being formed.

Introduction

5

Fig. 2: Detail of fig. 1, “Chaos”

The Canadian artist Luke Murphy⁴ speaks of Fludd’s “diabolically simple etching” as “a kind of ancestor […] to all black squares in art.” “It is meant to represent,” Murphy suggests, “what came before not only light, but darkness as well. What it tries to contain – an unimaginable nothingness – is so beyond its simple means that [one] can’t help but look at it in awe. It’s as if the great nothingness before anything at all makes us look closer at each black etched line for clues to better imagine what is beyond words.” And also look, we would suggest, at what is beyond image and indeed beyond what the image is supposed to represent: primordial chaos itself. A similar pull towards what may lie behind or beyond even chaos can already be detected in Hesiod’s Theogony, the primal locus of Chaos in Greek writing.⁵ The verb marking the appearance of Chaos is not, we should note, ‘to be’ but ‘to become’ (γένετ᾿: εγένετο). In Glenn Most’s translation: “First of all Chaos/Chasm came to be.” Where did it come from? we may ask, what came before the before? Robert Fludd’s tantalizing image illustrates what the reader will encounter in the pages of this volume: the inevitable tension between the nothingness of chaos and the ‘somethingness’, as it were, of its conceptualizing and representation. The formless, one might say, generates its own forms. Or even an excess of forms, as in the opening passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a wild muddle or jumble that cannot be controlled or contained: Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, quem dixere chaos: rudis indigestaque moles

 Luke Murphy on Robert Fludd, Painters on Painting, posted 27 May 2017, https://painterson paintings.com/luke-murphy-robert-fludd/, accessed 2 April 2020.  See the chapter by Glenn Most in this volume.

6

Introduction

nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum.⁶ (Before there was earth or sea or the sky that covers everything, Nature appeared the same throughout the whole world: what we call chaos: a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place.)⁷

Chaos is the antithesis of order, but also its complement or even progenitor (Fludd’s “mother of the world”). The relation between the two can be construed as dialectical interplay or even as direct begetting. Again Hesiod sets the precedent: “from Chaos/Chasm Erebos (i. e. darkness) and black Night came to be; and then Aether (the upper air, the sky) and Day came forth from Night, who conceived and bore them after mingling in love with Erebos.” (l.123 – 125)⁸ Chaos begets darkness, but darkness begets its very opposite. The dynamism of Hesiod’s narrative of origin makes chaos a productive force. Some readers of the poem have credited this force with the begetting of Gaia and Eros.⁹ Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. As the original “formless void” (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, it precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in both the cosmos and society, threatening to undo them both. From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament onwards, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain chaos, but also to unleash it as a sanction against the violation of social and ethical norms. Chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order: a region of pure potentiality that grounds reality and provides (as Fludd’s prima materia) the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order. As the following chapters will show, chaos assumes its own peculiar formations that sometimes mirror existing orders and sometimes point toward past or future ones. What makes chaos such a fertile subject for the interdisciplinary approach adopted in this book is the historical and cultural variety of its discursive formations. And also, that this variety is coupled with a long-term continuity of recurrent patterns and motifs. This blend of variation and continuity is equally char-

 P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoseon Liber primus, ll. 5 – 9. Retrieved from http://www.thelatinli brary.com/ovid.html, accessed 2 April 2020.  Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Anthony S. Kline. Retrieved from https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/ trans/Ovhome.htm, accessed 21 April 2020.  Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, vol. 1, ed. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2010).  This is not actually said in the text. See Most, “The Invention of Chaos”, below.

Introduction

7

acteristic of the concept of Nature. Nature and Chaos, one could say, travel through history hand in hand: Nature as the epitome of cosmic order, as God’s work and the living image of His Will in the world; Chaos as the negation of that order, the continuing presence of a destructive force that threatens its existence. But nature can also be seen as a part of that same chaotic force, not an embodiment of order but a source of disorder that must be tamed and suppressed if order is to be maintained. This axiological ambivalence is a hallmark of the role of nature in conceptualizing political order, the topic and central term of the Munich research group¹⁰ from which this volume has emerged. This topic retains its relevance beyond our chronological catchment area well into the 18th century and after. Alexander Pope’s “Windsor Forest” (1713) provides an exemplary instance of a conceptualizing of political order in which both nature and chaos are given an interactive role to play. It is a political landscape poem published in the year of the Peace of Utrecht which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, securing “the maritime, commercial and financial supremacy of Great Britain.”¹¹ A panegyric to the reigning House of Stuart,¹² Pope’s poem inscribes the peaceful scenery of Windsor with a political creation story: a second Eden wrested from the chaos of war and past tyranny: The Groves of Eden, vanish’d now so long, Live in Description, and look green in Song: These [the groves of Windsor], were my Breast inspir’d with equal Flame, Like them in Beauty, should be like in Fame. Here Hills and Vales, the Woodland and the Plain, Here Earth and Water seem to strive again; Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d, But as the World, harmoniously confus’d: Where Order in Variety we see, And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree. (ll. 7– 16) ¹³

What Windsor Forest ideally exemplifies to the poet is nature in both its variety and its harmony. The oxymoron “harmoniously confus’d” is set against the “crush’d and bruis’d” of Chaos. “Harmoniously confus’d” is a kind of blueprint  “Natur in politischen Ordnungsentwürfen: Antike ‒ Mittelalter ‒ Frühe Neuzeit” / “The Role of Nature in Conceptualising Political Order: Ancient ‒ Medieval ‒ Early Modern” (DFG Research Group FOR 1986), https://www.for1986.uni-muenchen.de/forschergruppe/index.html, accessed 5 April 2020.  G.M. Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England (New York: Longmans, Green & Co.,1942) 363.  Queen Anne, the last monarch of that line, died a year later.  Alexander Pope, “Windsor Forest”. Retrieved from The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive: https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o3704-w0010.shtml, accessed 5 April 2020.

8

Introduction

for the English type of landscape garden and by extension a ‘natural’, liberal order of politics. Nature is prospering, yielding rich crops: “And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns.” (l. 42) As clearly as the order of nature and the political order modelled on nature belong together, just as clearly is this ideal conjunction distinguished from Chaos and its political equivalent, tyranny. But Tyranny too has – or in Pope’s perspective had – its counterpart in nature: Not thus the Land appear’d in Ages past, A dreary Desart and a gloomy Waste, To Savage Beasts and Savage Laws a Prey, And Kings more furious and severe than they; Who claim’d the Skies, dispeopled Air and Floods, The lonely Lords of empty Wilds and Woods: Cities laid waste, they storm’d the Dens and Caves, (For wiser Brutes were backward to be Slaves) What could be free, when lawless Beasts obey’d, And ev’n the Elements a Tyrant sway’d? (ll. 33 – 52)

In Pope’s even-paced couplets, Chaos has become a tamed monster which may be safely paraded on the pleasant greens of Windsor. Yet the very orderliness and symmetry of the poem has a potentially unsettling subtext. The stanza introducing the beauties of the political locus amoenus and the immediately following stanza describing the horrors of political chaos form a perfect balance. Their equilibrium is underlined by their parallel endings: “a STUART reigns” – “a Tyrant sway’d.” Intertwined with the notion of chaos past is thus the notion, already mentioned, of its continuing presence: the always latent threat that the equilibrium of the social order may be tipped towards disruption. This thought with its roots in ancient cosmogony and myth proves remarkably durable over time. It features prominently in a classic work of modern sociology, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality. This construction, the authors argue, depends on the establishment of a “symbolic universe” which ensures that social institutions and roles are legitimated by locating them in a comprehensively meaningful world. For example, the political order is legitimated by reference to a cosmic order of power and justice, and political roles are legitimated as representations of these cosmic principles. The institution of divine kingship in archaic civilizations is an excellent illustration of the manner in which this kind of ultimate legitimation operates.

But, according to Berger and Luckmann, this working principle is not limited to ‘archaic’ cultures. The maintenance of a comprehensively meaningful symbolic universe is just as crucial for modern societies. Their “institutional order,” too,

Introduction

9

“is continually threatened by the presence of realities that are meaningless in its terms.” This order too is “faced with the ongoing necessity of keeping chaos at bay.” The case studies in this volume offer contributions to an archaeology of this ongoing necessity: “All societies are constructions in the face of chaos.”¹⁴ Andreas Höfele on behalf of the editors

The editors wish to thank Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for its support and Prof. Heinrich Meier, director of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, for generously hosting the conference from which this volume derives.

 Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge ( London and New York: Penguin, 1967), 121 (italics original).

Glenn W. Most

The Invention of Chaos The earliest surviving passage in which the word “chaos” appears is at the beginning of the account of the creation of the world in Hesiod’s Theogony: ἤτοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾿· αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖ᾿ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ ἀθανάτων οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου Τάρταρά τ᾿ ἠερόεντα μυχῷ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης, ἠδ᾿ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι, λυσιμελής, πάντων τε θεῶν πάντων τ᾿ ἀνθρώπων δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσι νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν. (Hesiod, Theogony, 116 – 122) [In truth, first of all Chaos came to be, and then broad-breasted Earth, the ever immovable seat of all the immortals who possess snowy Olympus’ peak and murky Tartarus in the depths of the broad-pathed earth, and Eros, who is the most beautiful among the immortal gods, the limb-melter – he overpowers the mind and the thoughtful counsel of all the gods and of all human beings in their breasts.]

These lines follow immediately after Hesiod’s requests to the Muses to recount to him the history of the immortals “from the beginning” (ἐξ ἀρχῆς) and to tell him “which one of them was born first” (ὅτι πρῶτον γένετ᾽ αὐτῶν); evidently, the lines quoted provide the answer to these requests. So we can be sure that Chaos is an immortal and that of the immortals it was Chaos that was born first of all and was present from the beginning. But it is not immediately clear what else there is that we could possibly say about Chaos. The word is not attested in Homer, and Hesiod is the earliest extant author who uses it. But Hesiod does not explain it – unlike the other two primordial entities, Earth and Eros, whom Hesiod characterizes by means of a full panoply of descriptive epithets and relative clauses, he does not specify by means of even a single word what exactly he wants us to understand by the Note: This article is a preliminary version of the first section of a longer study which discusses in greater detail, and with a full scholarly apparatus, not only Hesiod’s text but also its reception in ancient Greek philology and philosophy, and also considers Ovid’s use of the term “Chaos” in his Metamorphoses and elsewhere. The texts and translations of Hesiod are taken, sometimes with slight modifications, from Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, vol. 1, ed. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, revised edition 2018); those of other ancient authors are also taken, again sometimes with slight modifications, from the Loeb Classical Library. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-003

12

Glenn W. Most

term “Chaos”. This is very strange. After all, every Greek already knew who Gaia (Earth) and Eros were before encountering the Theogony: these two divinities, and the entities and processes that they represented and governed, were familiar elements of everyday experience and were venerated widely in religious cults. But no cult of Chaos is attested anywhere in ancient Greece, and we know of no mythic narratives that were attached to its name. What is more, Hesiod’s descriptions of Gaia and Eros emphasize aspects that are manifestly pertinent to a cosmogony that is based upon sexual reproduction: Gaia is broad-breasted, hence a firm and nourishing mother; while Eros melts the limbs and overpowers the mind and counsel of every single god and human being, and so will be able to supply a reliable motor for all the reproductive acts that will follow later and will structure both the Theogony and the world it describes. But Chaos, by contrast, is neither masculine like Eros nor feminine like Gaia, but instead is neuter. What role could a god that is neither male nor female possibly have in a theogony? How, and with whom, could it conceivably reproduce and thereby produce offspring? If Chaos is neuter, does its name perhaps designate not some personal god or goddess, but instead a concept or abstraction of some sort? And if so, should we take it not so much as a deity but rather as a philosophical, or proto-philosophical, notion? And in that case should it not be the tools of philosophy, not of theology or philology, that must be applied to understanding it? And finally: it is unclear how we are to understand the relation between Chaos and the other primordial entities Hesiod mentions. It is sometimes thought that Hesiod is claiming here that Earth and Eros were born from Chaos, so that Chaos would be not only the precursor of these two but also their progenitor. But Hesiod’s text does not say that Chaos was born first and that then from out of Chaos were born Earth and Eros: what it says is simply that first Chaos came about, and then Earth, and then Eros. This seems to indicate mere succession, not direct generation. But then what is the precise relation between these three entities? In the Theogony Chaos is in fact an enigma, perhaps intended as such, in any case one that Hesiod has placed conspicuously but only fleetingly at the beginning of his cosmogony and then left entirely unexplained. We might feel tempted to rush quickly through its brief appearance, in order to reach all the sooner the much more familiar entities that lie just beyond it, namely Earth and Eros. But surely it is worth pausing instead, to ask just what Hesiod meant by starting the creation of the world with Chaos. When we use the word “chaos” nowadays, we use it to mean a confused jumble of disordered matter of different kinds. This is, for example, the way in which the term is employed and explained at length by Ovid in the first book of his Metamorphoses, in his own account of the creation of the world:

The Invention of Chaos

13

ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, quem dixere chaos: rudis indigestaque moles nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum. nullus adhuc mundo praebebat lumina Titan, nec nova crescendo reparabat cornua Phoebe, nec circumfuso pendebat in aere tellus ponderibus librata suis, nec bracchia longo margine terrarum porrexerat Amphitrite; utque erat et tellus illic et pontus et aer, sic erat instabilis tellus, innabilis unda, lucis egens aer; nulli sua forma manebat, obstabatque aliis aliud, quia corpore in uno frigida pugnabant calidis, umentia siccis, mollia cum duris, sine pondere, habentia pondus. (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.5 – 20) [Before the sea was, and the lands, and the sky that hangs over all, the face of Nature showed alike in her whole round, which state have men called chaos: a rough, unordered mass of things, nothing at all save lifeless bulk and warring seeds of ill-matched elements heaped in one. No sun as yet shone forth upon the world, nor did the waxing moon renew her slender horns; not yet did the earth hang poised by her own weight in the circumambient air, nor had the ocean stretched her arms along the far reaches of the lands. And, though there was both land and sea and air, no one could tread that land, or swim that sea; and the air was dark. No form of things remained the same; all objects were at odds, for within one body cold things strove with hot, and moist with dry, soft things with hard, things having weight with weightless things.]

Ovid explicitly cites the Greek term chaos and he explains it as a mere mass (moles) that is raw and unformed (rudis), without any organization or order (indigesta), consisting of nothing other than inert weight (pondus iners) and the warring elements of all things thrown together and uncombined with one another (congestaque eodem | non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum). All the matter that will one day compose the ordered universe we know is already present, but because it has not been coordinated and articulated it exists in the condition of an indistinguishable mishmash: at the time of Chaos nothing remained in the form that most properly belonged to it (nulli sua forma manebat), but instead the elements of all things were in a state of constant warfare with each other. Whatever Hesiod may have meant by his Χάος, we can be quite certain that it was not this. While the etymology of the word χάος is not free of difficulties, there can be no doubt that linguistically this s-stem noun is closely connected with the adjective χαῦνος (“porous, filled with holes”) and with the verbs

14

Glenn W. Most

χαίνω and χάσκω (“to open, to gape wide, to yawn”). The root refers to something that is closed under normal circumstances and therefore usually presents a solid obstacle that resists penetration or view, but that has now opened up and reveals itself as an empty space rather than as an obstructing body: already in Homer, and then often later, above all a human mouth (Il. 16.350, Od. 12.350, Arist. Ach. 10, 30), or an animal’s maw (Il. 20.168, Hdt. 2.68, Arist. Fr. 337), probably also a wound (Soph. Fr. 508 Radt). Below Mycenae there is a ravine that the locals call Χάβος (“Chavos”); the form corresponds to the ancient Greek Χάος. In particular, when Homeric characters feel so profoundly ashamed of something they have done or of something that could be said about them that they wish that they could become invisible so that no one could ever cast reproachful eyes upon them, they wish that the broad earth would open up and swallow them: ὥς ποτέ τις ἐρέει· τότε μοι χάνοι εὐρεῖα χθών (“So will some man speak one day; on that day let the wide earth gape open for me.” Il. 4.182 and often). It is doubtless this Homeric commonplace, that the broad earth might suddenly gape wide open, that explains the meaning of Χάος in Hesiod’s Theogony and provides the source of the idea of its role in his cosmogony. Chaos is simply a wide yawning vacant gap, an empty gulf or abyss, surrounded by external borders but containing nothing whatsoever between them. It is opposed to Earth, which is stable and firm and provides a solid foundation for all the immortals (πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ | ἀθανάτων). But the Hesiodic transformation of this Homeric idea is magnificent. What in Homer had been psychology, in Hesiod becomes cosmogony; what had been a mortified fantasy of the momentary rupture of all normalcy, the solid earth suddenly opening wide its fearsome maw, here becomes an independent entity, with its own reality and dignity, prior even to the earth itself; whereas in Homer the earth remained where it was as context and what happened (or did not really happen, since this was a wish that remained unfulfilled) was merely that a gap opened up in it, in Hesiod the gap comes first and is the context for, and is hence either the same size as, or at least minimally larger than, the earth, which in a second moment finds its own place within it. Nonetheless the Homeric source of this idea remains recognizable in Hesiod’s εὐρύστερνος, which takes up again Homer’s εὐρεῖα χθών but also, understandably in this context, personalizes the adjective and perhaps even slightly feminizes it. If Chaos came about so that there would be a gap within which Earth could come about, then the question might arise of how completely Earth fills that gap. How snugly does Chaos surround Earth? Does Earth occupy Chaos completely, so that Chaos envelops it like a skin? Or might Chaos surround Earth, but more loosely, in the way that a felt cap covers a person’s head (cf. Anaximenes

The Invention of Chaos

15

A7.[6] DK = D3.[6] LM)? Or might the gap that is Chaos be larger than Earth, and if so would it be much larger or only somewhat larger, so that Earth would occupy only a portion of that gap and could be imagined to be located somewhere within it? There is no reason on principle why Hesiod must be thought to have been obliged, or even able, to provide a coherent answer to such questions – his conception of his world is not just narrowly or restrictively physical in our sense, but also essentially theological (naturally these terms would require further unpacking), and we can easily suppose that he had no clear and systematic view of such cosmological spatial relations. It is worth remembering that Hesiod’s account of the geography of Tartarus and the Underworld is notoriously difficult to interpret as coherent. And yet two passages suggest that Hesiod did indeed have a view on this matter: he seems to have imagined the gap formed by Chaos to extend beyond the limits of Earth, in such a way that, where Earth stopped, the empty void of Chaos began. The first occurs in the only other passage of Hesiod’s poetry in which we can be certain that he used the word Χάος, at a climactic moment of the battle between the Olympians and the Titans in the Theogony: ἔζεε δὲ χθὼν πᾶσα καὶ Ὠκεανοῖο ῥέεθρα πόντός τ᾿ ἀτρύγετος· τοὺς δ᾿ ἄμφεπε θερμὸς ἀυτμὴ Τιτῆνας χθονίους, φλὸξ δ᾿ αἰθέρα δῖαν ἵκανεν ἄσπετος, ὄσσε δ᾿ ἄμερδε καὶ ἰφθίμων περ ἐόντων αὐγὴ μαρμαίρουσα κεραυνοῦ τε στεροπῆς τε. καῦμα δὲ θεσπέσιον κάτεχεν Χάος· (Hesiod, Theogony, 695 – 700) [the whole earth boiled, and the streams of Ocean and the barren sea. The hot blast encompassed the earthly Titans, and an immense blaze reached the divine aether, and the brilliant gleam of the lightning bolt and flash blinded their eyes, powerful though they were. A prodigious conflagration took possession of Chasm […] ]

Zeus’ lightning bolts produce an immense conflagration that not only burns up everything down both at the level of the earth (ἔζεε δὲ χθὼν πᾶσα […] τοὺς δ᾿ ἄμφεπε θερμὸς ἀυτμὴ | Τιτῆνας χθονίους) and at that of the waters (καὶ Ὠκεανοῖο ῥέεθρα | πόντός τ᾿ ἀτρύγετος), but that also reaches all the way up to the aether on high (φλὸξ δ᾿ αἰθέρα δῖαν ἵκανεν | ἄσπετος). Whether or not we are to understand the word Χάος in line 700 to be referring to the same primordial entity named at line 116 (and hence whether or not we decide that it is to be capitalized), in either case the term clearly designates the open extent of empty space that stretches upwards from the earth and the waters on the one hand to the aether on the other – that is, to the yawning empty vertical gap lying in the middle of the cosmos above the earth and below the sky. The existence of

16

Glenn W. Most

a similar empty vertical gap far below the earth is suggested by the closely related word χάσμα in a slightly later passage: ἔνθα δὲ γῆς δνοφερῆς καὶ Ταρτάρου ἠερόεντος πόντου τ᾿ ἀτρυγέτοιο καὶ οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος ἑξείης πάντων πηγαὶ καὶ πείρατ᾿ ἔασιν, ἀργαλέ᾿ εὐρώεντα, τά τε στυγέουσι θεοί περ χάσμα μέγ᾿, οὐδέ κε πάντα τελεσφόρον εἰς ἐνιαυτὸν οὖδας ἵκοιτ᾿, εἰ πρῶτα πυλέων ἔντοσθε γένοιτο, ἀλλά κεν ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα φέροι πρὸ θύελλα θυέλλης ἀργαλέη· δεινὸν δὲ καὶ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι τοῦτο τέρας· καὶ Νυκτὸς ἐρεμνῆς οἰκία δεινὰ ἕστηκεν νεφέλῃς κεκαλυμμένα κυανέῃσι. (Hesiod, Theogony, 736 – 745) [That is where the sources and limits of the dark earth are, and of murky Tartarus, of the barren sea, and of the starry sky, of everything, one after another, distressful, dank, things which even the gods hate: a great chasm, whose bottom one would not reach in a whole long year, once one was inside the gates, but one would be borne hither and thither by one distressful blast after another – it is terrible for the immortal gods as well, this monstrosity; and the terrible houses of dark Night stand here, shrouded in black clouds.]

In this part of the underworld there are none of the features of the upper world we know, the earth and sea, and Tartarus below, and the sky above: there is nothing here but the sources and limits (πηγαὶ καὶ πείρατ[α]) of these things, however we are to understand them. It is a dark empty space, bounded on the one hand by gates (πυλέων) and on the other by a bottom (οὖδας) that one could not reach in a whole year, buffeted by constant storm-winds. Morphologically and semantically, χάσμα is not quite identical with χάος: the ending -μα of χάσμα suggests the particular result of a process of construction, while χάος seems to denote something more abstract and general. Why Hesiod substituted here the term χάσμα (which he never uses elsewhere) is a good question: presumably he did not do so for purely metrical considerations, but in order to suggest that this subterranean gap was not simply identical with the gap above the earth. What exists beyond Chaos? At lines 695–700, the aether seems to lie above it while the earth is underneath it; at lines 736–45, a bottom is said to lie below it underneath the earth. There is also one more passage transmitted in Hesiod’s Theogony, in which an apparently quite different conception appears: ἔνθα δὲ γῆς δνοφερῆς καὶ ταρτάρου ἠερόεντος πόντου τ᾿ ἀτρυγέτοιο καὶ οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος ἑξείης πάντων πηγαὶ καὶ πείρατ᾿ ἔασιν, ἀργαλέ᾿ εὐρώεντα, τά τε στυγέουσι θεοί περ. ἔνθα δὲ μαρμάρεαί τε πύλαι καὶ χάλκεος οὐδός,

The Invention of Chaos

17

ἀστεμφὲς ῥίζῃσι διηνεκέεσσιν ἀρηρώς, αὐτοφυής· πρόσθεν δὲ θεῶν ἔκτοσθεν ἁπάντων Τιτῆνες ναίουσι, πέρην χάεος ζοφεροῖο. αὐτὰρ ἐρισμαράγοιο Διὸς κλειτοὶ ἐπίκουροι δώματα ναιετάουσιν ἐπ᾿ Ὠκεανοῖο θεμέθλοις, Κόττος τ᾿ ἠδὲ Γύγης· Βριάρεών γε μὲν ἠὺν ἐόντα γαμβρὸν ἑὸν ποίησε βαρύκτυπος Ἐννοσίγαιος, δῶκε δὲ Κυμοπόλειαν ὀπυίειν, θυγατέρα ἥν. (Hesiod, Theogony 807– 819) [That is where the sources and limits of the dark earth are, and of murky Tartarus, of the barren sea, and of the starry sky, of everything, one after another, distressful, dank, things which even the gods hate. That is where the marble gates are and the bronze threshold, fitted together immovably upon continuous roots, self-generated; and in front, apart from all the gods, live the Titans, on the far side of the gloomy chasm. The celebrated helpers of loud-thundering Zeus live in mansions upon the foundations of Ocean, Cottus and Gyges; but the deep-sounding Earth-shaker made Briareus, since he was good, his sonin-law, and he gave him Cymopolea, his daughter, to wed.]

Here Chaos is one region among others below the earth and beyond it there is yet another region, in which two of the three Hundred-Handers dwell. Are the “foundations of Ocean” here (Ὠκεανοῖο θεμέθλοις, 816) the same thing as the “sources and limits of the seaˮ (πόντου […] πηγαὶ καὶ πείρατ[α], 737– 738) in the preceding passage? But there the χάσμα seemed to be identified as the region that contained the foundations of Ocean, whereas here the sources and limits of the sea are located “beyond the gloomy chasm” (πέρην χάεος ζοφεροῖο, 814). And yet if these are not the same, what is the relation between them? Furthermore, what are we to make of the fact that one passage speaks of a χάσμα and the other of a χάος? Are the two terms being used interchangeably, or is the point precisely some difference between the two, and if so what is that difference? Lines 807– 810 are identical with lines 736 – 739: unless they are a deliberate repetition on the part of Hesiod himself (but a repetition of this length would be uncharacteristic for Hesiod’s style), presumably they have been interpolated erroneously into one passage from the other by someone other than the poet at some point in the course of the poem’s transmission, but if so from which passage into which? This whole last passage has been athetized as an interpolation by a number of editors since Wolf; whether we attribute them to Hesiod himself, or to a later continuator or transmitter of his poem, they seem to represent a conception that cannot easily be squared with that of the rest of the Theogony. In any case, Hesiod’s Chaos seems to be nothing more than the first, inaugural stage in his cosmogonic account. Hesiod poses the generations of first Chaos, then Earth, and then Eros as a matter of pure chronological succession, and he does not explain their sequence logically. But it is evident that there is an

18

Glenn W. Most

underlying rationale to this sequence, for it would be impossible for Earth to come about first and to be followed by Chaos – for if Earth came about first, where would it come about? Instead, Chaos must evidently come first, and it comes about so that in the second stage Earth will have somewhere to come about (which is quite different from saying that Earth comes about out of Chaos or from Chaos). We might say that Chaos provides the place or the setting within which the firm Earth can be placed, but that in itself Chaos is nothing more than that. It is not so much location in the sense of a definite place in a stable cosmic space like that which one day Newton would imagine, as rather the very possibility of being located anywhere at all: as it were, a condition of possibility for place rather than some place itself. If Hesiod does not say very much about Chaos, this may well be for the simple reason that there is not much that he or anyone else could possibly say about it. Chaos simply comes about so that, somewhere, cosmogony can begin. To ask what preceded Chaos is nonsensical, for nothing could have preceded it. And yet there seems to be a certain tension between the aorist verb γένετ᾿ and the superlative adverb πρώτιστα, for the aorist tense might well suggest grammatically that something A was already the case (this A might for example have been expressed in the imperfect tense) before some definite action B (expressed in the aorist) took place, while the adverb asserts that this B not only was first but also, as a superlative, was the very first thing of all, so that no A could possibly have preceded it; after all, all the later aorists that will denote that something B came to be in the successive portions of Hesiod’s Theogony will situate that event at some determinate time in the past before which there was a preceding condition in which that something B had not yet come to be. This tension is inherent in Hesiod’s genealogical model: the aorists work well in the account of a lineage made up of a sequence of successive births, but it seems a bit odd when a verb of the same tense is applied to the very first member of that sequence. In all later births in Hesiod’s theogony, the divinity that is born is born from one or more other divinities who were already there before it; but this is not the case for his three primordial entities, Chaos, Earth, and Eros, which indeed were born or came about, but did so from nothing whatsoever. Is Chaos then just an abstraction, a place-holder used to start the cosmogonic engine running? We might think so when we read lines 116 and following; but in fact it will turn out soon that this is not quite true. For, astonishingly, only a few lines later Hesiod goes on to designate Chaos as the progenitor of its own lineage of divinities: ἐκ Χάεος δ᾿ Ἔρεβός τε μέλαινά τε Νὺξ ἐγένοντο· Νυκτὸς δ᾿ αὖτ᾿ Αἰθήρ τε καὶ Ἡμέρη ἐξεγένοντο,

The Invention of Chaos

19

οὓς τέκε κυσαμένη Ἐρέβει φιλότητι μιγεῖσα. […] Νὺξ δ᾿ ἔτεκε στυγερόν τε Μόρον καὶ Κῆρα μέλαιναν καὶ Θάνατον, τέκε δ᾿ Ὕπνον, ἔτικτε δὲ φῦλον Ὀνείρων. δεύτερον αὖ Μῶμον καὶ Ὀιζὺν ἀλγινόεσσαν οὔ τινι κοιμηθεῖσα θεῶν τέκε Νὺξ ἐρεβεννή, Ἑσπερίδας θ᾿, αἷς μῆλα πέρην κλυτοῦ Ὠκεανοῖο χρύσεα καλὰ μέλουσι φέροντά τε δένδρεα καρπόν· καὶ Μοίρας καὶ Κῆρας ἐγείνατο νηλεοποίνους, Κλωθώ τε Λάχεσίν τε καὶ Ἄτροπον, αἵ τε βροτοῖσι γεινομένοισι διδοῦσιν ἔχειν ἀγαθόν τε κακόν τε, αἵ τ᾿ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε παραιβασίας ἐφέπουσιν, οὐδέ ποτε λήγουσι θεαὶ δεινοῖο χόλοιο, πρίν γ᾿ ἀπὸ τῷ δώωσι κακὴν ὄπιν, ὅστις ἁμάρτῃ. τίκτε δὲ καὶ Νέμεσιν πῆμα θνητοῖσι βροτοῖσι Νὺξ ὀλοή· μετὰ τὴν δ᾿ ᾿Aπάτην τέκε καὶ Φιλότητα Γῆράς τ᾿ οὐλόμενον, καὶ Ἔριν τέκε καρτερόθυμον. αὐτὰρ Ἔρις στυγερὴ τέκε μὲν Πόνον ἀλγινόεντα Λήθην τε Λιμόν τε καὶ Ἄλγεα δακρυόεντα Ὑσμίνας τε Μάχας τε Φόνους τ᾿ A ᾿ νδροκτασίας τε Νείκεά τε Ψεύδεά τε Λόγους τ᾿ ᾿Aμφιλλογίας τε Δυσνομίην τ᾿ Ἄτην τε, συνήθεας ἀλλήλῃσιν, Ὅρκόν θ᾿, ὃς δὴ πλεῖστον ἐπιχθονίους ἀνθρώπους πημαίνει, ὅτε κέν τις ἑκὼν ἐπίορκον ὀμόσσῃ· (Hesiod, Theogony, 123 – 125, 211– 232) [From Chasm, Erebos and black Night came to be; and then Aether and Day came forth from Night, who conceived and bore them after mingling in love with Erebos. […] Night bore loathsome Doom and black Fate and Death, and she bore Sleep, and she gave birth to the tribe of Dreams. Second, then, gloomy Night bore Blame and painful Distress, although she had slept with none of the gods, and the Hesperides, who care for the golden, beautiful apples beyond glorious Ocean and the trees bearing this fruit. And she bore (a) Destinies and (b) pitilessly punishing Fates, (a) Clotho (Spinner) and Lachesis (Portion) and Atropos (Inflexible), who give to mortals when they are born both good and evil to have, and (b) who hold fast to the transgressions of both men and gods; and the goddesses never cease from their terrible wrath until they give evil punishment to whoever commits a crime. Deadly Night gave birth to Nemesis (Indignation) too, a woe for mortal human beings; and after her she bore Deceit and Fondness and baneful Old Age, and she bore hard-hearted Strife. And loathsome Strife bore painful Toil and Forgetfulness and Hunger and tearful Pains, and Combats and Battles and Murders and Slaughters, and Strifes and Lies and Tales and Disputes, and Lawlessness and Recklessness, much like one another, and Oath, who indeed brings most woe upon human beings on the earth, whenever someone willfully swears a false oath.]

How does Chaos reproduce? Given that it is neuter, it is not surprising that it does not engender offspring by pairing with another divinity, male or female or neuter, but instead simply generates out of itself, by a kind of neuter agamog-

20

Glenn W. Most

ony. More surprising is the fact that, vague and abstract though it is, Chaos has enough personal substantiality to create progeny of any sort. And yet the nature of the descendants that Chaos generates explains why Hesiod chose to attribute such a capacity to it. For Chaos and Earth are the progenitors of two races of gods that populate the whole divine world of Hesiod’s cosmos but that, by a kind of theological apartheid, live fully separate from one another and never intermarry with one another or produce joint offspring. From Earth come all the gods on the one hand that have personal names and individual personalities, the ones honored in cult by the Greeks and told of in mythic legends. But Chaos’ descendants on the other hand are not persons but instead are relations between persons, and almost all of them bear strongly negative connotations: after a first cosmic non-material generation of Night and Day, all the others that follow are not persons who do things but terrible things that happen to persons or that they commit, starting with Doom and ending with Oath. In particular, they seem more to represent terrible things that humans do to one another than ones committed or suffered by the gods. In a sense, the progeny of Chaos are Hesiod’s explanation for evil in the world, especially in the human world of violence, injustice, and need to which Hesiod only refers obliquely in his Theogony but to which he would later devote the whole of his Works and Days. If the children of Gaia are the agents that populate mythic narratives, the children of Chaos are the mostly evil actions that these agents perpetrate upon one another. We might say that within the narrative grammar of Hesiod’s Theogony, the children of Gaia are nouns while the children of Chaos are (despite their nominal form) verbs. Only together can they construct the well-formed narrative sentences of Hesiod’s account of the gods and of human and of the actions and sufferings of both of them. Did Hesiod invent his Chaos himself, or did he take it over from earlier traditions, be these Greek or Oriental? This question is of course impossible to answer with certainty, and given the complex (and still not fully understood) relations between Hesiod, a poet who used writing, and the oral traditions he presupposed, transmitted, and transformed (and perhaps thereby helped kill off), it is not even clear that the question, posed in these stark alternatives, quite makes sense. Moreover, we still know far too little about possible sources for Hesiod’s Chaos in ancient Near Eastern texts – to say nothing of our ignorance about the specific paths that such possible sources could have taken in order to reach Hesiod – for us to be able to assert with confidence either that Hesiod’s Chaos has a Greek origin or that it does not. But on the one hand it is difficult to conceive of Hesiod’s Chaos outside of the extraordinary construction of his Theogony, so thoroughly is it integrated into the fundamental plan of that work, and on the other hand there is no evidence whatsoever for any ear-

The Invention of Chaos

21

lier or independent existence of Chaos in Greek thought and no good evidence for an exactly parallel conception in early non-Greek sources. So my own cautious preference is to suppose either that Hesiod invented it himself, or that, if he did indeed encounter it in earlier traditions (whether these were Greek or foreign), he so thoroughly transformed it to fit it into his cosmogony that he deserves the credit for having invented it. If so, then Hesiod’s Chaos is Hesiod’s Chaos. But what about Ovid’s Chaos? The difference between the Hesiodic conception of Chaos and the Ovidian one could not be more evident. For Hesiod, Chaos is absolutely empty; for Ovid, it is a confused jumble of materials of different kinds. If I complain to my teen-aged daughter that her bedroom is in a state of total chaos, I do not thereby mean that it is an empty void, a black and vacant gap, but that it is a total mess made up of completely different things – shoes, clothes, books, musical appliances, sports equipment, etc. – that have been thrown together without any order whatsoever. Where did Ovid’s interpretation of Chaos come from? Might Ovid have invented his conception of Chaos himself? It would be attractive to suppose so, for we would thereby violate two methodological prejudices that are widespread among scholars but are not capable of surviving serious inspection: namely, first that there is nothing in Latin that was not already present in Greek, and second that there is nothing in poetry that was not already present in philosophy. Is it really impossible to imagine that Ovid might not have just invented his interpretation of Chaos as a material jumble entirely on his own? After all, no surviving direct source for Ovid’s account has ever been identified in ancient Greek and Latin literature by scholars: none of the ancient Greek and Latin attestations of Chaos that are earlier than Ovid understands the term to refer to a confused jumble of heterogeneous materials. It would be uneconomical to hypothesize that there must have been some prior text which interpreted Hesiod’s Chaos as a disordered disarray of matter and which inspired Ovid – but which was then lost in transmission and has not reached us. How are we to explain the origins and significance of Ovid’s version of Chaos? That is a very good question, one to which I hope to return soon.

Stefan M. Maul

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung Die babylonischen Lehren von der Dialektik des Werdens der Welt

1 Vielfalt der Schöpfungsvorstellungen und Mythen Die altorientalischen Vorstellungen von der Weltentstehung, die uns in keilschriftlichen Textzeugen entgegentreten, sind ausgesprochen vielfältig. Gute 150 Jahre nach der Entzifferung der mesopotamischen Keilschrift können wir die mehr als drei Jahrtausende währende Überlieferungsgeschichte der Literatur des Alten Orients weitgehend überschauen. Nicht wenige sumerische und akkadische Texte sind auf uns gekommen, die uns mit ganz unterschiedlichen altorientalischen Entwürfen vom Werden der Welt konfrontieren, aus jeweils verschiedenen Regionen stammen, auf unterschiedliche Fragestellungen Bezug nehmen, ganz verschiedene Absichten verfolgen und schließlich sehr unterschiedlichen Gattungen zuzuordnen sind. Zu den bedeutendsten Texten dieser Art zählt der babylonische Sintflutmythos, der hier in den Blick genommen wird.

2 Die Einbettung des Sintflutmythos in die Geschichte vom Werden der Welt Das altbabylonische, spätestens im 17. Jh. v.Chr. verfasste Atramchasis-Epos darf als eine der wichtigsten und auch ausführlichsten Quellen für die altorientalischen Vorstellungen vom Werden der Welt gelten.¹ Zwar lauten die letzten beiden  Die bis heute gültige Standardedition des Atramchasis-Epos erschien bereits im Jahr 1969: W. G. Lambert, A. R. Millard, Atra-ḫasīs. The Babylonian Story of the Flood. With the Sumerian Flood Story by M. Civil (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). Seitdem sind einige wichtige neue Textvertreter bekanntgeworden und zahlreiche neue Studien erschienen. Ein großer Teil der daraus zu gewinnenden neuen Erkenntnisse ist für jede einzelne Textzeile in der ausführlichen Bibliographie von D. Shehata erfasst: D. Shehata, Annotierte Bibliographie zum altbabylonischen Atram-ḫasīs-Mythos Inūma ilū awīlum, Göttinger Arbeitshefte zur altorientalischen Literatur Heft 3 (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2001). B. Foster hat in seinem Werk Before the Muses. An Anthology of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-004

24

Stefan M. Maul

Zeilen des umfangreichen Werkes „Die Sintflut habe ich besungen / für alle Menschen, horchet hin!“,² sie lassen aber dennoch keinen Zweifel daran, dass der Text nicht allein oder in erster Linie von der großen Flut handelt. Vielmehr schildert er das Weltengericht der Flut als Höhe- und Wendepunkt in dem Prozess des sich erst langsamen Entfaltens der Welt, deren Werden als eine Abfolge von schlimmen, ausweglos erscheinenden Krisen und deren weiser Bewältigung beschrieben wird.³ Unserem Text zufolge galt die Sintflut als wesentliche Voraussetzung für das Entstehen der Gegenwartswelt, die erst durch schmerzvolles Ringen zu dem Ebenmaß finden konnte, das der Gegenwart Verlässlichkeit und dauerhafte Stabilität zu geben vermag. Die erste Zeile des babylonischen Liedes von der Flut liefert den Schlüssel zum Verständnis des gesamten Textes und verweist auf den Kern seines Inhaltes. Sie lautet: „Zu der Zeit, da die Götter Mensch waren“.⁴ In provokanter Deutlichkeit lehrt uns dieser erste Vers, dass die altbabylonische Dichtung vor allem von dem Verhältnis von Göttern und Menschen berichtet. Von der Menschlichkeit der Götter und von der Göttlichkeit der Menschen wird in diesem Text die Rede sein, und davon, wie göttliches und wie menschliches, wie kosmisches und wie irdisches Maß im Lauf der Zeiten erst entstand, oder besser noch, erst gefunden werden musste. Das ausgewogene Maß, das der Gegenwartswelt Sicherheit verleiht, das unerschütterliche, auf gegenseitigem Vertrauen fußende Miteinander von Göttern und Menschen, so sieht es unser Text, ist das Ergebnis einer langen, dialektisch verlaufenden Entwicklung, die von heranwachsenden Antagonismen, zyklisch wiederkehrenden Krisen und deren Bewältigung geprägt ist.

Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 32005), 227– 280 eine ausgezeichnete Übersetzung des Atramchasis-Epos vorgelegt, die weitgehend den aktuellen Kenntnisstand des altbabylonischen Textes und der weit schlechter erhaltenen Fassung des Epos aus dem ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausend wiedergibt. Im Jahr 1994 legte W. von Soden eine deutsche Übersetzung der altbabylonischen Fassung des Textes vor: W. von Soden, „Der altbabylonische Atramchasis-Mythos,“ in Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments, Bd. 3, Weisheitstexte, Mythen und Epen, Lieferung 4: Mythen und Epen II, Hg. O. Kaiser u. a. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1994): 612– 645.  Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel III, Kolumne viii, 18 – 19.  Hierzu siehe auch W. von Soden, „Konflikte und ihre Bewältigung in babylonischen Schöpfungs- und Fluterzählungen. Mit einer Teil-Übersetzung des Atramḫasīs-Mythos,“ in Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 111 (1979): 1– 33.  Zu den sehr unterschiedlichen Deutungen, die diese Zeile im Verlauf der Zeit erfuhr, siehe D. Shehata, Annotierte Bibliographie (wie Anm. 1), 23 – 24.

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

25

3 Uranfang und erste Krise Der Dichter des altbabylonischen Atramchasis-Epos lässt seine Geschichte in grauer Vorzeit beginnen zu einer Zeit, als nur Götter die Erde bevölkerten und es noch keine Menschen gab. Durch Los hatten die Götter die Welt aufgeteilt und sich jeweils in Himmel, Erde und den unter der Erde befindlichen Raum, der den „Süßwasserozean“⁵ beherbergt, begeben. Die ersten Götter hatten neue Götter gezeugt und sich in Generationen derart vermehrt, dass nicht mehr hinreichend Nahrung für sie alle zur Verfügung stand.⁶ Deshalb blieb den zahlreich gewordenen Unsterblichen, die wie Menschen⁷ der Nahrung bedürfen, nichts anderes übrig, als im Schweiße ihres Angesichtes selbst für ihr tägliches Brot zu sorgen. Bereits hier beginnt, noch lange vor der Erschaffung des Menschen, die Welt zum ersten Mal aus dem Gleichgewicht zu geraten. Unter der Führung der sieben Anunna ⁸, der großen, schicksalsentscheidenden Götter, kam allein den zahlreichen irdischen Göttern die Aufgabe zu, die Ernährung aller Unsterblichen sicherzustellen. Denn allein die Erde kann Nahrung hervorbringen. Und so mussten die zahlreichen Götter der Erde, Igigi ⁹ genannt, in harter Fron Flußbetten und Kanäle in das Land eingraben, damit die Erde durch Bewässerung des Ackerlandes fruchtbar werde und die Feldfrucht gedieh. Doch die im Himmel und in der unteren Welt beheimateten Götter blieben ohne Arbeitsverpflichtung: Zu der Zeit, da die Götter Mensch waren, leisteten sie die Arbeit, schleppten sie den Tragkorb. Der Tragkorb der Götter war groß, denn gewaltig war die (zu leistende) Arbeit und mannigfach die Mühsal. So ließen die großen Anunna-Götter, sie alle sieben, die Igigi-Götter die Arbeit des Schleppens verrichten. (…)

 Die Mesopotamier glaubten, dass sich unter der Erdoberfläche ein gewaltiger, von ihnen apsû genannter Süßwasserozean erstrecke, aus dem sich Quellen und Flüsse speisen. Der im Zweistromland sehr hoch anstehende Grundwasserspiegel war ihnen Beweis für diese Vorstellung. Als Herr des apsû galt der Weisheitsgott Enki/Ea. Zum apsû und den zugehörigen Vorstellungen von Kosmos und Weltgefüge siehe W. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 22011).  Deutlicher als im Atramchasis-Epos ist dies in dem sumerischen Mythos „Enki und Ninmach“ geschildert.Vgl. die deutsche Übersetzung von W. H. Ph. Römer in Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments, Bd. 3: Weisheitstexte, Mythen und Epen, Lieferung 3: Mythen und Epen I, Hg. O. Kaiser u. a. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1993), 386 – 401.  Vgl. die erste Zeile des Atramchasis-Epos: „Zu der Zeit, da die Götter Mensch waren.“  Die sumerische Bezeichnung Anunna bedeutet „die von fürstlicher Abstammung.“  Die Etymologie der Bezeichnung Igigi ist uns unbekannt.

26

Stefan M. Maul

Die Anunna-Götter hatten sich entzogen, sie ließen die Igigi-Götter die Arbeit des Schleppens verrichten. Götter gruben die beiden Ströme,¹⁰ die göttlichen Wasseradern, das Leben des Landes. Die Igigi-Götter gruben die beiden Ströme, die göttlichen Wasseradern, das Leben des Landes. Götter gruben den Tigris-Strom und danach auch den Euphrat.¹¹

Das Epos spiegelt eine lebensweltliche Grunderfahrung Mesopotamiens: Der Segen der noch von Herodot gepriesenen,¹² geradezu unglaublichen Fruchtbarkeit des Zweistromlandes erschließt sich nicht von selbst sondern erst durch harte gemeinschaftliche Arbeit. Im semiariden Klima des südlichen Zweistromlandes ist Regenfeldbau nicht mehr möglich. So ist Ackerbau dort auf das Wasser von Euphrat und Tigris angewiesen. Aber anders als in Ägypten, wo der Nil die fruchtbaren Wasserfluten zur rechten Zeit vor der Feldbestellung bringt, ist im südlichen Mesopotamien das Wasser dann besonders knapp, wenn es benötigt wird.Viel zu spät, erst wenn die Zeit der Ernte gekommen ist, bringen die langsam fließenden Ströme Euphrat und Tigris die reichlichen Schmelzwasser aus den Gebirgen Anatoliens und Irans heran. Dann aber droht die Wasserflut zur Unzeit die Ernte zu ertränken und das Land zu überschwemmen. Der Wasserreichtum des Landes kann daher nur gewinnbringend genutzt werden, wenn eine überregionale Führungsmacht dauerhaft sicherstellt, dass durch die harte disziplinierte und koordinierte Arbeit von vielen Tausenden das Land von einem ausgeklügelten Kanalsystem durchzogen wird. Allein die zahlreichen Wasserstraßen, Kanäle und Becken, die der steten Pflege bedürfen, können das bedrohliche, zur Unzeit kommende Flutwasser aufnehmen und dann dosiert wieder abgeben, wenn es benötigt wird. Unserem Text zufolge sind Landwirtschaft und Irrigation, die Lebensgrundlage der Kultur des Zweistromlandes, durch die Götter selbst in die Welt gekommen. Doch in einer Zeit, „da die Götter Mensch waren“, waren Arbeit und Ungleichheit auch für die Unsterblichen der Preis, den diese, noch lange bevor es Menschen gab, für die Sicherstellung ihres Auskommens zu zahlen hatten. Im Atramchasis-Epos ist geschildert, dass die irdischen Götter über lange Zeiträume

 In den hier vorgelegten Übersetzungen stehen Ergänzungen, die nicht ganz gesichert sind, im Kursivsatz.  Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 1– 6 und 19 – 26. Falls nicht eigens angegeben, wird hier stets die Übersetzung der altbabylonischen Textvertreter geboten. Alle hier präsentierten Übersetzungen stammen vom Verfasser dieses Artikels.  Herodot, Historien I: 193. Siehe Josef Feix, Herodot. Historien. Griechisch-deutsch, Bd. 1, Hg. Josef Feix (Mü nchen: Heimeran, 1963), 176 – 179.

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

27

in schwerer Mühsal die Flüsse und Kanäle des Landes gruben und so die Kulturlandschaft Mesopotamiens prägten: Die Götter verrichteten die Arbeit des Schleppens des Nachts und auch bei Tage. Sie führten Klage dabei und fraßen die Wut in sich hinein. Sie jammerten laut inmitten der Erdhügel: „Der Tragkorb ist’s, der uns erschlägt, die Arbeit lastet schwer! Kommt her, dem Aufseher¹³ wollen wir entgegentreten! Von der schweren Arbeit, die auf uns lastet, soll er uns befreien! Den Herrn, den Ratgeber der Götter, den Helden, kommt her, ihn wollen wir von seinem Thron herunterholen! Enlil, den König, den Ratgeber der Götter, den Helden, kommt her, ihn wollen wir von seinem Thron herunterholen!“ Ein Gott aber öffnete seinen Mund und sprach zu den Göttern, seinen Brüdern: „Auf, lasst uns doch den Aufseher der alten Zeit erschlagen!“¹⁴

Ermutigt durch den „einen Gott“, der sich zum Wortführer der aufständischen Unsterblichen macht, sinnen die Götter, denen ihre Fronarbeit unerträglich geworden war, nun auf Kampf. In der hoffnungsfrohen Erwartung, dass der „Aufseher der alten Zeit“ erschlagen werde und endlich eine neue und bessere Zeit anbrechen möge, frei von der schlimmen Mühsal des Kanalbaus, verbrennen sie ihre Tragkörbe und zerbrechen Schaufeln und Hacken. Die ihnen auferlegte Arbeit kann nun nicht mehr weitergeführt werden. Sie rotten sich zusammen, unser Text sagt: „sie fassen einander“ und ziehen lärmend, nach Kampf rufend vor den Palast des Götterkönigs Enlil und drohen, diesen zu stürmen.¹⁵ Die wenigen Götter, die mit dem Götterkönig den göttlichen Palast bewohnen, sind ob der lärmenden Menge aufgeschreckt und verbarrikadieren den Götterpalast. Doch der Götterkönig Enlil schläft. Hastig wird er von seinem Wesir Nusku aufgeweckt: „Mein Herr, dein Haus ist umzingelt, Kampf brandet gegen dein Tor. Enlil, dein Haus ist umzingelt, Kampf brandet gegen dein Tor.“ Enlil ließ Waffen bringen vor seinen Thron. Enlil öffnete seinen Mund und sagte zu Nusku, seinem Wesir:

 Der hier genannte Titel lautet wörtlich „Thronträger“. Der „Thronträger“ war der Beauftragte des (Götter)königs, der die Arbeit der Massen zu beaufsichtigen hatte.  Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 38 – 49.  Die plastische Schilderung des Götterstreiks macht deutlich, dass massive soziale Spannungen und deren Lösung in den Erfahrungsbereich der altorientalischen Kultur des Zweistromlandes gehörten.

28

Stefan M. Maul

„Nusku, verriegele dein Tor, nimm deine Waffe und stell dich hin vor mich!“ Da verriegelte Nusku sein Tor, nahm seine Waffe und stellte sich vor Enlil hin. Nusku öffnete seinen Mund und sprach zu Enlil, dem Helden: „Mein Herr, ganz gelb ist dein Gesicht. Es sind doch deine eigenen Kinder. Was bist du so in Angst? Enlil, ganz gelb ist dein Gesicht. Es sind doch deine eigenen Kinder. Was bist du so in Angst?“¹⁶

Der ironisch-witzige Unterton ist nicht zu überhören. Der mächtige Herrscher der Götter ist aus seinem Schlaf gerissen. Denn Ruhe und Ebenmaß, die ihm zuvor noch den Schlaf ermöglicht hatten, sind dahin. Gerade das sich weiter Entwickeln der göttlichen Welt, das Entstehen von neuen Göttergenerationen, das (aus der Perspektive der Gegenwartswelt notwendige) sich Ausdifferenzieren der Göttlichkeit ist es, das zu einer grundlegenden Bedrohung der frühen Götterwelt herangereift war. Mit einem Mal sieht Enlil seine göttliche Ordnung durch die „eigenen Kinder“ in Frage gestellt, vor denen er sich nun mit Waffen schützen muß. Da als Ergebnis einer langen Entwicklung unter den Göttern die Lasten ungleich verteilt waren, ist die Herrschaft des Enlil in Gefahr, und die Götterwelt droht auseinander zu brechen. Rasch beruft Enlil die Versammlung der großen Götter ein und man beschließt, dass Nusku, der Wesir des Enlil, Verhandlungen mit den aufständischen Göttern führen möge. Nusku aber kann unter den wütenden Göttern nichts ausrichten. Sie verweigern die Arbeit und rufen nach Kampf: Es hörte dieses Wort der Enlil, seine Tränen dabei fließen. Der Gott geriet in Angst vor dem, was er nun erfuhr. Er sprach zu seinem Bruder Anum¹⁷. Enlil geriet in Angst vor dem, was er nun erfuhr. Er sprach zu dem Helden Anum: „Ich werde gemeinsam mit dir zu den Himmeln aufsteigen. Das Amt nimm fort (von mir), nimm es in deine eigene Hand. Da sitzen die großen Götter vor dir. Ruf doch den einen Gott, ihm soll man mein Amt übergeben!“¹⁸

 Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 80 – 96.  Anum ist der Name des Himmelsgottes.  Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 166 – 173.

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

29

Enlil, der Götterkönig, ist bereit abzudanken und sein Amt dem „einen Gott“, dem Gott nämlich, der der Wortführer des Götterstreiks gewesen war, zu überlassen. Eine Welt unter der Führung eines solchen Gottes wäre freilich keine Welt der Ordnung und Harmonie, sondern eine Welt des Aufbegehrens und des Chaos …

4 Die Lösung des Konfliktes In dieser ausweglos erscheinenden Situation, die das Götterkönigtum des Enlil, ja die gesamte göttliche Ordnung in Frage stellt, ergreift Ea, der Gott der Weisheit, das Wort.¹⁹ Er erkennt in seiner Rede die Klagen der irdischen Götter über deren übermäßige Arbeitsbelastung als berechtigt an. Gleichzeitig aber lässt er keinen Zweifel daran aufkommen, dass die Arbeit des Grabens und Schleppens, so schwer sie auch sein mag, dennoch verrichtet werden muss. Denn die Ernährung der so zahlreich gewordenen Unsterblichen gilt es nun einmal sicherzustellen. Unlösbar erschien die Aufgabe, den Aufruhr der hart arbeitenden Götter zu beruhigen, ohne dass die (Götter)welt durch Umsturz in Chaos und Maßlosigkeit verfiele. Doch der Weisheitsgott weiß Rat. Ein neues Wesen, sagt er, soll erschaffen werden, das die Götter von ihrer Fron für immer befreit: Da sitzt Belet–ili²⁰, der Mutterleib. Der Mutterleib möge den lullû ²¹ erschaffen. Den Tragkorb der Götter soll schleppen der Mensch! Sie möge den lullû-Menschen erschaffen. Er soll das Joch tragen, die von der Herrschaft auferlegte Arbeit! Er soll das Joch tragen, die von Enlil auferlegte Arbeit! Den Tragkorb der Götter soll schleppen der Mensch!²²

Begeistert von dieser Idee bedrängen die Unsterblichen nun die Muttergöttin, in Eas Plan einzuwilligen. Unter einer Bedingung ist sie bereit, den Menschen hervorzubringen: Durch mich allein ist es sinnlos, ihn zu erschaffen. Nur gemeinsam mit Ea wird ein richtiges Werk daraus.

   

In einer parallelen Überlieferung ist es der Himmelsgott Anum, der hier spricht. Bēlet–ilī („Herrin der Götter“) lautet der Name der Muttergöttin. lullû ist das altehrwürdige sumerische Wort für „Mensch“. Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 181– 187.

30

Stefan M. Maul

Nur er macht alles rein, den Ton dafür soll er mir geben, dann bin ich bereit, ihn zu erschaffen.²³

Nicht aus Ton allein, so bestimmt es Ea, soll der Mensch entstehen. Dem Lehm für die Menschenschaffung soll Fleisch und Blut eines Gottes beigemengt sein. Aber nicht irgendein Gott wird Fleisch und Blut hergeben müssen. Fleisch und Blut „des einen Gottes“, des Wortführers des Götteraufstandes, so verfügt es der Gott der Weisheit, soll man verwenden. Nicht nur das Göttliche, sondern auch das laute Aufbegehren wird so das Wesen des Menschen prägen. Den einen Gott möge man schächten, dann sollen die Götter sich darin rein machen. Mit seinem Fleisch und seinem Blut soll Belet–ili vermischen den Lehm. Ja, Gott und Mensch seien vermengt, zusammengeführt im Lehm! Lasst uns dem Paukenschlag für alle weitere Zukunft lauschen. Aus dem Fleische des Gottes werde (des Menschen) Geist (eṭemmu)!²⁴

So lautet Eas Rede. Der „Paukenschlag“ genannte Herzschlag des Menschen, das Lebenszeichen schlechthin, soll von nun an ein Mahnmal sein für den Schöpfungsakt, der Mensch und Gott untrennbar bis ins Physische hinein aneinander bindet. Den Menschen soll er an seinen göttlichen Anteil erinnern, aber auch an die ihm übertragene Pflicht, die Götter zu versorgen. Denn allein zu diesem Zweck wurde der Mensch erschaffen. Dem Gott aber, der verspricht, dem „Paukenschlag für alle weitere Zukunft zu lauschen“, soll er ein Mahnmal sein, das ihn daran erinnert, dass nur durch den mit einem göttlichen Anteil ausgestatteten Menschen die einst in Frage gestellte Einheit der Götter gesichert werden konnte. Wie verabredet erschafft die Muttergöttin nun den Menschen: Als sie aber jenen Lehm geknetet hatte, rief sie die Anunna, die großen Götter, herbei. Die Igigi, die großen Götter, gaben Speichel über den Lehm. Mami²⁵ öffnete ihren Mund und sagte zu den großen Göttern: „Dieses Werk habt ihr mir befohlen, und ich habe es nun vollendet. Einen Gott habt ihr geschächtet, samt seinem Verstand. Von eurer schweren Arbeit habe ich euch befreit.

 Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 200 – 203.  Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 208 – 215.  Mami ist ein weiterer Name der Muttergöttin Bēlet–ilī.

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

31

Euren Tragkorb lud ich dem Menschen auf. Aber das lärmende Geschrei habt ihr der Menschheit übertragen!“²⁶

Unser Text schweigt darüber, ob das Schlachten „des einen Gottes“ als Strafe für sein Rebellieren verstanden wurde. In späten mesopotamischen Überlieferungen findet sich jedenfalls auch die Vorstellung, dass der Schöpfergott zur Erschaffung des Menschen sein eigenes Blut geopfert habe. Denn Berossos berichtet, dass „jener Gott [d.i. der Menschenschöpfer] sich das Haupt abgeschlagen habe, und das Blut, das von ihm herabrann, die anderen Götter aufgefangen, mit Erde verknetet und Menschen daraus gebildet hätten; weshalb diese auch weise und des Geistes des Göttergeschlechtes teilhaftig würden.“²⁷ Von nun an übernehmen die Menschen die Arbeit der Götter und setzen das Schöpfungswerk fort, indem sie Kanäle graben und dadurch die Versorgung des fruchtbaren Landes mit dem Leben spendenden Wasser und das Gedeihen der Feldfrucht sicherstellen: Der Mensch wurde einzig und allein geschaffen, um den Unterhalt der Götter zu sichern. Das Versorgen der Götter mit Speis und Trank, die Hege und Pflege der Götter – hierin sind sich alle mythologischen und theologischen Keilschrifttexte des Alten Orients, die von der Erschaffung des Menschen handeln, einig – ist die eigentliche, die wahre Aufgabe des Menschen. Aber nicht nur den Verstand, auch das „Geschrei“ (das uns noch beschäftigen wird), so sagt es die Muttergöttin deutlich, haben die Götter „der Menschheit übertragen“. Hierin liegt der Keim für eine neue, langsam heranwachsende Krise.

5 Erneute Krisen und ihre Lösung Das Gleichgewicht der Welt, das durch die geniale Idee der Menschenschöpfung wiederhergestellt worden war, gerät erneut erst langsam, doch dann immer deutlicher aus den Fugen: Es vergingen nicht einmal 600 Jahre, da breitete das Land sich immer mehr aus, immer zahlreicher wurden die Menschen, und das Land brüllte dabei so wie ein Stier. Durch ihr lautes Getriebe war aufgebracht der Gott, Enlil hörte ihr Geschrei und sprach zu den großen Göttern:

 Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 231– 242.  Zitiert nach P. Schnabel, Berossos und die babylonisch-hellenistische Literatur (Leipzig: Teubner, 1923), 255.

32

Stefan M. Maul

„Unerträglich ist mir das Geschrei der Menschen. In ihrem lauten Getriebe komme ich nicht mehr zum Schlaf. Gebt den Befehl, dass Kältefieber entstehe!“²⁸

Erschreckend ähnlich ist die zweite Krise der ersten. Bevölkerungswachstum und Lärm der Menschen entsprechen dem Anwachsen der göttlichen Population und ihrem Lärmen, das dereinst Enlil aus dem Schlaf gerissen hatte. Nachdem dem Schöpfungsplan entsprechend die Gemeinschaft von Göttern und Menschen über lange Zeit scheinbar unerschütterlich stabil gewesen war, kehrt ohne wirkliche Absicht Zwietracht ein. Das „Geschrei“, das, wie die Muttergöttin vorhergesagt hatte, die Götter den immer zahlreicher werdenden Menschen „übertragen“ hatten, wird ihnen nun angesichts der Menschenmassen zum Ärgernis. So strafen sie zum ersten Mal den Menschen, der zum ersten Mal Not leiden muss. Von den Göttern gesandt, kommt nun Krankheit in die Welt, für die in der uranfänglichen Schöpfung kein Platz gewesen war. Das Kältefieber soll den lärmenden Menschen zur Ruhe zwingen. Atramchasis, der Sintflutheld, wird hier zum ersten Male genannt. In allem Lärmen der vielen Menschen ist er der einzige, der sich nicht allein um seine menschlichen Belange kümmert, sondern die Gemeinschaft von Mensch und Gott pflegt. Unser Text sagt: Doch er, Atramchasis – sein Gott war Enki²⁹, offen war sein Ohr. Er spricht mit seinem Gott, und dieser, sein Gott, spricht mit ihm.³⁰

Atramchasis bittet seinen Gott in der Not um Rat, und Enki-Ea verrät seinem Schützling, wie er es erreichen kann, dass die Plage des Kältefiebers ein Ende findet. Die Menschen, so empfiehlt der Weisheitsgott, mögen alle für die Götter bestimmten Opfergaben, also die Güter, um deretwillen die Menschheit einst erschaffen worden war, nur noch einem einzigen Gott zukommen lassen. Nämlich dem, in dessen Gewalt es steht, den Menschen die Fieberplage zu senden. Beschämt vor den Menschen und den anderen Göttern, deren Nahrung nun ihm allein zufiele, würde dieser von seinem unheilvollen Geschäft ablassen müssen. Atramchasis gewinnt die Menschen für Eas Plan, und so gelingt es tatsächlich, die drohende Gefahr von der Menschheit abzuwenden. Zwar hatte die Krankheit das Lärmen der Menschen gedämpft. Aber die Menschen erholten sich wieder:

 Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 352– 360.  Enki ist der sumerische Name des Weisheitsgottes Ea.  Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 364– 367.

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

33

Ihre Gesichter wurden wieder glatt. Ihr altes Geschrei kam wieder ins Sein. Die Tage ihres Wohlergehens kehrten wieder.³¹

So wächst die Zahl der Menschen im Laufe von Jahrhunderten immer weiter an. Ihr Lärmen wird dem Götterkönig erneut unerträglich, und schließlich erteilt die Götterversammlung dem Wettergott den Auftrag, auf der Erde das Wasser versiegen zu lassen. Die Menschen leiden schwer, aber auf die gleiche Weise wie beim ersten Mal, kann auch der Wettergott umgestimmt werden. Wiederum viele Jahrhunderte später kann dank Ea und Atramchasis auch die dritte Plage, eine grauenvolle Hungersnot, im letzten Augenblick beendet werden. Über Jahrtausende hatte der gottverbundene Atramchasis so die Menschheit immer wieder retten können. Nach jeder der Plagen, mit denen Enlil die Menschen zum Schweigen bringen will, heißt es in unserem Text wie bereits zuvor: Ihre Gesichter wurden wieder glatt. Ihr altes Geschrei kam wieder ins Sein. Die Tage ihres Wohlergehens kehrten wieder.

6 Die Sintflut Als sich schließlich zeigt, dass sich die Menschen und ihr Wandel niemals würden ändern lassen, will der Götterkönig Enlil, der vor Zorn jedes Maß verloren hat, die gesamte Menschheit in einer allumfassenden Flut ein für alle Mal vernichten. Diesmal sollen die Menschen, die bislang nur mit Krankheit und Leiden zum Schweigen gebracht werden sollten aber den sicheren Tod nicht kannten, ausgerottet werden und allesamt den Tod finden. Die in der Versammlung zusammengerufene Gemeinschaft der Götter stimmt dem Vernichtungsplan des Götterkönigs zu, ohne sich Rechenschaft darüber abzulegen, dass nur dank der Existenz des Menschen die göttliche Ordnung im Gleichgewicht hatte gehalten werden können. Allein der Weisheitsgott Ea sträubt sich erbittert, dem Vernichtungsbeschluss der Götterversammlung zuzustimmen. Diesmal aber muss er sich beugen und vor allen anderen Göttern schwören, dass er den Vernichtungsplan keinem Menschen verraten wird. Doch wieder weiß der Weiseste aller Götter einen Ausweg. Er lässt Atramchasis träumen, Ea rede mit einer aus Rohr geflochtenen

 Siehe A. R. George und F. N. H. al-Rawi, „Tablets from the Sippar Library VI. Atra-hasis,“ Iraq 58 (1996): 176 – 177, Z. 39 – 41.

34

Stefan M. Maul

Wand, hinter der Atramchasis schläft. Ohne das drohende Unheil der Flut auch nur zu erwähnen, richtet der Weisheitsgott in dieser Rede den Auftrag an Atramchasis, eine rettende Arche zu bauen, statt an seinen Schützling an die Rohrwand. So bricht Ea nicht den den anderen Göttern geleisteten Eid und dennoch erfährt Atramchasis rechtzeitig von der geplanten Menschheitsvernichtung und erhält dazu noch genaueste Anweisungen, wie er sich, seine Familie und die Arten der Tiere retten kann: Rohrwand, Rohrwand, Mauer, Mauer, Rohrwand, höre doch her, und Mauer, gib Acht! Mann von Schuruppak, Sohn Ubar-Tutus³², reiß’ nieder das Haus und baue ein Schiff. Lasse ab vom Reichtum, und suche statt dessen nach dem, das atmet. Die Habe sei dir zuwider, erhalte statt dessen, das was atmet, am Leben! Hole den Samen all dessen, das atmet, herauf in das Inn’re des Schiffs! Die Maße des Schiffes, welches du erbauen wirst, seien aufeinander abgestimmt: Genau gleich sollen sein seine Breite und seine Länge.³³

In der mesopotamischen Überlieferung gilt, anders als in der hebräischen Bibel, die Sintflut nicht als Strafe für Vergehen und Sünde, sondern sie soll dem lärmenden Treiben der Menschen, das die Götter stört, ein Ende bereiten. Es mögen sich in der Sintfluterzählung des Alten Orients zwar Erinnerungen an die Frühzeit der Hochkultur des Zweistromlandes erhalten haben, als Überbevölkerung in der Tat massive politische und soziale Probleme verursachte. Aber auch in der mesopotamischen Überlieferung stehen das Lärmen der Menschen und Schuld in einem deutlichen Zusammenhang. Denn die Götter sandten allen Menschen zur Warnung Zeichen, die auf die kommende Sintflut verwiesen, doch die ganz auf sich bezogene Menschheit konnte und wollte diese in ihrem Lärmen nicht warnehmen. Nur ein Einziger war fähig und bereit, die göttliche Botschaft zu hören: Atramchasis, „dessen Ohr offen“³⁴ war. Auch Berossos wusste, immer noch in dieser Tradition stehend, zu berichten, dass Xisuthros-Atramchasis „wegen seiner Frömmigkeit“ errettet wurde.³⁵  Der „Mann von Schuruppak, Sohn Ubar-Tutus“ ist Atramchasis.  Gilgamesch-Epos, Tafel XI, 21– 30 (hier wie im Folgenden zitiert nach S. M. Maul, Hg., Das Gilgamesch-Epos neu übersetzt und kommentiert von Stefan M. Maul [München: C. H. Beck, 72017], 140 – 141). Die weitgehend parallel formulierten, die Sintflut behandelnden Passagen sind in den bekannten Textvertretern des Atramchasis-Epos nicht so gut erhalten wie im Gilgamesch-Epos.  Siehe oben und die dort zitierte Zeile Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel I, 365.  Zitiert nach P. Schnabel, Berossos und die babylonisch-hellenistische Literatur (wie Anm. 27), 265.

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

35

Kaum ist die Arche fertiggestellt, bringt Atramchasis all seine Habe, seine Familie, die Tiere und „jeglichen Samen, von dem das atmet“, aber auch „Vertreter aller Künste“ auf das Schiff.³⁶ Dann bricht die Flut herein: Einen ersten Tag walzte der Sturm das Land nieder. Rasend brauste er einher. Dann aber brachte der Ostwind die Sintflut. Wie ein Schlachtengemetzel ging die Wucht der Flut über die Menschen hinweg. Der Bruder kann seinen Bruder nicht sehen, noch erkennen die Menschen einander in der Vernichtung. Selbst die Götter packte da vor der Sintflut die Angst! Sie wichen zurück, sie hoben sich fort in den Himmel des Anum. Da kauern die Götter im Freien, eingerollt in sich selbst so wie Hunde. Laut schreit die Göttin auf, einer Kreißenden gleich, in Klagegeschrei verfiel Belet–ili, die (sonst doch so) schön an Stimme: „Wahrlich, jener (uranfängliche) Tag ist deshalb wieder zu Lehm geworden, weil ich in der Götterversammlung Böses sprach! Wie konnte ich nur in der Götterversammlung Böses sprechen und, um meine Menschen auszurotten, Krieg erklären? Denn ich bin es doch, die (sie) gebar! Meine eigenen Menschen sind’s doch! Wie Fische im Schwarm füllen sie (jetzt) das Meer!“ Die Götter, die aus der Unterwelt, verweilen mit ihr in Weinen, in Klage aufgelöst verweilen sie mit ihr in Weinen, verdorrt ihre Lippen, beraubt der gekochten Opferspeisen.³⁷

Erst in der Vernichtung werden die Götter gewahr, was sie angerichtet haben. Ihrer irdischen Wohnstätten beraubt, müssen sie nun hungernd und dürstend „im Freien“ ausharren. Denn es scheint niemand mehr da zu sein, der ihnen Speise, Hege und Pflege zukommen lassen könnte. Zwar schweigen jetzt die Menschen, deren Leichen „wie Fische im Schwarm das Meer füllen“. Aber statt dessen verfallen die Götter in „Klagegeschrei“. Die menschenlose Welt scheint, wiederum erfüllt von lautem Geschrei, zurückgeworfen in die Zeiten des Götteraufstandes. Erneut steht die göttliche Ordnung auf dem Spiel. Als die Wasser der Flut endlich wieder Land freigeben, bringt der gerettete Atramchasis, für alle Götter außer Ea völlig unerwartet, auf dem Berg, an dem die Arche hängengeblieben war, ein Opfer dar. Die Götter aber rochen den Duft, die Götter rochen den süßen Duft, die Götter kamen alsbald wie die Fliegen über dem Opferspender zusammen.³⁸

 Vgl. Gilgamesch-Epos, Tafel XI, 81 ff.  Gilgamesch-Epos, Tafel XI, 109 – 127.  Gilgamesch-Epos, Tafel XI, 161– 163.

36

Stefan M. Maul

7 Konfliktlösung In großer Freude darüber, dass trotz ihres todbringenden Beschlusses Menschen die Sintflut überlebt haben, geloben die Götter, nie wieder der vollständigen Vernichtung der Menschheit zuzustimmen. Nur der Götterkönig selbst, der das Weltengericht angeordnet hatte, weil die allzu zahlreich gewordenen Menschen seine göttliche Ruhe störten, ist empört, ein Schiff und noch lebende Menschen vorzufinden. Der Weisheitsgott Ea aber macht ihm schlimme Vorhaltungen: Ea öffnete seinen Mund und sprach, er sagte zu Enlil, dem Helden: „Du, der Weise unter den Göttern, der Held, wie nur konnte es geschehen, dass du keinen (guten) Rat erteiltest, sondern die Sintflut sandtest? (Nur) dem, der selbst eine Sünde beging, laste seine Schulden an! (Nur) dem, der eines Fehlers sich schuldig machte, laste seinen Fehler an! Lockre (die Zügel), (denn) nie sollten (sie) zerschnitten werden! Zieh sie (dennoch) straff (genug), damit (sie) nicht erschlaffen! Statt dass du die Sintflut sandtest, hätte der Löwe sich erheben sollen, um die Menschenmenge klein zu halten! Statt dass du die Sintflut sandtest, hätte sich der Wolf erheben sollen, um die Menschenmenge klein zu halten! Statt dass du die Sintflut sandtest, hätte Hungersnot entstehen sollen, um das Land zu morden! Statt dass du die Sintflut sandtest, hätte Erra³⁹ sich erheben sollen, um das Land zu morden!“⁴⁰

Der Tod, der erst mit der Sintflut in die Welt kam, soll Eas Plan zufolge weiterhin in der Welt bleiben. Doch der Weisheitsgott fordert, in Zukunft das Schicksal der Menschen in einen Tun-Ergehen-Zusammenhang zu stellen.⁴¹ Statt je wieder eine alles vernichtende Flut zu senden, sollten in Zukunft nur diejenigen Menschen

 Erra ist der Gott, dessen Gewalt sich in Pest und Seuche offenbart.  Gilgamesch-Epos, Tafel XI, 181– 195.  Vgl. Josephus, Jüdische Altertümer I, 3:7: „Noë aber besorgte, Gott möchte jedes Jahr zur Vertilgung der Menschen solche Wasserfluten schicken. Daher brachte er ein Brandopfer dar und flehte zu Gott, er möge die frühere Weltordnung wieder einführen und keine solche Flut, die allem Lebendigen den Untergang drohe, wieder zulassen, sondern er möge die Bösen bestrafen, der Guten aber sich erbarmen und sie so vor kläglichem Unheil bewahren.“ (zitiert nach: Flavius Josephus, Jüdische Altertümer. Übersetzt und mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen versehen von Dr. Heinrich Clementz [nach der Ausgabe Halle a. d. S.: Otto Hendel, 1899; Wiesbaden: Fourier, 22006], 23).

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

37

durch einen vorzeitigen Tod gestraft werden, die sich eines Vergehens schuldig gemacht haben. Nach der Sintflut ist durch den weisen Ratschluss des Ea aber auch dem Leben eines jeden Menschen grundsätzlich ein absehbares Ende gesetzt. Anders als bei den vorsintflutlichen Menschen, die der biblischen und der altorientalischen Überlieferung zufolge Jahrtausende lebten, soll in Zukunft die Lebenszeit begrenzt bleiben. Denn nur so kann dauerhaft das maßlose sich Vermehren der Menschen und damit der immer wieder aufflammende Konflikt zwischen Göttern und Menschen vermieden werden.⁴² Der Tod wird so für alle Zukunft zu einem Garanten für die Stabilität der Gemeinschaft von Menschen und Göttern. Der Götterkönig Enlil muss einsehen, dass die Götter, die seinem Vernichtungsplan zugestimmt hatten, nun glücklich sind, dass Menschen das Weltengericht überlebten. Enlil kann nicht einmal dem Weisheitsgott Ea, der seinen Plan unterlaufen hatte, vorwerfen, den von allen Göttern gebilligten Vernichtungsbeschluss einem Menschen verraten zu haben. Denn Ea hatte ja seinen Schützling nicht direkt gewarnt, sondern ihn lediglich einen warnenden Traum sehen lassen. Da einerseits Enlils Autorität als König der Götter untergraben gewesen wäre, wenn sein göttlicher Befehl nicht vollständig ausgeführt worden wäre, und andererseits der Götterkönig dem schlauen Weisheitsgott keine Untreue vorwerfen konnte, gibt es nur eine Lösung, die göttliche Ordnung ohne Schaden zu erhalten. Enlil selbst muss Atramchasis (nebst seiner Frau) in das Land der Unsterblichen entrücken. Nur so kann der Götterkönig seinen unabänderlichen Entschluss, die gesamte (sterbliche) Menschheit durch die Flut auszulöschen, verwirklicht sehen, obgleich Atramchasis überlebt hatte. Gleichzeitig erlaubt ihm diese Lösung, die von Ea mit dem nachträglichen Einverständnis der übrigen Götter erwirkte Rettung des Atramchasis hinzunehmen, ohne dass Ea sich als ein vom Götterkönig abtrünniger oder seinem Schützling gegenüber wortbrüchiger Gott erweisen muss. So bleibt nur dank der Entrückung des Atramchasis die Autorität Enlils als Götterkönig unangetastet und die göttliche Ordnung bewahrt. Nach Atramchasis wird kein menschliches Wesen jemals wieder zu Unsterblichkeit gelangen. In der hier vorgestellten theologischen Sicht der Dinge ist das von immer wieder heranwachsenden Antagonismen und deren Lösung geprägte Werden einer stabilen Welt im wesentlichen die Geschichte eines mehr und mehr ausgewogenen Verhältnisses von Mensch und Gott. Der mesopotamischen Tradition zufolge erfuhr es nach der Flut aber noch eine letzte stabilisierende Korrektur. Hiervon ist im Gilgamesch-Epos die Rede. Gilgamesch, der der Sumerischen Kö-

 Auch in der biblischen Urgeschichte wird das ursprünglich sehr lange Lebensalter der Menschen begrenzt (siehe Gen 6:1– 4).

38

Stefan M. Maul

nigsliste zufolge 26.554 Jahre nach der Flut den Thron von Uruk bestieg, soll nämlich, als er auf seiner vergeblichen Suche nach dem ewigen Leben bis zu dem in die Unsterblichkeit entrückten Atramchasis gelangt war, von diesem als erster nachsintflutlicher Mensch „Kunde von der Zeit vor der Flut“⁴³ erlangt haben. Zurückgeworfen in die Welt der Sterblichen und zur Vernunft gelangt, soll er erst auf der Grundlage dieser Kenntnis dafür gesorgt haben, dass „die Kultstätten, welche die Sintflut zerstörte“, wiedererstanden und „die umnebelten Menschen“ die seit ewiger Zeit vergessenen „Riten“ wieder erlernten und praktizierten. Gilgamesch wurde in der Tradition des Zweistromlandes so zu demjenigen Herrscher, der die tiefe Narbe beseitigte, die die Flut, trotz Versöhnung, im Verhältnis zwischen Göttern und Menschen hinterlassen hatte. Weil er den Göttern erstmals nach der Flut wieder ihre festen irdischen Wohnsitze verschafft und so mit den neuerrichteten Tempeln dem Miteinander von Mensch und Gott seinen ordnungsgemäßen und von da an dauerhaft gültigen Platz wiedergegeben hatte, konnte aus dem wilden, intuitiven Opfer des Atramchasis nach der Flut ein geregelter Opferbetrieb neu entstehen. In ihm und in der Erfüllung des mit der Menschenschöpfung verknüpften Auftrags der Götterspeisung sahen die Menschen Mesopotamiens einen wesentlichen Grund für die nachhaltige Stabilität ihrer Kultur. Diese kulturstiftende Tat des Gilgamesch bildet den Schlussstein der Vorgeschichte des Alten Orients und markiert den Beginn der historischen Zeit. Erst jetzt ist das endgültige Gleichgewicht zwischen Menschen und Göttern, das kosmische und das menschliche Maß gefunden, das die Grundlage der Gegenwartswelt und ihrer Menschheitsgeschichte bildet. Das Todesschicksal des Menschen ist der Preis für das ausgewogene Maß, das der Gegenwartswelt auf Dauer ihre Stabilität und Sicherheit verleiht. Nur der Tod gibt die Garantie für die Unsterblichkeit des Menschengeschlechts, das nie mehr in einer globalen Katastrophe untergehen wird. Nach einer Urgeschichte eröffnet er das Tor zur Geschichte der Menschheit. Der mesopotamischen Weltsicht zufolge hat die Schöpfung erst durch eine lange, von wiederkehrenden Krisen und deren Bewältigung geprägte Entwicklung zu einer zuverlässigen, ewig währenden Stabilität geführt. Im Lied von der Sintflut sollen Gott und Mensch gemeinsam der Gnade gedenken, die durch die erst nach langem Ringen erreichte stabile Harmonie Menschen und Göttern zuteil wird. Die letzten Verse des Atramchasis-Epos bringen diesen Gedanken eindrucksvoll in Worte:

 Die hier zitierten Textstellen stammen aus der Einleitung des Gilgamesch-Epos (GilgameschEpos, Tafel I, 8 und 43 – 44).

Zwischen Chaos und Ordnung

(Enlil), dir zum Ruhme mögen diesem Lied die Igigi-Götter lauschen und deiner großen Taten sich erinnern. Die Sintflut habe ich besungen für alle Menschen / horchet hin!⁴⁴

 Atramchasis-Epos, Tafel III, Kolumne viii, 15 – 19.

39

Christoph Levin

Paradise Established The Foundation of Kosmos versus Chaos according to Genesis 1 – 3

1 The Unity of Two Creation Accounts Biblical scholars are in agreement that the book of Genesis opens with two different reports of how the world was created. Ever since Jean Astruc published his Conjectures in 1753, the source-critical distinction between Gen 1:1– 2:4a and Gen 2:4b–3:24 has come to be first gradually and then generally accepted.¹ In the 19th century, scholars were concerned to establish which of the two versions was the older, and it was almost a kind of second revolution when it turned out that the first report was the younger.² Today, this is the common opinion, though that does not mean that all debate has ceased. This consensus makes it easy to forget that for most of its history the first three chapters of the bible were read as parts of a coherent report. The redactors who created the current order held the same view when they combined the two sources into a single account.³ The two reports are joined by the linking verse Gen 2:4b: “In the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens.” For its content, this circumstantial clause relies on the first creation account, since only that one is explicitly concerned with the creation of earth and heavens. Syntactically, however, the clause belongs to the following text, with which it also

 Cf. Jean Astruc, Conjectures sur les memoires origineaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genese (Brussels: Fricx, 1753), 25 – 38.  This was the consequence of the so-called “Graf-Kuenen-Wellhausen-hypothesis,” based on Karl Heinrich Graf, Die geschichtlichen Bücher des Alten Testaments: Zwei historisch-kritische Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Weigel, 1866); Abraham Kuenen, De godsdienst van Israël tot den ondergang van den Joodschen Staat (Haarlem: Kruseman, 1869 – 1870); Julius Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels. In zwei Bänden, vol. 1 (Berlin: Reimer, 1878); English translation of the 2nd edition (1883): Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, trans. J. Sutherland Black and Allan R. Menzies (Edinburgh: Black, 1885).  Regarding the intention of the editors cf. Herbert Donner, “Der Redaktor: Überlegungen zum vorkritischen Umgang mit der Heiligen Schrift,” Henoch 2 (1980): 1– 29. For the technique of the composition cf. Christoph Levin, “Die Redaktion RJP in der Urgeschichte,” in Verheißung und Rechtfertigung (Berlin and Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2013): 59 – 79. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-005

42

Christoph Levin

shares the combined name of God Yhwh ʾælohîm, which has always been the most noticeable difference between the two accounts. The relative dating given applies to the second report. It is placed in a temporal relation to the first, namely that of concurrence. The line “In the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens” means that the events of the second account unfurled at the same time as the first account. From the very beginning, one thus finds the same solution devout readers of the bible continue to adduce in response to the problem that the bible contains two consecutive creation accounts: both are part of a single account – only the viewpoint has changed. In this view, Gen 1 describes the framework of creation as a whole, while Gen 2 adds a number of particulars. This interpretation is so palatable also because there are almost no overlaps in content between the two accounts. Only two real repetitions stand out: The creation of man is reported in both 1:27 and 2:7, the creation of land animals in both 1:25 and 2:19. But these could be resolved: The sentence in 2:7b “Thus man became a living being” is an elaborating comment and résumé that uses næfæš ḥayyāh “living being” to refer back to the first account where this term is frequent (1:20, 21, 24, 30). On this reading, 1:27 reports that man was created “in the image of God”, while 2:7a adds how God did this in practice: “Yahweh God formed man from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” In the case of the creation of animals, the link is created by their naming: In the first account, the act of naming is part of the pattern of creation for the first three acts: day, night, heavens, land and sea are all given their names. For the other works of creation, this element is absent. In 2:20 the second account reports that man named the animals God gave to him. A remark in 2:19b relates these two things to one another, as is visible in the emphasis on the fact that this time man is the one giving the names: “and whatever the man called every living being (næfæš ḥayyāh) that was its name.” These editorial additions in 2:4b, 7b and 19b allowed the second account to be read as a continuation of the first. If we read the two creation accounts as a unit, we immediately notice what is common to both of them: the central and completely uncontested role of the One and Only God. In Gen 1 this god creates the world through his command without any kind of counterpart coming into play, and also in Gen 2 he is the only subject. Unchallenged, he puts his works into action as both potter and gardener. This focus on the One God connects the two biblical accounts all the more, in that it serves to set them apart from most of the creation myths current in the

Paradise Established

43

cultural and religious environs of Israel.⁴ These generally reflect the contradictory experiences of the world familiar to us all, by having competing supernatural forces that can, with some simplification, be broken down to an antagonistic relationship between cosmos and chaos. If the cosmos is created by the One and Only God, however, the chaotic status quo ante that necessarily must have existed becomes something intangible. The almost monotheistic perspective we encounter in the biblical creation accounts is undoubtedly of later date. Though this does not preclude the existence of traditional models, the search for them thus has to operate within narrow confines.

2 The Original Shape of the Account Gen 1:1 – 2:4a Recently, it has become common again to read Gen 1 as well as Gen 2– 3 as essentially coherent texts. The obvious irregularities are explained by pointing to the tradition used by the authors.⁵ This is a severe misunderstanding. It demonstrably overestimates the capabilities of human memory and neglects the genre of these texts, large parts of which are of an interpretive nature. While one must agree with Hermann Gunkel that “The world is not constituted only of people who write books and who copy them,”⁶ the scriptorium of the Temple of Jerusalem in the Persian and Hellenistic era, where the biblical texts were curated and at least in part created, was a truly literary world indeed.⁷

 The most famous example is the late-Babylonian Epic of Creation Enūma Elish. The cuneiform text was edited by Wilfred G. Lambert and Simon B. Parker, Enuma Eliš: The Babylonian Epic of Creation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). English translation by Benjamin R. Foster in The Context of Scripture, vol. 1, Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 390 – 402.  Thus among many others the most recent commentary in German by Jan Christian Gertz, Das erste Buch Mose: Genesis: Die Urgeschichte Gen 1 – 11 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 33 and 83.  Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: a Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12, trans. K. William Whitney (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006), 306, n. 100 (trans. of Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1896], 58, n. 2).  For a more detailed source-critical analysis of Gen 1:1– 2:4a cf. Christoph Levin, “Tatbericht und Wortbericht in der priesterschriftlichen Schöpfungserzählung,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 91 (1994): 115 – 133; repr. in Fortschreibungen. Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003), 23 – 39.

44

Christoph Levin

Already in the late 18th century, modern biblical scholars recognized that the subdivision of the first creation account into six days was a later addition.⁸ Although this observation was instigated by the argument that the establishment of the Jewish Sabbath did not fit the mythical narrative one suspected behind the creation account,⁹ it was nevertheless accurate. The most obvious reason in its favour is that the creation of the cosmos consists of eight steps. Furthermore, the closing remark in 2:1 presupposes that the cosmos is complete with the creation of man: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” In 2:2, however, the act of creation ends only with God’s rest on the seventh day. This incongruence already irritated ancient translators.¹⁰ That the ordering of the world culminates in the Sabbath being established, or conversely, that the Sabbath is established to reflect on creation, is a profound and theologically logical thought, but it remains out of place here. Originally, the only temporal determination of the process lay in the very first word of the record: bereʾšît “in the beginning.” What is now squeezed into six days all happened simply “in the beginning.” Another literary level that we can identify is the act of creation being tied to the word of God. This motif is theologically extremely significant, as we can see, for instance, from the impact it had upon the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word” (John 1:1). It is rooted in the experience that the prophets’ message of doom came true with the conquest of Jerusalem.¹¹ The need to deal with this traumatic experience was what produced the insight that God’s word is supremely powerful, which ultimately signifies nothing less than the comprehensive causality of God’s word for all that happens in history as well as for all beings that exist in nature. As such, all the eight works of God in Gen 1 are

 The first to recognize this was Werner Carl Ludewig Ziegler, “Kritik über den Artikel von der Schöpfung nach unserer gewöhnlichen Dogmatik,” in Magazin für Religionsphilosophie, Exegese und Kirchengeschichte, vol. 2, ed. Heinrich Philipp Conrad Henke (Helmstädt: Fleckeisen, 1794): 1– 113, at 39 – 44.  For the history of biblical research in the last quarter of the 18th century cf. Christian Hartlich and Walter Sachs, Der Ursprung des Mythosbegriffes in der modernen Bibelwissenschaft (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1952). The contribution by Johann Philipp Gabler, “Einleitung zum ersten Theil der Urgeschichte,” in Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Urgeschichte, vol. 1, ed. Johann Philipp Gabler (Altdorf and Nürnberg: Monath and Kußler, 21790), 1– 136, was the most important.  Instead of the seventh day in the Masoretic Text of 2:2 the Greek translation and the Samaritan Pentateuch read: “On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done.”  For the origin of the term debar Yhwh “word of Yahweh” in the history of Old Testament theology see Christoph Levin, “Das Wort Jahwes an Jeremia: Zur ältesten Redaktion der jeremianischen Sammlung,” in Verheißung und Rechtfertigung (above note 3), 216 – 241. The origin of the term can be traced back to the editing of the prophetic books from the 6th century onwards.

Paradise Established

45

prefaced with God’s command: “Let there be” (or similar). All of existence obeys this command with its being: “And it was so.” This relationship of command and obedience simultaneously establishes a norm: As everything that exists obeys God’s mandate with its being one can say “that it was good.” The triad of command, execution and sanction is not always complete however. The sixth work, the creation of fish and birds, lacks the execution clause “And it was so.”¹² In the case of man, the execution clause appears only right at the end and refers less to the act of creation than to the benediction (V. 28 – 30). The sanction “God saw that it was good” is missing when the heavens are created. And after the creation of man, it is applied to creation as a whole (V. 31). Already the ancient textual tradition attempted to mend these inconsistencies. More serious, however, is that God himself executes the commands he gives. The scheme of command and execution only makes sense when the waters are gathered in order to let the land appear (V. 9), and when the plant life is being created: “God said: Let the earth put forth vegetation.¹³ […] And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation” (V. 11– 12). In all other cases, God himself is the agent. Strictly speaking, the command should thus be a self-encouraging cohortative, which indeed occurs on one single occasion, namely when man is created: “Let us make man in our image. […] And God created man in his image” (V. 26 – 27). In addition, the details of command and deed do not always agree. In the case of the first work, for instance, God separates light from darkness, but the command concerns the creation of light. If we remove all statements that add the creation by God’s word to the account, we are left with the following original form: (1:1) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (2) The earth was without form and void. […] (4b) Then God separated the light from the darkness. (5) And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. […] (7) And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. […] (8) And God called the firmament Heaven. […] (9*)¹⁴ And the waters under the heavens were gathered together into its places, and the dry land appeared. (10) God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. […] (12) The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. […]

 It was added only later by the Greek translation or its Vorlage.  In a rather strange way this form of the command was also used for the creation of the animals of the land: “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind” (V. 24). Contrary to this command, in V. 25 it is God who created the animals.  This following sentence is transmitted only by the Greek translation. From its style we can see that is relates to a Hebrew Vorlage. It has been lost because the execution clause “And it was so” apparently made it superfluous.

46

Christoph Levin

(16) And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. (17) And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth. […] (21) And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. […] (25) And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. […] (27) And God created man in his image. […] (2:1) Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

It is very likely that this account existed as a written source that the author of the Priestly writing – thus the conventional name for the Pentateuchal source the chapter belongs to – used when he was adding in his theology of the word. This account presents a remarkably rational theory of the evolution of the world that only slightly differs from modern theories, mostly in that the One God is considered the ultimate cause of all being. Julius Wellhausen has described the sequence of evolution presented here: The primal stuff contains in itself all beings, as yet undistinguished: from it proceeds step by step the ordered world, by a process of unmixing […] The chaotic primal gloom yields to the contrast of light and darkness; the primal water is separated by the vault of heaven into the heavenly water, out of which there grows the world above the firmament which is withdrawn from our gaze, and the water of the earth: the latter, a slimy mixture, is divided into land and sea, whereupon the land at once puts on its green attire. The elements thus brought into existence, light, heaven, water, land, are then enlivened, pretty much in the order in which they were created, with individual beings. […] There is no doubt that [the author] means to describe the actual course of the genesis of the world, and to be true to nature in doing so; he means to give a cosmogonic theory. […] He seeks to deduce things as they are from each other […] Chaos being given, all the rest is spun out of it: all that follows is reflection, systematic construction; we can easily follow the calculation from point to point. […] The arrangement of the things to be explained stands […] for the explanation.¹⁵

One should only add that these creatures are not depicted as individuals, but as categories: Not the sun and the moon are made, but the two great lights, not wheat and fig trees, but plants yielding seed according to their kinds, trees bearing fruit according to their kind, living beings of the waters according to their kinds, and so forth. And finally God created man “in his image.”

 Wellhausen, Prolegomena (above note 2), 297– 299.

Paradise Established

47

3 The Origin of Chaos The emergent cosmos presupposes chaos – but purely as its material conditio sine qua non. This is evident already from the fact that the first sentence is occupied not by the status quo ante, but by a summary declaration: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It is now mostly agreed that this much debated beginning is a self-sufficient main clause that offers a motto or a title. Besides linguistic evidence,¹⁶ this is suggested especially by its correspondence to the concluding summary in 2:1: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” Only in 1:2, so in second place, do we find a reference to chaos as the condition before creation. However, it is neither described, nor granted any power of its own, with which the creator god would have to contend. August Dillmann observed: “One cannot deny that the author traces creation back only to its emergence from chaos, while presupposing chaos itself without saying anything as to its origin, either that it exists independently of God, or that it is established by God.”¹⁷ And Gerhard von Rad explained that the chaos is mentioned here because “unless one speaks of chaos, creation cannot be sufficiently considered at all.”¹⁸ The status quo ante is described in 1:2: “The earth was without form and void (tohû wābohû). Darkness was upon the face of the deep (tehôm). The Spirit of God (rûaḥ ʾælohîm) was hovering upon the face of the waters.” These three sentences are of different origins. In the case of the third sentence, this is obvious since its closing phrase “upon the face of the waters” (ʿal penê hammayim) elaborates upon the second sentence’s “upon the face of the deep” (ʿal penê tehôm). Elsewhere, “God’s spirit” or “Yahweh’s spirit” refers to the power of creation (e. g., Ps 33:6; 104:30; Job 33:4).¹⁹ This makes one wonder whether this later addition was intended to belong to the description of the chaotic pre-existence of the world; does it not in fact hint at the transition into creation? This applies also if one interprets the statement about the spirit in a solely meteorological

 Cf. esp. Hermann-Josef Stipp, “Gen 1,1 und asyndetische Relativsätze im Bibelhebräischen,” in Alttestamentliche Studien (Berlin and Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2013), 3 – 40; idem, “Anfang und Ende: Nochmals zur Syntax von Gen 1,1,” ibid., 41– 51.  August Dillmann, Die Genesis. Für die dritte Auflage nach August Knobel neu bearbeitet (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1875), 20 (my translation).  Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. John H. Marks (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press, 1961), 47.  In Exod 28:3; 31:3; 35:31 the craftsmen who are to build the tabernacle are skillful because they are filled with divine spirit (rûaḥ ʾælohîm).

48

Christoph Levin

sense. In this case it is reminiscent of the sinking of the tehôm after the deluge: “And God made a wind (rûaḥ) blow over the earth, and the waters subsided” (Gen 8:1). We may also associate the miracle at the sea: “Yahweh drove the sea back by a strong east wind (berûaḥ qādîm ʿazzāh) all night, and turned the sea into dry land” (Exod 14:21). In any case, a biblical, exegetic interpretation is more plausible than the assumption that these statements are remnants of mythical ideas. The same applies to the middle sentence that mentions the primal sea (tehôm). Although tehôm and Tiamat are etymologically related, tehôm cannot be explained as a loanword from the Akkadian. Thus it is unlikely that tehôm refers to the Babylonian sea goddess.²⁰ We can thus rule out that the description of the pre-existence of the world hints at a struggle against the personified sea, like the one that brings forth the cosmos in Enūma Elish. Rather, the linguistic parallels seem to indicate a northwest Semitic background. In the Old Testament, tehôm stands for the ocean, including the subterranean primordial ocean (e. g., Gen 49:25; Isa 51:10; Ps 104,6), and in dire situations it signifies a threatening deluge of water (e. g., Jonah 2:6; Ps 42:8; 77:17). In the Flood, chaos returns in that tehôm engulfs the earth (Gen 7:11). It seems to me that Gen 1:2 engages with precisely this idea, meaning that tehôm stands for the chaotic status quo ante. It is further my impression that the sentence “Darkness was upon the face of the deep” is also a later addition. It seems to be connected to the redaction that inserted God’s word, acting as a contrast to the first command. In the original account, light and darkness are, like water and land, conceptualised as undifferentiated but pre-existing. According to v. 4, they are not created but separated from one another. The command “Let there be light”, on the other hand, produces light as something new. The status quo ante can thus not have been tohû wābohû, but must definitely have been darkness. “Darkness was upon the surface of the deep. […] And God said: Let there be light.” The remaining sentence: “The earth was without form and void (tohû wābohû)” describes the state from which creation departs. It must therefore have been part of the oldest version of this account, following the headline in v. 1. Here too one has of course sought mythical models, but without success. Etymology also takes us no further. The literal meaning of tohû wābohû emerges most clearly if one thinks backwards: it describes the state before the separation of light and dark, upper and lower ocean and, under the heavens, land and sea. The sentence is thus nothing more than a “not-yet-statement”, the like of which

 Cf. Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis: The Story of the Creation (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 21951), 100: “To derive tĕhôm from Tiʾâmat is grammatically impossible.”

Paradise Established

49

can be found at the beginning of many ancient creation accounts and reflects our inability to imagine the void that allegedly preceded all existence. The void is conceptualized as the not-yet. One should add, however, that this void is imagined as material nothingness, as it is generally in Antiquity.

4 The Original Shape of the Account Gen 2:5 – 3:24 At the beginning of the second creation account, this not-yet state is much more prominent. The presumed original version of this account reads as follows: (2:5) When no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, […] (7) God formed man and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. […] (8) And […] God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. […] (19) And […] God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man. […] (20) And the man gave names to all […] the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. […] (21) And […] God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. (22) And […] God made the rib into a woman and brought her to the man. […] (3:20) And the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. (21) And […] God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them. […] (4:1) Now the man knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.²¹

In this case, potential overlaps with ancient Near Eastern traditions are more readily apparent. The not-yet-statement the story opens with is reminiscent of Enūma Elish (I 1– 9): When on high no name was given to heaven, Nor below was the netherworld called by name, Primeval Apsu was their progenitor, And matrix-Tiamat was she who bore them all, They were mingling their waters together, No reed hut was intertwined nor thicket had appeared, When no gods at all had brought forth,

 For the source-critical analysis cf. Christoph Levin, Der Jahwist (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 82– 92; idem, “Genesis 2– 3: A Case of Innerbiblical Interpretation,” in Genesis and Christian Theology, ed. Nathan MacDonald et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012), 85 – 100; repr. in idem., Re-Reading the Scriptures: Essays on the Literary History of the Old Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 51– 64.

50

Christoph Levin

None called by names, none destinies ordained, Then were the gods formed within these two.²²

What is presented in the Akkadian epics – and the Ugaritic myths as well – with great poetic art, is heavily condensed in the Bible. This is often the case, and it should not surprise us that the mythical elements disappear. It is worth noting that the only non-mythical element from the beginning of Enūma Elish is the one that occurs also in the biblical text, namely the not-yet-state of vegetation: “When no reed hut had been matted nor thicket had appeared (gipāra lā kiṣṣuru ṣuṣâ la šeʾû), then the gods were formed.” This is all the more remarkable when one considers that the Akkadian text uses this motif because it wants to use the architectural conventions of the Mesopotamian plane to play with the double meaning of gipāru as reed and dwelling place.²³ The reference is not simply to vegetation, but also to settlements (and human culture in general), and perhaps also to the shrines as settlements of the gods. The parallel of Gen 2:5 – 7* is clear: “When no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, […] God formed man and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” If one takes this parallel seriously, it is probably a mistake to imagine the status quo ante of Gen 2 as a waterless waste,²⁴ even if Apsu and Tiamat have disappeared. The contrast between Akkadian mythology and biblical creation account consists not in watery vs. dry chaos, but in divergent ideas about the divine. The first act of creation is not the creation of the gods, but of man. Since the events hardly progress beyond this point, the story is an anthropogony, not a cosmogony. Once the One and Only God has shaped man like a potter, he breathes life into him. Then he creates a garden for him to live in and brings into being the animals, whom the man names and thus has at his disposal. Finally, God creates the woman by duplicating the man out of his own substance. The man gives the woman her name and thereby acknowledges her as of his own kind. At the same time, this act conveys the destiny of the woman to become the mother of all mankind. The creation of man is only complete once God has created clothing as his attribute, since that is what distinguishes him from the ani-

 Translation by Benjamin R. Foster, in The Context of Scripture (above note 4), vol. 1, 391 (with slight modifications).  Cf. Ignace J. Gelb et al., eds., The Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 5 (Chicago, Ill.: Oriental Institute, and Glückstadt: Augustin, 1956), 83, sub voce “gipāru”: “1. residence of the enu-priest or entupriestess, 2. part of a private house, 3. pasture, meadow, 4. taboo.”  Thus, e. g., Hermann Gunkel, Genesis, trans. Mark E. Biddle (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997), 4; John Skinner, Genesis (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 21930), 51; and most others.

Paradise Established

51

mals. Finally, the man mates with his woman, and the primordial couple creates mankind, marking the passage from myth into history.

5 Of Man’s First Disobedience This curiously harmonious picture did not remain the way it was, but became the matrix of one of the most impactful and puzzling narratives of the Western world. Chaos soon makes its return in the shape of conflict, which now plays out not among the gods, but between the One God and mankind. These conflicts have a different quality and urgency than the old myths do. The story now tells Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden.²⁵

The story reads like the recollection of a lost childhood – and that is precisely what it is. The first literary step in this direction was taken by the redactor who placed this text and the other parts of the primeval history at the beginning of a historical work that records the history of the Israelites from the creation of the world all the way to the threshold of the Promised Land. Based on the divine name used in the text, this work is generally called “Jahwist” or (in English) “Yahwist’s History.” Scholars long assumed that it dates to the early times of the monarchy in Israel and was produced to preserve the memory of an even more distant past. In the course of the last 50 years of research, this has turned out to be false. The Yahwist’s History was in fact instigated by the deportation of parts of the Jewish elite to Babylon following the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Almost all the narratives take place outside the traditional Judean heartland, and there is a persistent, emphatic interest in demonstrating that the god Yahweh is present and beneficent to his adherents not only in his traditional realm, but all over the world.²⁶ Now, as one of the main features of the creation account the significance of the ground is added. ʾādām “man” and ʾadāmāh “ground” belong together. The

 Thus the first lines (I 1– 4) of John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968), 40 – 41.  Cf. Christoph Levin, “The Yahwist: The Earliest Editor in the Pentateuch,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (2007): 209 – 230; repr. in Re-Reading the Scriptures (above note 21): 1– 23.

52

Christoph Levin

ground is the matter from which man is created (“Yahweh God formed man […] from the ground,” 2:7) – though in reality, this would be impossible, given the difference between clay (hebr. ḥomær) and soil (hebr. ʾadāmāh).²⁷ The ground is both the origin of man and his destiny, since it is his task “to till the ground” (2:5, 15; 3:23). God makes trees sprout “from the ground” (2:9) and moulds the animals out of its matter (2:19) – the same indirectly applies also to the woman, since she is made “from the man” (2:22). In the end, however, God curses the ground: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken” (3:17). For the farmer, the heaviest penalty is exile: “Yahweh God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken” (3:23). From that point on, man lives as if uprooted. On an alien, cursed earth, he toils to fulfil his destiny. And here, we touch upon the historical situation this text is trying to explain.²⁸ The cause of this fate lies less in the transgression than in tragedy. An emphasis on the transgression is introduced only by later additions (see below) and was brought out especially by the text’s history of reception that found here man’s original sin. Originally, the loss of innocence was more an inevitable, but tragic fate. God plants the trees of the garden for man’s nourishment, “pleasant to the sight and good for food.” Only one tree is reserved for him: “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:9). Partaking of it is forbidden under penalty of death (2:17). A reason for the prohibition is not given. If we ask what the point of this rule is, we find no real answers – only that this prohibition shows the man that he is man and not God. He is the recipient, not the creator of his world. When the prohibition was made, the woman did not yet exist. As soon as she enters the world, she sees “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,” just as God has created them (3:6 = 2:9), and since she cannot know the exceptional quality of the One Tree, it so happens that “she took of its fruit and ate.” Like the woman, the man too is innocent; for he takes the fruit not from the tree, as was forbidden, but from the woman: “she gave some to her husband,

 The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, I 101– 104, tells how the goddess Aruru creates Enkidu from clay (Akk. ṭiṭu). This is what is to be expected. Cf. Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, vol. 1 (Oxford: University Press, 2003), 544– 545.  Joseph Blenkinsopp, “A Post-exilic Lay Source in Genesis 1– 11,” in Abschied vom Jahwisten: Die Komposition des Hexateuch in der jüngsten Diskussion, ed. J. Ch. Gertz et al. (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2002), 49 – 61, esp. 51: “Death is threatened for non-observance, but what follows […] is not death or social extinction but exile.”

Paradise Established

53

and he ate.” It is not clear, whether he knew what he was eating. The fundamental conditio humana established by this act appears to be a matter of chance. The result of eating the fruit of the forbidden tree is that the two newly created humans, who, like children, had known no shame (2:25), mature in an instant: They now feel shame (3:7) and, more importantly, they know good and evil. In the Old Testament, “knowing good and evil” is nothing bad, but a virtue: it is the ability to rationally deliberate and decide. It is what separates the grownup from the child (Deut 1:39; Isa 7:15 – 16) and the wise man from the fool. It is an ability man shares with the gods, as 3:22, in a younger layer of the text, aptly notes: “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” The story expresses that this process of growing up is inevitable and necessarily results in being cast out of paradise. Friedrich Tuch concluded: “Thus there appears externally and fortuitously what has to be recognized as inward and necessary.”²⁹ Now, the woman must fulfil with pain her destiny of bearing children, and will be subjugated to the man (3:16). The man, on the other hand, must supply his existence – this is the meaning of the Hebrew idiom ʾkl læḥæm “to eat bread”³⁰ – “in toil” (3:17) and fulfil his purpose outside the garden, namely “to till the ground from which he was taken” (3:23).

6 The “Humility Edition” The ability “to know good and evil” that mature humans gained by partaking of the fruit brought them close to God – a closeness Jewish theologians must have considered dangerous. Some time later, the text was thus edited to produce what one might call a “Humility Edition”, a term inspired by an editorial level Markus Witte and others have traced in the dialogue in the Book of Job.³¹ Here, it emphasizes man’s mortality as a difference between man and God. Of course, man is considered mortal also in the oldest version, a fact that was missed in the history of reception, not least due to the interpretation Paul advances in Romans 5:12: “Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin.” It was not – to quote again John Milton – “the forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world.” Death was already there, as it is the condi-

 Friedrich Tuch, Kommentar über die Genesis (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1838), 48 (my translation).  Cf. Exod 2:20; Lev 26:5; 2 Kgs 4:8; Am 7:12; Ps 127:2.  Cf. Markus Witte, Vom Leiden zur Lehre: Der dritte Redegang (Hiob 21 – 27) und die Redaktionsgeschichte des Hiobbuches (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1994), 91– 115, 175 – 179, 194– 205: “Die Niedrigkeitsredaktion.”

54

Christoph Levin

tion of life. Immortality therefore needed to be introduced into the narrative as a lost chance. A comparable scene is found on the 11th tablet of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh retrieves the thorny plant from the subterranean ocean, “whereby a man may regain his life’s breath” (Gilg. XI 296), but immediately loses it to the snake, granting it the rejuvenating ability to shed its skin.³² The tragic constellation of these two scenes is identical. The means used to stage this tragedy is again a tree of special quality: Now we find also the tree of life in the midst of the garden, right beside the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:9). This second tree, which was not originally forbidden, has no function in the story itself. It is mentioned again only at the end to provide a reason why God casts man out of the garden: “lest the man put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (3:22). In order to prevent this, God tasks the cherubim and the flaming sword, the weather god’s mythical companions in northwest-Semitic mythology, “to guard the way to the tree of life” (3:24). This lost opportunity gains its dramatic depth from man’s frailty: “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (3:19). This is taken directly from the lament about the ephemerality of life familiar to us from the psalms (e. g. Ps 22:16; 44:26; 103:14; 104:29; Job 10:9; 30:19; Prov 3:20; 12:7). As such, man is now made neither from clay, nor from soil, but from dust (2:7, hebr. ʿāpār).

7 The Temptation But the way to the tree of life becoming a lost opportunity is not the most theologically impactful change made to the story. This honour is due to the next step, the appearance of the snake, for only now does sin as such enter the scene. Paradoxically, this happens because later writers, struck, like us, by the tragedy of the whole affair, were eager to absolve mankind of immediate responsibility. The woman no longer acted on spontaneous impulse, but succumbs to temptation. Chaos now invades the newly created world once again, with a third force appearing on stage besides God and man that is neither of the two. The reception history is dominated by this figure. In Milton’s Paradise Lost and many other authors, the snake, masculine in Hebrew, stands for an entire world of powers inimical to God and man. Here it is particularly important to distinguish between the actual tradition and its impact, and this applies both to the mythic content that may have predated the text, and to its later history of reception.

 See above note 27.

Paradise Established

55

One must first be aware that the writers were bound by what is written in the earlier text. That the dialogue-scene in 3:1– 5 and the related passage in 3:6 (“and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise”) as well as the curse on the snake in 3:13b–15 are later additions is apparent from stylistic changes, especially from God’s name changing from Yhwh ʾælohîm to simply ʾælohîm “God”. Since the only dramatis personae on the world stage so far were God and the two humans, the third power had to be taken from the animal world “that Yahweh God had made” (cf. 2:19). The snake was the obvious choice, since its lethal bite and its ability to shed its skin rendered it a being of great ambivalent power. In Egypt, a country swarming with snakes, “the snake surpasses all other animals of the Egyptian mythology in its colourful ambiguity.”³³ In ancient Syro-Palestinian iconography, the snake often appears as a divine attribute.³⁴ For Gen 3 it may further be significant that the Hebrew root nḥš can also denote divination. In the narrative the snake’s intellect is visible in its ability to speak. This comes as no surprise to the woman, and even the reader is not truly surprised. After all, the conversation between woman and snake could just as well be the woman’s interior monologue. The snake has no independent role to play. It tempts, nothing more. In her interrogation, the woman clearly expresses this: “The serpent beguiled me, and I ate” (3:13b). For God, this is reason enough to curse the snake. Close inspection reveals that the writers were able to glean all the details the snake puts forward in its conversation with the woman from the existing text. Even the statements “You will not die,” and “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” are not blasphemous, but take up what the text in 3:22– 24 already said. The same is true of the replies the woman gives to the snake. In them, however, the authors ignore the sequence of events: they have the woman quote to the snake the prohibition that was uttered when she had not been created yet. Almost instantly, readers of the bible came to consider this a problem. Josephus Flavius has the woman be created before the garden is planted and makes God address the prohibition to both man and woman.³⁵ The Babylonian Talmud maintains that the narrative sequence does not reproduce the sequence of events: Accordingly God pronounced the prohibition only in the ninth hour of

 Erik Hornung, “Die Bedeutung des Tieres im alten Ägypten,” Studium Generale 20 (1967): 69 – 84, esp. 81 (my translation).  Cf. Othmar Keel, Jahwe-Visionen und Siegelkunst (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), 71– 114; idem and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Edinburgh: Clark, 1998), 272– 274.  Antiquitates Iudaicae I,1,4 (40 Niese).

56

Christoph Levin

the day of man’s creation, after the creation of the woman in the seventh hour, moreover also after the birth of her children in the eighth hour – since all later human offspring are affected by the fall.³⁶ Others claimed that Adam must have told the woman of the prohibition immediately after her creation. John Milton too adopts this solution when he has Adam warn Eve by saying: [God] requires From us no other service than to keep This one, this easy charge, of all the trees In Paradise that bear delicious fruit So various, not to taste that only tree Of knowledge, planted by the tree of life, […] God hath pronounced it death to taste that tree, The only sign of our obedience left Among so many signs of power and rule Conferred upon us, and dominion given Over all other creatures that possess Earth, air and sea.³⁷

By having Satan overhear this conversation, Milton also solves another problem: How could the snake have known of the tree’s special qualities, which allowed it to challenge and tempt the woman? The attempt to absolve man of responsibility only served to make everything worse. Regardless of how the woman learned of the prohibition, her conversation with the snake presupposes that she did indeed know of it. As such, she violates it knowingly and intentionally. Even though she succumbs to a temptation, no one can lift the burden of responsibility she bears. There is no doubt as to her guilt, and the same is true of the man. Under these circumstances, the story thus reads as though the fall was the cause of mankind’s plight of mortality.

 Tractate Sanhedrin 38b: “R. Johanan b. Hanina said: The day consisted of twelve hours. In the first hour, his dust was gathered; in the second, it was kneaded into a shapeless mass. In the third, his limbs were shaped; in the fourth, a soul was infused into him; in the fifth, he arose and stood on his feet; in the sixth, he gave (the animals) their names; in the seventh, Eve became his mate; in the eighth, they ascended to bed as two and descended as four; in the ninth, he was commanded not to eat of the tree, in the tenth, he sinned; in the eleventh, he was tried, and in the twelfth he was expelled and departed, for it is written, Man abideth not in honour (Ps 49:13).” Translation: Isidore Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Seder Nezikin, vol. 3 (London: Soncino, 1935), 242.  Milton, Paradise Lost (above note 25), 220 (IV 419 – 432).

Paradise Established

57

This is a reading we should strongly oppose. My analysis of this text was not only intended to show how its contradictions can be explained as the results of a process of literary revision, but also to counter the millennia-old, fatalistic and sin-theological interpretation of the fate of mankind that this text provided the basis for. This interpretation is wrong. The limited duration of human life is the conditio sine qua non of history; and though we may individually suffer under it, we cannot do without it, and it is thus by no means fatal. It is also true that human culture begins in every respect with knowledge of good and evil. Longing for a protolapsarian state leads us back not to paradise, but to social and cultural chaos. However, there is also a profound truth here, whether intended by the authors or not, in that culture and history begin with disobedience. Creation, which we experience daily and help shape with our existence, presupposes chaos. And as bad as chaos is, it would be worse if it did not exist.

Reinhard Müller

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7) Ein Zeugnis althebräischer Gerichtsprophetie und seine politischen und religionsgeschichtlichen Hintergründe

Einleitung Etwa in der Mitte des alttestamentlichen Büchleins, das dem Propheten Amos zugeschrieben ist, steht folgende Anklage (Am 5,7): Die da zu Wermut¹ umstürzen das Recht, und die Gerechtigkeit haben sie zur Erde geworfen!

 So masoretischer Text, Vulgata, Peschitta und Targum Jonathan. Die Septuaginta versteht V. 7 ganz anders und verknüpft ihn mit dem Hymnus in V. 8 – 9: κύριος ὁ ποιῶν εἰς ὕψος κρίμα καὶ δικαιοσύνην εἰς γῆν ἔθηκεν … „Der Herr, der in der Höhe Urteil fällt und Gerechtigkeit auf Erden gesetzt hat …“ (Wolfgang Kraus und Martin Karrer, Hg., Septuaginta Deutsch. Das griechische Alte Testament in deutscher Übersetzung [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 22010], 1181 [Kursivierungen im Original, die nach dem Editionsprinzip der Septuaginta Deutsch die Abweichungen von der masoretischen Überlieferung anzeigen]). Hinter dieser Deutung mag ein Text stehen, der zu Beginn von V. 7 stark beschädigt war (Hans Walter Wolff, Dodekapropheton 2: Joel und Amos, Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament XIV/2 [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 42004], 270); nach Evangelia G. Dafni und Aaron Schart, „Amos,“ in Septuaginta Deutsch. Erläuterungen und Kommentare zum griechischen Alten Testament, Bd. 2, Psalmen bis Daniel, Hg. Martin Karrer und Wolfgang Kraus (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2011): 2339 – 2361, hier 2352, greift dagegen der Übersetzer wegen des fehlenden „logischen Übergang[s] von V. 7 nach V. 8“ „in einer sonst nicht begegnenden Freiheit in den Text ein“. Karl Budde, „Zu Text und Auslegung des Buches Amos,“ Journal of Biblical Literature 43 (1924): 46 – 131, hier 108 – 109, führte das griechische εἰς ὕψος auf lema‛lāh in der hebräischen Vorlage zurück (vgl. BHS), was in Verbindung mit hpk i.S.v. „auf den Kopf stellen“ tatsächlich belegt ist (Ri 7,13); diese Lesart sei lectio potior, während das masoretische lela‛anāh „zu Wermut“ auf „Verderbnis oder Verschlimmbesserung nach 6,12“ zurückgehe. Auch wenn diese Erklärung nicht völlig auszuschließen ist, muss sie einen größeren Textfehler oder einen starken Eingriff in den überlieferten hebräischen Text annehmen (lm‛lh > ll‛nh); einfacher bleibt die Annahme, dass die Variante auf die Deutung durch den griechischen Übersetzer zurückgeht. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-006

60

Reinhard Müller

In diesem Wort bricht ein ethisches Bewusstsein auf, das für die alttestamentliche Schriftprophetie grundlegend wurde.² Das Wort muss einen konkreten Anlass gehabt haben. Das lässt schon die auffällige Dynamik vermuten, die in den Verben „umstürzen“ und „werfen“ enthalten ist: Beide bilden eine plötzliche Bewegung ab, die von oben nach unten gerichtet ist.³ Etwas Wohlgeordnetes – Recht und Gerechtigkeit – wird nicht allein missachtet und entwertet, sondern gewaltsam zerstört. Die prophetische Stimme aber nennt das Geschehen beim Namen: Diejenigen, auf die der Sprecher blickt, sind bereits dabei, das Recht zu stürzen. Darin aber, dass das Wort hier zu lesen ist, steckt ein Appell an alle, die das Buch lesen: Eigentlich – so ist zwischen den Zeilen zu vernehmen – wäre das Recht zu bewahren und die Gerechtigkeit zu schützen. Das Amoswort erhebt eine sprachgewaltige Anklage gegen Menschen, die Macht haben, Recht in Wermut zu verwandeln.⁴ Das Ganze ist in weite Zusammenhänge der althebräischen Weltvorstellung eingezeichnet, in denen Gott und Mensch, Kosmos, Natur und Recht, Ordnung und Chaos in vielfältiger Weise aufeinander bezogen waren.⁵ Zugleich aber ist das Wort so formuliert, dass es den Horizont der althebräischen Weltvorstellung hinter sich lassen kann: Die Anklage, die hier erhoben wird, hat eine solche sprachliche Kraft, dass sie über die Zeiten hinweg Gehör findet.

1 Zu Form und Inhalt von Amos 5,7 Ein wesentlicher Aspekt für das Verständnis von Am 5,7 liegt darin, dass der Spruch eine Grundform der althebräischen Poesie enthält.⁶ Das Wort ist im Par-

 Vgl. das Schlagwort „ethischer Monotheismus“, unter dem im 19. Jh. das proprium der alttestamentlichen Prophetie gefasst wurde, klassisch etwa bei Julius Wellhausen, Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter,71914), 108.  S.u. Abschnitt 1.  Zum Doppelsinn von „umstürzen“ und „verwandeln“ s.u. Abschnitt 1 mit Anm. 16.  Das altorientalische Denken einschließlich des althebräischen orientierte sich nicht an präzise definierbaren Begriffen, sondern weitgespannten Netzen verschiedener Vorstellungen; vgl. z. B. Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods. A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 4; Reinhard Müller, „Die Rede vom Bösen im Gesellschaftsentwurf des Deuteronomiums,“ in Menschennatur und politische Ordnung, Hg. Andreas Höfele und Beate Kellner (Paderborn: Fink, 2016): 29 – 44, hier 29.  Wissenschaftlich erstmalig beschrieben durch Robert Lowth in seinen berühmten Praelectiones de sacra poesi Hebraeorum von 1753, s. Robert Lowth, Sacra poesi Hebraeorum. Praelectiones academicae Oxonii habitae. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1753), v. a. 177– 196, nota bene im Zusammenhang des Nachweises, dass die prophetische Literatur von grundsätzlich poetischem Charakter ist; vgl. dazu Rudolf Smend, „Robert Lowth (1710 – 1787),“ in Kritiker und Exegeten. Portraitskizzen zu vier

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

61

allelismus membrorum gebildet: Ein und derselbe Gedanke wird zweimal mit jeweils etwas anderen Worten gesagt; jedes Wort der ersten Vershälfte besitzt ein synonymes Gegenstück in der zweiten. Dieser Gedankenreim – man kann von einer „Stereometrie des Gedankenausdrucks“ sprechen⁷ – ist auch aus den altorientalischen Nachbarkulturen des Alten Testaments bekannt und begegnet in unterschiedlichen altorientalischen und alttestamentlichen Literaturgattungen. Am strengsten ist die Form im Sprichwort ausgeprägt;⁸ der Gedankenreim trägt dazu bei, dass das Sprichwort im Gedächtnis haften bleibt. Am 5,7 steht der Form des Sprichworts nahe, unterscheidet sich aber darin, dass der Satz unvollständig ist: Während das Sprichwort stets eine klare und abgeschlossene Lehre formuliert, fehlt ein syntaktischer Abschluss, der etwa besagen könnte, was die Folge des beschriebenen Handelns ist. Am 5,7 hat eine außergewöhnliche Gestalt; auch der Kontext in Kapitel 5 hilft nicht recht, den unvollständigen Satz zu erklären.⁹ Der Spruch wirkt wie ein leidenschaftlicher Ausruf, der schriftlich festgehalten wur-

Jahrhunderten alttestamentlicher Wissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017): 124– 139, hier 130 – 138.  Benno Landsberger, „Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt,“ in Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt/Leistung und Grenze sumerischer und babylonischer Wissenschaft, Hg. ders. und Wolfram von Soden, Unveränderter reprographischer Nachdruck der beiden im Inhaltsverzeichnis näher bezeichneten Aufsätze (1926/1936) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965): 1– 18, hier 17.  Vgl. Urmas Nõmmik, „The Idea of Ancient Hebrew Verse,“ Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 124 (2012): 400 – 408.  Vgl. Reinhard G. Kratz, „Die Worte des Amos von Tekoa,“ in Prophetenstudien. Kleine Schriften II, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 74 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011): 310 – 343, hier 331, der von einem „ziemlich verloren wirkenden Partizip mit anschließendem finiten Verb (3. Pl.) in V. 7“ spricht und darin zu Recht den wahrscheinlich ältesten Kern der Komposition von 5,7– 17 erkennt. Wegen des eindeutig sekundären Charakters von V. 8 – 9 (dazu s.u. Abschnitt 4) wird i. d. R. V. 10 („Sie hassen im Tor den, der zurechtweist, / und den, der vollständig aussagt, verabscheuen sie“) als ursprüngliche Fortsetzung von V. 7 gedeutet (z. B. Julius Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten. Übersetzt und erklärt [Berlin: Reimer,31898], 5 und 81– 82; Wolff, Dodekapropheton [wie Anm. 1], 273; Jörg Jeremias, Der Prophet Amos. Übersetzt und erklärt, Altes Testament Deutsch 24.2 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995], 68; Jakob Wöhrle, Die frühen Sammlungen des Zwölfprophetenbuches. Entstehung und Komposition, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 360 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006], 61). Drei Argumente sprechen jedoch dagegen, dass V. 10 von Beginn an zu V. 7 gehörte: 1. Die umfassende Anklage von V. 7 wird in V. 10 auf das Torgericht eingeengt, wobei den Angeklagten nicht der Rechtsbruch als solcher zur Last gelegt wird, sondern die Ablehnung derer, die im Tor für das gerechte Urteil einstehen; diese Verschiebung liegt nicht im Horizont von V. 7. 2. Der politische Zusammenhang, in den V. 7 eingezeichnet ist (s.u. Abschnitt 3), gerät in V. 10 völlig aus dem Blick. 3. Die Form der syntaktisch unvollendeten partizipialen Wendung ist auch durch 6,13 belegt, wo sich keine Fortsetzung im Stil von 5,10 findet.

62

Reinhard Müller

de.¹⁰ Die Bewegung und Unruhe, die in den Worten enthalten ist, kommt auch dadurch zustande, dass die Formen der beiden Verben „umstürzen“ und „werfen“ nicht übereinstimmen: Beginnt der erste Halbvers mit einem Partizip (hahopekîm „die da umstürzen“),¹¹ so endet der zweite mit einem finiten Verb (hinnîḥū „haben sie geworfen“). Die Worte sind streng chiastisch angeordnet: Die jeweils drei syntaktischen Glieder haben die Folge A – B – C – C’ – B’ – A’. Diese klassische Form wirkt wie ein Echo der Ordnung, die durch das Recht gesichert wird; die syntaktische Unvollständigkeit aber, die einer schiefen Ebene gleicht, bildet ab, dass das Recht in diesem Augenblick gestürzt wird und die Gerechtigkeit bereits zur Erde geworfen wurde. Die rechtlich gesicherte Ordnung ist an ihr Ende gekommen. Das auffälligste Motiv ist der Wermut¹²: Das seltene Wort bezeichnet eine Pflanze, die in der Wüste gedeiht und ungenießbar bitter ist.¹³ Im Alten Testament dient das Wort stets als Metapher; es steht für die Bitternis menschlicher Not (Thr

 Das lässt sich namentlich an dem eröffnenden determinierten Partizip festmachen, wo der Artikel noch den ursprünglichen Sinn des Demonstrativums trägt (s. Wilhelm Gesenius und Emil Kautzsch, Hebräische Grammatik, völlig umgearbeitet von E. Kautzsch [Leipzig: Vogel, 1909; ND Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995], § 126 b; vgl. Karl Marti, Kurzer HandCommentar zum Alten Testament, Bd. 13, Das Dodekapropheton [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1904], 190), was hier mit „Die da …!“ wiedergegeben wird (vgl. z. B. Göran Eidevall, Amos. A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Yale Bible, 24G [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017], 151). Ähnlich Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 60, dessen Übersetzung „Ihr, die ihr … umstürzt und … zu Boden stoßt“ freilich die 3. Ps. des finiten Verbs am Ende des Verses nicht korrekt wiedergibt.  Entsprechend den Weherufen in 5,18 (dazu s.u. Abschnitt 4) und 6,1 wird gern ein voranstehendes hôj „wehe!“ ergänzt (zuerst George Adam Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets. Commonly Called the Minor, Bd. 1, Amos, Hosea and Micah [New York: Armstrong, 1903], 167; vgl. z. B. Ernst Sellin, Das Zwölfprophetenbuch, Kommentar zum Alten Testament 7 [Leipzig: Deichertsche Verlagsbuchhandlung Scholl, 1922], 188 – 189; Budde, „Zu Text und Auslegung des Buches Amos“ [wie Anm. 1], 108; Wolff, Dodekapropheton [wie Anm. 1], 268 – 269; Kratz, „Die Worte des Amos“ [wie Anm. 9], 332), was jedoch in der Textüberlieferung keinen Anhalt hat (Anthony Gelston, The Twelve Minor Prophets, Biblia Hebraica quinta editione cum apparatu critico novis curis elaborato 13 [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2010], 83*). Zwar lässt sich nicht vollkommen ausschließen, dass ein hôj durch Haplographie wegen Homoioarkton ausgefallen ist; die merkwürdige Form findet sich aber auch in 6,13, was einen Textfehler unwahrscheinlich macht.  S. Anm. 1.  Vgl. H.B. Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible. Being a Review of the Physical Geography, Geology, and Meteorology of the Holy Land; with a Description of Every Animal and Plant Mentioned in Holy Scripture (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,71883), 493; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, Hg. Herbert Donner (Berlin: Springer, 182013), 613.

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

63

3,13.19), tödliche Gefahr (Prov 5,3), den bitteren Trank des göttlichen Strafgerichts (Jer 9,14; 23,15) oder den Frevel, der das Gericht nach sich zieht (Dtn 29,18). Sehr eigentümlich ist, wie in der ersten Vershälfte von Am 5,7 (V. 7a) zwei unterschiedliche Metaphern – Umsturz und Wermut – ineinander geschoben sind: Das Verb hpk „umstürzen“ bezeichnet für sich genommen den Akt, das Unterste zuoberst zu kehren, was häufig auf gewaltsame Handlungen bezogen ist. So kann die Zerstörung Jerusalems damit verglichen werden, dass jemand eine Schüssel „umstürzt“, also auf den Kopf stülpt (2Kön 21,13). Oder es ist davon die Rede, dass Throne umgestürzt werden (Hag 2,22) oder ein Zelt auf den Kopf gestellt wird (Ri 7,13). In solchem Sinn wird der Ausdruck „Die zu Wermut umstürzen das Recht …!“ in der zweiten Vershälfte damit parallelisiert, dass „die Gerechtigkeit auf ¹⁴ die Erde geworfen“ wurde.¹⁵ Zugleich aber wird das Umstürzen mit dem Motiv der Bitternis verknüpft: Das Recht wird in Wermut verwandelt. ¹⁶ Das verweist auf die schlimmen Folgen, die solches Handeln zwangsläufig hat: Wer das Recht stürzt, wird Bitternis schmecken.

 Nach Ernst Jenni, Die hebräischen Präpositionen, Bd. 3, Die Präposition Lamed (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000), 259, ein Lamed adverbiale zur Angabe der Richtung auf einer vertikalen Achse; der Ausdruck lā’āræṣ „zu Boden / auf die Erde“ (Jenni ebd.) ist recht häufig belegt, vgl. nur Am 3,14 („… und die Hörner des Altars werden abgehauen und fallen zur Erde“).  Die Semantik des Verbs ist in diesem Zusammenhang eigentümlich, da nwḥ hi2 zwar in einem recht weiten Feld i.S.v. „setzen, stellen, legen, (liegen‐)lassen, zurücklassen“ verwendet wird (vgl. Gesenius, Handwörterbuch [wie Anm. 13], 793 – 794), dabei aber meist recht deutlich der in der Wurzel enthaltene Aspekt des ruhigen oder unbewegten Zustandes mitschwingt, der durch die Handlung erreicht wird. Hier wird der Ausdruck i. d. R. ad sensum als „zu Boden werfen“ übersetzt; z. B. Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten (wie Anm. 9), 5; Wilhelm Nowack, Handkommentar zum Alten Testament, III/4, Die kleinen Propheten (Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1897), 139; Marti, Kurzer Hand-Commentar (wie Anm. 10), 190; Theodore H. Robinson, Die Zwölf Kleinen Propheten. Hosea bis Micha, Hg. ders. und Friedrich Horst, Handbuch zum Alten Testament I/14 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 21954), 88; ähnlich Ernst Sellin, Das Zwölfprophetenbuch (wie Anm. 11), 188 („zur Erde niederwerfen“). Dass das Verb in Am 5,7b eine gewaltsame Bewegung abbildet, legt v. a. Jes 28,2 nahe, wo die Rede ist von einem „Starken und Gewaltigen“, der den Kranz Efraims „zur Erde wirft mit Gewalt“ (hinnîaḥ lā’āræṣ bejād).Wolff, Dodekapropheton (wie Anm. 1), 268, und Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 60, geben das Verb mit „zu Boden stoßen“ wieder. Nach William Rainey Harper, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Amos and Hosea, The International Critical Commentary (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 119, ist Gerechtigkeit hier sogar personifiziert, „represented as an individual thrown down, and treated with violence and contempt, ‚trampled under foot.‘“ So auch Eidevall, Amos (wie Anm. 10), 158.  Zur Bedeutung „verwandeln“ vgl. z. B. Ps 114,8 (Felsen in Wassersumpf); Ps 78,44 (Nilwasser in Blut); Dtn 23,6 (Fluch in Segen); Ps 30,12 (Totenklage in Reigentanz).

64

Reinhard Müller

2 Eine Parallele im Amosbuch Ein Kapitel später lässt sich eine ganz ähnliche Aussage finden (Am 6,12b). Ihr steht ein sprichwortartiger Satz voran (Am 6,12a): Laufen etwa Pferde über Felsen, oder pflügt man mit Rindern das Meer¹⁷?

Pferde können nicht über Felsen laufen,¹⁸ und keiner pflügt mit Rindern das Meer. Der Spruch, der unabhängig von der Amosüberlieferung entstanden sein könnte,¹⁹ lässt sich auf verschiedenste Fälle anwenden, in denen jemand etwas versucht, was erfahrungsgemäß unmöglich, ja absurd ist. Auf Am 6,12a folgt eine Parallele zu Am 5,7, die offenbar dazu dient, die sprichwortartigen rhetorischen Fragen zu erklären (Am 6,12b): Denn ihr habt zu Gift das Recht verwandelt und die Frucht der Gerechtigkeit zu Wermut!

Solches Tun ist – wie die durch kî „denn“²⁰ geschaffene Verbindung mit den voranstehenden rhetorischen Fragen (V. 12a) besagt – eine Absurdität, die den Keim einer katastrophalen Folge in sich trägt.  Lies babbāqār jām statt des masoretischen babbeqārîm „mit Rindern“, was keinen rechten Sinn ergibt und auf fehlerhaften Ausfall der Worttrennung zurückgehen dürfte; so zuerst Johann David Michaelis, Deutsche Übersetzung des Alten Testaments, mit Anmerkungen für Ungelehrte. Der elfte Theil welcher die zwölf kleinen Propheten enthält (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1782), 86; vgl. z. B. Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten (wie Anm. 9), 87; Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 84.  Vgl. Michaelis, Deutsche Übersetzung (wie Anm. 17), 86: „Aeusserst widersinnig und halsbrechend wäre es, auf glatten Felsen mit dem Pferde zu jagen: es würde gleiten, und dessen kann es sich nur kaum enthalten, wenn es den Schritt gehet.“  6,12a wird i. d. R. als Bildung des Amos oder als im Kontext des Amosbuches entstanden erklärt; vgl. z. B. Marti, Kurzer Hand-Commentar (wie Anm. 10), 205; Robinson, Hosea bis Micha (wie Anm. 15), 96; Wolff, Dodekapropheton (wie Anm. 1), 330 – 331; Eidevall, Amos (wie Anm. 10), 187. Das Wort ist aber nicht auf seinen Kontext angewiesen (vgl. Budde, „Zu Text und Auslegung des Buches Amos“ (wie Anm. 1), 129: „Ganz einleuchtend ist das Verhältnis des Bildes zu dem damit Gekennzeichneten in b nicht“); die Allgemeinheit seiner Aussage, in der sich ein Grundzug weisheitlicher Weltbeobachtung spiegelt, deutet darauf, dass es sich um ein ursprünglich selbständiges Sprichwort handelt.  So Robinson, Hosea bis Micha (wie Anm. 15), 96. Auch die Übersetzung „dass“ deutet an, dass V. 12b den sachlichen Grund für die in V. 12a entlarvte Absurdität liefert: Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten (wie Anm. 9), 7; Nowack, Handkommentar zum Alten Testament (wie Anm. 15), 147; Marti, Kurzer Hand-Commentar (wie Anm. 10), 205. Andere verstehen das kî adversativ (Wolff, Dodekapropheton [wie Anm. 1], 330: „doch“; Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 84: „aber“;

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

65

Verglichen mit Am 5,7 ist das Wort über das gestürzte Recht zugespitzt. Anders als dort wird ein vollständiger Satz gebildet; diejenigen, um die es geht, werden jetzt angesprochen (2. Ps. Pl.), und die finite Verbform nimmt eine abgeschlossene Handlung in den Blick: „ihr habt umgestürzt / verwandelt“ (hapaktæm). Als Synonym zu „Wermut“ (la‛anā) wird das Wort „Gift“ (ro’š) verwendet und an den Anfang gestellt.²¹ Die metaphorische Rede von der „Frucht der Gerechtigkeit“ (perî ṣedāqāh) deutet an, dass die Gerechtigkeit als Pflanze gedacht ist, die im natürlichen Zustand eine genießbare und nährende Frucht hervorbringt.²² „Umstürzen“ erhält so noch stärker den Sinn „verwandeln zu“:²³ Der Sprecher wirft denen, die er anredet, vor, das Recht pervertiert zu haben. Auf welche Weise aber ist das geschehen? Der folgende Vers (Am 6,13) gibt einen Hinweis: Die da fröhlich sind über Lo-Dabar, die da sprechen: ‚Haben wir nicht durch unsere Kraft uns Qarnajim eingenommen?‘

Syntaktisch ist das wieder unvollständig und erinnert mit den partizipialen Ausdrücken (haśśemeḥîm „die da fröhlich sind“ / hā’omerîm „die da sprechen“) an den Ausruf von Am 5,7. Zwar scheint es hier um etwas ganz anderes zu gehen: die Freude über einen militärischen Sieg. Lo-Dabar (lô’ dābār) und Qarnajim (qarnajim) sind Orte, die zwischen dem Königreich Israel und dem nordöstlich angrenzenden Aram-Damaskus umkämpft waren;²⁴ offenbar hatte Israel sie zuletzt erobert.²⁵ Die Ortsnamen haben allerdings einen Doppelsinn: Lo-Dabar kann auch „Unding“ bedeuten; Qarnajim heißt wörtlich „Hörnerpaar“ – ein verbrei-

Eidevall, Amos (wie Anm. 10), 182: „but“): In diesem Sinne betont V. 12b, dass die Angeredeten das Recht zu Gift verwandelt haben, obwohl dies nach V. 12a unmöglich ist. Die semantische Offenheit des kî ist weiteres ein Indiz dafür, dass V. 12 nicht aus einem Guss ist und V. 12b zu dem ursprünglich selbständigen Sprichwort hinzugefügt wurde.  Vgl. die Parallelisierung der beiden Nomina in Dtn 29,17; Jer 9,14; 23,15; Thr 3,19.  Dazu s.u. Abschnitt 5.  Vgl. dazu die in Anm. 16 genannten Belege.  Zur Lokalisierung vgl. Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 92 (mit Lit.).  Vgl. allerdings Christoph Levin, „Amos und Jerobeam I.,“ in Fortschreibungen. Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, Hg. ders., Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 316 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003): 256 – 264, hier 262– 263, der im Zusammenhang mit dem von 2Kön 14,25a abhängigen Vers Am 6,14 erwägt, dass „[a]uch andere“, nämlich die Assyrer, sich der Einnahme dieser Orte gerühmt haben könnten. Eine Kritik an den Assyrern hat in der Amosüberlieferung jedoch keine Parallelen, und die hier vorgetragene Deutung von Am 5,7 und 6,12– 13 als Kritik daran, dass Israel den Assyrern die Vasallentreue aufkündigte, steht jener Möglichkeit entgegen.

66

Reinhard Müller

tetes Symbol der Kraft.²⁶ Wer sich aber über ein „Unding“ freut und sich rühmt, in eigener Kraft ein „Hörnerpaar“ erobert zu haben, erhebt ein Selbstlob, das unüberhörbar hohl klingt. Mit rhetorischem Geschick deutet das Wortspiel an,²⁷ dass solches Vertrauen auf zurückliegende militärische Erfolge zum Scheitern verurteilt ist.²⁸ Dieser Gedanke wird in Am 6,12– 13 mit der Kritik an der Verwandlung von Recht zu Gift und Wermut verknüpft: „Meint ihr, verkehrte Welt könne bestehn, dass ihr die Grundlage der Gesellschaft, Recht und Gerechtigkeit, auf den Kopf stellt?“²⁹ Diejenigen, die das Recht zu Gift „verwandelt haben“, sind dieselben wie die, die sich in falscher Selbstüberschätzung ihrer Eroberungen rühmen, und zwischen beidem wird ein enger Zusammenhang gesehen.

3 Politische Aspekte des Begriffs hpk „umstürzen, verwandeln“ An dieser Stelle ist das hebräische Verb genauer zu betrachten, das bislang meist mit „umstürzen“ wiedergegeben wurde, auch wenn es in Am 5,7 und 6,12 vordergründig „verwandeln“ bedeutet. Wichtige Perspektiven eröffnet der Blick über das Alte Testament hinaus: Die Verbalwurzel hpk ist auch für einige semitische Sprachen aus den Nachbarkulturen belegt.³⁰ Aus dem spätbronzezeitlichen Ugarit  Vgl. Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 92– 93; Eidevall, Amos (wie Anm. 10), 187– 188.  Das Wortspiel hat einen ähnlich überraschenden Effekt wie das berühmte Wortspiel von qajiṣ „Sommer(‐obst)“ und qeṣ „Ende“ in der vierten Amosvision (Am 8,1– 2), die wahrscheinlich die älteste der fünf Visionen gewesen ist (Christoph Levin, Das Alte Testament [München: Beck, 5 2018], 45; Reinhard Müller, „Zur Entstehung der Amosvisionen,“ in Fortgeschriebenes Gotteswort. Studien zu Geschichte, Theologie und Auslegung des Alten Testaments, Hg. ders., Urmas Nõmmik und Juha Pakkala [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020]: 273 – 293) und mit der das ursprüngliche Amosbuch geendet haben könnte.  Andernorts in der prophetischen Literatur des Alten Testaments wird dieser Gedanke als theologisch motivierte Kritik an menschlicher Selbstüberschätzung entfaltet: Wer sich der eigenen Kraft rühmt, nimmt gegenüber dem Gott, von dem die Kraft stammt, eine Haltung der Hybris ein (idealtypisch namentlich in Jes 10,5 – 15; vgl. dazu Reinhard Müller, „From Carchemish and Calno (Isa 10:9) to the Book of Isaiah. Paradigmatic Images of Imperial Hubris in Isa 10:5 – 15,“ in Imperial Visions. The Prophet and the Book of Isaiah in an Age of Empires, Hg. Reinhard Gregor Kratz und Joachim Schaper, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 277 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020], 61– 80.). Diese theologische Dimension scheint in Am 6,13 zu fehlen; zumindest wird sie nicht ausdrücklich benannt.  Wellhausen, Die kleinen Propheten (wie Anm. 9), 87.  Vgl. Gesenius, Hebräisches und aramäisches Handwörterbuch (wie Anm. 13), 283, und Jacob Hoftijzer und Karel Jongeling, Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions, Handbuch der Orientalistik I/21 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 291.

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

67

an der nordsyrischen Mittelmeerküste stammt eine Sammlung von Omina, in der es um Missbildungen an tierischen und menschlichen Föten geht;³¹ darin findet sich ein Omen, wonach ein Fötus ohne Beine das Vorzeichen dafür ist, dass die Palastwache „sich gegen“ den König „wenden“ wird (*hpk N-Stamm mit reflexivem Sinn)³² – eine Form des politischen Umsturzes, die im Alten Orient nicht selten war und sich auch in Israel und Juda mehrfach ereignet hat.³³ Ein Schlüssel zum Verständnis der beiden Sprüche aus dem Amosbuch könnte in einem aramäischen Vasallenvertrag des 8. Jahrhunderts v.Chr. enthalten sein, der wohl aus dem nordsyrischen, südöstlich von Aleppo gelegenen Sfīre stammt. Dieses Vertragswerk, das auf steinerne Stelen eingraviert ist, hat für das Alte Testament große komparatistische Bedeutung:³⁴ Die Inschriften stehen den ältesten Texten des Alten Testaments räumlich und zeitlich nahe; sie zeigen beispielhaft, wie ein Vasallitätsverhältnis zwischen benachbarten Königen durch religiöse Eide beschworen und vertraglich abgesichert wurde.³⁵ In einer der In-

 KTU 1.103 + 145; deutsche Übersetzung: Manfried Dietrich und Oswald Loretz, „Ugaritische Omentexte,“ in Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments, Bd. 2, Hg. Otto Kaiser [CD-Rom] (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 94– 101, hier 95 – 99. Zum größeren geistesgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang, in dem die Omenkunde stand, vgl. Stefan Maul, Die Wahrsagekunst im Alten Orient. Zeichen des Himmels und der Erde (München: Beck, 2013).  KTU 1.103:52; vgl. Josef Tropper, Ugaritische Grammatik. Zweite, stark überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 273 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag,22012), 537.  Vgl. z. B. die Ermordung des Königs Joasch von Juda durch „seine Knechte“ (2Kön 12,21).  Vgl. Christoph Koch, Vertrag, Treueid und Bund. Studien zur Rezeption des altorientalischen Vertragsrechts im Deuteronomium und zur Ausbildung der Bundestheologie im Alten Testament, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 383 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 52– 78; Cynthia Edenburg und Reinhard Müller, „Editorial Introduction. Perspectives on the Treaty Framework of Deuteronomy,“ Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 8 (2019): 73 – 86, hier 73 – 75 (mit Lit.).  Solche vertraglich fixierten Treueeide waren im zweiten Jahrtausend von den Hethitern zu einem Instrument der Sicherung von Herrschaft gemacht worden (vgl.Viktor Korošec, Hethitische Staatsverträge. Ein Beitrag zu ihrer juristischen Wertung, Leipziger rechtswissenschaftliche Studien 60 [Leipzig: Weicher, 1931]); im ersten Jahrtausend ist diese Praxis vor allem durch textliche Zeugnisse des neuassyrischen Großreiches belegt (vgl. Simo Parpola und Kazuko Watanabe, Hg., Neo-Assyrian Treaties and Loyalty Oaths, State Archives of Assyria [Helsinki: University Press, 1988]). Die Königreiche Israel und Juda wurden in der zweiten Hälfte des 8. Jahrhunderts Vasallen der Assyrer, und das israelitische Königtum ging infolge des gescheiterten Versuchs, das Joch der assyrischen Vasallität abzuschütteln, zwischen 732 und 722 v.Chr. in mehreren Etappen unter; diese politische Vorgänge dürften hinter der ältesten Amosüberlieferung gestanden haben (vgl. Levin, „Amos und Jerobeam I.“ [wie Anm. 25], 263 – 264).

68

Reinhard Müller

schriften wird die Wurzel hpk „umstürzen“ zweimal kurz nacheinander gebraucht:³⁶ Wer aber nicht bewahrt die Worte dieser Inschrift, die auf dieser Stele stehen, und spricht: ‚Ich will etwas auslöschen von ihren Worten!‘, oder: ‚Ich will das Gute umstürzen (’hpk) und zu etwas Bösem machen!‘ – an dem Tag, an dem er so handelt, sollen die Götter jenen Mann umstürzen (yhpkw) und sein Haus und alles, was darin ist, und sie sollen sein Unterstes [zuob]erst kehren, und seine Nachkommen sollen keinen Namen erben.

Einerseits ist das eine typische Fluchformel, wie sie am Ende königlicher Inschriften nicht selten zu finden ist: Sie soll die Inschrift davor schützen, verändert oder zerstört zu werden.³⁷ Andererseits geht die Funktion der Formel über die übliche Königsinschrift hinaus, da sie zugleich auf das Einhalten des Vertrags bezogen ist: Wer die Worte der Stele, die den Vertragstext bilden, nicht bewahrt sondern tilgt, gleicht jemandem, der „das Gute umstürzt und zu etwas Bösem macht“.³⁸ Das Gute umzustürzen bedeutet hier also schlicht den Bruch der vor den Göttern geschworenen Vasallentreue.³⁹ Eine solche Verwandlung des Guten (der beeideten Loyalität des Vasallen gegenüber seinem Herrn) zum Bösen (der gebrochenen Loyalität) hat eine unmittelbare Konsequenz für den, der dafür verantwortlich ist: Die Götter stürzen ihn und sein Haus und kehren das Unterste darin zuoberst. Verbindet man dies mit dem Begriffspaar Ordnung und Chaos,⁴⁰ ließe sich sagen, dass die absichtsvolle Beseitigung der guten politischen Ordnung, die etwas Böses und Chaotisches in die Welt bringt,⁴¹ die unausweichliche Folge hat, dass der Verursacher seinerseits von den Göttern ins Chaos gestürzt wird. Mit anderen Worten: Dass die Götter die Macht haben, das Unterste zuoberst  Text: KAI 222 I C 16 – 25 (Herbert Donner und Wolfgang Röllig, Hg., Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften, Bd. 1, Texte [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 52002], 54; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Aramaic Inscriptions of Sefire. Revised Edition, biblica et Orientalia 19/A [Rom: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1995], 54); eigene Übersetzung.  Vgl. z. B. KAI 10:13 – 16 (Jehawmilk von Byblos; Herbert Donner und Wolfgang Röllig, Hg., Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften, Bd. 2, Kommentar [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968], 12); KAI 26 III 13 – 20 (Karatepe; Donner u. Röllig, ebd., 38); KAI 202 B 16 – 28 (Zakkur von Hamath; Donner u. Röllig, ebd., 205).  Z. 19 – 20: ’hpk ṭbt w’šm [l]lḥyt.  Vgl. die Übersetzung bei Fitzmyer, The Aramaic Inscriptions (wie Anm. 36), 55: „I shall upset the good treaty-relations and turn (them) [to] evil“.  Vgl. dazu z. B. Stefan Maul, „Der Sieg über die Mächte des Bösen. Götterkampf, Triumphrituale und Torarchitektur in Assyrien,“ in Gegenwelten zu den Kulturen Griechenlands und Roms in der Antike, Hg. Tonio Hölscher (München: Saur, 2000): 19 – 46; Christoph Levin, „Old Testament Religion. Conflict and Peace,“ in Re-Reading the Scriptures. Essays on the Literary History of the Old Testament, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 87 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013): 165 – 181.  Zum Begriff des Bösen vgl. Müller, „Die Rede vom Bösen“ (wie Anm. 5).

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

69

zu kehren, soll die bestehende „gute“ Ordnung davor schützen, ins Böse gekehrt zu werden. Gleichzeitig aber wird deutlich, dass die Götter einen solchen Umsturz der Ordnung nicht verhindern können.

4 Theologische Aspekte des Begriffs hāpak „umstürzen“ Der Abschnitt aus dem Vertragswerk der Sfīre-Stelen lässt erkennen, dass die politische Dimension des Verbs „umstürzen“ untrennbar mit einer theologischen verbunden war: Nicht allein Menschen konnten Subjekt des Verbs sein, sondern auch Götter. Im Rahmen der polytheistischen Vorstellungswelten des Alten Orients konnte man erzählen, dass Götter einander zu stürzen versuchen. Ein klassisches Zeugnis, das ebenfalls für das Alte Testament höchstes komparatistisches Gewicht hat, ist der ugaritische Baalzyklus, der im späten 13. Jahrhundert v.Chr. aufgezeichnet wurde: ein großangelegter episch entfalteter Mythos, der erzählt, wie der Wettergott Baal um sein Königtum kämpft.⁴² Es dürfte kein Zufall sein, dass in diesem Text, dessen Sprache und poetische Formen eng mit der alttestamentlichen Poesie verwandt sind, eine Gottheit als Subjekt der Vokabel hpk „umstürzen“ vorkommt. Gegen Ende des Zyklus zeichnet sich ab, dass Baal, der zuvor vom Todesgott Mot besiegt worden war, sein Königtum wiedererlangen wird; in diesem Zusammenhang kündigt die Sonnengöttin dem Todesgott an, dass seine Herrschaft vor dem Ende steht:⁴³ Ja, er [scil. Baal] wird ausreißen die Wandpfeiler deines Sitzes, ja, er wird umstürzen den Thron deiner Königsherrschaft, ja, er wird zerbrechen das Szepter deiner Rechtsgewalt!

 KTU 1.1– 1.6 (deutsche Übersetzung: Manfried Dietrich und Oswald Loretz, „Mythen und Epen in ugaritischer Sprache,“ in Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments, Bd. 3, Hg. Otto Kaiser [CDRom] (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005b): 1091– 1316; Herbert Niehr, „Mythen und Epen aus Ugarit,“ in Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments. Neue Folge, Bd. 8, Weisheitstexte, Mythen und Epen, Hg. Bernd Janowski und Daniel Schwemer [Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2015]: 177– 301).  KTU 1.6 VI 27– 29 (eigene Übersetzung).

70

Reinhard Müller

Der ugaritische Begriff für „Rechtsgewalt“ (mṯpṭ)⁴⁴ ist das genaue Äquivalent zum hebräischen Begriff „Recht“ (mišpāṭ), der in Am 5,7 und 6,12 verwendet ist: Baal richtet das Recht seiner Königsherrschaft wieder auf, indem er das Recht des Todesgottes, das nichts anderes ist als die Herrschaft des lebensfeindlichen Chaos, bricht und den Thron des Mot stürzt. Wenn also eine Gottheit Subjekt des Umstürzens ist, bringt das für den Betroffenen Tod und Vernichtung; solche Durchsetzung göttlicher Herrschaft kann aber zugleich dazu dienen, göttlich gesetztes Recht wiederaufzurichten. Im Alten Testament hat sich dieser Zusammenhang mit der Überlieferung von Sodom und Gomorra verbunden: Das Strafgericht über die beiden frevlerischen Städte wird immer wieder als ein göttliches „Umstürzen“ benannt.⁴⁵ In Gen 19, wo von diesem Ereignis erzählt wird, heißt es an der entscheidenden Stelle (Gen 19,25): Und er stürzte diese Städte um und die ganze Umgebung, alle, die in den Städten wohnten, und das Gewächs des Erdbodens.

Das Subjekt dieses strafenden Handelns ist der Gott Jahwe, wie sich dem voranstehenden Vers entnehmen lässt (Gen 19,24): Jahwe habe Schwefel und Feuer auf Sodom und Gomorra regnen lassen. Allerdings enthält der Text Indizien dafür, dass in der ursprünglichen Fassung der Erzählung nicht Jahwe das Subjekt war, sondern der – hier männliche – Sonnengott.⁴⁶ Das passt dazu, dass man weithin meinte, die vergöttlichte Sonne ziehe jeden Morgen die Dämonen der Nacht und die mit ihnen verbündeten Verbrecher zur Rechenschaft.⁴⁷ Auch im Amosbuch wird Jahwe als Subjekt des Umstürzens erwähnt, einmal in einer Anspielung auf das Strafgericht an Sodom und Gomorra (Am 4,11),⁴⁸ zum zweiten Mal aber in einem kurzen Hymnus, der unmittelbar nach dem Ausruf über das gestürzte und zu Wermut verwandelte Recht zu lesen ist (Am 5,8):

 Gregorio Del Olmo Lete und Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition. Handbuch der Orientalistik I/112, Übers. u. Hg. Wilfred G.E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 32015), 597.  Mit dem von *hpk abgeleiteten Nomen mahpekāh: Dtn 29,22; Jes 13,19; Jer 49,18; 40,40; Am 4,11.  Vgl. Urmas Nõmmik, Die Vätererzählungen im Lichte höfischer Erzählkunst. Motivkritische Studien zu den Überlieferungen von Lot, Isaak, Rebekka und Jakob, Forschungen zum Alten Testament (Tü bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), im Druck, Kap. 3.3.  Vgl. Othmar Keel, Die Geschichte Jerusalems und die Entstehung des Monotheismus, 2 Bde., Orte und Landschaften der Bibel 4 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 277– 281 (mit Lit.).  S. Anm. 45.

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

71

Der die Plejaden und den Orion macht und zum Morgen die Finsternis umstürzt und den Tag zur Nacht verfinstert, der die Wasser des Meeres ruft und sie ausgießt auf das Angesicht der Erde – Jahwe ist sein Name!

Vor dem Schlusssatz „Jahwe ist sein Name“ steht eine Reihe sogenannter Partizipialprädikationen – eine Grundform hymnischer Sprache, die auch in den Gebetsliteraturen Mesopotamiens und Ägyptens häufig begegnet.⁴⁹ In Am 5,8 sprechen die hymnischen Prädikationen vordergründig von der schöpferischen Erhaltung der Welt: Wie Jahwe die nächtlichen Sternbilder erschafft und stets neu zum Leuchten bringt, hält sein Wirken auch die lebensnotwendigen Zyklen des Tages und des Jahres im Gang; neben dem Wechsel von Finsternis und Tageslicht wird die Gabe des Regens erwähnt, die in Palästina ins Winterhalbjahr fällt und für das Überleben unverzichtbar ist. Dass aber dieser Hymnus auf die göttliche creatio continua davon spricht, dass Jahwe „die Finsternis zum Morgen umstürzt (hopek)“, passt nicht ins Bild und dürfte kaum zu den traditionellen Formeln des hymnischen Gotteslobs gehört haben. Es liegt auf der Hand, dass dieses Wort im Blick auf den voranstehenden Vers Am 5,7 gebildet wurde:⁵⁰ Wenn angesichts derer, die „das Recht zu Wermut umstürzen“, davon gesprochen wird, dass Jahwe am Ende jeder Nacht „die Finsternis zum Morgen umstürzt“ und dann wieder „den Tag zur Nacht verfinstert“, klingt unüberhörbar an, dass der Umsturz von Recht und Gerechtigkeit nicht folgenlos bleibt, sondern im kosmischen Geschehen ein Echo findet. Dass die Rechtsbrecher ein göttliches Gericht zu erwarten haben, wird damit allerdings nur angedeutet. Das fällt gerade im Vergleich mit dem Vertragstext aus Sfīre auf, wo ausdrücklich gesagt wird, dass infolge des Umsturzes der „guten“ Loyalität „zum Bösen“ die Götter das Haus des Umstürzlers zuoberst kehren. Am 5,8 gehört nicht zum ältesten Bestand des Buches. Der Hymnus zählt zu den sogenannten Gerichtsdoxologien, die an drei Stellen (Am 4,13; 5,8; 9,5 – 6) in das Buch eingeschrieben wurden. Diese Texte sind erst entstanden, als das judäische Königtum bereits Vergangenheit war, also frühestens im 6. Jahrhundert

 Vgl. Frank Crüsemann, Studien zur Formgeschichte von Hymnus und Danklied in Israel, Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament 32 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969), 81– 154.  Vgl. nur Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 68.

72

Reinhard Müller

v.Chr.⁵¹ Mit den Hymnen machten sich diejenigen, die in der nachköniglichen Zeit an der Verehrung Jahwes festhielten, die älteren Amosworte zu eigen: Indem man inmitten des gerichtsprophetischen Büchleins Jahwe für sein fortwährendes schöpferisches Handeln pries, erkannte man an, dass seine nunmehr zurückliegenden Strafgerichte berechtigt gewesen waren. Die ältesten Texte des Amosbuches, zu denen Am 5,7 zählt,⁵² sind deutlich früher entstanden; sie entstammen mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit dem 8. Jahrhundert v.Chr. Wie in diesen frühen Texten das bevorstehende göttliche Strafgericht beschrieben wird, lässt sich namentlich aus Am 5,18 – 20* entnehmen (V. 18*.20b):⁵³ Wehe denen, die den Tag Jahwes herbeisehnen! Er ist Finsternis und kein Licht, und Dunkelheit und kein Glanz eignet ihm.

Die Form des Weherufes geht auf die Totenklage zurück; das hebräische Wort, das mit „wehe“ übersetzt ist, bedeutete ursprünglich soviel wie „ach“ und bezog sich auf den Verstorbenen. Hier wird dagegen eine Totenklage über Lebende erhoben. Daraus ergibt sich die semantische Verschiebung zum Weheruf: Das Wehe kündigt den unabwendbaren Tod derer an, um die es geht.⁵⁴ Diejenigen, auf die hier geblickt wird, sehnen den Tag Jahwes herbei und erhoffen von ihm Licht und Glanz, also Rettung und Heil. Der Grund für diese Hoffnung liegt wahrscheinlich darin, dass der Tag Jahwes das Neujahrsfest gewesen ist, an dem man alljährlich Jahwes Sieg über die Chaosmächte feierte.⁵⁵ Die prophetische Stimme aber, die das Wehe ruft, sagt voraus, was der Tag tatsächlich bringen wird: Finsternis und Dunkelheit – also eine Katastrophe von kosmischem Ausmaß. Dass solche Ankündigungen kein alleiniges Gut der althebräischen Prophetie waren, zeigt eine Inschrift von dem im Jordangraben gelegenen Tell Deir ‛Alla, die wahrscheinlich

 Vgl. Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 56 – 58.  S. Anm. 9 und 81.  Zur Rekonstruktion und religionsgeschichtlichen Einordnung vgl. Reinhard Müller, „Der finstere Tag Jahwes. Zum kultischen Hintergrund von Am 5,18 – 20,“ Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 122 (2010): 576 – 592.  Vgl. Müller, „Der finstere Tag Jahwes“ (wie Anm. 53), 581.  Vgl. Sigmund Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien, Bd. 2, Das Thronbesteigungsfest Jahwäs und der Ursprung der Eschatologie (Kristiania: Dybwad, 1922), 229; Müller, „Der finstere Tag Jahwes“ (wie Anm. 53), 585 – 590.

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

73

gegen Ende des 9. Jahrhunderts v.Chr. entstanden ist.⁵⁶ Die Inschrift, die vom Seher Bileam erzählt, der auch aus dem Alten Testament bekannt ist, enthält die Schilderung einer Himmelsszene, die dem Bileam offenbart wurde; dort findet sich eine fast wörtliche Parallele zu dem Wehewort aus Am 5,18 – 20*:⁵⁷ Die Götter kamen zusammen, indem die Hohen auftraten als Versammlung. Und sie sagten zur S[on]ne(ngöttin): ‚Du magst die Schleusen des Himmels mit deinem Gewölk verstopfen. Dort sei Finsternis und kein Glanz, Dunkelheit, und ni[cht] dein Strahlen! Du magst Schreck[en] bewirken [durch] finsteres [Gewöl]k. Aber grolle nicht für immer!‘

Bileam wird von Tränen überwältigt, nachdem er die Szene gesehen hat. Solch vollständige Abwesenheit des Lichtes bedeutet Schrecken und Tod. Die Sonnengöttin ist derart erzürnt, dass die hohen Götter ihr Grollen nur zeitlich begrenzen, aber nicht abwenden können.

5 Die kosmische Dimension des Rechts Für den Sinn von Am 5,7 ist schließlich der semantische Horizont der Begriffe „Recht“ und „Gerechtigkeit“ entscheidend. Das hebräische Wort für „Recht“ (mišpāṭ) wird namentlich für den Rechtsentscheid gebraucht;⁵⁸ was Recht ist, leitet sich in diesem Sinn vom Ausgang des Gerichtsverfahrens her.⁵⁹ Allerdings war rechtssetzendes Handeln nicht auf das gerichtliche Urteil beschränkt, und als Recht konnte auch schlicht das gelten, was einem richtigerweise zusteht.⁶⁰ Das

 Vgl. Erhard Blum, „Die aramäischen Wandinschriften von Tell Deir ‛Alla,“ in Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments. Neue Folge, Bd. 8, Weisheitstexte, Mythen und Epen, Hg. Bernd Janowski und Daniel Schwemer (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2015): 459 – 474, hier 459.  Übersetzung: Blum, „Die Aramäischen Wandinschriften“ (wie Anm. 56), 467 (ohne Kursivierungen, die hier die Parallele zu Am 5,7 hervorheben).  Vgl. 1Kön 3,28 (das salomonische Urteil) und 2Kön 25,6 (das Urteil, das die Babylonier über den von ihnen abtrünnigen König Zedekia sprachen).  Vgl. Ex 23,6, wo der wechselseitige Zusammenhang von Gerichtsurteil und Rechtsanspruch gut zu erkennen ist, sowie z. B. Dtn 1,17.  Vgl. Gerhard Liedke, „špṭ richten,“ in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, Bd. 2, Hg. Ernst Jenni und Claus Westermann (München: Kaiser, 1976): 999 – 1009, hier 1004– 1009, bes. 1005.

74

Reinhard Müller

Wort „Gerechtigkeit“ (ṣedāqāh) bezeichnet im Grundsinn die „gerechte Tat“;⁶¹ es bezieht sich namentlich auf Handlungen, die eine gerechte Ordnung herstellen oder bewahren.⁶² Das zugrundeliegende Rechtsdenken war auf die Gemeinschaft bezogen:⁶³ Als gerecht galt das, was der Gemeinschaft dient, sei es in Familie oder Sippe, Ortschaft oder Königreich. Für das Königtum war die Berufung auf Recht und Gerechtigkeit ein wichtiges Mittel, um die eigene Herrschaft zu legitimieren: Der König sei – so behauptete man in Israel wie andernorts im Alten Orient – vom Schutzgott des Reiches ins Amt eingesetzt, um im göttlichen Auftrag eine „gerechte“ Lebensordnung durchzusetzen und zu verteidigen.⁶⁴ Die Gerechtigkeit konnte als geradezu kosmische Entität gerühmt werden, die in einem geheimnisvollen Zusammenhang mit der lebensnotwendigen Fruchtbarkeit der Erde steht.⁶⁵ Diese Gedanken werden vor allem in Ps 72 entfaltet – einem Königspsalm, dessen Urform auf ein Lied zurückgeht, das bei der Thronbesteigung des Königs, wohl auch bei seinem jährlichen Thronjubiläum gesungen wurde (Ps 72,1*.3.5 – 7.16 – 17):⁶⁶ Jahwe⁶⁷, dein Recht⁶⁸ gib dem König und deine Gerechtigkeit dem Königssohn!

 Vgl.Walter Dietrich und Samuel Arnet, Hg., Konzise und aktualisierte Ausgabe des Hebräischen und Aramäischen Lexikons zum Alten Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 470, s.v. ṣædæq.  Dieses Verständnis ist v. a. im Zusammenhang mit dem König (vgl. Prov 16,12; Jer 22,15; Jes 9,6; 2Sam 8,15; Jer 23,5) sowie mit Gott (vgl. Jes 28,17; Ps 98,2; Jer 9,23) belegt.  Vgl. Klaus Koch, „ṣdq gemeinschaftstreu/heilvoll sein,“ in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament, Bd. 2, Hg. Ernst Jenni und Claus Westermann (München: Kaiser, 1976): 507– 530, hier 515 – 516.  Vgl. Reinhard Müller, „Herrschaftslegitimation in den Königtümern Israel und Juda. Eine Spurensuche im Alten Testament,“ in Herrschaftslegitimation in vorderorientalischen Reichen der Eisenzeit, Hg. Christoph Levin und ders., Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 21 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017): 189 – 230, hier 212– 217.  Vgl. Ps 36,7 (dazu Reinhard Müller, Jahwe als Wettergott. Studien zur althebräischen Kultlyrik anhand ausgewählter Psalmen, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 387 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008], 209); 72,3; Jes 5,7; 45,8; Jer 33,15.  Vgl. Reinhard Müller, „Herrschaftslegitimation“ (wie Anm. 64), 217; zu Literargeschichte und traditionsgeschichtlichen Hintergründen von Ps 72 Reettakaisa Sofia Salo, Die judäische Königsideologie im Kontext der Nachbarkulturen. Untersuchungen zu den Königspsalmen 2,18, 20, 21, 45 und 72, Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 25 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 205 – 273, die den Grundbestand des Psalms ähnlich rekonstruiert.  So der wahrscheinliche Text vor der sog. elohistischen Redaktion der Pss 42– 83, die den althebräischen Gottesnamen Jahwe an den meisten Stellen durch das Wort „Gott“ ersetzt hat; vgl. Reinhard Müller, „Das befestigte Herz. Psalm 57 und die kosmologische Dimension der althebräischen Anthropologie,“ in Die kleine Biblia. Beiträge zur Theologie der Psalmen und des

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

75

Die Berge mögen Heil bringen dem Volk und die Hügel Gerechtigkeit! Er lebe lang⁶⁹ bei der Sonne und vor dem Mond von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht! Er komme herab wie Regen auf die Mahd, wie Regenschauer, die das Land besprengen! Es blühe in seinen Tagen Gerechtigkeit⁷⁰ und Fülle an Heil, bis kein Mond mehr ist! Es sei Überfluss an Korn im Land, auf dem Gipfel der Berge bebe es! Wie der Libanon blühe seine Frucht und seine Ähre⁷¹ wie das Kraut des Landes! Sein Name sei für allezeit, vor der Sonne sprosse sein Name!

Der König steht der göttlichen Sphäre nahe: Er und sein Name sollen vor Sonne und Mond für allezeit bestehen. Der Herrscher verschmilzt so mit seiner Dynastie.⁷² Die königliche Herrschaft gleicht dem Regen, der vom Wettergott Jahwe gespendet wird.⁷³ Jahwe verleiht dem König Gerechtigkeit, und diese wird von den Bergen an das Volk weitergegeben. Weil unter der königlichen Herrschaft Gerechtigkeit blüht, genießt das Land überreichliche Fruchtbarkeit. Solche Vorstellungen müssen hinter den anklagenden Worten von Am 5,7 und 6,12 gestanden haben: Dass Am 6,12 von „der Frucht der Gerechtigkeit“ spricht, berührt sich eng mit Ps 72,7, wonach unter der Herrschaft des Königs die Gerechtigkeit erblüht. Mit der Rede von der Verwandlung des Rechts in Wermut und Gift wird der Zusammenhang von blühender Gerechtigkeit und reifendem Korn, Psalters, Hg. Markus Saur, Biblisch-Theologische Studien 148 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft, 2014): 59 – 82, hier 62– 63, Anm. 16 (mit Lit.).  Mit Septuaginta. Der masoretische Text bietet den Plural mišpāṭæka „deine Rechtsentscheide“ – eine wahrscheinlich sekundäre Lesart, die auf die Rechtssätze der Tora bezogen sein dürfte, die häufig mit diesem Begriff bezeichnet werden (z. B. Ex 21,1; Dtn 4,1; 6,1; 12,1).  Mit Septuaginta, deren Übersetzung auf die hebräische Form weya’arîk zurückgehen dürfte. Der masoretische Text liest dagegen „sie mögen dich (scil. Jahwe) fürchten“, was auf die in V. 4 nachträglich hinzugefügten Armen des Volkes bezogen ist.  Mit Septuaginta. Der masoretische Text liest dagegen ṣaddîq „der Gerechte“, was auf eine späte Bearbeitung des Textes zurückgehen dürfte.  So die wahrscheinlichste Rekonstruktion des an dieser Stelle offensichtlich korrumpierten Textes; vgl. Salo, Die judäische Königsideologie (wie Anm. 66), 207– 208, Anm. 14.  Vgl. Salo, Die judäische Königsideologie (wie Anm. 66), 259 – 261.  Vgl. Müller, Jahwe als Wettergott (wie Anm. 65).

76

Reinhard Müller

der in Ps 72,7.16 angedeutet wird, ins Gegenteil verkehrt. Wenn aber – wie das Amosbuch beklagt – Recht und Gerechtigkeit umgestürzt, zu Boden geworfen und zu Wermut und Gift verwandelt werden, bedeutet das im Licht von Ps 72 eine fundamentale Erschütterung der kosmischen Ordnung. Das Wehewort von Am 5,18 – 20* – eine der stärksten Unheilsankündigungen des Buches – bringt genau das zum Ausdruck.⁷⁴ An das Wehewort vom finsteren Tag Jahwes schließt sich in Am 5,21– 24.27* ein unheilvolles Orakel Jahwes an, in dessen zweitem Teil (V. 23 – 24) die Begriffe „Recht“ und „Gerechtigkeit“ aus Am 5,7 aufgenommen sind: Ich hasse, habe verworfen eure Feste, und ich kann eure Kultversammlungen nicht riechen. Und an euren Speisopfern habe ich kein Gefallen, und die Ganzopfer eurer Masttiere blicke ich nicht an. Tu weg von mir den Lärm deiner Lieder, und den Klang deiner Leiern kann ich nicht hören! Und es wälze sich heran wie Wasser das Recht und die Gerechtigkeit wie ein nie versiegender Bach! Und ich führe euch in die Verbannung, über Damaskus hinaus – hat Jahwe gesprochen.

Diese zornige Rede Jahwes, die – wie der Numeruswechsel zwischen V. 22* (2. pl.) und V. 23 (2. sg.) sowie zwischen V. 23(–24) (2. sg.) und V. 27* vermuten lässt⁷⁵ – in zwei Stufen entstanden sein könnte, wirft ein Schlaglicht auf die Hintergründe, die das unheilvolle Geschehen in der göttlichen Sphäre hat. Nach V. 21– 22*⁷⁶, dem vielleicht älteren Orakel, weigert sich Jahwe, die Opfer der Angeredeten (die nach dem Kontext von Kap. 5 die Angehörigen des „Hauses Israel“ sind; vgl. 5,1) anzunehmen; er kündigt die kultische Gemeinschaft mit seinen Verehrern auf. Der Bruch des Miteinanders von Gottheit und Menschen ist in der Aussage, dass Jahwe die Feste der Angeredeten „hasst“, unüberbietbar zugespitzt. Das Motiv des göttlichen Hasses war nicht ohne traditionsgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen: Im ugaritischen Baalzyklus heißt es in überraschend ähnlichen Worten, dass Baal

 Vgl. Müller, „Der finstere Tag Jahwes“ (wie Anm. 53), 588 – 590.  Vgl. Marti, Kurzer Hand-Commentar (wie Anm. 10), 190, 195, der die Suffixe in V. 23 in die 2. Pl. ändert, und Budde, „Zu Text und Auslegung des Buches Amos“ (wie Anm. 1), 115, der ebenfalls für V. 23 fehlerhafte Textüberlieferung erwägt.  Die scharfe Zurückweisung des Kultes wurde durch einen Zusatz am Anfang von V. 22 („Es sei denn, ihr lässt mir Brandopfer aufsteigen“) abgemildert; vgl. z. B. Jeremias, Prophet Amos (wie Anm. 9), 81.

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

77

Opfer hasse, die von Vergewaltigern rechtloser Sklavinnen dargebracht werden.⁷⁷ In Am 5,21– 22* wird zwar nicht gesagt, weshalb Jahwe die Opferfeste der Angehörigen des Hauses Israel hasst. Es drängt sich aber auf, dass der entscheidende Grund nichts anderes ist als der in Am 5,7 benannte Umsturz des Rechts: Wenn die rechtliche Ordnung der Welt derart zerstört wird, hat das zur Folge, dass der herbeigesehnte Tag Jahwes – das Neujahrsfest⁷⁸ – nur unheilvolle Finsternis bringt; Jahwe kündigt die kultische Gemeinschaft mit seinen Verehrern, die besonders an diesem Tag festlich begangen wurde, auf.⁷⁹ Das Wehewort über den finsteren Tag Jahwes (Am 5,18 – 20*) und die angeschlossene Gottesrede, in der Jahwe seinen Hass auf die Opferfeste kundgibt, gelten ein und demselben Vorgang: beide bilden ab, was die göttliche Reaktion auf die Verwandlung des Rechts zu Wermut ist. Die geschichtliche Konsequenz wird am Ende der Jahwerede lapidar benannt (Am 5,27*): „Ich führe euch in die Verbannung über Damaskus hinaus – hat Jahwe gesprochen.“ Darin dürfte sich die historische Realität in der zweiten Hälfte des 8. Jahrhunderts spiegeln, als die Assyrer in mehreren Schüben größere Teile der Oberschicht des israelitischen Königtums in ferne Reichsgegenden verschleppten. Aus Sicht der Assyrer geschah das, weil das israelitische Königreich seine Vasallentreue gegenüber dem Großreich gebrochen hatte. Der Zusammenhang von Am 5,7 und dem Schluss des Jahweorakels in 5,27* lässt vermuten, dass es dieser Bruch der politischen Loyalität gewesen ist, auf den sich der Ausruf in 5,7„Die da umstürzen zu Wermut das Recht, / und die Gerechtigkeit haben sie zu Boden geworfen!“ ursprünglich bezog. In Am 5,23 – 24 ist Jahwes zornige Rede um einige Züge erweitert, und die Verwerfung des Opferkultes wird mit den Begriffen „Recht“ und „Gerechtigkeit“ verknüpft: Das hier angeredete Du, das wohl mit dem „Haus Israel“ (5,1) zu identifizieren ist, soll Jahwe fortan mit Liedern und kultischer Musik verschonen (V. 23). Weil dabei vom „Lärm“ der Lieder gesprochen wird, geht es offenbar um kultischen Gesang, der den Rechtsbruch übertönt; zugleich klingt in dem Wort „Lärm“ (hamôn) das Tosen der Wasserfluten an,⁸⁰ das in V. 24 in den Blick gerät: Jahwe befiehlt, dass Recht und Gerechtigkeit sich „wie Wasser und wie ein nie versiegender Bach heranwälzen“ sollen. Während nach Am 5,7 Recht und Gerechtigkeit zu Objekten der Zerstörung wurden („… und die Gerechtigkeit haben

 KTU 1.4 III 17– 21: „Nun, zwei Opfer haßt Baal, drei der Wolkenfahrer: Ein Opfer der Schande und ein Opfer der Niedertracht, und ein Opfer der Unzucht mit Mägden.“ (Übersetzung: Dietrich u. Loretz, „Mythen und Epen in ugaritischer Sprache“ [wie Anm. 42], 1156) Vgl. Eidevall, Amos (wie Anm. 10), 166 – 167.  S. dazu Anm. 55.  Vgl. Müller, „Der finstere Tag Jahwes“ (wie Anm. 53), 590.  Vgl. Jes 60,5; Jer 10,13; 51,16.42.

78

Reinhard Müller

sie zur Erde geworfen“), erscheinen sie hier als geradezu belebte Entitäten, die sich auf Jahwes Geheiß wieder machtvoll zur Geltung bringen. Die Vergleiche betonen, dass dieses Geschehen ambivalent ist: Das wassergleiche Sich-Heranwälzen gleicht einer Flut, die als göttliches Strafgericht hereinbricht. Der fortwährend fließende Bach aber – in Palästina eine Seltenheit – verweist auf den göttlich gespendeten Regen: Dank der winterlichen Regenfälle trocknen manche Wasserläufe auch in den heißen Sommermonaten nicht aus. Das Doppelbild der zerstörenden Flut und des lebenspendenden Baches deutet das unheilvolle Geschehen, von dem die älteren Sprüche reden, als reinigendes Gericht: Wenn der falsche Kult, der mit dem Bruch des Rechts einherging, beendet wird, kann die Gerechtigkeit von neuem dem Leben dienen.

Ergebnis: die überzeitliche Geltung des Rechts jenseits von Rechtsbruch und Chaos Die Parallele zwischen Am 5,7 und den Verträgen aus Sfīre lässt vermuten, dass der anklagende Ausruf über den Umsturz des Rechts und seine Verwandlung zu Wermut ursprünglich auf gebrochene politische Loyalitäten bezogen war. Dazu passt, dass das Unheilsorakel von 5,21– 22*.27*, das in einer frühen Gestalt des Buches kurz hinter 5,7 stand⁸¹, mit der Ankündigung einer Deportation endet (V. 27*) – was offenkundig auf die neuassyrische Praxis, abtrünnige Vasallen zu bestrafen, anspielt. Wenn Jahwe in 5,21 von seinem Hass auf die Opferfeste seiner Verehrer spricht, muss – wie die Parallele aus dem ugaritischen Baalzyklus na-

 Der Grundbestand von Kap. 5 dürfte in V. 1– 3.7.18.20b.21.22*.27* zu greifen sein. Ursprünglich selbständige Worte, die z.T. auf prophetische Logien zurückgehen, lassen sich in folgenden Texten vermuten: dem Orakel 5,3*, dem anklagenden Ausruf 5,7, dem Weheruf 5,18*.20b, vielleicht auch in dem ohne Einleitung überlieferten Orakel 5,21.22*.27* sowie in dem Klageruf 5,2 (der wohl am klarsten das bereits eingetretene Ende des Königreiches Israel widerspiegelt); sie wurden v. a. durch die Überschrift in 5,1 (sowie durch den Zusatz am Ende von 5,3 und das eingefügte zweite Kolon in 5,18) in einen redaktionell gestalteten Zusammenhang gebracht. Alles Weitere in Kap. 5, v. a. die Kultkritik in V. 4– 5(.6) und die sozialkritisch-ethischen und zugleich eschatologischen Perspektiven in V. 10 – 17, heben sich vom ältesten Gut ab und sind wahrscheinlich viel später entstanden (vgl. Christoph Levin, „Das Amosbuch der Anawim,“ in Fortschreibungen. Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, Hg. ders., Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 316 [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003], 265 – 290, hier 281– 284; Kratz, „Die Worte des Amos“ [wie Anm. 9], 329 – 334). In Kap. 6 wiederum gehören möglicherweise nur 6,12– 13 zum ältesten Bestand, da der Abschnitt 6,1– 11 an der Parallelisierung von Zion und Samaria in V. 1 hängt und damit schon das Ende des judäischen Reiches voraussetzen dürfte; wie 5,7 könnte auch der politische Ausruf von 6,13 auf ein ursprüngliches Logion zurückgehen.

Das umgestürzte Recht (Amos 5,7)

79

helegt – ein schlimmer Frevel im Hintergrund stehen: Der Grund für Jahwes Hass war wahrscheinlich nichts anderes als der Umsturz der rechtlichen Ordnung, von dem 5,7 spricht. In einer Variation des Anklagerufs von 5,7 wird in 6,12 gesagt, dass das Recht zu Gift und Wermut verwandelt wurde; im näheren Kontext bezieht sich das auf die Hybris der militärischen Anführer Israels, die sich in fälschlicher Sicherheit ihrer Stärke rühmten (6,13). Gleichzeitig legt sich ein Zusammenhang mit den Worten in Kapitel 5 nahe: Weil die militärischen Anführer sich wegen zurückliegender Siege ihrer Stärke so sicher waren, haben sie das Recht gestürzt, indem sie die Loyalität, zu der sie sich gegenüber den Assyrern verpflichtet hatten, brachen. All diese Texte hatten vermutlich die politische Führungsschicht des Königreiches Israel im Blick. In den Ankündigungen eines Unheils von kosmischen Dimensionen, die in den ältesten Texten des Amosbuches enthalten sind, spiegelt sich die Erwartung einer unabwendbaren politischen Katastrophe.⁸² Es liegt auf der Hand, dass das auf die drohenden, teils vielleicht auch schon eingetretenen Vergeltungsaktionen der Assyrer bezogen war. Im heutigen Amosbuch haben sich die Begriffe „Recht“ und „Gerechtigkeit“ dagegen aus der politischen Sphäre gelöst. Der anklagende Ausruf „Die da umstürzen zu Wermut das Recht …!“ hat einen zeitlosen Charakter gewonnen. Vielleicht am deutlichsten ist das in der Mahnung von Am 5,15, die von einer viel späteren Hand hinzugefügt wurde; sie zeigt, dass sich die einst politische Prophetie zu einem allezeit gültigen Ethos gewandelt hat:

 Vgl. Levin, „Amos und Jerobeam I.“ (wie Anm. 25), 263 – 264; Müller, „Der finstere Tag Jahwes“ (wie Anm. 53), 591. Da Amos in der Buchüberschrift (Am 1,1*) als Judäer eingeführt wird, legt es sich – wie Levin, ebd., andeutet – nahe, dass die älteste Amosüberlieferung in der Perspektive des Königreiches Juda auf das Königreich Israel blickt; der historische Amos und das älteste Amosbuch wären nicht als Unheilsprophetie sondern judäische Heilsprophetie zu verstehen (vgl. Levin, Das Alte Testament [wie Anm. 27], 44– 45; Uwe Becker, „Die Wiederentdeckung des Prophetenbuches. Tendenzen und Aufgaben der gegenwärtigen Prophetenforschung,“ Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 21 (2004): 30 – 60, hier 51– 54; Kratz, „Die Worte des Amos“ [wie Anm. 9], 334). Die hier vorgetragene Erklärung von Am 5,7 und 6,12– 13 als politische Gerichtsprophetie lässt sich mit dieser Deutung verbinden: Die Sprüche sind nicht auf das Gottesvolk, sondern eine politische Führungsschicht bezogen. Sie geben zudem nicht zu erkennen, dass der Sprecher (bzw. diejenigen, die die Sprüche schriftlich festhielten) sich als Teil des Reiches Israel verstand; die Annahme, dass hier von außen auf Israel geblickt wird, passt zu Form und Pragmatik dieser Worte. Eine solche gegen Israel gerichtete Gerichtsprophetie – die zugleich judäische Heilsprophetie war, könnte aufgekommen sein, weil das Königreich Israel dem benachbarten Juda im „syrisch-efraimitischen Krieg“ (734) zuletzt feindlich begegnet war, und weil Juda anders als Israel eine proassyrische Politik verfolgte.

80

Reinhard Müller

Hasst das Böse und liebt das Gute, und richtet auf im Tor das Recht! Vielleicht wird Jahwe, der Gott der Heerscharen, sich des Rests Josefs erbarmen.

In der Rede vom Rest Josefs klingt an, dass die politische Katastrophe längst in der Vergangenheit liegt. Zugleich wird voraussetzt, dass es völlig evident ist, was im Torgericht – und wohl auch darüber hinaus – als gut und was als böse zu gelten hat. Verglichen damit, wie die Sfīre-Verträge von Gut und Böse sprachen – nämlich bezogen auf eine konkrete Form politischen Wohlverhaltens, liegt dieser Appell auf einer ganz anderen Ebene. Die alte Überzeugung, dass infolge des „umgestürzten“ Rechts die Welt ins Chaos stürzt, wird somit auch von der überlieferten Gestalt des Amosbuches zur Geltung gebracht: Wird das Recht „zu Wermut verwandelt“, zeitigt das eine lebensvernichtende Katastrophe. Für diejenigen aber, die sich dieser Gefahr bewusst sind, ist es – so der Anspruch des Buches – fraglos klar, worin „das Gute“ besteht: nämlich darin, das Recht jenseits von politischer Instrumentalisierung „aufzurichten“ und zu bewahren.

Beate Kellner

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring und Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung

1 Chaos und komische Literatur: Chaos als Resultat des Zusammenbruchs von Ordnung Während der höfische Roman im Mittelalter häufig Spannungen zwischen individuellen Interessen und gesellschaftlichen Ansprüchen verhandelt und dabei tendenziell auf die Überwindung von Krisen und Unordnung zielt, zeigen Genres der komischen Literatur im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit zumeist, warum und wie es zur Störung von sozialer Ordnung kommt. So wird in einer Fülle von maeren und Schwänken deutlich, wie leicht Freundschaft, Ehe und Familie, Dorfund Stadtgesellschaft, aber auch die höfische Welt durch triebhaftes Verhalten, Egoismus und Habgier zu erschüttern sind. Nicht selten wird dargestellt, wie sich bereits aus geringfügigen Anlässen eine Kette von Ereignissen mit einer Eskalation der Gewalt ergibt, die bis zum Zusammenbruch der Ordnung und zum Chaos führen kann. Wenn sich, zum Beispiel in Konrads von Würzburg Schwankmaere Heinrich von Kempten, eine ernste Bedrohung für den Kaiser und das Reich aus dem lächerlichen faux pas eines Kindes beim Festmahl am Ostersonntagmorgen entwickeln kann, wird mit den Mitteln der Komik dargelegt, wie labil die höfische Ordnung selbst im Zentrum des Reiches sein kann.¹ Dass gerade Fest und Mahl, die in besonderem Maße die Harmonie der Großen des Reiches bei Hof zur Schau stellen sollen, in die Katastrophe ausarten, macht die Störanfälligkeit dieser Rituale nachgerade offenkundig.²  Vgl. Edward Schröder, Hg., Kleinere Dichtungen Konrads von Würzburg, Bd. 1, mit einem Nachwort v. Ludwig Wolff (Dublin und Zürich: Weidmann, 101970). Vgl. dazu u. a. Beate Kellner, „Zur Kodierung von Gewalt in der mittelalterlichen Literatur am Beispiel von Konrads von Würzburg Heinrich von Kempten,“ in Wahrnehmen und Handeln. Perspektiven einer Literaturanthropologie, Friedmar Apel, Wolfgang Braungart und Klaus Ridder, Hg., Bielefelder Schriften zur Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft 20 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2004), 75 – 103.  Belege etwa bei Gerd Althoff, „Der frieden-, bündnis- und gemeinschaftstiftende Charakter des Mahles im frühen Mittelalter,“ in Essen und Trinken in Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Vorträge eines inhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-007

82

Beate Kellner

Komische Literatur bietet sich dazu an, nicht nur Modelle von Konsoziation durchzuspielen, sondern auch den Zusammenbruch von Ordnung und den Absturz ins Chaos zu veranschaulichen. Enorm sind das Ausmaß der Gewalt und die Formen der Brutalität, welche die Erzähler in diesen Texten präsentieren, kommentieren und worüber sie auch ihre Figuren lachen lassen. Hörern und Lesern sollen die Geschichten zur Unterhaltung dienen, doch da man die Umstände der Rezeption in den meisten Fällen nicht kennt, weiß man nicht, inwieweit diese kurzewîle sie tatsächlich zum Lachen gereizt hat. Das Verhältnis von Gewalt und Komik ist ohnehin prekär, das provozierte Lachen ist kein heiteres Gelächter, sondern eher ein Verlachen in Form von Spott und Hohn. Die Darstellung menschlicher Fehler und Laster sowie Absturz der Ordnung in Unordnung werden daher in komischen Texten des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit in aller Regel gerahmt durch Pro- und Epiloge, durch Kommentare, Drohungen und Warnungen, die deutlich machen sollen, dass es um abschreckende Beispiele zu verurteilender Verhaltensmuster und gesellschaftlicher Unordnung geht, die ex negativo auf das Richtige verweisen. Das Lachen und Verlachen wird auf diese Weise gerechtfertigt, handelt es sich doch um Didaxe, die am Beispiel des Falschen und Törichten das Richtige nur umso deutlicher betonen will. Aber so einfach ist es nicht: Komik in Form von Satire und Parodie eröffnet Lizenzen zum Reden über das, was eigentlich ausgeschlossen sein soll, und bietet diskursive Ermöglichungsstrategien für das Sprechen über das Unflätige, Triebhafte, Wilde, Natürliche vor und jenseits der Ordnung. Blickt man auf das Verhältnis von narratio und paratextueller Rahmung, von Warnungen, Fingerzeigen, Kommentaren und narrativer Proliferation dessen, wovor gewarnt werden soll, so ist zu fragen, ob die Texte nicht weit mehr Raum bieten, um den Imaginationen und Gelüsten der Rezipienten freien Lauf zu lassen, als für deren Erbauung und Didaxe zu sorgen. Die Texte erzeugen literarische Überschüsse, welche, einmal produziert, schwer wieder einzuhegen sind und das Potential haben, die Didaxe zu sprengen.

terdisziplinären Symposions vom 10.–13. Juni 1987 an der Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Irmgard Bitsch, Trude Ehlert und Xenja v. Ertzdorff, Hg. (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 21990 [1987]), 13 – 25, hier 22– 24; ders., Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue. Zum politischen Stellenwert der Gruppenbindungen im früheren Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990), 207– 208. Zum Phänomen der scheiternden Repräsentation vgl. etwa Rüdiger Brandt, „das ain groß gelächter ward. Wenn Repräsentation scheitert. Mit einem Exkurs zum Stellenwert literarischer Repräsentation,“ in Höfische Repräsentation. Das Zeremoniell und die Zeichen, Hedda Ragotzky und Horst Wenzel, Hg. (Tübingen: Niemayer, 1990), 303 – 331.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

83

2 Die Verkehrung höfischer Muster und der Sturz ins Chaos in Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring Dies gilt in besonderem Maße für Heinrich Wittenwilers um 1400 entstandenen Roman Der Ring, der in einer einzigen Handschrift (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Cgm 9300) auf uns gekommen ist.³ Obgleich die mediävistische Forschung große Mühe darauf verwendet hat, dieses „Haupt- und Schlüsselwerk des Spätmittelalters“⁴ zu dechiffrieren,⁵ gibt es uns bis heute viele Rätsel auf. Als schwierig erweist sich nicht nur die Zuordnung des Textes zu einer Gattung der spämittelalterlich deutschen Literatur, sondern besonders auch der Versuch, die Perspektive der Erzählung und die Position des Autors zu erschließen. Dementsprechend gibt es ein weites Spektrum von Deutungsangeboten zum Ring. So hat man den Text in jüngerer Zeit auf der einen Seite in einer allegorischen Gesamtdeutung als eine Darstellung des Abfalls von Gott in geistliche Hurerei festzulegen versucht,⁶ während ihm auf der anderen Seite unter dem Schlagwort Irrsinn und Kolportage jede Ernsthaftigkeit abgesprochen wurde.⁷ Die Integration von Wissen

 Vgl. die Ausgaben: Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring, nach der Meininger Handschrift, Edmund Wießner, Hg. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964, ND der Ausg. Leipzig 1931); Heinrich Wittenwiler, Der Ring. Frühneuhochdeutsch/Neuhochdeutsch, nach dem Text von Edmund Wießner ins Neuhochdeutsche, Horst Brunner, Übers. und Hg., Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 8749 (Stuttgart: Reclam 42007 [1991]); Heinrich Wittenwiler, Der Ring. Text – Übersetzung – Kommentar, nach der Münchener Handschrift, erläutert von Werner Röcke, Hg. und Übers. Mit einem Abdruck des Textes von Edmund Wießner (Berlin und Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter, 2012).  Vgl. Max Wehrli, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im Mittelalter. Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts, Dorothea Klein, Hg. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 31997 [1980]), 724.  Berichte zur älteren Forschung bietet Ortrun Riha, Die Forschung zu Heinrich Wittenwilers Der Ring 1851 – 1988, Würzburger Beiträge zur deutschen Philologie 4 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990); dies., „Die Forschung zu Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring 1988 – 1998 (Mit einer Bibliographie),“ in Vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. FS für Horst Brunner, Dorothea Klein, Elisabeth Lienert und Johannes Rettelbach, Hg. (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 423 – 430. Vgl. an neueren Arbeiten besonders Eckart Conrad Lutz, Spiritualis fornicatio. Heinrich Wittenwiler, seine Welt und sein Ring, Konstanzer Geschichts- und Rechtsquellen. Neue Folge der Konstanzer Stadtrechtsquellen 32 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke 1990); Hans-Jürgen Bachorski, Irrsinn und Kolportage. Studien zum Ring, zum Lalebuch und zur Geschichtklitterung, Literatur – Imagination – Realität 39 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2006 [postum erschienen]), 74– 258; Tobias Bulang, Enzyklopädische Dichtungen. Fallstudien zu Wissen und Literatur in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, Deutsche Literatur. Studien und Quellen 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 189 – 336, mit der jeweils verzeichneten Forschungsliteratur. Vgl. dazu besonders auch die Bibliographie in der Ausgabe von Röcke 2012 (wie Anm. 3), 501– 516.  Vgl. Lutz 1990 (wie Anm. 5).  Vgl. Bachorski 2006 (wie Anm. 5), 74– 258.

84

Beate Kellner

und Lehre, die geradezu enzyklopädische Dimensionen annimmt, und das Verhältnis von Komik, Unterhaltung und Didaxe verdienen demgegenüber einen genaueren Blick und gehen nicht in einer einsinnigen Betrachtung auf.⁸

2.1 Prolog Auf der Prologseite der Münchener Handschrift findet sich in der D-Initiale (fol. 1v, Abb.), deren Gestalt selbst schon derjenigen eines Ringes ähnelt, die Abbildung eines Mannes, der einen Ring mit einem eingefassten Edelstein hält. Darunter ist ein Wappen mit einem steigenden Ziegenbock gemalt. Die in grüner Farbe ausgeführte Bekleidung und Kopfbedeckung des Mannes verweisen auf einen Scholaren, in dem man den Erzähler gesehen hat, der sich am Ende des Prologs als Hainreich Wittenweilär (V. 52) zu erkennen gibt. Insofern ist der Titelbegriff des Ringes in Schrift und Bild dem Erzähler und Autor zugeordnet. Dass verschiedene Herangehensweisen an den Text möglich sind, wird überdies bereits im Prolog erörtert: Nachdem der Erzähler sein Buch, dem er den Namen Der Ring gibt (V. 8), in den Dienst und Ruhm der höchsten Dreifaltigkeit, der Jungfrau Maria und der himmlischen Heere gestellt und auf diese Weise Transzendenzbezüge unterstrichen hat (V. 1– 4), teilt er sein Publikum in gute und böse Menschen ein und erläutert, dass es zur Freude dieser und zum Leid jener gedacht sei (V. 5 – 8). Das Bild des Fingerrings, der mit einem Edelstein besetzt ist (V. 9), ruft die Vorstellung von Kostbarkeit hervor, und dementsprechend äußert der Sprecher: Chain vingerli ward nie so guot | Sam ditz, gehabt in rechter huot (V. 13 f.),⁹ was so viel heißt wie, es habe nie einen vortrefflicheren Ring gegeben als diesen, auf den man dementsprechend achten solle. Der Titel Ring verweist zugleich auf den gesamten Erdkreis (orbis terrarum) und den Lauf der Welt (cursus mundi): Wan es ze ring umb uns beschait | Der welte lauff und lert auch wol, | Was man tuon und lassen schol (V. 10 – 12). Damit wird zum einen der Anspruch auf Universalität erhoben, wie er einer enzyklopädischen Dichtung zukommt, ruft man sich in Erinnerung, dass sich Enzyklopädie vom griechischen Begriff κύκλος für Ring und Kreis ableitet.¹⁰ Zum anderen haftet den Ausführungen etwas Negatives an, denn mit dem Lauf der Welt wird in der spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Literatur oft das

 Vgl. Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 189 – 336.  Textzitate nach Röcke 2012 (wie Anm. 3).  Vgl. Edmund Wießner, Kommentar zu Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring, Deutsche Literatur. Reihe Realistik des Spätmittelalters, Kommentar zu Bd. 3 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1936), 8; Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 279, mit Quellenangaben.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

85

Abb. 1: Heinrich Wittenwiler, Der Ring, Prologseite, aus: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.

86

Beate Kellner

närrische und sündhafte Treiben der Menschen bezeichnet.¹¹ Zu dieser Vorstellung passt die didaktische Funktion, die ebenfalls im Zusammenhang mit dem Namen des Buches formuliert wird (V. 10 – 12). In diesem Sinne möchte der erste Teil Hoflehre, der zweite Tugendlehre mit Haussorge und der dritte Teil Lehren für Not- und Kriegszeiten bieten (V. 10 – 28): In dreu schol ez getailet sein Besunder nach den sinnen mein. Daz erste lert hofieren Mit stechen und turnieren, Mit sagen und mit singen Und auch mit andern dingen. Daz ander kan uns sagen wol, Wie ein man sich halten schol An sel und leib und gen der welt: Daz hab dïr für das best gezelt. Daz dritte tail dïr chündet gar, Wie man allerpest gevar Ze nöten, chrieges zeiten In stürmen, vechten, streiten. Also leit des ringes frucht An hübschichait und mannes zucht, An tugent und an frümchät (V. 15 – 31). [Das Buch soll meiner Intention nach in drei Teile geteilt sein. Der erste lehrt höfisches Benehmen mit Stechen und Turnieren, mit Rede und Singen und auch mit anderem. Der zweite Teil macht deutlich, wie ein Mann sich im Hinblick auf Leib und Seele und gegenüber der Welt verhalten soll. Das halte für das Wichtigste! Der dritte Teil gibt vollständig Auskunft darüber, wie man in Notlagen und Kriegszeiten, beim Stürmen, Fechten und Kämpfen am Besten fährt. So liegt der Nutzen des Rings in der Vermittlung von Höfischheit, Erziehung des Mannes, Vortrefflichkeit und Tüchtigkeit.]¹²

Dass es sich beim Ring um Lehrdichtung handelt, unterstreicht wiederum gerade auch der Name des Buches. Schon die Tatsache, dass der Text überhaupt einen Titel hat, stellt ihn in das Umfeld gelehrter lateinischer Literatur, zudem tauchen Begriffe wie Edelstein (gemma) und Schatz (thesaurus) recht häufig im Titel von lateinischen und deutschen Kompendien mit enzyklopädisch lehrhaftem Zu-

 Vgl. etwa Sebastian Brandt, Das Narrenschiff, Manfred Lemmer, Hg., Neudrucke deutscher Literaturwerke N. F. 5 (Berlin und New York: De Gruyter, 42010, ND der Ausg. Tübingen 2004), 4. Vgl. dazu Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 277– 278, mit Belegen.  Übersetzungen BK, angelehnt an Brunner 2007 (wie Anm. 3).

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

87

schnitt auf.¹³ Im Blick auf die Erzählung selbst lässt sich ebenfalls ein paradigmatischer Zusammenhang erkennen zwischen dem Ring als Namen des Buches und dem schäbigen, mit Fischaugen statt Perlen verzierten Ehering, den der Protagonist seiner Braut übergibt (V. 5278 – 5287). Die Ebenen von discours und narration werden also auch über die Vorstellung des Ringes zusammengehalten. Es zeigt sich nachgerade, dass im Sinnbild des Ringes mehrere Dimensionen miteinander verbunden sind. Folgerichtig belässt es der Prolog auch nicht bei der Formulierung von Didaxe, der Sprecher betont vielmehr, dass der Mensch aufgrund seiner Kleinmütigkeit nicht in der Lage sei, ständig von ernsten Dingen zu hören, vielmehr wolle er auch durch Scherz unterhalten sein (V. 32– 35), weswegen er das Geschrei der Bauern unter die Belehrung gemischt habe, damit sie die Rezipienten umso leichter zur Umkehr führe: Dar umb hab ich der gpauren geschrai | Gemischet unter diseu ler, | Daz sei dest senfter uns becher (V. 36 – 38). Zu beachten ist hier, dass der Erzähler den Begriff „Bauer“ nicht im soziologischen Sinne versteht und damit jemanden meint, der sich von bäuerlicher Arbeit redlich ernährt (V. 45 – 48), sondern einen, der unrecht lept und läppisch tuot (V. 44). Bauer in diesem Sinne ist gleichzusetzen mit Narr und Tölpel, die bäuerliche Welt erscheint also nicht nur als Gegenbild zu höfischer Vorbildlichkeit, sondern allgemeiner als Gegenentwurf zu Maß und Moral, Bildung und Kultiviertheit. Insgesamt hat man in Wittenwilers Aussagen (V. 36 – 38) in der Forschung in aller Regel eine Rezeption des Horazischen aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae | aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae („Entweder die Dichter wollen nützen, oder sie wollen erfreuen, oder aber sie wollen das sagen, was für das Leben zugleich angenehm und nützlich ist.“) gesehen,¹⁴ doch so einfach stellt sich die Gleichung nicht dar. Dies zeigt schon die Auszeichnung der Handschrift mit roten und grünen Linien, welche die beiden Bereiche nach der Anweisung des Prologs auseinanderhalten soll: Die rot die ist dem ernst gemain, | Die grüen ertzaigt uns törpelleben. (V. 40 f.). Dass die Linienführung gerade nicht im beschriebenen Sinne aufgeht, hat die Forschung einerseits verstört und andererseits immer wieder zu halsbrecherischen Zurechtrückungen und Reinterpretationen der Zuordnung von Scherz und Ernst geführt.¹⁵ Allerdings geben sowohl der Text des Prologs wie auch die

 Vgl. Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 279 – 287, mit Quellenbelegen und Hinweisen auf weitere Forschungsliteratur.  Horaz, Ars poetica, V. 333 – 334., vgl. Horace, Epistle, Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (Ars poetica), Niall Rudd, Hg., Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (Cambridge u. a.: Cambridge University Press, 1989).  Beispiele bei Bachorski 2006 (wie Anm. 5), 95 – 100, 246– 252. Lutz 1990 (wie Anm. 5), 427– 429, kommt bei seiner Untersuchung von Gebrauchsspuren, Merkzeichen, nota-Kürzeln, Para-

88

Beate Kellner

Gestaltung der Prologseite Hinweise darauf, dass die Dichotomie von Scherz und Ernst, rot und grün, vielleicht nicht ganz ernst gemeint sein könnte. Auf der Prologseite wird die Figur, die den Ring in der Initiale hält und die auf gleicher Höhe wie die Anweisung zur Differenzierung der Linien in der zweiten Spalte zu finden ist, gerade mit grüner Farbe bemalt, wodurch suggeriert wird, dass sie nicht ernst zu nehmen sei. Zugleich wird die Unterscheidung in Unterhaltung und Didaxe im Text von einer dritten Kategorie überlagert, wenn der Sprecher sagt, wer das Buch als etwas ansieht, was weder Nutzen noch Unterhaltung (V. 50) biete, könne es einfach als ein mär (V. 51) nehmen. Zumeist hat man mär im pejorativen Sinne als „erfundene, erlogene Geschichte“ verstanden,¹⁶ demgegenüber möchte ich andere Varianten ins Spiel bringen. Zum einen kann man an die Gattung maere und besonders das schwankhafte maere denken, zum anderen bezeichnet maere häufig die der Erzählung zugrunde liegende materia, den Stoff, der vom Erzähler zu bearbeiten ist sowie die erzählte Geschichte selbst ohne pejorativen Beigeschmack. Die Wendung wäre dann in dem Sinne zu verstehen, „dann nehmt das Buch doch einfach als eine literarische Erzählung, einen guten Schwank“, also als Gattungshinweis einerseits und Fiktionalitätssignal andererseits. Damit wird der didaktische Anspruch zwar einerseits im Prolog erhoben, aber andererseits auch wieder relativiert, was sehr gut zu der nicht konsequent durchgeführten Scheidung der ernsten Passagen und des törpellebens durch die Farblinien rot und grün passt, geht man nicht davon aus, die Lösung des Problems liege schlicht darin, dass der Schreiber farbenblind war. Hierzu ist auch zu bemerken, dass die Didaxe in der narratio bei der ausufernden Darstellung des törpellebens immer wieder in den Hintergrund tritt und sich zu verflüchtigen scheint. Die Schwankhandlungen entfalten eine Proliferation und produzieren narrative Überschüsse, die nicht mehr durch den didaktischen Anspruch einzuhegen sind. Der Text entzieht sich daher einerseits der einfachen Dichotomie, nach der die Darstellung des törpellebens gegenbildlich auf das Richtige wiese, das noch zusätzlich positiv durch Lehren untermauert werde. Zugleich verselbständigen sich andererseits die Lehren (Minnelehren, religiöse Lehren, Gesundheitslehren, Haushaltslehren, Kriegslehren), denn auch sie schießen über den Handlungsrahmen hinaus und laufen in der narratio ins Leere, zumal sie von den Protagonisten zumeist nicht befolgt werden. Die Lehren wirken daher oft dysfunktional zum Handlungsverlauf. Zum Dritten sind die Lehren in

graphenzeichen und Marginalien zu dem Schluss, dass diese sich zum einen auf lehrhafte Partien beziehen und zum anderen Schreibung, Lautung und gelegentlich Wortwahl bearbeiten.  Vgl. den Kommentar von Röcke 2012 (wie Anm. 3), 442– 443.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

89

sich nicht selten zweifelhaft und werden moralisch höchst fragwürdigen Personen in den Mund gelegt, die sie häufig zu hinterhältigen Zwecken einsetzen.¹⁷ Der Text bietet einerseits in ausuferndem, mitunter weit über das für die Handlung erforderliche Maß hinaus Lehre, doch er zeigt andererseits auch, wie diese im Milieu der Bauern oft bloß missbraucht wird und warum es nicht zu einer tatsächlichen Belehrung der offensichtlich unbelehrbaren törper kommt. Insofern scheint das in der Forschung geläufige Verständnis des Textes als Didaxe revisionsbedürftig, denn er lässt sich eher als Kommentar und Parodie auf Didaxe begreifen.¹⁸ Ebenso übersteigt der Text den gattungsgeschichtlichen Rahmen von maere und Schwank, und dennoch knüpft er daran an und ist aus einer Reihe von Schwänken aufgebaut,¹⁹ so dass sich seine Gattung am ehesten als Schwankroman verstehen ließe. Zugrunde liegt denn auch ein Hochzeitsschwank, von dem es zwei verschiedene Fassungen gibt, Von Metzen hochzit und Meier Betz. ²⁰

2.2 narratio Der Ort des Geschehens ist die Bauernwelt des Dorfes Lappenhausen im Grausental: Jn dem tal ze Grausen Ein dorff, hiess Lappenhausen, Was gelegen wunnechleich, An holtz und wasser überreich, Dar inn vil esler pauren Sassen ane trauren […]. (V. 55 – 60). [Im Grausental gab es ein Dorf namens Lappenhausen ganz wunderbar gelegen. Es war besonders reich an Holz und Wasser. Darin lebten in Freude viele ‚adlige‘ Bauernesel.]

Die Rede von den esler pauren beruht auf dem in spätmittelalterlichen Texten verbreiteten Wortspiel von Adel, edel und Esel: Die Bauern sind eben nicht edel, sondern Esel, auch wenn sie höfische Verhaltensweisen und Titel für sich in

 Vgl. dazu detailliert Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 189 – 218, 235 – 305.  Auf der anderen Seite schließt dies eine didaktische Rezeptionshaltung, die auch dokumentiert ist, nicht aus. Zur Glossierung der ernsten Textstellen der Handschrift mit Merkzeichen vgl. Lutz 1990 (wie Anm. 5), 427– 429.  Vgl. Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 189 – 218.  Vgl. die Fassungen des Bauernhochzeitsschwanks nach der Ausgabe von Brunner 2007 (wie Anm. 3), 586 – 645.

90

Beate Kellner

Anspruch nehmen.²¹ Erzählt wird die Geschichte der Verheiratung des Lappenhausener Bauernburschen Bertschi Triefnas mit dem Bauernmädchen Mätzli Rüerenzumph (Schwanzgrapscherin), das eingangs der Erzählung nach dem Muster höfischer Schönheitsbeschreibungen de capite ad calcem als Ausbund von Hässlichkeit vorgestellt wird: Sei was von adel lam und krumpf, Ir zen, ïr händel sam ein brand, Ir mündel rot sam mersand. Sam ein mäuszagel was ir zoph. An ir chelen hieng ein chroph, Der ir für den bauch gie. Lieben gsellen, höret, wie Ir der rugg was überschossen: Man hiet ein gloggen drüber gossen! Die füessli warend dik und brait, Also daz ir chain wind laid Getuon mocht mit vellen, Wolt sei sich widerstellen, Ir wängel rosenlecht sam äschen, Ir prüstel chlein sam smirtäschen. Die augen lauchten sam der nebel, Der atem smacht iͤr sam der swebel. So stuond iͤr daz gwändel gstrichen, Sam ir die sele wär enwichen. Sei chond also schon geparen, Sam sei wär von drien jaren. (V. 76 – 96) [Sie war vor lauter Adel lahm und krumm. Ihre Zähne und Händchen waren schwarz wie verbrannt, ihr Mündlein war so rot wie der Sand am Meer. Ihr Zopf war wie ein Mäuseschwanz. An ihrer Kehle hing ein Kropf, der bis zum Bauch hinunterreichte. Liebe Freunde, hört nun, was für einen Buckel sie am Rücken hatte: Man hätte eine Glocke darüber gießen können! Die Füßchen waren dick und breit, so dass kein Wind sie umstoßen und ihr damit Leid zufügen konnte, wenn sie sich nur dagegen stemmen wollte. Ihre Wänglein waren so rosenfarben wie Asche und ihre Brüstlein so zierlich wie Fettsäcke. Ihre Augen leuchteten wie der Nebel und ihr Atem duftete wie Schwefel. Ihr Kleidchen schlotterte an ihr, als sei ihr die Seele entwichen. Sie benahm sich so vollendet, als ob sie drei Jahre alt wäre.]

Wie inkonsequent die Verteilung der roten und grünen Farblinien als Kommentierung des Textes ist, zeigt sich gerade an Passagen wie dieser. Der Schönheitspreis ist nämlich rot markiert und soll danach gerade nicht das törpelleben (wie in

 So lässt sich etwa Bertschi von jedermann als junkherr (V. 68) anreden, beim Hochzeitsmahl gibt es einen Graf Purkhart (V. 5745) unter den Gästen, Mätzli stilisiert sich beim Mahl als höfische Dame (z. B. V. 6125 – 6128), und von anderen Gästen heißt es: Seu assen hofeleichen gar (V. 6079).

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

91

V. 41 angekündigt), sondern Ernstleich sach (V. 34) und damit Lehre anzeigen.²² Wie auch immer sich dies verhalten mag: Der vermeintliche Junkherr Bertschi verliebt sich unsterblich in diese „Schönheit“, so dass er um ihretwillen sterben will (zerserten im Sinne von ‚verrecken‘, V. 102). Seine sexuelle Gier zeigt sich bereits im Griff nach Mätzlis Geschlechtsteil auf der ersten Seite der Handschrift im Bild des Paares, das der Autorinitiale diagonal gegenübersteht. Nach einigen Verwicklungen und langen Beratungen beider Familien über die Frage, ob Bertschi Mätzli heiraten soll oder nicht, gibt man sie ihm schließlich zur Ehe (V. 5203 – 5276). In unserem Zusammenhang interessiert besonders der Ablauf der Hochzeitsfeier des Paares. Zur Hochzeit versammelt sich eine große Menge von mächtig lärmenden Nachbarn aus den umliegenden Dörfern Nissingen, Säurensdorf und Rotzingen (V. 5305 – 5311). Geschrei (V. 5310), nicht gepflegte Konversation, kennzeichnet die Gäste von Anfang an, was mit dem Hinweis im Prolog zu verbinden ist, der Erzähler habe der gpauren gschrai (V. 36) unter die Lehre gemischt. Die sprechenden Namen der Bauern verraten ihre Interessen nur zu gut. So deutet sich die Rauflust der Männer etwa in Namen wie Gerwig Schinddennak (V. 5317), Wüetreich (V. 6696) oder Siertdasland („Schänd das Land“, V. 3628) an. Bosheit, Sündhaftigkeit und die Verbindung mit Hölle und Teufel sprechen sich besonders in den Namen von Jäckel Reuschindhell („Rausche in die Hölle“, V. 5340), Teufelsgaden („Wohnstatt für den Teufel“, V. 5333) oder Frau Laichdenman („Frau Mannsbetrug“, V. 5505) und Lastersak (V. 5723) aus. Die leichte sexuelle Erregbarkeit und Gier der Frauen klingt in Namen wie Chützeldarm die gail („die ausgelassene Kitzeldarm“, V. 5326) oder Gredul Ungemäss („die maßlose Gretel“, V. 5327) oder in Ändel Pfefferräss („die pfefferscharfe Anne“,V. 5328) und Lena Vallinsstroh („Lena fall ins Stroh“,V. 5336) an. Die Mensch-Tiergrenze wird in Namen wie Ochsenchroph (V. 5479), Storchenpain (V. 5321), Farindkuo („Fahre in die Kuh“, V. 5573, Hinweis auf Sodomie) überschritten. Auf Urin und Kot weisen zum Beispiel Harnstain (V. 5321), Elsbet Follipruoch („Hosenvoll“ V. 5511) oder Scheissindpluomen (V. 2731). Die ungeheure Fress- und Sauflust zeigt sich besonders in den Namen Gumpost („Eingemachtes“, „Sauerkraut“, V. 6161), Trinkavil (V. 5849), Füllenmagen (Entweder verschliffen aus „Füll den Magen“ oder „Magenfüller“, V. 3705) oder Hafenschleken („einer, der den Topf ausschleckt“, V. 2635) und Schlinddenspek („Speckfresser“ V. 2636). Auf körperliche Defekte weisen etwa die Namen Schilawingg („der ein wenig schielt“, V. 6695) oder Graff Purkart mit dem überpän („Höcker“, V. 6035).

 Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 318 – 319, erläutert umfassend, dass sich die Beschreibung Mätzlis nicht als ernstgemeinte Didaxe auffassen lässt.

92

Beate Kellner

Die Gaben der Gäste stehen teils im Zusammenhang mit bäuerlicher und vor allem weiblicher Arbeit wie Nadeln, Spindelring, Spindeln (V. 5506 – 5507), Besenstiel, Kochtopf, Essigkrug, Korb und Sieb (V. 5520 – 5523), teils belasten sie das junge Paar eher als dass sie ihm helfen, wie zum Beispiel die Jungtiere, die noch aufgezogen werden müssen, ein Kitz (V. 5484) oder ein neugeborenes Kalb (V. 5488). Teilweise handelt es sich um bizarre Geschenke wie eine kranke Ente (V. 5492– 5494) oder einen Deckel zu einem Salzfass, das nicht existiert (V. 5524– 5525), oder kaputte, abgetragene Kleidungsstücke wie verschimmelte Handschuhe (V. 5517 f.) und einen alten Hut (V. 5526 – 5528). Der Erzähler lässt im Übrigen keinen Zweifel daran, dass die Gäste selbst solche Gaben höchst ungern verschenken, so tut zum Beispiel der Besitzer der kranken Ente kund, dass er sie am liebsten selbst gefressen hätte (V. 5493 f.). Straub beglückt oder besser beleidigt den Bräutigam gar mit Aphrodisiaka (V. 5501).²³ Statt Wohlwollen zeigen die Gäste also üble Gesinnung, Geiz und Schadenfreude beim Verschenken des Wertund Nutzlosen. In diesem Zeichen beginnt das Hochzeitsmahl (V. 5541– 6186), für das der Bräutigam schon tags zuvor einen Esel statt einer Kuh geschlachtet hat (V. 5372– 5375). Man hat die Textpartie, die durch die rote Linie der Handschrift am Rand des Textes als ernst und lehrhaft ausgewiesen wird, in der Forschung zumeist als Gegenbild zu Tischzuchten gedeutet, das wie in der späteren grobianischen Literatur des 16. Jahrhunderts²⁴ ex negativo auf das Richtige weise. Damit hat man sie genau in dem Sinne verstanden wie es das Titelblatt von Caspar Scheidts Grobianus angibt: Liß wol diß buchlin offt und vil | Vnd tu allzeit das widerspil. ²⁵ Doch sprengt die vielschichtige Darstellung des Hochzeitsmahles im Ring, welche die Perspektive mehrfach wechselt, den didaktischen Rahmen und gewinnt ein Eigengewicht jenseits von Lehrhaftigkeit.²⁶ Dies gilt zumal, da es unklar ist, ob Idealvorstellungen höfischen Benehmens im bäurischen Milieu überhaupt gelten sollen und welcher Standard an Regeln des Benehmens angelegt wird. Zugleich changiert der Bauernbegriff und man muss sich fragen, ob es überhaupt um Bauerntölpel geht oder ob die Figuren des Rings nicht eher für jeden Menschen

 Vgl. Röcke 2012 (wie Anm. 3), Kommentar, 467– 468.  Vgl. Friedrich Dedekind, Grobianus. Von groben sitten vnd vnhöflichen geberden. Erstmals in Latein beschriben, durch den wolgelerten Fridericum Dedekindum, vnd jetzund verteutschet durch Casparum Scheidt von Wormbs (Worms: Gregor Hoffman, 1551); siehe dazu Hans-Jürgen Bachorski, „Grobianismus,“ in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, Bd. 1, Klaus Weimar u. a., Hg. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007 [1997]), 743 – 745.  Vgl. Anm. 24. Siehe dazu Brunner 2007 (wie Anm. 3), Kommentar zu V. 5541– 6186, 576.  Vgl. die Deutung von Bachorski 2006 (wie Anm. 5), 131– 156.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

93

und jeden Narren stehen, worauf die Ausführungen des Prologs zu zielen scheinen. Die Grenzen des guten Geschmacks werden vom Beginn des Hochzeitsmahles an überschritten: Als Tischtuch dient ein Sack, der höchstens einmal im Jahr gewaschen wird, statt Becher und Gläser zu benutzen, säuft man aus Krügen. Messer und geschnittenes Brot gibt es nicht, dafür werden ganze Brotlaibe herbeigebracht und verzehrt. Die höfische Prozedur des Händewaschens wird ausgelassen oder man überschüttet sich mit Wasser, bis man klatschnass daher gelaufen kommt, ausgleitet, auf dem ars landet und Krüge zerschlägt (V. 5554 – 5620). Vor Hunger essen die Gäste beim ersten Gang die Suppe so hastig, dass einer sich verbrüht und dem Tode nahe kommt (V. 5541– 5543). Gewalt flammt auf, als der Geschädigte die Suppenschüssel mit der Faust zerschlägt, so dass Brühe und Brot im Dreck landen (V. 5545 – 5547). Doch damit nicht genug, die Gier der Gäste ist so groß, dass sie die Brühe aus dem Dreck (kat,V. 5550) aufsammeln und weiterverzehren bis zum letzten Schluck (V. 5548 – 5552). Was hier zum Ausdruck kommt, ist paradigmatisch für das ganze Mahl: Man kämpft um das Essen, verspritzt es, schlürft es vom Boden auf, isst es wieder und speit oder hustet es aus. Auf diese Weise entsteht ein permanenter Kreislauf der Nahrungsaufnahme und Ausscheidung. Eine Logik des Überflusses und eine Logik des Mangels stehen sich dabei gegenüber. Einerseits hat man genug, um es zu verspritzen und zu verschwenden und sich an der Vergeudung noch zu ergötzen, andererseits konkurriert man um jeden Bissen und verzehrt sogar erneut, was man selbst fallen lässt oder was anderen durch die Lappen geht (V. 5775 – 5804). Man säuft, bis einem die Luft ausgeht und sich die schielenden Augen überquellend verdrehen, und man hört nicht auf, so lange noch ein Schluck im Krug ist. Sobald er leer ist, verlangt man nach mehr (V. 5653 – 5684): Do trunchens her und suffend, ǀ Daz in die augen truffend (V. 5847 f.). Das Trinken nimmt so sehr orgiastische Züge an, dass man keuchend fast vergeht und seinen Schweiß am Tischtuch abwischen muss: Secht, do ward er cheichent, | Den swaiss ans tischtuoch streichent (V. 5853 f.). Während essen und trinken den Körper eigentlich aufbauen und zusammenhalten sollen, tritt hier das Gegenteil ein. Die Bauern ruinieren sich durch fressen und saufen. Am Eselsbraten wird gekaut und gezerrt, die Knochen werden benagt, bis einem die Zähne ausfallen. Die Hunde fressen mit, ziehen zum Beispiel Frau Else den Eselsknochen aus dem Mund und haben ihren Spaß damit, Untz daz in nichtznicht was beliben (V. 5706). Frau Else scheint sich nicht sichtlich an der Mahlgemeinschaft mit den Tieren zu stören und isst unverdrossen weiter (V. 5685 – 5706). Auch Kraut mit Speck werfen die als „höfisch gesittet“ ausgewiesenen Diener den Gästen so vor, wie man Kälber mit Gras füttert: Und wurfens für recht, sam eim kalb | Man gäb das gras in einem stal | In die chripp und überal (V.

94

Beate Kellner

5718 – 5720). Essen erscheint als Kampf gegen den Nebenmann und die Nebenfrau, die man als Konkurrenten um die Nahrung versteht und gegen die man sich durchsetzen muss (V. 5731– 5765). Wie beim grotesken Körper im Bachtin’schen Sinne stehen die Mäuler allzeit offen: Won die mäulr in warend weit | Und offen gar ze aller zeit (V. 5783 f.).²⁷ Man verlangt nach mehr und droht Triefnas überdies, die Braut mitsamt der Schwägerin zu schänden, wenn er nicht auf der Stelle Wein, Met und Bier herbeischaffe: ‚Ich sirt dirs weib mit sampt der gsweigen, | Trifnas, pringst du uns nit schier | Wein und mett und dar zuo pier […] (V. 5812– 5814). Als der Bräutigam als Reaktion darauf gewalttätig wird und einen Diener beim Bart packt, malträtiert man ihn selbst ebenso, zieht ihm die Hose aus, gießt ihm Wasser in den ars, packt ihn bei den Beinen und schlägt ihn an einen Baum (V. 5823 – 5842). Auf beinahe wundersame Art eskalieren diese Gewaltausbrüche aber nicht weiter, sondern verpuffen: Also ward nicht mer dar aus (V. 5843), bemerkt der Erzähler lakonisch. Auch über die Fische macht man sich mit größter Gier her: Als der snelle Vahrindwand beim Verschlingen eines Kopfstücks an den Gräten stirbt, ist man froh, einen Mitesser weniger zu haben und dankt noch Gott für seinen Tod (V. 5901– 5916). Listig führt man einen der gesellen, Herrn Kuckuck, hinter’s Licht, indem man vorgibt, man wolle seine Lieder über Dietrich von Bern hören, was einzig dem Zweck dient, ihn für die Zeit des Singens als Nahrungskonkurrenten auszuschalten (V. 5919 – 5945). Der Hochzeiter Bertschi sieht sein Hab und Gut mit Recht davonschwimmen und versucht, sich an Lehren vom Haushalten erinnernd, Einhalt zu gebieten, dementsprechend ermahnt er die Gäste zu diätetischem Maßhalten (V. 5946 – 5960). Hier werden Partikel aus der Gesundheitslehre aufgerufen, doch die Lehren werden zweckentfremdet, da es nicht um das Wohl der Gäste geht, sondern um die Schonung des eigenen Geldbeutels. So steigert sich die Orgie – ungeachtet der Ermahnungen des Gastgebers – bis zum letzten Gang, bei dem Obst aufgetragen wird. Gegen das Benehmen der Gäste und die Geschwindigkeit ihres Fressens und Verschlingens weist die Braut ihren vermeintlichen höfischen Anstand aus, indem sie siebenmal von einer Kirsche abbeißt (V. 6125 – 6128). Vermeintlich höfisches, de facto jedoch wiederum absurdes Benehmen, wird dem bäurischen entgegengesetzt, was die Frage, worin das Ideal denn nun liege, einmal mehr aufwirft. Gegen Ende des Mahles erledigt man schließlich kollektiv seine Notdurft (V. 6168 – 6172).

 Vgl. Michail Bachtin, Rabelais und seine Welt. Volkskultur als Gegenkultur, mit einem Vorwort versehen v. Renate Lachmann, Hg., STW 1187 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 21998), besonders 345 – 412.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

95

Dann folgt der Tanz (V. 6187– 6448), man spielt auf, singt ausgelassen und erhitzt sich immer mehr. Der Spielmann selbst gibt zu erkennen, dass er für eine narrenvart pfeift (V. 6197) und der Erzähler kommentiert, dass jeder wie in einem Traum auf und nieder sprang (V. 6206 f.). Der Vergleich mit dem Fallobst (Sam die äpfel von dem paum, V. 6208) zeigt die Bewegung nach unten, die als eine natürliche, triebhafte zum Ausdruck kommt. Die Welt ist aus den Fugen (V. 6210), man fällt übereinander her und miteinander in den Dreck. Die Kleider reißen auf, Knöpfe springen ab, Schnürbänder öffnen sich, und die Geschlechtsteile quillen mitunter heraus: Hilden haubtloch was ze weit; Dar umb iͤr an der selben zeit Daz tüttel aus dem puosem sprang Tantzens gir sei dar zuo twang. Hüdellein der ward so haiss, Daz sei den kittel vor auf raiss; Des sach man iͤr die iren do Und macht vil mängeu herzen fro; Seu schreuwen all: ‚Sei wil ein man: Sei hat ein maul und har dar an.‘ (V. 6404– 6413). [Hildes Ausschnitt war zu weit, weshalb ihr damals das Tittlein aus dem Busen sprang: Tanzlust hatte sie dazu gezwungen. Hüdlein wurde es so heiß, dass sie vorne den Kittel aufriss. Man sah die ihrigen, was viele Herzen froh machte. Sie schrien alle: ‚Sie will einen Mann: Sie hat ein Maul und Haare dran.‘]

Was Michail Bachtin für den grotesken Körper in karnevalesker Literatur beschrieben hat, gilt auch hier. Es werden offene Körper gezeigt, sie erscheinen entgrenzt und verbinden sich zu einem großen Haufen oder Klumpen von Körpern. Betont werden die Körperöffnungen, Mund und Nase, Bauch und Verdauungsorgane sowie die Geschlechtsteile.²⁸ Dass der Protagonist Bertschi Triefnas über Nase und Rotz gekennzeichnet ist und Mätzli Rüerenzumph das Begehren nach dem Penis im Namen trägt, wirkt wie eine Abbreviatur, die man stellvertretend auf alle Teilnehmer des Hochzeitsmahls beziehen kann. Der Strom der Nahrungsaufnahme und Ausscheidung verbindet sich unentwegt mit dem Fließen der Körpersäfte.²⁹ Die Szenen zeigen nicht nur eine Verkehrung und Ver-

 Vgl. Bachtin 21998 (wie Anm. 27), 76, 359.  Dass die Darstellung dieser Körperlichkeit und Vergemeinschaftung von Bachorski 2006 (wie Anm. 5), 152, im Anschluss an ältere Forschungspositionen auf die spätmittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Zurichtung des Individuums und eine aufkommende „Kälte der neuen Sozialbeziehungen‘“ zu beziehen ist, scheint mir ein sozialgeschichtlicher Kurzschluss zu sein.

96

Beate Kellner

spottung höfischer Tischsitten, sondern man entledigt sich – viel weit reichender – sämtlicher Errungenschaften der Zivilisation. Die Narration gewinnt eine Dynamik, die im poetischen Überschuss jeden normativen Rahmen sprengt. Im Bild der dörflichen Hochzeitsgesellschaft wird die tierische Natur des Menschen hervorgekehrt und offengelegt. Der Erzähler kommentiert entsprechend schon zu Beginn des Mahles: Da mit so huob sich frauw und man ǀ Hin zum tisch sam säw zum nuosch (V. 5570 – 5571). Man begibt sich zu Tisch wie die Säue zum Trog.³⁰ Die bäurischen Gäste spiegeln nicht nur den Stand der Bauern, sondern sie werden zur Chiffre für das nackte Leben des Menschen, das sich bloß unter dem Firnis der Kultivierung verbirgt. Insofern hält der Ring nicht nur den Bauern den Spiegel vor und macht sie lächerlich, sondern er entlarvt den Menschen in seiner bestialischen Natürlichkeit. Er zeigt, was eintritt, wenn man sich ungehemmt seinen Trieben überlässt. Dieses Chaos entsteht durch die Entledigung von jeglicher Ordnung und zeigt den Menschen gewissermaßen im unzivilisierten Rohzustand. Die Konstitution des Menschen wird hier offensichtlich als eine verdeutlicht, die so säuisch ist, dass sie sich jeder Belehrung, Höfisierung und Kultivierung entgegensetzt. Da schon im Prolog das Verständnis der Bauern als Narren betont wird und diese Auffassung auch in weiteren Anklängen an die Fastnacht und die Fastnachtstage bestätigt wird, erweist sich das Geschehen im Ring als Karneval, der gerade nicht auf die bloße didaktische Verkehrung der Ordnung festzulegen ist.³¹ Es versteht sich, dass in der beschriebenen Situation der Entgrenzung und Vertierung nur noch ein Funke fehlt, um Gewalt zum Ausbruch zu bringen. Verschiedentlich flackert diese beim Gastmahl und beim Tanz bereits auf (vgl. etwa V. 5823 – 5843), doch sie kann erstaunlicherweise immer wieder unterdrückt werden. Dies gilt nicht mehr nach jener Szene, als der Lappenhausener Eisengrein die Nissingerin Gredul aus Liebe – wie es im Text heißt – haimleich (V. 6452) an der Hand kratzt, worauf sie zu bluten beginnt (V. 6450 – 6455). Der Erzähler führt dies auf das Wirken des Teufels zurück, der Asche gesät habe, als das Fest gerade auf dem Höhepunkt gewesen sei: Und do es an dem besten was, ǀ Do sat der tiefel äschen drein (V. 6447– 6448). In der Forschung geht man gewöhnlich von der

 Ganz in diesem Sinne zögert man auch nicht, sich mit „Du Sau!“ anzusprechen: So, sau, so, sau, so, du, so? (V. 5621).  Wiederholt hat man versucht, die Zeit des Ringes auf die Fastnachtstage festzulegen. Vgl. besonders Kurt Ruh, „Ein Laiendoktrinal in Unterhaltung verpackt. Wittenwilers Ring,“ in Literatur und Laienbildung im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit, Symposion Wolfenbüttel 1981, Ludger Grenzmann und Karl Stackmann, Hg., Germanistische Symposien Berichtsbände 5, (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1984), 344– 355.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

97

Vorstellung eines tatsächlichen Eingreifens des Teufels aus,³² was den folgenden Ereignissen eine religiöse Begründung unterlegt und sie als Strafe für das Fehlverhalten der Dörfler beim Fest erscheinen lässt. Damit versucht man die Absurditäten der Orgie und des folgenden Kampfes theologisch zu begründen. Versteht man die Verse über den Teufel dagegen metaphorisch, wofür ich plädieren möchte, wird die Geschehensfolge in ihrer Unwahrscheinlichkeit deutlich gemacht, ohne dass sie im strengen Sinne theologisch motiviert wäre. In absurder Verkettung der Ereignisse und rasanter Eskalation der Gewalt entwickelt sich nämlich aus der geringfügigen Verletzung Greduls eine Rauferei der Hochzeitsgäste, die zu Totschlag, Gemetzel, Vergewaltigung und Frauenraub und schließlich Krieg und Untergang führt (V. 6447– 9666). Meine These ist, dass hier das aus dem maere und der höfischen Epik bekannte Motiv schwankhaft aufgegriffen wird, dass sich aus einem geringfügigen Ereignis ein großer Kampf entspinnen kann. In diesem Sinne sagt beispielsweise Konrad von Würzburg, als er den Untergang Trojas erzählt, dass aus einem Funken ein großer Brand wird, der nicht mehr einzudämmen ist: ûz einer gneisten wirt ein rôst, ǀ der niht ir zünden understât […] (V. 410 – 415).³³ So entwickelt sich etwa auch in dem eingangs schon erwähnten Schwankmaere Heinrich von Kempten aus dem bloßen faux pas eines Kindes eine ernsthafte Gefahr für das Leben des Kaisers und das Kaiserreich.³⁴ Erinnert man sich daran, wie rüde die Figuren im Ring schon vor Eisengreins Übergriff auf Gredul miteinander umgegangen sind, und bedenkt man auch, dass die Geilheit der Frauen so groß ist, dass sie in der sich an das Hochzeitsfest anschließenden Sexorgie mit bis zu zehn verschiedenen Partnern Beischlaf haben (V. 7088 – 7095),³⁵ ist die Verletzung Greduls nichts als eine Kleinigkeit, auch wenn sie vom Erzähler zum Wendepunkt der Geschichte stilisiert wird: Dar umb so cham

 Vgl. Riha 1990 (wie Anm. 5), 152; Brunner 2007 (wie Anm. 3), Kommentar, 578; Röcke 2012 (wie Anm. 3), Kommentar, 469, mit Hinweisen auf Mt 13,24– 30 und redensartliche Wendungen (Stellen, die jedoch alle nicht passgenau sind).  Konrad von Würzburg, Trojanerkrieg und die anonym überlieferte Fortsetzung, Heinz Thoelen und Bianca Häberlein, Hg., Wissensliteratur im Mittelalter 51 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert, 2015).  Vgl. Kleinere Dichtungen Konrads von Würzburg (wie Anm. 1), Heinrich von Kempten, V. 60 – 382.  Dass es sich hier um eine „sexuelle Utopie mit allgemeiner Kopulation und allseitiger Freude“ handelt, wie Bachorski 2006 (wie Anm. 5), 153, meint, würde ich nicht folgern. Auch seiner These von zwei Erzählsträngen (ebd., 153– 156), von denen der eine in die Utopie, der andere in Gewalt und Untergang führt, kann ich mich nicht anschließen.

98

Beate Kellner

der gpauren schimph | Nach iͤr gewon ze ungelimph (V. 6456 f.). – Deshalb artete der Scherz der Bauern, wie es bei ihnen üblich ist, ins Unglück aus.³⁶ Nachdem das Für und Wider eines Krieges im Kriegsrat der beiden Dörfer erwogen worden ist (V. 6682– 7601), entsteht tatsächlich ein förmlicher Krieg zwischen Nissingen und Lappenhausen, der sich in immer weitere Dimensionen ausdehnt. Die Schlacht, in die neben den umliegenden Dörfern auch Hexen, Riesen, Zwerge und Heiden sowie bekannte Helden der mittelalterlichen Sagenwelt eingreifen, während die Artusritter vorgeben, keine Zeit zu haben (V. 8025 – 8030) und auch die Städte in der Haltung kluger Neutralität absagen (V. 7765 – 7857), wird als Orgie der Gewalt erzählt (V. 7602– 9666). Im Verlauf der Kämpfe werden zahllose Körper durchbohrt, zerstochen, verstümmelt, geblendet, zerfetzt, gebissen, geschändet und zerstückelt.³⁷ Worum es in diesen Schlachten geht, gerät immer wieder aus dem Blick, die Motivation der mythischen und sagenhaften Helfer bleibt fragwürdig. Besonders deutlich manifestiert sich die Absurdität des Krieges beim Auftreten der Figur des Wilden Mannes, der zu einem Zeitpunkt, als beide Kriegsparteien schon schwer geschädigt sind, auf einem großen Hirsch daherreitet und nicht mit Schwert und Speer, sondern mit einem ungeschlachten Kolben in die Kämpfe eingreift (V. 8718 – 8776). Wahllos verteilt er Stöße an Männer und Frauen und verletzt auf diese Weise viele von ihnen tödlich. Doch er kämpft nicht nur mit seiner Waffe, sondern wirft die Kämpfer einfach in seinen Rachen, beißt sie mit seinen zwei langen und scharfen Zähnen tot und frisst sie auf. Das einzige Ziel, das er verfolgt, ist es, wahllos möglichst viele zu töten, insofern versteht er den Kampf der Parteien, die sich untereinander schwächen, als seinen Vorteil: Und wolt ³⁸ die streiter all gemain Nider legen so allain; Won er gedacht in seinem sinn: Iͤr vechten daz ist mein gewin, Daz seu unter enander tuond.‘ (V. 8727– 8731) [Und er wollte die Kämpfer alle zusammen ganz allein umbringen; denn er dachte sich: ‚Ihr Kampf gegeneinander ist mein Nutzen.‘]

 Vgl. die Scheltrede von Greduls Onkel Schindennak auf Eisengrein (V. 6461– 6463).  Vgl. Bachorski 2006 (wie Anm. 5), 156 – 162; vgl. dazu auch Werner Röcke, „Drohung und Eskalation. Das Wechselspiel von sprachlicher Gewalt und körperlicher violentia in Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring,“ in Blutige Worte. Internationales und interdisziplinäres Kolloquium zum Verhältnis von Sprache und Gewalt in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Jutta Eming und Claudia Jarzebowski, Hg., Berliner Mittelalter- und Frühneuzeitforschung 4 (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2008), 129 – 143.  Ausgabe Röcke 2012 (wie Anm. 3), wol.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

99

Für den Wilden Mann spielen die Motive für den Krieg keine Rolle, der Krieg erscheint in seiner Perspektive als Kampf aller gegen alle. Dementsprechend bringt er die Fronten in Verwirrung, die ohnehin labile Schlachtordnung wird aufgelöst, und der Wilde Mann bewirkt, dass sich die gerade noch erbittert gegeneinander kämpfenden Parteien der Zwerge und Hexen zum gemeinsamen Kampf gegen ihn vereinen. Doch er erweist sich aufgrund seiner Behendigkeit und Schnelligkeit als überlegen, tötet sie mit dem eisernen Kolben und reißt sie mit den Hörnern seines Hirsches auf. Die Überschreitung der Mensch-Tier-Grenze, die sich auch sonst im Ring immer wieder zeigt,³⁹ wird im symbiotischen Kampf von Mann und Hirsch besonders deutlich. Als beide schließlich doch besiegt werden, töten sie noch als Tote weiter, denn der Erzähler berichtet, dass so manche, über den toten Wilden Mann stürzend, selbst den Tod fanden, da sie ihr Leben an den Hörnern des toten Hirsches verloren. In seiner tierhaften Gestalt repräsentiert der Wilde Mann das Andere, das Wilde und Naturhafte, das schwer Bezähmbare als Gegenbild zur höfischen Ordnung. Weil er fundamentale kulturelle Differenzen entgrenzt, nämlich die Mensch-Tier-Grenze und die Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod, lässt er sich geradezu als Chiffre des chaotischen Zusammenbruchs der Ordnung in Wittenwilers Ring verstehen. Kein Wunder, dass der Erzähler kommentiert: Das was ein wildes gferte (V. 8755). [Das war ein wildes Durcheinander.] Der Krieg geht immer weiter, erst durch die Verräterin Frau Laichdenman wird er zugunsten der Nissinger entschieden (V. 9418 – 9539). Jede Ordnung ist zusammengebrochen, die bäuerliche Welt ist im Chaos versunken, das Dorf Lappenhausen ist vernichtet. Der Protagonist Bertschi kann fliehen und verteidigt sich auf einem Heuschober sitzend (V. 9541– 9652). Als der einzige Überlebende Bertschi das Ausmaß der Katastrophe erkennt und sieht, dass auch seine Frau den Kämpfen zum Opfer gefallen ist (V. 9653 – 9666), fällt er in tiefe Ohnmacht, jammert über sein Leid und schreibt sich selbst die Schuld an seinem Unglück zu, weil er sich um die Lehren, in denen er unterwiesen worden war, nicht geschert habe (V. 9667– 9686). Sodann zieht er sich in der Erkenntnis, dass alles Irdische vergänglich ist, als Einsiedler in den Schwarzwald zurück, um sich gottesfürchtig das ewige Leben zu verdienen: Also fuor er hin so bald Enmitten in den Swartzwald. Da verdienet der vil gwär In gantzer andacht an gevär Nach disem laid das ewig leben. Das well uns auch der selbig geben,

 Vgl. die obigen Überlegungen zum Hochzeitsmahl und den Namen der Gäste.

100

Beate Kellner

Der wasser aus dem stain beschert Hat und auch ze wein bekert! Amen (V. 9692– 9699) [So ging er sogleich mitten in den Schwarzwald. Dort verdiente der wahrhaft Aufrechte in tiefer Andacht ungefährdet nach diesem Leid das ewige Leben. Das möge auch uns der gewähren, der Wasser aus dem Stein hervorgebracht und auch in Wein verwandelt hat. Amen.]

Es ist seit jeher die große Forschungsdiskussion zum Ring, ob dieser Schluss eine religiöse Gesamtdeutung des Romans rechtfertigt oder sogar zwingend erforderlich macht.⁴⁰ Einiges spricht dagegen: Zu absurd mutet das Schlussbild an, der unmittelbar vorausgehende Kampf Bertschis auf dem Heuschober, der ihn zwingt, Heu zu fressen, um zu überleben, was ihn in den Augen seiner Belagerer so unheimlich macht, dass sie fliehen und ihn in Ruhe lassen. Bertschi wird am Ende des Romans von den Kontrahenten als wicht (V. 9648), als „Unhold“, gesehen und nicht als Einsiedler. Zu wenig weiß der Text auch von einer inneren Umkehr dieses zweifelhaften Helden. Der Schluss wirkt daher angehängt, so als brauche man eine religiöse Abrundung, weil man eine Geschehensfolge nicht ertragen und stehenlassen kann, die zeigt, wie im Bild des Dorfes die ganze Welt ins Chaos versinkt. Der Erzähler bemüht sich daher, das Geschehen in einen anderen und höheren Zusammenhang einzuordnen, indem er die Möglichkeit, das Seelenheil zu erlangen, gegen die sichtbare Vergänglichkeit der Welt setzt. Doch dies kann nicht verdecken oder vergessen lassen, was vorher ausufernd beschrieben und aufgedeckt worden ist, nämlich die tierische Natur des Menschen in all ihrer kruden Begehrlichkeit, Sauf- und Fresslust, Hurerei und Gewaltbereitschaft. Ob Bertschi in seinem neuen Leben der Eremitage so einfach in der Lage ist, diese Natur zu überwinden und ein frommes Leben zu führen, um sich das Seelenheil zu verdienen, stellt der Text am Ende sogar selbst in Frage, nimmt man das Spiel mit den Linien und Farben der Handschrift ernst. Denn der Entschluss, sich gottesfürchtig in den Schwarzwald zu begeben, wird ausgerechnet mit der Farbe grün markiert und somit als Scherz interpretiert (V. 9692– 9695). Auch wenn die Linienführung grün (Unterhaltung, Scherz) und rot (ernstgemeinte Passagen, Lehre) nicht konsequent im Text durchgehalten ist, irritiert die grüne Linie dennoch gerade bei dieser gewichtigen Passage am Schluss. Die Unvermitteltheit der Umkehr des Protagonisten und die Unterlegung dieses Schrittes mit der grünen Farbe als scherzhaft lassen sich gegen die vordergründige

 Vgl. besonders Lutz 1990 (wie Anm. 5).

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

101

Aussage als Hinweis darauf lesen, wie schwer es ist, die bäurische und das heißt die tierische und bestialische Natur des Menschen zu überwinden. Und selbst wenn der eine gerettet werden kann, bleibt, dass alle anderen ohne innere Umkehr untergegangen sind.

3 Das Reich der Riesen als ein verwirretes ungestaltes Muster der heut verwirrten ungestalten Welt in Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung⁴¹ Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung stellt den wohl bedeutendsten deutschsprachigen Roman der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts dar. Mit diesem Werk überträgt der deutsche Autor den ersten Teil der Pentalogie seines französischen Vorgängers Rabelais, Gargantua,⁴² ins Deutsche und erweitert die Vorlage in den drei Ausgaben von 1575, 1582 und 1590 auf den dreifachen Umfang.⁴³ Das Titelblatt

 Zu den nachfolgenden Zitaten vgl. Johann Fischart, Geschichtklitterung, mit einem Glossar, Ute Nyssen, Hg. (Düsseldorf: Karl Rauch Verlag, 1963), hier 8; zu den Erweiterungen von Ausgabe zu Ausgabe vgl. besonders Johann Fischart, Geschichtklitterung. Synoptischer Abdruck der Fassungen von 1575 / 1582 / 1590, 2 Bde., Hildegard Schnabel, Hg. (Halle a. d. S.: Niemeyer Verlag, 1969).  Vgl. Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, Mireille Huchon, Hg. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1– 153.  Vgl. zu Fischarts Bearbeitungstendenzen das immer noch grundlegende zweibändige Werk von Adolf Hauffen, Johann Fischart. Ein Literaturbild aus der Zeit der Gegenreformation, 2 Bde. (Berlin und Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1921– 1922); vgl. aus jüngerer Zeit besonders Florence M. Weinberg, Gargantua in a Convex Mirror. Fischart’s View of Rabelais, Studies in the Humanities, Literature – Politics – Society 2 (New York u. a.: Peter Lang, 1986), mit durchgängiger Tendenz zur Abwertung des deutschen Textes; vgl. auch dies.: „Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung: A Questionable Reception of Gargantua,“ in The Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982), 23 – 35; dies.: „Thélème selon Fischart: Omissions Fécondes,“ in Études Rabelaisiennes 21 (1988): 373 – 379; Jan-Dirk Müller, „Texte aus Texten. Zu intertextuellen Verfahren in frühneuzeitlicher Literatur, am Beispiel von Fischarts Ehzuchtbüchlein und Geschichtklitterung,“ in Intertextualität in der Frühen Neuzeit. Studien zu ihren theoretischen und praktischen Perspektiven, Wilhelm Kühlmann und Wolfgang Neuber, Hg., Frühneuzeit-Studien 2 (Frankfurt a. M. u. a.: Peter Lang, 1994), 63 – 109; Frank-Rutger Hausmann, „Differente Lachkulturen? – Rabelais und Fischart,“ in Differente Lachkulturen? Fremde Komik und ihre Übersetzung, Thorsten Unger, Brigitte Schultze und Horst Turk, Hg., Forum Modernes Theater. Schriftenreihe 18 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1995), 31– 45; Ulrich Seelbach, Ludus Lectoris. Studien zum idealen Leser Johann Fischarts, Beihefte zum Euphorion 39 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000); Bachorski 2006 (wie Anm. 5), 345 – 530; Beate Kellner, „Spiel mit gelehrtem Wissen. Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung und François Rabelais’ Gargantua,“ in Text und Kontext. Fallstudien und theoretische Begründungen einer kulturwissenschaftlich angeleiteten Mediävistik,

102

Beate Kellner

der Ausgabe von 1590 verspricht, eine Affentheuerlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung: Von Thaten und Rhaten der vor kurtzen langen unnd je weilen Vollenwolbeschreiten Helden und Herren Grandgoschier Gorgellantua und deß deß Eiteldurstlichen Durchdurstlechtigen Fürsten Pantagruel von Durstwelten, Königen in Utopien, Jederwelt Nullatenenten und Nienenreich, Soldan der Neuen Kannarien, Fäumlappen, Dipsoder, Dürstling, und OudissenInseln: auch Großfürsten im Finsterstall und Nu bel NibelNebelland, Erbvögt auff Nichilburg, und Niderherren zu Nullibingen, Nullenstein und Niergendheym. ⁴⁴

Das Adjektiv Affenteuerlich kombiniert die Lexeme „Affe“ und „Abenteuer“ und kündigt auf diese Weise an, dass die Gattung der Abenteuerromane hier nicht nur nachgeahmt, sondern auch im Nachäffen parodiert werden soll. Naupengeheuerlich hängt mit naupe, noppe, nuppe für „Tücke“, „Schrulle“, „Grille“ zusammen⁴⁵ und weist darauf hin, dass etwas folgen wird, was gerade nicht geheuer, sondern Vngeheuerlich ist⁴⁶ und damit „wunderlich“, „merkwürdig“, „außergewöhnlich“, „grotesk“ und „monströs“.⁴⁷ Im Verb klittern aus dem Begriff der Geschichtklitterung kommt die Arbeitsweise Fischarts in besonderem Maße zum Ausdruck, denn klittern lässt sich einerseits mit „schlecht, flüchtig schreiben“, „sudeln“, „klecksen“ zusammenbringen, andererseits mit klittern, klüttern, mhd.

Jan-Dirk Müller, Hg., Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien 64 (München: R. Oldenbourg, 2007), 219 – 243; Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 337– 489; Elsa Kammerer, „Enthousiasme, fureur et Ergeysterung. Une nouvelle hypothése d’interpretation du Glucktrarara de Johann Fischart (1575 – 1590),“ in Langues hybrides. Expérimentations linguistiques et littéraires (XVe – Début XVIIe siècle). Hybridsprachen: Linguistische und literarische Untersuchungen (15. – Anfang 17. Jh.), Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou und Paul J. Smith, Hg., Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance 598. De lingua et linguis 6 (Genève: Droz, 2019): 349 – 366; Beate Kellner: „Sprachspiel, Sprachenvielfalt und Hybridisierung in Johann Fischarts Geschichtklitterung“, in ebd., 385 – 402; vgl. jetzt auch die Beiträge zur Geschichtklitterung von Elsa Kammerer, Nicola Kaminski, Beate Kellner, Andreas Mahler, Jan-Dirk Müller und Ulrich Seelbach, in Johann Fischart, genannt Mentzer. Frühneuzeitliche Autorschaft im intermedialen Kontext, Tobias Bulang, Hg., Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung 37, (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2019), 189 – 292.  Für die Erschließung der Geschichtklitterung sind die wichtigsten Hilfsmittel Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 16 Bde. in 32 Teilbänden (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854– 1960, Quellenverzeichnis Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1971); vgl. dazu die Neubearbeitung durch die Arbeitsstellen der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Stuttgart: S. Hirzel 1965 – 2018) (im Folgenden als DWB); und das ebenfalls an der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen fortgeführte Projekt: Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, Robert R. Anderson u. a., Hg. (Berlin und New York: De Gruyter, 1989 – 2017), derzeit 15 Bde.  DWB, 13,474.  So noch in der Ausgabe von 1575. Zu Vngeheuerlich vgl. DWB 24,708.  Einen wichtigen Kontext bildet hier auch die Monstra- und Mirabilienliteratur.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

103

verklütern im Sinne von „verwirren“, „gaukeln“, „spintisieren“ und zum Dritten mit klüttern, „grübeln“.⁴⁸ Wie in Rabelais’ Gargantua soll es auch bei Fischart um das überaus berühmte und wohl bekannte, zugleich aber auch verrufene Herrscherhaus (Vollenwolbeschreiten) der Riesen Grandgoschier und Gorgellantua gehen. Die Wendung vor kurtzen langen unnd je weilen ruft sowohl die Vorstellung von Langeweile wie Kurzeweile hervor und deutet an, dass die Handlung vor kurzem und vor langem und jederzeit spielt. Wenn die Riesen als Fürsten von Utopien bezeichnet werden, gibt dies Fischart Anlass, im Titelblatt mit dem Begriff der Utopie zu spielen und ihn mit Nebelland und Niemandsland abzuwandeln. Griechische (οὔ), lateinische (nihil, nullus)⁴⁹ und deutsche Lexeme („nirgend“, „nie“) für „nichts“, „nirgends“, „kein“ werden hier variiert und mit den Konnotationen von Finsternis und Nebel verknüpft. Die Riesen sind Herrscher und sie hausen überall und nirgends. Sie sind Großfürsten über die Durstigen und zeichnen sich selbst besonders durch ihren Durst aus, wie in den Begriffen Eiteldurstlich und Durchdurstlechtig und Dipsoder ⁵⁰ offengelegt wird. Dass sie darüber hinaus auch große Esser sind, deutet sich schon darin an, dass sie Sultane der Kanarischen Inseln sein sollen, die dem Verständnis des 16. Jahrhunderts nach so heißen, weil die Bewohner wie Hunde (canes) angeblich alles roh essen und besonders begierig sind.⁵¹ Zugleich wird über die griechische Wurzel οὔ eine Brücke zur Odyssee und den Irrfahrten des Odysseus geschlagen, was auf die abenteuerliche Fahrt der Pantraguelisten in Rabelais’ Pentalogie verweisen könnte. Bei der Darstellung des Riesengeschlechts werden die mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Leitideen von Idoneität und Genealogie als Voraussetzung adliger Herrschaft parodiert. Die Verkehrung höfischer Legitimierungsmuster von Herrschaft zeigt sich schon zu Beginn des Gargantua im Blick auf die Genealogie, denn bei Rabelais wird der Gedanke entwickelt, dass selbst die höchsten weltlichen und geistlichen Würdenträger wie Kaiser, Könige, Herzöge, Fürsten und

 Vgl. DWB 11,1213 – 1214; Hermann Fischer, Schwäbisches Wörterbuch, Bd. 4, bearb. unter Mitw. v. Wilhelm Pfleiderer (Tübingen: Laupp, 1914), 493; ders. und Hermann Taigel, Schwäbisches Handwörterbuch (Tübingen: Laupp u. a., 1986), 262; Matthias Lexer, Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, Bd. 3 (Stuttgart: Hirzel 1992, ND der Ausg. Leipzig 1872– 1878), 146 – 147; Charles Schmidt, Historisches Wörterbuch der elsässischen Mundart, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der früh-neuhochdeutschen Periode, aus dem Nachlasse. (Straßburg: Heitz, 1901 [postum erschienen]), 200; vgl. dazu auch Erich Kleinschmidt, Stadt und Literatur in der Frühen Neuzeit. Voraussetzungen und Entfaltung im südwestdeutschen, elsässischen und schweizerischen Städteraum, Literatur und Leben N. F. 22 (Köln und Wien: Böhlau, 1982), 308 – 309, mit Anm. 262.  Nullatenenten, gebildet aus nulla und tenere.  Die Dipsodes kommen in der Pentalogie vor: Pantagruel, c. 23.  Vgl. Nyssen 1963 (wie Anm. 41), Glossar, 19.

104

Beate Kellner

Päpste von einfachen Kerlen abstammen können, und dass umgekehrt auch manch ein Habenichts aus königlichem respektive kaiserlichem Blut entsprossen sei (Gargantua, c. 1, 9 – 11). Der deutsche Autor übernimmt Rabelais’ Thema in die Geschichtklitterung (c. 1, 32– 44), doch er dekonstruiert das Legitimationsmuster noch weiter und prolongiert die Gedanken seines literarischen Vorgängers, indem er die Vorstellung einer genealogischen Mischung der Geschlechter und gentes gleichermaßen an den Völkerwanderungen exemplifiziert wie an Kriegen und gewaltsamen Eroberungen wie am Herumziehen einzelner Gruppen von Zigeunern, Studenten und fahrenden Schülern, Handwerksgesellen, Bettlern, Mönchen, Pilgern, Soldaten, Juden etc. (Geschichtklitterung, c. 1, 33 – 39). Die Parodie genealogischer Legitimierungsmuster verschiebt sich bei ihm auf die Vorstellung einer allgemeinen Promiskuität in der Welt über Völker, Reiche, Stände und Geschlechter hinweg. Offen gelegt wird die durch nichts beherrschbare, weder durch Völker- noch durch Ständegrenzen, noch durch geistliche Gelübde einzudämmende sexuelle Gier des Menschen, der genealogische Exkurs wird genutzt, um eben diese im Sinne sündhafter concupiscentia zu zeigen. Dementsprechend ist im Blick auf die Natur des Menschen auch vom eingenommenem Gifft des Cornelagrippischen Erbsündigen Schlangenschwantzes ⁵² die Rede (Geschichtklitterung, c. 6, 109). Der genealogische Diskurs mündet solchermaßen nicht in Inszenierungen des Wunderbaren, des Besonderen, des Transzendenten zur Auszeichnung und Legitimierung des Herrschergeschlechts der Riesen, sondern es wird gezeigt, dass dieses Legitimierungsmuster auf nichts als Gewalt und sexuellem Exzess beruht. Ist Genealogie ein Ordnungs- und Legitimierungsmuster von Herrschaft, so wird bei Fischart im Gegensatz dazu das blanke Chaos gezeigt, das sich aus der Vermischung der Völker und Geschlechter ergibt: Also kugelts im kreiß herumb, wie solt es nicht kegel geben: Ja daß ich geschweig des verreisens, migrirens, verruckens unnd auffbrechens etwann gantzer Länder unnd Völcker von wegen plagung der Mäus und Schnacken. Darvon gantze Postillen von Noe Kasten auß vorhanden, der Goten, Wandeln, Langparten, Nortmannen, Saracenen, Marckmannen, Wenden, Sclaven, Rugen, Walen, die untereinander gehurnauset, gewalet, gewandelt und gewendet haben, wie ein Hafen voll Beelzebubmucken: also daß es dem Wolffio im Scipionischen Himmel noch ein lust

 Vgl. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De originali peccato, (Augsburg: Drucker, 1568): hunc serpentem non alium arbitramur, quam sensibilem carnalemque affectum, imo quem rectè dixerimus, ipsum carnalis concupiscentiae genitale viri membrum, membrum reptile, membrum serpens, membrum lubricum, variijsque anfractibus tortuosum, quod Euam tentauit atque decepit. Zitiert nach Seelbach 2000 (Anm. 43), 337.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

105

herab zusehen gibt, daß die Mirmidonische zweibeynige Omeysen hie unten noch also durch einander haspeln unnd graspeln. (Geschichtklitterung, c. 1, 34).⁵³

Das Hervorkehren der Aspekte von Sexualität und Gewalt wird immer wieder auch durch die Ausstellung obszöner Zweideutigkeiten der Sprache potenziert. So wird schon bei der Aufzählung der Völkernamen und Völkerwanderungen das sexuelle Thema – etwa in den Wendungen, die zugleich mit den Völkernamen spielen, die untereinander gehurnauset, gewalet, gewandelt und gewendet haben (ebd.) und noch also durch einander haspeln und graspeln (ebd.) – angeschlagen. Fischart reizt die Namen der Völker aus und spielt, die Wörter karnevalesk verzerrrend und die Affektivität der Sprache auskostend, mit ihrer Polyphonie.⁵⁴ Und schließlich wird der Gedanke der genealogischen Vermischung auch in der Überschreitung der einzelnen Sprachen manifest, Völkergemenge und babylonische Sprachverwirrung gehören zusammen.⁵⁵ Chaotisch verwirrt und vermischt sind die Sprachen wie die Geschlechter. Ursache und Effekt des Durcheinanders in der Welt ist die sexuelle Begehrlichkeit des Menschen. Die dem genealogischen Denken inhärente Strategie zur Naturalisierung des Herkommens wird hier beibehalten, aber in eine ganz andere Richtung geführt. Im Blick auf die Romanhandlung passt dies zu der besonders bei Fischart übersteigert dargestellten Affektivität der Riesenfamilie. Die Riesen sind sozusagen der Ausbund devianter Herrscher, sie widersprechen in ihrer grobianischen Fress- und Sauflust sowie ihrer überbordenden sexuellen Gier allen höfischen Vorstellungen von zuht und mâze. So heißt es etwa von Grandgurgler (Grandgoschier), er sei ein ziemlicher Rollart und Ramler gewesen, dem man warlich die Geyssen hat auß dem weg führen müssen (Geschichtklitterung, c. 3, 59). Die Herrscher von Utopien werden wie hungrige und gierige Tiere dargestellt und diese Animalisierung und Bestialisierung soll auch für die Leser leitend sein, wenn der Erzähler dazu aufruft, auch sie sollen wie die Protagonisten der Geschichte den Säuen gleich werden: Also auch ihr (verzicht mir, daß ich euch den Säuen vergleich, sie geben dannoch guten Speck) wie könt ihr gedeuen, wann ihr nicht tapffer keuen, speien und widerkeuen, und gleich werd den Säuen. Aber den Säuen gleich werden ist kein schand, fürnemlich was den Magen antrifft:

 Es handelt sich wohl um eine Anspielung auf den Mythos von Myrmidon, dessen Tochter von Zeus in Gestalt einer Ameise verführt worden ist. Zugleich könnte die Passage auch auf den Traum des Zeussohnes Aiakos zielen: Jener träumte, dass von einer Zeus geweihten Eiche große Mengen von Ameisen fielen, die zu Männern wurden. Vgl. Nyssen 1963 (wie Anm. 41), Glossar, 39.  Zum Verfahren vgl. etwa Müller 1994 (wie Anm. 43); Kellner 2007 (wie Anm. 43).  Einen Hinweis auf die ursprüngliche Differenzierung bietet etwa Geschichtklitterung, c. 1, 35, wo von der Babilonischen trennung die Rede ist.

106

Beate Kellner

dieweil doch die Menschen unnd Säu, so viel den innern Leib betrift, einander änlich sind […]. (Geschichtklitterung, c. 3, 56)

Das Leben Grandgoschiers wirkt wie eine fortgesetzte, durch nichts begrenzte Fastnacht, und dementsprechend weist Fischart seinen Text selbst als fantastische Fastnachtsdichtung aus (Geschichtklitterung, Prolog, 18), was auch noch einmal eine Brücke zu Wittenwilers Ring darstellt. Die Doppelbödigkeiten der Sprache, die Fischart sich poetisch zu nutze macht, erlauben es, bei der Darstellung des Essens und Trinkens die Ebene der Sexualität immer wieder anklingen zu lassen.⁵⁶ Rabelais’ Kapitel zu den Trinkergesprächen der Riesen (Gargantua, c. 5, 17– 20), in welchem diese mit ihren Gästen dem Wein frönen, wird bei Fischart zur sogenannten Truncken Litanei (Geschichtklitterung, c. 8, 117– 145) ausgebaut und gewinnt orgiastische Züge. Der deutsche Autor weicht hier sehr deutlich von seiner Vorlage ab, verzehnfacht den Umfang des Kapitels und gestaltet die Szenerie breit aus. Lateinische Wendungen und pseudophilosophische Inhalte legen nahe, dass Fischart sich wohl an studentische und akademische Zechgelage sowie akademische Scherzreden angelehnt hat. Der älteren Forschung galt das Kapitel mit seiner Fülle von anzitierten Trinkliedern⁵⁷ als „Meisterstück treuer Menschenbeobachtung und realistischer Darstellung“ sowie als „Sittenschilderung von typischem Wert“, die sich gleichermaßen aus „volkstümlichen und gelehrten Elementen“ zusammensetze.⁵⁸ Die Vielzahl an Späßen, Einfällen, Flüchen, Zwischenrufen macht den Text unübersichtlich, dennoch lässt sich die Entwicklung des Trinkgelages zumindest in Ansätzen erkennen. Bezeichnungen für Gläser, Becher, Krüge und Kannen werden nach einigen die Szene kurz einführenden Bemerkungen in langer Auflistung aneinandergereiht (Geschichtklitterung, c. 8, 117). Dann folgen Trinksprüche, Lieder, Reden über den Durst und das Trinken. In Anspielungen an die Säftelehre wird das Trinken als Mittel, um die Körperwärme zu steigern sowie gegen das Ausdörren und besonders das Austrocknen der Seele empfohlen. Die Lieder und Trinksprüche kippen immer wieder und immer öfter ins Obszöne, wie etwa die folgende Passage verdeutlichen kann: Meydlin sind dir die Schuh recht, bei nachte, bei nachte, halt dich Annele feste. Du bist mir lieber dann der Knecht, pum Meydle pum, Ich freu mich dein gantz umb und umb, wa ich freundtlich zu dir kumm, hinderm Ofen und umb und umb, freu dich Stiffelbrauns Meidelein,

 Vgl. Kellner 2007 (wie Anm. 43).  Vgl. dazu Bulang 2011 (wie Anm. 5), 356– 368, mit zahlreichen Nachweisen und Hinweisen auf Forschungsliteratur.  Vgl. Hauffen 1921 (wie Anm. 43), Bd. 1, 227.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

107

Ich kumm ich kumm, ich kumm. Wolauff wolauff am Bodensee, sonst find man nindert freuden meh, Mit dantzen und mit springen, und welcher gleich nicht dantzen will, der hört doch höflich singen. Wolauff vollauff, vollsauff, dollauff, frisch auff, friß auff mein Brüderlein, Es sey gleich gut Bier oder Wein, […]. (Geschichtklitterung, c. 8, 123 f.)⁵⁹

Gegen vier Uhr morgens gelangt der Exzess allmählich auf den Höhepunkt. In Fischarts Darstellung hat das Thema der Trunkenheit längst auf den Gestus der Sprache übergegriffen, die Zecher lallen: prim, pram, prim, prom, pram, da giengen die Glocken an, prim, pram (Geschichtklitterung, c. 8, 132). Saufen und (homo) sexuelle Entgrenzung scheinen eins zu sein, die Zecher fallen übereinander her (ebd., c. 8, 132 f.). Der Durst will nicht enden, wird immer wieder von neuem angeregt, man reizt ihn mit Salzigem und Saurem. Man übergibt sich und verliert jede Kontrolle (ebd., 139 – 145). Es kommt zu Rauferei und Schlägerei (ebd., 133). Die Szenerie löst sich in der Orgie auf: Sex, Saufen und Gewalt. Die Welt des Herrschergeschlechts der Riesen versinkt in diesem Kapitel im Chaos. Der Sprachmodus dafür ist das Lallen, in dem der konnotative, affektive Reichtum der Sprache hervorgekehrt wird. Das Delirieren wird in der Trunkenlitanei in einer mise en abyme szenisch vor Augen geführt. In der Arbeit am Sprachmaterial werden die Grenzen der Wörter unter- und überschritten, kommen verschiedene Sprachen ins Spiel und werden hybridisiert. Die Entgrenzung der Wörter und Sprachen, die semantische Entleerung im Lallen, aber auch die semantische Verdichtung durch Übereinanderschichten verschiedener Sinndimensionen spiegelt die verworrene Welt im poetischen Überschuss. Man könnte nun folgern, dass Fischarts Text auf eine Didaxe ex negativo hinausläuft, durch die der Tisch- und Hofzuchtenliteratur durch die Ausstellung der grobianischen Lebensweise von Pseudoherrschern das Wort geredet wird. Doch die Feier des Animalischen, des Somatischen und Sinnlichen entfaltet eine Dynamik, die den Rahmen moralischer Nutzanwendung im Sinne einer Didaxe ex

 Vgl. auch etwa Geschichtklitterung, c. 8, 124– 125: Nun auß eim andern thon, wer singt uns eins? Herbei, herbei, was Löffel sey, zu disem Brei, gar bald und frei: Ich hof uns soll gelingen, hetten wir nur Löffel, Stöffel, lang Löffel, […]: vor freuden wolten wir springen, und Muslöffel, Busenlöffel, Bubenlöffel, Stubenlöffel, die thut uns auch herbringen, und gewaschene Löffel, eng Jungfraulöffel, Ein futer mit Löffel, und unsere löffel […]. Nun sih ich wol, daß ich auch soll, Mein Löffel einher tragen, So bring ich Rotzlöffel, Orenlöffel, Butterlöffel, Schaumlöffel, Was soll ich weiter sagen: Secht liebe Freund schön glatte Löffel, rau Wirtshaußlöffel, Ammeisterstubenlöffel, der Martschen Löffel, der Dürlin Löffel, der Ursel Löffel, der Hopffensidrin Löffel, Heyntz Löffel, Kuntz Löffel, Claus Löffel, Fritz Löffel, Ule Löffel: wer will darüber klagen, All Ort voll Löffel, all Winckeln voll Löffel, die Stub voll Löffel, das Hauß voll Löffel, Ich will nach keim mehr fragen: Singt nur mit Schall, ihr Löffel all, hoho Löffel do.Weit verbreitet ist der Löffel als Metapher des Penis, und die vorstehende „Löffelei“ lässt sich unschwer ganz in diesem Sinne verstehen.

108

Beate Kellner

negativo und einer Satire, bei der es um das bloße Verlachen geht, immer wieder sprengt: Dargestellt wird vielmehr die Unübersichtlichkeit der Welt, die nicht in einem Schema von satirischer Dichotomie von Schwarz und Weiß aufgeht, sondern ein verwirretes ungestaltes Muster der heut verwirrten ungestalten Welt vor Augen führt (Geschichtklitterung, Prolog, 8). Hieraus scheint kein Weg in eine neue Ordnung zu führen.

4 Fazit Wittenwilers Ring und Fischarts Geschichtklitterung zeigen in unterschiedlicher Ausprägung im Genre des schwankhaften und komischen Romans, wie die Verkehrung höfischer Verhaltensformen, die Devianzen im Milieu der Giganten und der Bauern die Ordnung einer Gemeinschaft ins Chaos stürzen können. Sie verweisen damit keineswegs nur ex negativo auf das Richtige, sondern sie zeigen die Fragilität der gesellschaftlichen Ordnung und der Prozesse von Höfisierung und Kultivierung. Sie machen deutlich, dass schon vermeintlich Geringfügiges, wie Greduls Verletzung an der Innenhand, eine Katastrophe auslösen kann und sie decken die gewalttätige, barbarische, rohe Natur des Menschen unter dem Firnis der Zivilisierung auf. Indem die Texte höfische Werte und Normen sowie adlige Legitimierungsmuster wie Genealogie und Ideoneität des Herrschers dekonstruieren und parodieren, legen sie den Finger auf die wunden Punkte dieser Ideale und Modelle. Dadurch zeigen sie, dass mit Erziehungsprogrammen und Lehren sowie Strategien der Konsolidierung und Legitimierung von Herrschaft allenfalls nur eine fragile Ordnung hergestellt werden kann. Insofern bilden die parodistischen Texte einen Gegendiskurs zu den Mustern der Begründung und Legitimierung von Konsoziation. Gegen den Absturz in Unordnung und Chaos wird in den Texten aber auch nach neuer Ordnung gesucht, die aus der Katastrophe und dem Zusammenbruch wieder entstehen kann. So endet Wittenwilers Ring gerade nicht mit der Auslöschung der dörflichen Welt, sondern mit der Enscheidung des Protagonisten zum gottesfürchtigen Leben in der Eremitage als Voraussetzung des Seelenheils. Mag dieser Schluss zwar bloß als angehängt erscheinen, so zeigt er auf der anderen Seite doch, wie schwer es selbst in einem schwankhaften literarischen Text ist, die Auslöschung der Ordnung im Chaos und die Vernichtung aller als Endpunkt des Romans stehen zu lassen.⁶⁰ Am weitesten geht hier Fischarts Text, denn in ihm

 Ein Seitenblick auf die Heldenepik mag dies bestätigen. Es ist bemerkenswert, dass es selbst beim Untergang der Nibelungen am Etzelhof noch Überlebende gibt. Vgl. Nibelungenlied, 39.

Chaos in komischer Literatur des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit

109

lässt sich kein Fixpunkt mehr erkennen, von dem her eine Ordnungsperspektive entwickelt würde, auch wenn der Prolog dies vorzugeben scheint. Im Gegenteil: Die Handlung wird durch Gelehrsamkeit einerseits, durch Wort- und Sprachspiele andererseits bis zur Unkenntlichkeit zersetzt. Das Chaos greift immer wieder auch auf die zitierten gelehrten Diskurse über, wenn diese parodistisch verdreht und verkehrt werden. Schließlich spiegelt sich die Unordnung auch auf der poetischen Ebene, indem die Grenzen der Wörter, Sprachen und Alphabete überschritten und hybridisiert werden, indem die Wörter zersetzt werden bis nur noch Silben oder Buchstaben übrigbleiben. Dabei können sie ihrer ursprünglichen Sinndimensionen verlustig gehen und eine affektive, häufig sexuell konnotierte Schicht der Sprache offenlegen, die wiederum zur überbordenden Begehrlichkeit der dargestellten Protagonisten passt.

Âventiure, in Das Nibelungenlied und die Klage. Nach der Handschrift 857 der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, Mittelhochdeutscher Text, Übers. und Komm., Joachim Heinzle, Hg., Bibliothek des Mittelalters. Texte und Übersetzungen 12 (Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2015).

Florian Mehltretter

Mixed Abysses Chaos and Heterodoxy in Romance Philosophical Poetry of the Late Renaissance

1 Introduction This article will follow the traces of Tohu wa bohu, in the sense of the unformed chaos of matter, in late renaissance romance poetry, and most notably in the Creation epics of Torquato Tasso and Guillaume Du Bartas. Since antiquity, the Tohu wa bohu, the state of a world “without form and void” (as the King James Bible puts it), as well as the primeval waters of “the deep” of Genesis 1,¹ in conjunction with Hesiod’s idea of chaos as a chasm or void and Ovid’s conception of chaos as disorder,² have been raising the questions of a possible independence or pre-existence of matter (or space) with respect to God’s creation and, arising from such radical “otherness”, of an autonomous principle of evil. We know that the standard answer of Christianity to these two questions is a negative one: There was no matter before the act of creation; neither from such pre-existent matter nor from God’s own activities can we derive an explanation for the origin of evil. As is also well known, various dualistic and gnostic schools have nevertheless been exploring the paths seemingly opened by the concept of primeval chaos, from antiquity to the present day. Since my field is not the history of religion, I will not presume to delve too deeply into this subject, but I should nevertheless like to mention a few pertinent instances: Manichaeism, with its dualism of good and evil principles and its idea of the “darkness” of matter, along with some comparatively early gnostic texts, such as the Acts of Thomas or the Pistis Sophia, which speak of the dragon or snake of primeval chaos; or the doctrine of the Naassenes, as related in Hippolytus of Rome’s Refutatio, who favoured an interpretation of the waters of Gen-

 Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments translated out of their original tongues. Authorized (King James) Version (1952) (Philadelphia, Pa.: National Bible Press, 1952), 5.  Theogony 116, in Hesiod, Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006, rev. 2018); Metamorphoses I, 7, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, Books 1 – 8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916). See Glenn W. Most’s chapter in this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-008

112

Florian Mehltretter

esis and of Psalm 29 as the darkness of matter, in which the spirit loses itself.³ Nearer to the modern age, medieval Catharism has much in common with these tendencies, whereas probably the most influential gnostic text of all time, the Poimandres, was translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1463 and widely read in the renaissance; it speaks of a terrible darkness, formed like a snake, that moves down from a world of light and transforms itself into humid, disordered matter that must be elevated by a divine word from above.⁴ A less doctrinarily dangerous, but nevertheless thorny issue connected with these discussions concerns the possible precedence of matter over form within the act of divine creation itself. What is at stake here is the question of whether or not matter can exist independently of form (or spiritual entities like ideas) and even the perfection of God’s creation: Did He at first create a chaotic jumble of unformed matter that had to be ordered afterwards? Now, within the confines of Christian theology, the more potentially perilous of these questions were probably considered closed by the end of antiquity, even though they sometimes resurfaced in special contexts (and the secondary question as to whether God created matter before imbuing it with form continued to be discussed). But esoteric traditions or poetic renderings, especially of the myth of creation, are another matter. Poetry in particular by its very nature tends to revive such battles: on the one hand, in a very banal sense because such retellings rephrase the biblical wording and thus produce linguistic difference, but more specifically, and more importantly, because the effects of poetic imagery and the accumulation of narrative detail tend to engender ambiguity. At the same time, however, as we shall see, poetry can develop its own strategies for dealing with the philosophical problems arising from such a situation. My aim is to show the specifically poetic way in which poets like Tasso, Du Bartas and other late Renaissance authors treat the potentially dangerous implications of pagan or gnostic conceptions of chaos in the late 16th-century atmosphere of coagulating orthodoxies, both Protestant and Catholic: the chaotic potential of chaos in the late Renaissance, so to speak. My focus, however, is less on the theology itself than on literary choices and techniques and the poetic horizons they may open up.⁵

 Hans Jonas, Gnosis. Die Botschaft des fremden Gottes (Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig: Insel, 1999), 148.  Jonas, Gnosis, 185.  Tasso famously uses the word “chaos” in a different context to refer to the state of his lyric poetry before the last revision of his Rime in book form: “Amore esce da la confusione, in quella guisa che da gli antichi poeti fu descritta che uscisse dal seno del caos.” (Torquato Tasso, Rime, parte prima [Mantova: Osanna, 1591] [dedication letter]), but this is quite obviously a merely

Mixed Abysses

113

2 Abissi When Torquato Tasso, in 1592, set out to write his epic, Le sette giornate del mondo creato, (The Seven Days of the Creation of the World), he had to define his position with regard to many intertexts. Apart from the Old Testament, most notably the Book of Genesis, there were many patristic and apologetic works on his desk, the most prominent of which was Basil of Caesarea’s Homiliae in Hexaemeron and other works by the Cappadocian Fathers, which Tasso, incidentally, probably read in Latin translations originating from the circle of Erasmus and Pirckheimer.⁶ Another important intertext was Tasso’s favourite sparring partner in things cosmological, a book he admired as poetry but had to rebut as philosophy, Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Tasso also had access to De opificio mundi by an important Jewish philosopher of the Hellenistic age, Philo of Alexandria, as well as the cosmological epics by Hesiod and Ovid, and a more recent book, the hexaemeric epic by the French protestant poet Guillaume Du Bartas, La Sepmaine ou la création du monde of 1578. This is itself an anti-Lucretian poem,⁷ of which Edouard Du Monin had published a Latin translation as early as 1579, Mundi creatio (Tasso may even have known Ferrante Guisone’s Italian version of 1592).⁸ In addition to these, many more intertextual presences, such as Gregorius Nazianzenus and other Church Fathers, are carefully evi-

rhetorical, not a philosophical use of the term, to signify that the rime amorose, even though born in disorder, will now be ordered as a petrarchist canzoniere should be (for the cyclic structure of Tasso’s Rime see Gerhard Regn, Torquato Tassos zyklische Liebeslyrik und die petrarkistische Tradition: Studien zur “Parte prima” der “Rime” (1591/1592) (Tübingen: Narr, 1987); this context will not be explored in this article.  See Giovanni Baffetti, “Il ritorno dei padre nel Cinquecento: Il ‘Mondo creato’ del Tasso” in Letteratura in forma di sermone: I rapport tra predicazione e letteratura nei secoli XIII–XVI; atti del seminario di studi, eds. Ginetta Auzzas, Giovanni Baffetti, and Carlo Delcorno (Firenze: Olschki, 2003), 150 and 153 – 155.  On this topic, see Stéphane Lamacz, “La construction du savoir et la réécriture du De Rerum Natura dans La Sepmaine de Du Bartas,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 64/3 (2002): 627– 638. Like Tasso, Du Bartas has to integrate aspects of the philosophy of nature into the framework of biblical revelation, cf. Frank Lestringant, “La Bible et le Jardin: les deux voies de la Révélation dans La Sepmaine de Du Bartas,” Littératures 29 (1993): 11– 24.  For the possible role of Ferrante Guisone, see Paola Cosentino, “Per un’ipotesi di lettura del Tasso autore del Mondo creato: la Divina Settimana di Ferrante Guisone,” Italique II (1999): 143 – 165 at 144.

114

Florian Mehltretter

denced in margin of the fair copy drawn up for Tasso, known as the Codex Palatinus Parmensis 42.⁹ Tasso knew what he was doing, and he liked to show it.¹⁰ A more hidden, but perhaps even more persistent textual presence in his mind is, as ever, Aristotle’s Poetics, and here Tasso has to contend with the Aristotelian verdict against didactic poetry as devoid of imitation. I will not dwell on this last topic, but I would like to stress two aspects: Tasso dramatizes both God’s creative action and the discursive actions of the various philosophers and schools he attempts to refute, so as to transform his account of what the world is into an action packed story. And he chooses blank verse, endecasillabi sciolti, as his metre, to mark his text as an answer to classical antiquity. In the sixteenth century, this choice, which, in Italian poetry – in the absence of any length or accent-based substructures in the sense of a metrical foot – tends to obscure the verse structure of the text and is thus a little awkward, would have been read as a strong classicist signal. Tasso thus takes up the Aristotelian challenge – and at the same time his poem is intended to be read as an answer to the most important cosmological poem of antiquity, Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Du Bartas, incidentally, sticks with the traditional rhymed couplets of French epic poetry. We shall keep an eye on all of these texts, but we should start with a glance at two Italian sonnets by minor renaissance poets, texts which Tasso knew and admired. In fact, he quotes them as prime examples of the sublime in lyric poetry, for they both treat elevated thematic matter in an elevated, difficult and austere style. They both refer to the opening verses of Genesis 1: 1 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram 2 terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas 3 dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux. […] 6 dixit quoque Deus fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum […]¹¹

 The codex Palatinus 42 is not Tasso’s autograph, but a copy made by Angelo Ingegneri. In the past, there was some doubt as to whether the source indications in the margins are to be regarded as authorized by the poet, but Enrico Proto, “Per le fonti del ‘Mondo creato’,” Rassegna critica di letteratura italiana 14 (1909): 195 – 196, and, more recently and in more detail, Raffaela Loda, “Il ‘Mondo creato’ di Torquato Tasso d la Bibbia glossata,” Aevum 72.3 (1998): 733 – 757 at 735, have shown that this is indeed the case, as Tasso himself seems to have made corrections not only to the text but to the marginal notes as well.  For details concerning the composition of Il mondo creato see the meticulous study by Paolo Luparia, “Tra Napoli e Roma: la genesi e composizione del ‘Mondo creato’,” in Tasso a Roma, ed. Guido Baldassarri (Ferrara: Panini, 2004): 143 – 175.  Robertus Weber, ed., Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983), 4.

Mixed Abysses

115

[King James Bible: 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. […] 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters …]¹²

The first sonnet I would like to comment on is by Francesco Coppetta de’ Beccuti, a mid-sixteenth century Petrarchist. I quote only the opening quatrain, which lists some of God’s great deeds in infinitive form: Locar sovra gli abissi i fondamenti de l’ampia terra e, quasi un sottil velo, l’aria spiegar con le tue mani, e ’l cielo e le stelle formar chiare e lucenti;¹³ [To build over the abysses the foundations of the wide earth and, as if it were a subtle veil, to spread the air with Thine hands, and to form the heavens and the stars, bright and shining;]¹⁴

Tasso, in his La Cavalletta ovvero della poesia toscana, compares this sonnet to another one by Giovanni Della Casa, published posthumously in 1558, which I should like to discuss in conjunction with the one by Coppetta.¹⁵ Della Casa, a serious and excellent poet, was bishop of Benevento and papal nuntius to Venice where, infamously, he introduced the Roman Inquisition and co-authored one of the first Indices librorum prohibitorum. I mention this in order to illustrate the deep connection between intellectuals, such as poets or philosophers, and the church authorities in the high and late Renaissance. The Counter Reformation and even its more sinister manifestations in the Inquisition or the Index, are not merely philistine enterprises arising outside the intelligentsia and clipping, as it were, its wings; regrettable though they may be, they are part of an intellectual process that involves the educated classes as a whole. Della Casa’s poem, the famous “Questa vita mortal”, closes his collection of lyric poetry, and in this case, it is the final sestet which interests us:

 Holy Bible, Authorized Version (above note 1), 5.  Francesco Coppetta de’ Beccuti, “Locar sovra gli abissi,” in Lirici europei del cinquecento, eds. Gian Mario Anselmi, Keir Elam, Giorgio Forni and Davide Monda (Milano: Rizzoli, 2004), e-book, n.p.  All translations: F.M., unless otherwise indicated.  See Torquato Tasso, “La Cavaletta ovvero de la poesia toscana,” in T.T.: Dialoghi, ed. Ezio Raimondi (Firenze: Sansoni, 1958), 615.

116

Florian Mehltretter

Anzi ’l dolce aer puro e questa luce chiara, che ’l mondo a gli occhi nostri scopre, traesti tu d’abissi oscuri e misti: e tutto quel che ’n terra o ’n ciel riluce di tenebre era chiuso, e tu l’apristi; e ’l giorno e ’l sol de le tue man sono opre.¹⁶ [Nay, the sweet and pure air and this clear light, Which opens up the world to our eyes, Thou didst extract from obscure and mixed abysses: And all the things that shine on earth or in the heavens Were closed in darkness, and Thou didst open it; And the day and the sun are works by thy hands.]

Tasso dedicated an entire lecture to this poem, in particular to its sound and style. I cannot go into the details of Tasso’s reading here. Instead, I should like to comment on something that unites the two poems, but which Tasso does not mention; it is, however, my contention, that he reacts to it in his own creation epic. Both creation sonnets take up the word abissos from the Vulgate, rendering it as abissi. While in the case of Coppetta, the abysses are mentioned solely for their depth, in order to stress God’s incalculable feat in locating and fixing the entire firmament on something that is not only deeply unstable, but indeed not even there, a kind of black hole, Della Casa furnishes the abissi with two qualities that belong to the dark chaos of the Tohu wa bohu: they are obscure and mixed, that is, they lack the light of the spirit and they contain something that is without order or structure. In both cases, however, the abysses are introduced as an object independent of God, an external, negative other, on which to build or from which to extract something positive. God’s achievement lies in overcoming the nature of this alien crevice, be it by building something on top of it in spite of its bottomless nature, or by extracting from it its very opposite. They appear as impediments or obstacles to God’s greatness that are duly surmounted. They are thus open to an interpretation in the sense of an independent existence of unformed space or matter before the creation, especially in the case of Della Casa, with the telling adjective misti. Now, I am not suggesting that Della Casa, the man of the Roman Inquisition, is sailing a bit close to the wind here. I am merely stating that poetic renderings

 Giovanni Della Casa, “Questa vita mortal,” in Lirici europei del cinquecento (note 13 above).

Mixed Abysses

117

of the beginning of Genesis normally do nothing to clarify the interpretative openness of the biblical verses in question. Rather, they open the abyss further. My first question directed at Tasso’s creation epic is therefore: How does Le sette giornate del mondo creato deal with the problem of “mixed abysses”? What is striking in this regard, is that Tasso postpones the issue. He takes his time on the first verse of Genesis 1, explaining, praying, elaborating and refuting heretic interpretations. In fact, it takes Tasso 525 verses to get to the second sentence of Genesis and thus to an interpretation of God’s relation to the “face of the deep”, as the Authorized Version puts it. But he does use the word abissi in the first five hundred lines of his poem, and in fact he does so rather more often than his usual standards of poetic variation would lead us to expect. Like Du Bartas before him, Tasso starts with a prayer, an invocation of God that slowly transforms itself into a Christian version of the classical prooemium, with the Holy Spirit taking the place of the muse. Tasso then begins his account of creation in verse 78 with thoughts on what may have happened before its inception. Against pagan ideas of theogony, he asserts that God was neither born nor was He lonely before His first creative act, being content with the rich inner life of the Trinity. Instead of succumbing to the follies of pagan philosophy such as this one, he adds, Christians should listen to the voice of Wisdom or Sapientia, to whom the next section is dedicated. This is where we first encounter our abissi, in fact twice in close proximity. Following Proverbs 8:24, Tasso stresses that the Sophia was with God even before the abysses were created. Tasso thus introduces the term via the Book of Proverbs and not via the ambiguous passage at the beginning of Genesis, avoiding as he does so any danger of being taken to allude to a pre-existent chaos. God’s Wisdom was created before anything material or spatial existed; thus anything that came afterwards had to come into being already formed and planned. The fact that Wisdom precedes the creation of space renders the deep abysses a great deal less chaotic. And in any case, the context of the canto in question implies that abissi here stands for nothing more exciting than the depths of the sea. Space and matter are thus clearly created and not eternal. After sketching out the two main reasons for creation, which is to say, the Platonic idea of gratuitously overflowing goodness (as found in the Timaios) and the motif of the creation as reflection of God’s glory, the poem muses on the beginning of time before time. How can time begin, when the notion of inception is in itself temporal? To answer this, God’s eternity is likened to a quiet lake, unmoved in itself, but capable of producing a small stream that comes out of it, a rivulet that comes into being and into motion emanating

118

Florian Mehltretter

from a body of water that contains the power of motion without having to move itself. After time, space. Tasso now comes to grapple with the problem of material creation, which is what interests us. He first dismisses atomic theories, such as those of Epicurus or Lucretius: A creator who would let chance decide which particles team up with others to form a world, would build but a frail cobweb. God, on the contrary, set the world upon solid columns, and he did so by His will. This is where our abissi come in once more – or, rather, several times, including the synonym, latebre. But Tasso uses these terms to signify the depth and unknowability of God’s plans, not the chaotic darkness of matter. Tasso does introduce the term as perhaps expected by his readers, he even repeats it, but he draws its fangs by applying it to an altogether different object. God’s idea of the world, then, is much deeper and vaster than creation itself. This bit of Platonic ontology is explained by likening it to the work of a jeweller or a miniaturist: The supreme art of such artists lies in expressing an all-encompassing idea of the world in minute form. Thus, the ideal world is greater than the material world, and matter becomes a secondary phenomenon. And in any case, matter is created as a mere medium that immediately receives the forms given to it by the creator. Matter looks expectantly at God and dresses itself up in the beauty He bestows on it, colours His thousands of forms and lights its candles from His great light. Tasso here follows Philo of Alexandria (but he does not use Philo’s idea of a cosmic Adam, which would constitute a kind of spiritual sketch of the universe – as Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann has termed it).¹⁷ From the expectant eagerness of matter to adopt the forms bestowed on it by God, Tasso deduces that there can be no two independent principles such as good and bad in the Manichean sense. For if matter emanated from a principle opposed to God, its reactions to His acts of form-giving would be rebellious or lazy. But “we see”, says Tasso (“ma noi veggiam”, 313) that it is eager to adopt the forms He deigns to impart, and perhaps the creations that are most beautiful are the most constant; these, Tasso muses, may remain until the world itself dissolves. I shall now jump Tasso’s account of what matter is or could be that follows here; I will return to it later. Let me stress, however, that, following Basil of Caesarea, Tasso puts forth the view that matter was created together with form, not

 See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia perennis. Historische Umrisse abendländischer Spiritualität in Antike, Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), 217– 223.

Mixed Abysses

119

independently, and let me say that the form abissi does not occur in this section of the poem: One could even say: it is notable by its very absence. It reappears only in the following section devoted to the second verse of Genesis 1, in a paraphrase of the biblical text: Ne le tenebre allor de’ ciechi abissi Lo spirto divino, e sovra l’acque Era portato […] (525 – 527)¹⁸ [In the darkness, then, of the blind abysses / And over the waters the Divine Spirit / Was floating]

By now we know that these are not the “mixed abysses” of Della Casa’s poem. In fact, Tasso subsequently explains, again taking his lead from Basil of Caesarea, that the darkness of the deep in this passage is to be understood in an entirely literal sense. The earth is covered with water and therefore invisible, and in any case the sun and the stars have not yet been created, so there is no light – and there are no humans capable of seeing by the light. The earth is thus enshrined in threefold invisibility. This, incidentally, corresponds more or less to St. Thomas’ interpretation of the passage.¹⁹ Tasso is obviously at pains to purge the abysses of their mixed, Tohu wa bohu potential, and he distributes the term strategically over his text in order to recode it either in the sense of the depths of God’s plans or in the more banal sense of the depths of the ocean. But this does not mean that he is entirely uninterested in the question of the chaos of matter. Before we turn to his account of it, it is as well to read what Guillaume Du Bartas has to say on this question.

 Edition quoted: Torquato Tasso, Aminta, Il re Torrismondo, Il mondo creato, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome: Salerno, 1999).  “Et quantum ex littera Genesis I, accipi potest, triplex formositas deerat, propter quod dicebatur creatura corporalis informis. Deerat enim a toto corpore diaphano, quod dicitur caelum, pulchritudo lucis, unde dicitur quod tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi. Deerat autem terrae duplex pulchritudo. Una, quam habet ex hoc quod est aquis discooperta, et quantum ad hoc dicitur quod terra erat inanis, sive invisibilis, quia corporali aspectui patere non poterat, propter aquas undique eam cooperientes. Alia vero, quam habet ex hoc quod est ornata herbis et plantis, et ideo dicitur quod erat vacua, vel incomposita, idest non ornata, secundum aliam litteram” [scilicet: Septuaginta]. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947), https://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa, accessed 3 January 2019, I Q66 a1, resp.

120

Florian Mehltretter

3 Nulla Apparve Du Bartas takes the opposite view to that of Tasso: Matter was first created and only afterwards imbued with form. Like the mother bear according to Isidor’s Etymologiae, God first brought a formless mass into being, and then, as it were, licked it into form.²⁰ Of course, He could have done it all at once, but according to Du Bartas, He took more time in order better to show His loving care. This problem, not to be confused with the related question of a possible preexistence of matter (but nonetheless potentially dangerous), has been discussed since the Church Fathers. Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, sums up the two main interpretations of Genesis 1 regarding the creation of matter and form – and the possibility of a kind of first matter devoid of form – and ascribes them to their respective originators, Augustine on the one hand (matter and form were created simultaneously), and Gregory the Great, Jerome and the Venerable Bede on the other (unformed matter was created first and existed in chaotic form until it was ordered by God), but does not pronounce himself clearly in favour of one of them.²¹ St. Thomas Aquinas’ discussion of this problem is less open than that of Peter Lombard. He holds that matter precedes form only logically, not temporally, because existence in time implies being in act, which in turn implies form. This excludes the possibility of a period in time in which matter existed without form. The possible alternative reading, however, that matter was first created in a general form, which was later differentiated, would contradict the doctrine of

 Isidorus, Etymologiae 12, ii, 22: “Ursus fertur dictus quod ore suo formet fetus, quasi orsus. Nam aiunt eos informes generare partus, et carnem quandam nasci quam mater lambendo in membra conponit.” Retrieved from http://www.monumenta.ch/latein/text.php?tabelle=Isido rus, accessed 3 January 2019. Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, La sepmaine, ou Creation du monde, eds. Sophie Arnaud-Seigle, Yvonne Bellenger, Denis Bjaï, Véronique Ferrer, Sabine Lardon and Jean-Claude Teraux (Paris: Garnier, 2011), 408 – 409. For Du Bartas’ metaphors and similes see Jan Miernowski, Dialectique et connaissance dans La Sepmaine de Du Bartas: “discours sur discours infiniment divers” (Genève: Droz, 1992), 63 – 70.  “[…] Scriptura genesis, quae dicit, in principio creasse Deum caelum, id est Angelos, et terram, scilicet materiam quattuor elementorum adhuc confusam et informem, quae a Graecis dicta est chaos; et hoc fuit ante omnem diem […] Alii quidem tradiderunt, omnia simul in materia et forma fuisse creata, quod Augustinus sensisse videtur. Alii vero hoc magis probaverunt atque asseruerunt, ut primum materia rudis atque informis, quattuor elementorum commixtionem atque confusionem tenens, creata sit […] Quam sententiam Gregorius, Hieronimus, Beda aliique plures commendant ac praeferunt.” (Petri Lombardi Sententiae, lib. II, dist. Xii, 1– 2, [Grottaferrata: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas,1971], 384– 385). This is, according to Loda, “Il ‘Mondo creato’ di Torquato Tasso”, 746, Tasso’s main source for this discussion.

Mixed Abysses

121

creatio ex nihilo (and is hence to be rejected), because in that case God’s creation would consist in merely altering something already in existence.²² Even though it could be argued (but will not be in this article) that Du Bartas is theologically in sympathy with St. Thomas,²³ the narrative actually presented

 “Augustinus enim vult quod informitas materiae corporalis non praecesserit tempore formationem ipsius, sed solum origine vel ordine naturae. Alii vero, ut Basilius, Ambrosius et Chrysostomus, volunt quod informitas materiae tempore praecesserit formationem. Et quamvis hae opiniones videantur esse contrariae, tamen parum ab invicem differunt, aliter enim accipit informitatem materiae Augustinus quam alii. Augustinus enim accipit informitatem materiae pro carentia omnis formae. Et sic impossibile est dicere quod informitas materiae tempore praecesserit vel formationem ipsius, vel distinctionem. Et de formatione quidem manifestum est. Si enim materia informis praecessit duratione, haec erat iam in actu, hoc enim duratio importat, creationis enim terminus est ens actu. Ipsum autem quod est actus, est forma. Dicere igitur materiam praecedere sine forma, est dicere ens actu sine actu, quod implicat contradictionem. Nec etiam potest dici quod habuit aliquam formam communem et postmodum supervenerunt ei formae diversae, quibus sit distincta. Quia hoc esset idem cum opinione antiquorum naturalium, qui posuerunt materiam primam esse aliquod corpus in actu, puta ignem, aerem aut aquam, aut aliquod medium. Ex quo sequebatur quod fieri non esset nisi alterari. […] Et ita, si informitas materiae referatur ad conditionem primae materiae, quae secundum se non habet aliquam formam, informitas materiae non praecessit formationem seu distinctionem ipsius tempore, ut Augustinus dicit, sed origine seu natura tantum, eo modo quo potentia est prior actu, et pars toto.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, retrieved from https://dhspriory.org/thomas/ summa, accessed 3 January 2019, I Q66 a1, resp.)  Violaine Giacomotto-Charra reads Du Bartas’ Premier Jour as a non-temporal “day”, a moment before the first moment of time, in which the prima materia is created by God as pure potentiality. Only on the second day does the creative work of distinction and of form-giving as an activity in time begin. This would correspond to St. Thomas’ concept of a logical, but not a chronological primacy of first matter over form and would thus render Du Bartas a Thomist. But Giacomotto-Charra has to account for Du Bartas’ lengthy tale of the strife between the elements in the general confusion of things, which not only fills some of the first day of his creation epic (und thus seems to imply time), but is rendered in a distinctly narrative, temporal style (und thus suggests temporality). She resolves this paradox by introducing a secondary distinction between biblical time and poetic time, according to which St. Thomas’ logical relation of first matter and the act of form-giving is metaphorically transformed into a temporal relation by the act of narrating it in a literary text. While this is not the reading proposed in this article, it is nevertheless a possible one. The fact remains, however, that Du Bartas’ narrative suggests a real period of disorder, which is later overcome, and that Tasso avoids this, preferring instead to evoke chaos in a much more cautious kind of poetic irrealis, which could even be read as a way out of Du Bartas’ conundrum. See Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, La forme des choses: poésie et savoirs dans “La sepmaine” de Du Bartas (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2009), 161– 167. For the temporal interpretation of Du Bartas’ Premier Jour favoured in this chapter, cf. Yvonne Bellenger, Du Bartas es ses divines semaines (Paris: SEDES, 1993), 281, and the enlightening pages devoted to the subject by François Roudaut, “Du Bartas, La Sepmaine, Le Premier Jour,” in Du

122

Florian Mehltretter

in his text follows Gregory the Great and Jerome in that the creation of matter precedes that of form, not just logically but temporally. This construction opens up a period of material existence without form and thus allows Du Bartas to include a lengthy description of the primeval chaos that is poetically most rewarding: God calls into being a first world devoid of form: Ce premier monde estoit une forme sans forme, Une pile confuse, un meslange difforme, D’abismes un abisme, un corps mal compassé, Un Chaos de Chaos, un tas mal entassé: Où tous les elemens se logeoyent pesle-mesle: Oú le liquide avoit avec le sec querelle, Le rond auec l’aigu, le froid auec le chaud […] La terre estoit au ciel et le ciel en la terre. […] Tout estoit sans beauté, sans reglement, sans flamme, […] Le feu n’estoit point feu, la mer n’estoit point mer […] L’air estoit sans clarté, la flamme sans ardeur, Sans fermeté la terre, & l’onde sans froideur. […] Ce n’estoit donc le monde, ains l’unique matiere Dont il devoit sortir: la riche pepiniere Des beautez de ce Tout : l’embryon qui devoit Se former en six iours en l’estat qu’on le void. […] La palpable noirceur des ombres Memphitiques, L’aer tristement espais des brouillars Cimmeriques, La grossiere vapeur de l’infernal manoir, Et, si rien s’imagine au monde de plus noir, De ce profond abisme emmanteloit la face: Le desordre regnoit haut & bas dans la masse: Tout étoit en brouillis: et ce Tas mutiné Se fust, seditieux, soy-mesme ruiné Tout soudain qu’il nasquit, si la vertu divine Esparse dans le corps de toute la machine

Bartas et l’expérience de la beauté, ed. James Dauphiné (Paris: Champion, 1993): 113 – 148, at 130 – 131.

Mixed Abysses

123

N’eust servi de mastic, pour ensemble coller Le vagueux Ocean, le ciel, la terre, et l’air.²⁴ (94– 96) [This first world was form without form, a confused pile, a formless mixture, an abyss of abysses, an ill-assembled body, chaos of chaos, a heap ill heaped up, where all the elements dwelt pell-mell, where the liquid quarrelled with the dry, the round with the pointed, the cold with the warm […] The earth was in the heavens, the heavens in the earth. […] All was without beauty, without regularity, without flame, […] Fire was not fire, the sea was not sea […] The air was without clarity, the flame without ardour, without firmness the earth and the wave without coolness. In a word, it was not the world, but just the matter from which it should go out: the rich tree nursery of the beauties of that whole: the embryo that would have to form in six days, to achieve the state which we see now. […] The palpable blackness of the Memphitic shadows, the sadly dense air of the Cimmeric fogs, the thick vapours of the infernal manor and whatever can be imagined of blackest black, clothed the face of that profound abyss: Disorder reigned high and low in this mass: all was in enmity, and this mutinous pile would have ruined itself seditiously at the very moment of its birth, had not divine virtue, which was spread out in the body of the whole machine, served as a mastic which glued together the wavy ocean, the sky, the earth and the air.]

In fact, God’s virtue, which according to this account glued together the whole deficient machine, narrowly managed to prevent Nature ruining itself at the moment of birth. That Du Bartas can call this formless mass a machine, clearly presupposes a premodern non-functional idea of a machine. This is about half of the text Du Bartas devotes to chaos, and he obviously loves it. He loves dwelling on the non-identity of all things, the absence of what constitutes them, the missing distinctions, forms and frontiers. Du Bartas’ sources, as indicated in the commentary of the splendid critical edition of 2011, are Ovid’s Metamorphoses book one, Augustine’s Confessions 12,8, and Hilarius of Arles’ Metrum in Genesim, 12– 15, as well as Basil of Caesarea’s brief dictum “everything is mixed” in Homiliae 1, 8 B. The interpretation according to which the unformed matter has later to be “polished” by God comes from a protestant source, Calvin’s Le Livre de la Genèse. ²⁵ Tasso will be careful to avoid this idea, if only in order not be too close to protestant sources. But Du Bartas blows these short snippets of tradition out of all proportion. He dwells on every aspect of chaos and thus gives very clear poetic evidence of

 Edition quoted: Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, La sepmaine, ou Creation du monde, eds. Sophie Arnaud-Seigle, Yvonne Bellenger, Denis Bjaï, Véronique Ferrer, Sabine Lardon and JeanClaude Teraux (Paris: Garnier, 2011).  All sources in the commentary of Du Bartas, La sepmaine, ou Creation du monde (above note 24), 94– 95. For Du Bartas’ affinity to Calvin, see Véronique Ferrer, “Du Bartas et la science de Dieu” in La Sepmaine de du Bartas, ses lecteurs et la science du temps: en hommage à Yvonne Bellenger, ed. Denis Bjaï (Genève: Droz, 2015): 189 – 202.

124

Florian Mehltretter

the inferiority of matter. The obvious disadvantages of this solution are, however, twofold: Matter can be thought of as independent of form and thus of spirit; and God’s creation appears initially as a glorious failure, a blundering first attempt that has to be corrected later.²⁶ Both aspects seem to suggest that God, in His creation, needed to overcome something deeply alien, that He had to bridge a chasm of duality – even though Du Bartas clearly does not intend any explicitly heterodox interpretation; it is, rather, a disseminative poetic effect. But Tasso was not prepared to take such a risk, preferring instead to follow more closely Basil of Caesarea’s (and St. Thomas’) hypothesis that matter and form were created simultaneously.²⁷ But apparently he did not want to forego the useful implications of chaos either, especially the evidence it might afford as to the inferiority of matter – and we shall see presently how he achieves this. Let us therefore take a closer look: Dunque lo spirto suo non poscia od ante, Ma con le forme la creò spirando; E di bellezza e di bontà divina Spirolle al seno un desiderio interno, Un vago istinto, anzi un leggiadro amore, Ch’a la natia diè fine orrida guerra: Per cui ritrosa e fella e ribellante Era a se stessa in suo furor discorde, Se dir si può che mai la terra al foco Fosse confusa in quella orribil mischia. Né foco era, né terra, e l’aria e l’onda Si distruggean ne le contrarie tempre. E ciascuna di lor nel dubbio acquisto Se medesma perdeva, e fiera morte Era la sua vittoria; e l’imo al sommo Male adeguato e mal confuso appresso. Onde quella incomposta e rozza mole Né tutto era, né nulla, e nulla apparve. Fu questa forse immaginata guerra E d’altra guerra pure imago ed ombra. E simolacro di tenzon maligna, Che fé natura al suo fattore avversa. Ma l’alto Dio creò quasi repente La materia e le forme; e qual sia prima,

 This corresponds to the first “sed contra” discussed in the article from St. Thomas’ Summa (above note 19), I Q66 a1.  For a slightly different interpretation of Tasso’s answer to Du Bartas’ chaos, see Armando Maggi, “La creazione prima della creazione: ‘Il mondo creato’ di Torquato Tasso alla luce di ‘La sepmaine’ di Gullaime du Bartas,” Romance Notes 37 (1996): 59 – 66, at 62– 65.

Mixed Abysses

125

O queste, o quella, io non mi glorio e vanto Già di provare in periglioso arringo, Da l’Academia uscito e dal Liceo. (327– 353) [Therefore, His Spirit created it [matter] neither beforehand nor afterwards,/ But with the forms;/ And He inspired it with such desire/ Of beauty and divine goodness,/ A vague instinct or a gracious love,/ Which set an end to its native horrible war,/ Because of which it was stubborn and unruly/ Against itself in its discordant fury,/ If at all one could say that ever the earth/ Was mixed with fire in this terrible scuffle./ There was neither fire nor earth, and air and waves/ Destroyed each other in contrary qualities./ And each of them, in doubtful conquest,/ Lost itself, and cruel death/ Was its victory, and the lowest with the highest/ Was ill-matched and confused at the same time./ Therefore, this un-composed and rough mass/ Was neither all nor nothing, and nothing appeared / appeared to be nothing./ This was perhaps an imaginary war/ And at the same time image and shadow of other wars./ And a simulacrum of adverse strife,/ Which made nature averse to its maker./ But the high God created as it were at the same time Matter and forms; and which of them was first,/ These or that, I would not pride myself/ To prove in that perilous joust,/ Which came out of the Academy and the Lyceum.]

As the end of this passage makes clear, the age-old question whether form or matter existed first, debated since the time of Plato and Aristotle, is not an inconsequential one. Fighting for one of the sides is dangerous. This reminds us of the intellectual climate of the Counter Reformation. Tasso declines to opt openly for one of the two solutions. But in spite of this seemingly agnostic attitude, his poetic text seeks to have it both ways, in line with Tasso’s general tendency (shared by many of his contemporaries) towards a synthesis of both systems.²⁸ It conjures up an image of the elements and qualities at war with each other, which, if not quite as drastic as that of Du Bartas, dramatizes the lack of self-sufficiency and even the inferiority of formless matter. At the same time, however, the text asserts that this war never actually took place, because God created matter and form simultaneously. It is left open to debate whether one can say that the elements were ever mixed at all, and the pun “nulla apparve” gives this openness a poetic form: It is unclear whether the war of the elements, if it took place, was merely invisible (nulla ap-

 Petrocchi sees this as the underlying programme of the Mondo Creato: “È invece nel segno di una sia pur confusa conciliazione di Platone con Aristotele che nasce il Mondo Creato, tentativo di inserire una concezione dell’universo d’ispirazione platonica nelle leggi scientifiche, cosmogoniche, del De caelo et mundo e del De generatione animalium[.]” (Giorgio Petrocchi, “L’ispirazione religiosa del Tasso e il mondo creato” in Torquato Tasso, ed. by Antonio Banfi (Milano: Marzorati, 1957): 415 – 429 at 427. There are many contemporaries who, in their different ways, strive for a synthesis of this kind, such as Bernardo Telesio, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella or Francesco Patrizi da Cherso.

126

Florian Mehltretter

parve) or whether it produced even a brief moment in which nothing – or even nothingness – appeared (nulla apparve) as a result of the reciprocal annulment of the warring elements. Tasso’s strife between the elements is therefore only a virtual one, it takes place in a non-existent moment, a point without extension on the arrow of time. But at the same time, this virtual war introduces the possibility of discord into the world, if only in an imaginary way, as a shadow of other wars. It offers a brief glimpse of the negative as unrelated to God, brought into being by the very possibility of His temporary inactivity. This is a very elegant solution, because it integrates a gnostic motif, the birth of evil out of a rebellion of matter (and thus not from God Himself), into an abstract, philosophical description almost completely free of mythical elements. Tasso’s chaos, then, is pure potentiality, it never appears in time or space. He opens up a virtual space of chaos in his poetic performance, while at the same time denying its ultimate reality. He has to do this, I think, for three reasons: First, he has to explain the very possibility of discord or war, which, as a kind of secondary idea, is born in this non-existent moment – that is, not from God’s own imagination; second, he has to give evidence of the inferiority of matter and its incapability of existing by itself, prior to the creation of form and hence of a spiritual inner core of the world – this is perhaps the main function of chaos in Tasso, especially in the context of this long part of the first canto, in which the relation of matter to form is the main theme; and third, of course, he needs to account for the presence of the Tohu wa bohu motif in Genesis 1, without, like Della Casa, making the mixed abysses of Chaos into something alien and potentially independent of God.

4 Two Conclusions I should like to draw two conclusions, an historical one, and a systematic one. On the level of history, it is interesting to see how Tasso’s position as regards heterodoxy differs from what modern readers might perhaps expect. His religious poetry is neither a meek reproduction of orthodox Catholic teaching, nor is it a bold attempt at saying what is forbidden or even impossible to think, such as that of Giordano Bruno. Tasso seems obsessed with integrating every grain of truth, from the most heterogeneous sources, into one great construction that has to conform to Counter Reformation theology in a way perhaps more radical than contemporary theologians themselves think necessary – and it has to conform to the literary traditions of Petrarchism or Aristotelian poetics at the

Mixed Abysses

127

same time. There are even moments where he seems to follow Dante’s poetics of sublime harshness, as evidenced in some passages of the latter’s Commedia, arguably the greatest Italian didactic epic; Tasso thus introduces yet another model, which would have been seen in direct opposition to the Petrarchist poetics evident in many of Tasso’s more elegant phrases.²⁹ Writing at the point of intersection of various normative tendencies, Tasso seeks to achieve perfect resolutions in all dimensions. He himself tries to lay down the law of orthodoxy, whether in his treatise on Aristotelian poetics, the Discorsi del poema eroico, or his auto-accusation and subsequent acquittal by the Inquisition.³⁰ Tasso’s aim seems to be to integrate the plurality of truths characteristic of the sixteenth century into one great, titanic edifice, even at the cost of personal breakdowns, which indeed occurred more than once. Tasso’s case demonstrates that in some authors, the norms imposed by movements like the Counter Reformation (or, on a different level, poetological Aristotelianism) are not merely external restrictions or top-down regulations. Rather, they become personal concerns of the agents involved, whether they be philosophers or poets. This suggests that the normative tendencies of the late Renaissance need to be taken seriously as intellectual events. They are not merely cases of vertical surveillance, but rather, as a group of historians currently active at Munich University would put it, cases of horizontal, vertical and internal “vigilance”, an active concern of all agents involved.³¹ On a systematic level, I should like to draw attention to the rather unusual form of narration in Tasso’s passage on the chaos of matter. It is not a fiction in the usual sense, which is to say, a make-believe that introduces an invented single event representative of a general truth or problematic. Nor is it a metaphorical or allegorical narrative: It may have metaphoric aspects or components, but it is not predominantly an analogistic model of something else. It is not exactly a case of counterfactual storytelling either, as it does not present us with a hypothetical consequence of a posited event in the sense of “what would have happened if” – even though that is perhaps the nearest equivalent.

 For echoes of Petrarch and Dante in the Mondo creato see Guiseppe Mazzotta, “Introduzione: Il mondo creato del Tasso. Potenza delle immagini e controversie post-tridentine,” in Visibile teologia. Il libro sacro figurato in Italia tra cinquecento e seicento, eds. Armina Ardissino and Elisabetta Selmi, XIX (Roma: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 2012).  On this topic, see Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 127.  See https://www.fnz.geschichte.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/forsch_projekte/vigilanz/ index.html, accessed 3 January 2019.

128

Florian Mehltretter

Rather, it is a poetic performance of something that very nearly happened, an acting out of a virtual reality that is represented as an important aspect of the nature of matter, but an aspect that never made it, as it were, into the empirical world. The text gives poetic space to an object whose existence is, at the same time, denied, and it uses this poetic space to provide a rich verbal display of chaos, that clearly goes beyond the intellectualism of counterfactual narration. While I would hesitate to call this procedure an unprecedented innovation, I would like to stress its truly poetic, evocative force. Poetry thus succeeds in suggesting an abyss of potentiality.

Andreas Höfele

“Come to Great Confusion” Chaos in King Lear “Chaos” is a rare word in Shakespeare. It occurs in only four of his plays and only once in each of them¹: Henry VI Part 3, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and – most memorably – in Othello: Othello Excellent wretch, perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! and when I love thee not Chaos is come again.

(3.3.91– 93)²

This is the turning point of the tragedy. Following immediately on Desdemona’s exit, Othello exuberantly equals the fixity of his love for her with that of the created world itself. But the addressee of his declaration is the villain, Iago, and by the end of the scene Iago’s insinuations will have undermined Othello’s confidence. The assurance of his love and thus his world is shattered. Chaos is come again. Although the word “chaos” does not occur in King Lear, the phenomenon itself certainly does. Nowhere else in Shakespeare’s work does chaos reach quite the same scale. In Othello, it is his world that is shattered while the state of Venice calmly, if sadly, moves on. In Hamlet, the state of Denmark is rotten and the troubled state of the prince’s mind registers a profound unsettling of traditional certainties. In Macbeth, nature itself abhors the killing of the legitimate king so that “the earth / Was feverous and did shake” (2.3.61– 62)³. But in neither the Scottish nor the Danish play is the frame of political, social or indeed any order quite as totally crushed as it is in what we might call Shakespeare’s “British play”. Dissolution in King Lear is both more thorough and more universal. In the first part of this paper I want to suggest that this has to do with a certain indeterminacy of the play’s setting in space and time and a similar indeterminacy of the characters’ motives. I will then examine the disruptive consequen-

 And once in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.  William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, ed. Michael Neill, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).  William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-009

130

Andreas Höfele

ces of Lear’s sudden resolve to divide his kingdom into two rather than three parts. This will be followed by a discussion of the Gloucester subplot focussing on Gloucester’s son Edgar in his disguise as Poor Tom, the figure most fully in tune with the dynamics of undoing, the pull toward nothingness which culminates in the storm scenes of Act 3. I will conclude with the question of whether the play offers, or at least hints at, a prospect beyond chaos.

1 Where and When? The dramatist Edward Bond, author of one of the more significant 20th-century rewritings of the Lear-theme, prefixes his play with an epigraph: “Lear lived about the year 3100. He was king for 60 years. He built Leicester and was buried under the river Soar. His father was killed while trying to fly over London. His youngest daughter killed herself when she fell from power. (Holinshed and Geoffrey of Monmouth)”.⁴ 3100 is at once utopian and archaic, distant future and distant past. In less defamiliarizing terms it is the year 900 BC, if you add up the biblical generations since Adam and Eve some 6000 years ago. Combine this with the perfectly, but somehow deceptively ordinary place names of Leicester and the river Soar and spice it with the curious mix of the mythical, the modern and the foolish in the failed attempt of the totally irrelevant father to fly over London, and you get, I think, a fairly successful pastiche of what we might call Shakespeare’s dis-enclosing, or unlimiting, of the Lear world.⁵ The juggling with time, place, and planes of reality in Bond’s epigraph has its closest Shakespearean analogue in a passage of King Lear which was long considered spurious because critics deemed it unworthy of the Bard.⁶

 Edward Bond, Lear (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), xv. Bond declares his qualification for the task of writing a Lear-play with the remarkable first sentence of his preface: “I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners.” (op. cit., v)  The two sources Bond cites, Holinshed and Geoffrey of Monmouth, ratify this overlapping of history and myth, fact and fantasy. The one, Raphael Holinshed, compiler of historiographic chronicles, provided Shakespeare with the source narratives for his English history plays of the 1590s. The other, a 12th-century Welsh priest, traced the history of the kings of Britain back to their mythical begetter Brutus or Brute of Troy, the great-grandson of Homer’s and Virgil’s Aeneas. See, for example, Richard Waswo, “Our Ancestors, the Trojans. Inventing Cultural Identity in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria 7.2 (1995): 269 – 290.  Sheldon P. Zitner, “The Fool’s Prophecy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 18.1 (1967): 76 – 80. For strong defences of the authenticity and relevance of the passage see: John Kerrigan, “Revision, adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear,” in The Division of the Kingdom: Shakespeare’s two Versions of

“Come to Great Confusion”

131

It occurs almost exactly in the middle of the play, at the end of the first storm scene in Act 3 as chaos is mounting and Lear’s progress is about to reach its nadir in madness and destitution. Having braved the thunderstorm and raged against it in his impending madness, Lear is about to seek shelter in a hovel with his last two remaining followers. One of them exits with a speech: Fool This is a brave night to cool a courtesan. I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go: When priests are more in word than matter, When brewers mar their malt with water, When nobles are their tailors’ tutors, No heretics burned but wenches’ suitors; When every case in law is right No squire in debt, nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues, Nor cut-purses come not to throngs, When usurers tell their gold i’the field, And bawds and whores do churches build, Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion: Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, That going shall be used with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time.

(3.2.79 – 96)⁷

When Shakespeare writes clumsy verse, it is with great skill. The alternation of gratingly forced with slickly pat rhymes gives the onward movement of the Fool’s litany an air of clownish stumbling, of always almost tripping but yet making it to the finish regardless. The mechanical parallelism of the “When…”-propositions suggests tight-knit coherence. The long-withheld “Then…”-conclusion seems to clinch it. Only the actual content of the prophecy makes a shambles of logical consistency. The first four lines register abuses, priests uttering words without substance, brewers diluting their beer, nobles addicted to fashion, lovers burned by syphilis. The six lines following do the exact opposite. They describe a utopian “ideal that will never come”.⁸ In this ideal state, the realm of Albion would not come to, but rather come out of, great confusion. And the

‘King Lear,’ eds. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983): 195 – 245, and Gary Taylor, “King Lear: the Date and Authorship of the Folio Version,” in Division of the Kingdom: 351– 451.  William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997). All Lear quotations are from this edition.  Foakes, note in his edition of King Lear, 268 – 269.

132

Andreas Höfele

time when “going shall be used with feet” either need not come at all – because that’s the way “going” in the sense of walking is always done anyway – or it might be a time when things will at last be done properly, as they should be, in as “natural” a way as walking with one’s feet. Following William Warburton’s mid-18th-century emendation, some modern editors have thought to improve the passage by rearranging its sequence so that Albion’s lapse into confusion (11– 12/92– 93) follows directly upon the abuses listed in lines 1– 4 (81– 84).⁹ The second, utopian part of the prophecy (lines 5 – 10 /85 – 90) would then conclude, fittingly, with a state of affairs in which things are done properly, that is, “going shall be used with feet”.¹⁰ The passage makes more sense this way. But the question is: should it? And the answer, I think, is no.¹¹ Because, illogical as it stands in the First Folio text, the passage displays the very confusion it describes. Its meta-theatrical character makes a perfect fit with the performance situation.

 In this order, the first part of the prophecy conforms exactly to the lines from Chaucer which Shakespeare drew on, and which in George Puttenham’s anthology The Arte of English Poesie (1589) are rendered thus: When faith failes in Priestes sawes, And Lords hestes are holden for lawes, And robberie is tane for purchase, And lechery for solace Then shall the Realme of Albion Be brought to great confusion.  This results in the following sequence: When priests are more in word than matter, When brewers mar their malt with water, When nobles are their tailors’ tutors, No heretics burned but wenches’ suitors; Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion. When every case in law is right No squire in debt, nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues, Nor cut-purses come not to throngs, When usurers tell their gold i’the field, And bawds and whores do churches build, Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, That going shall be used with feet.  For a strong case in favour of retaining the Folio sequence, see: Terence Hawkes, “The Fool’s ‘Prophecy’ in King Lear,” Notes & Queries, new series 7 (1960): 331– 332.

“Come to Great Confusion”

133

Stepping from the imaginary locale of the storm scene to the bare platform of the Globe theatre, from locus to platea in Robert Weimann’s terms,¹² and addressing the spectators directly, the Fool is occupying a liminal zone where the world of the archaic King blurs into the everyday world of the audience. The Fool’s “parody of a tradition of Merlinesque prophecies predicting ‘downfall for the state’”¹³ freely intermingles mythical prehistory with very contemporary grievances. It also unhinges any temporal logic. Prophecies, after all, are about the future. But the future tense of “then will the realm of Albion” makes sense neither in the present of the play where confusion has already arrived in full force, nor in the present of the audience if that present is plagued by the very contemporary-sounding abuses the Fool has listed. Confusion, in other words, is universal and ageless; it is, will be and has been. The Fool’s exit line unsettles time even further. It claims futurity for the very act of its utterance that we, the audience, have just witnessed. The prophecy, it turns out is a meta-prophecy, a prophecy that, although we have just heard it, has not been made yet, but will be made by Merlin, a mythical – or spurious – figure of a distant past that is still waiting to arrive, “for I live before his time.”

2 Darker Purpose Confusion in King Lear strikes suddenly and very early on. The play opens with a grand state ritual, a demonstration of sovereign power, with the King laying down the rules for the future stability of the realm. But before the first scene is over, “Chaos is come again.” And as in Othello, the tragedy preceding Lear, love is the cause of this reversal: Lear Meantime we shall express our darker purpose. Give me the map there. Know that we have divided In three our kingdom; and ’tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age, Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburdened crawl toward death. Our son of Cornwall,

 For the constitutive duality Shakespeare’s stage inherited from medieval performance traditions, see Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); dt.: Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1967).  Foakes, note, King Lear, 268; “downfall for the state”: quote from Hawkes, “The Fool’s ‘Prophecy’” (above note 42), 331.

134

Andreas Höfele

And you, our no less loving son of Albany, We have this hour a constant will to publish Our daughters’ several dowers, that future strife May be prevented now. The two great princes, France and Burgundy, Great rivals in our youngest daughter’s love, Long in our court have made their amorous sojourn, And here are to be answered. Tell me, my daughters – Since now we will divest us both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state – Which of you shall we say doth love us most, That we our largest bounty may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge. – Goneril, Our eldest born, speak first. Goneril Sir, I do love you more than word can wield the matter, Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty, Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare, No less than life […] (1.1.35 – 58)

Goneril, wife to the Duke of Albany, passes the test with flying colours. So does Regan, the second-born, wife of Cornwall, who manages to outdo her sister with even more extravagant hyperbole. Both receive their allotted portions of the kingdom. But when the turn comes for Lear’s favourite youngest daughter Cordelia to declare her love, she radically breaks decorum. Lear’s expectant question, “what can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters?” (1.1.85 – 86), receives the answer: Cordelia Lear Cordelia Lear

Nothing, my Lord. Nothing? Nothing. How, nothing will come of nothing. Speak again. (1.1.87– 90)

Cordelia does speak again, but only to reiterate and defend her refusal to please Lear with flattery: “I love your majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less.” (1.1.92– 93) In his subsequent outburst, Lear breaks the very bond Cordelia invokes as the basis and credential of her love. “The barbarous Scythian”, Lear vows, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied and relieved,

“Come to Great Confusion”

135

As thou my sometime daughter. (1.1.117– 121)

By disowning Cordelia, Lear unwittingly propels himself beyond the social and moral order whose supreme representative he is, or should be. By aligning himself with “the barbarous Scythian” and the cannibalism traditionally ascribed to him¹⁴ Lear moves to the very border of human society. And even beyond that border, a moment later when he rebuts the loyal Earl of Kent who is trying to speak up for Cordelia: Lear Peace, Kent, Come not between the dragon and his wrath! (1.1.122 – 123)

The play abounds with images of humans lapsing into bestiality. Lear especially, once he realises his fatal error, assails the monstrous ingratitude of Goneril and Regan by comparing them to a whole zoo of predatory animals – foxes, vultures, tigers, serpents. But the first human lapse into bestiality occurs here, the first monster to raise its head in the play being none other than the King himself. “When I love thee not”, says Othello, “Chaos is come again.” In King Lear, the withdrawal of love is just as sudden and disastrous,¹⁵ and its first emblem is the King-as-Dragon.¹⁶ The mythical beast with its trail of diabolical associations is suitably placed at the outset of a story that has, as many have noted, the simplicity of a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was an old King who had three daughters. When he came to divide his kingdom between them, he demanded that each of them say how  The classical authority for Scythians’ eating of human flesh is Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (c. 77 AD). See also below note 20. For an in-depth analysis of Lear’s curses: Björn Quiring, Shakespeare’s Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, trans. Michael Winkler (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 167– 251.  A third example of such sudden reversal is Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. There, the pastoral pattern has the action move from court world to wilderness (C.L. Barber’s “green world”) and back, with a conciliatory reunion at the end. Maynard Mack found the same pattern in King Lear, arguing that the typical progress of the pastoral can be discerned even as the action takes an anti-pastoral course. Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (London: Methuen, 1966), 65. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy. A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).  It is significant that Lear does not don the likeness of the “royal” lion, but adopts that of a markedly more demonic creature. I have discussed this in detail in Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 182– 185.

136

Andreas Höfele

much she loved him. The elder two made great pretence of their love and pleased him well. But the youngest, who loved him truly, said nothing. So he cast her off, dividing her share of the realm between the other two. And so he fell into misery and affliction. Stories of this kind dispense with all but the barest minimum of psychological motivation. Yet in the case of King Lear this has not prevented commentators from scouring the text for the very thing it tenaciously withholds. “[A]ny critic”, writes the philosopher Stanley Cavell, “is likely to feel compelled to provide his own solution” to questions like: “How are we to understand Lear’s motivation in his opening scene? How Cordelia’s?”¹⁷ Cavell himself has submitted his own solution in a highly illuminating essay. But whatever solution critical ingenuity may achieve, the disturbing effect of the opening scene (and indeed of much of what follows) crucially depends on motivation being withheld. We only need to look at Shakespeare’s most immediate source, the anonymous True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and his three daughters ¹⁸, in order to recognize this as deliberate. In the older play, not one action is carried out without full disclosure of its why and wherefore. The characters clonk along like speaking automatons on the rails of motivation. Leir’s love test, for example, is simply a ploy to coax Cordella into a politically desirable marriage. The very lack of such clarification in Shakespeare’s play enhances the relentless fatality with which Lear and Cordelia step into disaster. We see them driven but cannot quite see what drives them. This puts us into much the same position as the characters of the play vis à vis the chaos that follows. Motivation withheld, psychology shrouded in the opacity of “darker purpose” (1.1.35) does not diminish the scope of the tragedy; it enlarges it. Like the de-specification of time and place, the de-motivation of action¹⁹ enhances the sense of general calamity, not of a specific instance of disorder, but of universal chaos.

 Stanley Cavell, “The avoidance of love. A reading of King Lear,” in his Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 246– 325 at 250. While not denying the “fairy tale” element of the plot, Cavell dismisses it as a mere surface phenomenon, a distraction from the play’s profounder issues. (op. cit., 290) In Cavell’s analysis of the psychic drives and blockages of the play’s central characters “fairy tale” ends up sounding a bit like “honourable” in Marc Antony’s speech over the dead body of Caesar.  The play, printed in 1605, was entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1594. It is reprinted in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 337– 402.  Werner Habicht, “Entmotivierte Handlung in Shakespeares Dramen,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (West) (1981): 106 – 117.

“Come to Great Confusion”

137

3 Division Cordelia emerges from the opening scene as an outcast, but also as the Queen of France. While Burgundy rejects the suddenly dowerless bride, France, her other suitor, sees that “[s]he is herself a dowry” (1.1.243) and “take[s] up what’s cast away” (1.1.255). This Cinderella-like turn enables Cordelia to return at the head of a French army later on in order to rescue her father from her murderous sisters. Lear himself has by then become an outcast and a hunted fugitive. His plan to “divest [himself] of rule” (1.1. 49) and yet “retain / The name, and all th’ addition to a king” (1.1.137) goes disastrously wrong – inevitably so, as he rids himself of the one person who would have secured its success. Cordelia is, not only in name, the core, the heart of his original intent, as Lear himself admits immediately after disowning her: Lear I loved her most, and thought to set my rest On her kind nursery. (1.1.124– 125)

Goneril and Regan are quick to note the inconsistency of Lear’s intention to remain king after retiring from kingship. But for Cordelia there is no inconsistency in this. When Lear is reunited and reconciled with her at the end of Act 4, at last finding himself “in her kind nursery”, he asks: “Am I in France?” Kent’s answer is: In your own kingdom, sir. (4.7.76)

This shows loyalty and respect, but hardly describes the actual situation. Since abdicating, Lear no longer has a kingdom to call his own. The question is whether at this point there even is a kingdom at all. In Lear’s original plan, Cordelia’s third was not only to have been “more opulent” than her sisters’, it was also to have been at the centre and thus the centre of the realm. In a play where almost all the male names denote territory, Cornwall and Albany (i. e. Scotland) represent the southern and northern wings of a triptych. Its centrepiece, the heartland of the realm, was reserved for Lear’s favourite daughter and as his own residence in retirement. Three has a middle; two does not. With Cordelia’s expulsion, the middle drops out, and the kingdom is quite literally decentred. A foreboding of the inevitable conflicts this suddenly binary partition of the kingdom will cause can be

138

Andreas Höfele

detected in the ceremonial gesture with which Lear wants to see his decision “confirmed” by Cornwall and Albany, the joint “digesters”²⁰ of Cordelia’s third: Lear. Beloved sons, […] This coronet part between you. (1.1. 139 – 140)

To “part” the coronet originally meant for Cordelia would literally mean to break it. How the two sons-in-law are supposed to perform Lear’s command in this improvised state ritual and who, Cornwall or Albany, ends up holding the coronet is a mystery the text does nothing to solve. Short of breaking the thing, parting can only mean taking turns to hold it. This corresponds with Lear’s other provision, that he will dwell at his two elder daughters’ residences in alternating monthly turns. From the moment Lear expels Cordelia there is no place of rest for him anymore. He, like everyone else, is constantly on the move. Mobility is the result and index of the kingdom’s coming apart. Lear’s court, the original centre of power, is never re-established. Most of the action takes place outside, in open fields and on the road, in transit from one place to another. The one regular building, a point of convergence of the major characters’ movements, is Gloucester’s castle. But this turns from habitation into torture chamber, the site of the most horrendous act of on-stage violence in any of Shakespeare’s plays. Gloucester has his eyes crushed or “plucked out”²¹ one after the other, methodically and in full view of the audience. Assaulted in his own house, Gloucester appeals to the hallowed bonds of hospitality: Gloucester Good my friends, consider; you are my guests. Do me no foul play, friends. (3.7.30 – 31) I am your host; With robber’s hands my hospitable favours You should not ruffle thus. (3.7.39 – 41)

 1.1. 128 – 129: “Lear. Cornwall and Albany / With my two daughters’ dowers, digest this third.” In connection with the “barbarous Scythian / Or he that makes his generation messes /To gorge his appetite” (1.1. 117– 119) the verb “digest” acquires an unmistakably cannibalistic note.  The verb used by Goneril, who leaves before the atrocity takes place: “Pluck out his eyes!” (3.7.5)

“Come to Great Confusion”

139

But to his torturers, Cornwall and Regan, these bonds mean nothing. The violence Lear himself set in motion is now pervasive. By Act 5, his fractured kingdom has fallen into anarchy, a no-man’s-land where law no longer holds sway except as the arbitrary power of whoever can enforce it. When Albany confronts his wife with evidence of her plotting to have him murdered, she almost casually rebuts him: Goneril […] the laws are mine, not thine. Who can arraign me for’t? Albany Most monstrous! (5.3.156 – 157)

4 Poor Tom The story of Gloucester and his two sons mirrors that of Lear and his three daughters. For the wicked sisters, Goneril and Regan, there is Gloucester’s wicked bastard son Edmund. For the loving Cordelia, there is the legitimate Edgar. Like Cordelia, Edgar is condemned by his father, but remains steadfastly loving and loyal to him. Like Lear, Gloucester makes the wrong choice among his children and pays dearly for his error. Putting his trust in the treacherous Edmund, he is all too easily persuaded that Edgar plans to kill him in order to accelerate his succession to the earldom. Edgar is proclaimed a murderer and has to hide himself in the disguise of a mad beggar to escape arrest. Edmund, in the meantime, wins favour with the new rulers, especially with their wives, Goneril and Regan, and is rewarded with his father’s lands and title for betraying Gloucester’s continuing allegiance to the former king to his torturers, Cornwall and Regan. If Lear has to go mad, Gloucester has to go blind before he can see “how this world goes” (4.6.143 – 144). “O my follies!” (3.7.90) he exclaims on learning that it was Edmund who betrayed him. GLOUCESTER. I stumbled when I saw. […] […] O dear son Edgar, The food of thy abused father’s wrath, Might I but live to see thee in my touch, I’d say I had eyes again. (4.1.21– 25)

140

Andreas Höfele

The occasion for this anagnorisis arises almost immediately. The first person the eyeless Gloucester encounters after Regan has him “thrust […] out at gates [to] let him smell / His way to Dover” (3.7.92– 93) is Edgar. But Edgar does not reveal his identity, choosing to remain Poor Tom. His motive for this has been inconclusively puzzled over by many critics,²² though it is dramaturgically obvious. A happy recognition between father and son at this point would have derailed the tragic progress. Also, Edgar the innocent victim of his brother’s villainy is a rather bland, unremarkable figure. He returns in Act 5 as a conquering swordsman and a sententious moralizer. But Poor Tom belongs at the very centre of the “Lear world”:²³ he is a source of the innermost energies of the play.²⁴ When the desolate Lear comes face to face with the naked beggar in the storm night of Act 3, it is a profound revelation: Lear Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? Here’s three on’s are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. (3.4.101– 106)

When we watch this moment of truth, we know, of course, that it is founded on make-believe. As Stephen Greenblatt points out, “when Lear thinks he has found in Poor Tom ‘the thing itself’, ‘unaccommodated man’, he has in fact found a man playing a theatrical role.”²⁵ But false identity can work as a true mirror. So even if Edgar’s impersonation of Poor Tom confronts us with a kaleidoscope of self-referentiality (an actor playing a lord playing a beggar), his mimicry of “unaccommodated man” has more to offer than the tired ironies of representation. Eluding the graven fixity of “character” and the unity implied by the term “individual”, his role-playing creates a plural self that encompasses both the possessed beggar and the demons possessing him. This self becomes quite liter-

 “Why does Edgar delay before revealing himself to his father?” is one of the questions on Cavell’s list of motivational cruxes in King Lear. Cavell, “The avoidance of love,” 250; see above note 17.  Cf. the title of a study by John Reibetanz, The ‘Lear’ World: A Study of King Lear in Its Dramatic Context (Toronto and Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1977).  Cf. Simon Palfrey, Poor Tom: Living King Lear (Chicago, Ill. and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).  Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in his Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988): 94– 128 at 126.

“Come to Great Confusion”

141

ally dividable when, in response to Lear’s phantasmagorical vision of a sudden invasion of dogs (“The little dogs and all, / Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.” 3.6.60 – 61), Poor Tom offers to “throw his head at them: avaunt you curs!” (3.6.62) Perceived as half spirit, half beast on his first appearance, Poor Tom vocally multiplies into a chorus of singing, crying, croaking bird-demons crowding Lear’s mock law court in the hovel with chimerical fusions: The foul fiend haunts Poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppedance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel: I have no food for thee. (3.6.29 – 32)

Despite his role-playing, or rather, precisely because of it, Tom is indeed “the thing itself”: not in the sense of a stable essence of what constitutes “man” or the human, but as epitome of the uncontainable instability that characterizes the world of this play. Poor Tom embodies chaos itself.

5 Nothing When Edgar declares his intention to become Poor Tom he completes his metamorphosis with the same word that marked the onset of chaos in Scene 1, Cordelia’s “Nothing”: Edgar I will preserve myself, and am bethought To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury in contempt of man Brought near to beast. […] Poor Turlygod, poor Tom, That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am. (2.2.177– 192)

King Lear is redolent with this nothing. Statistics, for what it is worth, tells us that the word occurs more often in this tragedy than in any other Shakespeare play. But it is emphasis rather than frequency that makes it resound. “Nothing will come of nothing”, the proverbial phrase²⁶ with which Lear tries to coax Cor-

 R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley, Calif. and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), N 285.

142

Andreas Höfele

delia into giving a more pleasing answer, can also be read as a theologically heterodox negation of creatio ex nihilo. It hints at Lear’s intention to be the creator of a new order out of the “something” he expects from his daughters. By the time the Fool asks: “Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” Lear’s answer, “Why no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing.” (1.4.128 – 130) shows the proverbial message bouncing back at Lear himself. Instead of creating order, he has ruined both it and himself. As the Fool tells him: “Now thou art an O without a figure; […] I am a fool, thou art nothing.” (1.4.183 – 185) When the blind Gloucester meets Lear in Act 4, the mad King becomes the avatar of universal reduction to nothingness: Gloucester O ruined piece of nature, this great world Shall so wear out to naught. (4.6.130 – 131)

Lear himself invokes this rush towards annihilation in his storm speech in Act 3: Lear Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity of th’world, Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man! (3.2.1– 9)

Lear calls for no less than the end of the world, the destruction of nature and the extinction of mankind in a combination of biblical Flood and Last Judgement. “Let the great gods”, he demands, That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch, That hast within thee undivulged crimes, Unwhipped of justice. (3.2.49 – 53)

Before we actually see and hear Lear in his rage, the choric voice of an unnamed knight has already described the scene:

“Come to Great Confusion”

143

Kent Where’s the King? Knight Contending with the fretful elements; Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, […] That things might change, or cease, […] Strives in his little world of man to outscorn The to and fro conflicting wind and rain; […] Unbonneted he runs And bids what will take all. (3.1.3 – 15)

The knight closely paraphrases the drift of Lear’s speeches, especially his call for universal destruction. He also describes correctly what Lear is doing. But he misses a crucial dimension of what we then hear and see happening in the actual scene. For the Knight – as for Kent – Lear is simply pitiable, in Lear’s own words, a “poor, infirm, weak and despised old man” (3.2.20), so maddened by despair that he commits the absurdity of challenging the elements, so deluded that he strives “in his little world of man to outscorn” the forces of nature.²⁷ This does describe the scene, but not entirely. It describes Lear’s weakness, but not his strength. On the 18th and 19th-century stage, as on the film screen, Lear enacts his madness vis à vis a materially represented, visible and audible storm. But on the bare stage of Shakespeare’s own day, Lear acts and thus produces the storm as well, his words make the audience see and hear it. The storm rages because Lear makes it rage. It rages in and through his words. The winds blow and crack their cheeks because Lear says so. He is in command of the elements as well as being their “slave” (3.2.19). There is a mythical strength to his weakness. It makes his breakdown a performance of the general collapse of human and cosmic order. This representativeness informs Kent’s words at the close of the storm scenes. Seeing the exhausted Lear fall into slumber he says: “Oppressed nature sleeps.” (3.6.94) Lear’s rage spent, the storm abates.

 In retrospect, Lear acknowledges the recognition of his human frailty (and of the flatterers who used to deny it) as the lesson he was taught by his exposure to the storm: “When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men o’their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.” (4.6.100 – 104)

144

Andreas Höfele

6 Promised End? Is chaos overcome, order restored in the end? Lear awakes from healing sleep into the loving care of Cordelia, his madness gone: Gentleman Be comforted, good madam, the great rage You see is killed in him. (4.7.78 – 79)

Edgar returns from hiding and kills the evil Edmund in single combat. The wicked sisters, both enamoured with him, come to a bad end. Goneril poisons Regan, then kills herself. “I was contracted to them both;” says the fatally wounded Edmund, “all three / Now marry in an instant.” (5.3.227– 228) “The gods are just” (5.3.168), Edgar declares, and Edmund concurs: Edmund Thou’st spoken right, ’tis true; The wheel is come full circle […]. (5.3. 171– 172)

But having come full circle it does not stop. Unlike any of the previous versions of the Lear story, Shakespeare’s tragedy has Lear die over the dead body of Cordelia. Her army is beaten. She and her father fall prisoners to Edmund, who secretly orders their death. His dying attempt to have his order revoked comes too late. Lear re-enters carrying his dead daughter. This is the moment when readings with a Christian bent tend to offset the sparsity of what is actually said and done in the scene with an inversely proportionate amount of restorative edification. They take their cue from the undeniable presence of religious motifs: the “secular pietᔲ⁸, as it has been called, of Lear bending over his dead daughter; the Old Testament resonance of Lear’s cries of pain: “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” (5.3.255). The biblical referent here is Isaiah 13.6: “Howle you, for the day of the Lord is at hand”. The apocalyptic note sounded here is reinforced by the halting responses of the three surviving onstage observers:

 The much-quoted phrase is Helen Gardner’s: King Lear. The John Coffin Memorial Lecture 1966 (London: Athlone Press, 1967), 28. Maynard Mack speaks of “the image of Mary bending over another broken child” (King Lear in our Time [above note 15], 116).

“Come to Great Confusion”

145

Kent Is this the promised end? Edgar Or image of that horror? Albany Fall, and cease. (5.3.261– 262)

But if this is the promised end, it is conspicuously lacking the crucial ingredient: the promised revelation of God’s glory, the meaning in which all seeming meaninglessness will finally converge. For all the felt ultimacy of King Lear, this revelation, as Verena Lobsien has shown, is indefinitely deferred.²⁹ Nor does the father bending over his dead child give thought to any heavenly hereafter where loss of earthly life may be compensated for by an eternity of bliss. Unconcerned with either soul or salvation, Lear’s frantic autopsy has only one object, breath: Lear Lend me a looking-glass. If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, Why, then she lives. (5.3.259 – 261)

Bare physical life is all that matters. Redemption is respiration: if the “feather stirs”, this “does redeem all sorrows / That ever I have felt.” (5.3. 263 – 265) But the feather does not stir. Cordelia is “dead as earth.” (5.3.259) There is Lear No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? O thou’lt come no more,

 Verena Lobsien, “Multi pertransibunt, oder: das versprochene Ende – Inszenierungen frühneuzeitlicher Apokalyptik in Shakespeares King Lear,” in Apokalypse: Der Anfang im Ende, eds. Maria Moog-Grünewald and Verena Lobsien (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003): 103 – 127. Nina Taunton and Valerie Hart, “King Lear, King James and the Gunpowder Treason of 1605,” Renaissance Studies 17.4 (2003): 695 – 715, come to a similar conclusion in their exploration of the political topicality King Lear: “James capitalized on the archetypal patterning of the Brute legend, in which the threefold division of the kingdom threatening disunity and chaos was periodically rescued by heroic figures such as King Arthur. This apocalyptically oriented historical framework is utilized in King Lear since it clearly touches on the deep national anxieties which accompany the transition from one sovereign rule to another. James’s personal interest in the Apocalypse gave it added political relevance and even respectability, as well as providing a potent mythology to bolster Stuart absolutist ideology. Thus Shakespeare’s creative use of the apocalyptic paradigm has a political dimension as part of the overall complimentary gesture towards his royal patron. Yet at the same time, the play withholds the final stage to replacement of chaos by order, followed by the reign of Antichrist and Armageddon; the expectation of a new temporal and spiritual order is missing.” (711– 712)

146

Andreas Höfele

Never, never, never, never, never. (5.3.304– 307)

The bleakest blank verse Shakespeare ever wrote consummates the play’s rush into nothingness: “All’s cheerless, dark and deadly”, says Kent (5.3.288). At the end of King Lear, those who are still alive find themselves on shakier ground than in any other of Shakespeare’s tragic finales. Survivors of chaos, Edgar, Albany and Kent can barely begin to see any prospect beyond it. And neither the gods nor nature, the two authorities frequently appealed to in the course of the play, provide a reliable frame of order. The gods are “kind”, “gentle”, “just”, but also gratuitously cruel: Gloucester As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, They kill us for their sport. (4.1.38 – 39)

Which view – gentle, cruel or perhaps simply absent – the play endorses remains an open question. The nature of the gods (or, by extension, God) is as variable as the nature of nature. When Lear exclaims: “Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!” he appeals to the elementary principles of natural law, the “bonds” of nature, bonds of allegiance, filial love and obligation. When Edmund declares “Thou nature art my goddess!” he appeals to a force that defies any such bonds.³⁰

 John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of ‘King Lear’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), sees two clearly distinguishable natures at work in the play: “The benignant nature of Bacon, Hooker, and Lear” and “The malignant nature of Hobbes, Edmund, and the wicked daughters.” But the cumulative effect of the references to nature tends to blur rather than emphasize the distinction. Peter R. Moore, “The Nature of King Lear,” English Studies 87.2 (2006): 169 – 190, criticizes Danby for attributing a Hobbesian view to a play that was written when Hobbes was a teenager, but Moore applies an even stricter distinction of natures in his rigorously Christian interpretation of the play. For Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Moore says, Dame Nature (or Goddess Nature) was unequivocally good, the nature the good characters appeal to. Man’s fallen nature (personified in Edmund), on the other hand, was just as unequivocally bad. Theologically, Moore argues, both Gloucester and Lear come to an end they deserve: “Gloucester pays the price for adultery, a violation of natural law and the seventh commandment, as Lear suffers for blasphemy [in his storm speeches in Act 3], also offending natural law, and, so long as Lear’s offence may be regarded as consisting only of evil words—and not attempted deicide – he further breaks the second and third commandments. But the theological unity of Lear also depends upon the Manichean duality of nature: uncorrupted nature or law of nature versus the nature of man after the Fall.” (186) The question, it seems to me, is whether “theological unity” is what the play seeks to achieve.

“Come to Great Confusion”

147

It is remarkable that King Lear – in James Shapiro’s words, “the one Shakespeare play in which complex characters fall almost embarrassingly into the familiar binaries of ‘good’ and ‘evil’”³¹ – should make it so hard, or indeed impossible, to extrapolate anything even remotely resembling an overall world view. What the play conveys is the urgency of the characters’ attempts to make sense of their crumbling world, not the confirmation that these attempts ever reach their goal. It is this urgency, I would suggest, that led to King Lear replacing Hamlet as the pinnacle of Shakespearean tragedy in the twentieth century,³² specifically in the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent Cold-War era. Survivors of the one catastrophe now faced with the nuclear threat of an even greater one, found King Lear’s tableau of devastation uniquely apposite to their own time. It was then that Shakespeare was emphatically claimed as “our contemporary.” The phrase is usually associated with the Polish critic Jan Kott’s international bestseller of that title. Its central chapter, “King Lear or Endgame”, turns Shakespeare into a proto-dramatist of the Absurd. But the notion of Shakespeare as our contemporary (indeed “the greatest of our contemporaries”³³) predates Kott by a decade. It appears in a perception of Lear that could not be more opposed to Kott’s view: John F. Danby’s Christian humanist Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear. ³⁴ Both readings inevitably appear dated now. Kott, however, became the inspiration for what has sometimes been praised as the supreme Lear of the 20th century, Peter Brook’s 1962 production with Paul Scofield in the title role.³⁵ Brook’s film version ends with the dying Lear falling backwards in slow motion, sinking into nothingness in front of a dull grey sky. The makers of the film may or may not have intended this as a definitive statement that this grey expanse was terminally empty, containing no gods, offering no exit from Chaos. But it might also suggest that this is precisely what we just don’t know.

 James Shapiro, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 93.  For a discussion of that shift, see: R. A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear. Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).  Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (above note 61), 210.  See above note 30.  Scofield’s Lear was voted “greatest Shakespeare performance in history” in an opinion poll conducted by The Daily Telegraph among actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2004. Sylvia Morris, “Shakespearean Stars 2: Paul Scofield as King Lear”, posted 7 June 2011, http://theshakespeareblog.com/2011/06/shakespearian-stars-2-paul-scofield-as-kinglear/, accessed 30 September 2018.

Verena O. Lobsien

Sympathy Lost Pastoral Responses to Chaos

Chaos is not one of the last things, but one of the first. It refers to the paradoxical state of formless materiality and non-being, hence emptiness, before creation. But it is not only what preceded creation and made it possible in the first place. It also describes the confused, turbulent, conflicted and disorderly, again formless state of things at its end.¹ After things have gone to seed once more, this apocalyptic state will, in the Christian best-case scenario, be followed by a re-ordering, the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. As a secondary chaos, a state that undoes the distinctions and sunderings, the differentiations and identifications, the naming and negating that brought the world into being, it resembles the first; from the point of view of observer as well as participant it seems equally connected with hopes for the revelation of a good order. However, neither first nor secondary chaos are humanly commensurable. They are unspeakable, not easily amenable to language or thought. Only secondary chaos can be experienced. But both are also spaces of possibility, especially poetic possibility. To think about and imagine them raises interesting questions about outer and inner states, about modes and potentials of experience, not last about the natural world and the ways we humanly relate to it – and it to us. The ancients had a word for this mutual relationship: sympathy. Charting a very small part of the way in which pastoral poetry has responded to the experience of chaos will place us in a position from which we can appreciate not only  The difference is that between ‘waste’ and ‘laid waste’. The ambivalence between emptiness as vacuity and emptiness as potential form, not yet created, is implicit in most renderings of Gen 1:2 (tohu wabohu): “inanis et vacua”, “wüst und leer”, “unsichtbar und ungestaltet”, “without forme and voyd”. The paradox at the heart of chaos becomes palpable also in the tension between the two competing ancient paradigms of the concept, the Hesiodic (which, in the Theogony 116 – 122, offers an understanding as “chasm” and gaping abyss; Hesiod, Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006, rev. 2018]) and the Ovidian (Metamorphoses 1.5 – 20, which describes it as matter in disorder, “rudis indigestaque moles”, 1.7 – “a rough, unordered mass of things”; Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, Books 1 – 8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. by G. P. Goold [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916]); see the contribution of Glenn Most in this volume. The tension between total absence of form and formless materiality persists in early modern thinking, e. g. in the notions articulated by Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus (cf. also Marian Kurdzialek, Ulrich Dierse and Rainer Kuhlen, “Chaos,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1., eds. Joachim Ritter et al., [Basel: Schwabe, 1971]: 980 – 984). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-010

150

Verena O. Lobsien

the poetic response but also observe how the fundamental sympathy, that had made the response possible in the first place, may be lost.

1 The Death of the Poet and the Birth of the Pathetic Fallacy The death of the poet throws the world into a kind of chaos to which only poetry can respond. At least this is what emerges from one of the earliest examples of what was to become the classical pastoral answer to a devastating disorder and confusion akin to the end of the world: the anonymous “Lament for Bion”. The poem laments the death of the youngest of the three best-known ancient Greek bucolic poets, Theocritus, Moschos, and Bion. For a long time, the lament was ascribed to Bion’s older contemporary Moschos (2nd century BC); now critics assume that it was composed by one of Bion’s pupils. The dates of Bion’s own life are not known. The dirge intoned for him sets a pattern and founds a poetic convention that will prove to be of an amazing longevity. Its theme and structure find a poetic form adequate to the rendering of natural sympathy. They also constitute one of the most hard-wearing of literary effects: the so-called pathetic fallacy. In what follows I shall try to show that it is not just a rather silly narcissistic and anthropomorphic fantasy that may have come into being with the beginnings of European poetry and flourished mostly in the 19th century.² We shall, I hope, also be able to observe that it is, in a sense, not a fallacy at all. Like other formations of the formless, it will run through surprising transformations, including its deconstruction at a surprisingly early point in literary history. The “Lament for Bion” belongs to the larger genre, or mode, of pastoral.³ Bion, the object of universal grieving, was a famous poet and singer. The lament

 In Modern Painters (1856), John Ruskin describes it as a production of subjective, “contemplative fancy” and violent feeling, fundamentally untrue, see John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, (Library Edition Vol. 5). Modern Painters, vol. 3. Containing Part IV, Of Many Things. (London: George Allen, 1904), Ch. XII, 201– 220, at 204.  Cf. Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago,Ill. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Alpers, too, thinks of pastoral lament in apocalyptic terms, as response to the “question of how a world continues after a loss or separation” (93), with Theocritus’ First Idyll as paradigmatic for many of the characteristic aspects of the mode, such as pastoral conventionality and representativity (137– 145, see also 81). The “Lament for Bion” as well as Theocritus’ Idylls are quoted, with line references in brackets, according to Neil Hopkinson, ed. and trans., Theocritus Moschus Bion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). For a charting both of the origins and transformations of the Renaissance pastoral imagination see also Verena Olejniczak Lobsien and

Sympathy Lost

151

for his death casts him also as a herdsman. The first and greatest, certainly the most sophisticated of Greek pastoral poets, Bion’s predecessor Theocritus, also set the tone for this specific pastoral figuration. In Theocritus’s First Idyll, the inaugural poem of pastoral, it is the death of the famous oxherd and singer Daphnis that is lamented in a prize song by the shepherd poet Thyrsis. What Daphnis dies of never becomes quite clear – perhaps he dies of unrequited love, of despair at the consequences of a vow of chastity, or of Aphrodite’s jealous anger. Certain it is that at his death by water – the mode of his death, too, remains somewhat mysterious, he drowns himself, probably in a pool – not only his fellow-herdsmen congregate to bewail him, in addition diverse gods like Hermes, Pan’s father, or Priapus, who champion him, or whom, like Cypris, he may have offended, or like Pan, who receives his syrinx, but also his animals: “At his feet many cows, many bulls, many heifers and many calves made lament” (74– 75) – and several kinds of wild creatures, too: “For him the jackals howled, and the wolves too; for his death even the forest lion grieved aloud” (71– 72). Daphnis himself says farewell to the “wolves, jackals and bears” in their mountain caves, groves and woods (115), with whom he appears to have been on very familiar terms.⁴ And his dying causes an even more severe upheaval in nature. All former relationships are now reversed: Now you brambles may bear violets, and you thorns may do the same, and the fair narcissus may bloom on the juniper, and everything may be changed (panta d’ analla genoito), and pears can grow on the pine tree, since Daphnis is dying. Let the deer tear apart the hounds, and let the screech owls from the mountains rival nightingales. (132– 136)

The adynata marking the happening of impossible things indicate the cosmic dimensions of the change⁵ that is signified by the death of Daphnis. Eckhard Lobsien, Die unsichtbare Imagination: Literarisches Denken im 16. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2003), 87– 167.  Hunter regards the predators’ grieving as marking a metaphysically incisive event and comments: “The animals’ grief […] marks his death as the event which ultimately separated man from nature, as Prometheus’ deception separated men from the gods.” (Richard Hunter, ed., Theocritus: A Selection. Idylls 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11 and 13 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 98).  The rare word at this point (analla) additionally stresses the irrevocal alteration brought about by Daphnis’ death; cf. Hunter, noting the incantatory effect of the rhyming verses that seem magically to work the very change they sing about: “Daphnis sees his life as so fundamental to nature that his death, unlike that of Adonis who was able to return, should be marked by an overturning of the natural order […] Daphnis’ death is not in fact contra naturam, but his obsessive concern with his own position places him, in his own eyes, at the very centre of the natural order.” (ibid., 102– 103).

152

Verena O. Lobsien

The natural order is overturned; things are seriously out of joint. Echoing Theocritus at several points, the chaos threatening the pastoral world appears even more pronounced, the poetic answer to it considerably more elaborate in the “Lament for Bion”. The all-surpassing, Orpheus-like poet Bion has died, perhaps by poison, and not only his unknown pupil and fellow-poet, but with him the whole of nature responds to the loss. His death, giving rise to a barely expressible grief, throws everything into tumultuous confusion, fear, even terror. Ordinary life is radically disrupted. All good things seem to have come to an end and there seems to be no hope that the former happiness will ever be restored. All beauty seems to be gone, order lost for good. Natural relations are inverted or disconnected, lacking their vital node. This is of course the highest possible praise for the dead poet: The elegy credits him with having called forth, indeed created, an elementary resonance, an afterlife in voices other than his own. Thus, trees, groves, rivers and brooks, flowers, birds, animals wild as well as tame, muses, nymphs, satyrs – all creatures and divinities of nature are addressed and asked to mourn Bion. They respond by giving loud and moving voice to their sorrow for Bion as their lovely and beloved herdsman (boukolos), their “Dorian Orpheus” (18),⁶ the pastoral equivalent to Homer,⁷ weeping and wailing for the silencing of his song and the ceasing of his music. Most impressively, but not exclusively, we see and hear how the large pastoral community responds: The bulls stop their grazing, the cows give no milk, the bees make no honey, the trees cast their fruit before the time, the flowers wither, the nymphs cannot stop crying and the spring water turns to tears.⁸ The ‘allopathic’ adynata that marked natural sympathy for the death of Daphnis in Theocritus here appear in ‘homopathic’ version, as mimesis of the singer’s own passionate lamentation. Grief answers grief, sadness reflects sadness. In both cases, whether it articulates itself in dissonance or consonance,

 Thus, first among the birds, the nightingales: “You nightingales that lament among the dense foliage, bear news to the Sicilian streams of Arethusa that Bion the oxherd is dead; that with him song too has died, and Dorian minstrelsy has perished” (9 – 12). The birds respond in articulate antiphonal song: “[…] there lamented for death of Bion […] all the nightingales and swallows which he used to delight and teach to sing. Perched on the branches, they sang dirges across to each other, and in answer came the cry, ‘Do you mournful birds lament? We do just the same.’” (44– 49).  In contrast to Homer Bion celebrated not feats of arms but, similar to Daphnis, peaceful doings befitting a follower of Pan: Homer’s counterpart “[…] celebrated not wars and tears but Pan and oxherds, and he sang as he pastured his flocks. He made panpipes, milked his sweet heifers, and taught about the kisses of boys; he kept love close by him and provoked Aphrodite” (80 – 84).  Cf. ibid., 24– 35.

Sympathy Lost

153

there is a correspondence of affect. Nature speaks, and here it speaks the same language as the sorrowing poet. Conversely, the poet appears able to give voice to and articulate the grief of nature. Like Theocritus’ Thyrsis, he is also a medium of the Muses, who are in the poem’s burden repeatedly exhorted to begin their “grieving song”⁹ – the song that is being sung at this very moment, the poem that we hear or read. The co-affection is both real and created by the poem itself: The “Lament for Bion” not only registers and as it were documents Nature’s sympathy with the “Orphic” poet uniquely able to speak her language – to an extent difficult to determine it also brings forth and evokes this sympathetic answer, giving it allegoric form. The enabling foundational assumption is that of the ancient, mainly Stoic doctrine of cosmic, all-pervading sympathy, common from the early Stoics like Cleanthes (331– 232 BC) or Chrysippus (c. 280 – 207 BC) onward.¹⁰ We may assume that for the poet it was valid and self-evident. Nature speaks in the living poet’s words, because the dead poet, like Orpheus, was also capable of communicating in Nature’s words. In analogy to Bion previously acting as Nature’s medium and advocate, his fellow-poet now acts as spokesman and, literally, as persona for Bion as well as Nature. The structure of his text is thus that of a multiple mediation, one creature speaking for another, human for non-human animals and vice versa. Mutual sympathetic correspondence is the form given to the unspeakable event of the death of one who himself appears to have been a nodal point of the natural order and to have enacted and guaranteed this correspondence between humans and other living beings in an exemplary fashion. The formative power of this pastoral answer to chaos lies in the modes and strategies by means of which the poem creates the conditions for the perception of this correspondence. Its inversions, hyperboles, echos, repetitions and parallelisms constitute the conditions of its own communication. From the first, this communication is reflexive, autoreferential and metapoetic. This is poetry talking about itself; poetry highly conscious of its own powers. Potentially, these even extend to raising the dead. Human beings may be sentenced by death to “an endless, an unwaking sleep” (103), “surrounded by silence” (104), unlike flowers and plants that will grow

 Cf. Thyrsis in Idyll 1 in a similar medial role as spokesman: “Begin, dear Muses, begin the pastoral song” (64 and passim), later varied to “begin again”, finally to “come cease the pastoral song”.  For a concise summary and discussion of Stoic teaching on sympathy, see René Brouwer, “Stoic Sympathy,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 15 – 35; also Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, Die vergessene Sympathie (Munich: Fink, forthcoming).

154

Verena O. Lobsien

again the next year. But Bion’s music is thought to be capable, even in Hades, of moving Persephone’s heart so much that – perhaps – “just as she once gave back Eurydice to Orpheus for his sweet lyre playing, so she will restore you, Bion, to your hills” (123 – 125). This is the significant matrix of the pastoral response to a chaotic situation bordering on the apocalyptic, in which “everything may be changed”¹¹ and the dead return from the underworld. Its perspective is that of an anthropocentrically mediated ecocentrism, its central figure that of natural sympathy voiced through poetry. This also circumscribes the point of view from which I now turn to look at a few examples of early modern formations and transformations of the pastoral matrix.

2 Augmenting Disorderly Order: Spenser It is not only the death of the poet which calls for natural sympathy. It may also be the ruin of art and culture in a more generalized sense, as in Edmund Spenser’s early poem “The Tears of the Muses”.¹² In this complaint, all nine Muses one after the other lament the ubiquitous, unprecedented neglect of the arts they represent and the subsequent decay and degeneration of civilization. Ignorance, barbarism, folly, moral and intellectual confusion ensue and pervade all walks of life. Things threaten to lose their shapes, as music, theatre, dance, courtesy, learning, wisdom and above all poetry are despised and disregarded. Never before were such “mournfull tunes” (13) heard or “such wayling” (18), for here too nature joins in, mirrors and reinforces the Muses’ complaint: For all their groves, which with the heavenly noyses Of their sweete instruments were wont to sound, And th’hollow hills, from which their silver voyces Were wont redoubled Echoes to rebound, Did now rebound with nought but ruefull cries, And yelling shrieks throwne up into the skies. (19 – 24)

 Theocritus, Idyll 1, 134.  Citations follow William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop and Richard Schell, eds., The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1989); line references in brackets after the quotation.

Sympathy Lost

155

Cultural disintegration is figured in natural disorder, with streams overflowing and universal discord substituted for harmony, as the Muses’ voices become indistinguishable from the voices of nature and all things of beauty and joy are perverted into their opposites: And all that els was wont to worke delight Through the divine infusion of their skill, And all that els seemd faire and fresh in sight, So made by nature for to serve their will, Was turned now to dismall heavinesse, Was turned now to dreadfull uglinesse. (37– 42)

As last but one, Urania complains with special bitterness, not only as championess of astronomy, but also as spokeswomen of “th’heavenlie light of knowledge” (488), a celestial “wisdome” (499) that includes, besides divine knowledge in beholding “the heavens great Hierarchie” (507), equally insight into the formative powers of nature. This truly metaphysical science appears, in her words, as a source of grace, now about to be irredeemably lost, as rampant ignorance is “the enemie of grace” (497): Through knowledge we behold the worlds creation, How in his cradle first he fostred was; And judge of Natures cunning operation, How things she formed of a formeless mas; By knowledge wee do learne our selves to knowe, And what to man, and what to God wee owe. (499 – 504)

For Spenser the cultural pessimist, it is only a small step from loss of the awareness of form to a loss of self-knowledge, hence of manners, morals, religious devotion and ultimately salvation. Formlessness comes to equal gracelessness. With poetry and the poet as preeminent giver of form painfully disregarded, the forces of disorder threaten to take over; with culture about to disintegrate, nature also loses all vitality. Similarly, in Colin Clout Comes Home Againe, the pastoral world appears terribly saddened, almost deadened during the absence of Spenser’s poet-persona: Whilest thou wast hence, all dead in dole did lie: The woods were heard to waile full many a sythe, And all their birds with silence to complaine: The fields with faded flowers did seem to mourne,

156

Verena O. Lobsien

And all their flocks from feeding to refraine: The running waters wept for thy returne, And all their fish with languor did lament: But now both woods and fields, and floods revive, Sith thou art come, their cause of meriment, That us late dead, hast made againe alive: (22 – 31)

With Colin’s return, nature recovers its spirits and experiences a kind of resurrection. In absence, but as an important author to be quoted, Colin also figures in the “August” eclogue in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, another poem that explicitly and emphatically harks back to classical antiquity and attempts to model itself upon the ancient paradigms.¹³ With Colin, or rather: with his song recited in ‘representative’ sympathy by one of the poem’s pastoral protagonists, the poetic and poetological issues already touched upon are once more brought into play. In addition, poetic form as opposed to the forces of chaos is foregrounded not only on the thematic level but in the shape of the poem itself. Colin’s prizewinning complaint is the first English sestina. Spenser’s appropration and realization of an extremely sophisticated continental genre relies on and performs to perfection the device at the very heart of the pastoral response to chaos: namely repetition, or sympathetic echo with variations. As a strategy achieving the desired difficult and highly artificial effect of discordia concors (“disorderly order”)¹⁴ it will be transformed in significant ways by Spenser’s successors. In “August”, two shepherds, Willye and Perigot, engage in a singing contest.¹⁵ As in Theocritus’s First Idyll they compete for a lamb and an ornamented wooden cup. The subject of their song is Perigot’s unhappy love; they thematize

 Thus “E.K.” in his commendatory letter to Gabriel Harvey: “[…] following the example of the best and most auncient Poetes, which devised this kind of wryting, being both so base for the matter and homely for the manner, at the first to trye theyr habilities: and as young birdes, that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to prove theyr tender wyngs, before they make a greater flyght. So flew Theocritus, as you may perceive he was all ready full fledged. So flew Virgile, as not yet well feeling his winges. […] So finally flyeth this our new Poete, as a bird, whose principals be scarce growen out, but yet as that in time shall be hable to keepe wing with the best.” (Edmund Spenser, “The Shepheardes Calender,” in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, eds. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop and Richard Schell [New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1989]: 3 – 213, at 18 – 19).  Ibid., 15.  Ibid., “August”: 137– 147.

Sympathy Lost

157

it in a “roundelay”, one providing a brief narrative proposition, the other responding with an affirmative burden or “undersong[]” (128). Each sings the other’s song¹⁶ in sympathetic mutuality. The neatherd Cuddie serves as referee and judges that both have sung equally well (“ech have gayned”, 131). For any ordinary eclogue, this would have been more than enough, for pastoral community has successfully been recreated. But Spenser’s imitative ambition reaches beyond this, and he adds yet another element of repetition. After Willye and Perigot have sung, Cuddie offers to surpass their song by performing a complaint (“doolefull verse | Of Rosalend”, 140 – 141) by another, the best of pastoral poets, namely Colin Clout. Cuddie thus acts as representative medium in multiple ways, reaching far back into the tradition of the pastoral mode: He speaks for Colin alias Spenser in his role of lovesick Daphnis, his song (151– 189) rehearsing both the grief of Colin deserted by Rosalend and echoing the sorrows of Perigot. In presenting this friendly competition between three shepherds plus an absent pastoral master-singer, who constantly repeat each other’s sorrows, Spenser practises repetition-cum-variation to excess, both within the text, among the pastoral protagonists, and with a view to his ancient or Renaissance pretexts, always attempting to go yet one better. The manner in which he tries to excel is to replay the available structures in a yet more demanding form, thus claiming equal skill and mastery and, by emulation, possibly even greater poetic dignity than his predecessors. Arnaut Daniel, Dante, Petrarca, Sannazaro, Montemayor had all composed sestinas before, but Spenser offers the first English example with six stanzas of six unrhymed lines each, ending in only six different line endings. These are repeated in various permutations with the last line of each stanza and the first line of the following having to end with the same word. The stanzas are thus linked by an identical or tautological rhyme, while in the version realized by Spenser the numerical sequence of the remaining line-endings remains the same, including the alteration brought about by the iteration of the final line-ending; i. e. 123456 for the first stanza, 612345 for the second, 561234 for the third etc. The sestina ends with a three-line tornada, in which all six end-words recur, two in each line. Obviously, the sestina with its limited stock of recurring line-endings is particularly well suited to an imitation of the hopeless circles in which the love-lorn shepherd’s mind is caught. It facilitates, however, not only a performance of the singer’s mind entangled in the sameness of inescapable sorrow, additionally of

 For Alpers this kind of consonance is one of the defining characteristics of pastoral as a figuration both of pastoral convention and representativity; see Alpers, What is Pastoral? (above note 3), 182– 184, with reference to the “August” eclogue and its relation to continental pretexts.

158

Verena O. Lobsien

the homopathic mutuality within the pastoral community, but also a presentation of the intimate correspondence between the shepherds and their world. Cuddie, performing Colin’s (alias Spenser’s) song, makes nature take part in his condition: “Ye wastefull woodes beare witnesse of my woe, | Wherein my plaints did oftentimes resound” (151– 152). At least this is what the “forest wide” (159) or the “gastfull grove” (170) are asked to do: to “resound” and thus to “augment” (156, 157, 164, 171, 178, 185, 189), the singer’s “carefull cryes” (160) in echoing them. The same holds for the birds: Help me, ye banefull byrds, whose shrieking sound Ys signe of dreery death, my deadly cryes Most ruthfully to tune. And as my cryes (Which of my woe cannot bewray least part) You heare all night, when nature craveth sleepe, Increase, so let your yrksome yells augment. (173 – 188)

The natural voices are in sympathy with the complaining shepherd, reverberating, consonant, alliterating, enhancing. The echo is not only to repeat but to heighten what it repeats, while the singer places himself in the position of the dead poet in the “Lament for Bion”, both subject and object of his complaint. Stuck in his grief, immobilized in affective chaos, all he can do is to intensify by repeating the memory of his pain. Like Philomela after her metamorphosis sentenced to repeating in song what “bred her woe” (186) he resolves to take part “with the Nightingale” (183) and join in her song (presumably more melodious than that of the the other nocturnal, more “banefull byrds”).

3 The Abysmal Self: Sidney It may appear difficult to imagine a further descent into this ever-deepening quicksand of mourning with nature. However, in his Arcadia Philip Sidney manages yet another turn of the screw, in form, performance and function of the motifs and devices that are central to Spenser’s sestina. Whereas for Spenser’s singers, imitation and repetition provided considerable satisfaction, at least a sense of technical achievement and pride; also some mental reordering of the havoc wrought by their unhappy loves by means of re-investing stable circular patterns with meaning, for Sidney’s shepherds all hope, including the stabilizing promise implicit in strict poetic form, appears to be lost for good. Their replaying of the structures of natural sympathy is taken to a point of no return where playback topples into despair and destruction. As a result, and instead of being defended

Sympathy Lost

159

against chaos, the pastoral world is taken to the brink of apocalypse and, perhaps, pushed over. In this art, secondary chaos rules supreme, as in Sidney’s rehearsing of extreme poetic form its questionable perfection comes to replace all other perfections. Once again, the world is rendered empty and inane, as nature, instead of responding to human grief, is sucked into a noise-filled, self-tormenting abyss of the mind. Around the time that Spenser confidently sends off his “little booke”,¹⁷ Philip Sidney is at work on his great Arcadia (ca. 1580). The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, known as Old Arcadia,¹⁸ contains in its fourth (and last) book of eclogues yet another complaint: “Ye goat-herd gods”, sung by Strephon and Klaius. This is also a sestina, in fact a double sestina, which has, for several reasons, acquired a certain notoriety.¹⁹ Here, as in the other books of eclogues, the main action with its princely protagonists Pyrocles and Musidorus appears suspended, while the Arcadian shepherds, whose guests they are and whose lives are strongly affected by their doings, reflect the turbulent alterations of their hitherto peaceful existence but also their own concerns and worries in pastoral poetry. By the end of the Fourth Book things have turned into catastrophe. The protagonists’ fate seems to have reached its nadir. Pursuing their love interests, the princes Pyrocles and Musidorus, disguised as amazon Cleophila and shepherd Dorus, have caused a major government crisis in Arcadia: Basilius, the ruler and sovereign, appears to be dead, his wife Gynecia has lost her senses, having, like her husband before her, fallen helplessly in love with Cleophila and abandoned herself totally to her passion. One prince is suspected of fostering a rebellion, the other is accused of having dishonoured the princess Pamela; both have been imprisoned by Philanax, Basilius’ faithful friend and counsellor, who intends to have them executed in order to avoid further unrest. Only their prison guard, the noble Sympathus (276), is “stricken in compassion with their excellent presence” (283) and attempts to protect them from the worst. The Arcadian shepherds are deeply disturbed by all this, “finding no place for them in these garboils, to which their quiet hearts […] had at all no aptness”. They retire into the hills, contemplating the sunset, reflecting on “their present miseries”

 In the envoy “To His Booke”, 12.  Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 1994); quoted with page and – for poems – line references.  See, among others, Alastair Fowler, Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), 38 – 58, for a review of the discussion with a reading that attempts to explain why and how this poem has up to now succeeded in resisting interpretation.

160

Verena O. Lobsien

(284), and imagining their land (with familiar Virgilian topicality) laid waste by marauding troops, their pastures burnt and their animals killed and eaten. In this context of general fear and misery, with the political crisis uppermost in people’s minds, the pastoral world thrown into utter disorder and about to be overwhelmed by tumult and trouble, the Fourth Eclogues arrest the series of disasters at a point where it is as yet unclear whether it has already culminated or whether the worst is still to come. In their worry and anxiety, the shepherds fill the time with pastoral lament. However, it is not only the Arcadian themselves who give voice to these complaints, but also their guests. They, first and foremost among them Strephon and Klaius,²⁰ use the opportunity to articulate their private sorrows.²¹ By opening the sequence of songs with a double sestina, they set an extremely high poetical standard. With a view to Spenser’s sestina in the “August” eclogue, Sidney thus responds by way of emulation. From the competition he appears to emerge as superior, if only by the doubling of the form and the complication of its combinatory logic. Perhaps more importantly, his sestina also resumes central themes of the “Lament for Bion” and takes one of its foundational aspects to an extreme. Like Spenser’s, Sidney’s shepherds sing a song characterized above all by structures of sympathy – responding to, repeating and intertwining inner- and extratextual affective, cognitive and referential correspondences. Strephon and Klaius mirror Pyrocles and Musidorus, the pair of princely friends. Like these, they are guests among the shepherds of Arcadia; similar to them, they are entangled in an unhappy love affair and feel similar pain,²² exacerbated, however, by  Whose fates receive no further attention in the Old Arcadia, but are elaborated at considerable length in the New Arcadia.  Explicitly so, cf. 284: “[…] though humanity moved them to pity human cases, especially of a prince under whom they had found a refuge of their miseries and justice equally administered, yet they could not so naturally feel the lively touch of sorrows, but rather used this occasion to record their own private sorrows which they thought would not have agreed with a joyful time.”  As will be seen, even their response to their predicament resembles that of the main protagonists. The Arcadia leaves no doubt about the problematic nature of the princes’ attachments: from the first, both Pyrocles and Musidorus are thrown by their passion into states of total self-enclosure, recognized and reflected as such by themselves. It is this extremely self-conscious and self-confessed “captiving of us within ourselves” (39) which renders them inaccessible to reason, moral argument or the appeals of friendship and which leads not only to uncourtly dissimulation, counterfeit, lies and strategic disguise, but to the transformations in mind and body, gender and social status, that will precipitate the disastrous fates of their Arcadian hosts. It does not seem coincidental that a similar constellation should be offered as poetic nucleus at the point of greatest confusion and impending catastrophe in the narrative, arguing for the centrality of the double sestina for Sidney’s oeuvre as a whole. While it appears placed at the very heart of Sidney’s pastoral romance, the sestina also contains in a nutshell the despairing Petrar-

Sympathy Lost

161

the fact that their loves are focussed on one and the same unattainable lady, the incomparable “Urania, thought a shepherd’s daughter, but indeed of far greater birth” (284– 285). Still, holding the object of their passion in common does not adversely affect their friendship; on the contrary, it strengthens their sympathetic bond. Their relationship is one of perfect parallelism, almost unity: “For her [Urania’s] sake they had both taken this trade of life, each knowing other’s love, but yet of so high a quality their friendship was that they never so much as brake company one from the other, but continued their pursuit, like two true runners both employing their best speed, but one not hindering the other.” (285). Both feel the same, and both feel for each other. In addition, their feelings resemble the affective uproar of their hosts’, and in this consonance they sing as others have sung before them. Nonetheless, their participation in the Arcadians’ lives is an indirect and mediated one. They have their own agenda, for their personal grief is a result of Urania having left them. She has placed them under the strict command to stay in Arcadia, waiting to hear from her when and if she pleases. Thus they are forced to remain, impotently and desperately, in a potentially infinite unhappiness. Firmly resolved “rather […] to break their hearts than break her commandment”, they are forever fixed in their aporetic situation, unable either to mend or to end it. In principle, their imprisonment in this kind of private hell seems to correspond to the Arcadians’ misfortune, similar in that both originated in a passion too eager to be fulfilled. Still, there are differences: Their beloved Urania bears the name not only of one of the Muses, but also, with neoplatonic suggestiveness, of the Heavenly Venus. This seems to prescribe to their love an even higher ambition than that implied by the errant princes’ passion, or perhaps one that embraces the ultimate end of Pyrocles’ and Musidorus’ love, namely to transcend all materiality in striving for the highest beauty. But however perfect their mutual bond, however daring their amorous desire, and however strongly Strephon and Klaius cling to their unattainable goal and the metaphysical ideal associated with it, they appear to be far from realizing it. And if theirs seems to be a kind of allegory for the Arcadians’ unhappiness, the poetry they present does not offer the remotest consolation, let alone remedy for their plight.

chist poetics of Astrophil and Stella. On the questionable nature of the princes’ loves and their altered subjectivity see also Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, “‘Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind’: Sidney’s Old Arcadia and the Performance of Perfection,” in Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, eds. Susanne Rupp and Tobias Döring (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2005): 105 – 117.

162

Verena O. Lobsien

Despair is the subject and the mode of their song. As well as thematizing their hopeless condition, Strephon and Klaius sing about their own “plaining music” (l. 4 and passim).²³ The repetition of the arch-pastoral pattern of the lament of nature forms part of their metapoetic strain. The sympathetic correspondence, however, that Spenser’s Colin had wished for in order to “augment” his grief, is here radicalized to a degree that makes it unbearable. Once again, the matrix of natural poetic sympathy is transformed – yet, in a paradoxical sense, it is not altered. Its foundational pattern is revealed, and its dependence on a basic similarity, a natural contiguity is affirmed. A subliminal connectedness and vital community between sufferers and answerers is exposed and at the same time interpreted as a self-enhancing sameness. Strephon and Klaius fill the woods, valleys and mountains with themselves. Taken to its logical conclusion, this identity between inner and outer worlds is no less than terrifying. What Sidney’s shepherds are saying, what they seem to be saying in a new and different way, is in the end always, and shockingly, the same. It results in absolute negativity. Absence of change, tautological repetition are its topic as well as its all-embracing poetic mode. The singers’ reflexivity and their poetic autoreferentiality are taken to the point where they swallow all exteriority and become claustrophobic self-inclusion. What should have been the comforting response to an unavailable other with her imposition of an arbitrary command is, disconcertingly, turned into a reduction to mere selfhood. Strephon and Klaius are clamouring selves and nothing else. Their extremist lament systematically ruins the pastoral world their song causes, indeed forces, to respond. In the ancient pretexts (and in Spenser) nature appeared touched by human grief, moved of its own accord and painfully affected, but not destroyed. Here, as natural harmony is converted into an effect of interiority, it is irredeemably contaminated and spoilt. In their double sestina, Strephon and Klaius goad each other into an aporia of reciprocal self-affirmation that, instead of evoking a comforting vision of universal correspondence, inverts it and ultimately turns it against itself. This is also the reason for the poem’s artful and alienating sterility: These two barely distinguishable singers are totally by themselves, alone, and will remain so. All they hear are their own voices. Alterity has been exterminated. In its counter-natural introversion, the pattern of sympathetic connection consumes itself.  From the first, this is a meta-sestina (for a different suggestion for a first meta-sestina see Erika Greber, “Ordnungsmuster ‘ohne Muster’. Die Erfindung der Meta-Sestine,” in Figuren der Ordnung: Beiträge zu Theorie und Geschichte literarischer Dispositionsmuster. Festschrift für Ulrich Ernst, eds. Susanne Gramatzki and Rüdiger Zymner (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2009): 113 – 126.

Sympathy Lost

163

How is this done? Much of the devastating effect is due to the sestina pattern as realized here. As in Spenser’s sestina, there are no rhymes, but six different line-endings recurring in complicated and, at first hearing or reading, arbitrary permutations. The only principle discernible at first glance is that (as in Spenser) the end-word of each stanza’s last line is recognizably repeated as end-word of the next stanza’s first line. The perplexing sequence of end-words – 123456, 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531 – is the product of a special type of word-weaving:²⁴ that of retrogradatio cruciata as inaugurated by the Provençal troubadours, beginning with Arnaut Daniel.²⁵ In this combination of backwards and ‘crossing’ operations, we arrive at the sequence of each succeeding stanza by a reordering of the preceding stanza’s line endings in the sequence 6 – 1 – 5 – 2 – 4 – 3.²⁶ In addition, we arrive at a kind of algebraic order in the last stanza of the first sestina, in that we first get the even-number end-words placed in as-

 On the interweaving, hence texturing aspects of the operation see Erika Greber, Textile Texte. Poetologische Metaphorik und Literaturtheorie: Studien zur Tradition des Wortflechtens und der Kombinatorik (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 455 – 456, 466 – 468 and passim. See also Marianne Shapiro, Hieroglyph of Time: The Petrarchan Sestina (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), and Marianne Shapiro, “Entrebescar los motz: Word-Weaving and Divine Rhetoric in Medieval Romance Lyric,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 100 (1984): 355 – 383.  On the history of the genre see also János Riesz, Die Sestine: Ihre Stellung in der literarischen Kritik und ihre Geschichte als literarisches genus (Munich: Fink, 1971), and János Riesz, “Sestine”, in Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen, ed. Dieter Lamping (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2009): 678 – 687.  This recombination of end-words relative to the respective preceding stanza involves a movement of the first end-word of the first stanza to position 2 in the next, of the second to position 4, the third to 6, the fourth to 5, the fifth to 3, and the last (sixth) to the first position (1), with the order of positions finally corresponding to the order of end-words in the last stanza (246531). The “crossing” could also be described as a bottom-up pairing: last and first end-words of the preceding stanza become first and second of the succeeding, last-but-one and second of the preceding become third and fourth of the following, while third-from-last and third turn into fifth and sixth end-words of the following stanza. If we imagine the line-endings in a vertical sequence, the spatialization of linearity involved in the operation becomes even more obvious: In an alternating downward and upward movement the speaker first selects the last end-word (moving it to first position), next the first (moving it to second), then the last-but-one (moving it to third position), then the second (moving it to fourth), then the third from the bottom (moving it to fifth position), and finally the third from the top (moving it to the last position). The interlacing movement appears directed inwards, like the inward-turning spiral that results if the sequence 246531 is written in a vertical column and the numbers are connected in their proper numerical order, starting with 1. – Great thanks to Florian Mehltretter for helping me to appreciate the technical intricacies of the retrogradatio cruciata. For an exploration of twentieth-century and contemporary American variants see also Stephen Burt, “Sestina! or, The Fate of the Idea of Form,” Modern Philology 105.1 (2007): 218 – 241.

164

Verena O. Lobsien

cending sequence (2– 4– 6), next the odd-number end-words in descending sequence (5 – 3 – 1).²⁷ But does this signify anything beyond numerical regularity? The permutation of end-words follows an algorithm, whose formula is given by the ordinal sequence of the last stanza’s end-words (246531). Its performance consists in a movement that transposes the first stanza’s end-words from their initial order (123456) by successive application of the retrograde shift through the next stanzas so that we arrive, in the sixth stanza, at the sequence 246531 and, by necessity, in the next – the seventh stanza of the whole poem or the first stanza of the second circuit of the double sestina – again at 123456. Only through the doubling does the circularity become apparent. By realizing a second ‘lap’ of permutations, the doubling of circuits emphasizes the potential perpetuity that is suggested – but only completed in the seventh stanza, the first of the re-run – by a return of the sequence to the order in which it began. Between beginning and end of first and second laps the impression created is one of increasing obsessiveness combined with an emerging, but comfortless logic. It is hardly avoidable to notice the repetition of end-words from stanza to stanza and speaker to speaker, but it will remain impossible to anticipate the order in which they lead us back to where we started. The recurrence of the same and the return of the sequence to the pattern in which it set out only strengthens the impression of inescapable circularity, with it the coercive character of the form as well as its monotony in manifesting the singers’ despair.²⁸ The effect is a mixture of amazement and stupefaction with a persisting distress, intensifying in seizures that recur in an incalculable but inexorable rhythm. The double sestina leaves a sense of contrivance and of a refinement likely to elude the perceiver, a systematic madness whose hidden mathematical perfection gives no joy, but effectively destroys it. Far from performing a dream-like, contemplative swaying between nuances of meaning, Sidney’s double sestina becomes nightmarish because it consistently eschews variation while constantly talking about it. In twice six stanzas it per This is Alastair Fowler’s description of the “ordinal formula”: “‘Take even-number endwords in ascending order, odd-number endwords in descending order’” (Fowler, Conceitful Thought [above note 19], 41). But even he finds no pythagorean (or other) meaning in this. In the end, his reading reaffirms the bafflement voiced at the beginning of his essay: Sidney’s double sestina “[…] continues to give an unusual impression of force, as if it were creative, and it continues to resist many a resolute effort at interpretation, as if it were complex” (38).  Cf. William Empson’s well-known description of the effect: “The poem beats, however rich its orchestration, with a wailing and immovable monotony, for ever upon the same doors in vain. […] a whole succession of feelings about the local scenery, the whole way in which it is taken for granted, has been enlisted into sorrow and beats as a single passion of the mind” (William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity [London: Chatto and Windus, 31953], 36, 38).

Sympathy Lost

165

mutates six line-endings: “mountains”, “valleys”, “forests”, “music”, “morning”, “evening”. These seem to evoke the elements of the pastoral world that, according to the generic convention set by the lament of nature, ought to answer to the shepherds’ grief. However, the sympathetic response here truly becomes a pathetic fallacy, trapping speakers and respondents in a self-perpetuating machine. Instead of an answer we hear a mere replay, literally a resonance of the same. Nature does not speak. Repeatedly, she is implored to listen with “silent ears to plaining music” (4, 10). But she remains silent with a vengeance, turning into an echoing chamber, where only human voices are heard endlessly repeating the same “deadly swannish music” (25). The singer of the “Lament for Bion” also recruited the swan song as mouthpiece for his sorrowing.²⁹ But here the singers not only substitute their own voices for those of nature, they also become agents of the inversions that turn every natural thing and process into its opposite, substituting such sympathetic “music” the human imitation of a screechowl’s cry:³⁰ “I that was once esteemed for pleasant music, | […] Am grown a screech-owl to myself each morning” (15, 18). The alteration caused by themselves is all-comprehensive. It transforms the elements of the natural world into allegories of their own disordered state of mind; they become “monstrous mountains | Of huge despair, and foul affliction’s valleys” (16 – 17). What resounds from these forests is their own sound, not truncated as in a natural echo, but enhanced to a degree that threatens to drive the singers mad: “Shamed, I hate myself in sight of mountains, | And stop mine ears lest I grow mad with music” (59 – 60). What Sidney’s shepherds describe is a kind of heightened amplificatio, perhaps best characterized as a type of feedback,³¹ an unwelcome and extremely unpleasant acoustic phenomenon, in which sound redoubles on itself, getting louder and louder, painfully accumulating to a degree where it annihilates hearing itself. Unlike echo, feedback occurs not after the signal but simultaneous with it, in a near-identical, deafening intensification. Still, while the comparison with feedback neatly captures the hurtful, terrorizing aspects of the self-created noise the singers suffer, – as well as the resemblance between its self-reflexive, looping structure and the sestina’s metapoetic weaving and layering –, it fails to

 “Lament for Bion”, 14.  The screech owl rivalling the nightingale is also part of the series of adynata in Theocritus’s Idyl 1 that describes the reversals caused by the death of Daphnis (132– 136); cf. “Ye goat-herd gods” (40): “The nightingales do learn of owls their music”.  The idea is Jeff Dolven’s, here gratefully acknowledged, who presented it in his contribution to a workshop on the literary rhetoric of sympathy (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 13 July 2017).

166

Verena O. Lobsien

describe its semantic quality. In Sidney’s poem this amounts to a destructive transformation of all natural things into their opposites: Meseems I see the high and stately mountains Transform themselves to low dejected valleys. Meseems I hear in these ill-changed forests The nightingales do learn of owls their music. Meseems I feel the comfort of the morning Turned to the mortal serene of an evening. (37– 42)

Texturizing structure and semantics are thus pitted against each other. While the proliferation of parallelisms affirms not only universal equivalence but an allpervading sameness, the alterations signified describe the most radical inversions. These are clearly changes for the worse, if not the worst, and unremittingly so. And they lead to a complete disabling of sympathy. Mirroring Urania’s prohibition of communication, all interaction with exterior agents appears to have come to an end. Yet, the ruin of nature is all in the mind. Nothing is perceived, all imagined. Far from finding comfort in natural responsivity, the self imprisons itself in its own pain, at the same time causing nature to metamorphose into a version of its own desperate condition.³² As the natural world seems to reflect and imitate the speaker’s condition, his mind more and more resembles a landscape laid waste, his thoughts mutating into savage beasts of prey: Long since my thoughts more desert be than forests. Long since I see my joys come to their evening, And state thrown down to over-trodden valleys. […] Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forests, And make me wish myself laid under mountains. (28 – 30, 35 – 36)

With nature turned into a version of the self, poetic imagination becomes blind and deaf for everything outside itself. An overblown, empty, all-engulfing and self-reproducing faculty, it fills the whole mind. The point is not so much that a locus amoenus is changed into a locus terribilis, but that there is only the space within: Terror and pain are places within the self. The speakers recognize,

 Strephon and Klaius reflect this also in the “dizain” that follows the sestina: “So close unto myself my wracks do lie; | Both cause, effect, beginning, and the end | Are all in me: what help then can I try?” (41– 43, p. 288).

Sympathy Lost

167

feel, perceive nothing except their own self-enclosed state of mind, forever fixed in unhappiness. The effect is profoundly disconcerting – deadening instead of comforting. Poetry becomes anaesthetic. Instead of participating in the living resonances and correspondences around them, by assimilating the natural world the singers swallow and thus evacuate it. Everything is incorporated into a bloated interiority disfigured by despair and sentenced to everlasting stasis. Sidney thus has his shepherds stage an apocalypse of the natural world – with the sun extinguished, the air filled with stench, maddening and loathsome noises and with the “dreadful cries of murdered men in forests” (48), the mountains levelled, day turned into “eternal evening” (65), prayer into curses, all goodness ended, sweetness spoiled, all hateful and polluted. They perform what they evoke in creating their own personal hell from which no escape or redemption appears possible. What they gain is a sense of self, possibly of technical mastery, at the price of a loss of sympathy. With reflexivity radicalized, imagination rampant and selfhood heightened to the utmost, natural sympathy is in effect emptied of substance. The ancient pastoral idea is thus effectively perverted by Sidney’s use of the sestina form. The constraints it imposes are employed in a manner that shifts the functional weight of the poem from a self-reflexive imagination of nature’s response to an ostentation of poetic accomplishment that excludes all other concerns. As technical tour de force, Sidney’s sestina hides no satisfying order and carries no comfort. It is poetic form taken to an extreme. But its splicing of semantics and mathematics celebrates, above all, its own self-contained perfection, demonstrating highest poetic skill in a technical achievement emptied almost of all but its metapoetic function. While this may be seen to witness to the speakers’ imprisonment in their own woe, it fails to command compassion or succeed in altering their fate. Poetic mastery appears coupled with excruciating impotence. At best, the combination of the six reifications that pretend to sum up the shepherds’ world in the poem’s restricted vocabulary imitates the structures of a pastoral apocalypse. It is indeed an ill change which terminates the Uranian music of the spheres and replaces it by this kind of dissonance. If it figures anything, it is an ever-narrowing recursivity doomed to arrive at a dead end.³³ It only ever acts out the same, performing, by repetition, an emptying There are, in this spatialization of linearity, only two numerically upward movements: as the retrogradatio cruciata moves 6 to position 1, 5 is moved to 3. All other permutations are downward ones: 1 moves to 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, 4 to 5. This might be seen to create the effect of a vortexlike movement predominantly downward and inward, in a recursivity that fundamentally differs from neoplatonic epistrophé, which would suggest a widening, ascending, ever more comprehen-

168

Verena O. Lobsien

out of meaning in a kind of decreation, “[t]urning to deserts our best pastured mountains” (75). Here, the strictest of forms appears not only incapable of resisting chaos, but by performing, deepens it. The order it promises is a primarily mathematical one. It may be seen to rest on a texturizing operation, but what it weaves is a cage. The resulting chaos is the effect of a self-created hyperorder: the chasm of selfhood, masterful, engulfing, and ultimately empty in a pro- and retrogressive evacuation of referentiality. This is eminently arid artistry, a mimetic play with limited means, producing from the idea of a radical separation from the beloved object the effect of perfectly autoreferential subjectivity. Thus taken to its extreme, the melancholy of Strephon and Klaius is utterly hopeless, no healing vistas of neoplatonic ascent are opened, no petrarchist promises of poetic sublimation extended. Above all, natural sympathy is lost. If Sidney’s shepherds act out a kind of co-affection through the way they echo each other’s pain, this remains strictly between them, within the bounds of claustrophobic human interiority. In its response to the affective tumult triggered by Urania’s arbitrary command, poetic form, by introverting natural sympathy, effectively kills it. In conclusion, two speculative remarks may be in place. First, and obviously, pastoral song continues, even after this extreme specimen. It continues within the Arcadia, and it will be practised by other poets after Sidney. Natural sympathy, too, will continue to be elicited in pastoral complaint. The next prominent example that comes to mind is, of course, Milton’s Lycidas (1637);³⁴ another, much later but in spirit closer to the ancient matrix, is Shelley’s Adonais (1821). However, Dr. Johnson’s critical arrow is still aimed at the heart of Lycidas and its kind, questioning their relation to nature and natural sympathy.³⁵ True, it

sive and ultimately transcendent gyration. For examples of functional neoplatonic recursivity in the poetry of Sidney’s contemporaries see also Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, Transparency and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010).  There are, of course, other examples of natural sympathy in Renaissance pastoral poetry, especially in early modern poetry of place (such as Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cooke-ham”, Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst”, Thomas Carew’s “To Saxham”, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” and others). However, the poetry of complaint makes this point with particular clarity. It also seems questionable whether in country house poetry we find natural sympathy regained. What we get is at best the imagined sympathy of domesticated nature, offering itself to human consumption sua sponte, and framed in a bid for patronage and a convention increasingly hollow.  “In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply, are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction

Sympathy Lost

169

might be argued that Johnson’s resentment at pastoral’s traditionality misses its point, and the fact that there is “nothing new” in the constricted and constricting world of Strephon and Klaius is not due to the familiarity of their repertoire. But he gives voice to a suspicion that seems to be borne out by my own reading: we may have lost something for good, and we may have lost it before Milton. Secondly, an insight that could have emerged from this review of some ancient and renaissance complaints is that we only ever “have” chaos in our responses. Perhaps we can know it only by responding poetically. As such, chaos is strangely elusive. It is one of the unspeakables and must by definition remain formless. All we can have is forms, whether they amount to types of disorder or of emptiness. And these must, it seems, be in principle allegorical, literally “other-speech” (Andersrede), presenting words as place-holders for what cannot be addressed directly. It does not surprise, therefore, that pastoral offers, in the lament of nature, one of the most basic formative responses to chaos. Here it is indeed an irreducible other who is made to speak – one whose answer may once have had redemptive power.

on the mind. […] He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; […]” (Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets, ed. John H. Middendorf, vol. 1 [New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2010], 176, 177).

Gordon Teskey

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton 1 Modern Chaos This volume is titled “Formations of the Formless: Chaos from the Ancient World to Early Modernity.” If we were to look forward to later modernity, starting in the 1960s we would have to speak about the modeling of supercomplex dynamical systems such as the weather, or the coastline of England, and about the mathematical quest for order (order as fractal repetition and self-similarity on different scales) in the very heart of what was thought to be, by definition, the total absence of order: chaos. Chaos theory says much the same thing as “Formations of the Formless,” the first formation, the first sensitive early condition, being the first beat of the butterfly’s wings. But the total absence of order – what we are calling the formless – is how chaos has been thought about from the ancient world to the Early Modern period, and some distance beyond the Early Modern period as well. The phrase “Formations of the Formless” therefore expresses a paradox, paradox being a gateway to the infinite regression, the mise en abîme, which is chaos in logic. If you can reduce something to a paradox, every statement you make on its basis can be true: you can prove anything, even contradiction. Reducing to a paradox is therefore a more descriptive term for refutation, but also for abjection, the thrown-downness of the unformed. At least this form of self-similarity on different scales has been well known since antiquity, as the Third Man Argument, which was supposed to refute Plato’s theory of the forms: the participation of each individual man with the form of man requires a third man in-between the two terms, then a fourth and fifth to either side of that third, and so on.¹ The eternal return of the same is a still more ancient concept – is it, perhaps, the earliest concept we can call “philosophical,” or perhaps even “human”? – going back to Indian philosophy, from whence it was recovered

 For ancient references to the Third Man see Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato and Parmenides (London: Routledge, 1939), 87– 90; Gregory Vlastos, “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides,” in Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. R. D. Allen (London: Routledge, 1965): 231– 263; and John Malcolm, Plato on the Self-Predication of Forms: Early and Middle Dialogues (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 47– 52. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-011

172

Gordon Teskey

by Nietzsche as the “greatest weight” and the “most abysmal thought.”² His challenge? Try to love that. Satan does try. Milton calls up the prospect of the mise en abîme at least once in Paradise Lost, when his Satan voices his most abysmal thought: “Evil, be thou my good.”³ This phrase’s effect on the mind is like walking between railroad tracks – on the left, evil; on the right, good – in the hope of reaching the point on the horizon where they meet, a point that always recedes. Satan is the only place where they might meet, and even there, of course, they fail, each running around to the place of the other. We normally think of chaos as a region of unlikeness worse than any Augustine imagined, where no form holds its form for long and any moment of integrity dies, like a ship torn apart on the rocks. But the mise en abîme appears at first to be the opposite horror (if it isn’t, actually the same), the sight of same ship torn apart again and again, as if we were watching a film of it going forwards and backwards at high speed. In Milton this is the delirious tumbling over of opposites that continually leap at each other in the attempt to coincide, each ending up where the other was a moment ago – and leaping again. In chaos, in the abyss, the very difference between identity and difference is lost. Chaos is like a Ferris wheel, or the Spindle of Necessity in Plato’s Myth of Er, eternally returning the same; and it is like the sea, disintegrating all integrity; and it is like both at once; and of course – who wasn’t expecting this easy turn of the screw? – it is not really like either. Is there even an it? I don’t think so: there is no such thing as total disorder, even in the wildest turbulence at the center of a star. The concept of chaos as whelming and confused substance waiting for order is a backformation from the human practice of making. But just because it is a fabrication, a disintegrating idol in the mind, like the two colossi of Memnon, chaos is the most poetical of thoughts. Let us reflect further on the kaleidoscopic impact of other prepositions, were these to be substituted into our title: formations moving into the formless, where structures are ripped apart as they approach it; formations from the formless, which is to say, out of the formless, generating what nowadays are termed “emergent” phenomena, like consciousness and freedom, or Milton’s self-creating, self-nourishing nature, the tree of being growing out of “one first matter” (PL 5.473); formations with the formless, in which form is determined dialectically  Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, Calif.: Harper and Row, 1984), 232.  Paradise Lost, 4.110. Citations are from Gordon Teskey, ed., Paradise Lost, 2nd edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020). Paradise Lost (PL) line references are given in brackets in the text.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

173

and always depends on chaos for its organizing power, as in the improvised noise of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, or the paintings of Anselm Kiefer,⁴ and also, we shall see, Spenser’s Garden of Adonis, where the dying god – dying and decay, Aristotle’s phthora, being a descent into chaos – is “the Father of all formes”⁵; and even formations at the formless, which is to say, alongside it, at what the physicists call an event horizon, the boundary of a black hole marked by the limit that light radiating from it can reach before being held in by the intense gravitation. Beyond that horizon, looking back, what you would see is a small, orbicular region of darkness, a sucking chaos into which anything that gets close disappears, so completely it is not an event. But from father out, the black hole of this chaos is the anchor of a galactic vortex of stars. In a poem titled “Event Horizon,” Jorie Graham speaks of “an indentation, almost a cut … Where the dizziness seems to be rushing towards form.”⁶ The black hole of modern physics is certainly an exotic species of chaos. Its outer rim is the curvature of Night or, as in Hesiod, Νύξ [Nux] the daughter of Χάος [Chaos] and consort of Ἔρεβος [Erebos], darkness. While it draws into itself everything that approaches too near, it is also, as mentioned, the anchor of galaxies, keeping them from flying apart and so making their structures possible – which is why Ἡμέρη [Hêmerê/Hêmera] our daytime, and Αἰθήρ [Aithêr], the clear, burning region of the upper air (the name is from the verb to burn) –

 John Coltrane: Live in Japan, 4-disk box set on “Impulse!”; from recordings in July 1966. The dense materialism and spiritual longing of Anselm Kiefer’s paintings, “neither formed nor formless,” is well known from his many exhibitions. For the above phrase, see Richard Davey, “‘In the Beginning is the End and in the End is the Beginning,’ on ‘the Poetry of Rubble’,” in Anselm Kiefer; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 27 September – 14 December 2014 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2014), 49 and 55. Much of what can be said about formless comes under the name of Georges Bataille, the inspiration of Yve-Alain Blois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), originally published as L’Informe: mode d’emploi (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996). In the paragraph-essay entitled Informe Bataille asserts that philosophy has no other purpose than to make the universe take a form, with matter as its mirroring principle. His later philosophy will develop the idea of heterology, or “othering,” which is independent of both those traditional principles. See “Informe,” in Oeuvres completes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 217, and “Materialism,” in the same volume. Allan Stoekl, ed. and trans., Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939 (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31.  The Faerie Queene III. vi. 12 and 42. Citations from The Faerie Queene (FQ) by book, canto, and stanza from J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt, eds., The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, (1912; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1960).  Jorie Graham, Materialism (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco, 1993), 53.

174

Gordon Teskey

for us the far-flung arms of pinwheeling galaxies – are born of Night and Erebus.⁷ We can think this way, uniting old myths with new science, in some measure because the poets Edmund Spenser and John Milton showed us the way.

2 Thinkers of Disorder Who were these two poets? They are separated by about seventy years and belong to distinct phases of the early modern period: for Spenser, the sunset of the Elizabethan age, the 1580s and 90s, when the queen was in decline and social chaos was rising; for Milton, the Stuart era of revolution, in science as well as in politics, when a new order seemed to be emerging. Spenser was an elder contemporary of Shakespeare. He dedicated his epic allegorical poem, The Faerie Queene, to Queen Elizabeth I, pretending, at least in the first installment of 1590, that the entire work was an allegory of her moral perfections, represented in what he called “colourd showes” (III proem 3). Only secondarily was the poem intended to be morally exemplary to others: “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” as he says in the Letter to Raleigh, which was affixed to the first installment of the work.⁸ Fully three times as long as Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene was left incomplete at the poet’s early death in 1599, when he was in his later forties. A brilliant fragment called “The Mutabilitie Cantos” – starring, so to speak, the titaness Mutability, or phthora “decay,” who is nearly related to Chaos – would appear a decade later, in 1609, when The Faerie Queene was published in its state of final incompleteness. That was one year after John Milton was born, in December, 1608. Where Spenser belongs to the last decades of the sixteenth century, Milton occupies the middle decades of the seventeenth, the age of English Revolution, to which he was personally and publically committed, defending the regicide in English as well as in Latin, so that all Europe might hear. It was, he said, “my

 Hesiod, Theogony lines 116 – 126. See Glenn W. Most, ed., trans., Hesiod: Theogony. Works and Days, Testimonia, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 13 and n. Since by Chaos is meant a yawning emptiness, Most translates it as ‘Chasm’. See Most’s essay in this volume.  “A Letter of the Authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke.” See http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=102, accessed 30 April 2020.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

175

noble task, / Of which all Europe talks from side to side.”⁹ The revolution collapsed in 1660, at the Restoration of King Charles II, and Milton was lucky to survive. He published Paradise Lost in 1667 and again, in its final form, in the summer of 1674, only months before he died. It’s significant that Spenser died (on January 13th, 1599) at an age younger than Milton was when he began the composition of Paradise Lost, around age fifty. The Faerie Queene was incomplete at the poet’s death, but it is not inherently, as has been supposed, impossible to complete, or unnecessary to complete.¹⁰ It is hard to think what else Spenser would have done had he had, as Milton did, two more decades of life. Both poets come near the end of our story of chaos, but both were familiar with its long philological tail reaching back to poetical beginnings, in Hesiod and in Genesis, in which we have the “tehom” of the “abyss,” as this word is rendered in the Septuagint and in the Vulgate;¹¹ to the third kind of space, the chôra, or nameless receptacle-from-below, the hypodochê, of the Timaeas; to Democritus’ atoms and Ovid’s vast congestion of elements, a rudis indigestaque moles, “which is called chaos”; the chaos of Seneca, which is both empty and densely packed¹²; to the twelfth century Platonists, notably Bernardus Silvestris, who in the Cosmographia personifies Chaos as female “matter,” Hylê or Silva; and on again to the mythographers and poets of the Renaissance, inheriting from Boccaccio the spurious god Demogorgon, the father of all the other gods, including the Olympians, who is too dreadful to be known, quem scire nefastum, or whose name is too dreadful to speak, although of course it is spoken. Demogorgon is himself an event horizon on the shoreline of Chaos, only partly existent, begotten from a commentator’s mistaken transcription of the Greek word δημιουργόν demiurge (in the accusative), a workman, as he is called in the

 “To Cyriack Skinner,” in John Carey, ed., Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems (Harlow: Pearson and Longman, 22007).  For the view that the poem only appears incomplete but actually is complete, see Northrop Frye, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” University of Toronto Quarterly 30.2 (1961): 109 – 127.  Genesis 1:2: “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Vulgate: “terram autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi,” phrasing that echoes the Aeneid (6.269), “perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna”; Septuagint: “ἡ δὲ γῆ ἦν ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, καὶ σκότος ἐπάνω τῆς ἀβύσσου”; Luther’s German has “die Erde war wüst und leer, und es war finster auf der Tiefe.”  Seneca, Hercules furens 861 “stat chaos densum”; Agamemnon 487 “et atrum rebus induci chaos”; Thyestes 832 “deforme chaos”; Thyestes 1009 “inane chaos”; Medea 741 “Chaos caecum.” Also, Thyestes 843 – 844, into one gulf will fall the compacted throng of gods, “ibit in unum congesta sinum / turba deorum.”

176

Gordon Teskey

Timeas. Boccaccio makes Demogorgon the father of the three fates, and Natalis Comes makes him the child of Chaos.¹³ So it is that in one of the three references to chaos in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, we find, in Book Four, the most straightforward: a descent to underworld by the strange maternal character Agape who goes there to find out the futures of her three sons.

 For the δημιουργός “demiurge” as divine workman and creator, see Plato, Timaeus 28a6; for the ὑποδοχή “receptacle” 51α5; for χώρα “space” 52a8; cf. 48e4. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1. 5 – 9: “Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum / unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, / quem dixere chaos rudis indigestaque moles / nec quicquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem / non bene iunctarum discordia semina rerum.” Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia 1, ed. Peter Dronke (Leiden: Brill, 1978); Winthrop Wetherbee, ed. and trans., Poetic Works, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 38 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). Demogorgon is a spurious god born from a mistake in the gloss on Statius’ Thebaid 4.516, where Tieresias mysteriously refers to the high lord of the threefold world, whom it is forbidden to know: “et triplicis mundi summum, quem scire nefastum”. In his commentary Lactantius Placidus says Statius means the δημιουργόν (the accusative adds to the coming confusion) of the Timaeus, the highest god, whose name it is unlawful to know, a scribal error altering the Greek to demogorgona – “dicit deum demogorgona summum: cuius nomen scire non licet” – and then to demogorgon. Thus the mysterious god Demogorgon becomes the head and source of all the other gods in Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum Gentilium (1.5 and 14. proem), “he whom the ancients, in their error, for the sake of a beginning, called the first god” (“Demogorgone, quem primum deorum omnium errantes prisci dixere”; in Renaissance mythographies, in Spenser and Milton, and lastly in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, where, as “Eternity,” he rides up Olympus on his throne-chariot to draw Jupiter down into the abyss (3. 1. 52– 56). C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 39 – 40. The manuscript variants, demogorgona and demogorgon, may be corruption from Lucan, Pharsalia 6.744, the ravings of a Thessalian witch (referred to by Statius’ Tieresias), who asks, “an ille / Conpellandus erit, quo numquam terra vocato / Non concussa tremit, qui Gorgona cernit apertam.” “Or must I call on him, at whose name the earth trembles, and who looks on the gorgon’s head openly?” Charles G. Osgood, ed., Boccaccio on Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956), 15 and 146 n. 4; Latin text from Jeremiah Reedy, ed., Boccaccio in Defence of Poetry: Genealogiae deorum gentilum liber XIV, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 8 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 1978), 11; see also Michael Papio, ed. and trans., Boccaccio’s Expositions on Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 413, where he says the Fates are the daughters of Demogorgon and Chaos, coeval with the beginning of all things, more fully set forth in the De Genealogia 1.5. See Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, vol. 1, Books 1 – 5, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 67. Natale Conti, Mythologiae, eds. John Mulryan and Steven Brown (Tempe, Ariz.: ACMRS, 2006), xxx n. But Conti makes the Fates (among the accounts he reports) the offspring, with Pan, of the indigestaque moles that the ancients call Chaos, alluding to Ovid (174).

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

177

That is the second mention of chaos. The first comes in the vision of the Garden of Adonis, Spenser’s allegory of the origin, not of all souls, as in the episode of the Aeneid he is channeling, but of all living bodies. In it, we hear of “an huge eternall Chaos which supplies / The substances of Nature’s fruitfull progenies.” In Milton chaos is somewhere, although it shouldn’t be anywhere, since in it time and space are lost; in Spenser, chaos is everywhere and shouldn’t be somewhere, though it is. In Milton chaos is walled out as a danger to life; in Spenser it is brought in as a vital and fructifying source. A longer treatment of the implications of chaos in the Garden of Adonis, and particularly of the dying god himself, who gives life as he dies and is “eterne in mutabilitie” (III. vi. 48) must be left to another place. Let us return to Agape, and Demogorgon.

3 From Spenser’s Demogorgon to Milton’s Personified Chaos Agape expects to learn from those three fatal sisters her sons’ futures, who live in the “deepe Abysse” where Demogorgon is the master of Chaos: Therefore desirous th’end of all their days To know, and them t’enlarge with long extent, By wondrous skill, and many hidden wayes, To the three fatall sisters house she went. Farre under ground from tract of living went, Downe in the bottome of the deepe Abysse, Where Demogorgon in dull darknesse pent, Farre from the view of Gods and heavens blis, The hideous Chaos keepes, their dreadfull dwelling is. (The Faerie Queene IV ii 47)

That second sentence, “Farre under ground …,” imitates the long, winding descent to the house of the furies at the edge of Chaos and the place of its keeper, Demogorgon. “The dreaded name / Of Demogorgon” – cuius nomen scire non licet – is still there in Milton, neighboring Chaos and Night, a daemon trailing vestigial personifications, as if he were somewhere in-between a daemon and a figure: … when straight, behold! the throne Of Chaos and his dark pavilion spread Wide on the wasteful deep. With him enthroned Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,

178

Gordon Teskey

The consort of his reign, and by them stood Orcus [god of Death] and Ades [personified darkness] and the dreaded name Of Demogorgon, Rumor next and Chance And Tumult and Confusion all embroiled And Discord with a thousand various mouths. (Paradise Lost 2. 959 – 967)

Demogorgon’s true descendant in Milton is the personified figure of Chaos himself, the “anarch old” of “falt’ring speech and visage incomposed” (PL 2.988 – 989). When Satan encounters him, he asks for directions to the universe (Milton calls it “the world”), which God has newly created in the midst of chaos and out of the materials of chaos, having formerly created Heaven and Hell – three incursions across the “gloomy bounds” of Chaos’s “dominion” (PL 2. 976 and 978). In recompense for Chaos’s aid, Satan promises to destroy the created universe, reducing it “To her original darkness and your sway … and once more / Erect the standard there of ancient Night. / Yours be th’advantage all, mine the revenge!” (PL 2.984– 987). For there are two chaoses in Paradise Lost, the one being this person whom Satan addresses, “the Power of that place” (Book Two, Argument), the other the place itself, where “time and place are lost” (PL 2.894), a region of boundless extent – it goes on forever – in comparison to which the entire created universe is a tiny speck or, as Satan first descries it, “This pendent world in bigness as a star / Of smallest magnitude close by the moon” (2.1052) – i. e., barely discernable with the naked eye. The reply of the anarch old to Satan’s request gives us a retrospective view of the fall of the rebel angels through chaos, “With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout.” Chaos keeps residence on his frontiers, like the stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, defending, as he says – and Milton intends the joke – “That little which is left so to defend,” as if anything subtracted from boundlessness could reduce it in size. But the last words of Chaos are true, that destruction and ruin of any kind – Milton intends us to hear the Latin meaning of ruere “to collapse” – are irresistible to him: … I know thee, stranger, who thou art, That mighty leading angel who of late Made head against Heav’n’s King, though overthrown. I saw and heard, for such a num’rous host Fled not in silence through the frighted deep With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded, and Heav’n gates Poured out by millions her victorious bands Pursuing. I upon my frontiers here Keep residence. If all I can will serve

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

179

That little which is left so to defend, Encroached on still through your intestine broils, Weakening the scepter of old Night: first Hell, Your dungeon stretching far and wide beneath, Now lately Heav’n and Earth, another world Hung o’er my realm, linked in a golden chain To that side Heaven from which your legions fell. If that way be your walk you have not far, So much the nearer danger. Go and speed: Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain! (Paradise Lost 2.990 – 1009)

4 Milton’s Physical Chaos Our first sight of the physical chaos in Paradise Lost – it is the most sublime invention of that sublime poem – comes earlier, at the beginning of Satan’s journey, when the gate of Hell, ringed with iron and adamant, and with fire, is unlocked from within by Sin, who holds the key. Sin stands on the sill of Hell’s gate with Satan and their son, Death, looking out on the appalling abyss. The description is worth quoting at length to observe the mixture of mythical, natural, presocratic, and above all political elements – as when, for example, decision, a military term, does not bring peace but “more embroils the fray”: Before their eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark Illimitable ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth and heighth And time and place are lost, where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy amidst the noise Of endless wars and by confusion stand. For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce Strive here for mast’ry and to battle bring Their embryon atoms. They around the flag Of each his faction in their several clans, Light-armed or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow, Swarm populous, unnumbered as the sands Of Barca or Cyrene’s torrid soil, Levied to side with warring winds and poise Their lighter wings. To whom these most adhere, He rules a moment. Chaos umpire sits And by decision more embroils the fray By which he reigns. Next him high arbiter

180

Gordon Teskey

Chance governs all. Into this wild abyss (The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave) Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixed Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight Unless th’Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more worlds, Into this wild abyss the wary fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while, Pondering his voyage, for no narrow frith He had to cross. Nor was his ear less pealed With noises loud and ruinous (to compare Great things with small) than when Bellona storms With all her battering engines bent to raze Some capital city – or less than if this frame Of Heaven were falling and these elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast earth. (Paradise Lost 2. 890 – 927)

An approximate map of this astonishing passage would note its beginning with the philosophy of space, recalling Plato’s Timaeus, its vague channeling of Hesiod, with the birth of Nature from Chaos and Night¹⁴; and its reversion to the atoms of Democritus and the elements and principles, the archai, of the stoics. All of which calls up the simile to the infinite – let us say, innumerable – sands of the North African desert, “Cyrene’s torrid soil,” generating chance by the sands’ causal but incalculable combinations (we are close to modern chaos theory). The other comparison to something in our world, complementing those sands with a more openly political evocation of chaos, this one acoustical, is the earsplitting racket of battle, supremely evoked by Homer, the screaming klang of warriors, which is like the screaming of birds, and the confused shouting and clash of arms, the homados of battle. We are moreover given, though briefly, the dreadful prospect of everything returning to this state at last, in what I take to be the most hair-raising verse in the entirety of Paradise Lost: “The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave.” Chaos is to our minds a grave because of entropic heat-death to which the universe is destined, according to the second law of thermodynamics. But also, more close at hand, chaos is for us the dense confusion of nature in the anthropocene era created by us: the destruction of other life forms, the poisoning of the air, the pollution of fresh water, the melting of the icecaps; the great smear of plastic on the sea and in the sea – in every drop

 Hesiod, Theogony, lines 116 – 125.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

181

of seawater. The chaos of Greek myth is behind us, at the beginning of time. The chaos we are creating lies ahead: it is the coming chaos. Lastly, to make an end of this passage, regrettably leaving Satan’s actual journey to one side, we have the reminder that all these mixed and confused, warring elements are “dark materials” from which God can create more worlds (i. e., universes), should it please him to do so, even if chaos is to be the grave of them all – the womb of worlds not yet brought into being, but also their destined and inevitable end. Indeed, we will learn later in the poem, in Book Seven, just before the narrative of the Creation occurs, that this chaos is the alienated substance of God, his actual and infinite body, now abandoned by him and waiting for creation to change it. We will meet the prospect of chaos again on several occasions in Paradise Lost: when Satan lands on the outer or exterior surface of the convex wall of the created world, the cosmos. This huge outer orb protects the “luminous inferior orbs” “From chaos and th’inroad of darkness old” (PL 3.421) and is continually battered by the wild tempests of chaos. When Satan at last breaks into the cosmos, he flies downwards past innumerable stars and other worlds – “but who dwelt happy there / He stayed not to inquire” (PL 3.570 – 571) – and arrives at the sun where, in disguise, he draws from the angel Uriel vital information as he spies out his way to earth. In their conversation we have another description of creation from chaos, which may be quoted here to show how in Milton’s romantic imagination chaos is always productive, always more womb than grave. These words are Uriel’s: I saw when at His Word the formless mass, This world’s material mold, came to a heap. Confusion heard His voice, and Wild Uproar Stood ruled, stood Vast Infinitude confined, Till at His second bidding darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung. Swift to their several quarters hasted then The cumbrous elements, earth, flood, air, fire, And this ethereal quintessence of Heav’n Flew upward, spirited with various forms That rolled orbicular and turned to stars Numberless, as thou see’st. (Paradise Lost 3. 708 – 719)

When, in Book Seven, the Son commands the gates of Heaven to open and sails out into chaos and circumscribe the cosmos, that outer protective orb we just saw, he and the angels with him pause on the brink (as Satan, Sin, and Death did before), giving us another vision of sublime horror:

182

Gordon Teskey

On Heav’nly ground they stood and from the shore They viewed the vast immeasurable abyss Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild, Up from the bottom turned by furious winds And surging waves as mountains to assault Heav’n’s heighth and with the center mix the pole. (Paradise Lost 7.210 – 215)

The simile is interesting for its difference as well as its similarity. Milton knew of the rebounding effect of the sea floor on the height of waves (“Up from the bottom turned”) and the sea-bottom in Greek is byssos. An abyss is that which is without a bottom. When the Son silences chaos, as Jesus will rebuke the winds (Mark 4:39), we are told that “chaos heard his voice” (PL 721). But the hearer is no longer the personified “anarch old”; it is the physical thing in itself, just as in Mark’s gospel the waves of the Sea of Galilee are not personified, or half-personified, as they would be in a Greek or Latin text. The Hebraic sense of the natural world is that, being created by God, it is obedient to his voice, even as it remains lifeless. Personification is the beginning of idolatry. Another densely evocative phrase for chaos – vast profundity obscure – emerges when the Son takes the golden compasses, “to circumscribe / This universe and all created things” and draws the great circle in the deep: “One foot He centered and the other turned / Round through the vast profundity obscure” (PL 7.228 – 229). It is vast, obscure, or dark (compare Italian oscuro), and deep, extending below out of sight; but it also rears up menacingly overhead. Milton had crossed the Alps from Milan into Switzerland, an arduous undertaking, partly by carriage and partly on foot. The experience gave him plenty of time to contemplate mountains soaring above him, their snowy upper slopes resembling the foam of gigantic waves suddenly frozen.

5 Chaos Breached by Sin and Death The last direct visions of chaos come in Book Ten of Paradise Lost, when Satan is on his victorious journey back to Hell, a victory he will proclaim, with surprising results, in Pandemonium, another vision of the eternal return of the same, as the devils are annually condemned to be transformed into serpents and to devour, with convulsive iteration, simulacra of the fruit by which Eve and Adam were tempted, fruit that turns to choking ashes in their mouths, “like that which grew / Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed” (PL 10.561– 562). On his way back to Pandemonium Satan enjoys a family reunion with Sin and Death, who are building a gargantuan bridge across chaos for the devils

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

183

to cross from Hell to the Universe. Sin and Death find themselves empowered to begin when Eve and Adam fall. Sin feels a “connatural force” (PL 10.246) drawing her towards the earth; and Death is eager to go along with her, scenting “The savor of death from all things there that live” (PL 10.269). In a marvelous image, Death “upturn[s] / His nostril wide into the murky air, / Sagacious of his quarry from so far” (PL 10.279 – 281). With new strength Sin and Death fly out into the “anarchy of chaos,” shoaling together whatever is more solid into an “aggregated soil,” including, of course, so as to recall the Dead Sea and Sodom, “asphaltic slime.” The whole mass is made still more solid when struck by Death’s petrifying mace and fixed by his gaze, binding the substance, like hardening concrete, “with gorgonian rigor” (PL 10.283 – 98). The “mole immense” is fastened at one end to Hell’s gate and is driven over the “foaming deep” to become “a bridge / Of length prodigious joining to the wall / Immoveable of this now fenceless world / Forfeit to Death” (PL 10.299 – 304), fastened there – or rather, here – “with pins of adamant” (PL 10.318). One of the more notable epithets of chaos is introduced following an apposite simile to the Persian tyrant Xerxes scourging the waves of the Hellespont for breaking his bridge – “th’indignant waves,” as Milton calls them (PL 10.311). The new adjective for chaos is joined to the familiar word, abyss: it is vexed, which is to say, stirred up and turbulent, like Shakespeare’s “still-vext Bermoothes.”¹⁵ But the abyss is also in the common English usage, annoyed, as if the personification of Chaos were barely present, as we shall see he is: “Now had they brought the work by wondrous art / Pontifical, a ridge of pendent rock / Over the vexed abyss, following the track / Of Satan” (10.312– 315). Of course, that other adjective, pontifical, is a shaft directed at the Roman Catholic Church, an increasing political concern in Restoration England. Another terrestrial simile for chaos should be mentioned for what it shows about Milton’s geographical curiosity and his continual search for sublime scenes that are then miniaturized in comparison to what he would have us imagine. Sin and Death laboring in chaos are like polar winds: As when two polar winds blowing adverse Upon the Cronian Sea [the Arctic Ocean] together drive Mountains of ice that stop th’imagined way Beyond Petsora eastward to the rich Cathayan coast. (Paradise Lost 10. 289 – 293)

 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, in The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York and London: Norton, 1996), I. ii. 229, p. 21.

184

Gordon Teskey

In the last vision of chaos, Chaos himself appears, or partly appears – that is, never quite so fully as he does near the end of Book Two – enraged by this new bridge built right over, or right through his realm, by those he had some right to consider his allies. Sin and Death head one way on the bridge, toward the created world, and Satan goes the other way, to Hell: … Satan went down The causey to Hell gate. On either side Disparted Chaos overbuilt exclaimed And with rebounding surge the bars assailed That scorned his indignation. (Paradise Lost 10. 414– 418)

6 Milton’s Moral Chaoses This, as I said, is the last we see in Paradise Lost of the phenomenon of chaos, “the womb of nature and perhaps her grave.” But on two other occasions in the poem we see the energy of chaos expressed in imaginative visions of moral chaos. They may be mentioned here as being made possible by the Milton’s having thought his sublime chaos into poetry. The first is an extensive episode often referred to as the Limbo of Vanities, although Milton calls it the Paradise of Fools. It comes as a surprise in Book Three, when Satan has landed on and now stalks across “the firm opacous globe / Of this round world” (PL 3.418 – 419). He is alone on the outer, convex surface of the cosmos, but, the poet says, hereafter the place will be crowded with all things, and all persons, that are “transitory and vain” (PL 3.446), blown about like the lovers in the first circle of Dante’s Hell: Both all things vain and all who in vain things Build their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame Or happiness in this or th’other life, All who have their reward on earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal … All th’unaccomplished works of Nature’s hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, Dissolved on Earth, fleet hither and in vain Till final dissolution wander here … (Paradise Lost 3.448 – 458)

Among these are the children of the giants and heros of the Bible (Genesis 6), the Nephilim; the builders of Babel and “New Babels”; two pagan philosophers who

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

185

committed suicide, the one to achieve fame (Empedocles), the other to enjoy Plato’s Elysium sooner (Cleombrotus); Roman Catholic pilgrims who sought “In Golgotha Him dead, who lives in Heav’n”; dying persons who put on monkish robes in hope to slide undeserving into salvation; plus “Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars … with all their trumpery” (PL 3.464 – 480). In their deluded imaginations, these figures pass up through the celestial spheres – which Milton knew to be thoroughly discredited – until Saint Peter comes into their sight (another delusion), standing at Heaven’s gate with his keys. There, they take what they think is the final step into Heaven when they are blown sideways by fierce winds that sweep them around the outer surface of the created world: A violent crosswind from either coast Blows them transverse ten thousand leagues awry Into the devious air. Then might ye see Cowls, hoods and habits with their wearers tossed And fluttered into rags, then relics, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds. All these upwhirled aloft Fly o’er the backside of the world far off Into a limbo large and broad since called The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown Long after, now unpeopled and untrod. (Paradise Lost 3. 487– 497)

This is, as I said, a moral chaos, a junkyard like the backside of the moon in the thirty-fourth canto of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the satire of which Milton is channeling for our benefit, although with more severity and contempt. Even so, something about this episode makes it exceed its immediate meaning, as religious satire, and gives it prophetic force. The garbage wafted around the outside of the cosmos suggests its counterpart here: the tide of human waste throughout the world, wafted hither and yon by the currents of the seas. The other moral chaos is history. Rising seas suggest the Flood, when chaos is come again. In Books Eleven and Twelve of Paradise Lost the angel Michael takes Adam up a high mountain and shows him the future, a history of Eve and Adam’s descendants, following the biblical story, from the death of Cain to the apocalypse. Leaving aside the incarnation of Christ, the great divide in human existence on the earth comes – as it did up into the eighteenth century – at the Flood, which, accordingly, is seen at the end of Book Eleven: the “universal wrack” that ensues when God breaks open the fountains of the deep so the ocean can usurp upon the land, “till inundation rise / Above the highest hills” (PL 11.821– 829). Let us not forget that the cause of the Flood – the occasion for

186

Gordon Teskey

it – is human, not divine. That is why Milton gives special attention to the destruction of humanity’s ideal place, the mountain garden in the country of Eden. We stand with Adam and see the moment when, with the waters rising, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers become a single torrent and like a charging bull (this, I think, is the sense of “the hornèd flood”) tear the mountain of Paradise loose from its foundations, strip it of its trees, and carry it down to the Persian gulf. It gets lodged there and will reappear when the waters recede, now a barren, rocky, guano-rich and salt-encrusted island, the most forsaken place on earth: all fountains of the deep Broke up shall heave the oceans to usurp Beyond all bounds till inundation rise Above the highest hills. Then shall this mount Of Paradise by might of waters be moved Out of his place, pushed by the hornèd flood With all his verdure spoiled and trees adrift Down the great river to the opening gulf And there take root an island salt and bare, The haunt of seals and orcs and sea-mews’ clang. (Paradise Lost 11. 826 – 835)

We saw that Milton gets the word clang from Homer, where it is used of racket of large flocks of birds, the loudest sound on earth except for war. Placing his bow in the heavens after the Flood, God promised he wouldn’t destroy the world in this way again, by Flood, although we know he is keeping fire in reserve: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time.”¹⁶ But he didn’t promise we wouldn’t.

7 Mental Chaoses With their knowledge of the tradition going back to antiquity, Spenser and Milton were aware of what we may refer to as the antinomies of chaos – that it is animal and mineral, solid and liquid, dense and inane, whelming like the sea and gaping like a monster (chaos being from chascho, chainein, to yawn and gape); that it is empty and full, being a steep gap or chasm (chasma being a related word); that it is barren like a desert but productive and fruitful as well, the

 From “Mary Don’t You Weep.” Negro Spiritual, traditional.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

187

hiding place, in Augustine, of the rationes seminales, and the source of new worlds.¹⁷ Even older than the very ancient fear of rising seas and annihilating floods, witnessed in the Bible and Gilgamesh, are fears belonging not only to humans of the last six thousand years, from the agricultural revolution, but to humans and hominids going back more than hundred thousand years. I count three of them for now, each activating the hair-raising frisson of chaos. 1. The fear of night and darkness, when large predators hunt (whence Hesiod’s Erebos and Nux, who are born of Chaos) and hostile humans stalk, a terror that is very much alive in Beowulf, in which the monster Grendel, devourer of men, stalking the wilderness, the swamps, the unclassifiable regions, bears the epithets sceadugenga “shadow-goer” (line 703) and mearcstapa “border walker” (line 103).¹⁸ 2. The fear of falling from a branch or over a cliff into a chasm, a word related to chaos, which we hear of, for example, in Luke’s gospel (16:26), the chasma mega, originally the abyss of Genesis. It is not that Lazarus, in bliss, can’t relieve the rich man in Hell: it is that he can’t get there across the chasm in between, as Abraham explains to the wretch: “between us and you there stands a great chasm.”¹⁹ 3. The terror of being swallowed alive by large predators, including the sea conceived as such, of going down the sea’s throat, like Jonah and at least potentially Job. Grendel, obviously, fits in here, as well. When the chorus of Euripides’ Heracles is describing the hero’s labors, beginning with the killing of the Nemean Lion polluting Zeus’s grove, the hero drapes the skin about his body, along with its terrible head, which falls over his back, hiding his hair and showing its dreaded gaping jaws, or “terrifying chasm.”²⁰ The yawning and predatory  De Genesi ad litteram 5.7.20; 6.14.25 – 26.17.29 and 9.17.32; De trinitate 3.9. Rowan Williams, “Creation,” in Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 252. An idea derived from the spermatikoi logoi of the stoics. The point in Augustine is to deny any independent role to chaos in the creation, leaving the existence of all beings to the will of God: “[Dei] voluntas rerum necessitas est” (6.15.26). Williams writes, “It is the will of God that makes things happen. God’s continuing providence or ‘administration’ of the world is what determines events, not any internal principles of necessity.”  Friedrich Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R.D. Fulk, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 42008): “com on wanre niht / scriðan sceadugenga” (lines 702– 703, p. 26); “wæs se grimma gæst Grendel hätten, / mære mearcstapa” (lines 102– 103, p. 6).  “μεταξὺ ἡμῶν καὶ ὑμῶν χάσμα μέγα ἐστήρικται.” See also, in the Septuagint, Micah 1:6– 7, prophesying that the stones of Samaria, capital of the northern kingdom, Israel, will be reduced to a chaos: καὶ κατασπάσω εἰς χάος τοὺς λίθους αὐτῆς; and Zechariah 14:4, in which it is prophesied that the Mount of Olives will split, creating a great chasm – it is called, however, a chaos – between the two parts: χάος μέγα σφόδρα. Thus chaos in these two uses is full, a pile of stones, and empty, a chasm.  δεινῷ χάσματι θηρός. Euripides, Heracles 363.

188

Gordon Teskey

sea is heard “roaring / polyphoboistrous [sic]” in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “The Sea and Ourselves at Cape Ann,” channeled from T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” with its “sea howl” and “sea’s yelp,” its shoals with granite fangs between which there issues a vomit of whale’s backbone, shattered lobsterpot, broken oar, “and the gear of foreign dead men.”²¹ The sea is a chaos and a reducer to chaos. Chaos arouses the fear of night and darkness, when killers stalk and predators hunt; the fear of falling off branches and cliffs; and the fear of being engulfed – by mud, by the sea, and by monsters in the sea. After Milton and Spenser, such terrors are subjective, stalking those shadowy regions and terrifying abysses of the human mind. We have madness in Swift’s Tale of a Tub and the still more dreadful goddess of Dulness in Pope. As her empire expands, she reduces the world of the mind to primordial stupor; and with the loss of all intellectual discipline and order the arts die, truth flees to her ancient cavern, and physics, mathematics, and metaphysics expire, together with divinity and even common sense: they all “gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die” (4. 648). At last, the extinction is complete: Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All. (The Dunciad 4.653 – 656)²²

This is mental chaos as disorder and the loss of distinction, but that other product of chaos, the mise en abîme, has its classic psychological statement in Pascal, who speaks of the terror of the two abysses that assail the mind on either side: that of the infinitely great and that of the infinitely small: “Qui se considéra de la sorte s’effraiera de soi-même et, se considérant soutenu dans la masse que la nature lui a donnée entre ses deux abîmes de l’infini et du néant, il tremblera dans la vue de ces merveilles.” “Whoever reflects on himself in this way will be afraid of himself and, considering himself as held up by the mass that nature gave him between these two abysses – of the infinite and nothingness [i. e., the infinitely small] – will tremble at the sight of such marvels.”²³

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The Sea and Ourselves at Cape Ann,” in These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955 – 1993 (New York: New Directions, 1993), 233; T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943), 19 – 28, at section I, 21– 22.  Alexander Pope, The Duncaid, The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 5, ed. James Sutherland (London: Methuen; New Haven, Mass.: Yale University Press, 1965), 409.  Blaise Pascal, “Pensées #72,” in Pensées et opuscules, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 5 1909): 347– 358, at 350.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

189

The celebrated meditation from which these words are taken anticipates the eighteenth-century sublime, from Burke to Kant, with its reflex of the mind on itself; it looks forward to the “deep romantic chasm” of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a “savage place … holy and enchanted” – existing at least equally in and for the mind.²⁴ In Spenser and Milton’s day, however, the sublime was still something stupendously high or profoundly abyssal, an engulfing, annihilating power and also a great reservoir of production, of potential, or dynamis. The sublime has no reference to any effect on the observing mind.²⁵ In Spenser and Milton, chaos is still real, still out there.

8 Spenser’s “Hymn in Honour of Love” The only explicitly theogonic passage in Spenser’s works is from the “Hymn in Honour of Love,” composed in the same period as The Faerie Queene and published in the same year as the second installment of that poem, 1596. The debt to Hesiod is clear, if slight, although as always with Spenser (and almost never with Milton) it is hard to distinguish the influence of the original source from intermediaries. Contrary to our own way of thinking, Spenser tended to regard later works as enriching the original rather than as falling off from it. It’s unlikely he knew the Orphic cosmogony of Aristophanes’ Birds, in which the chorus tells us how Night, the black-winged, laid a an egg in the depths of Erebus, from which sprang golden-winged Eros, who mated with Chaos, also winged, and hatched the race of the birds, which is more august and primordial than the Olympians.²⁶ But there is a similar emphasis on Love’s wings, which grow from his own heat, kindled from heavenly fire. Some part of the tradition of Orphic cosmogonies may have reached Spenser through the chapter on the origin of Love in Ficino’s De amore, that imaginative commentary on the Symposium, where the elements of chaos have an innate force of love within, tending to form.²⁷

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan: or, a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment,” in Coleridge Select Poetry and Prose, ed. Stephen Potter (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1971), 94.  I am indebted for this point to Hudson Vincent, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, in his dissertation chapter on the sublime in the seventeenth century, “The Baroque Sublime.”  Aristophanes, The Birds, lines 693 – 702.  Marsile Ficin, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis, De Amore, ed. and trans. Pierre Laurens (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2002). I.3, 8 – 15 “De origine amoris.” For the influence of the Argonautica Orphica, which puts chaos before the world and the gods, see n. 19 pp. 256 – 257. M. L. West, The

190

Gordon Teskey

But where Ficino plods, Spenser (like Aristophanes) soars. He first describes the world (i. e., the cosmos), with its “goodly face,” long hidden in the ugly prison of Chaos, while Love slept in his mother Venus’ lap. There is no winged cosmic egg, and here the gods, at least Aphrodite, are prior to the creation of the world. Love is bestirred by Clotho, the first of the three fates, who spins the raw wool into thread (as her name implies) and so presides over beginnings. Upon waking, Love’s wings grow from his own heat, carrying him aloft like an eagle and speeding him through the darkness of the “great wide waste,” which, presumably, is the same thing as Chaos’s great ugly prison. Venus now provides light for her son, by which he begins to create the world – “the world that was not till he did it make” – separating the elements that had lain before in primordial confusion: For ere this worlds still moving mightie masse, Out of great Chaos ugly prison crept, In which his goodly face long hidden was From heavens view, and in deepe darnesse kept, Love, that had now long time securely slept In Venus lap, unarmed then and naked, Gan reare his head, by Clotho being waked. And taking to him wings of his owne heate, Kindled at first from heavens life-giving fyre, He gan to move out of his idle seate, Weakely at first, but after with desyre Lifted aloft, he gan to mount up hyre,

Orphic Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 37– 38 and 111– 113. For the influence of the 5th–6th century CE Argonautica Orphica, discovered in the fifteenth century, see Francis Vian, ed. and trans., Les Argonautiques orphiques (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2003). For a general survey, see D. P. Walker, “Orpheus the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists,” JWCI 16 (1953): 100 – 120. Pico della Mirandola, in Conclusiones … de modo intelligendi hymnos Orphei, # 28, has the famous sentence, “Frustra adit naturam et Protheum, qui Pana non attraxerit.”; “He who cannot attract Pan, approaches Nature and Proteus in vain.” Stephen Alan Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) (Tempe, Ariz.: MRTS, 1998), 514. For commentary, see Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, eds. and trans. Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio, and Massimo Riva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 74 and n. 22. Latin text with French translation, Jean Pic de la Mirandole, Neuf cents conclusions, philosophiques, cabbalistiques, et théologiques, ed. and trans. Bertrand Schefer (Paris: Allia, 2006), 204. For a discussion of Proteus as chaos, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958), 196. For the sea and the shape-shifting god Proteus as analogies of chaos, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 557.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

191

And like fresh Eagle, make his hardie flight Through all that great wide wast, yet wanting light. Yet wanting light to guide his wandring way, His owne faire mother, for all creatures sake, Did lend him light from her owne goodly ray: Then through the world his way he gan to take, The world that was not till he did it make; Whose sundrie parts he from them selves did sever, The which before had lyen confused ever. (“An Hymn in Honour of Love”, lines 57– 78)

In this remarkably pagan description there is no effort to make the classical myth work within the Christian tradition, which is what Milton does as naturally as breathing. For Christianity, the theological problem with a primordial chaos, such a chaos being a second originative principle, is that the chaos, Aristotle’s “prime matter,” will inevitably become a contrary principle of equal authority: a Manichaean dark side, defacing the omnipotence of God. Milton does not believe in creation ex nihilo, the common gloss of theologians, which aims at eliminating chaos altogether. There must be nothing prior to or coeternal with God’s will. Because Milton is committed to a fundamental materialism – for him, spirit is only a more refined mode of substance – he puts the origin of chaos in God himself, as I mentioned before. From eternity and in accordance with his own nature, God fills infinitude and then withdraws from that unimaginable state into a circumscribed space, leaving chaos behind, which is his own alienated substance. It is into that chaos that God will send forth his “goodness,” in the person of his Son, to create the world: Boundless the deep because I am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space Though I uncircumscribed Myself retire And put not forth my goodness which is free To act or not. (Paradise Lost 7.168 – 172)

Our final observation of chaos will be in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos. A reason for this should be given. Although Spenser is, of course, chronologically prior to Milton, he sees farther into modernity than Milton does. Moreover, Spenser’s final vision is not confined to religious eschatology, as Milton’s is. Milton’s chaos is as sublime, I suspect, as anything in poetry in any language. But Spenser’s thinking through of a continuing chaos is more subtly attuned to life within nature than is Milton’s vast excluded sea of potential.

192

Gordon Teskey

9 Spenser’s Mutabilitie and the Decay of the World In 1596 the second installment of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was published in quarto, adding three new books and reprinting the previous three in a separate volume. Of the poet’s projected total of twelve books, these six, amounting to some thirty-six thousand lines, are all the poet completed at the time of his early death in the year 1599 – or almost all. For a decade later, in 1609, a new edition of the poem appeared in a single folio volume and with it a new portion of The Faerie Queene: “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie which, both for forme and matter, appear to be parcell of some following book of The Faerie Queene under the legend of Constancie. Never before imprinted”; for short, The Mutabilitie Cantos. The two cantos are intriguingly numbered six and seven, with fifty-five and fiftynine stanzas respectively, a little longer than average, and an eighth canto “unperfite,” which is to say, “incomplete,” has only two stanzas, although they read like a conclusion to the poem as a whole or, what is much the same thing in Spenser, like a temporary stopping place, a pause for breath in a creative project that seems impossible to complete because its energies are inexhaustible. Yet here, where it is hard not to think of the poet’s approaching death, there is certainly the feeling of an end: For all that moveth doth in change delight: But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that great Sabbaoth God graunt me that Sabaoths sight. (The Faerie Queene VII. viii. 2)

The wordplay on the God of hosts and the day of rest, the eighth day Sabbath, which is eternity, is well known and presents a vision curiously like chaos, perhaps because it is the opposite of chaos: a vision of overwhelming spatial fullness in the sight of God’s hosts of angels, and of vacuity at the thought of a Sabbath that goes on forever. The mise en abîme leading down into Hell has become the abyss of God, as in Dante’s final vision with its mystical letargo, a deep weariness weighing on him more heavily than the abyss of time;²⁸ and the chaos where, as Milton says, time and space are lost, has become the eternity in which time and space no longer have any meaning.

 “Un punto solo m’è maggior letargo / che venticinque secoli a l’mpresa / che fé Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo”, Paradiso 33. 94– 96.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

193

The question whether the Mutabilitie Cantos belong to The Faerie Queene is easily settled, given their numbering, the headnote I have quoted, a reference by the poet to his theme of “warres and knights” (vi. 37), for there are no wars and no knights in this fragment, and above all the Spenserian stanza, unique in Spenser’s oeuvre to this poem alone. But how the cantos belong to The Faerie Queene, and not least whether we should refer to them in the singular, as a poem, or in the plural, as fragments, is far from settled. They could certainly be fit into a later, full book of twelve cantos, had the poet lived to write it. But not without reason have they been called a single, perfectly shaped and complete poem that could not possibly have gone into any future book of The Faerie Queene. For despite their fragmentary appearance, which must be deliberate if the former statement is true, they also bear the marks of a philosophical and retrospective summing up – not of the poem but of life – on a dreadful but for us a highly relevant theme: the decay of the world. In Spenser’s day it seemed to be happening independent of us; in our day it does not. The questions raised by The Mutabilitie Cantos can be stated as follows. Are the changes, mostly for the worse as we suppose, that we see everywhere in the world, and the death and decay that surround us, evidence that the world as a whole is decaying and will ultimately die? Or is there a permanence beneath change – Goethe’s Dauer im Wechsel – by the power of which order, and life, are continually renewed? In Donne’s Anniversaries, especially the first, “An Anatomy of the World” (1611), we are treated to an unremitting dissection of the world in a poem the form of which imitates that of an anatomy lecture, concluding when the smell of the corpse – which is that of the world – has become too strong to continue: an original formal constraint, unlikely to be repeated. Victor Harris borrowed a phrase from this poem for his classic study of the debate that erupted in the early seventeenth century between Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill over the decay of nature: All Coherence Gone (1949). At the time the issue seemed a curious and even transformative one in intellectual history, but definitely confined to the past. It has come alive again in our time. Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos may therefore properly be called by a name that is opposite to cosmogony or cosmo-genesis: a cosmophthora, a narrative of cosmic decay, of regression to chaos.²⁹ If the world can be born, then it can also die.

 Cosmophthora is an alternative title in the manuscript tradition of the fragments of Varro’s Κοσμοτορύνη, περὶ φθορᾶς κόσμου “The Cosmic Hot Pot, or The Decay of the Universe,” a Menippean satire. A torunê is a big pot into which the elements of the universe are thrown and confused with one another again, as they were originally in chaos. Marcus Terentius Varro, Satires Ménippées, ed. Jean-Pierre Cèbe (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1983), 1044 n. 1. The word can

194

Gordon Teskey

Will the world be annihilated (and what then?) or will it go on in some way forever, with all things “turning to themselves at length againe” (VII. vii. 58)? This fundamental question about chaos as archê and possibly telos is raised by the Mutabilitie Cantos in the most witty and amusing ways for such an apparently serious subject, and an unwontedly philosophical one, prompting Northrop Frye to speak of this work as “metaphysical comedy.”³⁰ Elsewhere Spenser makes use of his wide reading to mobilize philosophical ideas in poetry, but treats them in a poetical, not a philosophical way. In The Mutabilitie Cantos, however, the balance between poetry and philosophy is more equally balanced. Or, rather, more interestingly, the greater philosophical intensity of the Mutabilitie Cantos excites Spenser’s mind to his highest poetical flights. This is not the place to plot those three flights in detail and admire them as much as they deserve: 1. the politically savvy squaring off between Mutabilitie and Jove, somewhere in space, having some of the features of a political caricature by James Gillray or George Cruickshank; 2. the unexpected and delightful aetiological fable of woodgod and stream, Faunus and Molanna, bringing to life the Irish landscape around Spenser’s home, under the mountain, Galtymore, Arlo Hill in the poem, part of the range of Old Father Mole; and above all 3. the majestic series (still humorously exuberant) of pageants within one great pageant representing change on earth and in the Heavens, including the supposedly immortal gods and the supposedly perfect motions of the heavenly bodies. (In Aristotle’s metaphysics the heavenly bodies are said to have both independent being, like physical things here below, and freedom from change, like mathematical objects; having both these qualities makes them, as he says, “theological” (theologikê). In the court of Dame Nature, all elements of the pageant are summoned as “Large evidence” (vii preface) in support of Mutabilitie’s case for being given the rule of all and dethroning the usurper, Jove. It does not perhaps bode well for her case that in the open-air court on Arlo Hill, where all creatures on earth and all also denote the stirrer of such a pot (n. 7). It is possibly to this work that Philo’s “On the Immortality of the World” (Περὶ ἀφθαρσίας κόσμου) is a response (n. 5).  Glen Robert Gill, ed., Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye 29 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 174. Frye repeats this in several places, e. g., “The Mutabilitie Cantos are high metaphysical comedy, worked out in a secular context,” which he sees as being telegraphed by the poet early on, that is, in the eighth stanza, by means of “deliberate doggerel,” as when Mutabilitie climbs to Cynthia’s shining palace, “Whose silver gates (by which there sate an hoary / Old aged sire, with hour-glass in hand, / Hight Time) she entered were he lief or sorry” (FQ VII.vi.8). “Vision and Cosmos,” in Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson, eds., The Secular Scripture and Others Writings on Critical Theory, 1976 – 1991, Collected Works of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006): 213 – 229, at 223.

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

195

gods in the heavens and on earth, in the sea and the woods, are assembled by Nature’s sergeant, whose name is Order: And thither also came all other creatures, What-ever life or motion doe retaine, According to their sundry kinds of features; That Arlo scarcely could them all containe; So full they fillèd every hill and plaine: And had not Natures sergeant (that is Order) Them well disposèd by his busie paine, And raungèd far abroad in every border, They would have causèd much confusion and disorder. (The Faerie Queene VII. vii. 4)

After the pageant, Mutabilitie embarrasses each of the gods in turn before she summarizes her case, pointedly concluding by asking Jove, “Where were ye borne?”, showing him to be what that not un-amiable snob Brabantio calls “an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere.”³¹ She answers her own question with similarly entertaining contempt: “Some say in Crete by name, / Others in Thebes, and others other-where” (FQ VII. vii. 53). But wherever he was born, the fact of it proves, she alleges, that he is mortal and therefore subject to her. In two more stanzas she shreds the Ptolemaic system and its metaphysical presumption of immutability above the sphere of the moon, after which she summarizes. But before quoting her summary, which affirms the antiquity, ubiquity, and continuity of chaos, let us digress for the sheer pleasure of it to observe what she says about three gods, starting with Mercury, who from recent observations has deviated alarmingly from his predicted course. Venus is then rather unfairly attacked for her planet’s being dark during the day; and Phoebus, the sun, is attacked for suffering eclipses, like migraines, which Mutability, with typical exaggeration, says happen often: Next Mercury, who though he lesse appeare To change his hew [less than Cynthia, the moon] and always seeme as one, Yet he his course doth alter every yeare, And is of late far out of order gone: So Venus eke, that goodly paragone, Though faire all night, yet is she darke all day; And Phoebus self, who lightsome is alone, Yet is he oft eclipsèd by the way,

 William Shakespeare, Othello I. i. 134– 135.

196

Gordon Teskey

And fills the darkned world with terror and dismay. (The Faerie Queene VII. vii. 51)

At last Mutabilitie summarizes her case, based on the thought that “all that moveth doth mutation love” (VII. vii. 55): Then since within this wide great universe Nothing doth firm and permanent appeare, But all things tost and turnèd by transverse: What then should let, but I aloft should reare My trophee, and from all the triumph beare? Now judge then (O thou greatest goddesse trew!) According as thy selfe doest see and heare, And unto me addoom that is my dew; That is the rule of all, all being rul’d by you. (The Faerie Queene VII. vii. 56)

The flaw in her case from Spenser’s point of view is that it is empirical, being based on what Nature can “see and heare,” showing her affinity with the radically egalitarian giant with his scales, in Book Five. “In the Mind the Doom of Right must be” (FQ V. ii. 47), replies the knight Artegal, and that thought underlies Nature’s carefully considered response, delivered after a long delay, during which all the creatures assembled on Arlo hill “did hang in long suspense what would ensew” (FQ VII. vii. 57).

10 Life as Continuing Chaos I have brought us to this point in the work not for the judgment itself but for the curiously inadequate and unwise basis on which Mutabilitie has tried to enforce her claim, forgetting the strength of her genealogical claim voiced at the outset of her assault of the Heavens, which is that she is the daughter of Earth and granddaughter of Chaos, Earth being “great Chaos child” (FQ VII. vi. 26), whereas the gods, including Jove, are the grandchildren of Earth. She has climbed up to the sphere of the moon and ordered its goddess Cynthia to abandon her chair, threatening to pluck her down and strike her with a golden wand – an odd detail. The threat alone causes the light of the moon to be obscured – Spenser is pretty clearly describing an eclipse of the moon – and the darkness falls not only on earth but in the heavens as well, throwing shade on the Olympian gods, whom Mutabilitie intends to supplant. The gods fear that chaos has returned, having broken his chain; and Jove is concerned

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

197

that Typhon, another figure of chaos unleashed (although in Hesiod he is born form Gaia and Tartarus) has broken out of the place where Jove pinned him, under Mount Etna, where the monster now writhes in perpetual agony, vomiting fire: Meane-while, the lower World, which nothing knew Of all that chauncèd here, was darkned quite; And eke the heavens, and all the heavenly crew Of happy wights, now unpurvaide of light, Were much afraid, and wondred at that sight; Fearing least Chaos broken had his chaine, And brought againe on them eternall night: But chiefely Mercury, that next doth raigne, Ran forth in haste, unto the king of Gods to plaine. All ran together with a great out-cry, To Joves faire Palace, fixt in heavens hight; And beating at his gates full earnestly, Gan call to him aloud with all their might, To know what meant that suddaine lack of light. The father of the Gods when this he heard, Was troubled much at their so strange affright, Doubting least Typhon were againe upreared Or other his old foes, that once him sorely feared. (The Faerie Queene VII. vi. 14– 15)

Mutabilitie is summoned by a frightened Mercury to the court of Jove and immediately goes there, leaving Cynthia in place as a lower concern. She is haughty and hardy, a striding and imposing figure who seizes the advantage by arriving swiftly, while the gods are still in counsel, unarmed and amazed to see her “set upon them in that exstasie” (FQ VII. vi. 23). They want to flee but Jove keeps them in place and decks himself on his throne in full majesty, causing Mutabilitie to quake inwardly and to be “almost queld,” notwithstanding her being “fraught with pride and impudence” and outwardly stern and stout. Urged by Jove to speak – he calls her “fraile woman” and later, even better, “foolish gerl” (stanzas 25 and 34) – characterizations as ineffective as they are false. Her claim is that, on the mother’s side, she is a daughter of Earth, who is “great Chaos child,” whereas the Olympian gods, including Jove himself, are grandchildren of Earth. But on the father’s side, she avers, her claim to rule of the heavens is still stronger, as a daughter of Titan, the oldest son of the sky, Uranus, but usurped by his younger brother, Saturn, the father of Jove:³²  She later pointedly calls him “Saturnes sonne” (FQ VII. vi. 34).

198

Gordon Teskey

She, halfe-confusèd with his great commaund, Yet gathering spirit of her natures pride, Him boldly answer’d thus to his demaund: I am a daughter, by the mothers side Of her that is Grand-mother magnifide. Of all the Gods great Earth, great Chaos child: But by the fathers (be it not envide) I greater am in bloud (whereof I build) Then all the Gods, though wrongfully from heaven exil’d. For Titan (as ye all acknowledge must) Was Saturnes elder brother by birth-right; Both, sons of Uranus, but by unjust And guileful means, through Corybantes slight, The younger thrust the elder from his right; Since which, thou, Jove, injuriously hath held The heavens rule from Titans sonnes by might; And them to hellish dungeons downe hast feld: Witnesse, ye heavens, the truth of all that I have teld. (The Faerie Queene VII. vi. 26 – 27)

We have seen that this a better argument for Mutabilitie’s having title to rule of all than the empirical evidence she brings forth at Nature’s court to show that she already possesses what she wants to possess, and therefore should possess it. There follow more amusing exchanges between her and Jove. He inveighs against a host of rebels, all born of the earth, which it has been necessary for him from time to time to quell, each of whom should have learned from the unhappy example of his predecessor; as should have this new threat from the same stem: “this off-scum of that cursèd fry” (FQ VII. vi. 30). With that he picks up his lightning bolt to strike her down; but when aiming he catches sight of her beautiful face and changes his tune. Violence against the monstrous creatures of earth could lead to the extirpation of humanity as well. He suggests she has been foolishly misled, not knowing that he, Jove, holds the heavens by right of conquest, “And by eternall doome of Fates decree” (FQ VII. vi. 33) – those fates who reside on the boundary of chaos. Besides, Jove says, if Mutabilitie will give up her aggressive suit and behave like a good girl, she may at some undermined future time have Jove as her “gracious lord,” and thereby gain the seat that Titan by his folly lost. One cannot but be struck by Spenser’s advanced, feminist perspective, presenting Jove’s confidence in his attractiveness as comically overweening. We are expected to see his face fall at her response: “Cease, Saturnes sonne”:

The Coming Chaos in Spenser and Milton

199

Then cease thy idle claime thou foolish gerl, And seeke by grace and goodnesse to obtaine That place from which by folly Titan fell; There-to thou maist perhaps, if so thou faine, Have Jove thy gracious lord and soveraigne. So having said, she thus to him replide: Cease, Saturnes sonne, to seeke by proffers vaine Of idle hopes t’allure me to thy side, For to betray my right, before I have it tride. (The Faerie Queene VII. vi. 34)

With that, she appeals to the higher court of Nature, where she and Jove will face each other “For triall of their titles and best rights” (FQ VII. vi. 35). Jove will win. Nature will make her neoplatonic pronouncement about dilation and return: decaying, changing things are not losing their integrities but dilating their being through transformation before “turning to themselves at length againe”: “Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne; / But they raigne over Change, and doe their states maintaine” (FQ VII. vii. 58). As a result of this sonorous but curiously unsatisfactory judgment, Mutabilitie will be “put downe and whist” (whist means “silenced”), and Jove will be “confirm’d in his imperiall see” (FQ VII. vii. 59). Is that, actually, a good thing? It is perhaps strange how consistent the critical tradition has been in looking on this outcome with favor and relief, no doubt in part because of those animals on Arlo Hill who are looking on in suspense and hoping that annihilation – their annihilation, that is, the annihilation of each of them individually – will not prove to be victor in the debate, as if Jove were capable of giving them any better hope of perpetual life. I am not sure the poet looks on Jove’s victory with quite the same degree of relief, even if the poet is wearier of this world than are the animals on Arlo. Mutabilitie may be “unworthy” to rule the heavens, but unworthiness in office is not unheard of in Spenser’s day any more than in ours. She may rule them anyway. But one thing is sure: in everything that counts in our lives, Mutabilitie, the poet says, “beares the greatest sway,” a reflection that arouses, to our surprise, a loathing of life itself, because it is so fragile and uncertain: “Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle” (FQ VII. viii. 1). The same thought might make life more precious – it usually does. Perhaps neither Mutabilitie nor Jove can win in the end and they must always struggle, which is a good thing, or at least a necessary thing, a real thing. That would be the Taoist answer: Mutabilitie is wu, the principle of indifferentiation or, so to speak, of continuing and ever-present chaos; Jove is you, the principle of the differentiation of objects into survey-able governable things, the Olympian panopticon. Jove and Mutabilitie together – not with one as “sovereign

200

Gordon Teskey

lord” – are the Tao. If chaos is put at the beginning of time, as a primordial state from which everything somehow emerges, by the action of Eros, or the Fates, or whomever, then chaos, as the opposite of world, no longer exists at all until the world is reduced to it again – or is absorbed into God. What then would be a continuing chaos? It would be the ever-present energy of difference and differentiation that is as necessary to who we are as is our integrity, to each of us remaining the same, or approximately the same, and then very approximately the same, and then not really the same at all, through time. True, we cannot be ourselves without identity, cloudy identity. But we cannot be ourselves without change. This continuing chaos is of course Spenser’s Mutabilitie, chaos in motion, or what in genetics is called mutation, that accumulation of errors that creates new opportunities for life. The large evidence Mutabilitie brings into court, because it is orderly, is usually interpreted as an ironical refutation of her case. But the opposite is true, at least below the sphere of the moon, where what matters to us occurs. In the spectacular, mobile human pageants of Spenser’s last work, bursting with vitality in this astonishing spectacle of unwearying change, the labors of the seasons are zealously, joyously performed, and Mutabilitie’s energy, so essential to life, is driving everything on. That thought should, we might suppose, arouse exuberance in the poet, if only for having created something so wonderful, if not entirely true. But instead it turns him, with loathing, from life toward death.

Björn Quiring

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

In the 18th century, Milton was frequently praised as the most important poet of recent times. The Swiss author and critic Johann Jacob Bodmer, in his Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (Critical Treatise on the Marvelous in Poetry) from 1740 suggested that this importance was contingent upon the fact that Milton gave Chaos its appropriate position as a paradigm for the realm of poiesis. Bodmer praises Milton for presenting the reader with a “creation before creation” (“eine Erschaffung vor der Erschaffung”) in Paradise Lost. ¹ By representing the realm of mere possibility as a real place, namely Chaos, Milton, according to Bodmer, mimics the forces that turn possibilities into realities.² And Bodmer asserts that this is the most important task of the poet, “das Hauptwerck der Poesie”.³ Thus, Bodmer implies that Milton’s depiction of Chaos as a space of pure potential not only exemplifies this penetrating work, but also manifests its supreme achievement. The following pages will restate Bodmer’s case and emphasize the pivotal, somewhat neglected role of Chaos in Paradise Lost. It is essential that the world of Milton’s epic is not a neatly ordered, hierarchical cosmos, like the one depicted in Dante’s Divina Comedia, but a decentered space in which all natural and social orders are surrounded by a boundless state of a distinctly modern Chaos. One might even paraphrase William Blake and claim that Milton was “of the party of Chaos without knowing it”.⁴

 Johann Jacob Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie und dessen Verbindung mit dem Wahrscheinlichen (Zurich: Conrad Orell, 1740), 163.  “Der Poet, dessen Werck ist die Kräfte der Natur in der Überbringung des Möglichen in den Stand der Würklichkeit nachzuahmen, hat also das Nichts, das vor der Schöpfung war, schon als etwas vorgestellet, und damit die Schöpfung vor der Schöpfung vorausgehohlet.” Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung (above note 1), 165.  “Diese Art der Schöpfung ist das Hauptwerck der Poesie, die sich eben dadurch von den Geschichtschreibern und Naturkündigern unterscheidet, daß sie die Materie ihrer Nachahmung allezeit lieber aus der möglichen als aus der gegenwärtigen Welt nimmt.” Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung (above note 1), 32.  “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York and London: Doubleday, 1988), 35. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-012

202

Björn Quiring

At first sight, the plot of Paradise Lost seems to be orthodox enough, as it renarrates the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis: God’s creation of the world, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Paradise. This story is framed by a supplementary myth that consolidated itself during late antiquity and the medieval period: before the creation of the earth, Satan organizes an insurrection against God, is defeated and banished to hell, together with his followers.⁵ The earth and the cosmos that surrounds it are then created, in order to supply God with creatures who might develop into angels and fill the parts of heaven that have been left unoccupied due to the banishment of the devils. But Satan escapes from hell, sneaks into Paradise, takes the form of the serpent and seduces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, whereupon Adam repeats her transgression out of solidarity with her. Finally, the Son of God expulses the first human couple from Paradise, but also lets it be known by the prophecy of an archangel that he will redeem and save fallen man at the end of history. According to this short summary, Paradise Lost seems to be a rather conventional adaptation of the Judaeo-Christian myth of origins. However, if we take a closer look, the text becomes more ambiguous: Milton integrated many pagan elements into his epic, trusting that their Christian framework would put them in their proper subordinate place. However, the result appeared doubtful even to some of his contemporaries.⁶ The very form of the epic, grounded as it is in non-Christian, classical antiquity, might be partly responsible for a certain “paganization” that some readers detected. For example, the representation of the Christian God as an epic character inevitably runs into problems: God’s traditional attributes were thought to be far beyond human comprehension. When Dante encounters the Holy Trinity in the Divina Comedia, the epic must end, because this encounter surpasses all words.⁷ But Milton represents God as a protag-

 Concerning the history of this myth, see e. g. The Fall of the Angels, ed. by Christoph Auffarth and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, Themes in Biblical Narrative 6 (Leiden and Boston, Mass.: Brill, 2004).  For example, shortly after its first publication in 1667, the clergyman John Beale called Paradise Lost “too full of the devil”. John Beale, Letter 63 (August 31, 1667), British Library Add. MS 78312, quoted in: William Poole, “The Early Reception of Paradise Lost,” Literature Compass 1.1 (2004), n.p. In his book The History of Sin and Heresy (1698) Charles Leslie criticizes Miltons epic as a “licentious fancy [by which] the truth has been greatly hurt.” Charles Leslie, The History of Sin and Heresie (London: Hindmarsh, 1698), quoted in: John T. Shawcross, Milton. The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 1628 – 1731 (London: Routledge and Kegan & Paul, 1970), 117. See also C. Q. Drummond, In Defence of Adam: Essays on Bunyan, Milton and Others, eds. John Baxter and Gordon Harvey (Norfolk: Brynmill Press and Edgeway, 2004), 66.  Dante, Paradiso, trans. Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander (New York: Random House, 2007), 820 – 827 (33.55 – 145).

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

203

onist within an epic narrative, thus inserting him into a chain of causes and effects that renders him less inscrutable. God’s claims to be omnipresent, for example, are subverted by the epic’s tendency to position him clearly at a specific point in space, on the throne of heaven. He appears as finite, mutable, and even as emotional; his transcendent status is asserted, but never made evident. And how could it be, since it is impossible to show omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence to creatures whose finite senses remain confined within the limits of time and space?⁸ For this reason, Milton’s figure of God tends to oscillate between the transcendent and incomprehensible higher being of Christian theology and a Homeric supreme godhead such as Zeus, who surpasses all other creatures only by his supreme force. A general tension between the Protestant biblical worldview and an officially suspended, but strangely persistent, Greco-Roman mythical cosmos articulates itself within Milton’s text. The epic tends to paganize the Christian God, threatening to turn him into a god amongst others, a Zeus who tries to consolidate his position by turning into Yahweh. Indeed, Paradise Lost can be read as a heroic epic whose hero is none other than God himself, founding and unifying his cosmic empire in competition with another primordial deity, namely personified Chaos. In the cosmology of Paradise Lost, heaven, earth and hell are surrounded by the boundless, eternal kingdom of living Chaos: a dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, Without dimension […]. (2.891– 893)⁹

Milton thus reifies and re-mythologizes an otherness that all Christian theology had taken great pains to desubstantiate. In commonsensical Christianity, Chaos does not exist after the creation of the cosmos, apart from the limited disorder Satan and his minions tend to generate; the word itself does not appear in the Bible. In Dante’s Comedia, as well as in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, which influenced Dante’s worldview,¹⁰ the very notion is refuted: the cos-

 As Kant put it succinctly in the “Transcendental Dialectic”: “[…] die Ewigkeit, ohne Bedingungen der Zeit, die Allgegenwart, ohne Bedingungen des Raumes, die Allmacht usw. sind lauter transzendentale Prädikate, und daher kann der gereinigte Begriff derselben, den eine jede Theologie so sehr nötig hat, bloß aus der transzendentalen gezogen werden.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 563 [B 669 – 670].  Paradise Lost is cited by book and line, according to Fowler’s edition: Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).  See e. g. Kenelm Foster, The Two Dantes and Other Studies (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977), 56 – 65.

204

Björn Quiring

mos is finite and thoroughly structured, and beyond the cosmos, there is nothing, except God.¹¹ Admittedly, in the Hebrew Bible, one can find a suggestion of primal disorder, an earth “without form and void” (Gen 1:2). And this tohuwa-bohu has been equated with Greek Chaos in some hexaemeral works, for example in La semaine by Guillaume du Bartas, which Milton apparently knew.¹² However, this Chaos is neither eternal nor personified, as Milton’s Chaos is.¹³ Rather, it is merely a passing phase at the beginning of creation, preceded by the non-biblical but orthodox creatio ex nihilo which had been declared a Christian dogma in the fourth century CE.¹⁴ Since then, theology insists that God created the ordered world not out of preexistent disordered materials, but out of sheer nothingness. Around the year 400 CE, Augustine already tends to view any reference to a primordially disordered state of creation as a mere trope. He asserts that nothing existed before creation except formlessness (“informitas sine ulla specie”);¹⁵ and that the Bible, “insinuated” the inconceivability of this primordial nothingness “to people of slow apprehensions […] by some ordinary word”.¹⁶ In Milton’s time, late Spanish scholasticism differentiates God from Nature by means of this very creatio ex nihilo: “God produces from nothing, Nature from potential being”.¹⁷ Milton deviates from this tradition even in his prose works. He wrote a rather heretical theological Summa which remained unpublished in his lifetime, entitled De Doctrina Christiana. ¹⁸ In this compendium, he interprets the Bible in

 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Prima Pars, 50 – 119, Latin/English Edition, trans. Laurence Shapcote (Lander, Wyo.: Aquinas Institute, 2012), 145 – 148 [I, q. 66, a. 1].  See e. g. George Coffin Taylor, Milton’s Use of Du Bartas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).  See Guillaume du Bartas, La Sepmaine ou Création du Monde (Paris: Michel Gadouleau, 1583), 20.  See Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (London and New York: T & T Clark International, 2004).  Augustine, Confessions, vol. 2, trans. William Watts (London and New York: William Heineman and Macmillan, 1912), 292– 293 [12.3].  Augustine, Confessions, 292– 293 [12.4].  Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Jesu in octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis Stagyritae, vol. 1, (Coimbra: 1591), 214; cited in Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 244.  Milton’s authorship of this treatise has occasionally been questioned, but a group of eminent researchers have made a book-length case for Milton’s authorship, which it is hard to find unconvincing, since it not only painstakingly reconstructs the manuscript’s provenance but also uses stylometry and diverse other methods in order to demonstrate the compatibility of both its form and content with Milton’s other works. See Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

205

the very opposite sense: he asserts that God did not create the world ex nihilo, but that his primordial act of creation was an ordering of primordial divine matter. For confirmation, he employs philological arguments: Materia autem prima quae fuerit, varie disputatur. Moderni plerique volunt ex nihilo emersisse omnia; unde et ipsorum credo sententia orta est. Primum autem constat, neque Hebraeo verbo ‫ָּב ָרא‬, neque Graeco κτίζειν, neque Latino creare, idem quod ex nihilo facere significari: immo vero unumquodque horum idem quod ex materia facere passim significat. As to what the original matter was, however, there are various arguments. Most moderns contend that everything emerged out of nothing (out of which nothing, I reckon their own opinion originates!). In the first place it is certain that neither the Hebrew word bara’ nor the Greek word ktizein nor the Latin creare means “to make out of nothing”. On the contrary, each of them regularly means “to make something out of matter.”¹⁹

Milton proceeds to back up his point with philosophical statements: Actio enim et passio relata cum sint, nullumque agens extra se possit agere, nisi sit quod pati queat, materia nimirum, Deus ex nihilo creare hunc mundum videtur non potuisse non ob virium, aut omnipotentiae defectum, sed quia necesse fuit aliquid iam tum fuisse, quod vim eius agendi potentissimam patiendo reciperet. For since “activity” and “passivity” are relational terms, and since no agent can act outside itself unless there exists something to be acted upon, which doubtless is matter, it seems that God could not have created this world out of nothing – “could not”, not from any lack of power or omnipotence, but because there had to be something already in existence which by being acted upon might receive the almighty force of his efficacy.²⁰

In Paradise Lost, Chaos is described as the location where God finds this primordial matter, “his dark materials to create more worlds” (2.916). God’s powers, according to Milton’s representation, largely manifest themselves in his capacity of arranging and rearranging its preexistent materials, thus constituting consistent, organized territories that he fertilizes, cultivates and rules. Chaos thus acts as the sombre background and enabling condition of the traditional, bounded and rounded cosmos in which Adam and Eve will meet their destiny. Where does this Chaos come from? The short answer is that it comes from pagan sources: Milton’s primordial Chaos obviously stems from Greco-Roman

K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).  John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, in The Complete Works, vol. 8, eds. John K. Hale, J. Donald Cullington, Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 286 – 289.  John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, (see above note 19), 288 – 289.

206

Björn Quiring

mythology, particularly Hesiod’s Theogony, perhaps including its reception in Plato’s Timaeus, but certainly its reception in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ²¹ As often, Edmund Spenser also turns out to be one of Milton’s precursors. In the Faerie Queene, all created things are also said to be formed from the raw material of Chaos: For in the wide womb of the world there lies, In hateful darkeness and in deep horror, An huge eternal Chaos, which supplies The substances of Nature’s fruitful progenies. All things from thence do their first being fetch, And borrow matter, whereof they are made, Which whenas form and feature it does catch, Becomes a body, and doth then invade The state of life, out of the grisly shade.²²

However, Spenser’s Chaos is not personified; and neither is it represented as uncreated or infinite. Milton, however, describes his Chaos as both an “eternal” (3.18) and an “illimitable” (2.892) region “where length, breadth, and height/ And time, and place are lost” (2.893 – 894), an infinite realm of darkness and disorder. A problem results: how does the temporal and spatial boundlessness of Chaos relate to the temporal and spatial boundlessness of the sole God? In Hesiod’s myth of origins, the Theogony, which Milton evidently knew and drew on,²³ Chaos was the most ancient of all gods, after whom the others emerged.²⁴ The claim of Milton’s Christian Father-God to have existed from all eternity and to have created everything is thus accompanied by a subtle counterclaim. Milton scholars have often tried to minimize this theological problem. C. S. Lewis, for example, who tried his best to make a good Anglican out of Milton, chose to ignore the problem of Chaos altogether in his landmark study of Paradise Lost. ²⁵ Later on, Stephen Fallon made the not altogether convincing Augus-

 See e. g. A. B. Chambers, “Chaos in Paradise Lost”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 24.1 (1963): 55 – 84.  Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 347 [3.6.36 – 37], spelling modernized.  See e. g. John Milton, Of Education, in: The Complete Prose Works, vol. 2, ed. E. Sirluck, (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1959), 394.  Hesiod, Theogony, in Works and Days, Testimonia, vol. 1, ed. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 12– 13 [116].  C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

207

tinian argument that the great disorder is fundamentally unreal.²⁶ This is incorrect, insofar as not only the devils, but also humans and even God’s clear-sighted angels treat “the realm of Night”, as they call it, like an autonomous enemy state that threatens to invade the cosmos and is kept under close surveillance by celestial spy services (see e. g. 2.131– 134; 4.664 – 666). Accordingly, this infinite realm of darkness and disorder has to be treated as a reality within the diegetic space of the epic, hinting at the persistence of GrecoRoman mythology in Milton’s cosmos. That he has burdened the epic with this recalcitrant snippet of paganism might be a symptom of his unwieldy humanism. However, Milton’s Chaos is not merely a blast from a pagan past; it also reflects a new interest in disorder and its effects in seventeenth-century intellectual life. What one might call the first “chaos theories” were formulated in this period, struggling with the question how order can arise out of the very dynamics of disorder: from Robert Fludd to Jakob Böhme to Thomas Hobbes, it was thought that the very dynamics of a primal confusion could contribute to the generation of harmonic forms.²⁷ Likewise, Milton’s Chaos is not completely unstructured, but vaguely differentiated, producing “clouds” (2.936), “smoke” (2.928) and “vacuities” (2.932) within itself, even though these differentiations are erratic and all objects apparently unstable. The stirrings of another, supplementary order can thus be perceived beyond the distinctions that organize divine creation and beyond the fading background signals of persistent Hesiodic deities. The endless space from which they both emerge turns out to be a decidedly modern phenomenon. The disorienting suspension of all fixed spatial reference points in Milton’s description of Chaos – the loss of “length, breadth, and height,/ And time and place” – would hardly have been conceivable without a reconceptualization of space that occurred in the 17th century. This reconceptualization was instigated by the propagators of a new natural philosophy, for example Galilei and Giordano Bruno; and it culminated in what Alexandre Koyré has designated as the passage “from the closed world to the infinite universe”.²⁸ According to Koyré, the world at this point was “no more seen, or conceived, as a finite and hierarchically ordered […] whole, but as an open, indefinite, and even

 Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in SeventeenthCentury England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 190 – 192.  “Der Fortschritt des Denkens am Beginn der Neuzeit beruht wesentlich darauf, daß man begann, über die Unordnung Aussagen zu machen und ihr ohne das Eingreifen eines transzendenten Faktors eine Gesetzlichkeit der Selbstregulation zuzuschreiben.” Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), 252.  Alexandre Koyre´, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).

208

Björn Quiring

infinite universe, united not by its immanent structure but only by the identity of its fundamental contents and laws […].”²⁹ The laws that apply in Milton’s “hoary deep” (2.891) are those of the novae scientiae, as can be most clearly seen in an episode in which Satan travels from hell to earth via Chaos. On this way through the “dark, unbottomed, infinite abyss” (2.405), Satan encounters a “vast vacuity” (4.932) and would still fall into this void, if the apparently contingent appearance of a nitrous cloud had not saved him: He […] meets A vast vacuity. All unawares, Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft. (2.928/931– 938)

This fall is remarkable for several reasons: most obviously, it is potentially infinite since it occurs in an “illimitable” space (2.892); in Dante’s Aristotelian universe with its clear boundaries, this calamity would be impossible. And while one may also find notions of infinite universes in antiquity, for example in De rerum natura by Lucretius,³⁰ Milton’s infinite Chaos is definitely a post-Galilean phenomenon. The most obvious symptom of this modernity is the circumstance that Satan’s fall occurs in a vacuum in which his wings are useless. Within the ancient cosmology, true “vacuities” do not exist³¹; and the circumstance that Satan cannot fly in this void, but only plummet forever, is beholden to Galilei’s ground-breaking assertion that, due to lack of air resistance, a feather in a vacuum falls just as fast as a piece of lead.³² Miltonian Chaos apparently observes the universal natural laws of the novae scientiae. And it is hard to fathom whether the resultant motions accord with the will of God. No apparent transgression has caused Satan’s second fall into the endless void. In fact, this fall would mar God’s proclaimed plans for the execution of justice, at least to the extent that it would save Satan from the fires of hell that have officially been ordained for him.

 Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies (London: Chapman & Hall, 1965), 6 – 7.  Lucretius, De rerum natura/Welt aus Atomen, ed. Karl Büchner (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 72– 83 [1.951– 1113].  See e. g. Aristotle, Physik, trans. Hans Günter Zekl (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), 174– 203 [213a– 217b].  Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010), 72– 77.

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

209

And, likewise, no apparent merit or demerit brings about Satan’s subsequent salvation from the depths by “ill chance”. Chaos appears as the uncanny repository of all the things, be they ancient or modern, that Milton does not want to do without, but that do not fit into the closed cosmos of traditional Christian doctrine. But Chaos is not only a material realm, containing the uncharted expanses of Galilean science and persistent remnants of pagan antiquity, but also a space of social interaction. Milton often uses a political vocabulary in its descriptions, representing Chaos as a conflicted society. In this context, it is to be noted that the word “anarchy” and its derivatives appears no less than four times in Milton’s descriptions of Chaos (2.896; 2.988; 6.873; 10.283). Its inhabitants are personified and competing proto-elemental forces, vaguely allegorical, but exceeding the bounds of allegory.³³ Chaos is an eternal battle not of the elements, but of the four properties that, according to Aristotle, constitute the elements. Milton writes about these “endless wars” (2.897): For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce, Strive here for mastery, and to battle bring Their embryon atoms […]. (2.898 – 900)

Aristotle draws the distinction between “hot, cold, moist, and dry” in De generatione et corruptione and in De partibus animalium where he also calls those properties “powers”, or, more precisely, “forces” (δυνάμεις).³⁴ These forces, due to the extreme volatility of Chaos, constitute mere potentials of materiality. For this reason, Milton calls them “embryon atoms”. In an offside remark within his metaphysical treatise Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that Milton thus revives an old notion of Chaos as a dynamic state preceding the “evolution of matter” and therefore declares him to be a poetic precursor of process philosophy.³⁵ Yet despite their processual, insubstantial status, these forces have a fierce tendency to bond and form war parties:

 See e. g. Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 169.  Aristotle, Parts of Animals/Movement of Animals/Progression of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck and E. S. Foster (London: Heinemann and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 106 – 107 [646a].  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology: Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Season 1927 – 28, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1985), 95 – 96.

210

Björn Quiring

[T]hey around the flag Of each his faction, in their several clans, Light-armed or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow, Swarm populous, unnumbered as the sands Of Barca or Cyrenë’s torrid soil, Levied to side with warring winds, and poise Their lighter wings. To whom these most adhere He rules a moment […]. (2.900 – 907)

The dynamic proto-elements, endowed with an agency that seems to inhere in the very space they occupy, are engaged in an eternal and strangely victimless struggle with no conceivable objective. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, one may designate it as a war that is completely deterritorialized.³⁶ This eternal battle exhibits remarkable similarities to what Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan, a few years earlier, had conceptualized as the original state of society and characterized as “the first Chaos of violence and civil war”³⁷: a war of all against all that cannot be confined within the usual bounds of a military conflict between states. Milton develops what Joanna Picciotto has called a “physical correlate of the political state of nature as Hobbes imagined it”.³⁸ John Rogers has pointed out that this association between physics and politics was common in Milton’s time.³⁹ Just as Milton oscillated between the beauties of pagan antiquity and their denigration in the name of Christianity, just as he oscillated between admiring and belittling Galilei’s teachings, he also exhibited an ambivalence towards the social theory of Hobbes whom he disliked, but praised for his capacious intellect.⁴⁰  For a relatively lucid exposition of the terms “territorialization” and “deterritorialization”, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 67– 70.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 290 [3.36].  Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 453.  John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 131. Evidently, Hobbes himself was not too averse to this mixture between “natural philosophy” and politics, basing the Leviathan partly on his treatise on physics, De Corpore. See e. g. Cees Leijenhorst, “Sense and Nonsense about Sense: Hobbes and the Aristotelians on Sense Perception and Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 82– 108, at 98 – 99.  Björn Quiring, “Milton’s God and Hobbes’ Leviathan: Elective Affinities,” in Natur und Herrschaft: Analysen zur Physik der Macht, eds. Kay Jankrift, Alexander Kagerer, Christian Kaiser and María Ángeles Martín Romera (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2016): 273 – 284.

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

211

And there is still another latent ambivalence to consider when it comes to Milton’s Chaos: the epic not only engages with the astronomical discoveries of the new sciences, but also with the disorienting discoveries of new worlds on earth, associated with names like Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Francis Drake. In his poetry and prose writings, Milton demonstrates a fascination not only with the sublime, illimitable spaces beyond earth, but also with the vast, newly accessible spaces and largely unknown populations of the Americas and Eastern Asia, and their historiographies that were just as hard to integrate into the traditional Christian worldview.⁴¹ Especially the wildernesses and wastelands of Asia have found their way into his descriptions of Chaos, which is occasionally called a “darksome […] desert” (2.973) and whose edge is explicitly compared to “the barren plains” (3.437) where the “roving Tartar” (3.432) and the “Chineses” (3.438) range. In the Brief History of Moscovia, an unfinished manuscript that Milton apparently wrote around 1645 and which was published posthumously in 1682, he compiled ethnographic information from diverse travel accounts, devoting special attention to the Siberians and Mongols – or Tartars, as they were, somewhat incorrectly, called in that period.⁴² Traces of the research for that study can be found all over Paradise Lost. For example, the epic refers to the Mongolian capital “Cámbalu” and calls it the “seat/ Of mightiest empire” (11.386 – 388), since the Mongol empire, in its maximum extension, was indeed the largest empire the world had seen in Milton’s time, stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean.⁴³ And Milton repeatedly associates the nomadic tribes of Mongolia with the uncertain, dissolving territories of Chaos, and thus with a supplementary order, beyond and beneath the Christian cosmos. For example, another curious and ambiguous occurrence of the word “Tartar” can be found in the seventh book of the epic, when God is about to form the earth and the cosmos that surrounds it. Before he can begin to create from the raw materials of Chaos, it is said that God first has to expulse the “tartareous dregs” that inhere in these materials:

 Walter S. H. Lim, John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 249.  John Milton, A Brief History of Moscovia and of Other Less-Known Countries Lying Eastward of Russia as Far as Cathay, Gather’d from the Writings of Several Eye-Witnesses, in The Complete Prose Works, vol. 8, eds. Maurice Kelley and George B. Parks (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1982): 473 – 538.  Mingjun Lu, The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature: A Globalization and Liberal Cosmpolitan Approach to Donne and Milton (Farnham and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2015), 178.

212

Björn Quiring

His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth Throughout the fluid mass; but downward purged The black tartareous cold infernal dregs, Adverse to life: then founded, then conglobed Like things to like […]. (7.235 – 240)

Other meanings of the word come into play here: in the works of Paracelsus und Helmont, “tartar” designates the evil principle within matter, forming inassimilable elements that cannot be digested by the human body.⁴⁴ Etymologically, this term was supposed to derive from the Hebrew or Syriac “tatari” which allegedly denoted a “residue” or “remainder”. Due to this association with the Hebrew word for “remainder”, the Mongolians were occasionally considered to be the ten lost tribes of Israel.⁴⁵ Furthermore, the term “Tartarus” designates, of course, the ancient Greco-Roman underworld. Medieval rhetoricians used this homonymy in order to affirm that the Tartars were the devil’s offspring, although no one seems to have taken this invective seriously, in either medieval or early modern times.⁴⁶ Again, this agglomeration of meanings makes Milton’s Chaos appear as a repository of forces and entities that were hard to assimilate or contain in the traditional hierarchical worldview. But despite its deep heterogeneity, the realm of Chaos is unified insofar as it is claimed by a supreme ruler, a great “anarch” (2.988) who both represents and incarnates his kingdom. A sovereign lord of an anarchy seems to be a self-contradiction, and contradictions do indeed surround this figure. At first sight, it is notable that this chief of Chaos oscillates between form and formlessness: Milton depicts him on a throne in front of a “dark pavilion” that is “spread/ Wide on the wasteful deep” (2.960 – 961). He is positioned at the unstable frontier of his deterritorialized territory, both defending it and representing it to the cosmos. The “great anarch” therefore appears as a threshold figure, retaining some of the disordered characteristics of Chaos, such as a “visage incomposed” (2.989), but endowed with a consistent, vaguely anthropomorphic form. And he is surrounded by his courtiers who are in a similar position: With him enthroned Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,

 John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, (above note 39), 133 – 135.  Mingjun Lu, The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature, (above note 43), 195.  Axel Klopprogge, Ursprung und Ausprägung des abendländischen Mongolenbildes im 13. Jahrhundert: Ein Versuch zur Ideengeschichte des Mittelalters (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993), 155 – 158.

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

213

The consort of his reign; and by them stood Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name Of Demogorgon; Rumour next, and Chance, And Tumult, and Confusion, all embroiled, And Discord with a thousand various mouths. (2.961– 967)

The coherent incoherence of this court is emphasized: since Chaos and his court inhabit a “pavilion”, that is, a large tent, and establish their residences where occasion demands (2.998 – 999), just like nomadic rulers, they carry some Tartar traits.⁴⁷ However, two courtiers – Orcus and Ades – bear the names of two punitive judges of the Greco-Roman underworld, emphasizing the link to classical mythology. Furthermore, there is Demogorgon whose very name straddles the divide between pagan and Christian culture: it is a variant of Plato’s name for the divine creator, demiurgós; but in Christian times, perhaps due to the name’s similarity to that of the monstrous Gorgons, it came to designate a demon who is responsible for the world’s disorder.⁴⁸ Five more courtiers and governors under Chaos are mentioned, and they all seem to be emblematic, allegorical figures. However, this estimation is slightly complicated by the fact that these five creatures also appear in Hesiod (or in Pseudo-Hesiod).⁴⁹ And in Hesiod’s works, the allegorical status of these deities is not clearly determinable: his texts deliver

 Eric B. Song has pointed out that this association of Chaos and nomadism has parallels in other passages of Paradise Lost and in others of Milton’s works. See Eric B. Song, Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), 14.  Apparently, “Demogorgon” first appears as a misreading in a commentary on Statius’s Thebaid (either stemming from late antiquity or from early medieval times); in this commentary, Demogorgon is characterized as the supreme creator God, “summus deus”. The name seems to have been introduced into the Renaissance tradition by Boccaccio, and it subsequently appears both in Marlowe’s Faustus and in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. See Herbert J. Rose, Griechische Mythologie: Ein Handbuch (Munich: Beck, 1982), 169. See also Jean Seznec, Das Fortleben der antiken Götter: Die mythologische Tradition im Humanismus und in der Kunst der Renaissance, trans. Heinz Jatho, (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1990), 165.  Chance and Discord are both integrated into the genealogies of the Theogony under the names of Tyche and Eris; Rumour as Pheme is maligned in Works and Days; and Tumult/Homados and Confusion/Kydoimos are mentioned in the pseudepigraphic “Shield of Heracles”. Hesiod, Theogony (above note 24), 20 – 21, 32– 33 [225 – 360]; Hesiod, Works and Days (see above note 24), 148 – 149 [760 – 764]; Hesiod, “The Shield,” in The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments, trans. and ed. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14– 15 [155 – 156].

214

Björn Quiring

semi-allegories that are still imbued with the mana and the lineage of venerated divinities – powers that are not reducible to mere elusive abstractions.⁵⁰ But the representatives of Chaos oscillate not only between faiths and cultures, and between identity and non-identity, but also between genders. Chaos is frequently feminized by epithets such as “wide womb” (2.150), and when God creates worlds out of the proto-elements that inhabit the “hoary deep”, Milton repeatedly describes this creative act most literally as an insemination, making the “great abyss […] pregnant” (1.21– 22): on the watery calm His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth Throughout the fluid mass […]. (7.234– 237)

The relation of the “great anarch” to his consort is therefore particularly interesting. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos gives birth to Nyx, that is, to Night.⁵¹ But Milton makes her his wife instead of his parthenogenetic daughter. Accordingly, the text stresses her primordiality: she is not only called “eternal” (3.18), but also “unoriginal” (10.477), that is, “without origin” and therefore uncreated. Again, Milton here re-mythologizes and personifies an otherness that Christian theology had taken great pains to desubstantiate, since Augustine expounded that darkness is just an absence of light, a mere lack, instead of an active force.⁵² Milton’s Ancient Night, on the other hand, appears to be active enough, and God’s creatures occasionally state that they fear her oppressive power (4.664– 667). It was already mentioned that the Realm of Chaos is also called the Realm of Night several times in the epic, implying that she is involved in the governance of the great abyss. Since Chaos himself also assumes a feminine attitude towards God, Chaos conveys the impression of a latent matriarchal order, complementing the divine patriarchy. This leads us to the question of how the rulers of the abyss govern their anarchic realm. According to Milton’s description, their role is largely administra-

 On the problem of allegorical intentions in Homer and Hesiod, see Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 40 – 42. See also Klaus Heinrich, Gesellschaftlich vermitteltes Naturverhältnis: Begriff der Aufklärung in den Religionen und der Religionswissenschaft, Dahlemer Vorlesungen 8 (Frankfurt a. M.: Stroemfeld and Roter Stern, 2007), 53 – 91.  Hesiod, Theogony, (above note 24), 12– 13 [123].  Augustine, On Genesis, in Works 1.13, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2002), 43 – 44 [4.7].

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

215

tive: Chaos personified presides over his realm as an administrating judge, an “umpire”: Chaos umpire sits, And by decision more embroils the fray By which he reigns: next him, high arbiter, Chance governs all. (2.907– 910)

The “anarch” thus administrates his realm in a strange way: by definition, he cannot rule it in any conventional sense. Accordingly, the battle between the proto-elements itself determines who is to rule by the law of combat. Yet, because the competing parties are inherently impermanent entities, victory is always transient. A certain configuration of hot, cold, moist and dry “rules a moment”, then dissipates again. Personified Chaos presides over this unending competition-jurisdiction merely as an umpire, that is, as “impar”, a third person who has the authority to judge a conflict and decide impartially, because of his supposed independence.⁵³ In his position, personified Chaos therefore provides a jurisdiction that supplements the rule of the strongest. However, he can only utter a judgment that is already obsolete at the very moment of its promulgation and that has no conceivable consequences within the non-space and non-time of Chaos. His judgment is neither performative nor constative, but altogether void: an empty intervention, blown about according to the law of brute force. At most, the utterance of the decision oversteps the bounds of neutrality and functions as another deployment within the conflict; it “more embroils the fray”, contributing to future complications. Personified Chaos imposes a juridical structure on his dominion, but one that is indistinguishable from lawlessness. Chaos himself stresses this paradoxical nature of his sovereignty: when Satan, on his way from hell to earth, enters the court and addresses its sovereign, Chaos complains that his chaotic realm is Encroached on still through our intestine broils Weakening the sceptre of old Night […]. (2.1001– 1002)

It must strike the reader as odd that the great anarch considers “intestine broils” as detrimental to a reign which “by confusion stand[s]” (2.897). These broils should be acknowledged as the very essence of Chaos, the “fray/ By which he reigns”. But on the other hand, this self-effacing contradiction is symptomatic:

 A. R. Lakshmanan and J. J. S. Wharton, Wharton’s Concise Law Dictionary, (Delhi: Universal Law Pub. Co., 2009), 1065.

216

Björn Quiring

sovereign Chaos not only presides powerlessly over an endless battle, but he also incarnates it. He is the confused exponent of a realm of confusion, attached both to form and to formlessness. All the same, the angels as well as the humans refer to him and his realm as a threat to the created cosmos, which raises the question how Chaos and cosmos actually relate to each other. In the brief dialogue with Satan that the epic grants him, personified Chaos describes his own relationship to the God of Paradise Lost just like Hesiod’s Chaos might describe his relationship to Zeus: he portrays the competitor as an inimical upstart whose recent territorial conquests and innovations encroach upon his own ancient regions: I upon my frontiers here Keep residence; if all I can will serve That little which is left so to defend […]: first, hell, Your dungeon, stretching far and wide beneath; Now lately heaven and earth, another world Hung o’er my realm […]. (2.998 – 1000/1002– 1005)

Because of the disorganization of his realm, Chaos has no military means to reconquer the lost territories. But he can at least stake a claim: the great anarch claims precedence over God’s realm, and implicitly also over God, alluding to the Hesiodic myth of origins which affirms that Chaos was the first of all gods. This calls into question the Father’s claim to have existed from all eternity and to have created everything. On the side of the supreme being, the reaction is a disavowal of the mere existence of Chaos. While the chaotic realms of Ancient Night are recognized by angels and humans, on the occasions when God himself mentions the realm of Chaos, the Father conflates it with hell, the circumscribed realm he created for the eternal punishment of the devils. He calls the latter their place of punishment, the gulf Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide His fiery Chaos to receive their fall. (6.53 – 55)

The Father thus identifies the realm of Chaos with the realm of Satan, another competitor, but one whose claims to divine status can much more easily be dismissed as preposterous. One receives the impression that a celestial cover-up might be attempted here. Questions of antecedence, power and hierarchy pose themselves in this context; and Paradise Lost never actually resolves them. God, as “first and last” (2.324) ruler over everything must precede and succeed the personified, active Chaos, but how can one precede and succeed something that is without origin or end? Paradise Lost does not conclusively answer the

The Tartarean Jurisdiction of Chaos in Milton’s Paradise Lost

217

question; it only offers a hint: consonant with the monism of Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana,⁵⁴ God claims in Paradise Lost that everything, including Chaos, once was part of his own identity before he retreated from it and concentrated his presence in one place, namely the throne of heaven: Boundless the deep, because I am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I uncircumscribed myself retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, necessity and chance Approach not me, and what I will is fate. (7.168 – 173)

But occasionally some statements of God turn out to be counterfactual,⁵⁵ and so this assertion might conceivably be doubted too. All that the narrator positively tells us about the Christian God is that he created the world by arranging chaotic “dark materials” in a limited territory within a pre-existent Chaos, just like any pagan creator God would. In Paradise Lost, this power to form ordered structures from the warring proto-elements of the abyss is not even an exclusively divine privilege: other creatures can also create out of Chaos, as Satan’s children Sin and Death demonstrate when they build a bridge from hell to earth out of the “foaming deep” (10.301) of the abyss. God and Chaos seem to enclose one another, and the narrator does not arbitrate between their claims to antecedence, even though Milton, in De Doctrina Christiana, rejects the notion of two infinite beings.⁵⁶ In this unacknowledged ambiguity, a complication in Milton’s worldview becomes discernible. Chaos is represented as a realm beyond the dichotomies that organize divine creation, but nonetheless as a structured space, interacting with the cosmos, supplementing the divinely sanctioned dichotomy of heaven and hell. Thus, a space is imagined in which all that would be inadmissible in the traditional, hierarchical order of the cosmos is grudgingly accepted. And this alienated acceptance of a realm of divine indifference also resonates with Milton’s political conceptions: it is remarkable that Milton spent a considerable amount of vitriol in polemics against the “popish laws” of Catholics and his fellow Protestants, attacking doctrines which seem to differ from his own only in

 See, first and foremost, John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, (above note 19), 294– 295. See also See John Reesing, “The Materiality of God in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana,” Harvard Theological Review 1.3 (1957): 159 – 173.  See e. g. Björn Quiring, “Die Ausrufung der Naturgesetze in John Miltons Paradise Lost,” Poetica, Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 42 (2010): 117– 138, at 117– 118.  John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, (see above note 19), 152– 153.

218

Björn Quiring

minor points; and yet, one does not find similar condemnations of the pagan rulers of “Tartaria” in his work, or any demands to send Protestant missionaries to the far east.⁵⁷ He even casually notes some features of Asian law and social life that coincide with his own political ideals; for example, that their social structures are simple and patriarchal and that “no man [is] forced to religion” in these parts.⁵⁸ In Paradise Lost, we encounter the same strange neutrality: according to the great prophecy given by the archangel Michael at the end of the epic, Chaos will be neither eliminated nor diminished. It is even suggested that some of God’s creatures who are neither bad enough to go to hell nor good enough to go to heaven will be dissolved back into the proto-elementary forces of Chaos from which they were made (3.455 – 458). Perhaps this strange persistence of Chaos can at least partly be explained by Milton’s ambivalent Hobbesianism:⁵⁹ the endless wars of Chaos are the precondition for the existence of an ordered cosmos, just as the Hobbesian war of all against all is the precondition for the existence of an ordered state. And just as the Hobbesian war of all against all never altogether disappears from the social field, but keeps sustaining the order of the state, ready to reemerge at appropriate occasions,⁶⁰ so the wars of Chaos sustain the order of the cosmos, fueling it with its “dark materials”. In that respect, the strange and distant law of the unchartered regions of Chaos turns out to be very closely connected to the official divine order. Their relation resembles what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the sometimes mutually supportive, sometimes conflictual connection between the state apparatus and the nomadic war machine.⁶¹ In Milton’s infinite spaces, order and disorder entwine and contaminate each other. Thus Paradise Lost affirms the Christian cosmos, but posits it in a decentered space of latent potentials, in which its place and the conditions of creation must be renegotiated.

 Walter S. H. Lim, “John Milton, Orientalism, and the Empires of the East in Paradise Lost,” in The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia, eds. Debra Johanyak and Walter S. H. Lim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 203 – 236, at 216.  John Milton, A Brief History of Moscovia, (above note 42), 499 – 501, spelling modernized.  On Milton’s Hobbesianism, see e. g. Björn Quiring, “Milton’s God and Hobbes’ Leviathan: Elective Affinities”, (see above note 40).  See e. g. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 35 – 36.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minn. and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 351– 423.

Karsten Fischer

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

On the Ideological Iconography of Authoritarianism in Hobbes In the beginning there was chaos, and then there was order. This description brings together the Judeo-Christian creation myth from the book of Genesis, Greek philosophy since Hesiod’s Theogony, the scientific theory of the Big Bang, and the political theory of Thomas Hobbes, who considers chaos a recurring threat. This correspondence between (meta)physical theories of world emergence on the one hand and a theory of politics as an anthropogenic cultural achievement on the other is surprising only at first glance. For Hobbes had become acquainted with the Stoicheia (Στοιχεῖα) of Euclid in 1629 during his trip to France and had paid homage to it in the title of his initially unpublished work Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640) and the tripartite Elementorum Philosophiae.¹ As late as Leviathan (1649) he still maintained that geometry was “the onely Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind”.² Typically for him, the religious emphasis serves a programmatic purpose. Hobbes emphasized in his autobiography that he had been enthusiastic about the Euclidean method and read the work “with the utmost diligence, not simply on account of its theorem, but also as a guide to the art of reasoning.”³ Accordingly he propounds in his critique of Aristotelian justice theory that commutative justice is “in proportion arithmetical”, while distributive justice is “geometrical”.⁴ Hobbes not only credits geometry with the technical progress of mankind. He expects a rule of conduct based on the geometrical mode of moral

Note: For hints and suggestions I am indebted to Astrid Séville, Lorenz Narku Laing, and Stefan Matern.  Herfried Münkler, Thomas Hobbes (Frankfurt a. M. and New York: Campus, 22001), 32– 33.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28.  Thomae Hobbes, Angli Malmesburiensis Philosophi Vita, in Thomae Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera Philosophica Quae Latine Scripsit Omnia In Unum Corpus Nunc Primum Collecta, vol. 1, ed. Gulielmi Molesworth (London 1839), XIV: “delectatus methodo illius, non tam ob theoremata illa, quam ob artem ratiocinandi, diligentissime perlegit.” Translation in: Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 250.  Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies. With a new Introduction by M.M. Goldsmith (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 83 – 84. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-013

220

Karsten Fischer

philosophy to overcome the base greed of the common people and thereby secure lasting peace for the whole of mankind.⁵ This almost sounds like the famous Platonic demand (Republic, 473c) that if kings were not to become philosophers, the philosophers would have to become kings in order to change human affairs for the better. For our purposes it is decisive that Hobbes takes a second counterintuitive detour to politics besides geometry, namely iconography. I will look at this in the first part of this paper. I will then illuminate how Hobbes derives his apotheosis of order from a naturalization of chaos and thus effects the paradigm shift in political theory that results in a legitimation of authoritarianism. In conclusion I will briefly outline some current developments in this theory and its political offshoots today.

1 First, then, political iconography. We take a detour to Hobbes via the Bohemian engraver, etcher and draftsman Wenceslaus Hollar (1607– 1677), who worked for Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, from 1636 and lived in England from 1637 on. According to Horst Bredekamp, the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan is by Abraham Bosse, not by Hollar. Hollar himself said that he had not read Hobbes’ “great book”, the Leviathan, “for it looks to be long and hard.”⁶ There was nevertheless some personal connection between Hollar and Hobbes. Both were strict royalists and had been educators of Prince Charles at the same time.⁷ It is worthwhile considering parallels and mutual influences between their political iconographies and how these were shaped by the same Zeitgeist. With regard to the significance of chaos for the establishment of order, it should first be emphasized that Hollar represents the creation-theological succession of chaos and order, according to which God (Elohim) created heaven and earth in the beginning. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” (Gen 1:2– 3)

 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, eds. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4– 5.  Gillian Tindall, The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in Reality and Imagination (London: Pimlico, 2002), 173 – 174.  Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes. Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder. 1651 – 2001 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 32, 36, 52.

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

221

Fig. 1: and 2: Wenceslaus Hollar: Chaos, n.d., the Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, University of Toronto

And after the creation of sun and moon

Fig. 3: Wenceslaus Hollar: Creation of Sun and Moon, n.d., the Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, University of Toronto

222

Karsten Fischer

Hollar presents the Creation of Man and Beast

Fig. 4: Wenceslaus Hollar: Creation of Man and Beast, n.d., the Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, University of Toronto

as an achievement of order which has not only finally overcome chaos but is an almost relativity-theoretic space-time continuum: “Adam created” – “Eve made” – “the Forbidden Tree”. Hollar not only presents the relationship between chaos and order theologically, but also relates it to the political context for a given reason. A year after the beginning of the English Civil War he thematized this Civilis Seditio and depicted it as a double-headed serpent:

Fig. 5: Wenceslaus Hollar: Civilis Seditio, 1643, the British Museum, London

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

223

This is the Greek mythical creature Amphisbaena, mentioned by Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia to emphasize the shamefulness of Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon.⁸ In Roman antiquity the Amphisbaena is execrated in Lucan’s De bello civili,⁹ and it is even mentioned in Plinius’ Naturalis Historia. ¹⁰ Transplanted from Dante’s Inferno (24.82– 90), the monster can also be found in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (X, 524). Against the background of the Egyptian pyramids and the Sphinx – civilizational achievements which only bear witness to their transience – Amphisbaena strives with its two heads in opposite directions, symbolizing the social disruption and political disorientation of the English Civil War as competing factions ruin order through their opposition.¹¹ Further proof of Hollar’s engagement with the problem of civil war is his engraving 16 years later with the programmatic title A Comparison Between the Bohemian and English Civil Wars. Here Hollar renders his biographical fate of falling out of the frying pan of the Thirty Years War in Bohemia into the fire of the English Civil War.¹² The details remind us of the frontispiece of Leviathan with its juxtaposition of religious and political conflicts,

 Aischylos, Oresteia, 1231– 1239.  Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, De bello civili, IX, 719: “Et gravis in geminum vergens caput Amphisbaena.”  C. Plinius Secundus maior, Naturalis Historia, VIII, 35: “[…] geminum caput amphisbaenae, hoc est et a cauda, tamquam parum esset uno ore fundi venenum.”  Cf. Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Datalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar 1607 – 1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), XXIX and 72, also Richard T. Godfrey, Wenceslaus Hollar. A Bohemian Artist in England (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 91, and F.G. Stephens and Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires (London: British Museum, 1870), 314. See also Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, http://www.brit ishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId= 3021570&partId=1&searchText=hollar&page=1, last access 23 May 2020.  Godfrey, Wenceslaus Hollar (above note 11), 92.

224

Karsten Fischer

Fig. 6: Abraham Bosse: Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

and they make sense of the parallelism of the respective historical events, from the so-called Defenestration of Prague to the manifold chaos of war. Their vanishing point is the statement that transcends both wars: Sed nulla potentia longa est, Quo non discordia Cives.

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

225

Fig. 7: Wenceslaus Hollar: A Comparison Between the Bohemian and English Civil Wars, c. 1659, Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, University of Toronto

No commentary on the Civil War could be more in agreement with Hobbes. He maintained that after the Protestant translation of the Bible into vernacular languages the life of no ruler could be secure: For after the Bible was translated into English, every man, nay, every boy and wench, that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty, and understood what he said […]; and every man became a judge of religion, and an interpreter of the Scriptures to himself. […] If it be lawful then for subjects to resist the King, when he commands anything that is against the Scripture, that is, contrary to the command of God, and to be judge of the meaning of the Scripture, it is impossible that the life of any King, or the peace of any Christian kingdom, can be long secure.¹³

 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Chicago, Ill. and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 21– 22, 50.

226

Karsten Fischer

The iconographic correspondences are hardly accidental. They prove not only the political proximity between Hobbes and Hollar but also the impact of both in contemporary political discourse. As Horst Bredekamp has shown, Hobbes was convinced that language “must be transferred into the lines of geometric mathematics and shielded and fenced in by images.” “For Hobbes, images were a medium of communal bonding and the observance of the community’s rules.” Hobbes wanted “artificial eternity of sovereignty through images.”¹⁴ For images have such a great power in collective memory that they can even be a factor of cultural evolution.¹⁵ If we now reconstruct in a second step how Hobbes derives the apotheosis of order from the naturalization of chaos and thus carries out his paradigm shift in political theory, we do well to follow the line of political iconography.

2 This leads us to the frontispiece of Hobbes’ De Cive, which is as good an image of Thomas Hobbes’ political theory as the frontispiece of Leviathan. The horizontal juxtaposition of secular and spiritual power as united in the hands of Leviathan, is replaced by a vertical arrangement.

 Horst Bredekamp, Souverän ist, wer mit den Bildern entscheidet, in: Herfried Münkler et al., Staatserzählungen. Die Deutschen und ihre politische Ordnung, ed. Grit Straßenberger and Felix Wassermann (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2018), 127– 148, at 133 and 135. My translation, K.F.  Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb speak of “symbolic inheritance systems” in their Evolution in Four Dimensions. Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2014), 196 – 228.

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

227

Fig. 8: Jean Matheus: Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 1642, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Religion occupies the heavenly sphere above earthly events. The worldly sphere is characterized by the juxtaposition of order and chaos, state and civil war, Leviathan and Behemoth, not as monsters but as female figures. On the left we see the figure of Imperium. The crown of the young, beautiful and luxuriously dressed figure symbolizes legitimacy. She holds the scales of justice in her right hand and the sword of the state monopoly on force in her left, which points to heaven, i. e. religio. She reigns over an earthly paradise of peaceful agricultural work and a city on the hill in the background. Exactly the opposite is illustrated on the right: The statue of Libertas shows an ugly crooked old hag whose bow and arrow point down, indicating hell on earth. In the background the state of nature prevails, in which the life of man is “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹⁶ Here there is only violence and no justice. One sees how three archers and a warrior with a cudgel hunt down their fellow men, while on the right edge of the picture two cannibals cook

 Hobbes, Leviathan (above note 2), 89.

228

Karsten Fischer

the mutilated remains of a victim. And beyond the poor huts protected only by rows of trees a jumping predator forms the animal equivalent of human action.¹⁷ Thus Hobbes, together with the artist Jean Matheus, succeeds in creating a particularly skilful iconographic legitimation of power. It refers back to colonialist stereotypes that had been consolidated and transmitted by powerful images. For example, Adriaen Collaert’s etching “America”, based on a drawing by Marten de Vos, shows a woman representing America riding on an armadillo.

Fig. 9: Adriaen Collaert: Amerika, c. 1595 – 1600, Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum

She is the personification of the new continent […] on her oversized mount. She turns her body frontally towards the viewer, but looks to the right, where in the background naked Indians

 Cf. Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 29 – 60, at 48 – 49.

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

229

with bows and arrows as well as axes defend themselves against the troops of the conquerors and their firearms. […] In the background on the left, Collaert […] presents, along with sheep, goats and another armadillo, the ‘everyday’ activities of the Indians, e. g. the cutting up of a human being […], the subsequent roasting of the limbs over the fire, and the hunt.¹⁸

This colonial gaze, which serves to warn of the regression to the supposedly everyday civil war among uncivilized peoples, is of course a projection (in the psychoanalytical sense) of the violence perpetrated in the name of civilization. In her book John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism, Barbara Arneil says: “Hobbes, searching for the order and stability of civil society, paints its inversion as a bleak and ignoble natural state.”¹⁹ From the perspective of postcolonial theory, Abdul R. Janmohamed characterizes this perception as follows: That world is therefore perceived as uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately evil. Motivated by his desire to conquer and dominate, the imperialist configures the colonial realm as a confrontation based on differences in race, language, social customs, cultural values, and modes of production. […] In the ‘imaginary’ colonialist realm, to say ‘native’ is automatically to say ‘evil’ and to evoke immediately the economy of the Manichaean allegory. The writer of such texts tends to fetishize a nondialectical, fixed opposition between the self and the native. Threatened by a metaphysical alterity that he has created, he quickly retreats to the homogeneity of his own group.²⁰

With Hobbes the phantasm of the native, however, is an introversion of othering insofar as it serves the legitimation of power in the imperial center. As a reminder of the regression to barbarism, the native personifies the state of nature in Hobbes and thus serves as a justification of the authoritarian order as opposed to the alleged naturalness of chaos. Let us briefly recall that Aristotle had taught that the polis exists by nature and that man is a political being by nature.²¹ This, as Christof Rapp points out, refers to his quality as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, i. e. his “ability to communicate linguis-

 Karl-Heinz Kohl, ed., Mythen der Neuen Welt. Zur Entdeckungsgeschichte Lateinamerikas (Berliner Festspiele: Frölich & Kaufmann, 1982), 328. My translation, K.F.  Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1996), 27.  Abdul R. Janmohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (London and New York: Routledge, 2003): 18 – 23, at 18 – 19.  Aristoteles, Politics, 1253a: ἐκ τούτων οὖν φανερὸν ὅτι τῶν φύσει ἡ πόλις ἐστί, καὶ ὅτι ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον, καὶ ὁ ἄπολις διὰ φύσιν καὶ οὐ διὰ τύχην ἤτοι φαῦλός ἐστιν, ἢ κρείττων ἢ ἄνθρωπος·

230

Karsten Fischer

tically”.²² In this Aristotelian view, which had dominated political philosophy since Scholasticism, Hobbes sees no less than the seed of civil war. Thus he states that “there was never any thing so deerly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latine tongue.”²³ Hobbes’ interest in man’s ability to communicate linguistically merely refers to the ability to subordinate qua contract, and thus he makes himself the gravedigger of political Aristotelianism and the inventor of the insightful, self-interested, voluntarily submissive and henceforth “servile man”.²⁴ In the central passage of Leviathan, Hobbes develops his new political-theoretical approach in explicit demarcation from Aristotle’s arguments and from errors he holds Aristotle responsible for: It is true, that certain living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, live sociably one with another, (which are therefore by Aristotle numbered amongst Politicall creatures;) and yet have no other direction, than their particular judgements and appetites; nor speech, whereby one of them can signifie to another, what he thinks expedient for the common benefit: and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know, why Man-kind cannot do the same. To which I answer […] that these creatures, having not (as man) the use of reason, do not see, nor think they see any fault, in the administration of their common businesse: whereas amongst men, there are very many, that thinke themselves wiser, and abler to govern the Publique, better than the rest; and these strive to reforme and innovate, one this way, another that way; and thereby bring it into Distraction and Civill warre. […] Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is Naturall; that of men, is by Covenant only, which is Artificiall: and therefore it is no wonder if there be somwhat else required (besides Covenant) to make their Agreement constant and lasting; which is a Common Power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit. […] This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner. This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a Common-wealth, in latine Civitas. This is the Generation of that great Leviathan, or rather

 Christof Rapp, Aristoteles zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2001), 55. My translation, K.F.  Hobbes, Leviathan (above note 2), 150.  Iris Därmann, “Damnatio ad bestias in Nordamerika. Gehorsamsproduktionen in der kolonialen Philosophie und politischen Zoologie Thomas Hobbes’,” in Politische Ikonographie und Differenzrepräsentation, ed. Sebastian Huhnholz and Eva Marlene Hausteiner (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2018), 261– 286, 281. My translation, K.F.

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

231

(to speak more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence.²⁵

Here Hobbes denounces human rationality in his own very specific way: not as insufficient, but as misguided. According to Hobbes, the intellectual superiority over social animals which humans complacently attribute to themselves does not lead to the unfolding of the unique human rational potential, as not only Aristotle believed, but also (despite all the differences between them) Immanuel Kant in Conjectural Beginning of Human History. Rather, Hobbes attributes to social animals the advantage of not thinking about supposed mistakes in their “administration”, whereas humans constantly do this, arrogantly overestimating themselves and deducing a need for reform which causes only social disruption and civil war. If Hobbes then concludes that for the sake of peace it is necessary for everyone to submit to the mortal god, Leviathan, this demand rests on the argumentative intermediate step in the sentence beginning with “Lastly”. Here the antiAristotelian distinction is made that the harmony of social animals is natural, whereas the harmony of human beings exclusively based on contract is artificial. Precisely this justifies the requirement that the constancy and duration of the contract be reproduced as “a Feigned or Artificiall person” by fearsome state power²⁶ Thus Bredekamp aptly characterizes the Leviathan as a “rational automaton”.²⁷ This marks the decisive paradigm shift in modern political thought. In antiquity it was the political order that was regarded as natural, while disorder (στασιωτεία) was regarded as unnatural apostasy. In his cyclical view of history Machiavelli could still see disorder emerging from order and vice versa. For Hobbes, on the other hand, chaos is the natural state, and political order is the always endangered cultural achievement of overcoming chaos. Contrary to imprecise talk of a pessimistic anthropology in Hobbes, his theory is based on the conviction that human beings do not have a constant nature but always remain unpredictable.²⁸ And because chaos con-

 Hobbes, Leviathan,119 – 121. It is incomprehensible that David Armitage, Civil Wars. A History in Ideas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017), 111 should claim, despite such passages, that “civil war was for Hobbes strictly an oxymoron.”  Hobbes, Leviathan (above note 2), 111.  Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes (above note 7), 60. My translation, K.F.  Francis Offor, “From Chaos to Order: The Role of the Self in Hobbes’ Moralism,” in The Ethics of Subjectivity. Perspectives since the Dawn of Modernity, ed. Elvis Imafidon (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 11– 23, at 13.

232

Karsten Fischer

stantly threatens to break up the order of human coexistence, order must be protected by uncompromising authoritarianism. In contrast to cosmological chaos theories in which initial disorder can be permanently overcome, Hobbes assumes a permanent threat of relapse into social chaos. It is not the Aristotelian assumption of the naturalness of political order which establishes authoritarian rule but the assumption of its artificiality as a fragile and vulnerable human project. Hobbes does not argue for this absolutist delimitation of the state as does Sir Robert Filmer in Patriarcha with the legitimacy of the traditional divine right of secular rule. Hobbes’ argument is based instead on the threat of man’s self-empowerment to engage in public criticism, rational justification, procedural deliberation and political participation. Thus Hobbes, as it were, proleptically brands all of the future achievements of liberalism as “dangerous doctrines” prone to civil war:²⁹ the divisibility of sovereignty, the separation of civil and spiritual power, the legal binding of power, the right of resistance, and freedom of public speech.³⁰ Hobbes not only equipped the arsenal of all varieties of authoritarianism. He even succeeds in reinterpreting the Achilles heel of autocratic government, namely the problem of succession: Of all these Formes of Government, the matter being mortall, so that not onely Monarchs, but also whole Assemblies dy, it is necessary for the conversation of the peace of men, that as there was order taken for an Artificiall Man, so there be order also taken, for an Artificiall Eternity of life; without which, men that are governed by an Assembly, should return into the condition of Warre in every age; and they that are governed by One man, as soon as their Governour dyeth. This Artificiall Eternity, is that which men call the Right of Succession. There is no perfect forme of Government, where the disposing of the Succession is not in the present Soveraign. For if it be in any other particular Man, or private Assembly, it is in a person subject, and may be assumed by the Souveraign at his pleasure; and consequently the Right is in himselfe. And if it be in no particular man, but left to a new choyce; then is the Common-wealth dissolved; and the Right is in him that can get it; contrary to the intention of them that did Institute the Common-wealth, for their perpetuall, and not temporary security.³¹

 Hobbes, Behemoth (above note 13), 71.  Stephen Holmes, Introduction, in Hobbes, Behemoth (above note 13): VIII–L, at XXV.  Hobbes, Leviathan (above note 2), 135.

Naturalization of Chaos and Apotheosis of Order

233

So Hobbes actually attributes to the sovereign the right to decide on his own succession and describes this not only as a perfect form of government but as “Artificiall Eternity”. Again he naturalizes chaos as an apotheosis of order.

3 This is the significance of Hobbes’ political theory for current neo-authoritarianism. His succession plan for the authoritarian sovereign might have served as a script for Franco’s attempt to continue his dictatorship by appointing his successor. As is well known, King Juan Carlos’ democratic views frustrated Franco’s plan. The extension of decision-making power in time and content, i. e. term of office and sphere of rule, is the formal core of authoritarian rule. We need only look at the practices of current neo-authoritarianism in order to recognize it in our present day: From Putin’s office rochades to extend his mandate under Article 81 Part 3 of the Russian Constitution, to Xi Jinping’s self-enthronement as a dictator for life, as it were, and Trump’s attempt to replace constitutional rule of law with a strictly voluntaristic and idiosyncratic policy, which Madeleine Albright has called the nucleus of American fascism³² – this can always be legitimized with Hobbes. However, Hobbes is only the founder of the absolutist state, not of the totalitarian state. He did not intrude into the area of individual morality and way of life, as is the hallmark of totalitarianism and also reappears in current criticism of allegedly decadent liberalizations. In this respect Hobbes is closer to Kant than to Carl Schmitt.³³ In his book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol from the year 1938, Schmitt accused Hobbes of having remained inconsequential and, by releasing man’s inner arbitrariness, having fatally infected the mortal god Leviathan and surrendered him to liberalism.³⁴

 Madeleine Albright, Fascism. A Warning (New York: Harper, 2018).  Karsten Fischer, “Hobbes, Schmitt, and the Paradox of Religious Liberality,” in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 13 (2010): 399 – 416.  Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 57. Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes. Sinn und Fehlschlag eines Symbols. (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938).

234

Karsten Fischer

This is not a statement purely from the perspective of the history of political ideas. Rather, it shows that the greatest abyss of repressive rule did not occur in the 17th century but in the 20th century. Thus, we must withstand illusory hopes of historical progress and make sure that after the temporary upswing of the second half of the 20th century we do not again plunge into that abyss, which has always been fueled by fear of chaos and the promise of order.

Index of Authors Aeschylus 223 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius 104 Alpers, Paul 150, 157 Althoff, Gerd 81 Anaxagoras 3 Anaximenes 14 Aquinas, Thomas 119 – 121, 203 f. Ariosto 185 Aristophanes 14 Aristophanes 14, 187, 188 Aristotle / Aristoteles 4, 114, 125, 173, 191, 194, 208 f., 229 – 231 Arneil, Barbara 229 Astruc, Jean 41 Augustine of Hippo / Augustinus 120 f., 123, 172, 187, 204, 214 Bachorski, Hans-Jürgen 83, 87, 92, 95, 97 f., 101 Bachtin, Michail 94 f. Baffetti, Giovanni 113 Basil of Caesarea 113, 118 f., 123 f. Beale, John 202 Bede (The Venerable) 120 Berger, Peter 8 f. Bernardus Silvestris 175 f. Berossos 31, 34 Bion 150 – 154, 158, 160, 165 Blake, William 201 Blenkinsopp, Joseph 52 Blum, Erhard 73 Blumenberg, Hans 207 Boccaccio, Giovanni 175 f., 213 Bodmer, Johann Jacob 201 Böhme, Jakob 149, 207 Bond, Edward 130, 154, 156 Bosse, Abraham 1, 220, 224 Bredekamp, Horst 220, 226, 228, 231 Brook, Peter 129, 147 Bruno, Giordano 119, 125 f., 207 Bry, Theodor de 1, 3 f.

Bulang, Tobias Burke, Edmund

83 f., 86 f., 89, 91, 102, 106 189

Calvin, John 123 Cavell, Stanley 136, 140 Charles, Prince of Wales 220 Charles II, King of England 175 Chrysippus 153 Cleanthes 153 Cleombrotus 185 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 189 Collaert, Adriaen 1, 228 f. Coltrane, John 173 Columbus, Christopher 211 Comes, Natalis 155, 176 Coppetta de‘ Beccuti, Francesco 115 Cornford, Francis MacDonald 171 Cruickshank, George 194 Crüsemann, Frank 71 Da Gama, Vasco 211 Danby, John F. 146 f. Daniel, Arnaut 59, 69, 73, 157, 163, 218 Dante Alighieri 127, 157, 176, 184, 192, 201 – 203, 208, 223 Därmann, Iris 230 Dedekind, Friedrich 92 Del Olmo Lete, Gregorio 70 Deleuze, Gilles 210, 218 Della Casa, Giovanni 115 f., 119, 126 Democritus 175, 180 Dent, R.W. 141 Dietrich von Bern 94 Dillmann, August 47 Dolven, Jeff 165 Donne, John 193, 211 Donner, Herbert 41, 62, 68 Drake, Francis 211 Du Bartas, Guillaume 111 – 114, 117, 119 – 125, 123 f., 204 Du Monin, Edouard 113 Elizabeth I, Queen of England

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655001-014

174

236

Index of Authors

Empedocles 185 Empson, William 164 Epicurus 118 Erasmus of Rotterdam 113 Euclid 219 Euripides 187 Fallon, Stephen M. 206 f. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 188 Ficino, Marsilio 112, 189 f. Filmer, Sir Robert 232 Fischart, Johann 81, 101 – 108 Flavius Josephus 36, 55 Fludd, Robert 1, 3 – 6, 207 Fowler, Alastair 51, 159, 164, 203 Franco, Francisco 233 Frye, Northrop 175, 194

Hesiod 5 f., 11 – 22, 111, 113, 149, 173 – 175, 180, 187, 189, 197, 206, 213 f., 216 Hilarius of Arles 123 Hippolytus of Rome 111 Hobbes, Thomas 1, 146, 207, 210, 219 – 234 Hoftijzer, Jacob 66 Holinshed, Raphael 130 Hollar, Wenceslaus 1, 220 – 223, 225 f. Holmes, Stephen 232 Homer 11, 14, 130, 152, 180, 186, 214 Hornung, Erik 55 Howard, Thomas (Earl of Arundel) 220 Isidore (of Seville)

56, 120

Jablonka, Eva 226 Janmohamed, Abdul R. 229 Jerome (Saint Jerome) 120, 122 Jinping, Xi 233 Johnson, Samuel 168 f. Jonas, Hans 112 Jongeling, Karel 66

Galilei, Galileo 207 f., 210 Gardner, Helen 144 Geoffrey of Monmouth 130 Gesenius, Wilhelm 62 f., 66 Giacomotto-Charra, Violaine 121 Gill, Glen Robert 194 Gillray, James 194 Godfrey, Richard T. 223 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 193 Goodman, Godfrey 193 Graf, Karl Heinrich 41, 90 Graham, Jorie 173, 210 Greber, Erika 162 f. Greenblatt, Stephen 140 Gregorius Nazianzenus 113 Gregory the Great 120, 122 Guattari, Félix 210, 218 Guisone, Ferrante 113 Gunkel, Hermann 43, 50

Kant, Immanuel 189, 203, 231, 233 Keel, Othmar 55, 70 Kerrigan, John 130 Kiefer, Anselm 173 Klopprogge, Axel 212 Koch, Christoph 67 Koch, Klaus 74 Kohl, Karl-Heinz 229 Konrad von Würzburg 81, 97 Kott, Jan 147 Koyré, Alexandre 207 f. Kratz, Reinhard G. 61 f., 66, 78 f. Kuenen, Abraham 41

Habicht, Werner 136 Hakewill, George 193 Harris, Victor 193 Hauffen, Adolf 101, 106 Hawkes, Terence 132 f. Heidegger, Martin 172 Heidel, Alexander 48 Helmont, Johan Baptista van Herodot 14, 26

Lakshmanan, A. R. 215 Lamb, Marion J. 226 Landsberger, Benno 61 Levin, Christoph 65, 78 f. Lewis, C. S. 176, 206 Liedke, Gerhard 73 Lim, Walter S. H. 211, 218 Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak 145 Locke, John 229

212

Index of Authors

Lombard, Peter 120 Lowth, Robert 60 Lu, Mingjun 211 f. Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) 176, 223 Luckmann, Thomas 8 f. Lucretius 113 f., 118, 208 Lutz, Eckart Conrad 83, 87, 89, 100 Machiavelli, Niccolò 231 Malcolm, John 171 Marcus Aurelius 178 Marti, Karl 59, 62 – 64, 76, 209 Matheus, Jean 1, 227 f. May, Gerhard 5, 134, 204, 223 Milton, John 51, 53 f., 56, 168 f., 171 – 200, 201 – 218, 223 Montemayor, Jorge de 157 Moschos 150 Most, Glenn W. 5 f., 149 Mowinckel, Sigmund 72 Müller, Jan-Dirk 101 f., 105 Münkler, Herfried 219, 226 Murphy, Luke 5 Nebuchadnezzar 51 Newton, Isaac 18 Nietzsche, Friedrich 172 Nõmmik, Urmas 61, 66, 70 Nyssen, Ute 101, 103, 105 Offor, Francis 231 Ovid 3, 5 f., 11 – 13, 21, 111, 113, 123, 149, 175 f., 206 Paracelsus 149, 212 Pascal, Blaise 102, 188 Pennington, Richard 223 Petrarca / Petrarch 127, 157 Petrocchi, Giorgio 125 Philo of Alexandria 113, 118 Picciotto, Joanna 210 Pirckheimer, Willibald 113 Plato 125, 171 f., 176, 180, 185, 206, 213 Plinius (Pliny the Elder) 135, 223 Pope, Alexander 7 f., 188 Putin, Vladimir 233

237

Rabelais, François 94, 101, 103 f., 106 Rad, Gerhard von 47 Raleigh, Sir Walter 174 Rapp, Christof 229 f. Röcke, Werner 83 f., 88, 92, 97 f. Rogers, John 210, 212 Ruh, Kurt 28, 32, 36, 84, 96, 100 Ruskin, John 150 Salo, Reettakaisa Sofia 74 f. Sanders, Pharoah 173 Sanmartín, Joaquín 70 Sannazaro, Jacopo 157 Scheidt, Caspar 92 Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm 118 Schmitt, Carl 233 Schnabel, P. 31, 34, 101 Schröder, Edward 81 Scofield, Paul 147 Seneca 175 Shakespeare, William 129 – 148, 174, 183, 195 Shapiro, James 147, 163 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 168, 176 Sidney, Sir Philip 158 – 162, 164 – 168 Song, Eric B. 7, 213 Spenser, Edmund 154 – 160, 162 f., 171 – 200, 206, 213 Swift, Jonathan 181, 188 Tasso, Torquato 111 – 121, 123 – 127 Taylor, Gary 131, 204 Theocritus 150 – 154, 156, 165 Tindall, Gillian 220 Trevelyan, G.M. 7 Tristram, H.B. 62 Trump, Donald 233 Tuch, Friedrich 53 Virgil 130, 156 Vlastos, Gregory 171 Vos, Marten de 228 Warburton, William 132 Weber, Robertus 114 Wehrli, Max 83 Weimann, Robert 133

238

Index of Authors

Wellhausen, Julius 41, 46, 60 f., 63 f., 66 Wharton, J. J. S. 215 Whitehead, Alfred North 209 Wießner, Edmund 83 f. Witte, Markus 53 Wittenwiler, Heinrich 1, 81, 83 – 85, 87, 96, 98 f., 106, 108

Xerxes I, King of Persia

183

Ziegler, Werner Carl Ludewig Zitner, Sheldon P. 130

44