Plato Baptized: Towards the Interpretation of Spenser's Mimetic Fictions [1 ed.] 9781442678514, 9781442614840

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PLATO BAPTIZED Towards the Interpretation of Spenser's Mimetic Fictions

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Elizabeth Bieman

PLATO B A P T I Z E D Towards the Interpretation of Spenser's Mimetic Fictions

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press 1988 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-5767-5

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Bieman, Elizabeth Plato baptized Bibliography: Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-5767-5 1.Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Plato - Influence - Spenser. 3. Neoplatonism. 4. Hermeneutics. I. Title. PR2364.B53 1988

821'.3

C88-093686-X

This book has been published with the help of grants from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from the Faculty of Arts, University of Western Ontario.

For Donald John and Graeme, in whom I have seen, and see, the pattern

'I have often been puzzled about those things, Parmenides.' Socrates (Parmenides) The soul approaches God more closely by not understanding than by understanding.' St John of the Cross 'What is clear is always something surprising as well, like the turning-on of a new light, extending the range of what is to be taken into account.' Hans-Georg Gadamer 'What pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve Which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss.' Roland Barthes 'So in perplexing him and numbing him like the sting ray, have we done him any harm?' Socrates (Meno)

Contents

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ix

1 To discouer ... the general intention': A Methodological Introduction 3 2 'For wisedome is most riches': Plato and His Socrates 25 3 'Each vnto himselfe': Systematizers, Seekers, and Seers 55 4 'A temple faire and auncient': The Plotinian Paradigm 88 5 'All that moueth, doth mutation loue': Metamorphoses and Baptism 105 6 'Through hardy enterprise': Approaching Spenser 134 7 'Beginning then below': Questioning in Love 152 8 Twixt them both': Questions Arising in Society 179 9 'Upon the Pillours of Eternity': The Fusion of Horizons 212 10 'Speeches few': An Afterword 244 NOTES 247 G L O S S A R Y 293 B I B L I O G R A P H Y 299 INDEX 311

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Acknowledgments

My debts in this book are many, too many to be specified as fully as I might wish. Some stand out. A. Hilary Armstrong, whom I have met on only a few occasions, has been the greatest single help in the evolution of my knowledge of the Platonic tradition - primarily through his many publications but significantly, also, through the confirming encouragement and guidance he has offered a literary critic with the temerity to stray into the purlieus of philosophers and classicists. Professors William F. Tamblyn and William F. Blissett, decades apart, opened Spenser terrain for me in which I have been travelling ever since. I owe much to colleagues at home and afar, who have read parts or all of this work at earlier stages: in addition to Professor Armstrong, they include Professors Balachandra Rajan, Roger Kuin, Cory Bieman Davies, Ross Woodman, David Kaula, Geoffrey Rans, Waldo F. McNeir, the late C.A. Patrides, and the three readers for the University of Toronto Press and the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, Professors Blissett and Jon Quitslund, and Fred Unwalla. The book has been much strengthened by those suggestions I have adopted; I accept full responsibility, of course, for elements that may still fall under question. I should mention, too, the camaraderie of the international Spenser community as it is offered through the activities of the Spenser Society, and the 'Spenser at Kalamazoo' section of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. I name these few, each for reasons tied to specific occasion: Jerome S. Dees, Humphrey Tonkin, G. Foster Provost, Carol Kaske, Hugh N. Maclean, A. Kent Hieatt, A.C. Hamilton, Richard Neuse, Thomas H. Cain, Judith H. Anderson, DarrylJ. Gless. Others unnamed will, I trust, recognize their inclusion in the word 'camaraderie.' Thomas P. Roche, jr, edited that portion of Chapter 7 which appeared

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as 'Sometimes I... mask in mirth lyke to a comedy: Spenser's Amoretti' in Spenser Studies 4; and Donald Cheney oversaw the preparation of my article on the Fowre Hymnes (also incorporated into Chapter 7) for the forthcoming Spenser Encyclopedia. To these, and the presses they represent (University of Pittsburgh and University of Toronto), my thanks for early acceptance and guidance, and, in the first instance, for permission to republish. I have enjoyed research assistance over the years from a number of young scholars, David Brooks, Jan Plug, Brenda Carr, Brian Diemert, and Monika Lee. Funding for the first two, who did the lion's share, was provided through the Ontario Work/Study Bursary program; for the others through the Faculty of Arts at the University of Western Ontario. Many libraries have opened their resources to me while this book has been developing: the Warburg and Courtauld institutes of the University of London, St Deiniol's Library in North Wales, the University of Liverpool Library, the British Museum (now Library), the Folger Institute, the John P. Robarts Library of the University of Toronto, and at home in London, Ontario, the D.B. Weldon, Huron College, and King's College libraries, all of the University of Western Ontario. I am grateful to them all, and most specifically, to J.B. Trapp and the late D.P. Walker of the Warburg, to H. John M. Turner, and to John F. MacPherson, of Weldon, for hospitable help of various sorts. This project has been supported at early and later stages by the (then) Canada Council and the (later and now) Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Past and present deans of the Faculty of Arts and chairmen of the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario have provided support both tangible and moral: to TJ. Collins, T.M. Lennon, J.G. Rowe, J.A.B. Somerset, andJ.F. Woodruff, my thanks. I am especially grateful to the Faculty of Arts for subvention funding. At the University of Toronto Press, editor Prudence Tracy has been a constant support, and Jean Wilson a helpful copy-editor. Antje Lingner, the book's designer, has pleased me immeasurably by adapting for the cover a painting by my husband, Graeme Bieman. Peter Blaney of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities has also been helpful, not least by demonstrating the interest of a fellow Plotinian. My deepest debts are signalled in the dedication.

PLATO BAPTIZED Towards the Interpretation of Spenser's Mimetic Fictions

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CHAPTER ONE

To discouer ... the general intention' A Methodological Introduction

The asking of questions to which there are no conceptual answers goes back in Western literary experience at least to Plato's Socrates, and to the roughly contemporary book of Job. It issued in early Christian thought in Paul's and Augustine's complex rhetoric and paradoxical language. By the time of Spenser the tradition that had incorporated and transmitted Platonism, appropriate biblical thinking, and Neoplatonic revisions of both, was offering to poets a readily available figurative and paradigmatic language system. In it they embodied and ordered their most probing poetic impulses. Signs of strain and scepticism, as mimetic and recapitulative of deepest human experience, were always permitted their roles in the dynamic patterns of the resultant poems. When a majority of educated readers were ready to give conceptual assent to the doctrines and the faith that had been built upon the texts and interpretations inherited within the conjoined Platonic and biblical traditions, the poems could be read as relatively unequivocal indicators to ontological significance. We no longer read them thus. My concern with the process of questioning so often undertaken in the Neoplatonic image-language of the Renaissance poets grew out of the enigmatic satisfaction I have always felt in reading Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantoes. That all-embracing poetic 'fragment' offers one of the fullest expressions extant of the issues and forms of language with which we shall be involved. Like the book of Revelation it seems to be an ending that looks beyond itself without escaping, in the end, the world of time and history it represents. Like the dialogues of Plato it asks very large questions and offers enigmatic responses. Like the book of Job it culminates in a supralogical theophany that provides the only release possible from the problems raised. In Mutabilitie, as elsewhere, Spenser uses the resources of metaphoric language that derive from sue-

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cessive textual, and oral, expressions of Platonic, Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic, and Christian thinking. The capacity of the Cantos to arouse debate has issued in a very broad range of modern readings. It is no longer customary to read them simply as a Christian appendage, a conventional retraction appended to a humanist epic. Those whose academic predispositions and habits tend most to the logical and analytic often overlook the contribution of doubt and incipient despair to the dynamic of vision, in this or in any other visionary poem. Such critics, when they focus on the darkness evident in fictive detail and tone, tend to dismiss the enigmatic judgment of Dame Nature and the culminating two stanzas of personal prayer as perfunctory theological impositions upon a picture of existential despair. They hear Spenser anticipating the plea 'Stop the world. I want to get off; or, if they grant him to have been deluded by the comfort offered in his rhetoric, they suggest with some condescension that modern readers can see what he must have failed to understand in his own fiction.1 It will soon be evident that I share the current scepticism concerning the possibility of finding meaning embodied in a work of art - insofar as 'meaning' may be defined as something susceptible to fully logical expression.2 But the field of speculation in this study embraces meaningful experiences generated by the activity of interpretation, experiences inexpressible in the kind of analytic discourse that is best suited to exploring kinds and degrees of difference within what Plato calls the Many. Borderland experiences, unitive or recognitive, often relate the Many to the One, and demand expression (when, as frequently, the experiencer is caught up in a sensed imperative to communicate them) in symbol, myth, parable, paradox, equivocation, or other modes of discourse that are 'fractured' or otherwise strange.3 The non-discursive experiential kinds of meaning I am indicating were not regarded in the Renaissance and earlier as suspect qua irrational. The word 'reason' itself- assigned to the highest human faculty in those traditional psychologies that derived from Plato through (and with accretion from) Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, and others - embraced all those activities we now might call spiritual, contemplative, imaginative, and intuitive. The words that Milton gives to Raphael as pedagogue and guide remind us that such functions were considered, through Spenser's period and, for thinkers in the Platonic tradition long beyond his time, to be far higher than mere logic and analysis.4 One may agree easily that all readings are necessarily 'misreadings,' at least to the extent that modern interpreters necessarily regard the

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cosmic paradigms that inform the Renaissance figurations5 of reality as fictive in a more extreme sense than such images must have seemed to the minds of the Renaissance. But, among critics who emphasize the shifts in understanding inevitable in successive acts of reading, I like Hans-Georg Gadamer in this positive formulation: 'one understands differently when one understands at all.'6 Since Gadamer gives 'difference' an adverbial function, his sentence affirms process over the fact of change, and subordinates the potentiality of misreading to the conviction that some mode of understanding is achievable. In the 19805 the methods of deconstruction and the tones of post-modernism seem to stand at the terminus ad quern of Platonic scepticism; the affirmation of process reminds us that no terminus in human understanding can remain terminal. If, in practice, 'understanding' must be limited to the experience of the specific interpreter, in theory 'understanding' should be permitted to imply the apprehension of a mode of significance pertinent to participating members of the one body of humanity - whatever the 'hasty accidents' of their temporal situations. Critical puzzles have been known to lead towards, and yield to, renewals of various sorts. The various understandings implied in the poetic texts at issue were, I am convinced, grounded in the by no means nai've traditions of Platonic and biblical hermeneusis as they had evolved to the time of the Renaissance. So important do I find this conviction that the first half of this study is devoted to supplying a new thread to lead us through the maze of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts by weaving strands of evidence that have not been brought together in just this way. The older texts are at least as important for readers of Spenser and other Renaissance texts as those generated by Ficino and post-Ficinian 'Platonists' which have tended to dominate discussions of Spenser's 'philosophy.' Bearing the authority of great antiquity, the older were published and read synchronically with the newer throughout Spenser's century.7 We, more conscious than Renaissance thinkers of the ways the ongoing generation of texts affects our thinking, will of course speculate upon a meaning in the Cantos beyond that which the petitioner of the final stanzas seems to understand in his own words. In the final chapter I shall demonstrate that a reading which takes account of both evidences of doubt and evidences of faith will discern an affirmative aura about the Cantos that the petitioner within the fiction may not yet understand, reeling as he does under the sway of Mutability. The implied affirmation need be separated neither from the poetic foreconceit nor from the poet's art.

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The Cantos enact a mimesis of the process that leads to 'personal knowing,' whether the petitioner is seen to reach that state or not. 'Personal knowing,' as Michael Polanyi describes it, is the 'active comprehension of things known.' In such an activity of knowing the particulars of experience are incorporated into a larger context by the participatory, self-identifying, involvement of the knower.8 The moment, or the extended duration, of such knowing must be transitory, because human minds always move on in due course to more focused, less integrative, activities. Yet the transient experience contributes heuristic effect: released for a time from the strain of scepticism and provided with a changed perspective, the experiencer proceeds refreshed to new modes of logical and analytical knowing and expression. Whether Spenser's petitioner is seen to come to such 'personal' knowledge or not, the mimesis of the epistemological process is capable of producing an event of personal knowing in the involved author, reader, or both. When Mutabilitie, the seed point for this book long before it came to assume its present shape, emerges again in my conclusion, the circularity of form will suggest the hermeneutical process itself as it has been experienced through centuries of commingling biblical and Platonic traditions. By probing the unknown, and knowing by the already known, by writing and reading, by riddling and interpreting in the upward and downward spirals that point beyond words, human questioners acquire - if not 'answers' - something of the 'knowing' they seek - active integrative wisdom about themselves and their places in the cosmos. The much-embracing question of the 'meaning' of the Mutabilitie is but one of many issues in Spenser criticism towards which this book is directed. Whether the cosmos and the human societies it engenders can be viewed in negative, in cautiously affirmative, or in joyously positive terms: these questions Spenser addresses recurrently in his fictions. Interpreters find evidences, by turns, for each of the alternative perspectives. Those who focus narrowly when reading passages of darkened vision tend to impose the understanding gained there upon their interpretations of other passages - thus inhibiting the mimetic process of growth in understanding Spenser offers through the developing work of a lifetime. The history of the interpretation of the Fowre Hymnes illustrates this danger. If misunderstood in function, Spenser's introductory epistle 'retractating' the hymns of earthly love and beauty leads to a dualistic misinterpretation not only of the hymns as a structure but also to the neglect of many of the most affirmative elements in the Spenser canon. Such errors lead to other untenable opinions: that Spenser makes direct

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use of Neoplatonism only in the earthly hymns, reverting to a separate mode of thinking, the Christian, in the heavenly pair and The Faerie Queene (this in itself implying that 'Platonism' and 'Christianity' in the Renaissance can be separated); that Spenser as Calvinistic Protestant holds the fallen cosmos in pessimistic disesteem; and that those exuberantly joyous passages in the Epithalamion, the Garden of Adonis episode (FQ 3.6), and the marriage of the rivers (FQ 4.11) represent passing aberrations from the pen of one whose basic theology, and final vision, were much darker.9 The chapters of practical interpretation of Spenser's poetry will lay out these issues, 'beginning then below' with the hymns to earthly love and beauty, and demonstrating their congruity with the heavenly pair in a larger whole. The chapters of praxis, further, will demonstrate Spenser's confidence in his readers' familiarity with the paradigmatic languages transmitted through Christian Platonism; his own freedom in interpreting and reshaping the traditional materials; and the frequently equivocal strategies to which he is driven - by his own ambivalences and by social pressures - as he attempts to express in his fictions the fullness of understanding which he at times seeks for himself, at times enjoys, and at times seeks to give as prophetic witness to others. The earlier part of the book will unfold a number of reasons for believing that Platonism and Neoplatonism contribute much that is positive and world-affirming to the gathered tradition. Chapters 2 and 3, and 5 and 6, which bracket the Plotinus chapter and precede Spenser's three, describe the structures of thinking that Spenser inherited by tracing them through certain key figures and texts in the Platonic and biblical streams. The image-languages that evolve across the centuries will be outlined for two purposes: to accumulate details that will serve as referential bases for interpretation; and to demonstrate that the tradition as Spenser inherited it had always been a dynamic, changing process of handing down, of interpretation and reinterpret a tion. It has continually proved itself capable of conferring new freedoms upon those who interpret creatively, and conversely capable of fettering those who misunderstand to the dark and confining cave of received opinion and dogma. Chapter 4, 'The Plotinian Paradigm,' draws out of the Enneads of Plotinus the most important single model of the dynamic paradigmatic language of Neoplatonism. The whirling circular images to which Plotinus characteristically resorts in his attempts to invest the linear medium of language with a meaning too large for any single verbal account

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will evoke a sense of joyous recognition in any reader already familiar with Spenser: with the whirling pageant in Mutabilitie, the whirling dancers upon Acidale, the whirling processes of generation in the Garden of Adonis, the whirling cycles of time in Amoretti and Epithalamion. Here indeed is a series of individual poetic utterances providing in retrospect so comprehensive a vision that it can serve as heuristic model against which to interpret separate utterances elsewhere in Spenser, and in the heirs of the poet's poet. The Plotinian paradigm, utterly different as it is, generically and stylistically, from any one of Spenser's poems - or indeed, as a speculative construct, from any one of the Enneads - matches the breadth of Spenser's vision in the passages just specified, as both match a biblical text of similar breadth, the book of Job. To have the Plotinian paradigm ready to the understanding does as much to facilitate the interpretation of Spenser as any other single stratagem. Neither in the Spenser chapters nor in the occasional aside concerning other poets will I focus deliberately upon questions of specific source, although such issues may arise incidentally; nor will I take other than incidental interest in the relative strengths of the components of received tradition in any given work. The Renaissance poets were scholars, of course, but the fruits of their poetic labours invite us primarily to taste and see. We may hope to taste more sensitively, and see more comprehensively, when we choose for a time to share vicariously in the tradition they embraced as a living whole. The readings of the traditional materials, and of Spenser, are offered as mimetic enactments of 'personal knowing,' worth sharing to the degree that they can contribute to the different personal knowing of subsequent readers. I claim for them no privilege over such other readings as I would judge of value - readings which demonstrate some capacity in the interpreter to reconstruct imaginatively the questions arising in the writer's thinking as it emerges from the writer's language. Readings of such value must, at the same time, demonstrate some capacity in the interpreter to participate in the creative freedom enjoyed by those who generate texts. Because conceptual assent to doctrines formerly understood through the inherited image-languages had eroded by the early decades of this century, a generation or more of literary critics found it necessary to reconstruct for modern readers the world view implied in traditional poetic language. They found its bases in what they usually called Christian humanism, the syncretic amalgam of classical and biblical thought. They found that the poets of Renaissance England, when they drew upon

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ancient materials, tended to favour sources from the Platonic tradition over the more practical or scientific works deriving from Aristotle which were also enjoying recirculation in the period.10 Such thinkers tended to assume that any instance of paradigmatic language was carrying as freight the doctrines traditionally associated with such patterns. Great as their service has been to later interpreters, they tended to miss ironies, equivocation, evidences of sceptical thinking, and much of the humane richness we now find in the texts. The title of this book reflects the intellectual world of Spenser and other Renaissance poets, a world suffused with 'Christian humanism.' The name of Plato provides an historical anchorage for the sense we gain in reading poetry of the period that the speakers see themselves standing in a borderland between two worlds, the here of time and the there of eternity, between the illusory and dangerous world of sense and opinion, and the supra-realm of ordering Truth, creative Power, and saving Grace.11 Speaking from the borders, the voices reach towards and sometimes achieve a state of awareness or recognition that confers, however temporarily, a mode of freedom from the felt bondage of divided consciousness. Such renovating experiences initiate, at least for a time, integrated and integrative modes of daily existence whether they are encountered in the making of, in the living of, or in the reading of a fiction. The word 'baptized' should evoke not only the initiatory function just suggested but also the recognition that Spenser was writing in a Christian culture and addressing Christian readers out of, so far as we are able to judge, more or less firmly held Christian convictions.12 The notion of baptism should also communicate something of the developed thought of the Old Testament as, comprehended and transformed by the New Testament interpreters, it issues in the confluences of Christian Platonism. To be 'baptized,' in the metaphoric sense, is to recapitulate the triumph of Job. The book of Job, that most enigmatic and powerful of all Old Testament narratives, records (as do some of the more watery psalms) the sense that being overwhelmed by the chaos of experience is a precondition for experiences of cleansing and renewal. Job's Hebraic questioning of ultimates is couched in utterly unphilosophic terms: he hurls demands for a confrontation at a God he sees as unjust until a Voice from the Whirlwind responds, offering no theodicy. In a torrent of particular images it offers instead a mimesis of power and beauty in a world that coheres in the personal will of its creator. No devout Old Testament writer, necessarily mindful of the commandment against

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making images of God, could stretch his limits more effectively than the final redactor of Job; no sceptical philosopher could possibly judge God's response to Job as logically conclusive. Job himself finds it quite sufficient to his needs. He enters a new life, 'baptized' and confirmed by the divine encounter.13 Others have argued persuasively that certain English poets, especially in the early seventeenth century, undertook mimeses of traditional meditation in poetry as a Christian discipline, a means of grace.14 Endorsing their findings, I differ to the degree that I lay more emphasis than they on the strain of scepticism deriving from both the Greeks and the Hebrew Wisdom literature, and on the language of Neoplatonism that so frequently shapes both the questions and the responses we find in Spenser and other Renaissance thinkers. The languages of Renaissance poetic fictions frequently owe more to the Greek than to the biblical dimensions of their inheritance. Scepticism is one inevitable consequence of metaphysics, itself more Greek than Hebrew: it is provoked whenever metaphysics overreaches logic and empirical evidence. Scepticism is also provoked, at least potentially, when pressing personal decisions have to be made in the context of received doctrine and codes of conduct. Further, the very presence to consciousness of any large conceptual framework gives rise naturally to new questions. Just so, the conventional moralistic frames delineated in Job by the comforters, as in Oedipus Tyrannus by the Chorus, point up the questions of theodicy and identity for Job and for Oedipus. The merging cosmological and moral frames, as they derive from conflated humane and biblical texts, offered a matrix for Spenser and continue to serve as backdrop to his fictions. What I undertake in the early chapters poses certain dangers. To deal with the transmission and revisionary development of Platonism and Neoplatonism through Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Christian eras, and to formulate therefrom a composite and dynamic description of the tradition, is to strain against the disciplines of focused thought in which our modern academies train us. One can, with due care, speak about illogical and mystical matters with academic rigour and clarity, but to recreate mimetically the visionary experiences often expressed or implied in such subject matter requires the deliberate deployment of figurative language and paradox to blur the edges that separate to the analyst the individual parts of the Many from each other. IS The subject matter demands the risk. In human experience, the edges that logic seeks to maintain intact customarily blur in borderland situations - moments of choice, of lov-

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ing fusion, of parting between persons; and moments of sceptical confrontation in which one of the Many addresses the One who is felt to be Other until the process of questioning induces a change of perspective. In humane literature, the edges are often blurred deliberately (or the lines of discourse or narration are fractured, as Frank Kermode puts it): writers tease us out of thought, to see more completely than we might if all were completely available to logic. Socrates and Plato were masters of this teasing art, as were many writers of the Bible.16 (With some of the murkier exegetes, of both traditions, we cannot be sure that the illogicalities are deliberate.) Spenser takes his place in the ranks of those who tease us into new modes of thought. It is expedient, in understanding his fictions, to attempt as much breadth and as much clarity as possible in each given context. We learn much from those critics who 'refuse ... to identify the force of literature with any concept of embodied meaning' as they set themselves against 'logocentric or incarnational perspectives.' But like Geoffrey Hartman, whose description of'deconstruction' I quote here,17 I do not identify with the second term of that description. I share with such theorists common ground drawn from Heidegger and Gadamer: a concern lest the dynamic languages that come down to us in scripture and literature be frozen into static, outgrown doctrinal structures. With readers of many critical stripes, I recognize that the stresses and gaps which arise in equivocal and mythic discourses are crucial in their effects. But if required, in interpreting Spenser, to choose between logocentric perspectives, by which it is assumed that words can and often do point mysteriously to significances they never, finally, can encapsulate, and denials that genuine meaning can ever emerge in reading, my choice is simple. The sensitive interpreter must, like a chameleon, participate in the particular colouration of the text being interpreted or alternatively, must grant it its autonomy - in order that the 'personal knowing' of which I have spoken may emerge, if it will. From a more historical perspective, I find it highly improbable that a professedly Christian poet of the Renaissance was involved in exercises denying the bases of his faith. Further, I understand that questioning and faith are not mutually exclusive categories. I thus expect the fictive worlds of Spenser to offer potentialities of meaning, however much actualized experiences of meaning must shift through successive generations. When a poem plays out its language games on the verge of a void into which meaning threatens to fall, I recall the degree to which in mystical thinking (more familiar to even the wary Protestant poet of the

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Renaissance than to the modern reader) an experience of the void serves to prepare for moments of enlarged personal knowing. I am thus prepared to recognize, and to re-understand as valid, such signs of release from the void as may be presented: this I do, finally, in the delicately poised ending of Mutabilitie. To define my critical position I would suggest that this book describes a process of reconstructive, or recreative, hermeneusis. The words should evoke the affinities I feel with Gadamer, and should suggest my conviction that each reading is a reconstruction insofar as it participates in the materials and recreates something of the structure of the originating text.18 Throughout subsequent chapters I shall attempt to limit my direct usages of terms now current in literary theory for at least two reasons: that the roots of this study in the ancient materials not be masked by a heavy overlay of post-modern language; and that a study already carrying the technical language arising through the long tradition, and drawing upon other modern disciplines, not be further freighted. It is, however, clear to me that many of the materials I draw from the past that was imaginatively present to Spenser have prepared for language and arguments prevailing in current literary theory. The sceptical strain in the Platonic tradition provides something quite other than the logocentric set-pieces of Platonic myth. Spenser's poetry is, of course, 'logocentric' in that it continually opens itself to a mysterious absence beyond itself- and in ' Mutabilitie' beyond the absent court of the absent Gloriana. But its very openness, achieved through metaphoric and equivocal strategies, is deconstructive insofar as it prevents the consciousness of either narrator or reader from closing upon anything resembling a dogmatic centre. When Spenser deconstructs, he does so serving many freedoms, not least the creative freedom we as readers can achieve in reconstructive, recreative, interpretations. It should be helpful to set forth now the significances I attach in the course of this book to a number of interrelated key terms and to indicate the contexts in which they will be encountered. (I treat these same terms, with others, more briefly in the appended Glossary.) Tacit and Focal Thinking Michael Polanyi, a practising scientist before he turned to epistemological explorations of extra-logical knowing, differentiates between

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To discouer ... the general intention'

two kinds of interinvolved ways of thinking, the 'tacit' and the 'focal.' Tacit awareness is the subliminal or peripheral awareness of a gestalt that holds whole patterns in some mode of consciousness. It emerges to what we normally call consciousness in those 'aha' or 'eureka' moments when (and here mechanical metaphor best expresses the suddenness with which such moments strike the subject) 'the penny drops,'19 and everything clicks into place in a complex and satisfying structure of coherence. After the flash of tacit awareness, focal awareness normally takes over for the testing, demonstrating, and working out in particular applications, of what has come to be seen in the larger pattern. The process leads at this juncture to the production of an hypothesis, or the clarification of a situation or relationship. Focal efforts thereafter will differ from those that were probable or even possible before the transformative event of tacit knowing. That the hypotheses or understandings formulated after such moments will be regarded as valid only for limited spans of time, whether hours or centuries, does nothing to diminish their importance. Without an hypothesis (or a topos, a rhetorician would prefer to say), one normally arrived at through tacit awareness, the inquirer can have no large map by which to establish directions. For Polanyi, as for Dilthey and Gadamer, the larger patterns known are achieved through the personal contribution of the knower to each act of knowing. 'I start by rejecting the ideal of scientific detachment,' he explains. 'I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the thing known,' active in that the knower must bring skills and information into the gestalt through a genuine involvement, a 'personal participation.' Polanyi does not imply, here, that understanding is subjective: rather, he believes that his understanding implies objectivity because the personal thrust has broken through to a 'hidden reality.' Although he suspects that this account of scientific method may be 'shrugged aside' as 'out-dated Platonism' and 'mystery-mongering,'20 he insists that the conception of objectivity is central to his whole argument. Polanyi's expositions of his epistemology derive from and apply most directly to the world of scientific thinking, yet he believes that they warrant broader application.21 Gadamer offers one convenient means to connect Polanyi's scientific epistemology with the hermeneusis of Renaissance texts. Tradition, part of whose nature is the handing on of traditional activity, must have become questionable [through the historical process] for an explicit consciousness of the hermeneutical task of appropriating tradi-

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Plato Baptized

tion to have been formed.'22 It is not by pure chance that shifts in scientific perspective were so intertwined in the Renaissance with the burgeoning interest in scriptural exegesis, as indeed they were also in the nineteenth century. We enhance our chances of understanding the inquiring fictions of any inquiring age by bringing to our own critical inquiries the skills and information achievable through as full an understanding as possible of the traditions within which, and against which, the questions of that age were being asked. By the 'personal participation' that implies an informed and willing suspension of modern detachment from the conjoined scientific and religious worlds of the Renaissance poet, we engage in that thrust towards enlargement of understanding that operates through analytic demonstration and extends the potentialities of further literary knowing. When sceptics lack the vision of coherence presupposed and implied in an acceptable paradigmatic framework they remain trapped within narrow limits of language and logic. But the active testing of those limits on the borderlands of living circumstance involves the sceptic in heuristic risk and opportunity. An encounter with the void of logic may transform itself into the deeper and darker experience of what mystics call the Void itself - the ultimate abyss - an experience so painful and profound that the trap, with the safety net, of scepticism disappears for a time as irrelevant. The sceptic then will be no less a sceptic, but will be less narrowly confined in subsequent events of personal knowing. All theoretical or practical attempts to understand the interrelationships between wholes and parts, Polanyi's tacit and focal knowing, the One and the Many, reveal at length that a double bind lies in wait. Polanyi explains: 'to speak a language is to commit ourselves to a double indeterminacy due to our reliance both on its formalism and on our continued reconsideration of this formalism in its bearing on experience. For just as, owing to the ultimately tacit character of all our knowledge, we remain ever unable to say all we know, so also in view of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in what we say.'23 Insofar as language has and knows its own limits it will force scepticism repeatedly to the fore, however incrementally adjusted, in new attempts to express and explicate the larger awarenesses that have been gained. We speak, critically, of the 'hermeneutical circle,' a figure implying that to discover any sense of the unity and coherence of a work we must move through the parts to a whole; and that, thereafter, in

15

'To discouer ... the general intention'

interpreting the significance of any element, we explore its contribution in the light of the whole we have experienced.24 If arrested or blocked in a given reader by rigidifying or lethargic tendencies the hermeneutical process will end in the reiteration of opinion deriving from a position adopted long before. But at its creative best the process shifts back and forth between contemplative and sceptically analytical modes of reading, between tacit and focal modes of thinking, in a universe of meaning that constantly expands by means of, as well as in invitation to, ongoing acts of interpretation. Hermeneutical problems arise not only in primary attempts to understand, but also in efforts of critical persuasion. When focusing upon the interpretation of parts under a given tacit awareness the interpreter must deploy the language of logical discourse by strategies that seem appropriate in the particular circumstances. Yet logically discursive language is incapable of matching, precisely, either the interpreter's non-verbal experiences in reading or his speculative view of the author's fore-conceit. Difficulty is compounded when the language chosen by the interpreter belongs to a different verbal code from that normally drawn upon by a particular reader to express modes of non-verbal experience. A-logical matters expressed in terms uncongenial to the reader are all too often dismissed as deficient in any meaning. As interpreter, I shall be calling upon other pairs of terms as relatively unfamiliar and potentially thorny to some readers as 'tacit' and 'focal.' In Chapters 2 and 3, and occasionally thereafter, the pair 'metaphor' and 'metonymy' will emerge in the examination of developmental and cultural differences in the ways language has been deployed and understood in different times and countries in the ancient Mediterranean world. In Chapter 2, and pervasively thereafter, the Platonic terms 'mimesis'and 'methexis' will figure prominently. When understood as polar opposites the concepts they name bear a slight resemblance to 'metaphor' and 'metonymy'; but understood as their interrelationships are traced through the tradition the terms come to interact dynamically and creatively. A third pair, the Saussurean terms 'langue' and 'parole,' will be introduced in Chapter 4, where their function is selfexplanatory; but what I call there the most typical langue of Neoplatonism - The Plotinian Paradigm' - should be set in relationship to usages of the word 'paradigm' (with its cognates) elsewhere in this book. Before I reach the discussion of 'paradigms,' and append a brief note on 'allegory,' I must explain the understandings I entertain and invite in the words 'mysticism' and 'baptism.'

16

Plato Baptized

Metaphor and Metonymy Because in this book I am using the terms as polar opposites, definitions from literary handbooks which present metonymy as a sub-species of metaphor can be misleading. My usage follows Northrop Frye's radical displacement in the early pages of The Great Code of Russian formalist thinking mediated by Roman Jakobson. An example of Frye's usage will serve to open the subject: The AV [of the Bible] represents Jesus as saying to Nicodemus in John 3:8, The wind bloweth where it listeth ... so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.' This [as in the Authorized Version] is a metonymic translation [o thinking that was originally metaphoric]: 'Spirit' is a conception, identified with the Holy Spirit of Christian doctrine, and 'wind' is a concrete illustration of it. But in the Greek text the same word pneuma, is used for both wind and spirit. Hence a purely metaphorical translation is also possible: The wind blows where it likes ... that's what everyone is like who is born of the wind.' We may find this rendering a trifle unsettling and so, apparently, did Nicodemus, hearing only the word pneuma.

Frye speaks of 'a verbal magic in the metaphorical phrase,' of verbal 'energy common to words and things' that serves to bind the signifiers and signifieds in some unified relationship. In metonym 'verbal magic is sublimated into a quasi-magic inherent in ... linear ordering,' says Frye. Jonathan Culler distinguishes between metaphoric worlds as those in which propositions are read as literally true, and metonymic worlds in which they are understood as metaphorically true.25 Kenneth Burke draws a basic distinction: 'Metaphor is a device to see something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this' and works by conferring a 'perspective' by which the this's and the that's can be understood in their interrelatedness. Metonymy, on the contrary, works by a process of 'reduction' by analysis of what has been or could be joined in metaphor back into the separated constituents, this and that. Metonymy is 'realistic,' 'scientific,' in clarifying the distinctions between this and that, but clarity is achieved at a cost. In the reduction of metaphor to metonymy what Paul Ricoeur calls the 'imaginative' in metaphor, that process that stretches the mind to encompass a new sense of the relatedness of particulars, is deactivated, and with it much of the 'feeling' that metaphor evokes.26 For now, it should suffice to indicate two points: the oblique applica-

17

'To discouer ... the general intention'

bility of this understanding of metaphor' to the 'tacit awareness' arising from, and giving rise to, the traditional thinking which confers 'perspectives' large enough to join separated particulars in a comprehensive pattern or paradigm; and the similarly oblique applicability of Burke's explanation of 'metonymy' to processes of analytic thinking and discursive explanation, which develop as tacit thinking yields to focal. In practice, since I acknowledge the potential ambiguities in the term 'metonymic,' I shall try to limit its usages to those few instances in which an alternative such as 'analytic,' 'focal,' 'schematic,' 'systematic,' or 'reductive' will not serve. Mimesis and Methexis The next terms to be threaded into this web, 'mimesis' (imitation) and 'methexis (participation), are not precise opposites, but initially may seem to be so. Aristotle's use of mimesis in the Poetics - 'poetry is the imitation of an action' - established a sense of 'aesthetic distance' in the word that clings to it in one stream of literary criticism, the Aristotelian, which, until relatively recently, was more influential in critical theory than the stream Frye calls the 'Longinian' and I the Neoplatonic. In the Aristotelian understanding of mimesis, literature is seen as 'product'; in the Neoplatonic as 'process.'27 I shall at times be less concerned with Aristotle's literary usage of 'mimesis' than with Plato's earlier cosmogonic usage in the Timaeus, wherein the demiurge fashions the cosmos by 'imitating' the beautiful pattern of Forms in the ideal world above. The Timaean usage, supported by similar passages in the Republic, gives rise to the suggestion that the cosmos is but a pale imitation, lower by far in value and function than the pattern, the paradigm, it imitates. Were 'mimesis' the sole foundation we had for understanding the relationship between the cosmos and its creator in Plato we would have to settle for the sense that his thinking is dualistic, metonymic, proto-Aristotelian, dichotomizing the 'this' of this world from the 'that' of the eternal, static, pattern. But Plato and his heirs have left us also the word methexis, participation: it is puzzlingly deployed, especially in the Parmenides, to overcome the sense of hierarchical alienation imposed upon us by 'mimesis' in the account of cosmic creation. Through strategies and paradoxes to be spelled out later as I trace a way through the Platonic tradition, mimesis comes to be seen metaphorically, not reductively, as a dynamic process of participatory imitation through which the imitator grows actively to identify with the imitated model. The separation of this from that, of

18

Plato Baptized

subject from object, dissolves when mimesis is understood as a dynamic means of engaging in methexis. What I identify as 'participatory mimesis' in Neoplatonic thinking depends upon the understanding of mimesis as process, not product. Aesthetic distance disappears when we picture the literary process in this way: reader, poet, and text are dynamically interinvolved in a process of growth. Participatory mimesis depends upon the metaphoric way of thinking. 'Aristotelian' mimesis on the other hand presupposes a stratifying, metonymic, separation of textual product from both its producer and consumer. ('Aristotelian' mimesis is isolated from Aristotle by quotation marks because, for example, his concept of catharsis clearly presupposes a degree of imaginative participation by the audience in the dramatic text, even as it recognizes the safeguard of their separation.) Mysticism Some of the difficulties the term 'mysticism' raises have been generated by differences in the languages deployed by those who attempt to translate non-verbal experiences of their own into words. Others arise from differences between the categories devised or adopted by those who wish to order and interpret in a detached and logical way the evidences offered in diverse personal accounts of 'mystical' experience. Without arbitrating among the various points of view, I shall describe the range of meanings I am ready to invest in the term in this study. I dismiss, of course, all colloquial usages of the term which render it even fuzzier about the edges than it need be in its legitimate multivalency. James R. Home says that 'mysticism is, literally, a psychological process which occurs with varying degrees of intensity in everyone's life.'28 I find practical disadvantages in stretching the term to that extent. For experiences of creative and recreative insight in the course of intellectual work and play, and for key moments of personal and spiritual growth, we have terms such as 'breakthrough,' 'personal knowing,' 'anagnorisis,' 'metanoia,' 'self-realization,' 'epiphany' and 'revelation,' 'conversion,' and even 'eureka.'29 'Baptism,' when used metaphorically, will also serve, and has done so often in Christian tradition. To clarify one term by another equally slippery, I limit my own usages of 'mysticism' and its cognates to contexts that have a religious dimension. Although a numinous charge may be carried by any of the alternative terms I have suggested above, I imply by 'religious' at least one of the following conditions: the presence of linguistic factors estab-

19

To discouer ... the general intention'

lishing the context in Jewish, Christian, esoteric pagan, or Eastern religions; or some thrust in the experience described towards what Paul Tillich, a Platonic reconstructionist, calls 'ultimate concern.'30 For Tillich 'ultimate' experiences approach the metaphysical either overtly or by involving an experience of personal change so deep that it is felt to arise beyond the limits of selfhood. Such ultimate experiences, like those unfolded by the narrator and supplicant of Mutabilitie, I do define as mystical and religious, even if they arise as much or more from speculative scepticism as from a firmly defined faith. It is obvious that I am permitting the term 'mysticism' more latitude than Evelyn Underhill does in her still important study, Mysticism, first published in 1910.3I She draws upon a Christian mystical tradition that has often described analytically and categorically experiences resistant to verbal expression. Such descriptive strategies move towards a prescriptiveness inappropriate to a mystic's disciplined and humble expectancy. They are even less appropriate to literary criticism. When poets verbalize - even in paradox, myth, fractured narrative, and symbol - their verbal mimeses of movement towards refreshed understanding differ significantly from the non-verbal consummation that the Christian mystic has been taught to await. I insist, here, upon qualifying the categorical distinctions drawn by Underhill and other writers on the subject: the Neoplatonic system, to which most mystics are at least indirectly indebted for their language, postulates a dynamic of love and power flowing without division through all levels of creation.32 Accordingly, I resist any automatic judgment that one kind of mystical experience is necessarily lower in value than another, as is usual when one kind is perceived to involve the divinization of the lower world and another a personal flight to the higher. When the language derives from a dynamic and fluid system in which the Many are constantly being transformed by the permeating One, the hierarchical value judgments deriving from a different dimension or stage in Platonism lead to deceptively conventional, and static, perceptions of the utterances (poetic or philosophic) under consideration. Most writers upon mysticism ascribe something like cognitive effects to the mystical experiences they describe - but not logically cognitive effects. Many note the moral changes that may be wrought through such experiences in the subject's subsequent behaviour: such changes seem to flow from, rather than to be integral to, the mystical experience per se. Burke's and Ricoeur's models of the metaphoric process are worth conflating here: as the mystic 'this' joins the otherness of 'that' in an 'imaginative' union, the 'feeling' component produces

20

Plato Baptized

effects more lasting than the 'cognitive' pursuit of, or perception of, union. In some deep personal experiences in which mystical significance may validly be identified, the cognitive may be subordinated or even ignored in the approach to the central event. That is to say, the experience may arise without evidence that focused verbal questioning has preceded it. Change, and confirming strength, may come mysteriously, mystically, from a direction which may be interpreted by the subject either as beyond, or as so deep within that it transcends in depth the bases of normal consciousness. Such numinous and expansive events of personal knowing can transform all subsequent experiences. The most celebrated instance in early Christian history was the conversion experience of Saul/Paul on the Damascus road, which will figure in a later chapter.33 In Luke's account in Acts, Saul has not been shown as engaged in any open inquiry: rather he is going about his rabbinical business in opposition to the deviant new Christian sect, with no demonstrable uneasiness. But Luke has just recounted the martyrdom of Stephen, at which Saul was 'consenting.' The juxtaposition invites speculation that Saul has already seen the Christ in Stephen's mimesis of his master's death, and has been engaged in deep emotional intercourse in a non-verbal mode. However it is interpreted, Saul's experience on the Damascus road culminates after three days in a baptism described as both physical and spiritual. Saul's 'mystical' experience issues in an initiatory sense of communal ingrafting and of personal renewal for the new man, Paul (Acts 6:5-8:1 and 9:3-18; Gal 1:13). Spenser was writing in a Protestant milieu. In reference to such events of knowing he was naturally disinclined to introduce the mystical terminology that a medieval Catholic would employ - that taken by the mystical tradition from the treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius.34 Remarkably, in a still hierarchical though changing age, Spenser - like Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton - seems at times radically disinclined to assign a higher value to experiences that are conventionally 'religious' than to moments of deep human significance. Questions posed in and of the quotidian and engaged energetically enough will lead as readily as more overtly religious questions into the borderland beyond which lies the otherness knowable as the divine or as the void. The fictions a poet contrives upon such questions will carry their readers with them, whether the originating issues are carnal, social, or spiritual. The moment of understanding the divine pattern, the egress from the void, awaits the transgression of a border. The breaking of boundaries35 is not easily achieved, whether by poet, fictive protagonist, or

2i

To discouer ... the general intention'

reader. When it is achieved, the sixteenth-century Protestant seeking to express his new sense of knowing and freedom would have found the word 'baptism' to hand, if interpreted metaphorically. Metaphoric Baptism Spenser's contemporary, William Perkins, indicates in a number of passages (appropriately for this study, in dialogue form) that the sacrament of baptism was capable of indicating to a speculative Elizabethan thinker many of the significances suggested above: Q What is a sacrament? A A sign to represent, a seal to confirm, an instrument to convey Christ and all his benefits ... Q Why do the sacraments seal unto us the mercies of God? A Because we are full of unbelief and doubting of them ... Because we are like Thomas, we will not believe till we feel them in some measure in our hearts.

And again: Timotheus. We are all baptized. Belike then we shall all understand the scripture. Eusebius. But alas, very few there be that are taught and feel their ingrafting into Christ, their justification, their inward dying unto sin and living unto righteousness, which is the meaning of their baptism ... And until a man be taught his baptism, that his heart feel the sweetness of it, the scriptures are shut up to him, and so dark that he could not understand it, though Peter, Paul or Christ himself did expound it unto him.36

Perkins indicates that the sacrament as physical sign confers a latent potentiality of spiritual understanding which may wait many years for actualization: once actualized, it confers a power of interpretation which cannot be conveyed by logical teaching. Christ, the logos-pattern, can be experienced through the incorporated, and incorporating, power of the sacraments; but not even Christ as teacher can expound the pattern effectively unless, thus incorporated, he dwells within the one who is learning to interpret. (The Augustinian roots of this understanding will be explored in Chapter 5.) Although the sacrament of baptism could be administered as physical enactment only once, for the reformed Christian its experiential effects

22

Plato Baptized

would be known each time grace communicated itself through the hermeneutically realized power of scripture. Grace must come through an internally experienced hermeneusis, not by the words alone or the words as taught by even the best of teachers. The focal investigation of moral and spiritual questions could prepare for the breakthrough of grace, the new awareness of baptismal power. That power was realized in a mode we can liken to the tacit knowing of the universal gestalt, which, and Who, is the universal, baptismally incorporated, cosmically metaphoric, Christ. 'The Paradigm' and 'Paradigms' The idea of Christ as the universal pattern, readily recognizable in the scripture's Logos, brings me to the term 'paradigm.' Because of its currency in language models, in mathematics, and perhaps also its current usage in reference to codifying structures of logical and metaphysical thought, 'paradigm' tends to carry a sense more static than I intend in this book. In speaking of Platonic and Neoplatonic 'paradigms' I use the word as it has arisen in a literature of process, not of product. The word belongs inescapably to the tradition by virtue of its function in the Timaean myth: cosmic creation originates when the demiurgic Maker undertakes the mimesis of a paradigm he beholds on high. The paradigm thus is that of which mimesis makes its copies. But it becomes, under influence of the Parmenides that in which a Neoplatonic methexis, or participatory mimesis, is understood to participate. 'Paradigm, ' then, refers in this book to process, a process interinvolved with the process of successive hermeneuses of texts in the tradition. Further, creative processes, cosmic and textual, work themselves out metaphorically - that is, by incarnating their own vital, evolving significances in what they create - in the solid geometries of cosmic space, the linear geometries of time, and in spatially and temporally based language. Like the cosmos itself, as Plato's Timaeus metaphorizes it, the largest 'paradigm' of Christian-Platonic language is a giant living creature, more metamorphic metaphor than set schema, a creature that in continually changing, yet retaining recognizable signs of its earlier metamorphoses, comes as close as language can come to the accretive events of tacit personal knowing that we human thinkers experience. The smaller paradigms of this study, the various manifestations of the urPlatonic paradigm, are set forth as heuristic vehicles by which we can hope to enter more immediately into the processes of knowing invited by Spenser's texts.

23

'To discouer ... the general intention'

The 'continued Allegoric, or darke conceit' One further cluster of terms may come to mind when we think of 'paradigms' in preparation for reading Spenser - the patterns formed when narratives link and extend single metaphors into 'a continued Allegoric, or darke conceit.' It will be clear enough that Spenser's allegorical 'Methode' of'delivering' 'good discipline' is 'metaphoric' in the expanded senses offered earlier. Allegory unfolds a fiction in which characters, places, emblematic detail, and other spatially definable elements are woven together through narrative time in mimeses of living. The 'method' is undertaken, Spenser announces in his 'Letter ... to ... Raleigh,' to 'fashion' the 'gentleman'-reader of Elizabethan England (and, by extension, of our more modern academies) in the pattern of virtues, private, political, and spiritual, much as Socrates sought to develop virtues in the youths of distant Athens by methods not altogether dissimilar. Insofar as Socrates' dialectic led to Aristotelian analysis and logic, it reinforced the movement into analytic, stratifyingly metonymic, thinking that has dominated Western culture ever since his day - generating many discourses quite unlike Spenser's. But insofar as the Socratic method leads to creative aporia, and to the use of myth as a mechanism of release, it leads naturally into allegory. His own allegory, Spenser indicates, employs 'clowdily' many devices: through them he unfolds his larger metaphoric sense of a unified, unifiable, and self-unifying cosmos in process, and offers that sense to his readers. The individual threads of Spenser's great text demand focal attention; its puzzles induce in its readers the aporias that yield to expansive understanding. To say more at this point would be to anticipate unnecessarily much in coming chapters, or to work towards a theory of Allegory, which is not my intention in approaching Spenser's metaphoric practices through his chosen language. 37 In summary, questioning and transformative response will be the organizing co-ordinates of this book, or (to adopt Polanyi's language) the processes to which I give most focal attention in critical interpretation. Metaphoric and metonymic (analytical, logical, schematic) ways of using language will frequently be identified and set in counterpoint to each other. The puzzles arising in the understanding of the Platonic tradition through the interrelated concepts of mimesis and participation will also demand attention. Often the discussion will be situated against a montage of paradigmatic language drawn from the tradition. Spenser's mimetic fictions, engaging as they do the patterns of the

24

Plato Baptized

textual field I explore in Chapters 2 to 6, will be explored in that context. The hermeneutical enterprise will be reconstructive. Whenever the co-ordinates are engaged through paradigms that lie open to the eye of an informed reader, the interpretations may appear quite traditional; when the co-ordinates are engaged through subtextual clues to a less obvious frame, the methods will appear deconstructive. If the investigation leads at times to apparent frivolity or dilation, it will point to a mimetic universe of meanings in which nothing is totally sacred, totally frivolous, or totally isolated. In a mimetic and participatory quest, entered and sustained by questioning, we may expect to find ourselves the companions as well as the heirs of Spenser and others who themselves were engaged in transforming traditional meaning.

CHAPTER TWO

Torwisedomeis most riches' Plato and His Socrates

Spenser, with other writers who were remaking tradition in the manner of their times, was being totally consistent with the Platonic roots of his tradition. Each reconstructed and transformed what came to hand. Each found his own balances between fidelity to received traditions, as he had come or had chosen to understand his past, and the freshness and immediacy of the languages he deployed in 'overgoing'1 those pasts. Although each had the opportunity and most had the predisposition to see successive periods of the past as synchronically present to the imagination, and although the tendency throughout the centuries had been to find consistency and not change in the Platonic tradition, and consistency between Platonic and biblical roots, it will be prudent in the early sections of this study to approach in a diachronic fashion the history that made up their perceived pasts. Only by some sort of narration that proceeds sequentially from the roots of Western culture in ancient Greece and biblical cultures can I expect to give the materials 'followability.>2 If we are willing to accept A.N. Whitehead's description of Western philosophy as a long 'series of footnotes to Plato,'3 we must modify the description by admitting that we can claim no certainty about which of his heirs Plato might have recognized as legitimate. Our one certainty can be in stating that Plato did not leave us any unqualified statement of doctrine, nor any coherent pattern in the whole that all commentators will agree upon. Emile Brehier, one of Plato's most helpful interpreters in this century, believes that 'it is not the dogma of ideas but [the] methodological impulse which constitutes Platonism.'4 Agreeing, I shall be tracing my 'followable' path through the field of particulars primarily to demonstrate the methodological impulse. Recent commentators upon the riddles posed by text and counter-

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Plato Baptized

text in the Platonic canon suggest that Plato may be perplexing those who look for logical consistency not merely because he affirms the values of open-ended questioning, but also because he at times seems to have launched himself into problems that he could not solve without contradicting, quite openly, something he had suggested elsewhere. His treatments of the relationships pertaining between the One and the Many, given a name but hardly an explanation in 'methexis' (participation) , and his treatments of the poets and of poetry, represent apparent inconsistencies to which we shall return more than once.5 A foolish consistency seems to have been the least of Plato's aims in the many-voiced dialogues. But it may well be that a better justification of his inscrutabilities arises when we understand that we must enter imaginatively into a very different stage in the long history of human thinking when we seek to understand Plato. He knew Pythagoras and Socrates; he must not be expected to have known Aristotle past his student's days at the Academy, nor to have known Ptolemy's Euclid. Plato developed and extended the language codes he had at hand, but predated many of those from the ancient world which shape the questions we take back to him. Language in Plato's Time Homer had written, centuries before Plato's time, in a concretely vivid mode of language that I am calling the metaphoric.6 Insofar as we can reimagine such thinking, Olympus was for Homer and his auditors an actual mountain from which Zeus and his company entered into the various activities that affected the course of natural and human events he recounted in The Iliad. As the centuries scrolled towards Plato's time, words gradually took on the power of signifying abstractions; the resultant habits of conceptual thinking established standards of'truth' other than those of poetic immediacy. In Plato's lifetime, as in our own, poetic and metaphoric uses of language survived; but a new mode, the metonymic, analytical and pre-logical, was supplanting the metaphoric, often at Plato's own firm insistence. Whereas a metaphoric 'Olympus' is simply the place of the gods (the name carrying the significance almost magically) a metonymic 'Olympus,' for reasons that have recognizably more to do with convention than with the way things 'really' are, signifies a high centre of supernatural (or later, natural) power. The medieval debate between the Realists and the Nominalists is remotely anticipated in the early shift in language from metaphor to metonymy. In the metonymic use

27

'For wisedome is most riches'

of language significance detaches itself from signifier in the process of understanding; the word stands for something else, dualistically and analytically, as it does not in the more monistic mode of poetry and metaphor. A great deal of Plato's suspicion of 'poetry' seems to have stemmed from his awareness of the way language was moving, and his correlative admiration for the dividing razor of Socratic dialectic. Plato does focus in the Cratylus upon something like these specific alternatives in the understanding of language, without deciding in favour of either.7 Schleiermacher, early in the development of modern hermeneutics, was comparing the metaphoric and more divisive metonymic modes of reading when he argued that the Trojan war exists in Homer's poem in a manner that is totally independent of any archeological discovery, and that those who concern themselves with matters of historical validity are misreading The Iliad as poem.8 A critical concern with the image-bearing paradigms of the Platonic tradition involves essentially the same issue. This book's unconcern with identifying supposed doctrine, except as it informs the linguistic vehicle, is justifiable in that Spenser is a poet, not a philosopher, however fascinating he clearly found the questions explored in the traditional texts. To search for his poetic meaning by tracing images back to sources and ascribing to the images doctrines from the past is to misunderstand the poems as poems. To ask whether, for instance, the 'philosophy* of the Garden of Adonis in Book Three of The Faerie Queene is Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic, is fruitless; but to see traces of the language codes of each ancient philosophy in the text will contribute to the only meaning worth seeking, the one arising from the passage in the given act of reading.9 Owen Barfield, discussing the logical separation of subject from object that has prevailed during most of Western culture, suggests that 'to form a conception of the unconsciousness of primitive man we have really ... to "unthink," not merely our now half-instinctive logical processes, but even the seemingly fundamental distinction between self and world ... The word concrete can perhaps best be defined as "that which is neither objective nor subjective",' metaphor being, in this sense, concrete. The Greeks, he continues, with 'divine concreteness' used two simple words in speaking of what we call subjectivity and objectivity, 'Poiein and Paschein - Do and Suffer.'10 What Socrates does, in the dialogues, is to set a questioning dialectic in opposition to the rhetorical training offered to the aristocratic youth of Athens by the Sophists. What he suffers, a martyrdom, may be separated from his dialectical methodology and the supposed content of his

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Plato Baptized

teachings by the logical division the martyr-to-be taught as a technique of discovery. But Plato's re-enactments in the Phaedo and the Defenseof the drama leading to his mentor's death demonstrate clearly that the 'doing' and the 'suffering' belong to a larger whole. 'Life without [active] examination is not worth living,' says Socrates (Defense 38 a), refusing to bend or alter course as he submits to death.11 Bruno Snell points out that the shift towards conceptual thinking in which Socrates took so active a part seems, ironically, to have precipitated his execution. A statute written centuries before required a man to hold a stance defined by the word nomizein towards the civic gods. The word signified originally the expression of respect for the divine. But by Socrates' time the Athenians understood the word to mean 'acknowledge the existence of the gods,' and on the basis of their misreading of the key word in the statute were able to justify the charge of atheism against the philosopher who was threatening the status quo.12 The dialogues make it clear that Socrates neither lacked personal piety nor opposed public ritual. It was, rather, the radical scepticism of his methodology and epistemology, neither possible before the departures from metaphoric thinking, that proved fatal. Philosophic Method We may take Socrates as speaking for the authorial Plato when he compares his vocation as philosopher with that of a midwife. Socrates is instrumental in bringing new meaning to birth, both as catalytic facilitator and as the tester of the viability of new verbal formulations, but he insists that what is brought forth and confirmed in its new life is no offspring of his own (Theaetetus 148 6-150 d). In every dialogue Plato, too, distances himself from any formulation we might try to pin down as his own doctrine. He never shows himself as subject uttering some objective or objectifiable version of truth: in fact, he gives to Socrates words which dismiss the possibility that language, when rendered static by writing, can serve as a reliable vehicle of truth. So consistent is this judgment with the sceptical Plato's strategies in the dialogues that we see the writer squarely behind the Socratic mask. Like his mentor, Plato rarely offers firm answers. Poiein and Paschein are rejoined in his fictions: the questioner acts in posing the question; he may, if the process serves its purpose, enjoy as passive recipient a given awareness. The dialogue, as genre, lends itself perfectly to explorations of a topic or constellation of topics through the interplay of a variety of points of

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'For wisedome is most riches'

view. The persona of Socrates comes closest, we sense, to occupying positions Plato would be willing to acknowledge, but Socrates as dialectician avoids anything like a fixed position. Within the dialogues, Plato employs three main methods, in different mixes as occasions and his own perspectives shift: first, Socratic dialectic, especially when the fictive Socrates is on stage; second, actively imagined debates, or successions of statements of position in a variety of voices, some of which the unwary may take as offering Platonic doctrine; and finally, occasional excursions into overtly poetic language and myth. When Plato does resort to the older modes of myth and poetry he controls the metaphoric by some bracketing device, refusing to impose upon a reader's logical autonomy, or, more important, to permit the reader to escape too completely from the exercises of inquiring analysis. He will say 'it seems that'; he will explain accommodatively 'in such a manner as will be most intelligible'; he will ascribe the tale he tells to a priest or priestess or poet. But he will also suggest the recreative potentiality in the act of considering truths that are merely 'probable.'13 Plato moves about like quicksilver in the borderland between those mental worlds we set in opposition when we contrast metaphor to metonymy, holistic to analytic thinking, the field of tacit knowing to the thrust of focused inquiry, religious to proto-scientific thinking. He leads the dance among the variables like the trickster-psychopomp Hermes-Mercury. He forces his interpreters to decide what weight to assign a given variable in a given dialogue. His ultimate function is to induce the realization that the analytic clear-sightedness that divides and the comprehensive vision that unites and renews are complementary. (Spenser's fictions work in similar ways: his minor characters represent traits focused upon through the process of division; his Arthur and the absent Gloriana, with perhaps Britomart and Mutabilitie, participate with the patterns of his 'cosmic cores' in the comprehensiveness of myth.) Plato exercises his protreptic strategies with as much enthusiasm for the purgative effects of the Socratic logic against superstition and illusion as he shows for the experiential and ultimately religious effects he gains by pushing to that limit of logic14 he signifies in the word aporia. But he insists firmly on the value of that state. In any brief lexicon the word will be glossed in the abstract as perplexity or doubt, the state of embarrassment suffered when logic is thoroughly confounded. But the metaphoric root of the word signifies a strait, a difficulty in passage not necessarily an impenetrable barrier. The word relates, by sound at least, and perhaps originally more directly, to aporreo, the verb describ-

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Plato Baptized

ing an effluence or streaming forth. It is possible that for Plato the latent metaphor in aporia was strong enough to evoke the image of a strait that may be approached but not passed by means of logical inquiry, and that the aural similarities between the words suggested also the related apprehensions of mysterious truth that could be brought through the strait to birth. Whatever may be made of this argument, Gilbert Ryle, an interpreter who is certainly not given to the Neoplatonic position, insists that the value of 'driving answerers into impasses' lies in 'finding the ways out.'15 The quality of effects achieved through the aporia is suggested by Meno (Meno So a, b) when dialectic has driven him to distraction: since he finds himself helplessly bewitched he accuses Socrates of using spells and incantations that have the same numbing power as the sting ray. Both characters are conscious of the humour: its source, we see, lies as much in the incongruity of describing the relentlessly logical cause by the a-rational effect in the first image as it does in the bathetic nature of the second. The states induced by Plato in his readers, usually through the fictive Socrates, meet in the borderland joining the two categories of mental activity that I explored in the introduction. Sceptical questioning has, in Plato, the clear and direct function of purging from thinking everything that is inferior, muddled, or superstitious. Beyond the initiatory purgation, Plato's mimeses of logical inquiry push insistently towards the state of aporia; they prepare thus for the emergence of novel understandings larger than logical definition can encompass, within the fictions in the discussants, and beyond the fictions in us as interpreters. These experiences of meaning bear close analogy to the Christian metaphor of spiritual baptism (John 3:5; Galatians 3:3, 27). Any attempt to make a patterned and consistent whole of Plato's thinking can lead to speculation: perhaps he was pushing himself towards a structure of significance large enough to hold inconsistencies in equilibrium. J.N. Findlay explores evidence drawn from the dialogues, the Platonic epistles, and all references by Aristotle and other ancients to Plato's unwritten teachings in the Academy. Refusing to entertain the notion of Plato as a deliberate mystagogue, Findlay suggests that Plato was always willing 'to divulge parts of a long-held, profound, programme, unclear as regards both goal and method, to which he felt ever-varying attitudes of confidence and criticism ... What he was unable to communicate to others [in writing] was also what he was unable to say clearly to himself.'16 The evidence points to Pythagorean origins for the 'programme.'

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Those who puzzle over the inconsistencies in the dialogues will come to recognize in them the co-presence of Plato's two masters, each with his own accommodations to the tension between logical and religious modes of thinking. His Socrates offers the new dialectical way with language; his myths when dialectic pushes towards aporia; and, in the piety which undergirds his actions, a model of human integrity strong enough to stand beside the biblical figures of Job and Jesus. Pythagoras, for the most part a felt absence in the dialogues, has offered through oral tradition doctrines of immortality and metempsychosis (to which Plato has his Socrates subscribe guardedly through his myths), and on the intellectual side the doctrine that the cosmos comes to be through the integrative patterning of numbers, not words. That Plato makes no effort in the dialogues to force his two masters into a systematic congruity indicates not the failure of such an effort but the wisdom that their functions, far from identical, can be seen as complementary. Since the gift of Socratic dialectic is more susceptible to verbal expression than the mysteries of Pythagoras, Socrates is the more prominent figure in the dialogues. But there is reason to suppose, as tradition has had it, that Plato laid a stronger emphasis on Pythagoras in his oral teaching.17 We shall be wise to remember, further, that Spenser valued the image of a more mystical, more Pythagorean, Plato than the image we have tended to recognize in this century.18 We can state with assurance, however we weigh the evidence, that Plato recognized, and frequently chose to emphasize, the limits to language that we encounter so often in his works - the incapacity of dialectic to embrace all that can be suggested in myth and metaphor, of the metaphoric to achieve dialectical precision, and of any verbal formulation dependent on linear syntax to express the dynamic comprehensiveness given in a flash of vision. The seminal awareness in this most poetic of philosophers that questioning can lead to wisdom, whether or not it leads to answers, offers the point of departure for the study of a questioning poet in a questioning age. The Figure of Socrates in the Dialogues Small, snub-nosed, and bulging of eye, the elderly Socrates in the dialogues falls far short of Greek ideals of physical beauty (Symposium 215 ff.; Theaetetus 209 c). Yet he draws the love, as well as the intellects, of the admirers who surround him. 'I am smitten with a kind of sacred rage, worse than any Corybant,' confesses his drunken young friend and would-be paramour, Alcibiades, in the Symposium. He is driven to

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Plato Baptized

tears and shame by the tyrannical power of Socratic method and the fun that is poked at him; yet when Socrates is being serious, Alcibiades testifies, he is like a ludicrous little statue of a Silenus that opens to reveal beautiful, godlike, smaller figures inside (Symposium 216 d-2i/ a). Socrates speaks of the divine within him: he hears a voice that prohibits him from exercising political power in his own person and commands that he 'examine those who think that they are wise when they are not' (Defense31 d and 33 c). Although an interlocutor may experience Socrates' methods as tyrannical, his goals are those of the 'statesman': in obeying his own inner voice he offers freedom from illusion to those for whom he provides the model of self-knowledge; he enables them to reach towards the ideals of truth and justice that lead to virtuous action in society (Meno 93 a-ioo c). For him, political and civil values are interconnected with private virtue. As the Greeks were evolving the power of abstract thinking, worlds of value could be projected, imaged, alternatively, as above the sensible cosmos, and more psychologically, as within the individual soul. In the resultant systems, hierarchical principles prevailed: ultimate value tended to be posited beyond the individual in the metaphoric heights or depths. On Plato's evidence, it appears that the Athenian authorities did not rid themselves, in Socrates, of one who set himself as an individual against the state and against the gods. They seem, rather, to have sought riddance from the danger posed by one who demonstrated the discrepancy between a high theoretical vision of order and statesmanship, and the existing practices endorsed by the manipulative rhetoric of the Sophists. Plato presents in Socrates a figure rarely matched in world literature for his integrity, and for the power that that integrity confers upon his words. Metaphorically, we can know him as well as we know the figure of Jesus, the Christ, in the New Testament. But if, thinking analytically, we seek to find the historical Socrates in the image offered by his evangelist, Plato, he proves as elusive as the Jesus of history. Other similarities between these giants of integrity are often noted. Each manifests a balance between his humility before the divinity that rules him and the outward assurance that prompts hostility against him and charges of arrogance and blasphemy. Each, having worked towards the greater good of his own community, submits to death at the hands of those who fear his questioning of authority. Each values justice and love above his own life. Each leaves evidence of an enigmatic oral teaching that is more a way to truth than a body of 'true' doctrinal

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statements. There are contrasts, as well - between age and youthful manhood, Greek and Jew, and especially between the primacy of method which inhibits prescription of doctrine in Socrates and the elaborate doctrinal and dogmatic overlay that the early church imposed upon its literary representations of Jesus. In .this last contrast, Plato has shielded his mentor: the elaboration of doctrine and dogma in the later Greek tradition is usually ascribed to Plato, or to his more overtly religious master, Pythagoras, and not superimposed upon the Socrates whose pronouncements Plato makes so inescapably equivocal. Plato does, nonetheless, show a Socrates of deep religious sensibility and obedience. If we dismiss, as dead metaphor, those passages in which Socrates speaks of his guiding daemon and of sacrifice we are still left with a figure who must be judged religious in the modern sense defined by Paul Tillich's phrase 'ultimate concern.' One who chooses to die for truth, perhaps especially for the mode of truth he has approached most vigorously through dialectic, must surely relate that newer function of language to values he holds as ultimate. Otherwise, death will hold for him far more of absurdity than the Defense suggests it did. It shows us a man resigning himself to martyrdom at the hands of those he feels constrained to obey in all that does not reduce his intellectual freedom; a man who chooses to exercise that freedom in that obedience; and a man who pronounces over the city he loves - as Jesus was to do over Jerusalem - a prophecy of the woe that attends a failure to recognize divine truth when it issues through a human voice. The Phaedo shows a man facing immortality in a hope that is strong enough, however guarded by sceptical bracketing, to assure him of total serenity when death begins to still his language. Socrates' last request comes in unqualified metaphor: he seeks the sacrifice of a cock, the bird of the morning, to Asclepius, the god who renews life. We see him, thus, looking by metaphor through that strait to which the language of dialectic has brought him.19 As we turn now to a series of dialogues from which we shall assemble, block by block, the foundations of the composite changing paradigm of Plato's tradition, we bear in mind the sceptical methodology that has ensured both its growth and its modifications. Major thinkers have rarely claimed that the structure is more than a 'likely story' (Timaeus 29 c, d). I suggest that we should emulate most transmitters of the structure, and differ from interpreters who would remake Plato in the image of a modern rationalist, in assigning balancing weights to 'likely' and to 'story.'

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Recollection of Immortality through Dialectic: The Meno At the outset of the Meno the question posed to Socrates is 'Can virtue be taught?' Socrates transposes the practical question into a theoretical key, asking what virtue is 'in itself and confessing he has 'no idea' of the answer. He leads Meno through an extended exercise of binary division and choice: is it a man's sort of virtue or a woman's? is it the temperance or the justice that contributes to good city management? is it the power of acquiring good things? with justice or without? - and so on. Meno is led to an aporia in which, rendered incapable of defining 'virtue itself,' he admits that a man cannot search for that which he does not know, need not search for that which he knows already, and in frustration concedes victory to the 'wizard' and 'sting ray.' After admitting in good humour to his verbal trickery, Socrates offers a way out through a myth he attributes to priests and poets. The soul is said to be immortal; it passes through a series of incarnations. When it comes into this world its memory of all it has known previously is dimmed, but not lost beyond retrieval. The best teachers lead the soul, re-mind it, to re-collect what it already knows deep within. Virtue 'itself need not be defined to be recollected, but the dialectical attempt at definition provokes the memory. As a corollary to the myth of an otherwhere whence, through memory, true knowledge can be recovered, Socrates introduces the distinction between knowledge and opinion that runs through most of the dialogues. Episteme, recollected knowledge, is different from and superior to doxa, opinion (ironically the root of 'doctrine'). Opinion is the inferior mode of knowing attained through sensory impressions of the sensible world. Plato introduces in the Meno a body of Pythagorean lore that is more religious than scientific. It comes to Meno, as it comes to us at further remove, via the senses - by hearsay, and by hearsay recorded in writing. Yet his Socrates demonstrates its reliability as a guide to education by drawing geometric truths from an untutored slave boy through a process of dialectical questioning. The theory of immortality and reincarnation can, upon this evidence, be held as 'true opinion,' but can be termed true as epistemic knowledge only for those who have come to apprehend the truth of immortality at a level deeper than that of sensory experience. The dialectical philosopher cannot claim to father such knowledge on those who are already carrying it within, but by fostering the search for it they help to bring it to birth. Insisting upon the unverifiability by logic of Pythagorean myth, Socrates avers: 'one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word

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and act - that is, we shall be better ... men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover' (Meno 86 b-c). Had Plato had the advantage of reading Polanyi on 'personal knowledge,' as Polanyi could certainly read Plato, he might have found the vocabulary of focal and tacit knowing attractive for the Meno. He would, if so, have insisted more strenuously upon the religious dimension in tacit knowing than Polanyi permits himself to do. The words just quoted from the end of the Meno point towards Socrates' martyrdom in the cause of focal inquiry even as they affirm the value of the aporia. This same passage can be used to define a contrast between the languages characteristic of Socrates in the dialogues and of Jesus in the gospels. In his metonymic mode, Socrates maintains the stance of scepticism that he and Plato are teaching the world to value. In his metaphoric mode, Jesus offers more assurance: 'Seek and ye shall find'; 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life'; 'he who has seen me has seen the Father' (John 14:6-24). But Plato does much to bridge the distance between his Socrates and divinity. He gives him the frequent use of myth and metaphor, subject to ever-present qualification; he has him affirm that he has been called to bring his dialectical gifts (however Promethean) from the divine world to the human; and he works by the dramatic ironies which invite us to see Socrates as that 'statesman' he will not claim openly to be. The man who has 'virtue ... by divine dispensation' and the power to create that virtue in another is, in a metaphor adopted from Homer, the only one among 'the flitting shades' who has the breath of life in him (Meno 100 a) .20 Dialectic offers the way to the Truth; and Plato's Socrates has more in him of true life than any other in the world of illusory shadow. The congruity between the images drawn of their masters by John and Plato may be more than coincidental -John's is always recognized as the most Greek of the four gospels. This is not to suggest that John, if he was aware of the similarities, was equating the two figures. As recorder of the good news, John was choosing metaphoric language to point up the difference he proclaims between his Master and any mere man. The analogy (whether John was conscious of it or not) puts Socrates in the company of all those figures in the Old Testament who may be seen as types of Christ. John may have had Socrates in mind: evidence arises in his story of the interchange between Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus does not style himself a midwife, but he speaks in a metaphor of birth of the elemental and spiritual baptisms needed for

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Plato Baptized

the new life of the Kingdom; 'Ye must be born again ... of water and the Spirit... [to] enter into the Kingdom of God' (John 3:3, 6). John's is the only gospel that records the story. The Meno has provided anchorage for this extended consideration of Socratic method and of the figure of Socrates; from it I have drawn comparisons that anticipate the later confluence of Platonic and biblical traditions; in it we find the Pythagorean myth of immortality put to the service of Socratic pedagogic theory.21 Because Plato raises more questions in the dialogues than he ever answers systematically, I organize the rest of this chapter by gathering his speculations on various topoi, to establish overviews by dealing, seriatim, with the 'alternative accounts' he has left us in separate and mutually inconsistent texts. My groupings are chosen to facilitate the few summary statements I find worth risking. But the separateness, the quiddity, of the texts under focal consideration must be preserved if we are to understand the indigestibility of the nutritive Platonic materials that have fed our Western tradition, and assimilate it to the sceptical methodology that precluded Plato from writing down anything that can be taken unequivocally. Politics, Education, Psychology, and Poetry: The 'Seventh Letter' and the Republic In a letter written to the friends in Syracuse of the nobleman Dion, who had suffered death under the rule of his nephew, Dionysius n, 22 Plato recounts the tangled story of his own connections with the ruling family in that Sicilian city. Having lost his early ambition to serve the Athenian state at the time of the unjust death of Socrates, and concluded that since all extant systems of government were bad only 'correct philosophy' genuinely practised by those in authority could improve matters, Plato has on extended visits endeavoured at some personal risk to instruct the Sicilian ruling family in right thinking (Letter 7, 324 €-326 c). Although he does not allude directly to the Republic in the letter, we can see that the sense of political responsibility heightened in Plato at the death of Socrates must have evoked the dialogue which sets forth the image of a rightly ordered state. Socrates is given the major voice in the Republic, but the state that he describes (more often in direct discourse and myth than in dialectic) owes its theoretical superstructure to Plato's experiences in Pythagorean communities in Sicily. From these Plato derived the emphasis he lays in the Republic on the disciplines of music and mathematics as means

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of liberating the student intellectually and morally (Republic 7, 522a532 b) 23 and some components of the conceptual and mythic frame that functions as context for the educational and political programs.24 The most vivid concretion in the Republic of the tacitally present Pythagorean frame comes in the myth of the cave at the opening of Book vn. As told by Socrates, and partially interpreted in the telling, the myth interweaves conceptual co-ordinates such as bondage and freedom, illusion and truth, into a narrative that, much abridged, we recall as follows. The uneducated are like prisoners in a subterranean cave, chained by legs and neck so that all they can see is the play of moving shadows cast upon the wall they are facing by the flames of a fire burning behind them. This flickering of multiple shadow they take to be the real world. The educated man is like one who, escaping his fetters, has taken a path out of the cave, past the fire (which he sees upon emergence as the image of the wavering lights of sun, moon, and stars in the sensible universe) into the fuller light beyond. Once accustomed to the brilliance of a light truly real, such a man's eyes are so ill-adapted to the shadowy cave that, on his return, he will appear to the inhabitants something of a blinking fool, and will long to return to the world of light. When his tale has been told, Socrates offers direct analysis of the allegory: those of his hearers who have been freed by philosophy to rise above the sensible world must recognize their duty to return to the shadows for the good of the lesser educated, because the goal of social organization is not 'the special happiness of any class in the state' but the inducement of a more elevated condition in the city as a whole (519 d, e). The Republic ends with a second important myth, the 'Myth of Er' (x 6i4ff.). Distanced by the characteristic bracketing, it is ascribed to Er, a warrior who has revived after twelve days in the land of the dead. He has learned that between successive incarnations the individual is directed by the Fates towards his next life, and that the quality of the new incarnation involves elements of chance, judgment, and choice. The relative merit of the life just completed will colour the choice: the just man will choose a higher form of life than he has hitherto enjoyed, the unjust a lower. In closing his account of Er's story, Socrates promises that contemplation of the myth 'will save us if we believe it' because it will lead to wise practical choices. The resemblances between this myth and Eastern doctrines of reincarnation and karma derive, in all probability, from Oriental components in Pythagorean thought, whether these came, as legends have it, from the philosopher's captiv-

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ity in the Near East, or as a modern theorist indicates, through Thrace and Russia from Siberian shamanism.25 In ending with this emphasis on the cycles of the individual soul, the Republic may seem to anticipate an individualistic ethos, but we must guard against anachronistic interpretation in terms of self-realization. The individual exists, in the dialogues, in intimate interconnection with the state. If not all individuals progress to enlightened wisdom, it will suffice if the rulers of the oligarchic state do so. The benefits to others will follow automatically. Each in the lesser ranks enjoys the possibility of limited advance by conforming to the just standards and duties prescribed by the liberated, and thus liberating, philosopherrulers. The Pythagorean Plato did not see a single life as of much importance in the long view; the Socratic Plato, at least in this Utopian dialogue, seems to rest his confidence not in any individual ruler but in the power of dialectic to counter both the older forms of superstition and the new manipulative rhetoric that together threaten the health of the body politic. The Socratic injunction 'know thyself points not to solipsism, but to better service to the state through service to the god within. In the Republic the organized structures of the body politic and the human soul reflect and interact with each other directly. Questions of identity translate into questions of moral and political action. Three classes are separated by function: they are the enlightened rulers, the 'guardians'; the warrior and executive class, the 'helpers'; and below both, the populace at large, artisans and labourers, women, children, and slaves. Upon rare occasion intelligence and merit may change the rank to which a person is assigned (415 c). The philosophical control assigned to the guardians, the highest class in the state, is also assigned to the noetic soul, the highest of three parts of the human psyche.26 Ideally, this intellectual or rational soul rules the lower powers with justice; the spirited (or animal) middle soul serves the higher and protects the lower through its courage; and the lower, the appetitive or vegetable soul - potentially 'a mob of motley appetites' and emotions learns to govern itself in temperance as it accepts the service of its superiors in the hierarchy. If any one part of the soul neglects its proper function the harmony is destroyed, and the whole complex suffers accordingly. The theories of love advanced in the Phaedrus and the Symposium bear out the psychological principles adduced here. Order, in the Republic's theoretical frame, extends down from the intellectual level psychologically, from the guardian class politically, and is derived by the highest level of each from principles higher yet,

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the metaphysical Ideas of Plato's system. The Ideas, sometimes translated as the Forms, constitute a creative and creating order apart from that of this sensible universe in which the destinies of men and states unfold. In the history of Platonic thinking the world of the Ideas has been most frequently projected in spatial metaphor - the Chair itself, Justice itself, Likeness and Difference themselves, seem to float in a hierarchical arrangement somewhere above the clear skies above Olympus. Plato's language invites such imaginings, yet he is never willing to locate elements of his Otherworld in spatial metaphor without adding a qualifying safeguard nearby in the dialogue. Plato speaks often enough in terms of inwardness27 to assure us that he repudiates too literal a visualization of the mysteries he presents. Metonymic language offers a means lacking in the earlier metaphoric mode to separate the concrete and the abstract and to push thinking to the place of separation; but since language is inevitably bound by its own latent metaphor, this new abstracting language provides no means to capture unequivocally what lies beyond itself. Those central Platonic questions - how the unseen ideal relates to sensible experience, and how the truths apprehensible in the borderland are to be presented in the uncongenial medium of language - did not silence Plato, nor did they lead him to answers satisfying to anyone who insists upon logic alone. Such large questions bear directly upon a subsidiary issue, one of major importance in literary criticism - Plato's treatment of poetry in the Republic. Since many direct considerations of this matter are available I can be brief.28 We find poets and poetry judged harshly and excluded from the educational curriculum in the schools of the Republic. With apologetic words for Homer, Socrates explains. The poetic craft deserves a distinctly lower place in the scheme of things than that of a craft like carpentry, because a carpenter makes a visible image of the Ideal Chair or Bed that serves as his model or pattern, but the poet makes images which, reflecting mere sensible images, stand at one remove further from the ideal. 'Mimetic art... is an inferior thing, cohabiting with an inferior and engendering inferior offspring' (10, 603 b). Poetry, moreover, has a dangerous emotional power. When Homer reflects, for instance, the passionate abandon of his hero he threatens to lead his audience to a similar abdication of control (10, 606 a, b). Poets should write only of those actions that will edify and thus lead to right behaviour (3, 398 b). Nothing in the Republic points favourably to imaginative poetry. Elsewhere Plato is less severe. In the Protagoras (339ff.), an inconclusive debate unfolds over the interpretation of certain apparently incon-

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sistent poetic passages. The 'conversation about poetry' reminds Socrates of the talk of 'second rate people' at 'wine parties.' But the tone is lighter than in the Republic, the effect slightly more equivocal. The Ion differs further: it is susceptible to naive interpretation as favouring poetry, since Plato gives Socrates a rather high-sounding defence of the rhetor's art. But Socrates surely has tongue in cheek as he teases Ion, the none-too-bright professional performer of Homeric verse. He describes poets as sweet, mildly deranged, winged creatures who exercise a divine power that has its 'magnetic' source in the Muse. The chain of poets, like a series of iron rings held together by magnetic attraction (553 d), depend upon the force of their loadstone, the Muse. Socrates does not labour the precariousness of the poets' position to an unperceptive Ion, but we, seeing it, are prompted to take the whole defence as a jeu d'esprit. Passages in the Phaedrus deal with the poetic madness more seriously, placing it beside the divinely inspired madness of prophets, mystics, and lovers. Socrates explains that such states result from 'a divine disturbance of our conventions of conduct (emphasis added): possibly the necessary inner control is less affected (Phaedrus 265 a, b). The least equivocal of praises for poetry comes at the end of the Meno: there, without any obvious irony, Socrates ascribes a measure of divinity to the 'statesman' who can inculcate virtue in another because of his visionary recollective powers, and to 'oracular priests... prophets... and ... poets of every description.' All the figures named tend towards the metaphoric in language. I move away now from the Republic to cull passages and details from other dialogues that pose further questions: the large cosmological questions Plato addresses in the Timaeus, and the questions of love and beauty that provide crucial links forward in the tradition. Again, my outlines will be sketchy. I shall seek merely to draw forward more contributions to the paradigmatic language against, and within, which Spenser's mimeses of questioning are shaped. The Uses and Limits of Language: Phaedrus, Cratylus, Parmenides The framing narrative of the Phaedrus testifies to Plato's suspicions of written discourse. The young Phaedrus, preparing to recite for Socrates a speech written by Lysis, is almost dissuaded at the outset: Socrates, he says, would prefer to enter into dialogue with the author, who is also present. Yet he does consent to listen; after which he replies with a flight of rhetoric that shows him to be fully as skilled in fine oratory as

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any of the rival Sophists. Socrates then proceeds to undercut the achievements alike of Lysis as writer, Phaedrus as rhetor, and himself as both. He concludes: 'Any written work ... is a matter of reproach to its author ... if he regards it as containing important truth of permanent validity' (277 d). To the sophistical set speech Socrates opposes the dialectic of the teacher who offers oral instruction in virtue to be 'written in the soul of the listener.' Only the active interplay of living language can lead to the discovery of genuine truth. The Cratylus poses a serious central question: are 'names,' and by extension the nouns and verbs by which we name things and actions, given to humans by nature or the gods, or are they evolved conventionally from human usage? Through the dialectic Socrates offers sharpened apprehensions of the way language operates; eventually, of course, his interlocutors find themselves considering principles more abstract than those with which they began - in this instance, principles of permanence and flux. Socrates refuses to deliver a decisive answer to the questions at issue. But in the ludicrous pair of images he applies to the concept of a cosmos in flux - a leaky pot and a man with a runny nose he indicates a clear aversion to one extreme (440 c). At many points the Cratylus demonstrates the comical confusion that arises when debaters employ the metaphoric and metonymic modes at cross-purposes. It suggests, nonetheless, the genuine value of a process whereby one level of questioning is transposed to another level. Apprehensions are broadened, effecting limited gain, even if no breakthrough to final understanding is achieved. The Philebus ostensibly deliberates upon the relative values of wisdom and pleasure. Offering a rigorously structured and paradoxical model of the upward thrust of dialectic, it progresses not by exalting wisdom but by demoting the principle of harmless pleasure by stages as it ranges other principles of value in ascending order above it. By the end, painless pleasure stands in fifth place, below craftsmanship in fourth, reason or mind (nous) in third, beauty in second, and 'measure,' a principle of proportioned mixing, in first. A consensus has been achieved upon the wisdom of employing dialectic, which 'seems' the gift of gods (16 c, d), so that one may rise in contemplation from lesser to greater goods. The ascent, however, makes no ultimate leap from the more exalted ranks of the Man to the One. Summarizing the gains that have been made, Socrates quotes two fragments of poetry: from Orpheus, 'But with the sixth generation ... cease the rhythmic song'; and 'let us have a third libation to the deliverer.' The quotations inter-

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cept a third summation (66 c, e) ,29 By these motifs of incantation and ritual Socrates opens a tiny gate upon a world beyond that comprehended by the five senses. By a hermeneutically revisionist process, the Philebus suggests an extended metaphor, one more Neoplatonic than Platonic, deriving from and supporting my conviction that the tradition has radical continuity. Socrates' dialectic proceeds by tacking into a wind that blows from beyond the limits of logic, from the locus of the gods to whom he offers oblique thanks. The key to this conceit is the word anagoge, employed by the Neoplatonists of the early Christian era for the work of elevating the spirit, whether by dialectic or by theurgic means. This word - whose abstract significance is 'a leading up' - signified in its early concreteness a hoisting of sails in preparation for putting to sea. In the metaphoric age, we recall, the one word 'pneuma' signified breath, spirit, or wind.30 If we entertain the image of the Philebus tacking by dialectic purposefully upwind, its goal is the limit linking focal, logical thinking to the tacit perception of unifying pattern suggested in 'measure,' the highest of its five principles. We might, continuing the metaphor, describe the Parmenides as a linguistic and logical exercise that moves erratically and inconsistently upon the border of metonymic abstraction, close to the side of most perplexity. There is no obvious thrust towards resolution. Certainly, no other dialogue has proved so perplexing to its modern interpreters as the Parmenides. Its concerns are central to all Platonic metaphysics: the relationships between the Many and the One (or a One), and the meaning of the term (methexis), 'participation,' as applied to such relationships. Edward R. Lee puts the central critical issue: 'How could the philosopher who wrote the Parmenides later write the TimaeusT In that later dialogue Plato lays his burden of meaning on the word mimesis, 'imaging,' to describe the relationship between the Ideas or Forms and the sensible universe. Yet, Lee argues, Parmenides i32d-i33a blows that metaphor out of the water. That Plato later puts such weight on mimesis makes him appear 'a philosopher with a logically incoherent theory of whose logical incoherence he is magnificently aware, and which he nonetheless affirms with all the power of his literary art ... [Lee has] the greatest reluctance to believe in this picture' but cannot disprove it.31 Long ago I abandoned my reluctance to believe in a Plato who presents us with matters he knows will not cohere under the hard criteria of logic, but I am not as convinced as Lee seems to be that we should

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read the Parmenides as fully serious. I disagree with those who find in the dialogue a late recantation, a parody deflating pretensions to metaphysical profundity and warning interpreters against taking the doctrine of Forms seriously at all.32 Yet I find the suggestion of parody highly appealing: the tediously dry abstractions push not so much towards an elevating perplexity as towards the conviction that in this extended play of abstract language the philosopher-emperors are wearing no clothes. It makes as much sense to see a parodic Parmenides pointed against the logician's expectation that the mysteries of the One and the All are reducible to his discourse as to see it deflating the metaphysician. Convinced that Plato did understand fully the problem he is raising, Lee excuses him on the grounds that he 'never saw his problem as a logical one, but ... solved it, if at all, as a metaphysical problem.' Lee points in 'if at all' to a hermeneutical scepticism I endorse, although I prefer a word other than 'solved' in application to what Plato probably saw as unanswerable questions. The dialogue pushes abstraction to the point of absurdity; it employs its most concrete questions to ask whether there are eternal forms of 'hair, mud, and dirt' (the third surely euphemistic) ; and it lays forth the affirmative responses of Socrates' young interlocutor in such subservient and mechanical monotony that it is impossible to take the scene seriously in either dramatic or philosophical terms. In this reading, Plato was seeking no solution to his puzzles. Those who value dialectic need not be ever-solemn about it, especially if they have come to value also the a-logical mode of knowing towards which dialectic leads.33 If, however, we ascribe a modicum of seriousness to the Parmenides we shall interpret it as Plato's endorsement of the 'philosophy' of the poet Parmenides, whose surviving hexameter fragments reveal a monism as hard to interpret as the dialogue bearing his name. A.P.O. Mourelatos describes it as 'essentially a non-dualism ... compatible with numerical plurality.'34 That description is as strikingly appropriate to the perspective communicated by Socrates in the Phaedo upon the interdependence of body and soul as it is also to the perspectives invited by Spenser's Garden of Adonis (FQ 3, 6) and Mutabilitie. The late medieval Platonist, Nicholas of Cusa, constantly saw harmony in discord, the One in the Many, the unity that 'means nondivision, distinction, and connection.'35 His thinking fits Mourelatos's description of the Parmenidean monism as well as it fits the governing thesis of this book. In Polanyi's epistemology, the breakthrough of tacit knowing shows a unifying pattern in multiplicity; focal inquiry proceeds by distinguishing among

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the units of multiplicity; meaning inheres in the straits that connect the two modes of knowing. The Parmenides will always offer puzzles rooted in the opaqueness to interpretation of the terms 'participation' and 'image,' which stand against each other when we raise questions about Plato's 'dualism' or 'monism.' Lee offers as much understanding as it is reasonable to expect by speaking of the problem's 'horizontal' and 'vertical' dimensions. As an image of the world of Forms this world lies horizontally stratified and separated well below the original pattern. But as an image that participates vertically in its pattern by virtue of being made 'in its image' (Parmenides 132), as an image that somehow tries to be like the higher (Phaedo 74 d), this imaging world is dynamically interinvolved with the Other in a manner that paradoxically supports both the plurality of the Many and the unity of the One whole.36 To rephrase, Plato is 'horizontally' a dualist and 'vertically' a (pluralistic) monist; to see the first is to think in spatial, static, metaphor and to see the second is to set the metaphors in motion. Lee's formulation answers the appetite for focal distinction, even as it permits us to pause in a sort of negative capability, aware that both views are meaningful. Neither negates the other: in the pluralistic monism of the Parmenides 'one [must be] careful to exclude any relations of contrariety ... between [this pair] of real elements.'37 Elusive as the Parmenides still proves to be, the issues it raises are crucial to one questing towards a Mystery beyond logic. These same puzzles of relationship between the One and the Many, the Many and the One, arise in the three very dissimilar dialogues to which I now resort. By now we should expect no unequivocal answers. Creativity and Love: Timaeus, Phaedrus, and Symposium Socratic method has no function in Plato's late treatise on cosmology, the Timaeus. Timaeus, identified as an astronomer and natural philosopher (27 a), unfolds the discourse to a Socrates and a Critias who, except in the introductory dialogue, remain mute. We are led to expect the analytical language of science from such a man, but Timaeus begins and ends in the metaphoric mode, with an invocation to the gods at the outset and a description of the cosmos as a divine giant living creature at the end. In a characteristically Platonic qualification, Timaeus exhorts himself to accommodate his matter to his audience (27 d), before unfolding what he equivocally characterizes as a 'likely story' (29 d). The

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cosmos unfolds below the level of true Being in a constant process of Becoming. (Timaeus shows a clear preference for Being over Becoming.) The 'god' who made and continues to make the universe is a Craftsman, a demiurge; he shapes a mysterious medium, the 'all that is,' which before his shaping was a chaos of 'discordant, unordered motion.'38 As he works upon the imperfect but still beautiful world of Becoming, the Maker keeps in mind the beautiful orderly pattern of the higher world of Forms. The shaping power by and in which he works is nous, only approximately translatable as Mind, Intellect, or Reason, because nous itself demands to be understood in the metaphoric mode.39 At the level of nous, 'this' and 'that' are unified, subject and object are not divided: the Forms are both 'above' and 'in' the Maker's mind. Yet when the discourse of Timaeus on these matters focuses more on the world of Becoming than on the noetic world of Being it becomes so metonymic in its struggle for comprehensibility that the effect conveyed is still dualistic: the unitive potentiality carried by the word nous is rarely actualized in the discourse. Although the Maker is called a 'god,' he is not of the highest divinity this is a cosmology, not an ontology. The closest the Timaeus ever comes to suggesting a supreme divinity above the Maker is in a reference to the Republic in the opening dialogue (17 c). If the question of a God above the Maker occurs to the interpreter, as it must when the Maker is said to be limited by Necessity, the implication that the Republic might provide an intertext for interpretation may prompt the recollection of the passages on the Good (Republic 509 a, b). That supreme principle, above knowledge and truth, and even above ousfa (essential Being), is the source of all lesser goods: thus it may be postulated as the source of the goodness ascribed here in Timaeus to the Maker at the point when, devoid of any jealousy, he desires to confer order upon disorderly chaos so that all things might be good like him. An appeal to the Republic suggests that the 'horizontal dualism' we have recognized in the Timaean account need not be taken as absolute. We do not have the whole of the 'likely story,' but, by the narrator's own warning, an accommodative approximation to some otherwise inexpressible larger structure of significance. Dualistic impressions dominate when the images of the Timaeus are mechanical, based in the metaphors of shaping or making. But when the animating principle, Psyche is considered - both the Soul of the World (41 d) and the tripartite human soul, its microcosm (69 d-yj c) the dualism is softened. Psyche, not unambiguously, is spoken of as 'mixed with' and 'fastened to' that which is becoming bodily structure.

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Since it is clearly a principle of life and of order, and the bodies are ordered, and living, there must be some overlap between lower and higher, and 'mixed' at least so indicates. Yet a severe moralistic dualism is implied in 'fastened.' In the account of the making of the human soul (69 d), the highest part of the soul, the noetic, is located in the head and divided from the location of the spirited soul by the neck, as it in turn is carefully separated from the appetitive soul by the diaphragm. The fear of pollution from below is clear. Confusions arise when a metonymic thrust towards clear distinction opposes the unitive power of metaphor. Nonetheless, because of the great and influential metaphors upon which the account depends, and because of abstractions so ambiguous to later interpreters that they take on the force of metaphor, the Timaeus survives for poets and their readers. Having considered the Maker, his goodness, the ambiguously described medium, and the en-souling psyche, I turn next to language of engendering and stamping, to the concepts of Necessity and Time, and to Plato's vivid conclusion. At first, and recurrently, the creator is given a double designation, poieten kai patera, Maker and Father:40 no single descriptive metaphor will serve. In the prolonged proto-scientific accounts of the shaping of materials and properties by Pythagorean principles (eg, 30-3, 55-65), words implying technical craftsmanship take the fore without entirely displacing those suggesting generation and growth (39-40). But when approaching the cup (krater) (41 d) and the Receptacle (hypodoche) (49-52), which somehow support the actions of the Maker and Father (as a mirror supports an image, Cornford suggests)41 the discourse employs more generative language. After the Maker has blended soul-stuff in the krater and diluted it to ensoul the stars and men, he distributes affections and sensations 'by necessity' with the karmic laws that will control them - so that he, himself, will be guiltless of any ensuing evil. He leaves to 'the younger gods' the fashioning of bodies (42 d) and remains remote 'in his own accustomed nature.' Yet, we are told, the human souls, 'his children, heard and were obedient to their father's word' (42 e). The relationship of body to soul in this passage remains obscure. Later, the Father imprints his image (a mechanical metaphor with sexual overtones) in the mysterious Receptacle whose significance is vitalized by the phrases 'the nurse of Becoming,' 'the mother ... of what has come to be visible,' and 'a nature invisible and characterless, all-receiving' (49 3-51 b). Another word, chora (52 b), introduces the concept of the Receptacle as space: Whitehead interpreted it as the Space-Time continuum of early twentieth-century physics.42 The rela-

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live passivity and anonymity of the Receptacle did not run counter to the maternal metaphor in Plato's time: it was then believed that the female contributed no more than womb space and nourishment for a seed that was totally male.43 The contrast between ancient and modern biology should make us wary of anthropomorphizing the imaged process too completely, making the Receptacle as important as the 'fathering.' In Spenserian terms, the Receptacle would be more like the Garden itself than like either Venus or her strangely passive Adonis.44 The Maker does have an opposing, but not equal, co-contributor to the process of Becoming: the mysterious force of ananke (Necessity). Never clearly explained, ananke seems simply to be there, exerting its own imperatives upon the chaotic 'all that is' whenever the Maker fails to persuade it by the force of nous (47 6-48 e). There must of necessity be such instances: otherwise time, 'the moving image of eternity,' would be indistinguishable from its pattern. But because of Necessity the image can only be as perfect as 'possible.' Interpreters have seen Necessity, variously, as natural law, a kind of built-in orderliness that is different from the orderliness of nous; as an irrational element in the World Soul; or as a recalcitrance in the original chaos-stuff upon which nous and its emissary psyche have to work. Cornford persuasively dismisses the first theory, tending towards the third. The second and third can make sense together: since soul blends and interacts with visible bodies as it informs them, it seems reasonable to postulate a reciprocal blending action coming from the chaos-stuff, which would render the soul irrational, or at least less rational. If something of this sort could not occur, it would not seem to be necessary to separate the noetic Maker, as Timaeus does, from polluting contact.45 Such a view of ananke, dualistically opposing it to the craftsman's nous, holds initial comfort for the questioning human mind. Neither the good Maker and Father nor his human creatures need be held responsible for all the evils in the visible universe. The blame for evil can be projected instead upon the disorderly lower elements which resist the divine persuasion. But such comfort, sacrificing as it does so much of divine power, is cold even in a theodicy. When the focus shifts to questions of human psychology and soteriology the problems are exacerbated. The stubborn bodily frame then sets itself recalcitrantly against the divinely derived nous that inhabits the circle of bone above the isthmus of the neck. The sense of bondage in the human frame and alienation from the better world of true Being contributes to human desperation. Something of this problem emerges later in Paul's struggle to come to terms with his warring members,46 in the complaints of the

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Petrarchan lover of Spenser's earthly hymns, and in any thinking that is less successful than Paul's and Spenser's in achieving the countervailing conviction of liberation through the reconciling, incarnate, love of Christ. The strongest metaphor of all comes in Timaeus' peroration. The characterization of the cosmos as a giant living creature, unified in its plenitude and divinized is totally positive in effect: 'Having received in full its complement of living creatures, mortal and immortal, this world has thus become a visible living creature embracing all that are visible, and an image of the intelligible, a perceptible god, supreme in greatness and excellence, in beauty and perfection, this Heaven single in its kind and one' (92 c). No hint here of Necessity, and only one nod in 'image' towards dualism: we are left with a triumph of unitive metaphor over divisive metonymy. In the strength of this metaphor a base is provided for the later monism of Plotinus. I have left untouched as yet the proto-scientific descriptions of the process of forming that combine Pythagorean numerology and solid geometry with what sounds, to ears tuned to the vocabulary of early modern science, like ludicrously fanciful metaphor. An example or two will give the flavour. First a passage which prepares for the discussion of psyche, yet to be introduced, and reminds us of the supreme principle of 'measure' in the Philebus: Now that which comes to be must be bodily, and so visible and tangible; and nothing can be visible without fire, or tangible without something solid, and nothing is solid without earth. Hence the god set about making it of fire and earth. But two things cannot be satisfactorily united without a third: for there must be some bond between them drawing them together. And of all bonds the best is that which makes itself and the terms it connects a unity in the fullest sense; and it is of the nature of a continued geometric proportion to effect this most perfectly (31 b, c).

Next, part of a longer passage upon the formation of the four elements by the principles of Pythagorean geometry: 'It appeared as though all the four kinds could pass through one another into one another; but this appearance is delusive; for the triangles we selected give rise to four types, and whereas three are constructed out of the triangle with unequal sides, the fourth [earth] alone is constructed out of the isosceles. Hence... [only] three of them can do this ...' (54 b-d). Cornford believes that Earth, later to be assigned the stable cube as an alternative figure, is differentiated from the others in consequence of that projected plan.47

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Should the quaintness of effect and the inconsistencies suggested in these passages, compounded by the inconsistencies in metaphor to which we have been attending throughout, lead us to a dismissive condescension, a glance at current physics contributes balance. Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum theory, counsels humility in the face of modern analogues: 'in quantum mechanics, we are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic phenomena, but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded' (emphasis in the original).48 Yet there is value, he argues, in such ambitious accounts of physical theory. The first and last principle of a cyclical series summarized by John Honner in The Transcendental Philosophy of Niels Bohr,' is that 'no content can be grasped without a formal frame.' In the seventh point of the series, the apparent ambiguity of large scientific accounts is explained and justified: 'Our position, as observers in a domain of experience where unambiguous application of concepts depends essentially on the conditions of observation, permits the use of complementary descriptions, and demands them if description is to be exhaustive.'49 We turn now to two dialogues, believed earlier than the Timaeus, in which we shall find the relative dryness of proto-science giving way to the humour and fervour we expect from Plato when questions of love, human and divine, are under consideration. Bohr's dicta, with Plato's own comfortable readiness to shift metaphors, support a comparison at this point of transition between the dynamic of creative nous and psyche in the Timaeus, and the creative, and potentially disruptive, force of eros which dominates the cosmological and psychological discussions of the Symposium and the rhetorical set-pieces of the Phaedrus. Suitable, and alternative, structures of metaphoric language and dialectic are evolved by Plato in each fresh account in response to the initiating questions posed in the dialogues. In Timaeus we have seen psyche, a derivation from nous, moving downward as emissary of goodness to animate the world of Becoming. By recalling 'the Good' itself from the Republic we can construct the paradigm of a descending triad, each principle operating on a lower level than its predecessor - a macrocosmic model for the human soul. We note again the incompatibility of dynamic and static variants of the model: when one stage or state is seen as dynamically merging with the next so that creative function is passed along the impression tends towards the pluralistic monism Mourelatos ascribes to the historical Parmenides; when we recall that psyche and the 'lower gods' buffer nous from polluting contact with bodies we get a horizontally layered

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and very dualistic impression. Like the Bible, the Timaeus lends textual support to very different ways of thinking. The two dialogues of love, the Phaedrus and the Symposium, offer on balance effects that are warm and dynamic: they caution against the power of love to lead the human soul into degradation, but good humour, prudence, cameraderie, and above all soaring idealism outweigh the darker elements. At the outset of the Symposium love is affirmed: as a primal principle of creation in the alternative cosmogonies Phaedrus takes from Hesiod and Parmenides; as the power that 'reconciles the jarring elements of the body' in the speech of the physician Erixymachus; as the loveliest and the best of the gods, and the youngest, in the eulogy of Agathon. These praises fade beside the soaring idealism of words recounted by Socrates and attributed to Diotima, a wise woman, words which mirror a similar and more extended oration by Socrates in the Thaedrus. I turn now to the latter. Love, says Socrates demonstrating his rhetorical skills to Phaedrus, is a divine madness, a gift of the gods 'fraught with the highest bliss' (245 b, c); and like other forms of inspiration it has the power to deliver us from troubles (244 e). The turbulence of bodily passion, always dangerous, is intimately involved in the higher erotic energies that motivate the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, in his ascent. Socrates likens the tripartite human soul to the complex figure of a charioteer (the noetic soul) driving an unmatched team - a spirited white horse (the animal soul) and an unruly black horse (the appetitive soul). Eros impels the precariously balanced trio, each part operating separately in the way most appropriate to it. When the horses are set racing towards the satisfaction of lower appetites the charioteer's attention to rational and moral issues is obstructed by the turbulence of the dark horse. His predicament is not, certainly, identical to the aporia induced by dialectic, but it is analogous in function: it too forces the perplexed soul to approach limits, here not only the limit to reason forced by the turbulence, but also the limit of natural moral law which the lover longs to transgress. If the charioteer is strongly 'winged' in the righteousness derived through philosophic recollection, he will succeed in directing his team upwards through the strait of mixed opportunity and threat. He may, impelled by love rightly directed, even reach the heaven of bliss in which strong united souls are 'carried round with the gods' in the contemplation of eternal truth. As in any mystical experience short of the final beatific vision, such as mystical liberation can be enjoyed only 'until the heaven's revolution brings [the soul] back full circle' (247 d).

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The effects of the vision last: under the benevolent aspect of Necessity 'whatsoever soul has followed in the train of a god' (and such a god is Eros) 'shall be kept from sorrow until a new revolution shall begin.' If the enlightened soul subsequently 'comes to be burdened with a load of forgetfulness,' sheds the wings she grew under the power of Love, and falls to earth, she may at least expect to enter in the next incarnation into a 'human babe that shall grow into a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower of the Muses and a lover.' With what degree of irony we cannot tell, Socrates ranges this category of souls above those that belong to kings, statesmen, prophets, poet-makers, other kinds of artisans, Sophists, and tyrants. (It is easy to see, here, that the speakers of Donne's 'The Canonization' and 'The Sun Rising' have read their Phaedrus.) Beauty has an extensive role to play in the liberation of the lover. True Beauty on high is goal and reward 'in all its brightness' for those 'whole and unblemished' lovers who are, 'without taint of that prison house [we] call a body.' Such only may enjoy true ec-stasy, the standing apart from the body, whether the vision be enjoyed between incarnations or during a moment on earth inspired by a good love. Anyone 'now in the body' who has recently known discarnate bliss will, upon beholding 'a godlike face or bodily form,' shudder, and grow feverish. Then gradually he will feel the warmth of his soul's discomfiture nourishing the roots of the wings he once possessed. When they have sprouted anew, he will rise once more, his reason triumphantly controlling his now harmonized team, and will gaze on the Beauty above (250-2 b). Socrates, as orator, avows that however one may, or should, question the story's details, 'the cause and the nature of the lover's experience are in fact what I have said' (252 c). Recalling that the speech serves Socrates as the second fine oration in his ironic attack upon fine oratory, we must recognize that not all questions about love are answered in one account, not even in this compelling myth. The kind of love openly under discussion during most of the Phaedrus and the Symposium is that between master and follower: in idealistic passages between a philosopher and his disciple, and in more cynical interchanges between a man of tangible power and a youth who seeks advancement through the alliance. Neither Socrates nor Plato so far as we can judge feels uneasy discussing the homosexual idealisms that prevailed in their aristocratic Athens; but venality and opportunism (the sins of the black and white steeds respectively) are clearly seen as condemned under the laws of Necessity. A fall from grace need not be absolute under this aspect of Platonic eternity: if a pair of lovers in

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whom the mid-soul is strong enjoy, when off guard, what passes for bliss among the vulgar they may find after death that the desire they have nurtured thus unworthily will suffice to move them together on an upward path.50 Most of the doctrinal potentialities of the Phaedran myth appear again in Socrates' account of the discourse of Diotima. After noting the ennobling force of procreative eros among animals, Diotima finds that 'there's a divinity in human propagation' that makes for 'immortality.' More impressively (Vlastos finds this the 'most profound thing in the dialogue'), Diotima uses metaphors of generation in speaking, first, of the love conceived in the soul by the sight of beauty, and then of the 'birth in Beauty' (206 bff.) - that productive final fruit of the lover's ascent. Vlastos comments further: 'Platonic - as also, later, courtly and ... romantic love - is meant to be a life-transforming miracle, a secular analogue to religious conversion, a magical change of perspective ... What started [for Plato] as a pederastic idyl ends up in a transcendental marriage.' Credit must be given Plato, he maintains, for the first recognition in Greek literature of the spiritually transformative potentialities of eros.51 Since Plato tends, moralistically, to locate his greatest abstract values at some distance from the bodily frame, his vertical metaphors of soaring ascent serve his purposes admirably. The distances they imply reinforce our sense of the dynamic of longing. Yet Plato's metaphor of the pregnant soul implies inwardness as well, and repeats the occasional note of inwardness we see in the other dialogues. Diotima, who teaches that Eros always desires what it does not have (203 c) locate both need and love within, in the breast of the lover. Other metaphors in other great discourses on love in Western culture have indicated both need and the answer to need in terms of inwardness.52 The Christian Platonist, Cusanus, writing in the early Renaissance, finds the process of creative mimesis itself sacred: 'In thee, God, being created is one with creating, since the image which seemeth to be created by me is the Truth which createth me.'53 The accounts offered by interpreters, Platonic and poetic, can no more capture wholly what they image than can human language claim to bind down the power of God. Yet in the process of making such accounts the Renaissance thinker hopes for a reciprocal encounter with the Mystery imaged. Two further speeches in the Symposium can be used to demonstrate that a reductive hermeneutic, translating metaphor into doctrine, does so at serious cost. Both the drunken speakers, Aristophanes the comic poet and Alcibiades the would-be beloved of Socrates, offer metaphoric

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notions that can be demonstrated to conform subtextually, through Plato's mimetic artistry, to his more beautiful metaphors of the lover's ascent. Aristophanes recounts a myth of the old round double men who, before a jealous god severed half from half, rolled happily about on all eights (189 d-i93 d). The subsequent yearning of each half to discover and reunite with the 'tally' half of the original can be interpreted as a yearning for the restoration of a 'true order,' true qua original, and thus as analogous to a yearning for the Order of Forms. But the loss of the comic images and events if the tale is thus interpreted prevents the recognition that love has its debasing and ludicrous aspects, especially dangerous when the creator-god is seen as less than friendly. Similarly, to isolate from the maudlin rambling of Alcibiades only the morally edifying example of Socrates' self-containment under temptation is to miss the more edifying testimony that the philosopher, when he is being serious, is like an outwardly ugly and comic Silenus sheltering something divine within. The grosser dimensions of the dialogues are not merely entertaining. They demonstrate that, however appearances may mislead, they are capable of conveying values of another order. Although I have chosen not to capitalize 'order' in this usage, it will be evident that any attempt to bring the discourse to a single level is self-defeating: such a metonymic abstraction as 'order' converts itself under further inquiry into a less obtrusive, more sophisticated qualatent, metaphor: interpretation must continue to deal with outer and inner dimensions of appearance and reality. Conclusion Nowhere in the foregoing pages have I ascribed firmly held specific doctrines to Plato: my exposition of his self-contradictory methods and his attitudes to written discourse indicate how fruitless such attempts can be. By focusing upon selected instances of Plato's language as he deploys it dialectically, discursively, and mythically, I have illustrated the varied bases upon which thinkers after Plato built systems, continued questioning, and - at times - followed Plato on paths leading to those baptismal stretchings of awareness that offer refreshment, new beginnings, new perspectives, and stronger links between self and goal. I note, in summary, Plato's overarching concern with the reciprocal interinvolvements of the worlds of Becoming and Being, Being and Becoming. I have considered some of Plato's central myths. I have left open, of necessity, the puzzles raised in Plato's uses of the terms meth-

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exis and mimesis as alternative accounts of the relationships between the Many and the One. Plato's methods, his image-language and his technical terms, and most of all the comprehensiveness of his questioning, have been explored by subsequent interpreters ever since he wrote. His texts still serve in modern hermeneutic theory as heuristic examples and instruments. The rewards for those who take up his inquiries are usually commensurate to the energy invested and the breadth and the depth of the evertransformed, and ever-transforming, questions asked.

CHAPTER THREE

'Each vnto himselfe' Systematizers, Seekers, and Seers

A discontinuous and roughly chronological scanning of developments between Plato and Plotinus, this chapter gathers details towards the reconstruction of paradigms, and more important, towards observing the shifting dynamic of language. Spenser was an interpreter of the tradition; so are we as we evolve our own understandings. Intellectual assent to putative doctrine is not required of us; openness in questioning, and willingness to move imaginatively in others' traces will serve more fruitfully.1 The chapter slows for only a few aspects of the thinking of a few figures. I ask that the reader keep in mind my conviction of the value of broad tacit fields of awareness as matrices for critical questioning. Aristotle Was Aristotle a Platonist of a new sort or the initiator of a countermovement in philosophy? The question is still open. Aristotle spent twenty years in the Academy; after living abroad, he returned to found his own Lyceum, apart from the Academy where Plato's nephew, Speusippus, with others, was teaching 'Platonism.' The 'Middle Platonists' and the Hellenistic Neoplatonists accepted Aristotle as part of the Platonic succession. We, too, should regard Plato's most celebrated pupil both as an ancient who contributed another strain to the thinking of the Renaissance and as a Platonist with differences. Aristotle turned the hierarchical Platonic world into the horizontal, giving to the concepts of causal origin and goal some of the functions Plato had located in his higher abstractions, but he did not abandon it. Without the impetus to logical division and the practical analytic demonstrations that came to him through Socrates' and Plato's dialectic, Aristotle's categorical thinking and systematizing might never have evolved.

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One of Aristotle's many references to Plato offers a point of departure: it demonstrates, appropriately, his ability to move away from his teacher as he discusses Plato's independence in interpreting and developing what he had been taught. Aristotle is speaking of Plato's oral instruction in the Academy (nothing precisely comparable is set down in the dialogues): The philosophy of Plato ... in most respects followed these thinkers [the Pythagoreans], but had peculiarities that distinguished it from the philosophy of the Italians. For, having in his youth first become familiar with Cratylus and with the Heraclitean doctrines (that all sensible things are ever in a state of flux and there is no knowledge about them), these views he held even in later years. Socrates, however, was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions ... (Metaphysics i :6, 987 a-b) 2

The phrase 'neglecting the world of nature ... but seeking the universal' hints at the empirical and pragmatic temper that separates Aristotle from Plato; the credit Aristotle gives Socrates for metonymic precision in definition emphasizes the value he himself places upon clarity in conceptualizing. As a man of his time in Greece (not at all the exclusively rational world that classicists visualized early in this century) 3 Aristotle honoured the gods and accepted certain modes of metaphysical language as appropriate; but the world of Platonic myth is very distant from his writing. The passage continues: Plato accepted his teaching, but held that the problem applied not to sensible things but to entities of another kind - for this reason, that the common definition could not be a definition of any sensible thing, as they were always changing. Things of this sort, then, he called Ideas, and sensible things, he said, were all named after these, and in virtue of a relation to these; for the many existed by participation in the Ideas that have the same name as they. Only the name 'participation' was new; for the Pythagoreans say that things exist by 'imitation' of numbers, and Plato says they exist by participation, changing the name. But what the participation or the imitation of the Forms could be they left an open question. Metaphysics 1:6, 987 b)

The ease with which Aristotle suggests that methexis is but a change of name from mimesis shows that what he cannot observe and codify, or

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locate within the particulars that do concern him, he is content to pass over quickly. In this, he seems to have reflected the attitudes of his contemporaries for whom, it has been argued, the relationships between 'participation' and 'imitation' were far less perplexing than they are for us.4 Sentences following the passage just quoted show that Aristotle attributes to Plato a shift into the dichotomizing (and, here, horizontally layering) mode of metonym. He notes that Plato interposed an order of numbers 'in an intermediate position' between sensible things and the order of forms; that 'he agreed with the Pythagoreans' in giving primary importance to the One, which is 'not a predicate of something else,' but departed from the Pythagoreans in his belief that 'the Numbers exist apart from sensible things, while they say that the things themselves are Numbers.' It would seem that the Pythagoreans, qua community of believers, expressed their doctrines in the mode of metaphor that Socrates led Plato to abjure, insofar as possible. One further point has applicability to a poet who, at the outset of his major fiction, names opposed figures 'Una' and 'Duessa': Aristotle testifies that for Plato 'the other entity besides the One' was the dyad, out of which 'as out of some plastic material' all other numbers 'could be neatly produced.' When Aristotle compares the dyad to a 'plastic material' he seems to be approaching his own concept, expressed elsewhere, of hyle, the material substratum of the sensible universe. Aristotle took the term Form from Plato, but he used it less than his own term energeia - act, actualization, or actuality - to which he equates it in explaining that energeia is as Form to the Matter he prefers to call dynamis, potency or potentiality (De Anima 414 a). Energeia is prior to dynamis in Aristotle, as the 'enacted' or grown man is prior to his seed. But when we focus on the seed itself, the actuality of the man it bears within (as potential) is its form or soul, as well as its telos or end. Thus 'the soul is the cause of its body in all three senses ... It is (a) the source or origin of movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of the whole living body' (De Anima 415 b) .5 In this somewhat theoretical passage we see Aristotle's bias towards the biological and social ends of inquiry. Characteristically, he seeks the shaping principles of every part of the Timaean living cosmos within the giant organism. This leaves plenty of scope for mystery, of course: the potential in acorn or sperm to actualize itself in the mature organism can evoke a wonder close to the reverence the Stoics express for their vital cosmos. Emile Brehier finds Aristotle's language upon these matters to lack 'demonstrative rigour.' But he notes the great change, vis-a-vis Plato and the Pre-Socratics, in the sort of unprovable state-

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ment that is being articulated. For Aristotle, as not for his forebears, 'existence can only be given in the form of substances that are actual, and wholly determinate.' He therefore satisfies himself with achievements that can be attained through the logical deployment of language addressed to observable particulars. Aristotle was, it is clear, temperamentally less than interested in pursuing the wholly Other, the unconditioned indeterminacy that attracts Platonic theologians: he is convinced that 'thought, far from separating itself from sensible things, instead turns towards them' - and must do so - 'to know essences.' This dimension of Aristotelian thinking contributed not only to the Stoicism that itself merged into Neoplatonism, but perhaps also directly to the reverence Plotinus was later to express for the sensible cosmos.6 To order the language he deployed in addressing his cosmos of particulars, Aristotle developed a rigorous system of logic, upon which I make two brief observations. First, since causality is always central to his concerns, and since language is both active tool in the investigation of other entities and, at times, itself the object of inquiry, Aristotle lays great weight on the relationships in logical discourse between subject and predicate. In so doing he consolidates in his system the split between 'this' the subject and 'that' the object of its activity which we find characteristic of Greek philosophy after Socrates. Second, since he is so frequently categorizing and systematizing the particulars empirically available to him, he seems to find Socratic dialectic of limited interest. His practices may have contributed to the open antagonism of the Epicureans towards dialectic. In the particulars of his ethics and psychology Aristotle differs less from Plato than in tone and perspective. He too gives priority to virtue as a goal in living; but, like Augustine, his heir in this respect, Aristotle sees it not as an abstraction but as a state of character developed through choices between the clearly better and the clearly worse, or choices that must find the 'mean' between extremes. 'We are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use' (Nicomachean Ethics n, 2, 1103 b). Aristotle, like Plato, concerns himself with the related issues of bondage and freedom; but whereas Plato addresses them poetically and movingly, as in Socrates' eschatological conjectures in the Phaedo (107 c, 114 e) and in the myths of the Republic, Aristotle deals with them dispassionately, as in distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary actions in the Nicomachean Ethics (3.1, moff). He puts little emphasis on problems that call for the freeing, lusis, that emerges from

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beyond discursive language and practical action. Such, akin to 'salvation,' is essentially a religious concept -not the sort he tends to concern himself with unduly. When Aristotle describes the human psyche he offers a tripartite structure that is roughly assimilable to Plato's. Parallelling the noetic, the spirited, and the passionate levels spelled out in the Phaedran myth and in the Timaean discourse, Aristotle offers the noetic, the animal, and the sensitive or vegetable dimensions of the soul. But he abandons Plato's hierarchical geography of the human frame, seeing nous incorporeally diffused through the body as form; and he develops independently a complex system of faculties in the psyche that I shall not pause to describe here.7 Even when he proposes, at the culmination of the Ethics, that the highest human happiness lies in theoria, contemplation - 'an exercise of nous in accordance with the best that is in us' he justifies this uncharacteristic elevation on the grounds of an enlightened hedonism: 'the life according to reason is the best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest' (NE 10, 7, 1177 3-1178 a). Aristotle's legacies in method and doctrinal detail clearly are important to the systematizers, seekers, and seers who follow him in the Platonic tradition. Paradoxically, we can see those matters in which Aristotle differs from Plato as more fruitful in the developing tradition than those in which he follows more closely. They offer alternatives to be pondered, as his methods make for rigour in the pondering. If he, personally, laid less emphasis on the state of aporia than Plato, he left works that, taken in conjoined authority with those stemming from the Academy, often produce a creative perplexity. Plato speaks most often and most forcefully in terms of transcendent values; Aristotle reinforces those fewer passages in the dialogues that present images of the shaping and enlivening power of psyche in the here and now. With both in view the later interpreter is called to adopt inclusive, rather than exclusive, hermeneutical practices. Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics Cicero cites Antiochus of Ascalon in the opinion that 'Stoic theory should be considered a correction [a reinterpretation] of the Old Academy rather than actually a new system. '8 Stoics follow the Timaeus in picturing the cosmos as a giant organism and Aristotle in adopting an empirical epistemology; they differ from both in their materialism. They see their universe infused with Logos, a fiery breath that vitalizes

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and governs; they accord a deep reverence to the living whole; but even their Logos is conceived in physical terms. In place of Plato's transcendent Ideas they conceive of the logoi spermatikoi, the seminal reasons, from which inner dynamic principles all things develop. (The debt the Stoics owe to Aristotle herein is even more obvious than the debt Spenser owes to them in FQ 3.6.32, where the 'naked babes' passing in and out of the Garden of Adonis can be interpreted as such seed principles.) The vitalism infusing the Stoic cosmos is particularized in the astrological influences they admit to their system, and in the activities of the Olympian gods and other quasi-divine figures which they allegorize in interpreting myth.9 In ethics, the Stoics seek the inner strength to repudiate concern for external goods; they urge submissive assent to such pleasures and pains as are 'morally irrelevant,' but not to anything unnatural, or morally evil. The Stoic is not against the pleasures that are natural to virtue: as John Rist explains, for the old Stoa 'the wise man feels pleasures and pains; what he does not feel is those pleasures and pains which are (the result of) mistaken judgments. In relation to these only he is apathes [morally detached].'10 The Stoics' views of Necessity, Fate, Providence, and human freedom are shifting and complex. Of such issues in their thinking it must suffice to note that their emphasis on Providence, probably deriving from Semitic tradition, facilitated later confluences of Greek and biblical thinking,11 and to offer Seneca's pronouncement on these matters: T do not obey God but assent to what he has decided' (Letter 97). Brehier, who cites these words, insists that the assent is active, not passive: 'Stoic resignation is not a last resort but a positive joyous acceptance of the world as it is ... To follow nature, to follow reason, to follow God ... is for the Stoics ... the same thing.'12 The pluralistic monism of the Stoic cosmos (the Many bound together by the One fiery divine breath) is, we see, easier to maintain than Platonic 'monism,' because the Stoics insist upon the immanence of the Logos-order.13 The later monism of Plotinus preserves the organic vitality of the Stoic conception but differs radically in its idealism. The Stoics prepared ground in yet another way for the Neoplatonists: they asked important questions about the relationships of signifiers to signifieds, of verbal propositions to structures in nature, of language to Logos.14 Their linguistic sophistication anticipated a similar sophistication in Plotinus which enabled him to recognize with neither confusion nor embarrassment the necessary inconsistencies in his choices of metaphor.

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Epicureanism is dismissed briefly in most outlines of the Platonic tradition: 'the influence on Neoplatonism is ... minimal' except in the controversies that it prompted.15 But three factors in the doctrine of Epicurus are pertinent. First, he posits 'something invisible, a void, and proves it by something obvious, motion; for if there is no void neither can there be any motion.'16 Thus, he keeps open among empiricists the potentiality of mystery. Second, he argues repeatedly that we need in our search for the happiness of ataraxia, serenity, 'a comprehensive view, but not an equal number of particular views ... details are easily discovered if only the overall schemes are apprehended and clearly retained in the memory.' Here we find reinforcement from an unexpected quarter for the recognition of heuristic function in the apprehension of a broad field of awareness. Epicurus can seem very modern to anyone mindful of Polanyi's recognition of the heuristic value of even those hypotheses that will prove false. Epicurus holds that 'all that is necessary is that the cause explain [the details]; it need not be their real cause.'17 Third, as a materialist concerned to make a place for freedom of decision in his system, Epicurus speaks of a swerve (clinamen) in which atoms, independent in this of natural law, may move randomly in the void. A 'swerve' in the atoms moving in the soul will help the individual 'to initiate new actions' of a desirable sort.l8 Noting here the hunger for freedom to choose new directions, we see that, unlike as Plato and Epicurus are, the availability of the Epicurean notion of clinamen henceforth could support human hopes for transformation. We find something like that liberating 'swerve' when Spenser's titanic rebel, Mutabilitie, gets out of line. In terms of the theoretic bases of this book, we can link the notion of the 'swerve' to any of the oddnesses, fractures, discontinuities, and equivocations that force readers into potentially liberating perplexities. Wherever Scepticism arises we recognize something comparable to Socratic Platonism. In the original sense of the word, and the general sense in which I use it elsewhere in this book, a 'sceptic' is an inquirer. When vigorous inquiry leads to aporia, the Socratic and Platonic thinker may be driven to modes of language which will go beyond the nodal point of perplexity without denying the value of inquiry. Such seems to have been the usual experience of the 'Academic Sceptics,' of whom more shortly. The most extreme strain of Scepticism, the Pyrrhonist (named for Pyrrho, who taught in Athens after Aristotle), denies the very possibility of formulating any truth, positive or negative, upon empirical evidence, and advocates a suspension of judgment that leads to the desir-

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able state of ataraxia, serenity. The conjunction of Pyrrho's epistemology and goal may have had roots in India: during a journey east with Alexander's entourage he may have met with the 'gymnosophists,' Brahmin ascetics, who, like Plato, distrusted the perceived world as illusory, and inimical to their desired state of detachment.19 The Pyrrhonists trace back to their founder a crucial and lasting distinction between the phenomenon, that which appears to the senses of the perceiver, and the unknowable object as it exists apart from any act of perception. Sextus Empiricus, a Sceptic, set down, circa 200 AD what he knew of the Pyrrhonist approach: 'Honey appears to us to be sweet (and this we grant, for we perceive sweetness through the senses), but whether it is also sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt, since this is not an appearance [a phenomenon] but a judgment regarding the appearance.'20 Spenser's flying Florimell, in the honey of her name, bears traces of this text: her seductive beauty appears at first to be phenomenal, but when we are led later to compare her with her false simulacrum we see that the true Florimell participates in the noumenal, at least for noble souls like Arthur. The Platonic Academy developed another branch of Scepticism some decades after Plato's death. Whereas Speusippus and Xenocrates had hardened some of the myth and discourse of the dialogues (and possibly some of the Pythagorean oral teaching) into doctrinal statement, their successor Arcesilaus, in the middle of the third century BC, led th school in a revival of vigorous oral Socratic dialectic. Arcesilaus survives, on secondary evidence, primarily as an energetic critic of dogmatic philosophy; yet he seems, oddly, to have had a positive doctrinal side as well. Sextus records on hearsay that Arcesilaus 'passed on to such of his companions as were naturally gifted the dogmas of Plato' (OP i, 234). Leon Robin notes a tradition that Carneades, who succeeded Arcesilaus in the Academy, followed him in the practice of conducting dialectical disputation in the open spaces of Athens, and disclosing the doctrines attained through dialectic behind closed doors.21 If the tradition is sound, these Academics, openly sceptical in public, were following secretly the implications of Plato's Seventh Letter, that it is dangerous to disseminate doctrine in any context that does not ensure pedagogical or communal corrigibility and validation. Aenesidemus, who revived the Academic strain at the turn of the eras in Alexandria, employed the methodology of questioning in the service of the Heracleitean doctrine that 'All sensible things are ever in a state of flux' (Sextus, OP i, 210). Aristotle testifies to this doctrine's importance to Plato (Metaphysics 1.6. 987 a, b). Such a doctrine vio-

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lates the Pyrrhonist's insistence that nothing true, whether positive or negative, can be said of the objects behind the phenomena.22 The Sceptics, of whatever strain, are the transmitters and consolidators of those dimensions of Platonism that push questioning toward limits; they were well known to Renaissance thinkers, in an age when scepticism was less likely to be perceived as antagonistic to faith than it now is.23 Their methods are even yet being fruitfully adapted in the hermeneuses (theological and literary) to which this book owes much.24 Interlinks with the Biblical Tradition:Job I break with the chronology of the Platonic tradition now, moving aside to indicate a few parallels between the classical and biblical strands: the interweaving of these will be especially evident when I come to the Jewish Middle Platonist, Philo, whose thinking I use in preface to my discussions of Jesus and Paul. Of those books from which I draw only Job will be granted extensive attention.25 I observed earlier that Job, hero of a book roughly contemporary with the dialogues, stands in the company of Socrates and Jesus as a figure of unflinching integrity. More than either, he demonstrates the kind of intense questioning that leads within its own mythos to a clear countering response which broadens awareness, changes the very ground of questioning, and offers release and renewal. Socrates questions and leads others to question in the dialectic he controls; his questions point in metonymic language towards the abstractions that will ensure perplexity; but when he suggests an answer in myth or metaphor he does so with a humour or a serenity that suggests that his own serious questioning has been done to good effect in the narrative past. Jesus also questions as he teaches, more metaphorically than Socrates but with the same rhetorical control: 'Whom say ye that I am?' (Matthew 16:15); 'Which ... of these ... was neighbour unto him who fell among the thieves?' (Luke 10:36). Like Job, Jesus also asks intensely personal questions: in Gethsemane, 'If thou be willing, remove this cup ...' (Luke 22:42); and upon the cross, 'My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' (Mark 15:34). These questions are both subject to qualification, the first because it is only implied, implied in deep humility, the second because it is couched as a quotation from a Psalm. They are to be answered in the larger comic mythos of the Bible as the whole evolves, but in their immediate narrative contexts, they wait upon a voice once heard by Jordan that is now tragically silent. The sufferer, alone at his life's limit, cannot experience a comic ending

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to the earthly unfolding of his mythos if he is to share fully in human loneliness. The earlier sufferer, Job, has entered his period of trial with a faith which, like that of Socrates, looks to justice beyond the human level, and, like that of Jesus, rests upon Hebrew scripture; but the quality of his questioning is unlike cither's. Job hurls his questions in anger in the face of a God whose existence he never doubts, whose law he has always accepted and obeyed. But he has no genuine understanding of the nature of the God he confronts until such understanding is given. At that point, his unanswered questions are dropped in their irrelevancy. The questioner is both satisfied and released from the imprisoning predicaments of body and soul he has been suffering. Job's experience supports proleptically the promise held forth by Jesus, 'Seek and ye shall find' (Luke 11:9); but his story warns us, especially through the ridiculous figures of the 'comforters,' not to expect without hard personal questioning the true knowledge that waits to be disclosed.26 Like the Song of Solomon, the Pauline epistles, and Revelation, Job as a linguistic structure is 'logically odd' to a degree outstanding even in the library of biblical books that Ian Ramsey, giving religious language 'empirical anchorage' in linguistic philosophy, finds 'appropriately odd' throughout.27 The difficulties posed by the book as a whole are so various and so acute that only readers as willing as the comforters to accept received dogmas can settle comfortably into the company of the pietists. Such comfort, dearly bought, involves dismissal of the longest and most powerful poetic passages in the work. However, the obedient, patient Job of pietism does exist in the text - in a framing prose narrative. The only relation this figure bears to the epic questioner rests in the structural fact that the prologue and epilogue are, confusingly, accepted as given in the longer poetic blocks. The hermeneutical openness of Job lies in the 'fracture'28 or glue line marking the edges between two very different sorts of text in the edited construct. The frame narrative (Job 1:1-2:13 and 42:7-17) combines many of the elements of folk tale with the larger elements and potency of myth. Job endures all his misfortunes in the early section and regains health and possessions at the end. In the frame God and Satan dominate, playing power games over the life of an innocent man whose patience seems to have been imposed upon him by the defining terms of the narrative. Job is 'God's servant'; he will take anything; we are invited neither to empathize with him nor to question the morality of the dualistic struggle that entraps him. God is in command: if all is not quite right here, who are we to intrude? Everything 'happens'

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in the prologue and epilogue, but nothing engages us as readers in the struggle. Conversely, nothing much 'happens' in the long chapters of poetry, yet everything of deep signifying power is held under pressure between the prose brackets. Here the impatient Job speaks, or rather he cries, pleads, challenges, taunts, and affirms by turns. Other voices are interspersed, those of the 'comforters' who offer conventional wisdom to their miserable friend, and climactically, a Voice 'out of the Whirlwind' which the narrator announces as the Lord's. This Voice comes in response to Job's insistence on his right to a day in court (31:35-7). He needs that day to deny the guilt his complacent comforters have ascribed to him: 'you're suffering? God is good and just. Thus it follows you must be guilty of something. Repent!'29 Charged and found guilty under dogmatic definition of God's righteous relationships with the world, Job is struck silent by the difference in the 'odd' utterance of this Voice. It puts him in his place firmly - upon his feet in dignity, and in the role of active listener. It never addresses the issue of justice that Job and his friends have found crucial in their separate modes of understanding. This is not the God the comforters have been speaking about. Their structural function is to give expression to the premise the whole work calls into question: the legalistic theology of the earlier Old Testament. Job differs from the comforters fruitfully: although he does accept their premise insofar as he finds justice an issue when he, an upright man, suffers, he transgresses their limits when he refuses to accept the premise unquestioningly. When the legalistic attempt to define God and his ways leads to the aporia of the 'problem of evil/Job has the courage to question until he is granted his release - in Greek language, his lusis. The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind is neither defendant nor arbiter in a cosmic court: he is the glorious, and in no way humble, Lord of the world of Plato's Becoming. The exuberance of his utterance matches that of the most celebratory psalms, yet this Lord shows little (beyond the one thing needful - that he will enter into dialogue with a man) of the psalmist's constant concern for the human place in the scheme of things. His oration is a self-disclosure, and the self he discloses is the shaper and sustainer of the cosmos. He controls, and exults in, all creatures of his natural empire. The world he describes is congruent with the pluralistic monism of the Parmenidean Plato, but his language is as intimate and personal as that of any lesser Olympian in Homeric myth. This God's happy acceptance of the great beasts Leviathan and Behemoth (chaos monsters as adapted from Oriental myth,

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they parallel the recalcitrant hyle the philosophers regard so warily) erases the dualisms imposed upon Job in the comforters' dogmatic speeches. Job's response to the Voice that has responded to him is total: he must accept this universe, Leviathan-thrashings and all. Its patterned grandeur opposes and exposes the folly of any human attempt to divide its mingled substance into good and evil. Yet structurally Job's response is 'appropriately odd': he is said to 'abase' himself, which sets him in humble opposition to the Voice that has urged him to stand upon his feet, and more curiously, sets him in the attitude the comforters have been advocating; and he says he has 'seen' the Lord (as he asked repeatedly to do - eg, 13:24, 19:27) when we have only been told of an encounter with a Voice. It is clear enough that the 'repentance'Job speaks of in the last verse of the poetry (42:6) refers to his hubris in voicing a challenge based in insufficient knowledge of the nature of the Other; and equally clear that the Voice has both satisfied his demand by dignifying him in an encounter and has released him from the compulsion to continue questioning. It is perhaps not quite as clear that the quester Job reaches all the wisdom available to the interpreter since the editor's shift to the prose frame narrative whisks this Job away from our focus and substitutes the patient Job getting his tangible rewards. I rest my own confidence that the quester does make a radical advance in the word 'see': Old Testament characters, as a rule, are given to hearing God, and to fearing the sight of the sacrosanct Face (Genesis 3:8; Exodus 20:18-21; Isaiah 6:5). Job's hubris has broken through the limits of taboo and enabled him to find not punishment but a gracious release through this vision of the cosmos stretched out before his inner eye. The contemplation of God at work in a pattern large enough to embrace all opposites has overcome the split that the legalistic language of Torah interposes between Creator and his all-embracing creation. Henceforth when Job recognizes his brotherhood to dragons and owls (30:29) he will be able to exult, not lament, in the recognition. Job stands in that borderland where the questioning mind, exemplary to a nation,30 shows itself ready to be freed from its outgrown understanding of the tribal Jahweh by the fuller self-disclosure of a larger, truer God. This God, the 'I Am' of ultimate Being (Exodus 3:14), stands behind the Law and offers freedom from it: his people cannot grow in their understanding of him without questioning, and his Law both prompts and monitors their questions. The Bible has always had the power to give rise to new significances

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in the ongoing process of hermeneusis.31 What Northrop Frye says of the Voice in Job applies equally well to the perplexities aroused by all other fractures and oddnesses observable in the structures and linguistic detail of scripture, and of other sacred texts coming down from the Hellenistic period in Jewish history. To answer a question is to accept the assumption in it, and thereby to neutralize the question by consolidating the mental level on which the question was asked. Real questions are stages in formulating better questions; answers cheat us out of the right to this.' The final pages of The Great Code, which Frye insists 'can hardly [be] a conclusion,' resonate to the same modern and postmodern notes that contribute to the present argument: the Nietzschean notion of 'limit'; the 're-creative' function of criticism; the power in certain texts to effect a vital connection between the many and the One; the imperative impelling one who has experienced wholeness to reconstruct the experience in necessarily inadequate language.32 further Links with the Bible: Canticles and 'Wisdom' The Song of Solomon's incongruity in Jewish and Christian canons has ensured that it undergo continual processes of allegorization. This collection of frankly erotic lyrics, loosely arranged in juxtapositions that imply narrative without ever delivering it unequivocally, has offended the legalists of most traditions and periods. St Jerome is typical: he accepted the tradition that 'the book refers only to spiritual love,' as he cautioned against its exposure to young readers without safeguards. Another patristic writer claimed that it was never read in public by Jews or by Christians.33 Modern readers who face its sexuality with more delight than discomfort are unwise, however, if they dismiss too readily the traditional allegorical interpretations of Bridegroom as God or Christ and Bride as Israel or the Church. To do so is to ignore images in the extant structure that ensure evocations of the book of Exodus. The wooden palanquin that carries the Bridegroom through the desert, which we are told has been splendidly wrought to enclose the royal presence (ss 3:9-10), bears a striking resemblance to the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:ioff.), splendidly wrought to carry the tablets of the Law in its enclosure and the divine presence invisibly on the golden mercy seat above. Further, the column of dust arising from the procession (ss 3:6) resembles the pillar of cloud which signifies the Lord's presence with his people in Sinai (Exodus 13:21). Similarly, the Bridegroom's claim for the spotlessness of his beloved (ss 4:7) may be linked (in an admittedly complex way) with the spotlessness required of the

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lamb chosen for sacrifice to ensure the continuance of the life of Israel in the Passover narrative (Exodus 12:5-13). In the erotic context, the Bride of the Song is a more than willing 'victim,' and her sexual role is the mirror opposite to that of Christ in Revelation as Lamb and Bridegroom; yet the promises God makes to his people from Abraham onward in Jewish scripture must be realized through the fecundity enjoined upon Adam and Eve in Eden, and that entails the spilling of female blood, a spotting of the erstwhile spotless, in the nuptial rites.34 Without doubt, the metaphor that allegorists insist upon is rooted in scripture as it stands. Psalm 19:5-6 offers confirmation in the image of God as Bridegroom. Certain of the latter prophets speak of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel in terms of marriage.35 The most serious misinterpretation of the Song of Solomon has not been the anachronistic imposition of spirituality on a text that offers no sound basis for it, but rather the insistence of ascetic interpreters that the meaning is only spiritual. Old Testament writings do not dichotomize sexual and spiritual matters ascetically - and metonymically - as certain Christian and Gnostic writings came to do in the Hellenistic period. The metaphors of Canticles hold body and spirit in a creative, and heuristic, polarity. Evidences of the admixture of Greek thinking in Jewish culture arise in Jewish writings of the periods following the invasions of Alexander - under the Persians, then under the Ptolemies, and most forcefully under the Seleucid emperors (165 BC onwards), who rigorously insisted upon the Hellenization of education.36 Echoing by distant implication the sexual account of creation in Hesiodic myth, and, more obviously, the proto-science of the Timaeus, certain late verses in Proverbs make of the figure of personified Wisdom a demiurgic Logos, a Word, by whom 'the Lord ... hath founded the earth and divided the firmaments' (3:19-20). Wisdom, moreover, is a companion in whom he delights daily: The Lord possessed me in the beginning ... or ever the earth was ... When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth ... [and] strengthened the fountains of the deep.' Greek echoes are even stronger in the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, written in the Seleucid period. Wisdom (Sophia, Sapientia in Greek and Latin) lives in an implied spousal relationship with God (8:3-4); she is an effluence, an emanation, a breath flowing forth from the divine presence to pervade the whole of creation, like the cosmic pneuma of the Stoics. Flowing into the souls of holy men she knits them through herself to God (Wisdom of Solomon 7:24-28). Her fruits in human actions are the four cardinal virtues of the Platonists and Stoics: temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude (8:7).

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The flavour of the passages just described is far less abstract than comparable discourses in Greek philosophy. This Wisdom lives with the devout first person speaker (the book is ascribed across many centuries to Solomon, linking it to the marriage metaphor of his 'Song'). Into his life she brings, and there sustains, the divine effluence. When he vows to bring her home with him as counsel and comfort (8:9), the personification functions more as metaphor than as metonymy. Through Wisdom, as through psyche in the Timaeus and Logos in the Stoics and Middle Platonists, the human and the divine are organically bound. In the later Jewish scriptures the connections are consistently marked by language suggesting fruitful personalized affection. Much of this linguistic dynamic remained within Jewish tradition, to be developed further in medieval kabbalism, and in turn (through Christian kabbalists like Pico and Leone Ebreo) in Spenser's final hymn. Philo: A Platonistjew We turn now to an interpreter whose intellectual and spiritual energies are exercised, like Spenser's, in incorporating one tradition into another. Philo Judaeus, a contemporary of Jesus, enjoyed the excellent education in the classical Greek curriculum that befitted his station as a member of a powerful family in ancient Alexandria, a major centre of Hellenistic learning. As a devout Jew he also enjoyed extensive learning in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Jewish scripture made a century or more earlier to serve the Jewish communities of the diaspora. So natural and so complete is the synthesis of two cultures in Philo's commentaries on the Pentateuch that he is regarded by Jewish scholars such as Nahum Glatzer and Harry Wolfson as 'essentially Jewish,' one whose philosophy is insignificant by comparison to his scriptural hermeneutics, and by an authority on Middle Platonism, John Dillon, as a thoroughly reliable interpreter of the Platonism of his period. Dillon notes, of course, the strong colouration of Jewish piety to which Wolfson and Glatzer respond, but he finds the view that Philo was 'an eclectic because of the apparent amalgam of Platonist, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines observable in his works' to reveal a degree of ignorance of the developed eclecticism of the Platonic tradition in Philo's time. 'It is not necessary ... to go outside the spectrum of ... Platonism to explain his position.'37 I stress Dillon's judgment not merely for its instruction concerning Philo, whose influence on early Christian theology and Renaissance thinking is indisputable. It offers further instruction when we encounter the all too frequent examples of similar thinking among critics of

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Spenser, or of any other creative reinterpreter of the conjoined classical and biblical traditions in the Renaissance. Those whose habits of focal thinking demand distinctions without attendant recognition of larger and more fluid patterns will tend to ignore the evidence of hermeneutical reconstruction.38 Philo, reclaimed for Judaism by modern Jewish scholarship, was best known in the ancient world among early Christian Platonists like Origen and Clement, who found his Platonic commentaries on the Pentateuch, skilfully allegorized by methods learned from the Stoic interpreters of Homer, exemplary for the interpretation of puzzling elements in Christian scripture. He was similarly regarded in the Renaissance. A tradition invoked frequently by Philo, that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras as Pythagoras had been a follower of Moses in the transmission and interpretation of the wisdom that God had originally made known upon Sinai, provided a basis for demonstrations of the harmonies between Greek and Biblical thinking. This tradition of'the ancient theology'39 had genuinely ancient roots: the pagan Neoplatonist, lamblichus, may be bearing testimony to the legend of the Mosaic succession in citing the name of 'Mochos' as the ancient master of Pythagoras in his Life of Plato's teacher.40 Philo's interpretations of the early Genesis narratives are marked by a much more negative attitude to the 'fallen' cosmos than that which prevailed in pre-Hellenic Hebrew scripture. In the Law, the books of Moses, as in the more historical books of the 'former prophets,' the fall in Eden signifies primarily the initiating act of disobedience that led to successive individual and corporate acts of disobedience against the God of the Hebrews. But as later generations turned attention to the broader cosmological backdrop to Jewish history41 they incorporated patterns of hierarchical mythic thinking similar to those in Greek accounts of creation. Under such paradigms, the fall in Eden acquired overtones which led, in Philo as in most early Christian writers, to an ascetic repudiation of the physical (whether physis of the universe or of the individual) in favour of the spiritual, and to a concomitant denigration of all that was symbolically female. In one instance, typical of many others, Philo speaks of the 'divinely inspired' soul overcoming an original disaster that has predisposed it towards the 'female' in the psyche as the throwing off of 'the womanly corruptions' found in 'sense perception and passion.'42 To argue a direct connection between this ascetic and misogynous thinking in Philo and in the slightly later Paul would be foolish; but the comparison arms us usefully against the tendencies of an older critical generation to blame all ascetic and

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misogynous thinking in the last two millennia upon Paul and other New Testament writers. Philo, sharing in the habits of hierarchical layering prevailing in Hellenistic thinking, sets under God the 'most important part of the soul,' mind (nous), and identifies it with the imago del conferred upon the human creature in Genesis i :2/. This higher imaging part he finds in no way conceivable from the characteristics of the human body: presumably Philo approves the demiurgic device - the separating 'isthmus' of the neck. He draws on the eros philosophy of the Phaedrus and the Symposium for his description of the ascent of human nous to that point of ecstatic contemplation at which 'rays of divine light are poured forth upon it like a torrent, so as to bewilder the eyes of its intelligence by their splendour.>43 Anyone who might wish to categorize Philo's commentaries in terms of metaphor and metonym faces serious difficulty: in one sense, his allegorization is metonymic in setting 'this,' a biblical passage, against 'that,' a Platonic exegesis. Yet in another sense we have seen him in this example shifting from the concept of 'imaging,' laden as it is with the potential of metonymic separation, to pre-Plotinian metaphors of light and effluence that are more suggestive of unitive methexis than of metonymically conceived mimesis.44 Visual imagery is primary for Philo. 'Hearing holds second rank to seeing,' he asserts, departing from the conventions of those early Old Testament narratives in which God communicates through the ear but not, of course, departing from the end of Job. Philo picks up one early scriptural narrative in this context, Jacob's encounter with 'the man' at ford Jabbok (Genesis 32:24-30). He interprets the patriarch's new name, Israel, as T have seen God,' drawing on the etymology Jacob ascribes to Peniel when he names the place of the encounter in which his life has been 'preserved.'45 Writing 'on Abraham,' Philo reveals that he follows the Platonic bias towards the most disembodied of the senses: 'It is to sight alone ... that God has caused light to arise ... the first thing ... pronounced in the sacred scripture to be good.' The other four senses are 'slaves to the passions of the flesh ...' Sight alone can look upward to 'other sources of delight. '46 Philo seems to be the originator of a curious and highly evocative metaphor, one that relates directly to the central proposals of this study. In a treatise known as the Heres - 'Who is the Heir of Divine things' - he speaks of the Logos as a divider or cutter, the maker of distinctions in the process of cosmic creation. The word he uses, tomeus, usually signifies something like a knife or two-edged sword, but can

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also signify pincers, a tool with grasping function. Dillon finds it unclear 'where, if anywhere, Philo finds this image.'47 I would suggest Genesis 1:4 as probably contributive: there 'God divided the light from the darkness,' and to an interpreter cognizant of patterns of recurrence that 'division' appears to be a conjunctive limit. David M. Hay, who translates tomeus as 'cutter' in his study of the treatise, finds that paradoxically the tomeus used as severer in creating particulars serves also as the 'Glue or Bond' that holds all things created together thereafter. Logos, as agent of the transcendent God in the articulation of cosmos, 'abides on the border between Creator and creature.' As source of human linguistic articulation, the Logos is also 'the means by which man is able to comprehend the world (how its logical order corresponds to his logic),' and hence to comprehend God through his visible work. Hay relates the Logos-tomeus to the rabbinical image of Torah as a two-edged sword, and by extension to various images of swords in Ephesians 6:17 and in Revelation. In all of these, the word as distinguishing instrument has both purgative and preservative potency. In Heres, Hay argues, Philo presents the image of the Wise Man as one who, in full knowledge of the world of divisions, presses humbly yet boldly on in inquiries that lead to a 'zenith where the human mind ... is displaced by the divine mind in the highest form of ecstasy.' Hay believes Philo's driving purpose is to invite participation in the rigorous drawing of distinctions, because 'the path to salvation leads through a succession of separations.>48 Although Hay is not, of course, writing in the light of my arguments on the approach to an aporrhesis of tacit meaning through a dialectically induced aporia, his explication of the tomeus as divider-bridger shows it to be a very specific metaphor for the logos-thinking that waits on its own boundaries for a 'torrent of light.'49 Philo defines and joins in this idiosyncratic metaphor the crucial juncture between focal or cutting and tacit or bonding modes of thinking: in doing so he is, fully, both Jew and Greek. In 'On the Creation' (LIV-LV) Philo speaks again of boundaries, this time of the trees in Eden as 'boundaries as it were in the soul,' there being 'no trees of life or of knowledge upon the earth nor is it likely any will appear hereafter. '5° His interpretation is concerned with the matter of disobedience and punishment: he does not claim that the treeboundaries are imposed for heuristic purposes, as one might conjecture in the light of the doctrine of the fortunate fall, developed somewhat later,51 or in the light of the central premises of this study. Philo finds analogues explaining the degeneracy of fallen humanity in the Platonic dialogues. The generations descending from Adam and Eve are

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like repeated copies of the 'first men' whose excellences derived directly from God. Like the products of sculptors and painters, such 'imitations always fall short of the original.' The deterioration is likened to the progressive weakening in the force connecting a series of iron rings.52 The echoes of Republic X and Ion are clear. To the precariousness of the human predicament as defined in Greek terms, Philo proposes a solution in the biblical model, and guide, Moses. One escapes the results of the fall by imitating Moses, who by entering into the cloudy darkness over Sinai encountered God, and became a paradeigma, a pattern, capable of serving those who strive after him by imprinting in their own souls the image (typos) of his goodness.53 Reconstructing Philo's perspective on the imitatio Mosis, Burton L. Mack finds that it must be understood against 'a qualified dualism or a dynamic monism in Philo in which Platonic and Stoic terminology are used [as was the terminology of the Logos- tomeus in Heres, which Mack does not mention] both to distinguish between two kinds of cosmic order and to hold them together in relation under the ... absolutely transcendent God.' The two orders reflect Plato's sensible and noetic worlds; but for Philo the noetic is 'not ... excluded from the dynamic processes of creation.' Nous relates to creative process both as Timaean pattern and as Aristotelian telos. 'The basic pattern of cosmic process includes three movements: descent, the way through the world, ascent.'54 Mack insists that the dynamism of such a system, once understood, works to unify the whole and overcome the separations imposed by systematic language.55 The Jewish worshipper, participating by mimesis in the paradigm of Moses, and thereby engaging himself in the Pentateuchal texts that Moses received directly from God, is enabled to make the 'transition into the archetypal world... from "hearing" words to "seeing" the word as it reflects allegorically the grand cosmic story.'56 If we compare Philo's textually based inquiries into the Mosaic accounts of creation with Job's more anguished questioning we find the scriptural interpreter and the mythic hero pointing towards the same goal - the awareness of the God who commands obedience uande a set of binding laws or circumstances, and yet rewards energetic questioning by permitting the sight of the full beauty of his face reflected in the order of the cosmos. This devout Jew, through whom I have chosen to preface a number of demonstrations of Jesus and Paul's interpretive shaping of later thinking, shows us the radical freedom enjoyed by a Jewish interpreter of scripture in this crucial era. Whether abroad or in Palestine, terms were employed in hermeneusis that could not possibly have arisen in

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the originating cultural milieu.57 On the other hand, Philo, with his Middle Platonist's methods and language, offers instructive contrasts to the strategies characteristic of Jesus and Paul. An aphorism by Northrop Frye completes this transition to the major New Testament figures: 'historical truth has no correlation with spiritual profundity, unless the relation is inverse.'58 Metaphoric language, of the sort Jesus used characteristically and Paul used to a greater degree than the 'men of Athens' whom he clearly knew, is the best carrier of ahistorical meaning. Jesus and Paul: Fulfiller and Abrogator of the Law Neither Jesus nor Paul set out to break with Judaism. Had either known of the work of Philo he would have recognized in it a mimesis of the deep engagement with Hebrew scripture in which the Jew is trained. The earliest Christian church was the communal response of a group of Jews to Jesus' life of reinterpretive prophecy, to the death that he thereby found demanded of him, and to the hope rekindled after his crucifixion in his followers' interpretation of evidences of his continuing life among them.59 In the words of a modern Jewish Christian, 'At the very least ... Jesus must be regarded as the last of the Biblical Hebrew prophets and the first of the Christian saints.'60 In his turn, Paul helped shape the developing church through language he had learned as a Jew of the diaspora in Tarsus, a milieu not as intellectual as Philo's Alexandria, but more Hellenized than the Palestine Jesus knew. But in Jesus' time, Palestinians did use Greek as the language of commerce and secular learning: even there a purely Hebrew experience could be had only in the study of the earlier Old Testament. Such late Jewish writings as parts of Daniel and the Wisdom of Solomon had been written in Aramaic and Greek, respectively. When we turn to consider Jesus as interpreter of the Old Testament we rely, of course, on narratives in the New Testament that are themselves interpretations of a life lived in full consciousness of Jewish scripture. Although the authors of these narratives had memories trained in a strong residual oral tradition, and although holding the words ascribed to Jesus sacred they must have changed them as little as possible except in attempts to convey the meaning they found rooted in their master's person, the precise utterances of Jesus are beyond certain recall. What I say of him here is said of a composite literary paradigm, elements of which were gathered to represent the historical figure after he had passed from the writers' world. The warning is not meant to

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apologize for the present undertaking, simply to define it. It bears analogies to Isis' gathering of the fragments of her Osiris, and to Milton's mimesis of the reconstruction of Truth after sparagmos in Areopagitica. Gadamer notes that the word 'representation' shifted its significance in early Christian practice: 'in the light of the ... idea of the incarnation and the mystical body ... Repraesentare [came to mean] "to make present".' To put it Platonically, mimesis came even closer now to the immediacy implied in methexis than in the thinking of Aristotle.61 It may be useful here to offer an alternative account of my understanding of this critical enterprise: it is 'logocentric,' in some of the senses indicated by Gadamer, and by Derrida in Of Gramma tology.62 Matters of Christological logocentricity I leave to those who, as a current idiom has it, are 'doing theology.' The interpreter about whom I now pose my interpretive questions and propose my interpretive reconstructions lives in the ahistorical and 'spiritually profound' medium of metaphoric narrative. Even as we admit, then, the elusiveness of 'the historical Jesus,' we may find that language redeployed in successive searches for meaning can conjoin successive participants in a unified and unifying dynamis. Through our own acts of questioning language discloses its creative potency: the Jesus of narrative discloses his power. In the gospels Jesus is shown as fully conversant with Jewish law (by Luke, in 2:41-9, at least from the age of twelve); he is not shown in any particular relationship to Greek culture. We know that the man behind the image must have spoken Aramaic, not the Greek in which the gospels re-enact his words. He speaks often in parables, brief metaphoric narratives that invite the metonymic strategy of allegorical interpretation. Occasionally he offers guidance to interpreters - as in his probing question following his tale of the good Samaritan. But more important for this book are three further areas of investigation: the passages in which Jesus draws attention to his own revisionist hermeneutic as he addresses elements of the Law; the statements he is given to make about his own role and significance; and various symbolic usages of the language of hearing and seeing that testify to a paradigm of metanoia typologically adumbrated in Job and realized in Jesus. When Jesus calls for 'ears to hear' he is speaking polysemously. In the early Old Testament idiom to which Job's comforters conform, to hear is to obey without question; to Job and to Jesus it is to comprehend and respond; and often in the Bible 'seeing' becomes the metaphor for the new mode of response.63 The seventh chapter of Mark offers a highly compressed narrative in

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which Jesus confronts the Pharisees on matters of ritual ablutions, ceremonial gifts, and dietary law, accusing them of 'making the word of God of none effect through [their] tradition.' Next he calls the people to him so that they may 'hearken ... and understand' if they have 'ears to hear' that evil and defilement are matters of inner concern rather than outer observance. Radical as the confrontation is made to seem, Jesus is here confirming, as well as extending, a shift towards the understanding of the Law in spiritual terms that had many roots in the later Old Testament, as, for instance, in Micah 6:8. In his first chapter Mark sets an account of preaching and healing at Capernaum in close juxtaposition to a narrative of the baptism, in which sight and hearing both figure prominently. The dove of the Spirit descends as a voice from heaven announces the Sonship of Jesus. Against this tacit background, Mark gives the people's reaction to the new preacher: 'they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes.' The link between the Spirit incorporated in this man and his authority is established.64 Luke, who repeats the Capernaum story, prefaces it by an account of a prior address to Jesus' home synagogue in Nazareth. Luke has already suggested the dynamis of God at work in Jesus by bringing the two into near identity in the celebrated ambiguity of Jesus' command to the devil, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God' (4:12). Although that command may be read initially as Jesus' self-addressed scriptural reminder against the temptation to cast himself down from the temple, Luke reinforces the more Christological dimensions of the verse when he gives Jesus striking claims for himself in Nazareth. After reading a text from Isaiah 61:1, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach ... heal ... [and] set at liberty them that are bruised,' Jesus pauses dramatically till 'the eyes of all' are on him and then proclaims This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears' (Luke 4:18-21). Using Nazareth as synecdoche for the Jewish nation, Luke foreshadows the rejections of passion week by showing the townspeople's wrath against the new prophet: they expel him and threaten him with death. Jesus has begun his ministry at home in Judaism, but his is an interpretation of the Old Testament that his people will not accept 'in their ears.' Eyes to see are given to only a few, even when all train the organs of external perception upon him. Matthew's fifth chapter, his first on the 'Sermon on the Mount/ draws a striking image of Jesus as reconstructive critic of the Law. Representing collected sayings of Jesus in a highly stylized arrangement, it begins reassuringly: Think not that I am come to destroy the

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law or the prophets: I am ... come ... to fulfil.' With formulaic emphasis, Jesus modifies a series of older commandments by saying 'ye have heard that it was said by them of old ..." and then, after stating the law in question, 'but I say unto you ..." Each of the new injunctions is harder to obey than its predecessor: killing can be avoided more easily than anger 'without... cause'; adultery than lustful feelings. 'An eye for an eye' is a more welcome precept under pressure for revenge than commands to love the enemy and turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:17-48). The final injunction, 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father ... in heaven is perfect,' seems impossible to obey as it is translated here, but it can sound almost like a reassuring promise in the Greek. Rendered literally, the verb tenses yield 'Shall be therefore you perfect, as the father of you, who in the heavens, perfect is.'65 Where the Authorized Version gives 'perfect,' Matthew's Greek gives inflections of telos. The call, through mimesis, points towards the perfect pattern, the telos, the Omega. Dynamis is called to be transformed into energeia. The call, here, is not issued in a Platonic or Aristotelian treatise but by the Jesus whom Matthew has depicted (3:16, 17) upon his baptism as the realized model of Sonship. Power and pattern are visible in the midst of this human community in the one who speaks the commanding promise. Each writer of the synoptic gospels has something of the seer about him. As each narrates the events and sayings he accepts as phenomena of history, he re-enacts his own perplexity, showing the inevitable connection between astonishment and the divine disclosure he has found in Jesus.66 As each leads a reader through the paths he himself has travelled he does so metaphorically, in the sense that he makes no effort to abstract the doctrinal meaning that others may infer from his patterns. The Jesus of these three gospels proclaims not himself but, repeatedly, 'the kingdom of God' (in Matthew, of 'heaven'). In Old Testament usage the phrase implies hope for an order better than that of the writer's time present. Earlier, as in i Chronicles 29:11, the eschaton is visualized as an historical national triumph; later, as in Isaiah 24:18-23, as the time when God will break down all limiting forms to renew the cosmic order. Closely aligned to visualizations of the 'day of the Lord' ushering in the kingdom is the expectation of a visible Messiah - in Daniel he descends on clouds of glory (Daniel 7:13, 14). Very little tonal difference separates the apocalyptic prophecies in the later Old Testament from those ascribed to Jesus in Mark 13, Luke 21, and Matthew 23 and 24. Jesus prophesies a time of destruction and chaos, after which 'this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world ... and

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then shall the end come' (Matthew 24:14). Matthew's word for the 'end' is telos, the same word that has been translated as 'perfect' in the sermon. Again, intertextual memories of Aristotle are evoked by the Greek language. They prompt the conjecture that in these very different genres, myth and sermon, we have been offered 'alternative accounts,' not logically compatible, of a significance too large to be conveyed by either alone. From the outset of Jesus' ministry his multivalent proclamations of the kingdom are associated with the call to metanoia (eg, Matthew 4:17, Mark 1:15): the usual translation, 'repentance,' is far too narrow. The call is to a 'change of mind upon reflexion,' to quote the lexicon, a reforming of inherited images and concepts into new patterns. Any new pattern 'conformable' to the mind of the proclaimer (as in Paul, Romans 8:29) must be inclusive enough to prompt recognition of the kingship of God in the created cosmos (as Job comes to see it when he 'repents'). Moreover, the network of meaning must be subtle enough to prompt recognition of the kingship at work in the Jesus who says it is 'at hand' (Matthew 10:7). John's gospel stands clearly apart from the other three. Like them he narrates events and sayings with an eye to the total design; but since he seems more Greek than they, both in his abstract philosophical prologue (John 1:1-14) and in the otherworldly immediacy of his seer's vision, he goes much further than they towards direct doctrinal statements. He usually attributes these to Jesus: 'the Father ... hath committed all judgment unto the Son' (John 5:22) and 'I am the Resurrection and the Life' (John 11:25). John weaves Judaic and Hellenistic elements together seamlessly. As he builds his composite paradigm of the LogosMessiah, he appears to be reflecting Parmenidean, Platonic, and Aristotelian particulars in 'I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life' (14:6); yet his formula of presentation, the 'I am,' recapitulates God's selfannouncement in Exodus 3:13, 'the Way' recalls 'the way of the righteous' under the Law (Deuteronomy 8:6; Psalm 1:6; Isaiah 30:21), and the further metaphors of 'Bread' and 'Wine' that he connects to the 'I am' (6:35, 15:1, 5) are fully rooted in Old Testament usage. The effortless joining of Greek and Hebrew elements in John, as in Philo and, we shall see also, in Paul, serves as reminder that when meaning is diffused through more than one language veil in a complex tradition it is misleading to sever by analysis one veil too sharply from another. The ninth chapter of John exemplifies his methods and his vision: in it he juxtaposes and draws together metaphors of blindness and seeing in narrative mimeses of questioning and significant response. Of a man

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'blind from his birth' the disciples ask Jesus a question born out of the perspective of Job's comforters: 'who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?'Jesus implicitly rejects their premises: 'Neither ... but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.' In the oddness of an apparent non sequitur, he proclaims himself 'the light of the world,' and having 'thus spoken,' confirms these words associating himself with Logos by restoring light to the man's physical eyes. Next John brings the Pharisees into the context with their own set of questions. Of Jesus some deduce that 'this man is not of God,' because he has healed on the Sabbath, but others ask 'How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles?' This time it is the testimony of the one who has been healed that reveals the irrelevance of the questioning: 'Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.' During further interrogation in terms of the Pharisaic premises the man is pushed to declare an incipient faith that 'if [Jesus] were not of God, he could do nothing,' and is excommunicated. The final bloc of this narrative implies that this man now seeing who was blind, now saying to Jesus, 'I believe,' stands metaphorically for, as in the narrative he stands with, the new Christian community which will, like him, be cast out by the Jews. At the end of the chapter, to Jesus' riddling words 'I am come ... that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be made blind' the Pharisees ask mockingly, 'Are we [then] blind?'Jesus answers, still riddling on the paradoxes of sin and healing, blindness and vision, 'now ye say, we see; therefore your sin remaineth.' Although their own scripture has revealed the need for metanoia (Job 42:5; Isaiah 29:8), and although the paradoxes that drive a serious interpreter to astonishment and not to mockery have been uttered directly to them, these Pharisees will go on asking questions based in the Law when its fulfilment is present to their unheeding ears and eyes. When Luke in Acts tells the story of the most celebrated metanoia in Christian history, that of the Pharisee Saul while he was 'yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord' (Acts 9:1), he makes full use of the current metaphors of light, vision, and hearing that John and Matthew have worked into their narratives. On the road to Damascus Saul is first struck down by 'a light from heaven' and then addressed in the Old Testament manner through the ear: 'Saul, Saul, why persecutes! thou me?' The call is in question form, as if reflecting a process deep in the visionary auditor. In his responding query as to the confronter's identity Saul responds to the note of authority in the voice: 'Who art thou, Lord?' To the answer 'I am Jesus,'

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already encrypted in the word 'Lord,' he responds with continuing meek obedience, and with signs - physical blindness and abstention from physical nutrients for three days - that point to the inward spiritual thrust of the experience. Upon a touch from the hand of the guardian who has nurtured him in the Christian community for the three dark days, Saul regains his sight, is baptized with the Holy Ghost, and takes meat to be strengthened for his new life in the world, 'preaching Christ' (Acts 9:1-20). By many of these familiar metaphoric details Luke has underscored the spiritual nature of the 'revelation of Jesus Christ' by which Paul claims so much authority in his more polemical letters. But Luke at the same time has established strong links between his accounts of SaulPaul's conversion and of Stephen's martyrdom. Saul was 'among those consenting,' when the attackers 'stopped their ears' to Stephen's words describing his vision of the risen Christ in the opening heavens; Saul was there to hear Stephen's mimetic prayer of forgiveness and absolution towards his persecutors under the fatal volley of stones. In Luke's juxtapositions a historical event, mimetic of another historical event, is shown to set in train the dynamis that will realize itself first in Paul's experience of metanoia, and thereafter in his continuing life of response. 'Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!' (i Corinthians 9:16). Paul has experienced an imperative he knows as divine.67 I turn now to the words of Paul himself, an energetic Jewish dogmatist turned seer. What the gospels and the book of Acts imply through narrative accretion Paul struggles to make explicit in his letters. Unlike those who can speak of Jesus through direct experience of the historical man or through the continuous chain of memory communicated by the disciples, Paul must establish his new authority among the justifiably suspicious Christians on the basis of his mystical experience of the resurrected Christ. Having encountered in a flash the paradigm of cosmic significance, he must translate the received disclosure into successive structures of language, alternative accounts, each of which is bound to fall short in some respect. His struggles to find expression in metaphor, paradox, and argument carry his readers along in a perplexing search for systematic doctrine. Whether incidentally or through his training (he shows himself to be no mean rhetorician), Paul's letters provide stimuli to his readers' experiences of the mystery of his Christ, and to further interpretive efforts. One of Paul's greatest needs after conversion was to work out the relationship between his new religion and his old.68 With great herme-

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neutic freedom he announces: 'Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law' (Galatians 3:13); for 'the letter kills, but the Spirit makes alive' (2 Corinthians 3:6). In the well-known allegorization of the figures of Sarah and Hagar (Genesis 16 and 21; Galatians 4:22-31), he establishes his claims for the new spiritual revelation of Christ in Sarah, the typological image of the mother of the patriarchal line. Paul's reading of the episode bears little direct correlation to the ancient narrative. Yet he maintains a humble gratitude towards the stern law of his people which, in convicting the pious Jew of his own helplessness in the time before 'faith is come' serves as a 'schoolmaster to bring [him] unto Christ' (Galatians 3:24-5) - to that limit where salvation can break through (Romans 3:20, 7:24) ,69 Paul's sense of the inadequacy of purely logical language shows everywhere in his discourse. He sets apparently meaningful statements out in self-cancelling patterns, or in contexts that whittle away subtly at the statements. The widest possible field of vision is often necessary to reveal their coherence, as in the following example. To the Corinthian Christians Paul writes, in consecutive verses, that God has 'reconciled us unto himself; that he 'was in Christ, reconciling'; and that he, Paul, as 'ambassador' exhorts them 'in Christ's stead' to 'be ... reconciled to God' (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). A reader may well react with initial impatience - where is the emphasis to lie? In the passage the goal is first proclaimed as accomplished, then as having been in the process of being accomplished in a lifetime now ended, and at the end of the progression as yet to be experienced.70 A querying of the successive formulations throws attention on the one constant in the three sentences, 'reconciliation,' in the Greek katallage. Originally the word signified an exchange of currency (a suggestion that carries over to the notion of redemption), but it came to mean also, according to the lexicon, 'a change of perspective' from enmity or alienation to friendship. In the first instance, then, the word can suggest a gift of great value, grace from God to 'us'; in the second, the grace in action in the paradoxical overcoming of the split between the subject of the action, the giver, and the object, the human recipient; and in the third the completion of the circuitous exchange of grace in the recipient's acknowledging awareness of what has been done, and what was being done, in the first two statements. The metaphor of a spiritual circuitry, analogous to that adumbrated in Plato and fully expressed later in Plotinus, is implied when we are driven to ponder this 'odd' handling of tenses. We lose much of Paul's compelling prickliness in the interpretation, but we gain a representation of

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the dynamis of Christ that no single direct doctrinal statement could convey. Paul develops many more pointed paradoxes in struggling to express his comprehension of the Christ who moves in the transformative transactions between the divine and the human. The 'second man' or second Adam, Christ Jesus, is 'the Lord from heaven' (i Corinthians 15:47). His wisdom is foolishness and stumbling-block to Greek and Jew (i Corinthians 1123). His weakness is strength; his death is life (i Corinthians 1:25-7; i Corinthians 15:20-57). Paul's greatest stress in interpreting his Lord as dynamic paradigm falls upon events and significances that the Jesus in the gospels can only be shown to allude to proleptically: the crucifixion and the experiences his companions will have of his continuing presence in the resurrection appearances and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Paul has been called and baptized into the Christian community, yet he believes 'Christ sent me not to baptize but to ... the preaching of the cross' (i Corinthians 1:17-18). Through the 'offence' of the cross, not through his teaching, has Christ 'redeemed us from ... the law' (Galatians 5:11; 3:13): the aporetic extremity of that passive-active sign, the cross, effects the release of the spirit into the world as the dying body yields it up. For those who have come to know Christ 'in the spirit' (Galatians 3:3) paradox can serve to effect a renewal of the valued awareness. For those to whom the spirit has not brought 'the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God' (2 Corinthians 4:3), Paul knows that the logical arguments he is capable of mounting at times will end, whatever his efforts, in an unconvincing tangle.71 Paul speaks in one instance of the given light as 'the mind of Christ,' (i Corinthians 1:15-2:16), the nous of Christ. This noun, which participates intertextually in the language of Greek philosophy that Paul uses also in his sermon to the Greeks at Athens (Acts 17), appears rarely in his letters: he speaks more characteristically of the highest spiritual principle in the word pneuma, breath, which carries rich significance as a translation of the Hebrew ruach, breath or spirit (eg, Genesis 2:7), and as one word the Stoics use for the fiery principle that animates the cosmos, otherwise spoken of as logos.72 Whether 'noetic' or 'pneumatic,' the living power is shown to be given and received in language that suggests participatory mimesis. The righteous will 'be conformed to the image of [the] Son' (Romans 8:29); Paul's own tribulations make him 'conformable unto' the death of his Christ (Philippians 3:10); 'Be ye followers [mimetai] of me, even as I also am of Christ' (i Corinthians 11: i); 'let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus ... Wherefore ... work out your own salvation ... For it is

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God which worketh in you both to will and to do ..." (Philippians 2:5-13). Paul's patterns of thinking are, like Philo's, undeniably Jewish and yet at the same time conformable to the patterns of stoicized Middle Platonism. Paul's imitatio Christi parallels Philo's imitatio Mosis. Both Hellenized Jewish interpreters helped shape the patterns of patristic thinking. But there is a crucial contrast: Paul's interpretation of the early Old Testament may resemble Philo's in departing from the literal narrative very freely, but Paul can derive his 'spiritual' interpretation of gospel events by building upon elements already present in the oral tradition concerning Jesus. The pneuma, the holy spirit, had been associated with the figure of Jesus from his baptism onward. Recent Pauline interpreters have abandoned the misunderstanding common a century ago, wherein Paul was accused of imposing an alien theology of salvation upon the purer and simpler moral 'teaching' of Jesus.73 From this argument that Paul is seeking to make metonymically, doctrinally, systematically, available what is metaphorically implied in the narratives of the gospels - even as he finds himself driven back by perplexity into metaphor and paradox - I move now to consider matters of tone in Paul's letters that do separate him from most of the New Testament writers. As proclaimer of the incarnate Christ, Paul is caught in a paradox that seems at times more personal than doctrinal: he constantly betrays in the face of'the flesh,' (sarx), the symbolically female, a horror that spills over into his language, colouring his contributions to Christian tradition. He cries for deliverance from 'the body of this death,' yet proclaims the resurrection of the 'spiritual body' to counter the more Platonic notion of the immortality of the soul (Romans 7:24; i Corinthians 15:39-42). He proclaims the equality of'male and female' in Christ (Galatians 3:28), yet advocates the ideal of celibacy (i Corinthians 1:1-19) • I cite these puzzles not to add another voice to the ongoing debates over Paul's 'dualism' but to observe that in the attitudes he conveys towards the world of 'the flesh' Paul departs both from earlier Jewish norms and from Platonic insights upon the axis that conjoins the physical to the spiritual in the experience of sexual love. His attitudes have probably been shaped by the kind of thinking that is often called 'gnostic.' Gnosticism and Gnosis On any overview, ancient gnosticism must be considered not a single system of religious myth and doctrine but a medley of incompatible texts and evidences that have given rise over the centuries to a variety of

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equally incompatible interpretive responses. Until relatively recently, gnosticism has been described as a Christian heresy evolved through the Platonizing or Hellenizing of a hypothetically purer and more down-toearth New Testament religion. My focus on the Greek elements discernible both in the gospel accounts and in Paul has been intended to counteract the error of splitting 'biblical' from 'Greek.' Sounder hypotheses now current find the strongest bases of gnosticism in the radical reinterpretation of Jewish scripture by Jewish ascetic cults which turned their backs on the community of the external law to promulgate an esoteric faith drawing on Persian and Greek thinking to supplement the Torah. Not surprisingly, as Jewish gnostics drew apart from more orthodox Judaism they participated in movements current in paganism.74 'Gnostics' professed the saving power of a spiritual gnosis or knowledge which was occult, hidden, in two senses - it was not readily apparent to the physical senses or to natural reason, and it was available only to chosen initiates. Seeing themselves as pneumatics, or spiritual men, they felt a sharp separation from the rest of humanity, whose spirits they saw as clogged with the quasi-material vestures of the lower psyche. In most systems described from surviving texts gnosis involves the repudiation of the cosmos as the work of an evil demiurgic creator (a demonic parody of Plato's craftsman), and as the trap, prison, or tomb obscuring the divine pneumatic spark that lies either asleep or in anguished longing at the centre of each human creature.75 But in some passages the gnosis communicates to the reader the possibility of restoring the divine unity by several means: by participating imaginatively in the myth of the descent of the divine redeemer, his ingathering of the separated sparks, and his reascent; by a meditative inturning of the true pneumatic self; or by a contemplative revitalizing of the cosmos in the light of the achieved gnosis. In words ascribed to the redeemer Jesus by a gnostic Christian writer we see implications of all three variants: 'Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty ... Not... "Here it is" or "There it is." Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it' (Gospel of Thomas) J6 Although this passage is much more explicit in its mysticism than the kingdom proclama tions in the synoptic gospels, it offers similarities to the representations of New Testament thinking advanced above.

8s

'Each vnto himselfe'

Texts such as the Gospel of Thomas have been available to modern interpreters only since a large cache of documents was discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945. Elaine Pagels, who describes a number of them and speculates on their place in early church history, believes that they must radically alter our understanding of the intellectual and spiritual forces that gave rise to the canonical New Testament texts. They offer, she believes, a 'powerful alternative' to our inherited images of early Christian thinking77 and justify our recognition of vestigial clues in the canon to doctrines of a mystical innerness that the historical church did not succeed in expunging, or forcing literally underground. What we now know, thus, about the ancient currents of thinking so discernible in Paul that gnostic Christians of the next century could look to him as their authority78 - cuts in two ways. On the one hand we find the darker form of gnosticism, familiar to us through the wellknown reconstructions of its texts by Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion.79 The dualistic otherworldliness of this form far exceeds the more dualistic utterances of Plato. This world is no longer seen as a cosmic mimesis trying to enter into methexis, but rather as a 'hateful darkness,' a tomb fashioned in layers by fantastically elaborated hostile forces emanating, not from the highest God, but from an evil demiurge. 'Love' is no longer seen as a creative force but as the destructive motion that draws the human race down into 'the body of this death': lovers of the body actually are in death.80 Pessimistic perspectives did not need to be sought out in esoteric Hermetic texts during the Renaissance in England, although they certainly could be reinforced by much in the newly available ancient lore. The Calvinists, on the authority of some of Paul's darker texts, found God unknowable forever to the reprobate even if not to the elect. By reinforcing a view of the world as 'fleshly slime' they contributed to the pervasive melancholy marking the end of Elizabeth's reign. When the Christian hope was rendered problematic for those who feared reprobation, perplexity was generated as forcibly as by any older scepticism. When, moreover, human sexuality, the love of body for body, was seen as implicated in the radical separation of the human creature from the hidden God, even ostensibly frivolous love poetry was rendered suspect. A much brighter form of gnosis was available, alternatively, in other texts within the Hermetica. This form is distantly akin to the radiant cosmic vision experienced by Job, and very close in substance to the affirmations of Plotinus and of later kabbalists. In such texts the lower

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cosmos is joined to higher levels and to the divinity beyond by chains of mediating spiritual presences. These, 'daemons' to the pagans and 'angels' to Jews and Christians, may aid the gnostic initiate to escape the earthbound state. Spenser's images of irradiating cosmic hierarchies in the 'An Hymne of Heauenly Beavtie' draws upon the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius through which the affirmative aspects of gnosticism were mediated to Christian tradition.81 The role of the female is larger in gnostic myth - both in the pagan forms Hans Jonas reconstructs and in the gospels Elaine Pagels draws upon - than in most ancient traditions. The 'female' may be regarded initially as the inferior psychic element which, as in Philo, must be transformed into the pneumatic 'male' through the redemptive process, but 'she' is redeemable. 'She' may be visualized as sharing in the androgynous godhead. 'She' may assume the role of Sophia, the emanation from deity we have already observed in the later Old Testament, now an appealingly vulnerable wanderer - very much like Spenser's Una when she is separated from her strong protectors. If 'she' is held responsible for any ills in the lower world it is because, like Pandora (and unlike Una), she took part in the scattering of the sparks of primal light, a view somehow softer than that taken of Eve during many Christian centuries. And when, in the gnostic gospels, the female assumes the role of Mary Magdalen, she is pictured as being much closer to an equally loving Christ than she is in the canonical accounts. Since the terminology associated with gnosticism is now much in flux as specialists work through the newly available texts, I avoid the unqualified use of the word 'gnostic' except in the time-established dark sense that is rooted in the attacks of the early church fathers upon the movements they judged heretical and to which they conceded no positive dimensions. In any other sense the word will be clarified by context. For more positive dimensions of gnosis in the Renaissance, 'Hermetic' is still serviceable: historically it is appropriate as connected with the Poimandres and Asclepius, texts ascribed to 'Hermes Trismegistus' and transmitted by Ficino as part of the whole spectrum of 'Platonism'; speaking mythographically, it is appropriate to texts that depict active conjunctive forces between lower and higher worlds which serve the same intermediary functions as the Olympian Hermes.82 Although accounts of the older gnosis were, of course, available, the gnosis that the Protestant Christian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries looked to for liberation and redemption could never be an exclusively guarded secret. Although the older texts might help to

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'Each vnto himselfe'

define its richness, the knowledge of salvation was understood in more orthodox terms as the gift of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the LogosChrist, baptizing the agonist from perplexity into a new phase of spiritual life. Each reception of the Spirit ensured the enlargement and clarification of the recipient's field of tacit knowing.

CHAPTER FOUR

'A temple faire and a undent' The Plotinian Paradigm

Likeness to good men is the likeness of two pictures of the same subject to each other; but likeness to the gods is likeness to the model, a being of a different kind to ourselves. (Enneads 1.2.7)'

The salient model of the thinking we now call Neoplatonic - whether we refer to the ancient pagan philosophers we now approach or to the Christian syncretists of the Renaissance who anchored their metaphoric thinking in Ficino's translations of the ancient texts - is to be sought in Plotinus. Plotinus understood himself as a 'Platonist,' just as through Plato's respectful presentations of Socratic method, of Pythagorean wisdom, and of the pluralistic monism of Parmenides it appears that he understood himself, variously, as a Socratic, a Pythagorean, and perhaps a Parmenidean. While thinking of himself as a Platonist, Plotinus freely assimilated anything he found of value from Aristotelian, Stoic, Sceptic, and Oriental thinking: his sense of the tradition was fluid and inclusive. We proceed now to examine the model implicit in the mystical philosophy of Plotinus, a model that was indirectly available in the West through the medieval centuries, and freshly available in Ficino's translations to the readers of the Renaissance. We anticipate the modifications they, in turn, will make in their later interpretations.2 Plotinus and the Enneads Plotinus never spells out fully the model that lies behind his Enneads, but in each of the treatises he assumes his students' knowledge and recognition of it. When his disciple, Porphyry, assembled and edited

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'A temple faire and auncient'

the master's lecture notes for posthumous publication he explained in the introductory Life that Plotinus taught the system orally and cumulatively, as he himself had been taught orally by Ammonias Saccas, teacher also of an Origen who was possibly the Neoplatonic church father.3 Porphyry's oblique apology for the absence of a self-consistent archetypal model of Plotinian thinking in the texts he edits is superfluous: Plotinus himself explains repeatedly that the language he must force to his purposes is always inadequate. Hence, he implies, the model approached through energetic linguistic inquiry must not be expected to be available within any single linguistic vehicle. In Saussure's terms, we may think of Plotinus' systematic model as 'une langue,' one he develops from the codes established and modified by earlier Platonists, and of the separate Enneads (as also of the disparate utterances of each of his predecessors) as 'des paroles.' Jonathan Culler's observations on Saussure's thinking are pertinent: 'Everything in la langue ... must have first been in parole. But parole is made possible by la langue, and if one attempts to identify any utterance or text as a moment of origin one finds ... [dependence] upon prior codes ... It is the nature of codes to be always already in existence, to have lost origins.'4 In talking about 'the Soul of the All,' Plotinus explains, 'we must consider that the terms "entry" and "ensoulment" are used in the discussion for the sake of clear explanation. For there never was a time when this universe did not have a soul, or when body existed in the absence of soul, or when matter was not set out in order; but in discussing these things one can consider them apart from each other' (4.3.9). He articulates clearly here the difficulties faced by anyone who seeks to bring under the focus of diachronic language the apprehensions gained in a synchronic awareness of pattern. Further in this vein: 'we "Platonists" speak of one thing as prior and another as posterior not in terms of "logical [or focal] distinction" but in terms of "hierarchical order'" (1.4.3); 47, 49. See participation (methexis) and particialso glossary. patory mimesis. See mimesis (and numerology 217-18, 229, 233-8, 241 methexis) and glossary. Nygren, Anders 136, 276nio, 28ini2 Patrides, C.A. 248n4, 271^5

322

Index

pattern. See paradigm. Paul (the apostle) 3, 74, 80-3; and the body, 47, 146 149, 29on24; and Calvinism, 271^5; and Christmysticism, 97, 126, 142, 2s8ns2; and 'Dionysius the Areopagite,' 124, 126, 273ns6; and gnosticism, 85, 104, 118; and Greek thinking, 78, 156; and hermeneusis, 143, 146, 155, 265nn68 and 69; and language, 81; and wisdom, 186 Peck, Scott 28sn2 Pembroke, Countess of 194 Pepin, Jean 269^ perichoresis, 131. See also paradigm. Perkins, William 21, 116-17, 144-5 'personal knowing.' See Polanyi; tacit and focal thinking. Petrarch 138, 154, 168, 172 Philo 69-74: and creation, 109; and eros, 71, 180; and the 'female,' 70, 86; Greek and biblical, blending of, 69, 83, 123-4; and hermeneusis, 73-4; and logos-tomeus, 71-2; and triads, 264^4; and imitatio Mosis, 97, 147; Heres, 71-2; On the Creation, 72-3 Pico 69, 135, 144-6: Heptaplus, 144, 273^1, 277m i, 278^9 'pillours of eternity' 240-3 Plato (and Platonisms): on Beauty, 51-2; and Christian Platonism (Christian humanism), 7-9, 11532, 137, 141, 145-6, 159, 184; and 'evil' in matter, 85, 91, 98-9; on hermeneusis, 10-11, 42-4, 55-6, 90-1, 134-6, 29on3o; on language, 26-8, 40-4; and logocentrism, 12; on love and creativity, 44-53, 258n5o; and method (dialectic), 25, 28-31, 35-6, 96, 253~4ni4; and mimesis, 17-18, 56, 139; his myths, 37, 52, 256n25; and mysticism,

19, 263-4^2; on Necessity (ananke), 45, 47-8, 51; and numerology, 48; and Plotinus, 88-104, 147; on poetry, 39-40; and Pythagoras, 26, 30, 56-7, 147, 222, 235; Socrates in the dialogues, 31-3, 35; and Spenser, 134-7, 141, 150, and implicit throughout Chapters 7-10; and tripartite soul, 38, 49, 59, 179-80, 182, 214, 232; Cratylus, 27, 41, 254ms; Defense, 28, 32, 33, 2s6n27; Ion, 40, 73, 263-4^2; Laws, 173, 258^0; 'Letter 7,' 36, 62, 247n2, 2$6n27; Meno, 30, 32, 34-6, 40, 117, 256nn25 and 27; Parmenides, 17, 22, 42-4,

49, 78, 127, 262H3O,

266n2, 269n8; Phaedo, 28, 33, 43-4, 58; Phaedrus, 38, 40, 49-52, 59, 71, 100, 119, 258n5o; Philebus, 41, 48; Protagoras, 39-40; Republic, 17. 36-40, 49, 58, 73, 112, 217; Symposium, 31, 38, 49-5L 7i> 125, 157; Theaetetus, 28, 31; Timaeus, 17, 22, 33, 40, 42, 44-9. 68, 90, 92, 98-9, 114, 257n38, 267nn. See also allegory; mimesis (and methexis); paradigm; the Many and the One. pleroma 128 Plotinus 88-104; and aporrhesis (emanation) 95-6, 254ni5; on eros and beauty, 93-4, 101-2, 158; on dialectic (and logic), 96-7; and gnosticism, 85, 91, 99-100; and hermeneusis, 7, 88, 90, 98; on language and metaphor, 60, 89-90, 100-1, 249ni5; Life of, 89; and light, 71, 92-5; mysticism of, 89-90, 102, 132; on matter and evil, 98-9; his paradigm, 7-8, 15, 88, 92-5, 101-2, J 49» 233. 24°; and Porphyry, 105-7; and Proclus, 113; and Augustine, 117-18; and Spenser, 216, 222, 243 29on26; and Synesius, 121-2

323

Index

pluralistic monism. See Monism, Parmenidean. pneuma 16, 109, 121. See also nous. poiein and paschein 27, 28. See also glossary. Polanyi, Michael 6, 12-14, 43. I23, 128, 26oni7, 274n66, 288n3 polarity, principle of 224, 227. See also coincidentia oppositorum; Garden of Adonis. Popham, Elizabeth 279^3 Popkin, Richard 26o-in23 Porphyry 89, 91, 105-8, 122, 220: Life of Plotinus, 89; 'On Homer's Cave of the Nymphs,' 106-8, 223, 241 Poulet, Georges 267ni i Prado, C.G. 282ni7 praxis. See theoria and glossary. Prescott, Anne Lake 284^7 Pritchett, Stephen 278n26 Proclus 105-6, 110-15, 254~5ni8, 269~7oni4: on eros, 114-15, 128; and Parmenidean monism, 269n8; on participatory mimesis (methexis), 113-15; and PseudoDionysius, 115, 124; Elements of Theology, 106, 110-15. See also Liber de Causis. Prothalamion 175-8, 201 Pseudo-Dionysius (Dionysius the Areopagite) 124-32, 161: on angels, 127; on eros, 125-6; on language, 125; lines of transmission, 20, 86, 161, 266n2; pseudonymity, 27oni5, 273n56; The Celestial Hierarchy, 126-7; The Divine Names, 124-7; The Mystical Theology, 127, 130-1, 241 psyche (soul): in Aristotle, 59; in Plato, 38, 46, 49-52; in Plotinus, 90, 94-5, 97, 99, 101; in Spenser, 198-200, 206, 217; in Proclus, 112; and Wisdom, 68, 97. See

also beauty, eros, nous, Plato, Plotinus. Puttenham, George 28711128 Pyrrho (pyrrhonism). See Sceptics. Pythagoras (and Pythagoreanism): and 'ancient theology,' 70, 141, 254m8, 273n5i; mathematical doctrines, 34-5, 46, 48, 218, 235, 255^3; his Orientalism, 37-8; and paradigm, 147, 154; and Plato, 30-1, 33, 56-7, 254ni7; and PseudoDionysius, 127; and reincarnation, 36-7 Queen Elizabeth. See Elizabeth (Queen). questioning (inquiring) 3, 23, 55, 75, !34~5» 212, 224-5. See also aporia; baptism; dialectic; equivocal discourse; hermeneusis; sceptical thinking. Quilligan, Maureen 252^7, 277ni3 Quitslund, Jon 161, 277*118, 2821122 radicalism, Spenserian 212-15 Raj an, B. 256^0 Raleigh, Sir Walter 201, 203, 287^5. See also 'Letter to Raleigh.' Ramsey, Ian 25oni9, 26i-2n26 Ramus, Petrus 164-5 Ray, William 247~8n3 reconstructive hermeneusis 12, 25 Redcrosse 186-7, 206-7, 208, 238 rest. See 'dwelling.' Riches, John 264^9 Ricoeur, Paul 16, 19-20, 25on24, 255023 Rist, John M. 60, 267^14, 292^8 Robin, Leon 62 Robin, W. Ansell 217 Robinson, James M. 26im4 Roche, Thomas P., jr 204, 253^, 287^6

324

Index

Rollinson, Philip 2521137, 269114 Rosenberg, Eleanor 284^8 R0stvig, Maren-Sofie 28inn Rowland, Beryl 284^7 ruach. See psyche; glossary. 'Ruinesof Rome' 192 'Ruinesof Time' 186,191-4,200 Ryle, Gilbert 30 'sabbath,' 'sabbaoth,' and 'sabaoth' 162, 233-4, 238-40 sacrament (andsacramental) 92,109, 114, 116, 185, 207. See also baptism, marriage. Sanders, E.P. 266-7117 Sapience (Wisdom) 158, 161-2, 240, 282H22

Saussure, Ferdinand de 89, 138 sceptical thinking 10, 12, 35, 88-9, 140, 24/n2. See also Plato; questioning. Sceptics (school of philosophers) 61-3 Scholem, Gershom 145, 2soni8, 278n32 Scholes, Robert 251^5 Schonfield, Hugh 262^3 'seal of the Father.' See baptism. Secret, Francois 279^3 seeing (and hearing) 75-7, 79-80 Seneca 60 Sextus Empiricus 62 Seznec, Jean 276117 Shakespeare 188; Henry V, 286ni4; King Lear, 100, 27oni8; Measure for Measure, 267-81117; The Tempest (Prospero), 108 Shapiro, Herman 2771111 Sidney, Sir Philip: his circle, 176, 279n33; on mimesis, 139-41; his mind, 277ni8; as Philisides in 'Ruinesof Time,' 181, 192-5; Apology for Poetry (Defense), 139-41,

189, 192; in Astrophel and Stella, 169, 194 Smith, Andrew 268ni Smith, Paul 281 mi Snell, Bruno 28, 253^ Socrates: on body and soul, 43, 257^5; his image in the dialogues, 31-3; and Jesus, 33, 63, 182; and language, 33, 41; on love and beauty, 50-3; method, n, 23, 28-32, 34-5, 38, 58, 125, 147, 253~4ni4, 2s6n25; his myths, 34, 37, 51-2, 90; his piety, 28, 32-3, 245, 255ni9; on poetry, 40; and Pythagoreanism, 36-7; and questioning, 3, 41, 63, 118, 150. See also Plato. Sophists 27, 32, 116 Spenser, Edmund: and anagoge, no; and Christian Platonic (humanist) tradition, 8-9, 69; and logocentrism, 12; and mimesis as approach to 'personal knowing,' 6, 8, 11; his 'pessimism,' supposed, 4, 86, 104; his Plato, 31; and Plotinian paradigm, 22, 101, 104; his questioning method, 20, 23, 29, 121, 132; and 'source hunting,' 27, 253^. See also, for all entries covering Chapters 6-10, names of characters, topics, and titles of works arranged alphabetically throughout index. Speusippus 62 Stace, W.T. 251^2 Stephen (martyr) 20, 80 Stoicism 57, 59-60, 68, 90 Sweeney, Leo 111-12, 131 synchronic and diachronic reading 5, 136-7, 141, 150, 152 Synesius 121-4, 126, 153, 268n2 tacit and focal thinking (with tacit awareness): and aporia/aporrhesis,

325

Index

95-6; defined, 12-15, 2/4n66; and 'dwelling,' 274n68; and hermeneusis, 70, 212; and Holy Spirit, 2/2n44; and language, 245; and Logos, 117, 120; and logos-tomeus, 72, 131-2; and metaphor, 17; and metaphoric baptism, 22, 87, 128; and method, 29, 35; and pleroma, 128; and Sidney, 141 Taylor, Alfred 2571142 Taylor, Thomas 254ni8 'Teares of the Mvses' 192 teletai (verbal and ritual enactments in Orphism) 148-9, 28on45 telos (end, goal, perfection): in Aristotle, 57; as Christ/Logos, 77, 142, 241; and 'dwelling,' 274^165 and 68, 28on45; and generation, 132; and history, 138; in Matthew, 77 theoria and praxis 109, 244. See also glossary, theurgy (and theurgic ritual) 106, 108-10. See also anagoge. Thomas Aquinas, Saint. See Aquinas, Saint Thomas. Thompson, Leonard 26in25 Tillich, Paul 19, 252^6 Time (and Eternity) 221, 237, 240-3. See also 'dwelling'; Epithalamion; Garden of Adonis; Mutabilitie; Plato, esp. Timaeus. Timias 200-6, 208-9, 287^5 tomeus. See logos-tomeus and glossary. Tonkin, Humphrey 228, 253^, 29in38 Tracy, David 2611124 transformation. See baptism, metanoia. tripartite soul. See Plato, and the tripartite soul. Trismegistus, Hermes. See Hermes.

Ulreich, John C., jr 140-1, 256^8, 263^8 Una 57, 86, 204, 207-8 Underbill, Evelyn 19, 25inn3i and 32 Upton 217, 234, 239 Valeriano, Piero 267nio Valla, Lorenzo 273^6 Venus 47, 156-8, 175, 177, 208-9, 219-24, 242, 283n35 via negativa 127 via positiva 127, 131 Vicari, Patrica 28on4i, 283^8 Virgil 197-8 Vitsaxis, Vassilis 256112$ Vlastos, Gregory 258^0 Walker, D.P. 25oni8, 269nii, 276117, 277nu, 279n35 Wallis, R.T. 114, 259ni, 266n3, 268n2, 26911115 and 8 Warden, John 279^0 Wardropper, Bruce W. 187-8, 286ni5 Warwick, Anne (Marie), Countess of 154 Watson, Elizabeth 284^5 Weatherby, Harold 2921161 Webster, John 164-5 Welsford, Enid 275ni, 28inu White, T.H. 284^7 Whitehead, Alfred North 25, 46 Williams, Arnold 25oni8, 273^1 Williams, Kathleen 29in4i Wind, Edgar 28i-2ni3 Wisdom. See Sapience. Wittreich, Joseph 248nio, 277ni3, 28sn4 Xenocrates 62 Yates, Frances 276117, 279nn33 and 35 Zaehner, R. 251-2^2 Zohar, The. See Kabbalah.