Bede and Aethelthryth: An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics
216
Bede and Aethelthryth: An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics
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Overview
Bede and Aethelthryth asks why Christians in Britain around the year 700 enjoyed Latin poetry. What did they see in it? What did they get from it? This book attempts to reconstruct the horizon of expectation of a highly learned, Latin-speaking nun as she encounters a fifty-line poem by the Venerable Bede, the Hymn to Aethelthryth.
The reconstruction is hypothetical and derived from grammatical manuals, learned commentaries from the early medieval period (especially Servius’s commentary on Virgil), and a wide variety of aesthetic observations by classical and medieval readers. The first four chapters describe basic expectations of a reader of Christian Latin poetry. The fifth chapter places the Hymn in its context within Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. A few pages after Bede records his hymn, Caedmon will recite his own hymn under the watchful eye of Whitby’s Abbess Hild, who was a friend of Aethelthryth.
Both hymns are attempts to reform the lyric traditions of pagan Rome and pagan Anglo-Saxon England in the light of Christian teaching. The last three chapters contain a line-by-line commentary on Bede’s alphabetic, epanaleptic elegy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781940425948 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2016 |
| Series: | WV MEDIEVEAL EUROPEAN STUDIES , #18 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 711 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bede and Aethelthryth
An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics
By Stephen J. Harris
West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2016 West Virginia University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-940425-94-8
CHAPTER 1
On Beauty
A significant decline in the study of Latin and the widespread secularization of the Western university have resulted in very few readers being prepared to appreciate the Christian Latin poetry of the Venerable Bede. He wrote at a time when educated readers knew something of both classical and liturgical Latin. More importantly, all of Bede's poetry engages with the Latin Vulgate Bible, and Bede's readers knew the Vulgate well. Christians today read Scripture in dozens of English translations, some of which are far removed from the terminology and syntax of the Vulgate. Translations of Bede, even into Old English, tend to obscure allusions to classical and Scriptural traditions, which are at the heart of Bede's literary art. This is especially true of his poetry. Most of Bede's prose has been translated: Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (c. AD 735, hereafter HE) is available in English translation, as are most of his commentaries on Scripture and his works on grammar and time. However, apart from a few snippets here and there and a pamphlet printed in Lincoln, Bede's poetry remains available only in Latin. Why? Perhaps because tastes have changed in 1300 years. Or perhaps because Bede is no Shakespeare. But then Shakespeare is no Bede: they wrote to different audiences and to different purposes. If we are to appreciate Bede's poems, then understanding his audience and his purpose is an essential first step. But how to empathize sufficiently with his readers? Typically, one tries to imagine an ideal reader, an avatar who is sensitive to the historical and cultural cues contemporary with a poem. But imagining as accurately as possible a reader in seventh-century Anglo-Saxon England is exceptionally difficult. We would have to imagine what she (not we) would notice in Bede and, if she were a teacher, what she would ask her students to notice. She would have to be a cloistered Christian, subject to a convoluted mixture of monastic rules. She would have to live in a monastery connected to a school and scriptorium.
Perhaps she might be a nun who lived at Barking, an abbey in London that was part of Bede's audience. One of Bede's sources for his HE was a book written at Barking, which housed a monastic school. She would have trained in the best grammatical traditions available in Britain, as Bede did. She would have had access to an extensive library, such as existed at Bede's twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Barking's abbess Hildelith taught the trivium, and she and nine other nuns or abbesses, to whom Aldhelm dedicated his prose De virginitate, were capable of parsing Aldhelm's very difficult Latin. (The importance of female readers of Bede's work will become apparent in later chapters.) Still, however successfully we might construct this reader, we could not reasonably reconstruct her psychology or her tastes. At best, we could try to recover what she and her contemporaries recommended to each other as beautiful in the art of poetry. That is the subject of this chapter: beauty in the eyes of an educated, orthodox, Christian nun in the seventh century. Once we know a little about seventh-century beauty generally, we need specifics. Which particular elements of a poem would she have seen as beautiful? As a response to that question, a review of Bede's reading and tastes comprises chapters two through four. The last four chapters cover Bede's Hymn to Aethelthryth. If all that sounds tentative, provisional, and imaginative, it is. Still, it may provoke some interesting questions.
First, if indeed our nun of Barking sought out Beauty in Bede's verse, what might beautiful mean to her in regard to poetry? Did she conceive of Beauty as an observable phenomenon, something that she could segregate out of a poem like a vein of gold in a rock? Or was beauty just a word — a nominal category — something everyone says but no one really understands? If Beauty is real, where do we find it? Is it a quality found in things like paintings or poems, or is it a capacity of an observer? If Beauty is in the eye of an observer, is it intuitive or learned? Second, if Beauty is not real but nominal, then perhaps we can discover how people talked about it. Yet we find that, although there is a vague core of meaning, definitions change. The term beauty has to be treated in historical context. The term might be like an evolving organism, adapting as aesthetic opinions changed. If it was, then how could we fix on one definition, or even several? Would our nun of Barking have a historical sense of the shifting meaning of beauty? Or the shift in meaning between languages? Even if beauty were sufficiently defined, would it be translatable across languages and cultures, or is it semantically limited by them? Third, if both philosophical and philological descriptions of Beauty are elusive, then is there a way to recover a lived experience of Beauty? We seem so far removed from the early Middle Ages that we rely on a simulacrum that we have built from what few shards survive. It is like trying to navigate a video game with most of the polygons missing. How would recovery of an experience of Beauty be possible with such partial evidence? Fourth, picking a point in history and in geography to solve these problems of shifting meaning might be an illusion to calm our fear of uncertainty. Would our composite nun of Barking be unrecognizable to Bede? Her reading must be reconstructed. But how? The extensive library of Wearmouth-Jarrow is a library of the imagination, its contents having been assembled over the centuries by scholars and source-hunters. Works known to have been at Jarrow have since lost their historical and local peculiarity in the necessary compromises of modern, printed editions. Moreover, whatever the putative training of our nun, she would need interests, desires, or expectations to drive her reading. They would likely coordinate with the interests and desires that drive a person to lifelong service to Christ. But an ideal reader constructed by a twenty-first-century academic would probably look a lot like an academic. (Could we imagine, for example, an ideal reader with whom we would disagree or whom we are incapable of understanding?) What then would justify the historicized characteristics of any proposed ideal reader? Is there a well-tried method for establishing such a reader?
Not only is the meaning of Beauty a conundrum, but so too is a method of analyzing the topic of beauty. Beauty in literature is usually treated as a province of aesthetics. However, it is impossible to know whether Bede or his contemporaries would have recognized aesthetics as a discrete area of inquiry. A thousand years later, Immanuel Kant initially thought it beyond the reach of philosophy. Moreover, current topics in aesthetics range far beyond our seventh-century monastic quarry. Among these topics are aesthetic experience, a psychology of aesthetics, language and aesthetics, and the ideological function of aesthetics. These topics, each of which promotes a set of methodologies, range loosely around a set of fundamental questions that arise from complicated philosophical debates, many of which reach back centuries. To flit from one debate to another would be jejune; but to choose one debate and trace it backwards in time would risk excluding much medieval material — Biblical commentaries, for example, or the Catholic liturgy — that is largely beyond the scope of current aesthetic debates. What makes angels beautiful? What is attractive about the bride in the Song of Songs? Can terrible suffering be beautiful? Even a study of Latin or Old English terms that imply aesthetic qualities is of little help. The terms are strangely disposed in early medieval texts and do not map from one language to another. Bede called hexameter meter pulcher 'beautiful', the same word used in Genesis 41:26 to describe the cows of Pharaoh's dream. Beautiful cows? Surely, one use of pulcher had a bearing on another, but what Modern English term would connect the syntax of hexameters to attractive bovines? To make sense of that wide semantic scope, we would have to presume a deep connection between aesthetics and Scripture; but that presumption would confound contemporary academic departmentalization. It would be more in keeping with current academic trends to apply poetics to Scripture, to treat Scripture as another text to be explicated aesthetically — the Bible as literature, for example. All this being said, there is nevertheless a fruitful line of inquiry into Bede's aesthetic practices that focuses on religious devotion, even if that line of inquiry is not strictly in the province of modern aesthetics. Furthermore, that line seems particularly germane because of the locus in quo, the monasteries in which Bede prayed and taught.
Bede lived a very traditional and conservative life. It was a peaceful life of order and repetition, governed by a complicated monastic rule. That life still exists today, and if we were to stretch a golden thread between Bede's past and our present, its modern end would fix firmly to a contemporary monastery. As in many monasteries today, Bede's monastic life was shaped by a visual and aural aesthetic. Based ultimately on Scripture, that aesthetic was derived in part from the Magisterium — the tradition of Scriptural commentary and Church teaching that was integral to a formal life of Catholic faith. The Magisterium is not a list of doctrine and rules, but rather a vast sea of revealed truths that come in the shape of debates, investigations, proposals, and stipulations that help to prepare a Christian for his own encounter with Christ. A Catholic's encounter with Scripture is tutored by the encounters of inspired readers who preceded him. It was therefore within a monastic environment informed by the Magisterium that Bede found his audience. The limits of that audience's expectations were drawn by Scripture, Catholic tradition, Church liturgy, the Breviary, hymns, homilies, and the Latin and vernacular literature they read. Bede was not writing for modern, secular scholars in research universities, but for devoted men and women religious in Britain.
This chapter describes an aesthetic common to that monastic environment; it is generally known as the Great Theory of Beauty. The divine attributes of order and due proportion sit at its center, and they help to define an ideal reader whose literary tastes can be suggested by assessing early medieval reading habits. As we will see, those tastes were considered mature if they confirmed the valuations of order and due proportion that had been observed in nature and in Scripture. Bede, who observed and described the order of the tides, of time, of the Latin language, and of English ecclesiastical history, was devoted in his intellectual and spiritual efforts to natural, right, and just order.
The Great Theory: Greek
The story of Beauty begins in Greece. We are concerned here with a story, not with historical fact, and the story gets retold from generation to generation. It becomes the grounds of our continuing inquiry into Beauty. This story shapes our encounter with art; it tutors us in our efforts toward refined, sophisticated appreciation of literature; it is codified in books, in the layout of museums, and in the college curriculum. Very, very generally, it goes like this. In early Greek life, beauty was not an autonomous idea, but, as Umberto Eco says, was "always associated with other values, like 'moderation,' 'harmony,' and 'symmetry.'" In part, this multiple association is reflected in vocabulary. The words used for beautiful in demotic Greek are eueides, meaning well-shaped, and kalos, meaning good and beautiful. Earlier Attic Greek distinguished between kalos and agathos — the former meaning physically beautiful, the latter morally beautiful — but in later Greek the two terms elide into kalos, which comes to mean both good and beautiful. Another term that arises is kalokagathía, a combination of kalos, kai (and), and agathos. So in the Greek language, beauty is literally synonymous with morality.
Demotic Greek is the language of the New Testament and thereby influences Christian conceptions of beauty — or at least limits how Christians can express beauty. Greek theories of beauty tend to describe it as a bridge between the body and soul. For Plato, and equally for Sappho and Praxiteles, beauty lay in both the physical form and the goodness of the soul. Plato explains that relationship in his Phaedrus. The soul experiences true Beauty before it is embodied here on earth. When a man sees the beauty of the earth, Plato writes, he "is transported with the recollection of the true beauty." True Beauty is somehow innate, built into every human soul. The heavenly light of Beauty even shines in earthly bodies. Plato writes that these lights "are seen through a glass dimly." This idea would resurface in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians 1:12: "For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face." (Paul was speaking in Greek to Greek-speaking philosophers.) The soul finds pleasure in Beauty, because in looking even on the dim light of earthly beauty, it returns, as if on wings, to the illuminated condition of its origin. The metaphor of Beauty as light, we should note, is an ancient association carried resolutely into Christian hymnody. St. Ambrose of Milan would use that association as the governing metaphor of his famous hymn, "Splendor paternae gloriae" (the radiance of the Father's glory). God's glory is "Light of light and source of all light, / Daylight, illuminating days." Prudentius, whom Bede calls "nobilissimus scolasticus" (most celebrated scholar, DAM, 153), would use the image of a monk waking at dawn as a metaphor for the soul waking to Christ. Above Bede's tomb in Durham, cast in light-reflective metal, are words from his commentary on Revelation: "Christ is the morning star who when the night of this world is past brings to his saints the promise of the light of life and opens everlasting day."
So what does the Greek soul perceive besides light? Primarily order, proportion, and harmony. Pythagoras sowed the seeds of this idea. He held that the origin of all things lay in number. Number and order are distinguished from Chaos, a distinction that was assured by heavenly protectors. Harmony and order were under the protection of Apollo, and Chaos was associated with Dionysus, a dyad famously pursued by Nietzsche. Pythagoras found numerical order everywhere in nature. He listened to the sounds of variously sized hammers as they struck anvils and wondered why smaller hammers had a higher pitch. He thereby correlated pitch with weight, demonstrating that the world is not as discrete as our senses suggest, but that even sound and weight are subject to a common order. He then developed his numerical theory of musical notes, which exist both as effects of specific physical objects such as flutes and lyre strings, and as mathematical ratios. In other words, abstract mathematics describes harmonies in physical bodies. The abstract world and the physical world were governed and correlated by a mathematical order. Given a string of length x, ½ x is an octave, ¼ x is a fifth, and so on. This proportion obtains for the length of a column of wind in a flute or a trumpet. It also underlies the difference between the weights of strings on a lyre. Proportions also govern sound and vision in Greek art. The mathematical proportions between the notes in a column of wind are the same proportions one finds between the columns of a Greek temple. And they were applied to the human form in the pursuit of beautiful statues. The Romans later adopted this notion of a governing mathematical order. Illustrated in a famous drawing by Leonardo, Vitruvius set the proportions of the ideal human body. Given a body of the height x, ¼ x is the height of the torso, 1/10 x is the height of the head, and so forth. Art and sculpture present idealizations of form, idealized according to divine proportion. One finds another description of the numerical order of the universe in Cicero's De re publica, specifically in the Dream of Scipio Africanus that was commented upon by Macrobius. From the Greeks comes the fundamental aesthetic principle of the Middle Ages: a perfect, rational, abstract, describable mathematical order underlies all physical reality.
Pythagoras said that Zeus gave order to the cosmos, a just measure and limit, too. Number, proportion, and harmony governed the disposition and movement of the cosmos. The Greeks therefore believed, and rightly, that the interrelation of bodies can be described mathematically. Bede, the scientist who reorganized the calendar to better accord with his astronomical observations, knew it, too. So would our nun of Barking. Juvencus, a Spanish poet who influenced Bede, described the Magi as "a people far away that knows the secrets of the rising sun. / Skilled at noting the risings and settings of the stars." Science was considered beautiful. Its beauty and the beauty of art reflected the orderly, proportional, and harmonious movement and disposition of creation. And it is this claim that is known as the Great Theory of Beauty. The Pythagorean view was distilled into a belief that could be carried easily from generation to generation: that the numerical order of the universe governs both the physical world and the human soul.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bede and Aethelthryth by Stephen J. Harris. Copyright © 2016 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
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