48 Historicism

'He that would fly without wings must fly in his dreams.'

--COLERIDGE

I give the name Historicism to the belief that men can, by the use of their natural powers, discover an inner meaning in the historical process. I say by the use of their natural powers because I do not propose to deal with any man who claims to know the meaning either of all history or of some particular historical event by divine revelation. What I mean by a Historicist is a man who asks me to accept his account of the inner meaning of history on the grounds of his learning and genius. If he had asked me to accept it on the grounds that it had been shown him in a vision, that would be another matter. I should have said to him nothing. His claim (with supporting evidence in the way of sanctity and miracles) would not be for me to judge. This does not mean that I am setting up a distinction, to be applied by myself, between inspired and uninspired writers. The distinction is not between those who have and those who lack inspiration, but between those who claim and those who do not claim it. With the former I have at present no concern.

I say an inner meaning because I am not classifying as Historicists those who find a 'meaning' in history in any sense whatever. Thus, to find causal connections between historical events, is in my terminology the work of a historian not of a historicist. A historian, without becoming a Historicist, may certainly infer unknown events from known ones. He may even infer future events from past ones; prediction may be a folly, but it is not Historicism. He may 'interpret' the past in the sense of reconstructing it imaginatively, making us feel (as far as may be) what it was like, and in that sense what it 'meant', to a man to be a twelfth-century villein or a Roman eques. What makes all these activities proper to the historian is that in them the conclusions, like the premises, are historical. The mark of the Historicist, on the other hand, is that he tries to get from historical premises conclusions which are more than historical; conclusions metaphysical or theological or (to coin a word) atheological. The historian and the Historicist may both say that something 'must have' happened. But must in the mouth of a genuine historian will refer only to a ratio cognoscendi: since A happened B 'must have' preceded it; if William the Bastard arrived in England he 'must have' crossed the sea. But 'must' in the mouth of a Historicist can have quite a different meaning. It may mean that events fell out as they did because of some ultimate, transcendent necessity in the ground of things.

When Carlyle spoke of history as a 'book of revelations' he was a Historicist. When Novalis called history 'an evangel' he was a Historicist. When Hegel saw in history the progressive self-manifestation of absolute spirit he was a Historicist. When a village woman says that her wicked father-in-law's paralytic stroke is 'a judgement on him' she is a Historicist. Evolutionism, when it ceases to be simply a theorem in biology and becomes a principle for interpreting the total historical process, is a form of Historicism. Keats' Hyperion is the epic of Historicism. and the words of Oceanus,

't is the eternal law

That first in beauty should be first in might,

are as fine a specimen of Historicism as you could wish to find.

The contention of this article is that Historicism is an illusion and that Historicists are, at the very best, wasting their time. I hope it is already clear that in criticizing Historicists I am not at all criticizing historians. It is not formally impossible that a Historicist and a historian should be the same man. But the two characters are in fact very seldom combined. It is usually theologians, philosophers and politicians who become Historicists.

Historicism exists on many levels. The lowest form of it is one that I have already mentioned: the doctrine that our calamities (or more often our neighbours' calamities) are 'judgements'; which here means divine condemnations or punishments. This sort of Historicism sometimes endeavours to support itself by the authority of the Old Testament. Some people even talk as if it were the peculiar mark of the Hebrew prophets to interpret history in this way. To that I have two replies. Firstly, the Scriptures come before me as a book claiming divine inspiration. I am not prepared to argue with the prophets. But if any man thinks that because God was pleased to reveal certain calamities as judgements' to certain chosen persons, he is therefore entitled to generalize and read all calamities in the same way, I submit that this is a non sequitur. Unless, of course, that man claims to be himself a prophet; and then I must refer his claim to more competent judges. But secondly, we must insist that such an interpretation of history was not the characteristic of ancient Hebrew religion, not the thing which sets it apart and makes it uniquely valuable. On the contrary, this is precisely what it shares with popular Paganism. To attribute calamity to the offended gods and therefore to seek out and punish the offender, is the most natural thing in the world and therefore the worldwide method. Examples such as the plague in Iliad A and the plague at the opening of the Oedipus Tyrannus come at once to mind. The distinctive thing, the precious peculiarity, of Scripture is the series of divine rebuffs which this naive and spontaneous type of Historicism there receives; in the whole course of Jewish history, in the Book of Job, in Isaiah's suffering servant (liii), in Our Lord's answers about the disaster at Siloam (Luke xiii, 4) and the man born blind (John ix,13). If this sort of Historicism survives, it survives in spite of Christianity. And in a vague form it certainly does survive. Some who in general deserve to be called true historians are betrayed into writing as if nothing failed or succeeded that did not somehow deserve to do so. We must guard against the emotional overtones of a phrase like 'the judgement of history'. It might lure us into the vulgarest of all vulgar errors, that of idolizing as the goddess History what manlier ages belaboured as the strumpet Fortune. That would sink us below the Christian, or even the best Pagan, level. The very Vikings and Stoics knew better.

But subtler and more cultivated types of Historicism now also claim that their view is especially congenial to Christianity. It has become a commonplace, as Fr Paul Henri lately remarked in his Deneke lecture at Oxford, to say that Judaic and Christian thought are distinguished from Pagan and Pantheistic thought precisely by the significance which they attribute to history. For the Pantheist, we are told, the content of time is simply illusion; history is a dream and salvation consists in awaking. For the Greeks, we are told, history was a mere flux or, at best, cyclic: significance was to be sought not in Becoming but in Being. For Christianity, on the other hand, history is a story with a well-defined plot, pivoted on Creation. Fall, Redemption, and Judgement. It is indeed the divine revelation par excellence, the revelation which includes all other revelations.

That history in a certain sense must be all this for a Christian, I do not deny. In what sense, will be explained later. For the moment, I submit that the contrast as commonly drawn between Judaic or Christian thought on the one hand and Pagan or Pantheistic on the other is in some measure illusory. In the modern world, quite plainly, Historicism has a Pantheistic ancestor in Hegel and a materialistic progeny in the Marxists. It has proved so far a stronger weapon in our enemies' hands than in ours. If Christian Historicism is to be recommended as an apologetic weapon it had better be recommended by the maxim fas est et ab hoste doceri than on the ground of any supposedly inherent congeniality. And if we look at the past we shall find that the contrast works well as between Greek and Christian but not as between Christian and other types of Pagan. The Norse gods, for example, unlike the Homeric, are beings rooted in a historical process. Living under the shadow of Ragnarok they are preoccupied with time. Odin is almost the god of anxiety: in that way Wagner's Wotan is amazingly true to the Eddaic original. In Norse theology cosmic history is neither a cycle nor a flux; it is irreversible, tragic epic marching deathward to the drum-beat of omens and prophecies. And even if we rule out Norse Paganism on the ground that it was possibly influenced by Christianity, what shall we do with the Romans? It is quite clear that they did not regard history with the indifference, or with the merely scientific or anecdotal interests, of the Greeks. They seem to have been a nation of Historicists. I have pointed out elsewhere that all Roman epic before Virgil was probably metrical chronicle (Note: Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic'. A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford. 1942), pp.32ff.); and the subject was always the same - the coming-to-be of Rome. What Virgil essentially did was to give this perennial theme a new unity by his symbolical structure. The Aeneid puts forward, though in mythical form, what is precisely a reading of history, an attempt to show what the fata Jovis were labouring to bring about. Everything is related not to Aeneas as an individual hero but to Aeneas as the Rome-bearer. This, and almost only this, gives significance to his escape from Troy, his amour with Dido, his descent into Hades, and his defeat of Turnus. Tantae molis erat: all history is for Virgil an immense parturition. It is from this Pagan source that one kind of Historicism descends to Dante. The Historicism of the De Monarchia, though skilfully, and of course sincerely, mortised into the Judaic and Christian framework, is largely Roman and Virgilian. St Augustine indeed may be rightly described as a Christian Historicist. But it is not always remembered that he became one in order to refute Pagan Historicism. The De Civitate answers those who traced the disasters of Rome to the anger of the rejected gods. I do not mean to imply that the task was uncongenial to St Augustine, or that his own Historicism is merely an argumentum ad hominem. But it is surely absurd to regard as specifically Christian in him the acceptance of a terrain which had in fact been chosen by the enemy.

The close connection which some see between Christianity and Historicism thus seems to me to be largely an illusion. There is no prima facie case in its favour on such grounds as that. We are entitled to examine it on its merits.

What appears, on Christian premises, to be true in the Historicist's position is this. Since all things happen either by the divine will or at least by the divine permission, it follows that the total content of time must in its own nature be a revelation of God's wisdom, justice, and mercy. In this direction we can go as far as Carlyle or Novalis or anyone else. History is, in that sense, a perpetual Evangel, a story written by the finger of God. If, by one miracle, the total content of time were spread out before me, and if, by another, I were able to hold all that infinity of events in my mind and if, by a third, God were pleased to comment on it so that I could understand it, then, to be sure, I could do what the Historicist says he is doing. I could read the meaning, discern the pattern. Yes; and if the sky fell we should all catch larks. The question is not what could be done under conditions never vouchsafed us in via, nor even (so far as I can remember) promised us in patria, but what can be done now under the real conditions. I do not dispute that History is a story written by the finger of God. But have we the text? (It would be dull work discussing the inspiration of the Bible if no copy of it had ever been seen on earth.) We must remind ourselves that the word History has several senses. It may mean the total content of time: past, present, and future. It may mean the content of the past only, but still the total content of the past, the past as it really was in all its teeming riches. Thirdly, it may mean so much of the past as is discoverable from surviving evidence. Fourthly, it may mean so much as has been actually discovered by historians working, so to speak, 'at the face', the pioneer historians never heard of by the public who make the actual discoveries. Fifthly, it may mean that portion, and that version, of the matter so discovered which has been worked up by great historical writers. (This is perhaps the most popular sense: history usually means what you read when you are reading Gibbon or Mommsen, or the Master of Trinity.) Sixthly, it may mean that vague, composite picture of the past which floats, rather hazily, in the mind of the ordinary educated man.

When men say that 'History' is a revelation, or has a meaning, in which of these six senses do they use the word History? I am afraid that in fact they are very often thinking of history in the sixth sense; in which case their talk about revelation or meaning is surely unplausible in the extreme. For 'history' in the sixth sense is the land of shadows, the home of wraiths like Primitive Man or the Renaissance or the Ancient-Greeks-and-Romans. It is not at all surprising, of course, that those who stare at it too long should see patterns. We see pictures in the fire. The more indeterminate the object, the more it excites our mythopoeic or 'esemplastic' faculties. To the naked eye there is a face in the moon; it vanishes when you use a telescope. In the same way, the meanings or patterns discernible in 'history' (Sense Six) disappear when we turn to 'history' in any of the higher senses. They are clearest for each of us in the periods he has studied least. No one who has distinguished the different senses of the word History could continue to think that history (in the sixth sense) is an evangel or a revelation. It is an effect of perspective.

On the other hand, we admit that history (in Sense One) is a story written by the finger of God. Unfortunately we have not got it. The claim of the practising Historicist then will stand or fall with his success in showing that history in one of the intermediate senses - the first being out of reach and the sixth useless for his purpose - is sufficiently close to history in the first sense to share its revealing qualities.

We drop, then, to history in Sense Two: the total content of past time as it really was in all its richness. This would save the Historicist if we could reasonably believe two things: first, that the formidable omission of the future does not conceal the point or meaning of the story, and, secondly, that we do actually possess history (Sense Two) up to the present moment. But can we believe either?

It would surely be one of the luckiest things in the world if the content of time up to the moment at which the Historicist is writing happened to contain ail that he required for reaching the significance of total history. We ride with our backs to the engine. We have no notion what stage in the journey we have reached. Are we in Act I or Act V? Are our present diseases those of childhood or senility? If, indeed, we knew that history was cyclic we might perhaps hazard a guess at its meaning from the fragment we have seen. But then we have been told that the Historicists are just the people who do not think that history is merely cyclic. For them it is a real story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But a story is precisely the sort of thing that cannot be understood till you have heard the whole of it. Or, if there are stories (bad stories) whose later chapters add nothing essential to their significance, and whose significance is therefore contained in something less than the whole, at least you cannot tell whether any given story belongs to that class until you have at least once read it to the end. Then, on a second reading, you may omit the dead wood in the closing chapters. I always now omit the last Book of War and Peace. But we have not yet read history to the end. There might be no dead wood. If it is a story written by the finger of God, there probably isn't. And if not, how can we suppose that we have seen 'the point' already? No doubt there are things we can say about this story even now. We can say it is an exciting story, or a crowded story, or a story with humorous characters in it. The one thing we must not say is what it means, or what its total pattern is.

But even if it were possible, which I deny, to see the significance of the whole from a truncated text, it remains to ask whether we have that truncated text. Do we possess even up to the present date the content of time as it really was in all its richness? Clearly not. The past, by definition, is not present. The point I am trying to make is so often slurred over by the unconcerned admission 'Of course we don't know everything' that I have sometimes despaired of bringing it home to other people's minds. It is not a question of failing to know everything: it is a question (at least as regards quantity) of knowing next door to nothing. Each of us finds that in his own life every moment of time is completely filled. He is bombarded every second by sensations, emotions, thoughts, which he cannot attend to for multitude, and nine-tenths of which he must simply ignore. A single second of lived time contains more than can be recorded. And every second of past time has been like that for every man that ever lived. The past (I am assuming in the Historicist's favour that we need consider only the human past) in its reality, was a roaring cataract of billions upon billions of such moments: any one of them too complex to grasp in its entirety, and the aggregate beyond all imagination. By far the greater part of this teeming reality escaped human consciousness almost as soon as it occurred. None of us could at this moment give anything like a full account of his own life for the last twenty-four hours. We have already forgotten; even if we remembered, we have not time. The new moments are upon us. At every tick of the clock, in every inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of 'history' falls off the world into total oblivion. Most of the experiences in 'the past as it really was' were instantly forgotten by the subject himself. Of the small percentage which he remembered (and never remembered with perfect accuracy) a smaller percentage was ever communicated even to his closest intimates; of this, a smaller percentage still was recorded; of the recorded fraction only another fraction has ever reached posterity. Ad nos vix tenuis famae perlabitur aura. When once we have realized what 'the past as it really was' means, we must freely admit that most - that nearly all - history (in Sense Two) is, and will remain, wholly unknown to us. And if per impossibile the whole were known, it would be wholly unmanageable. To know the whole of one minute in Napoleon's life would require a whole minute of your own life. You could not keep up with it.

If these fairly obvious reflections do not trouble the Historicist that is because he has an answer. 'Of course' he replies, 'I admit that we do not know and cannot know (and, indeed, don't want to know) all the mass of trivialities which filled the past as they fill the present; every kiss and frown, every scratch and sneeze, every hiccup and cough. But we know the important facts.' Now this is a perfectly sound reply for a historian: I am not so clear that it will do for the Historicist. You will notice that we are now already a long way from history in Sense One - the total story written by the finger of God. First, we had to abandon the parts of that story which are still in the future. Now it appears we have not even got the text of those parts which we call 'past'. We have only selections; and selections which, as regards quantity, stand to the original text rather as one word would stand to all the books in the British Museum. We are asked to believe that from selections on that scale men (not miraculously inspired) can arrive at the meaning or plan or purport of the original. This is credible only if it can be shown that the selections make up in quality for what they lack in quantity. The quality will certainly have to be remarkably good if it is going to do that.

'The important parts of the past survive.' If a historian says this (I am not sure that most historians would) he means by 'importance' relevance to the particular inquiry he has chosen. Thus, if he is an economic historian, economic facts are for him important: if a military historian, military facts. And he would not have embarked on his inquiry unless he had some reason for supposing that relevant evidence existed. 'Important' facts, for him, usually do survive because his undertaking was based on the probability that the facts he calls important are to be had. Sometimes he finds he was mistaken. He admits defeat and tries a new question. All this is fairly plain sailing. But the Historicist is in a different position. When he says 'Important facts survive' he must mean by the 'important' (if he is saying anything to the purpose) that which reveals the inner meaning of History. The important parts of the past must for a Hegelian Historicist be those in which Absolute Spirit progressively manifests itself; for a Christian Historicist, those which reveal the purposes of God.

In this claim I see two difficulties. The first is logical. If history is what the Historicist says - the self-manifestation of Spirit, the story written by the finger of God, the revelation which includes all other revelations - then surely he must go to history itself to teach him what is important. How does he know beforehand what sort of events are, in a higher degree than others, self manifestations of Spirit? And if he does not know that, how does he get his assurance that it is events of that type which manage (what a convenience!) to get recorded?

The second difficulty is obvious, if we think for a moment of the process whereby a fact about the past reaches, or fails to reach, posterity. Prehistoric pottery survives because earthenware is easy to break and hard to pulverize: prehistoric poetry has perished because words, before writing, are winged. Is it reasonable to conclude either that there was no poetry or that it was, by the Historicist's standard, less important than the pottery? Is there a discovered law by which important manuscripts survive and unimportant perish? Do you ever turn out an old drawer (say, at the break-up of your father's house) without wondering at the survival of trivial documents and the disappearance of those which everyone would have thought worth preservation? And I think the real historian will allow that the actual detritus of the past on which he works is very much more like an old drawer than like an intelligent epitome of some longer work. Most that survives or perishes survives or perishes by chance: that is, as a result of causes which have nothing to do either with the historian's or the Historicist's interests. Doubtless, it would be possible for God so to ordain these chances that what survives is always just what the Historicist needs. But I see no evidence that He has done so; I remember no promise that He would.

The 'literary' sources, as the historian calls them, no doubt record what their writers for some reason thought important. But this is of little use unless their standards of importance were the same as God's. This seems unlikely. Their standards do not agree with one another nor with ours. They often tell us what we do not greatly want to know and omit what we think essential. It is often easy to see why. Their standard of importance can be explained by their historical situation. So, no doubt, can ours. Standards of historical importance are themselves embedded in history. But then, by what standard can we judge whether the 'important' in some high-flying Hegelian sense has survived? Have we, apart from our Christian faith, any assurance that the historical events which we regard as momentous coincide with those which would be found momentous if God showed us the whole text and deigned to comment? Why should Genghis Khan be more important than the patience or despair of some one among his victims? Might not those whom we regard as significant figures - great scholars, soldiers, and statesmen - turn out to have their chief importance as giving occasion to states of soul in individuals whom we never heard of? I do not, of course, mean that those whom we call the great are not themselves immortal souls for whom Christ died, but that in the plot of history as a whole they might be minor characters. It would not be strange if we, who have not sat through the whole play, and who have heard only tiny fragments of the scenes already played, sometimes mistook a mere super in a fine dress for one of the protagonists.

On such a small and chance selection from the total past as we have, it seems to me a waste of time to play the Historicist. The philosophy of history is a discipline for which we mortal men lack the necessary data. Nor is the attempt always a mere waste of time: it may be positively mischievous. It encourages a Mussolini to say that 'History took him by the throat' when what really took him by the throat was desire. Drivel about superior races or immanent dialectic may be used to strengthen the hand and ease the conscience of cruelty and greed. And what quack or traitor will not now woo adherents or intimidate resistance with the assurance that his scheme is inevitable, 'bound to come’, and in the direction which the world is already taking?

When I have tried to explain myself on this subject in conversation I have sometimes been met by the rejoinder: 'Because historians do not know all, will you forbid them to try to understand what they do know?' But this seems to me to miss the whole point. I have already explained in what sense historians should attempt to understand the past. They may infer unknown events from known, they may reconstruct, they may even (if they insist) predict. They may, in fact, tell me almost anything they like about history except its metahistorical meaning. And the reason is surely very plain. There are inquiries in which scanty evidence is worth using. We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread. But there are other inquiries in which scanty evidence has the same value as no evidence at all. In a funny anecdote, to have heard all except the last six words in which the point lies, leaves you, as a judge of its comic merits, in the same position as the man who has heard none of it. The historian seems to me to be engaged on an inquiry of the first type; the Historicist, on one of the second. But let us take a closer analogy.

Suppose a lost Greek play of which fragments totalling six lines survive. They have survived, of course, in grammarians who quoted them to illustrate rare inflexions. That is, they survive because someone thought them important for some reason, not because they were important in the play as a play. If any one of them had dramatic importance, that is simply a lucky accident, and we know nothing about it. I do not condemn the classical scholar to produce nothing more than a bare text of the fragments any more than I condemn the historian to be a mere analist. Let the scholar amend their corruptions and draw from them any conclusions he can about the history of Greek language, metre or religion. But let him not start talking to us about the significance of the play as a play. For that purpose the evidence before him has a value indistinguishable from zero.

The example of a defective text might be used in another way. Let us assume a mutilated MS, in which only a minority of passages are legible. The parts we can still read might be tolerable evidence for those features which are likely to be constant and evenly distributed over the whole; for example, spelling or handwriting. On such evidence a palaeographer might, without excessive boldness, hazard a guess about the character and nationality of the scribe. A literary critic would have much less chance of guessing correctly at the purport of the whole text. That is because the palaeographer deals with what is cyclic or recurrent, and the literary critic with something unique, and uniquely developing throughout. It is possible, though not likely, that all the torn or stained or missing leaves were written by a different scribe; and if they were not, it is very unlikely that he altered his graphic habits in all the passages we cannot check. But there is nothing in the world to prevent the legible line (at the bottom of a page)

Erimian was the noblest of the brothers ten

having been followed on the next and now missing page by something like

As men believed; so false are the beliefs of men.

This provides the answer to a question which may be asked: Does my canon that historical premises should yield only historical conclusions entail the corollary that scientific premises should yield only scientific conclusions? If we call the speculations of Whitehead or Jeans or Eddington 'scienticism' (as distinct from 'science') do I condemn the scientist as much as the Historicist? I am inclined, so far as I can see my way at present, to answer No. The scientist and the historian seem to me like the palaeographer and the literary critic in my parable. The scientist studies those elements in reality which repeat themselves. The historian studies the unique. Both have a defective MS but its defects are by no means equally damaging to both. One specimen of gravitation, or one specimen of handwriting, for all we can see to the contrary, is as good as another. But one historical event, or one line of a poem. is different from another and different in its actual context from what it would be in any other context, and out of all these differences the unique character of the whole is built up. That is why, in my opinion, the scientist who becomes a scientist is in a stronger position than the historian who becomes a Historicist. It may not be very wise to conclude from what we know of the physical universe that 'God is a mathematician': it seems to me, however, much wiser than to conclude anything about His 'judgements' from mere history. Caveas disputare de occultis Dei judiciis, says the author of the Imitation. He even advises us what antidotes to use quando haec suggerit inimicus.

It will, I hope, be understood that I am not denying all access whatever to the revelation of God in history. On certain great events (those embodied in the creeds) we have what I believe to be divine comment which makes plain so much of their significance as we need, and can bear, to know. On other events, most of which are in any case unknown to us, we have no such comment. And it is also important to remember that we all have a certain limited, but direct, access to History in Sense One. We are allowed, indeed compelled, to read it sentence by sentence. and every sentence is labelled Now. I am not, of course, referring to what is commonly called 'contemporary history', the content of the newspapers. That is possibly the most phantasmal of all histories, a story written not by the hand of God but by foreign offices, demagogues, and reporters. I mean the real or primary history which meets each of us moment by moment in his own experience. It is very limited, but it is the pure, unedited, unexpurgated text, straight from the Author's hand. We believe that those who seek will find comment sufficient whereby to understand it in such degree as they need; and that therefore God is every moment 'revealed in history', that is, in what MacDonald called 'the holy present'. Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met? If I attack Historicism it is not because I intend any disrespect to primary history, the real revelation springing direct from God in every experience. It is rather because I respect this real original history too much to see with unconcern the honours due to it lavished on those fragments, copies of fragments, copies of copies of fragments, or floating reminiscences of copies of copies, which are, unhappily, confounded with it under the general name of history.

49 "HORRID RED THINGS"

Many theologians and some scientists are now ready to proclaim that the nineteenth-century "conflict between science and religion" is over and done with. But even if this is true, it is a truth known only to real theologians and real scientists - that is, to a few highly educated men. To the man in the street the conflict is still perfectly real, and in his mind it takes a form which the learned hardly dream of.

The ordinary man is not thinking of particular dogmas and particular scientific discoveries. What troubles him is an all-pervading difference of atmosphere between what he believes Christianity to be and that general picture of the universe which he has picked up from living in a scientific age. He gathers from the Creed that God has a "Son" (just as if God were a god, like Odin or Jupiter): that this Son "came down" (like a parachutist) from "Heaven", first to earth and later to some land of the dead situated beneath the earth's surface: that, still later, He ascended into the sky and took His seat in a decorated chair placed a little to the right of His Father's throne. The whole thing seems to imply a local and material heaven - a palace in the stratosphere - a flat earth and all the rest of those archaic misconceptions.

The ordinary man is well aware that we should deny all the beliefs he attributes to us and interpret our Creed in a different sense. But this by no means satisfies him. "No doubt," he thinks, "once those articles of belief are there, they can be allegorized or spiritualized away to any extent you please. But is it not plain that they would never have been there at all if the first generation of Christians had had any notion of what the real universe is like? A historian who has based his work on the misreading of a document, may afterwards (when his mistake had been exposed) exercise great ingenuity in showing that his account of a certain battle can still be reconciled with what the document records. But the point is that none of these ingenious explanations would ever have come into existence if he had read his documents correctly at the outset. They are therefore really a waste of labour; it would be manlier of him to admit his mistake and begin over again.” I think there are two things that Christians must do if they wish to convince this "ordinary" modern man. In the first place, they must make it quite clear that what will remain of the Creed after all their explanations and reinterpretations will still be something quite unambiguously supernatural, miraculous, and shocking. We may not believe in a flat earth and a sky-palace. But we must insist from the beginning that we believe, as firmly as any savage or theosophist, in a spirit-world which can, and does, invade the natural or phenomenal universe. For the plain man suspects that when we start explaining, we are going to explain away: that we have mythology for our ignorant hearers and are ready, when cornered by educated hearers, to reduce it to innocuous moral platitudes which no one ever dreamed of denying. And there are theologians who justify this suspicion. From them we must part company absolutely. If nothing remains except what could be equally well stated without Christian formulae, then the honest thing is to admit that Christianity is untrue and to begin over again without it.

In the second place, we must try to teach something about the difference between thinking and imagining. It is, of course, a historical error to suppose that all, or even most, early Christians believed in the sky-palace in the same sense in which we believe in the solar system. Anthropomorphism was condemned by the Church as soon as the question was explicitly before her. But some early Christians may have done this; and probably thousands never thought of their faith without anthropomorphic imagery. That is why we must distinguish the core of belief from the attendant imagining.

When I think of London I always see a picture of Euston Station. But I do not believe that London is Euston Station. That is a simple case, because there the thinker knows the imagery to be false. Now let us take a more complex one. I once heard a lady tell her daughter that if you ate too many aspirin tablets you would die. "But why?" asked the child. "If you squash them you don't find any horrid red things inside them." Obviously, when this child thought of poison she not only had an attendant image of "horrid red things", but she actually believed that poison was red. And this is an error. But how far does it invalidate her thinking about poison? She learned that an overdose of aspirin would kill you; her belief was true. She knew, within limits, which of the substances in her mother's house were poisonous. If I, staying in the house, had raised a glass of what looked like water to my lips, and the child had said, "Don't drink that. Mummie says it's poisonous," I should have been foolish to disregard the warning on the ground that "This child has an archaic and mythological idea of poison as horrid red things."

There is thus a distinction not only between thought and imagination in general, but even between thought and those images which the thinker (falsely) believes to be true. When the child learned later that poison is not always red, she would not have felt that anything essential in her beliefs about poison had been altered. She would still know, as she had always known, that poison is what kills you if you swallow it. That is the essence of poison. The erroneous beliefs about colour drop away without affecting it.

In the same way an early peasant Christian might have thought that Christ's sitting at the right hand of the Father really implied two chairs of state, in a certain spatial relation, inside a sky-palace. But if the same man afterwards received a philosophical education and discovered that God has no body, parts, or passions, and therefore neither a right hand nor a palace, he would not have felt that the essentials of his belief had been altered. What had mattered to him, even in the days of his simplicity, had not been supposed details about celestial furniture. It had been the assurance that the once crucified Master was now the supreme Agent of the unimaginable Power on whom the whole universe depends. And he would recognize that in this he had never been deceived.

The critic may still ask us why the imagery - which we admit to be untrue - should be used at all. But he has not noticed that any language we attempt to substitute for it would involve imagery that is open to all the same objections. To say that God "enters" the natural order involves just as much spatial imagery as to say that He "comes down"; one has simply substituted horizontal (or undefined) for vertical movement. To say that He is "re-absorbed" into the Noumenal is better than to say He "ascended" into Heaven, only if the picture of something dissolving in warm fluid, or being sucked into a throat, is less misleading than the picture of a bird, or a balloon, going up. ALL language, except about objects of sense, is metaphorical through and through. To call God a "Force" (that is, something like a wind or a dynamo) is as metaphorical as to call Him a Father or a King. On such matters we can make our language more polysyllabic and duller: we cannot make it more literal. The difficulty is not peculiar to theologians. Scientists, poets, psychoanalysts, and metaphysicians are all in the same boat.

Man's reason is in such deep insolvency to sense.'

(Note: Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty, Book I, line 57).

Where, then, do we draw the line between explaining and "explaining away"? I do not think there is much difficulty. ALL that concerns the un-incarnate activities of God - His operation on that plane of being where sense cannot enter - must be taken along with imagery which we know to be, in the literal sense, untrue. But there can be no defence for applying the same treatment to the miracles of the Incarnate God. They are recorded as events on this earth which affected human senses. They are the sort of thing we can describe literally. If Christ turned water into wine, and we had been present, we could have seen, smelled, and tasted. The story that He did so is not of the same order as His "sitting at the right hand of the Father". It is either fact, or legend, or lie. You must take it or leave it.

50 IMAGERY IN THE LAST ELEVEN CANTOS OF DANTE'S 'COMEDY'

This study will doubly lack the charm of novelty: for the method is not my own and the subject is closely akin to one that I have treated before in the presence of this society. My previous study was on Dante's similes. My present theme is narrower in so far as I confine myself to the last eleven cantos, but wider because it is not limited to similes. I use the word Imagery to cover Metaphor, even those metaphors which lurk in a single word and of which neither poet nor reader need always be explicitly conscious, and even some which may be suspected of being, in the philological sense, nearly dead'. That is, we include every appeal to the imagined exercise of the five senses, always excepting those images which are directly represented as parts of Dante's story and which would appear on the screen if anyone (which God forbid) made a film of it. Thus roratelo alquanto , bedew him a little', in XXIV, 8 is a specimen of the Imagery we shall be studying: but the Empyrean itself, or Beatrice herself, is not. The method is that which Dr Caroline Spurgeon has applied to Shakespeare. (Editor's Note: Shakespeare's Imagery and What it Tells us (Cambridge, 1935)) The aim is to surprise the imagination of the poet in its more secret workings, to disengage that incessant orchestration which accompanies his drama and which, though it may escape notice while our attention is fixed on the stage, probably contributes in the highest degree to the total effect.

From such an examination one might hope to gain in knowledge of two distinct but very closely connected subjects. On the one hand, one might hope to learn many things about Dante, and perhaps some which he did not know himself. We should discover to what ideas his mind most habitually recurred, his likes and dislikes, his semi-conscious associations. Our results would be psychological. On the other hand, we might hope to learn what these images, however they came into Dante's mind, do to the mind of the reader while he reads the poem and how they contribute to its effect. This second knowledge would be aesthetic: we should be learning how poetry operates. In her work on Shakespeare Dr Spurgeon was primarily interested in Shakespeare's psychology. In this paper I am primarily interested in Dante's poetry.

Even if my interests did not lead me away from the psychological to the aesthetic, my ignorance would. One of the most important distinctions for the psychological student would be that between imagery new-minted by the poet and imagery that is traditional. When a man uses traditional imagery he reveals little (I do not say nothing) of his idiosyncrasy. That the Paradiso speaks of the Church as the Bride (sposa) does not tell us much about Dante. Thus, to take a less obvious instance, in XXIV, 102 we read of miracles as works a che natura

Non scaldò ferro mai, nè battè incude.

Nature's smithy will appear less important for the psychological student when he remembers that it had appeared in Alanus. But it will not be depreciated for the aesthetic student. Wherever the image came from, it has arrived in our minds, and acts upon us. I do not say that from this second point of view the distinction between traditional and novel loses all importance, and in what follows I shall point out (as far as my knowledge allows me) the traditional images. The more traditional they are, the less they affect us: but if we are sensitive readers their effect will never sink to zero. I shall of course often fail to recognize what is traditional. That error, which would be fatal in a psychological study, will, I trust, be merely an impoverishment in mine.

But inevitably in trying to distinguish my approach from Dr Spurgeon's I seem to claim a neater distinction between them than really exists. How the psychological and the aesthetic, not to mention the traditional and the novel, are actually blended can be seen from an example. In XXV, 38 Dante is half way through a viva voce examination by three Apostles, when one of them, St James, addresses to him some words of encouragement. As a result

io levai gli occhi ai monti,

Che gl'incurvaron pria col troppo pondo.

There is here a double act of the imagination. First the Apostles are compared to mountains (probably with aid from a traditional allegorization of the psalm that Dante quotes). Then the majesty of the mountains (or of the Apostles, for they are momentarily one) which weighs upon the soul is equated with an actual weight which bends the bearer double. In most minds the aesthetic and the psychological conclusions will follow simultaneously. He makes us go through that imaginative transference whereby a mountain mass seems to crush us with its weight, and at the same moment we perceive that he was a man who looked at mountains in that way. Nor do I think that any reader of the Comedy will fail to ask Where, in an earlier canto, did we meet the image of intolerable weight?’, and then to remember the Proud doubled beneath their loads on the first terrace of Purgatory: and how Dante continued to feel that weight in memory after he had left the first terrace (Purgatorio , XIII, 136 et seq.) and how he tells us that this was the punishment he feared for himself. That is, he judged Pride to be his besetting sin and therefore attached to its punishment sensations to which his imagination was very alive. But with that, we are fully embarked on psychology. For our study it is enough to notice how immensely venerable the Apostles have become first by the mountain image and then by the image of weight which, as it were, grows from it. No direct praise of their wisdom or sanctity could have made us respect them half so much.

Before beginning my analysis I should perhaps raise one problem. Some of the images which I shall mention are offered to us by a single word and that word comes at the end of a line: in other words the rhyme requires it. How far does that reduce its significance? It is true that Italian is a language rich in rhymes and Italian poets are less likely than English to be driven to an otherwise unsuitable word for the sake of its sound. It is also true that facility in rhyming, far from requiring the genius of Dante, is something which mere practice must infallibly bestow on anyone whatever who has made as many rhyming verses as Dante had done before he wrote the Paradiso. There is nothing mysterious about this. There are a certain number of rhyming words in the language as there are a certain number of books in a room: habituation will teach a man quickly to lay his hand on any rhyme as it will enable him to lay his hand on any book in his own library. On the other hand, the number of rhyming words in a language cannot be increased at will, except by comic coinages: and therefore, at a given moment the best poet may be as out of pocket as the worst. The word at the end of one line may be too good to give up, and yet there may be few rhymes to it. It may be worth keeping even at the cost of a slightly strained rhyme lower down. A place where some will suspect this is XXVll, 83-4

il lito

Nel qual si fece Europa dolce carco.

I myself do not think carco creaks: I leave it to the society. But clearly, the psychologist who was following out the significance in Dante's sensibility of that idea of weight which we have just touched on, would have to decide whether the periphrasis in fece carco came in because Dante thought of Europa's ride in terms of weight or solely for the sake of rhyme, or for both reasons. For the aesthetic analyst the problem is different. What matters to him is not whether a given rhyme was in fact forced or not but whether it seems to the reader to be forced and therefore tends to be unconsciously discounted. For if so, it contributes less to the effect of the poem upon our minds.

The smallest class is images of Smell. Of these I find only two certain instances. I have excluded inebriate dagli odori at XXX, 67 because I am not sure whether it is imagery at all in our sense. The flowers are to be imagined as having real scent. Even if it were admitted we should still have only three, and one of them (odor di lode , XXX, 126) highly traditional. One might have expected that a poem about Heaven would be full of aromatic imagery. In fact it is there only by implication. There are flowers: and the angels, if I may use the expression, buzz like bees over the eternal Rose in canto XXXl. That makes us supply the olfactory images for ourselves. And what the reader is made to do for himself has a particular importance in literature. Hence the cynical dictum that chaste is the most erotically suggestive of all adjectives is not so wide of the mark, and cool evokes the idea of summer.

The Sea, in its own right, furnishes only two images. I say in its own right' because it is used in XXXl, 73-5

Da quella region, che piu su tuona,

Occhio mortale alcun tanto non dista,

Qualunque in mare piu giu s'abbandona

but only as a measure of distance, and is again implied in the image of Fortune turning the ship (XXVll, 145). In neither of these does it seem to be used for its own marine quality. In the two instances where it is so used it symbolizes evil: the mar dell'amor torto (XXVl, 62) and the onde of cupidigia (XXVll, 121). Even when we remember the mar si crudele of Purgatorio , I, 3, it would be foolish to conclude that Dante habitually thought of the sea with dislike. The beautiful seascapes with which the Purgatorio opens would sufficiently prove the contrary. In the eleven cantos which I am studying it happens to appear only as something one has to be pulled out of and is in both places associated with the verb trarre . The core of the image is rescue from drowning, and this is no doubt a potent imagination for all humanity. It would not appear in a poem written by a fish.

Another class which contains only two items is that of images drawn from the Student's life, and they will occur at once to everyone's mind: the bachelor preparing for his disputation in XXlX, 46, and the forward pupil in XXV, 64. Both arise so directly out of the narrative that, however humorously and affectionately touched, they hardly amount to imagery in the sense that here concerns us.

Of images that might roughly be said to involve Landscape there are only three - the mountains to which the three Apostles are compared in a passage already mentioned, the sunlight coming through a rift in the clouds on to a flower-bed (XXIII, 79), and the elaborate simile of the cliff mirrored in water at XXX, 109. I must warn you that at this point my classification might be disputed. Garden images in general I have put under another heading because their emphasis is on the garden as such, the place of growth, the gardener's work, not on what might be called the view'. The flower-bed of XXIII, 79 comes here because in it the emphasis is on the thing seen, the thing that would interest a painter. So defined, landscapes are rare in our eleven cantos; nor does this surprise me. It is perhaps a characteristic of the Middle Ages rather than of Dante. Medieval poets are interested in trees, flowers, beasts, birds, and rivers: not often, I think, in landscape. When they are, they are usually of Germanic stock.

Four images I have classified as Psychological; by which I mean that in them Dante compares the state of mind which his celestial experiences arouse in him with some state of mind commonly known in our daily life. Three of these four are connected with sleep. In XXIII, 49 Dante compares himself to a man vainly trying to remember a dream; in XXVl, 70, to a man wakened by sudden light, and in XXXIII, 58-60, more interestingly, to one waking from a dream and retaining the emotion it has created but not the dream itself,

Qual e colui che somniando vede, Che dopo il sogno la passione impressa

Rimane, e l'altro alla mente non riede,

lines which strikingly anticipate Wordsworth's

the soul

Remembering how she felt, but what she felt

Remembering not. (Prelude, II, 315-17)

Nor of course is the resemblance accidental, for each poet is trying to describe what each thought ineffable.

The five images taken from Childhood show a remarkable uniformity. There is no reference, as we might have expected, to the innocence, the beauty, or the gaiety of children. Four out of the five present the same thing - the infant at the breast: one of these four, the fractious child turning away; three, the child feeding.

We now come to three classes each of which musters seven items. One of them calls, I think, for no comment - the class which I have headed Mythical and Historical, and which a medieval poet would, in English, have called simply Historical'. The most striking of them are that in which Dante compares his stupor at the sight of the Heavenly City with the stupor felt by the Goths on entering Rome, and the unforgettable statement which follows the Beatific Vision,

Un punto solo m'e maggior letargo

Che venticinque secoli alla impresa,

Che fe' Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d' Argo. (XXXIII, 94-6)

Notice here the art. Mere numbers venticinque secoli - do nothing in poetry. Even words like immeasurable do little. But the Argo puts us at once in the dawn of time, in the old untravelled world when the shadow of a ship was a wonder, and thence causes us to view the whole distance which separates it from the moment of Dante's vision. The others in this class are, I think, such as we should expect to find in any medieval poet.

The second of the seven-membered classes is that of Erotic or Hymeneal imagery. I was at first surprised by the shortness of this list, and if we discount the traditional images in it sposa in XXVll, 40, XXXl, 3, XXXll, 128, and nozze in XXX, 135 - it reduces itself to three. Each of these is contained in a single word (donnea once, and innamora twice) and none of them is emphatic. It would seem that the close interconnexion of human with divine love which is the main explicit subject of all Dante's poetry did not twine itself so closely about the stem of his imagination as we might suppose: the proportion between eroticism in the foreground and eroticism in the background is in fact the opposite of what the Freudians would teach us to anticipate. But one must always remember that Dante's thought makes no fusion, much less confusion, of the two loves in the end. The whole ten cantos are climbing to that moment at which the human beloved

sorrise, e riguardommi;

Poi si torno all'eterna fontana. (XXXI, 92-3)

We have still to consider a third class which contains seven images of Weight. If seven seemed a small number of erotic images, seven seems a large number of ponderosities in a poem where we are steadily moving away from the Earth to the rim of the universe. And none of them can strictly be called traditional, though one may be a dead' metaphor - the punti lievi e gravi of XXlV, 37. The others all suggest weight in more or less painful aspects. His subject itself is il ponderoso tema (XXIII, 64)

and weighs on his omero mortal: the mountainous Apostles, as we have seen, bow him with their imagined weight: because of his mortal pondo he must, having seen Heaven, return to Earth (XXVll, 64); he is reminded in the Ninth Sphere how, at the Centre, he had seen Satan da tutti i pesi del mondo costretto (XXlX, 57): Christ is described as

Carcar si volle della nostra salma. (XXXII, 114)

I have always felt that no poet-least of all, any poet whose theme is so unearthly as Dante's - has such an admirable solidity. Something of this may be due to these images of downward pressure. Perhaps we believe in his salita because we are not in such a world of irresponsible levitation as Shelley dreams of, but in a rigid Ptolemaic universe where all bodies draw to the centre, and only blessed souls and fire move upwards. For in poetry, if not necessarily in theology, Patmore may be right when he says Spirit is heavy Nature's wing

And is not truly anything

Without the weight.

(Editor's Note: Lewis was quoting from memory. Patmore says in The Wedding Sermon, x, 87-9: Spirit is heavy nature's wing, And is not rightly anything Without its burthen, etc.)

We now come to four classes which contain nine images each. Two of these, the Astronomical and the Military, are quite ordinary and deserve no mention in a study on the small scale I intend. But the other two are very curious and unexpected and closely connected with each other. I call the first Clothes and Attire. Now in a poem about Heaven we might expect to hear a good deal about white robes and golden crowns: but that turns out not to be the sort of thing that Dante is thinking of. We have one image of a crown, a garland (XXXll, 70), but the point is the fitness of the particular crown to the colour of the wearer's hair: allegorically, the fitness of each redeemed soul not only to Beatitude in general but to her unique Beatitude. Just before that, at line 57, we have a ring: but the point is that the ring exactly fits the finger. Adaptation, enclosure, fitting in, is the basic idea. The remaining images are based on a different, but related, idea. The whole cosmos is clothed in the Empyrean as in a real manto (XXIII, 112). Light travels into the eye di gonna in gonna (XXVl, 72), from gown to gown, through petticoat after petticoat. When St Peter circles round Beatrice, singing, his song is such that no verbal shading is adequate a cotai pieghe : the music has become the folds of a drapery (XXlV, 26). Adam calls God

il sommo bene,

Onde vien la letizia che mi fascia. (XXVI, 134-5)

The joy wraps him up like a blanket or a bandage. In canto XXX, so Dante at the river of light finds himself. fasciato in the velo of its refulgence. It is all, to me, quite unexpected. His mind (and therefore ours while we read) is apparently very sensitive to the experience of putting on, being enfolded, swathed, enveloped.

Closely connected with wrapping up is the idea of tying up, and therefore, inevitably, of untying: and these compose my next, for which I cannot find a better name than Cord images or images of Binding. In XXlV, 30 the prayer of Beatrice unties' St Peter from his sphere. The Blessed Virgin is prayed to untie' the cloud of mortality from Dante in XXXIII, 31. Dislegare is used in both passages. In XXXl, 90 Dante prays that his soul piacente a te , dal corpo si disnodi . In XXVl, 49 he is asked what other cords (altre corde ) besides the intrinsic goodness of the Divine Essence draw him to God. In XXVIII, 11 he speaks of the fair eyes whence Love made the cord to take him. In the same canto (58) Beatrice speaks of the nature of the Hierarchies as a knot (nodo) which Dante cannot untie. In the next (XXlX, 36) the union of potentiality and actuality is tal vime , che giammai non si divima . In XXXll, so a hard problem is a legame . Finally, the supreme vision is expressed in the words La forma universal di guesto nodo (XXXIII, 91). The world of Dante's imagination, like that of Ptolemaic science, is a world of knots, cords, envelopes.

Next come images of Travel and images which may be called Physiological in so far as they refer to parts or operations of the human or animal body. Each category yields eleven examples. The images of travel are not very remarkable. Two of them present the writing of the poem as a journey: it is no voyage for a light craft in XXIII, 67, and in XXlV, 25 the pen has to take a jump like a traveller on a bad road. The Incarnation appears as il buon cammino in XXIII, 75: and again in the same canto (105) the Holy Womb is the inn or lodging (albergo ) of the Saviour. Elsewhere, the travel images illustrate spiritual or intellectual progress. Of the physiological images, some are unremarkable, like the pelle bianca and pelle nera in XXVll, 136, or the sin of Adam as a wound (piaga ) in XXXll, 4. Laughter, metaphorically used, comes three times. The strangest and most interesting of all in this class is

Con quanti denti questo amor ti morde. (XXVI, 51)

We have already seen Love as an affair of cords that draw. It is now something that bites. And there is no question here of erotic love: it is love for the Unmoved Mover that has teeth. Nothing, perhaps, shows so clearly the difference between Dante's mind and that of most of the men I know. It is true that corde and morde rhyme with one another: but on the lowest view of his metrical skill, one at least must have been chosen for its own sake - unless we are to suppose, madly, that both are makeshifts put in to rhyme with concorde.

We now come to a curiously large class (it numbers twelve) of what I call images of Emission. The name is unsatisfactory, but I trust I can make myself understood. They all concern letting out, or keeping in, opening, or shutting: both psychologically and aesthetically they are in close connexion with the wrappings up and tyings and untyings which are enumerated under clothes and cords: and they may also have a subconscious connexion with the physiological. When Dante speaks, he describes himself as releasing the waters of his interno fonte (XXlV, 57). Later in that canto (100) a proof uncloses (dischiude ) the truth. Doves open (pande ) their love to one another (XXV, 20). The young pupil is anxious that his knowledge unconceal itself' (si disasconda , XXV, 66). Images of distillation occur at XXV, 71 and XXXIII, 62. Hope is a fountain. God is the Eternal Fountain. In creation He opens Himself (XXlX, 18). These images form a sort of link between the tyings and untyings and certain images of rain which we shall meet later.

Equal in number to the Emission images are the images from Eating and Drinking. Two of them are traditional; or three if pasciute di vento (XXlX, 107) is, as I suppose, proverbial. It is, I think, characteristic that what is generally compared to food is the satisfaction of spiritual or intellectual desire: if indeed we can, in Dante, distinguish the two. His joy at beholding the triumph of Christ in XXIII, 43 is quelle dape . He is pieno with the drops that distil from an Epistle of St James (XXV, 77). His curiosity about the River of Light in XXX, 74 is tanta sete .

The last of the smaller classes, with sixteen members, is the Zoological. Nine out of the sixteen are connected with birds, usually by the mere suggestion of wings and feathers which symbolize spiritual movement. Of the beast images the most remarkable is the homely one of the animal coperto in XXVl, 97 - presumably a pig in a cart or a duck in a basket on the way to market.

And now there is a sudden jump in the size of our lists. We come to the Meteorological and Social, each with twenty-four items. My meteorological class consists of images taken from the lower sky and thus distinguished from the Astronomical. Two facts emerge at once. Of the six passages in which the general appearance of the sky is suggested, four deal with early morning (the dolce stagione of Inferno) and one with either morning or evening. I suspect that this is not peculiar to the eleven cantos we are studying: my memory of the whole Commedia is full of sunrises and the early tremolar della marina . But balancing these we find a high percentage of images drawn from dew or rain. The rains which will at once occur to the mind of any who has read Dante will probably be either the rain which fell upon the gluttonous or the fiery rain under which Brunetto Latini walked. But in the Paradiso the characteristic associations of rain are good ones: La larga ploia Dello Spirito Santo (XXlV, 91-2): the drops from the Epistle of St James of which Dante is so full that he can now shed them upon others (XXV, 77): the virtu which the Divine Mind piove , rains down upon the spheres (XXVll, 111): the piover of allegrezza which pours over Mary in XXXll, 88. There is, indeed, only one exception: the incessant rain which destroys the budding promise of human will in XXVll, 125. I believe these images of good rain to be very important. The descent of the fructifying rain from heaven to earth is in a sense the symbol of the Ptolemaic universe in which power is always transmitted downwards. In a larger sense it symbolizes any Agape religion, any system in which man (and nature) is the patient, and Grace the agent. And more obviously it has its hymeneal associations as the visible act of the ieros gamos of sky and soil: associations made explicit by Spenser when angry Jove an hideous storme of raine

Did poure into his Lemans lap.

(Editor's Note: The Faerie Queene, I, i, 6.)

Under the heading of Social images I have included some which might rather be called Ecclesiastical or even Religious. The common bond is that they all concern either institutions or things seen in places where human beings are together. Thus the pilgrim in XXXl, 103 who gazes at the Veronica is for me a social image, because Dante is not thinking how he or we should feel in his place, but observing the stranger's behaviour as if he had seen him in a crowd. The pilgrim has come perhaps from Croazia’ to see our Veronica'. The social images, thus defined, have one very remarkable characteristic. We know that Dante was an exile and an embittered politician: we might expect to find his social images full of satire. In reality they are without exception either happy and favourable or (more rarely) neutral. If these were our only evidence we should infer that we were reading the work of a man at complete harmony with his fellows. Many of them are concerned, as Charles Williams would have delighted to note, with the idea of the City or the Empire. Saints in bliss become Barons or patrici : God is the imperadore , Heaven His basilica or aula , sometimes a convento or consistorio , or a citta . The poem is told that now it must dance (XXIII, 62). The blessed dance like a damsel who rises and enters the ball to do honour to a bride (XXV, 103). Beatrice, speaking of Papal corruption, works like a donna onesta who has heard of another's fault. There are images from a masquerade (XXX, 91) and a charming picture of a master embracing a servant who has brought good news (XXlV, 148). There is a chessboard, a salutation, a bride tacita ed immota , and a temple. The images in themselves call for no comment: what strikes us is their frequency and cheerfulness. We have all read books which place philanthropic and optimistic sentiments in the foreground, but betray, as it were in odd corners, how few people the author likes. In Dante the tension is reversed. Terrible denunciations are hurled at persons and abuses; but at the roots of his mind we discover an easy and unemphasized enjoyment of towered cities' and the busy hum of men'. He is not an oddity or a misfit; hence springs some at least of the security and exhilaration with which we read his severe and in some ways appalling poem.

The images of Light and Heat number twenty-five, of which we may discount seven as traditional. They are mostly references to the fire' of love, so common in the poets that we do not strongly notice them. Another subsection in this class consists of what may be called variations on the scriptural theme that God is light. These, no doubt, could also be called traditional; but they are so close to the internal narrative, so frequent, and often so strongly imagined, that I think they affect us as if they were new. They are also inevitable in any monotheistic system, and especially in that of medieval Christendom. Thus when we read of the supreme Essenza Che ciascun ben che fuor di lei si trova

Altro non e ch'un lume di suo raggio (XXVI, 32-3)

we not only understand the doctrine but see the picture. The same is true, if I may judge by my own experience, of the many images from reflected light: as of the

verace speglio

Che fa di se pareglio all'altre cose

E nulla face lui di se pareglio- (XXVI, 106-8)

which makes equally good sense and good poetry whichever reading we adopt: in XXlX, 25 (E come in vetro etc.) the emphasis is on the speed of reflexion: in line 144 of the same canto, on the multiplicity of mirrors and, in contrast, the unity of the light which they all reflect. But I will not enumerate further, for the importance and relevance of these images, though great, is very obvious and will have escaped no reader of Dante.

What concerns us more is to notice that side by side with these twenty-five images of heat and light we have also twenty-five that may be called Horticultural or Agricultural. The poetry of the Paradiso is as full of roots and leaves and growth as it is of lights - and far fuller of both than of jewels or crowns. It is worth noticing that very few of these images are merely images of visible beauty. Dante looks at vegetation with the eyes of a gardener more often than with those of a tourist: he is interested in becoming, in process. The nearest we get to the merely visual is in XXIII, 70 where the assembly of the blessed is a fair garden; but then it is a garden blossoming under the rays of Christ' - one feels that light drawing up those flowers. The Blessed Virgin is compared to roses and lilies: but lilies whose smell drew the Saviour on His buon cammino (ibid. 75). Leaves are not mentioned for their greenness. Once they illustrate serial progression when St Peter draws Dante di ramo in ramo to the ultime fronde - that is, takes him systematically through the subject of Faith (XXlV, 115). Elsewhere the saints come like leaves in the garden of the Eternal Gardener (XXVl, 64): or, with a faint suggestion of Homer, human customs succeed one another like leaves (XXVl, 136). Ripeness occurs thrice. Dante has to grow ripe for enduring the rays of the three great Apostles (XXV, 36): Adam, the man who had never been a child, is as Pomo che maturo solo prodotto fosti (XXVl, 91): it is explained in canto XXX that the river and the topazes that plunge into it and the laughter of the fields are only ombriferi prefazii of the truth - not that Dante is looking at unripe (acerbe ) or preliminary things but that his vision is still immature. The whole life of the plant, seed, root, flower, and fruit comes in. Verbs like seminare , inflorare , germogliare , germinare provide an earthy ground-bass to the poetry of the higher heavens. The blessed are the

frutto

Ricolto del girar di queste spere. (XXIII, 20-1)

Toser is surely wrong in his comment that Dante here refers to the activity of stellar and planetary influence in producing the characters and lives of men. Wholesale astrology was simply the current medieval and renaissance form of determinism: only a modified astrology was possible to a Christian poet, and Dante in Purgatorio, XVI had put into the mouth of Marco Lombardo the orthodox view that constellation' leaves room for free will and that if not sapiens yet certainly sanctus dominabitur astris A maggior forza ed a miglior natura

Liberi soggiacete, e quella cria

La mente in voi, che il ciel non ha in sua cura.

(Purgatorio, XVl, 79-81)

To describe the saints in glory as the fruit' of constellation' would be to attribute to the lower nature', the created universe, that which is the gift of the miglior natura or Grace, and which even the unfallen Adam could not have achieved in his mere nature. In what sense, then, can the heavenly harvest be attributed to the spheres? I think Dante is here regarding them primarily as the embodiments of Time, and indeed almost identifying them with Time itself, having read in Chalcidius's version of the Timaeus (38B), tempus vero caelo aeguaevum est ut una oria una dissoluantur . The gathering of the Church Triumphant in Heaven is the final cause of the whole historical process and may thus be called the fruit of Time, or of the Spheres. If so, this image is closely linked with another which I have reserved to the last because it seems to me to combine the grotesq ue and the sublime more triumphantly than any other poetical image I have met. At the end of canto XXVll (118) the Ninth Sphere is compared to a flower pot and Dante bidden to observe

come il tempo tenga in cotal testo

Le sue radici e negli altri le fronde.

I must confess that all the Miltonic sublimities seem to me heavy and superficial things compared with this astonishing vision which reveals our race crawling among the topmost (or, if you will, the lowest) leaves of the great time-tree that grows head-downward from the Ninth Heaven. Not even from that crystalline soil but from a vase.

Only one category now remains, and it, with its nine and twenty images, has an easy lead. It would be interesting to know how many have guessed it. My title for it is Technical': it is imagery drawn from the arts, crafts, manufactures, and skilled occupations of men: from painting, musical instruments, seals and sealing-wax, clocks, thread, money in a purse, hammer and anvil, rowing, riddling with a sieve, archery at the butts, the cares of the artist, the jeweller, the geometrician and the astronomer observing an eclipse, and finally (on the very eve of the ineffable vision) a prudent reminder that a good tailor cuts his coat according to his cloth. So closely does Dante observe on the poetical level the rule given for the spiritual life in the Imitation summum non stat sine infimo (II, X, 4).

Apart from its other defects, this little analysis suffers from dealing with only eleven cantos. I have no idea how my statistics would be altered if I had time to extend them to the whole Comedy. Yet even from these cantos something seems to emerge. Images whose only claim is their beauty are conspicuously rare. What would seem at first sight to be the prosaic is neither wooed nor avoided. What runs through many of my lists is the suggestion of a curious intensity of sensibility in directions where modern sensibility is, I believe, much weaker: the intensity which compares the gratification of curiosity to an infant sucking at the breast, which can feel fasciato , muffled or wrapped up, in joy, or in light, which feels love pulling with ropes or biting with teeth, which can see spiritual or even local transitions as knots tied or untied. It is this strain which makes me uncertain of the growing belief that if a Dante speaks of a professedly allegorical lady in terms of violent passion we may conclude that she was not wholly allegorical. That would be so with most of us: with Dante, perhaps less. That is one aspect of his imagery: the curiousness, the almost sensuous intensity about things not sensuous. But side by side with that, we find other characteristics: Dante in the garden, and Dante in the streets, his feeling for the silent growing life, and his cheerful, spontaneous interest in the state and courtesies, the trades and skills, of men. It is, perhaps, this continual reference both to the quiet, moistened earth and to the resonant pavements, workshops, and floors, which support and make convincing his invention of a heaven which, in the obvious sense, makes very few concessions to the natural man.

51 IMAGINATION AND THOUGHT IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The man of the Middle Ages had many ignorances in common with the savages of more modern times, and some of his beliefs would certainly suggest savage parallels to an anthropologist. But it would be very wrong to infer from this that he was at all like a savage. I do not only, or chiefly, mean that such a view would depress medieval man beneath his true dignity. That's as may be; some might prefer the Polynesian. The point is that, whether for better or for worse, he was different. He was in a different predicament and had a different history. Even when he thought or did the same things as savages, he had come to them by a different route. We should be quite on the wrong track if we sought the origin, at least the immediate origin, of even the strangest medieval doctrines in what some even call pre-logical thinking.

Here is an example. In a twelfth-century English poem called the Brut we read the following: 'There dwell in the air many kinds of creatures which shall remain there till doomsday comes. Some of them are good and some do evil.' (Editor’s Note: La3amon, 15774-9 (Madden's edition)) These beings are mentioned to account for the birth of a child for whom no human father could be detected; one of them had in fact begotten Merlin. Now, if we considered this passage in vacuo, we might very well suppose that the poet's mind was working just like that of a savage, and that his belief in aerial daemons sprang as directly from a tribal culture as coarse grass from uncultivated soil. In reality, we know that he is getting it all from a book, from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain, and that Geoffrey is getting it from the second-century De Deo Socratis of Apuleius, who, in his turn, is reproducing the pneumatology of Plato. Trace that pneumatology back for a few centuries or so and then at last you may come to whatever roots it had in a culture really close to savagery and a thinking possibly pre-logical. But all that is almost as remote from the medieval English poet as it is from us. He tells us about the aerial daemons neither because his own poetic imagination invented them, nor because they are the spontaneous reaction of his age and culture to the forces of nature, but because he has read about them in a book.

Here is another. In a French poem of the fourteenth century Nature personified appears as a character and has a conversation with another personage called Gracedieu. Grace-of-God would, for various reasons, be a misleading translation, so I will call her Supernature. And Nature says to Supernature The circle of the cold moon truly marks the boundary between your realm and mine forever'. (Editor’s Note: Guillaume Deguileville, Pelerinage de l'Homme . In Lydgate's trans. (E.E.T.S., Extra Series LXXVII, ed. F. J. Furnivall, 1899), 3415 seq.) Here again we might well suppose the savage mind at work; what more natural than to locate the houses of the gods at a reasonable distance and choose the Moon for the gate between their world and ours? Yet, almost certainly that is not what is happening. The idea that the orbit of the Moon is a great boundary between two regions of the universe is Aristotelian. It is based on a contrast which naturally forced itself upon one whose studies were so often biological and psychological, but also sometimes astronomical. The part of the world which we inhabit, the Earth, is the scene of generation and decay and therefore of continual change. Such regularities as he would observe in it seemed to him imperfect; terrestrial nature carried things on, he thought, not always but on the whole' in the same way. (Editor’s Note: De Gen. Animalium, 778a; Polit. 1255b.) It was clear from observing the weather that this irregularity extended a good way upwards above the surface of the Earth. But not all the way. Above the variable sky there were the heavenly bodies which seemed to have been perfectly regular in their behaviour ever since the first observations were made and of which none, to his knowledge, had ever been seen to come into existence or to decay. The Moon was obviously the lowest of these. Hence he divided the universe at the Moon; all above that was necessary, regular, and eternal, all below it, contingent, irregular and perishable. And of course, for any Greek, what is necessary and eternal is more divine. This, with a Christian colouring added, fully accounts for the passage we began with.

Both examples - and it would not be difficult to cite more - point to the same truth, and it is a truth basic for any understanding of the Middle Ages. Their culture is through and through a bookish culture. Millions, no doubt, were illiterate; the masters, however, were literate, and not only literate but scholarly and even pedantic. The peculiar predicament of medieval man was in fact just this: he was a literate man who had lost a great many of his books and forgotten how to read all his Greek books. He works with the rather chancy selection he has. In that way the Middle Ages were much less like an age which has not yet been civilized than like one which has survived the loss of civilization. An exaggerated, but not wholly fake, model would be a party of shipwrecked people setting to work to try to build up a culture on an uninhabited island and depending on the odd collection of books which happened to be on board their ship.

Of course this is grossly oversimplified and I must immediately take notice of one complication which may have already occurred to you. Genealogically, and in some measure culturally, the medieval European had roots in the barbarian life of the north and west as well as in Mediterranean civilization. Along that line, it may be said, he had a much closer link with primitive thought than through its far-off echoes in Latin literature. This of course is true. Fragments of indigenous and spontaneous mythology survive; Germanic, in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Old High German, or Celtic (to some undefined extent) in the French romances. Popular literature, such as the Ballads, may throw up more or less disguised fragments of this at quite late periods. But we must insist that these things loom much larger in the popular picture of the Middle Ages than they did in the reality. By the time we reach the High Middle Age all the old Germanic literature has been forgotten and the languages in which it was written are unknown. And as for the Ballad and the Romance, it is important to realize that both these attractive products are the reverse of typical. It is easy to be deceived here, because it was the Ballad and the Romance which first excited modern interest in the Middle Ages; Medieval studies began there. The reason is simple. These forms appealed to the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even now many of us were first lured to Medieval studies by this romantic attraction. Even now the man in the street' thinks of the Middle Ages, if at all, in terms of the romances; popular iconography - a joke in Punch, an advertisement - wishing to suggest the medieval, depicts a knight in armour riding through desolate country, adding castles, dragons, and distressed damsels quantum suff. But the paradox is that the note is one which the real Middle Ages struck only in a minority of Ballads and Romances and hardly at all in any other form. That boundlessness, indefiniteness, suggestiveness are not the common or characteristic medieval mood. The real temper of those ages was not romantic. The Arthurian stories represent, perhaps, a truancy or escape from habitual concerns.

Characteristically, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a spiritual adventurer; he was an organizer, a codifier, a man of system. His ideal could be not unfairly summed up in the old housewifely maxim A place for everything, and everything in its (right) place'. Three things are typical of him. First, that small minority of his cathedrals in which the design of the architect was actually achieved (usually, of course, it was overtaken by the next wave of architectural fashion long before it was finished). I am thinking of a thing like Salisbury. Secondly, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. And thirdly, the Divine Comedy of Dante. In all these alike we see the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of a passionately logical mind ordering a huge mass of heterogeneous details into unity. They desire unity and proportion, all the classical virtues, just as keenly as the Greeks did. But they have a greater and more varied collection of things to fit in. And they delight to do it. Hence the Comedy which is, I suppose, the supreme achievement: crowded and varied as a railway station on a bank holiday, but patterned and schematized as a battalion on a ceremonial parade.

You see how this arises naturally from their situation? I described them as literate people who had lost most of their books. And what survived was, to some extent, a chance collection. It contained ancient Hebrew, classical Greek, classical Roman, decadent Roman and early Christian elements. It had reached them by various routes. All Plato had disappeared except part of the Timaeus in a Latin version: one of the greatest, but also one of the least typical, of the dialogues. Aristotle's logic was at first missing, but you had a Latin translation of a very late Greek introduction to it. Astronomy and medicine, and (later) Aristotle, came in Latin translations of Arabic translations of the Greek. That is the typical descent of learning: from Athens to Hellenistic Alexandria, from Alexandria to Baghdad, from Baghdad, via Sicily, to the university of Paris, and thence all over Europe.. . A scratch collection, a corpus that frequently contradicted itself. But here we touch on a real credulity in the medieval mind. Faced with this self-contradictory corpus, they hardly ever decided that one of the authorities was simply right and the others wrong; never that all were wrong. To be sure, in the last resort it was taken for granted that the Christian writers must be right as against the Pagans. But it was hardly ever allowed to come to the last resort. It was apparently difficult to believe that anything in the books - so costly, fetched from so far, so old, often so lovely to the eye and hand, was just plumb wrong. No; if Seneca and St Paul disagreed with one another, and both with Cicero, and all these with Boethius, there must be some explanation which would harmonize them. What was not true literally might be true in some other sense; what was false simpliciter might be true secundum quid. And so on, through every possible subtlety and ramification. It is out of this that the medieval picture of the universe is evolved: a chance collection of materials, an inability to say 'Bosh', a temper systematic to the point of morbidity, great mental powers, unwearied patience, and a robust delight in their work. All these factors led them to produce the greatest, most complex, specimen of syncretism or harmonization which, perhaps, the world has ever known. They tidied up the universe. To that tidy universe, and above all to its effect on the imagination, I now turn.

I assume that everyone knows, more or less, its material layout: a motionless Earth at the centre, transparent spheres revolving round it, of which the lowest, slowest, nearest and smallest carries the Moon, and thence upwards in the order Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; beyond these, all the stars in one sphere; beyond that, a sphere which carries no light but merely imparts movement to those below it; beyond that, the Empyrean, the boundary of the mundus, the beginning of the infinite true 'Heaven'.

No one, as far as I know, has exaggerated the emotional and imaginative difference between such a universe and that which we now believe ourselves to inhabit; but a great many people have misconceived the nature of the difference. The cardinal error (ubiquitous in earlier modern writers, and still clung to by some who should know better today) may be expressed in the following words. 'The Earth, both by her supposed size and by her central position, had, for medieval thinkers, an importance to which we now know that she is by no means entitled.' Hence, of course, the probable conclusion that their theology - here, once more, pre-logical thinking might be suspected - was the offspring of their cosmology. The truth seems to me the reverse. Their theology might be thought to imply an Earth which counted for a good deal in the universe and was central in dignity as well as in space; the odd thing is that their cosmology does not, in any obvious sense, encourage this view.

First, as regards size. That the Earth is, by any cosmic scale, insignificant, is a truth that was forced on every intelligent man as soon as serious astronomical observations began to be made. I have already said that Aristotle thought the region above the Moon more divine than the airy, watery, and earthy realm below it. He also thought it incomparably large. As he says in the Metaphysics, 'The perceptible world around us' - that is, the realm of growth, decay and weather - 'is, so to speak, a nothing if considered as part of the whole.' (Note: Metaphysics, 1072b; cf. Paradiso, XXVIII, 41-2.) Later in Ptolemy's compendium, which transmitted Greek astronomy to the Middle Ages, a more precise statement is made; the Earth, we are told, must, for astronomical purposes, be regarded as having no magnitude at all, as a point. This was accepted by the Middle Ages. It was not merely accepted by scholars; it was re-echoed by moralists and poets again and again. To judge from the texts, medieval man thought about the insignificance of Earth more persistently, if anything, than his modern descendants. We even find quite popular texts hammering the lesson home by those methods which the scientific popularizer uses today. We are told how long it would take you to get to the sphere of the fixed stars if you travelled so many miles a day. The figure brings the distance out at something near 118 million miles.

Now of course this is a small distance compared with those of which modern astronomers talk. But we are here considering not the accuracy of the figure but its imaginative and emotional impact. From that point of view I maintain that the difference between a million, a hundred millions, and a million millions, is wholly negligible. All these figures can be used, manipulated, with equal ease by anyone who can do simple arithmetic; none of them can at all be imagined in the sense of 'visualized', and those who have most imagination know this best.

From that point of view, then, the medieval model of the universe is on a par with the Newtonian (I do not say, with the modern, for I want to defer the consideration of it). Either will allow you to lose yourself in unimaginable distances, to sink and say with Leopardi il naufragar m’e dolce in questo mare, (Note: Giacomo Leopardi, ' L'Infinito', Canti , ed. Giuseppe de Robertis (Firenze, 1960), p. 124, l. 15.) and to see the Earth as a speck of dust - if, of course, that is the sort of thing you want to do. And now comes the point I really want to make. I have not said that the difference between the medieval and, say, the Newtonian picture was less than our grandfathers supposed. It was quite as great. But it was not the kind of difference we have been taught to expect.

What it really was I can, here and now, only suggest. The thing really needs to be learned not from a lecture but (you are scientists) by an experiment; an experiment on one's imagination. It is a simple one. Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that the pre-Copernican astronomy is true. Look up at the sky with that assumption in your mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will then, I predict, begin to dawn on you.

You will be looking at a world unimaginably large but quite definitely finite. At no speed possible to man, in no lifetime possible to man, could you ever reach its frontier, but the frontier is there; hard, clear, sudden as a national frontier. And secondly, because the Earth is an absolute centre, and Earthwards from any part of this immense universe is downwards, you will find that you are looking at the planets and stars in terms not merely of 'distance' but of that very special kind of distance which we call 'height'. They are not only a long way from the Earth but a long way above it. I need hardly point out that height is a very much livelier notion than distance; it has, the moment it is imagined, commerce with our nerves, with all our racial and infantile terrors, with our pleasures as mountaineers, our love of wide prospects, and a whole vast network of ethical and social metaphors which we could not shake off even if we tried. Now these two factors taken together - enormous but finite size, and distances which, however vast, remain unambiguously vertical, and indeed vertiginous - at once present you with something which differs from the Newtonian picture rather as a great building differs from a great jungle. You can lose yourself in infinity; there is indeed nothing much else you can do with it. It arouses questions, it prompts to a certain kind of wonder and reverie, usually a sombre kind, so that Wordsworth can speak of 'melancholy space and doleful time' or Carlyle can call the starry sky 'a sad sight'. But it answers no questions; necessarily shapeless and trackless, patient of no absolute order or direction, it leads, after a little, to boredom or despair or (often) to the haunting conviction that it must be an illusion. Earth and Man are, if you like, dwarfed by it, but not much more dwarfed than the Solar System, or the Galaxy, or anything else. One cannot be, in any very important sense, small where size has ceased to have a meaning. The old universe was wholly different in its effect. It was an answer, not a question. It offered not a field for musing but a single overwhelming object; an object which at once abashes and exalts the mind. For in it there is a final standard of size. The Primum Mobile is really large because it is the largest corporeal thing there is. We are really small because our whole Earth is a speck compared with the Primum Mobile.

I have been speaking so far only of dimensions. But the effect of the old model becomes even more interesting when we consider order. It is not merely very large, it is a whole of finely graded parts. Everything descends from the circumference with a steady diminution of size, speed, power and dignity. This ninefold division is harmoniously crossed by a threefold division. All above the Empyrean is in a special, immaterial, sense 'Heaven', full of the Divine Substance. From the Empyrean down to the Moon is the realm of aether - that strange half-matter in which so many different ages have believed, on what seems to a layman very inadequate evidence - changeless, necessary, not subject to Fortune. From the Moon down to the Earth is the realm of air (for they thought the air extended to the Moon's orbit), which is also the realm of luck change, birth, death, and contingence.

You see why I compared it to a building - though indeed any great, complex work of art - Paradise Lost or Euclid's Elements or Spinoza's Ethics or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony - would have done almost as well. It is a structure, a finished work, a unity articulated through a great and harmonious plurality. It evokes not mere wonder but admiration. It provides food for thought and satisfaction for our aesthetic nature. I think everyone will see what I mean if I say that in passing from the Newtonian to the Ptolemaic cosmos one passes from the romantic to the classical. Milton could describe the Moon as looking Like one that had bin led astray

Through the Heav'ns wide pathles way.

(Editor’s Note: Il Penseroso, 69-70.)

That hits off admirably the feeling many generations now have had when they look at the night sky: I do not think any ancient or medieval man would have felt so. That particular charm, the charm of the pathless, was one that the old universe lacked; it had a severer, a more robust attraction and appealed to a more formal imagination.

After the dimensions and the order, we must consider the dynamics. I have already said that movement earthward from any part of the whole was conceived as movement downward. In that sense they understood what we would call gravitation. Thus one philosopher says that if you could bore a hole through the Earth and drop a stone down, the stone would come to rest at the centre. And in the Comedy, Dante and Virgil come to the centre where they find Lucifer embedded and have to climb down his shaggy sides in order to continue their journey to the Antipodes; but Dante finds to his surprise that after they have passed his waist they have to climb up to his feet. For they have of course passed the centre of gravitation. But they never talk of gravitation. Their way of describing it is to say that every natural object has a native or 'proper' place and is always 'trying' or 'desiring' to get there. When unimpeded, flame moves upwards and solid bodies move downwards because they want to go you may call it, 'home'. Is this animism? Did they really think that all matter was sentient? Apparently not. They will distinguish animate and inanimate as clearly as we do; will say that stones, for example, have only being; vegetables being and life; animals, being, life and sense; man, being, life, sense and reason. The truth is that their language about inanimate bodies was the same kind of language that the modern man uses - I mean, the modern 'plain' man, not the modern scientist or philosopher. When a modern says that the stone fell 'in obedience to the law of gravitation', he does not really think there is literally a law or literal obedience; that the stone, on being released, whips out a little book of statutes, finds the chapter and paragraph relevant to its predicament, and decides it had better be a law-abiding stone and 'come quiet'. Nor did the medieval man believe that the stone really felt homesick, or felt at all. Both ways of putting it are analogical; neither speaker would usually know any way of expressing the facts except by an analogy.

But of course it makes a great difference to the tone of your mind which analogy you adopt - whether you fill your universe with phantom police-courts and traffic regulations, or with phantom longings and endeavours. The second alternative, which the Middle Ages adopted, is connected with another and more far-reaching doctrine which is not merely analogical. We are now approaching the junction between their cosmology and their theology. The theology involved is, however, not that of the Bible, the Fathers, or the Councils, but that of Aristotle. Of course they thought it consistent with Christianity; whether they were right in so thinking is not my concern.

The infinite, according to Aristotle, is not actual. No infinite object exists; no infinite process occurs. Hence we cannot explain the movement of one body by the movement of another and so on forever. No such infinite series could, he thought, exist. All the movements of the universe must therefore, in the last resort, result from a compulsive force exercised by something immovable. He thought that such an Unmoved Mover could move other things only by being their end or object or (if you like) target-what he calls their 'Final Cause'-not as one billiard ball moves another but as food moves the hungry man, as the mistress moves her lover, as truth moves the philosophical inquirer. He calls this Unmoved Mover either 'God' or 'Mind'. It moves the Primum Mobile (which of course sets all the inferior bodies in motion) by love . (Editor’s Note: Metaphysics, 1072b.) But notice that this does not mean what a Christian would naturally mean by the word. There is no question here of a beneficent Being loving the world He has created and descending to redeem it. God, in Aristotle, moves the world by being loved, not by loving; by being the supremely desirable object. This of course implies not only consciousness but high rationality on the part of that which is moved. Accordingly we find (not now by analogy, but in strictest fact) that in every sphere there is a rational creature called an Intelligence which is compelled to move, and therefore to keep his sphere moving, by his incessant desire for God. It was disputed whether the Intelligence is 'in' the sphere as the soul is in the body (in which case the sphere must be envisaged as an eternal and exalted animal) or as a man is in a ship (in which case the corporeal sphere is a kind of instrument). On the whole the second view won. A modern may ask why a love for God should lead to perpetual rotation. I think, because this love or appetite for God is a desire to participate as much as possible in His nature; i.e. to imitate it. And the nearest approach to His eternal immobility, the second best, is eternal regular movement in the most perfect figure, which, for any Greek, is the circle. Hence the universe is kept going by the continual effort of its most excellent parts (each a little slower and feebler than the one above it) to conform their behaviour to a model of which they always fall short. That of course is the real meaning of Dante's (often misunderstood) line about 'the love that moves the sun and the other stars'. Even so love is perhaps too ethical a word; 'appetite' would be better. In this scheme God is the quarry, the Intelligences the huntsmen; God is the mistress, all things else the suitors; God the candle, and the universe the moth.

2

In my last lecture I suggested the experiment of a starlit walk taken with the assumption that Ptolemaic astronomy is true. In order to bring that old model into fuller activity, I now want to recall an experience which, I suppose, everyone has had; that of coming out from some indoor function of pomp and importance, an opera or a debate or a feast, and suddenly looking up at the cold stars above the housetops. What seemed so big while we were inside is all at once dwarfed. The sky is like an ironic comment on this and on all other human concerns. If we remember our Pascal, we may even murmur The silence of those eternal spaces frightens me'. After that, we may rally and hit back and say, still using Pascal, that though we are small and transitory as dewdrops, still we are dewdrops that can think, (Editor’s Note: The silence of those eternal spaces frightens me' is a translation of Pascal's pensee: Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie': Brunschvicg No. 206 (II, p. 127). The indirect quotation, 'that though we are small and transitory as dewdrops, still we are dewdrops that can think, does, I feel require a comment. Lewis has confused (or is it an inspired misreading?) Pascal's original roseau (reed) with rosée (dew). Although Pascal really compares man to a reed, I feel that I should preserve what Lewis wrote. This is because his image of the 'dewdrop' strikes me as the superior image, and it quite obviously serves his purpose best. The complete text of the pensee to which he is referring is: 'L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'ecraser: une vapeur, une goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais, quand l'univers l'ecraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui; l'univers n'en sait rien. Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée. C'est de la qu'il faut nous relever et non de l'espace et de la durée, que nous ne saurions remplir. Travaillons donc a bien penser: voila le principe de la morale': Brunschvicg No. 347 (II, pp. 261-3).) which is (we presume) more than can be said for the galaxies. Let us now try to understand why neither of these reactions - neither the initial deflation nor the come-back - was at all likely to occur to a man of the Middle Ages.

He did not think that the spaces he looked up at were silent, or dark or empty. Far from being silent, they were perpetually filled with sweet, immeasurable sound. The vast hollow spheres, turning each at its proper interval inside its superior, gave out a blended harmony. There were various explanations of the fact that we do not hear it. One of the oldest and most pleasing was based on the travellers' tale that those who lived near the great cataract on the Nile were unconscious of its noise. Because they had always heard it, they never heard it. The same would obviously hold true in an even higher degree of the music of the spheres. This is the only sound which has never for one split second ceased in any part of the universe; with this positive we have no negative to contrast. Presumably if (per impossibile) it ever did stop, then with terror and dismay, with a dislocation of our whole auditory life, we should feel that the bottom had dropped out of our lives. But it never does. The music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night and in all ages.

Nor were those high regions dark. The darkness in which the stars (for us) are set is merely the darkness of the long, conical shadow cast by the Earth when the sun is below our feet. They knew, from their theory of lunar eclipses, that the apex of this dark cone must fall well above the moon. Beyond that apex the higher heavens are bathed in perpetual sunshine. In a sense, no doubt, we should say the same. But then we are aware (as they, I think, were not) of the part played by the air in diffusing sunlight and producing that bubble of luminosity which we call day; we have even, in stratospheric ascents, gone high enough to see the blue curtain grow thin at the zenith so that blue turns to black and the night of space almost shows through. They knew that, up yonder, one was above the air, in whatever they meant by aether; they did not know that one would see the sun flaming in a black pit. They thought on the contrary that they would be floating (for Milton is here a medieval) in those happie climes that lye

Where day never shuts his eye,

Up in the broad fields of the skye.

(Editor’s Note: page 53, line 7. Comus, 976-8.)

And these spaces, bright and resonant, were also inhabited. We have already peopled them with the Intelligences who either animate or guide the spheres. Distinct from these, but of course equally immortal and superhuman, are the angels. Their natural habitat is between the Empyrean and the Moon and their number is probably enormous. Unlike the aerial daemons who live between Moon and Earth, they have no bodies - such, at least, was the view that finally prevailed - but are naked minds. We, like them, are rational, but there is a great difference. We have an immediate and intuitive grasp only of axioms and have to seek all other knowledge by the laborious process of discursive thinking. They are wholly intuitive; concepts are as palpable to them as apples or pennies are to us. In fact, their reason is to ours as noon to dusk. Clearly when you look up at a sky peopled by such creatures as these, it is just no good asserting 'I am a dewdrop that thinks'. The very necessity of 'thinking' (as we ordinarily understand the word) is the measure of our inferiority.

Understand that the vast majority of these bodiless minds have no concern at all with us. We touch only the lowest fringe of angelic life. For angelic life also is graded; the word angel is, rather unfortunately, used both for the whole lot and also for the lowest rank - just as we use sailors sometimes in contrast to ships' officers, but sometimes in a sense that covers all who enable the ship to sail. They are ordered in nine classes which are arranged in three groups of three classes each. The top hierarchy, which consists of the creatures classified as Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, looks exclusively God-wards, absorbed in contemplation of the Divine essence, and unconcerned with the created universe. The next hierarchy (Dominations, Virtues, and Powers) has some responsibility for the general order of nature. The lowest hierarchy deals with human affairs; Principalities with the destiny of nations, Archangels and Angels, in varying ways, with those of individuals. You will notice that even at such a unique crisis as the Annunciation the Mother of Christ was visited only by an Archangel, a member of the lowest class but one. That gets the perspective right. It is this conception, as well as the poet's own genius, which gives to Dante's angels a sublimity and masculinity never captured by later art. It is the loss of this conception which finally vulgarizes the angels into those consumptive girls with wings that figure in so much Victorian stained glass. The full degradation of the Cherub - the fat baby who has played that role ever since Raphael - will perhaps be clearest if we remember that the word probably comes from the same root as gryphon. Even for Chaucer a cherub was a creature of fire: not at all 'cuddly'.

But I must crowd the sky a little more. Medieval man looked up at a sky not only melodious, sunlit, and splendidly inhabited, but also incessantly active; he looked at agents to which he, and the whole earth, were patients. Besides the Intelligences and the angelic hierarchies there are the planets themselves. Each of them is doing things to us at every moment. First, on the physical side, the beams of each planet (which penetrate through the Earth's crust) find the appropriate soil and turn it into the appropriate metal; Saturn thus producing lead, Mars iron, the Moon silver, and so forth. The Moon's connexion with silver, and the Sun's with gold, may be real survivals (at many removes) of pre-logical, pictorial, thinking. Venus is, perhaps, a maker of copper because she was, centuries earlier, Kupris, the lady of Cyprus, and that accursed island produced copper in ancient times. Why Saturn made lead, or Jove tin, I do not know.

But of course, as everyone has heard, the planets had a more than physical effect. They influenced the course of events and they influenced human psychology. Born under Saturn, you were disposed to melancholy; born under Venus, to amorousness. At this point, clearly, there is a rich survival of classical Paganism into medieval culture. And of course the names of the planets, and their representations in art, are those of the ancient planetary gods. As far as my reading goes, no one appears to have been at all worried about it. There was, indeed, a quarrel between the theologians and the astrologers, but not exactly about that. So far as I know, no theologian denied the general theory of planetary influences. The important question, theologically, was whether the planets compelled or merely disposed men to action. If they compelled, then of course there was an end of human freedom and responsibility. If they merely disposed, then planetary influence, like heredity or health or education, was merely part of the concrete situation handed over to the individual to do the best he could with. The theologians were in fact, as so often, fighting against determinism. Nor were they fighting against a phantom: in renaissance times, if not before them, astrological determinism was very widely accepted. It seemed (odd as this sounds to us) to have the support of age-old experience and common sense, and the theological resistance seemed idealistic wishful thinking. In the Middle Ages men's minds no doubt wavered. The ordinary, moderate, respectable view was summed up in the maxim sapiens dominabitur astris ; a wise man, assisted by Grace, could get over a bad horoscope just as he could get over a naturally bad temper.

That, as I have said, was the important question on the theoretical level. On the practical level orthodox people, while admitting planetary influence, strongly disapproved of 'judicial astrology', the lucrative practice of foretelling the future. They did not need to deny that some astrological predictions of human behaviour might be correct. Planetary influence could not remove free will but it could alter the states of mind and imagination which free will has to deal with. Any man can master this psychological raw material and thus refute the prediction; but few men do and therefore the predictions will succeed as regards the majority. Just in the same way and for similar reasons a modern theologian might say that Marxian predictions based on economic determinism or Freudian predictions based on psychological determinism will usually be true, and true about mass-behaviour, but not necessarily about a given individual.

I stress the parallel between astrology and more modern forms of determinism in order to bring out a point which, though I have made it elsewhere, is too important to be passed over. We must never allow ourselves to think of astrology as something that belonged to the romantic or dreaming or quasi-mystical side of the mind; above all, we must not connect it with magic. Astrology was a hard-headed, stern, anti-idealistic affair; the creed of men who wanted a universe which admitted no incalculables. Magic sought power over nature; astrology proclaimed nature's power over man. Hence the magician is the ancestor of the modern practising or 'applied' scientist, the inventor; the astrologer, of the nineteenth-century philosophical materialist. Neither figure, by the way, is specially typical of the Middle Ages . (Editor’s Note: Cf. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1943), chapter III, p. 52, especially: 'The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak. There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.) Both flourished as much, if not more, in the ancient and in the renaissance world.

I have already said that the medieval man thought he was looking up at a luminous universe through the dark shadow of the Earth. He was also looking up at the region of aether through the region of air. The air was the medium through which all the influences from above reached him. The whole air could become healthy or unhealthy as the result of certain conjunctions in the upper sky. Hence a medieval doctor could explain widespread illness by saying 'It's due to this influence'. If he were talking Italian he would no doubt say questa influenza, and that word has stuck. I mention the air, however, not merely to bring in that curiosity but for two other reasons.

First: the air is below the Moon. That is, as you have heard, it is excluded from the region of necessity and regularity. In the air, as on the Earth, you have contingence and the irregular; in the air you have the aerial daemons who can, like men, do either good or evil. Here we come to an important difference between medieval and modern man. The ordinary modern (I do not mean the modern scientist) would regard regularity - or, if you like, monotony - as a symptom of inferiority. The fact that the heavenly bodies always behave in the same way, while men do this and that and change their minds, would be for him presumptive evidence that the former are irrational and inanimate and that we, we 'dewdrops' that think, are to that extent their betters. For the same reason, if he believed in the aerial daemons and the planetary Intelligences, he would probably prefer the daemons. The Middle Ages inherited from the Greeks a very different view. Aristotle in the Metaphysics remarks that in a household (he is of course assuming a household with slaves) the free members are precisely those who have least chance to live 'at random'. The slaves can do that; for the free people 'everything is mapped out'. It is a surprising picture but, I have no doubt, a true one; all ancient literature goes to show that a house-slave is, of all servants, the least like a robot. But I quote it here for a different reason. Though Aristotle does not make it perfectly clear, scholars are agreed that he is intending to compare the heavenly bodies with the free people and the slaves with us. For the heavenly bodies 'everything is mapped out'; our liberty to live 'at random' marks our inferior status. We, like slaves, have or take 'spare time' and in it 'potter about', chatting, making love, playing games, cracking nuts or 'just sitting'; they, like Aristotle himself, have their strict programme.

Secondly, the mediation of celestial influences through the air illustrates a principle that runs through the whole universe. Last time I compared that universe to a great building: I should now like to compare it to a fugue - the orderly and varied reiteration of the same 'subject'. When Donne says

On man heavens influence workes not so,

But that it first imprints the ayre

(Note: page 57, line 19. The Extasie, 57-8.)

he is making one statement of that subject. You have here, you see, a triad in the form: Agent (the planets), Medium (the air), Patient (man, and, in general, Earth). It is a triad which still has its appeal; I suppose that aether, at no very distant period, was accepted because we wanted a medium or go-between. But it appealed very much more strongly in the Middle Ages. The Triad is repeated on every level.

First, among the angels themselves. The Middle Ages learned all about their triadic organization from a Latin version of a (probably sixth-century) Greek theologian whom we know as Pseudo-Dionysius. The method by which he dovetails his triadic angelology into his Old Testament, where (by our standards) nothing like it is to be found, is a charming example of the process I mentioned before - the great medieval labour of harmonization and syncretism. (Editor’s Note: page 57, line 33. Sancti Dionysii ...opera omnia ...studio Petri Lanselli...Lutetiae Parisiorum (MDCXV).) He points out that in Isaiah vi the angels are crying out 'Holy, Holy, Holy' not (as we might expect) to God but to one another. Why? Obviously because each angel is handing on his knowledge of the Divine Sanctity to the angel next below him. The only exception is the Seraphim. They alone of all creatures apprehend God immediately. But as soon as you reach the Cherubim you have a triad; God as agent, Seraphim as medium, Cherubim as patient. Then below that, Seraphim as agent, Cherubim as medium, Thrones as patient. And then the same triad within the second hierarchy and the third; and of course between the first, second, and third hierarchies as wholes. It is a continual devolution as if God, who in a sense does all things, will yet do nothing immediately which can possibly be done through the mediation of His creatures. And as if even this were not enough, we are then told that within each individual angel, of whatever class, the triad occurs again; each has primary faculties which act through the medium of secondary faculties on tertiary faculties. Thus you get not only triad above triad but triad within triad till the mind is dizzy with them.

All this, within the angelic world itself. But the moment one steps outside that world one finds that it itself, collectively, is part of a vaster triad. For God governs the world through the angels; the whole angelic population, without prejudice to its complex internal triads, is the medium between God as agent and Nature (or Man) as patient. Just so on Earth a King governs the commons through the barons. But this of course was not, for the medieval mind, a mere analogy. It was the real earthly and social reproduction of the triad. I say 'social' to distinguish it from 'individual'; for within the individual man, as within the individual angel, the triad is repeated.

It is indeed repeated twice, once on the ethical and once on the psychological level. Ethically (and here, at many removes, they were following Plato) the triad is Reason, Emotion, and Appetite. Reason, seated in the head, governs the Appetites, seated in the abdomen or beneath it, by the aid of the more fully human and civilized emotions which were located in the thorax; such things as shame, honour, pity, self-respect, affection. This ethical triad was accepted for millennia. The effort now sometimes made to lead a civilized life on reason alone, rejecting the emotions, the attempt of the monarchic head to rule the plebeian belly without the aid of that aristocracy in the thorax, would have seemed to Plato a rash venture; like what motorists call 'driving on your brakes'. It is hard on the brakes and leads to skids. On the psychological level the individual triad depends on the doctrine of the triple soul. But the word anima had a larger and less exclusively religious range of meaning than soul; 'life' would sometimes be a better translation. There is vegetable soul, common to all plants, which gives only life; sensitive soul, which gives life and sensation; and rational soul, by which we think. Man of course has all three: when things are going right inside him, his rational governs his vegetable through his sensitive.

A thirteenth-century author, Alanus, works out the theological, the social, and the individual triads in terms of castle (or citadel), city, and the lands beyond the city walls. These are literally given, of course, in the social one; a king in his citadel, the barons in the city, the peasants in the fields outside. In the individual the head is the citadel, where the empress Sapience keeps her court. In the City of the Breast lives the high baronage of Magnanimity. Outside, in the abdomen, or still more outside, in the genitals, live the common appetites. But it is the theological triad that most concerns us at the moment. The castle of God is the Empyrean, the region beyond the outermost sphere. In the city, in the vast ethereal spaces, dwell the cosmic nobility, the nine orders of angels. Down here on Earth there is a place permitted to us 'as to aliens', he says, 'outside the wall'. (Note: De Planctu Naturae , P.L. ccx, Prosa III, col.444 A, B) Outside the wall - that is the point. Go back for a moment to the experience I mentioned at the beginning; that of looking up at the stars as you come out from an opera or a feast. The full contrast between the medieval experience and ours is only now apparent. For whatever else we feel, we certainly feel that we are looking out; out of somewhere warm and lighted into dark, cold, indifferent desolation, out of a house on to the dark waste of the sea. But the medieval man felt he was looking in. Here is the outside. The Moon's orbit is the city wall. Night opens the gates for a moment and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps which are going on inside; staring as animals stare at the fires of the encampment they cannot enter, as rustics stare at a city, as suburbia stares at Mayfair. I have spoken advisedly of 'high pomps'. My account so far has perhaps made this complex, densely peopled cosmos a little too severe, made the operations of the spheres and the angels sound, as we should say, 'a little too like work'. I could correct that more easily if I had slides. I am thinking in particular of one picture which represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile itself. It is of course wholly symbolical; they knew perfectly well that such a creature - it had no body - could not be literally depicted at all. But the symbol chosen is delightfully significant. It is a picture of a girl dancing and playing a tambourine; a picture of gaiety, almost of frolic. And why not? These spheres are moved by love, by intellectual desire, never sated because they can never completely assimilate themselves to their object, and never frustrated because they continually do so to the fullest extent which their nature admits or requires. Their existence is thus one of delight. The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one. They are the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect Object.

A modern mind will of course say that the men of that age fashioned heaven in the likeness of Earth and, because they liked high pomps, the Mass, coronations, pageants, tournaments, carols, attributed such activities par excellence to the translunary world. But remember that they thought it was the other way round. They thought that the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the social hierarchy on Earth were dim reproductions of the celestial hierarchies. The pageantry and ceremony which they indulged in to the utmost of their powers were their attempt to imitate the modus operandi of the universe; to live, in that sense, 'according to nature'. That is why so much medieval art and literature is concerned simply with asserting the nature of things. They liked to tell, and to be told again and again, about the universe I have been describing. Any poet in any poem is liable to start describing the angels, the spheres, the influences, the metals, and a hundred other things I have not had time for - gems, beasts, the Zodiac, the Seven Virtues, the Seven Sins, the Nine Worthies, the nature of winds, the divisions of the soul, herbs, flowers, what not. They wrote it, they sang it, painted it and carved it. Sometimes a whole poem or a whole building seems almost nothing but verbalized or petrified cosmology. In all this I have never found one trace of the savage idea that by representing the things on Earth you somehow helped them to happen in the universe. Their minds were not like that. It was rather the spontaneous desire of us 'aliens outside the city wall' to participate as far as we can in the glory of the life of the city; like the Mothers' Union doing in the village hall the same play that was done in London - a legitimate, absurd attempt, and very good fun for all concerned.

Two points which may have caused some discomfort remain. Is it, imaginatively and emotionally, tolerable to have the Earth spatially central and, at the same time, in some other sense, a furlong outside the wall? And is it quite satisfactory to have an infinite space outside the highest heaven? It is, if we take their thought at its highest level. On that level it involves something of which no model could be drawn on a blackboard, nor even easily made in three dimensions.

Aristotle had said 'Whatever is outside the highest Heaven is of such a sort that it needs no place, nor does time affect it'. (Editor’s Note: De Caelo, 279a.) It is typically Aristotelian in its dry caution, typically pagan in its reverent timidity. Taken over by Christians, this of course turns into something much more positive and resounding. As one author says, all that heaven is Deo plenum, full of God. Or, as Dante says, it is Iuce intellettual piena d'amore (Paradiso, xxx, 40). In other words there isn't exactly any space beyond the cosmos. The Empyrean is the boundary of space, not in the absurd sense which would force us to put more space outside it but in the sense that it is the point at which the spatial mode of thought breaks down. To reach the end of space is to reach the end of spatiality.

Dante makes this vivid to us by an astonishing tour de force. He cannot of course make the spaceless imaginable in the strict sense. What he does is to show us space turning inside out; that teaches us pretty effectively that spatial thinking, as we ordinarily know it, has broken down. First, to prepare us, he gives us this remarkable image. The Primum Mobile is described as the 'vase' in which time has its roots - 'look elsewhere for its leaves' (Paradiso, XXVIl, 118-20). Time, of course, in the old philosophy, was generated by the movement of the Primum Mobile. But consider the image - a gigantic tree growing downwards through those 118 million miles, its roots in the stars, its leaves being the days and minutes we live through on Earth. I had almost said 'the leaves of its topmost branches', for one cannot help thinking of them as topmost: what is down for us must be up for the tree, its sap must be coming up, its roots must be its lowest point. Thus he begins to turn the universe inside out. Then, later, in the Empyrean itself, he is shown a point of light round which nine lights are circling, the nearest to the centre moving at the highest speed and the furthest out at the lowest. Of the centre Beatrice says 'Heaven and all nature hangs upon that point' (Paradiso, XXVIII, 41-2); it is what Aristotle says in so many words of the Unmoved Mover. The point is an exposition of God; the nine (so to call them) planets are the nine angelic hierarchies and you see that this is our universe inside out. In our visible world the circumference, the Primum Mobile, moves quickest and is nearest to God; the Moon moves slowest and is nearest what we call the Centre - i.e. the Earth. But the true nature of the universe is exactly the opposite. In the visible and spatial order Earth is centre; in the dynamic, invisible order the Empyrean is centre, and we are indeed 'outside the city wall' at the end of all things. And the centre of that Centre, the centre of Earth, is the edge, the very point at which all being and reality finally peter out. For in there (as we call it), out there (as we ought to call it) is Hell - the last outpost, the rim, the place where being is nearest to not-being, where positive unbeing (so to call it) asymptotically approaches that zero it can never quite reach.

Such was the medieval cosmos. It had of course one serious drawback. It wasn't - or a good deal of it wasn't - true. I have rather been inviting you to consider it as a work of art; perhaps, after all, the greatest work of art the Middle Ages produced. Of course it was not a mere fantasy. It was intended to cover, and up to a point did cover, the facts as they knew them. And perhaps in calling it untrue, we should all now mean something other than our grandfathers meant. They would have taken the Newtonian account as simply true and the medieval as simply wrong. It would be for them like the diffeerence between a good map and a bad one. I suppose most people would now admit that no picture of the universe we can form is 'true' in quite the sense our grandfathers hoped. We would rather speak of 'models'. And since all are only models, we should be prepared to find in each something of the nature of the artist as well as something of the object. From that point of view, too, a study of the various models has its interest. I think the medieval and Newtonian models - the one so ordered, so sublime, and so festive, the other so trackless, so incapable of form - reflect the older, more formal and intellectual world and the later enthusiastic, romantic world pretty well. What our own models - if you continue to allow us models at all - will reflect, posterity may judge.

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