9 World

9 World

I. ‘WORLD A’ AND ‘WORLD B’

In the earliest recorded period of our language this noun has two senses which we may call World A and World B.

(A.) In Alfred’s version of Boethius we read that children die and the parents ‘mourn for it all their woruld’. This clearly means ‘all their life’. But to cover all the shades of the A-sense we had better say that World A means something like age or durée. In Ælfric’s homily on the Assumption of St John we find ‘through endless worulda’ (plural), through ages without end. In Alfred again ‘will stand to worulda’, will last forever. The A-sense long survived the Anglo-Saxon period. In the thirteenth-century Sawles Warde comes ‘praise thee from worlde into worlde’, from age to age, representing in saccula saeculorum. By an unusual archaism, the A-sense is preserved in the Prayer Book, where it probably mystifies many church-goers. ‘World without end’ means ‘age without end’, forever. As a boy I thought that ‘before all worlds’ in the Nicene Creed meant ‘before any of the planets’. It really means ‘before all ages’, outside time, ab aeterno.

(B.) The B-sense is that which the word most naturally suggests to a modern speaker. The poet who did the Metres of Boethius into Anglo-Saxon writes ‘in those days there were no great houses in the weorulde’. Here we could translate it ‘earth’. But whenever the distinction between the earth and the universe is present to the mind, World B can mean either, and the context usually shows which. Thus Gower writes

Tofore the creacion

Of eny worldes stacion,

Of hevene, of erthe, or eke of helle(VII, 203)

—‘before the creation of any place in the universe, e.g. of heaven, earth or hell’. World B may loosely be defined as the region that contains all regions; if all absolutely, then it means universe; if ‘all that usually concern us humans’, then it means earth.

Since World A is something in time and World B something in space, it is not at once easy to see the semantic trunk out of which two such different branches have grown. But the very form of the word provides a probable clue. Worold, like its Old Norse equivalent veroldr, appears to be built out of two elements. The first is wer (a man), related to Latin vir and Irish fir, and fossilised in wer-wolf, the man-wolf. The second is something like ald, age or period. But what would ‘man-age’ mean? Something, I believe, which all our attempts at translation will make too precise. The generations of men? Human history? The common lot of men, the sort of life they have? Anyway, ‘all this’ in which we find ourselves embedded. Perhaps ‘human life’ will serve us best.

Now when we turn from considering words in isolation and look at them in concrete sentences, we discover that ‘human life’ is not nearly so distinguishable from World B (the region of regions) as we had supposed. In Beowulf ‘parting from worulde’ (3068) means death; to enjoy or share in or have worolde (1061–2) means to be alive; ‘they woke into worold’ (60) means ‘they were born’. Whether we translate woruld by ‘human life’ or ‘earth’ or ‘universe’, we shall make equally good sense, and very nearly the same sense, of all three. And good reason why. To be alive and to be in the region of regions are the same thing; we seem to enter both when we are born and perhaps leave both simultaneously when we die. Sense A and Sense B were not before the poet’s mind as alternatives at all; just as, if we say ‘He left the College in 1930’, we do not always know whether we mean primarily that he relinquished his status as a member of it or that he moved his belongings out of his rooms and went away by a taxi. Here, as not seldom, we begin by thinking that we have met a semantic chasm which has to be bridged and then discover that we were digging the chasm.

A glance at Old Norse will here prove helpful. Besides veroldr (their form of world) the Norsemen had the word heimr. This sometimes means no more than a limited region or ‘land’. Jotunheimar are the giant-lands. But it certainly also came to mean the region of regions. In the Prose Edda (49) the death-goddess says that Balder may return from the dead if he is wept for by all things í heiminum. Here both the tenor of the story and the form heiminum (which contains the definite article) make it certain that we must translate it ‘all things in the World’ (Sense B). And heimr clearly has the same meaning when Snovri begins his great saga with the word that has become its title: heimskring’a, the ‘world-disc’. Here, then, we have the linguistic outfit for a clear and fixed distinction. If the Norsemen had chosen, they could have kept veroldr for World A and heimr for World B. In fact, however, the two words can become almost synonyms. In Volsungasaga (XIX) we read ‘as long as the veroldr stands’ (or ‘lasts’); and in XXX, ii ‘while the heimr stands’ (or ‘lasts’). Both mean the same and, save by a difficult abstraction, must inevitably do so; for both refer to the same event. Ragnarök will put an end to ‘human life’ as we know it and to this universe simultaneously. The same catastrophe will end the play and destroy the theatre.

II. ‘WORLD A’ AS STATE OR PERIOD

A man’s woruld, as we have seen, can be his life. And worulda in the plural can be ages. By keeping these two shades of meaning together in our minds we shall best understand the sense I now have to investigate.

A man’s ‘life’ can be considered in three ways. First, simply as his being alive; e.g. ‘this will cost you your life’. Secondly, as a subject of moral approval in the reverse; ‘what sort of life has he led?’ means, pretty well, ‘how has he behaved?’ Thirdly, ‘what sort of life has he had?’ will mean ‘what were his circumstances, his fortunes?’ It is the third way that here concerns us.

Again, an age (or epoch, or period) can be considered in two ways. It can be a tract of time distinguished solely by position; as it would be if we said ‘the period between his accession and the Transylvanian campaign is not well documented’. But also, and much more often, it can come before the mind as a tract of time with a character of its own; a period qualitatively, as well as positionally, distinguished from others. This is what happens when we speak of the Stone Age, the Middle Ages, or the Age of Enlightenment.

Now ‘life’, taken not as the life ‘led’ but as the life ‘had’, so that it is almost synonymous with lot or future, and ‘age’ or ‘epoch’, taken qualitatively, blend to give world the sense I am talking of. It may be defined either as ‘A condition or State of Affairs (which lasted for a certain period)’ or as ‘A period (during which there was a certain State of Affairs)’. The difference is one of emphasis. Sometimes the qualitative, sometimes the chronological, aspect is uppermost.

In the following examples the emphasis is on the qualitative. We are told that when the rebel angels were hurled into Hell, ‘their worold was changed’; their ‘case was altered’. In Beowulf we read of a man so fortunate that ‘for him all woruld turns out agreeably’ (1738–9). The state of his affairs is exactly as he would wish. In Alfred’s version Wisdom asks Boethius ‘was all your woruld ever to your pleasure?’—were ‘things’ ever exactly as you liked? Centuries later Thomas More after painting a picture of hypothetically total corruption concludes, ‘But that worlde is not I thanke god in Englande yet’. The lover in Gower says that once ‘mi world stod on an other whiel’.

When world in this sense is accompanied, as in the last example, by a personal pronoun, it is hardly at all distinguishable from ‘future’ or ‘interests’. Thus Gower elsewhere says that nowadays every clerk is determined to ‘kepe his world’; almost to keep his ‘position’. Twice he speaks of someone achieving ‘his goode world’; getting what he wants. To the same class belongs the Wife of Bath’s gratitude ‘that I have had my world as in my tyme’; something like ‘I’ve had my good times in my day’.

Wolsey in Cavendish’s Life prays Mr Kingston ‘to have me most humbly recommended unto his Royall majestie, beseeching him in my behalf to call to his most gracious remembraunce all matters proceeding bytween him and me from the beginning of the world unto this day’. Here ‘the world’ may be a mistake for ‘this world’; but, either way, the world referred to is the association between Wolsey and the King, the State of Affairs which is now so lamentably ending.

Some doubt may be felt about Marvell’s ‘Had we but world enough, and time’. Since he goes on to speak of Ganges and Humber, we might at first suppose that he means World B, that he is saying ‘If the region of regions were large enough’. But, on a closer view, he does not seem to be complaining that the two rivers are insufficiently far apart or that there are too few places in which the lovers could wander separately. The implied complaint is that they lack opportunity to utilise them. I should paraphrase the first line as ‘if our circumstances and our time were less restricted’. This is World-as-Condition almost at its vaguest.

For examples of World with the more chronological emphasis we may turn once more to Gower. The golden head of the image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream symbolises

A worthi world, a noble, a riche

To which non after schal be liche

—in other words, the Golden Age. He also speaks of comparing ‘these olde worldes with the newe’, comparing former ages, former States of Affairs, with one’s own. The banished duke and his followers in Arden ‘fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’, the bell’età de l’oro. The virtues of the same ‘antique world’ live again in Adam. John Holland, Jack Cade’s follower, says ‘It was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up’, and his companion echoes the sentiment with ‘O miserable age’. ‘Your father’, says Johnson, ‘is a judge in a remote part of the island, and all his notions are taken from the old world’. Scott speaks of ‘an auld-world party who made themselves happy in the auld fashion’.

I am not sure how to classify the place in Huon where Lord Berners says of an army ‘the noise and bruit that they made seemed to be a new world’. It can hardly mean that the noise was like a new heimr or universe. More probably ‘it was like nothing on earth’ and thus was a wholly new State of Affairs. But we must remember that colloquial hyperbole reduces words to the vaguest semantic status.

III. ‘WORLD A’ AS THE COMMON LOT OR ‘THINGS’

‘Alas,’ says Alfred, ‘in how bottomless a pit the mind lies suffering when the mutabilities of this worulde beset it!’ He does not mean the mutabilities of World B, such as changes of climate or landslides. These would be only one instance, and rather a rare instance, of the changeableness he has in view. Nor does he use ‘this woruld’ to mean ‘this (i.e. the present) period or state of affairs’. On the contrary the mutability he complains of consists in the very fact that neither ‘this’ period nor any other is permanent. It would be truer to say that ‘this woruld’ means ‘human life’ or ‘life’. We have already seen that woruld can be so translated when Beowulf says ‘they woke into woruld’, meaning ‘they were born’. But Alfred’s use, closely considered, is not exactly the same. In our Beowulfian examples woruld meant by ‘human life’ simply the being alive; the biological fact and, as bound up with this, one’s presence in World B, the region of regions. Alfred’s ‘this woruld’ emphasises the qualitative aspect—what it is like to be a man, the sort of things that happen to you while you are alive. The characteristic of woruld in this sense is that it constantly changes men’s worulda, their states of affairs. Another way of putting it would be that, just as World B is the Region which includes all other regions, so World A in the sense we are now considering is the State of Affairs which includes all other states of affairs; the over-all human situation, hence the common lot, the way things go. Things or Life would often translate it.

Thus (again from Alfred), ‘You thought fate ordered this woruld’—‘arranged things’ would mean the same. Chaucer’s Egeus ‘knew this worldes transmutacioun’; knew the ups and downs of things. As a result he had concluded that ‘this world’—he could equally have said ‘this life’ or simply ‘life’—‘nys but a thurghfare ful of wo’.

We read a still vaguer reference when we read in Piers Plowman of ‘the mene and the riche worching and wondring as the world asketh’, or in Gawain how ‘wynter wyndes agayn’ (comes rolling back) ‘as the world askes’. You can, if you insist, render world by something like ‘nature’ or ‘necessity’. But it may be doubted whether we have made any advance in clarity by saying that anything is necessitated by necessity or that nature prescribes the course of nature. Even if we had, I believe we should be foisting upon the poets an abstraction that was not in their minds. ‘As the world asks’ means no more than ‘as must be’. Similarly, when Chaucer’s monk repels the suggestion that he should live according to his Rule by asking ‘How shal the world be served?’, I do not think we should translate world by some abstraction such as ‘society’. He only meant ‘How are things to go on?’ So in As You Like It,

‘It is ten o’clock;

Thus we may see’, quoth he, ‘how the world wags.’

(II, VII, 22)

Centuries later Johnson in a letter to Boswell, recalling their jaunt to the Hebrides, observes ‘Such an effort annually would give the world a little diversification’. If he had said ‘would be a diversification’ or even ‘would make a change’, he would have conveyed just as much.

It might be thought that a sense, if you call it a sense, so vague as this was useless. But this is not so. A word may continue to have a syntactical function when it has lost all precise reference; witness the it in ‘it’s raining’.

IV. ‘WORLD’ IN BIBLICAL TRANSLATION

The developments I have mentioned so far were all in my opinion purely native; we must now turn our attention to meanings which World acquired as a result of its use in translations of the Bible. It acquired them all during the period when our translators were still working from the Vulgate Latin, and they were hardly at all altered when, in the sixteenth century, the new scholars went behind the Latin and began to produce translations directly from the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New.

For Biblical purposes World was seriously over-worked. In the New Testament it was made to do duty for no less than four Latin words (which in their turn do duty for four Greek words). In the Old it represents ultimately five words in Hebrew but, since for our present purpose the New Testament alone is of any real importance, we may leave the Hebrew words out of account, merely noticing that two of them (cheled and olam) contain the idea of time and are in that way very close to our English World A. But we cannot quite so summarily dismiss the Greek words; for though they affected English only indirectly through their Latin renderings, we shall not fully understand those renderings unless we know what they were meant to represent.

First, then, world may stand for Latin terra which in its turn stands for Greek ge, the earth. It does so, for example, in Rev. xiii. 3 (‘all the world wondered’).

Secondly, it may stand for orbis or orbis terrae in Latin. This represents Greek he oikoumene which is an ellipsis for he oikoumene ge, ‘the inhabited earth’. So in Matt. xxiv. 14 (‘preached in all the world’) or Luke ii. 1 (‘that all the world should be taxed’).

It will be noticed that only in my quotation from St Matthew is either word used in its perfectly literal sense. In the others the earth means the inhabitants of earth, the human race; just as when we say the baby was a nuisance to the whole street, ‘street’ means its inhabitants. Usually this idiom involves hyperbole. The author of the Apocalypse might perhaps mean that every single human being felt wonder, but the Evangelist certainly did not think that the whole human race was being ‘taxed’—or registered—by Augustus. He knew well enough that there were people outside the Roman Empire.

This usage presents no difficulties and is probably to be found in nearly all languages.

Thirdly, world represents Latin saeculum, as in ‘the care of this world’ (Matt. xiii. 22), ‘the children of this world’ (Luke xvi. 8), ‘wise in this world’ (I Cor. iii. 18), ‘not only in this world but in that which is to come’ (Eph. i. 21).

The central meaning of saeculum seems to have been something like ‘generation’. Venus causes all animals to procreate their saecula. According to Cicero the Platonic ‘Great Year’ includes ‘I hardly dare to say how many saecula of men’. The oak outlives many human saecula. And, like world, it can mean an age or period; ‘the age (saeculum) of Romulus coincided with the time (aetas) when Greece was full of poets’. Augustus will inaugurate aurea saecula, Ages of Gold. Here we have the qualitative aspect of an age. We have it even more emphatically when Tacitus, trying to shame the Romans of his own day, says that among those noble savages, the Germani, ‘mutual conception is not called the saeculum’. (Obviously there were those at Rome who excused immorality by saying ‘It’s the saeculum’, the mode, the way we live now; compare the modern equivalent, ‘It isn’t as if we were Victorians’.)

Saeculum regularly translates Greek aion. Aion can mean simply life; to be ‘robbed of one’s dear aion’ is to be killed. It can also mean ‘the sort of life one has’, one’s lot or fortune; not even such lucky people as Peleus and Cadmus had an aion free from all disasters. In a passage from Aeschylus it seems to mean a generation. Out of this trunk two strangely different branches grow.

On the one hand, like World, aion can come to mean ‘indefinite time’ or ‘ages and ages’. As Aristotle says, ‘the totality that includes all the time there is . . . is called aion’. He connects it with aei (always). Chronologically earlier, but logically a further step, is Plato’s use of aion. For him it means ‘eternity’ in the strictest sense; not indefinite nor even infinite time but the timeless. The Creator, he says, made a ‘movable model’ of aion and this model is what we call time. Time is a model of aion because it attempts, by incessantly replacing its transitory ‘present moments’, to compensate for this transience and symbolise, or parody, the actual plenitude of the changeless reality—like trying to imitate omnipresence by visiting as many places as possible in rapid succession. Hence in Shakespeare time is ‘thou ceaseless lackey to eternity’.

On the other hand, aion, especially among those who had a Jewish background and used Greek only as their second language, developed the sense of epoch or period with the fullest possible change of meaning. In many cultures we find the idea that the course of history once was, or some day will be, or at any moment might be, interrupted by catastrophic change, ushering in a wholly, or at least overwhelmingly, new state of affairs and even of the natural universe. Such an event constitutes the end of one aion and the beginning of another. Aiones differ from the ‘periods’ used by our historians because their diversity from one another is far greater, and also (more importantly) because the later aion does not grow out of the earlier by any natural development. Continuity has been broken. The new aion is not so much a new act as a new play. If any survive the change they will find themselves playing new parts against new scenery; she who was a star in the old play may find herself a super in the new.

Ragnarök, which I had to mention some pages ago, would thus mark a change of aiones. Still more would the terrible moment imagined by Plato, when the universe starts revolving backwards and all natural processes go into reverse. But no people were more haunted by the conception of aiones than the Jews; and the Jews never more haunted than during the two centuries that preceded the Christian era. These are the age of Apocalyptic, of popular works prophesying the imminence of the new aion. Christianity itself in some sense—we must leave it to theologians to define—reaffirmed this prophecy. Whatever else the first Christian teaching was, it was certainly a statement that the old (and bad) aion was ending or ended and that the new aion was about to begin or had begun already.

Rather unfortunately both these senses of aion are used in New Testament Greek. Thus es ton aiona ‘into the aion’ (I John ii. 17) means ‘forever’, ‘eternally’, and the adjective aionios means ‘eternal’ or ‘everlasting’ (as in Matt. XXV. 46). But side by side with these we find dozens of passages where ‘this aion’ or ‘this present aion’ is the very reverse of eternal, being contrasted with an aion that is ‘to come’ (e.g. Matt. xii. 32; Gal. i. 4). English world, however, was never used to translate aion where aion means eternity.

This being so, we may feel that world-saeculum-aion are in an excellent relationship, for the Latin and Greek words, and the English word in one of its senses, coincide surprisingly in their ranges of meaning. All indeed would have been well if world had had only this sense and had been used to translate only saeculum.

In fact, however, it also translates mundus, which translates kosmos. With these words, in their classical usage, we at last escape from all those ideas of time, or life, or generation, which, in one language or another, have surrounded us ever since this chapter began. They mean, quite unambiguously, the universe, the heimr, the region of regions. But we should get nearer to the ancient point of view if we said rather ‘the pattern of patterns’ or ‘the arrangement of arrangements’.

Mundus in Latin is both an adjective and a noun. The adjective’s range of meaning is something like clean, neat, tidy, spruce, well turned-out. People who are mundi are elegantes. Horace will have the furniture munda if a visitor is coming. In Christian Latin the cor mundum is the (morally) clean heart (Matt. V. 8). The noun mundus is a collective, roughly translatable as ‘means of adornment’. The delightful things Pope puts on Belinda’s dressing-table were her mundus. Mundus muliebris, says the Digest, includes lotions, face-cream, mirrors and ‘things by which a woman becomes mundior’. And that, says the elder Pliny, ‘is why what the Greeks [using their word for adornment] call the kosmos, we call the mundus, because of its perfect and flawless elegantia’. (I despair of translating the last word, but shall have something to say in another section about the attitude to Nature which underlies it.)

The semantic parallel between the developments of mundus and kosmos which Pliny here suggests is suspiciously neat. It may be doubted whether the Latin word, on its own steam, would have reached just that meaning by just that process. Perhaps it was coaxed in that direction, under Greek influence, for the very purpose of making it a synonym to kosmos. But this makes little difference. The force and flavour of a word may depend as much on its imagined history as on its real history; sometimes more. So with the Greek word. The Greeks thought they were calling the universe kosmos because it was the adornment, the arranging, the embellishment of what had originally been ugliness, disorder, chaos. If in reality they had reached the name kosmos by some different route—say, because the stars twinkled like jewellery—this would make no difference to what they thought and felt about it.

Like he oikoumene, both kosmos and mundus can be used to mean the inhabitants of the world (B), ‘everybody’, tout le monde; of course, with hyperbole. When the Pharisees said ‘All the kosmos (Vulgate, mundus) has gone after him’ (John xii, 19), they did not think the whole human race was proceeding up that street. Again, both can be used vaguely to mean no more than a vast area; as when the Gospel says ‘I suppose the whole kosmos (Vulgate, mundus) wouldn’t hold the books that would be written’. This is a façon de parler. The Evangelist was not really picturing a universe packed tight up to the highest heaven with rolls of manuscript; no more than we, if we said ‘I wouldn’t for the world distress the archdeacon’, have a picture of being offered the galaxies as a bribe and refusing the offer.

V. THE CONFUSION OF ‘KOSMOS’ AND ‘AION’

The distinction between aion or saeculum on the one hand and kosmos or mundus on the other clearly provides the instrument by which a consistent and lucid way of talking might have been achieved. And this would have been of immense value. We should then have had no confusion between (1) the natural universe which, on the Christian view, must be good, since its Creator pronounced it to be so; (2) the present evil aion, under which that universe has long been labouring, and which, as the Christians assert, is to be succeeded by a better aion. But powerful forces prevented this.

(1) The universe as we know it, the heimr, must no doubt be good. True. But the final goal of every human person is the enjoyment of God, not of this heimr. Therefore nothing that the heimr can offer, not even its most innocent blessings (daily bread, health, natural affection, or friendship) must be allowed to engage the whole heart. If it were, we should be treating as our home what was meant to be only a wayside inn. Unless we practice detachment, the heimr (however good in itself) becomes for us a danger.

(2) This evil aion, this present veroldr, is essentially evil. Evil is its specific characteristic; it is to it what stone implements are to the Stone Age or enlightenment to the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the heimr can become a danger to us accidentally, through our infirmity, the aion is always and necessarily a danger. It is not enough to be merely ‘detached’ about it; we must defy, resist, and utterly renounce it.

(3) But this distinction, however important philosophically, dwindles into something merely academic in the daily practice of the spiritual life. The heimr, no doubt, is merely to be dispraised in comparison with a higher object, as something, though good, not nearly good enough; and the aion is to be utterly condemned. But surrender to either is fatal. For as Law says, ‘If you are not wheat, if the heavenly life is not grown up in you, it signifies nothing what you have chosen in the stead of it, or why you have chosen it’. One man may die by drinking poison and another by drinking good liquor in excess, but both will be equally dead. As a result, in all that concerns the will, the emotions, and the imagination, the (good) universe and the (evil) aion become extremely close neighbours. To most people at most times, for all practical purposes, both have to be treated, though not for exactly the same reason, as enemies.

(4) We have seen in Old Norse how the destruction of the heimr and the end of the veroldr become interchangeable; for the very good reason that the same catastrophe will destroy the one and conclude the other simultaneously. For a similar reason the end of the kosmos and the end of the present aion will coalesce in thought. In Matt. xiii. 39 we read of ‘the end of the aion’. It is probably useless to ask whether this means the cessation of the existing, evil regime, or the abolition of the material universe as we know it. The curtain, and the theatre, will both fall.

These then, quite apart from language, are pressures tending to confusion. But—

(5) Language aggravates them. The New Testament writers themselves do not consistently use kosmos for the one conception and aion for the other. They were not consciously collaborating in the production of a work. They worked far apart in place and time and there was no question of meeting to hammer out an agreed terminology. And none was writing his native language. They wrote the sort of Greek which scholars have called the koinè, a deracinated and internationalised Greek used all over the Levant for business and government. It was not a barbarous corruption like Pidgin nor a contrived language like Basic. It was more like the sort of English in which two educated Indians who had no mother-tongue in common might converse today; grammatical but unidiomatic, lacking both in nuance and in precision, cut off from the associations of the nursery, the hearth, and also the library. The koinè is the speech of people who are living linguistically from hand to mouth; grabbing at ‘any old word’ which, however roughly, will, at a particular moment and for a particular audience, serve the wholly practical purpose they have in view.

As a result we find kosmos used where aion (the present evil ‘set-up’) must be meant. Examples are ‘The world (kosmos) cannot hate you, but it hates me because I give evidence that its behaviour is evil’ (John vii. 7); ‘the spirit of the world (kosmos)’ in I Cor. ii, 12; or ‘unspotted from the kosmos’ (Jas. i. 27). In this last passage the Latin translator significantly renders kosmos by saeculum and not, according to his usual practice, by mundus.

(6) Finally, the English translators always use simply world for both kosmos and aion, except where aion means eternity.

The consequent semantic situation is most strikingly illustrated by the occurrence within a work attributed to a single author of ‘God so loved the world’ (John iii. 16) and ‘Love not the world’ (I John ii. 15). The Greek uses kosmos in both passages. In the first the kosmos must be either the universe, the whole creation, or else, by the idiom already noticed, its inhabitants, the human race. In the second it cannot mean the human race. But it could mean either the evil aion with whose ethos we must make no truce, or the perishable universe which we must not love as if it were our true home. Or both.

It is therefore not surprising that English world has acquired, or retained, certain meanings and indeed certain antiquities from the multiple functions it had in Biblical translation. The next few sections will be devoted to these.

VI. ‘THE OTHER WORLD’

‘Neither in this aion nor in the aion to come’ (Matt. xii. 32). Let us suppose that aion is here used in the strictest sense, so that the whole contrast is between one epoch and the next. And let us also suppose that the English translators understood this perfectly well. It is clear that if they had done so they could with perfect propriety have translated aion by world, since age or epoch or state of affairs is one of the things world could mean. And since in fact they did translate it by world, it would seem only fair to conclude that they understood the verse.

On the other hand, I believe I should be safe in betting fifty pounds that for several centuries only the smallest minority of those who have read or heard the text have got out of it any idea of aiones whatever. The ‘world to come’ has meant to them not a new state of affairs but a region or heimr, the land of the dead. Whether this is conceived naïvely as somewhere in remote space, or more ambitiously as ‘a different plane of being’, makes little linguistic difference. Either way it is ‘future’ or ‘to come’ only in the sense that the speaker has not yet been there; as America might be ‘my future home’ to one contemplating emigration. It is contemporary with this earth. It has always been there. Innumerable generations have already entered it.

The idea of aiones, with other apocalyptic ideas, has sometimes re-emerged in particular sects. It comes every now and then before the minds of ordinary believers in special contexts. Theologians sometimes deal with it. But the picture common to popular Christian feeling and imagination, the normal object of fears and hopes, the consolation of the bereaved, the subject of play and poem, has been the one I have just described. We need not bother about the mind of the translators themselves. Whatever they intended, this is how their version has usually been read. And that is what mattered to our language.

The popular conception is partly—in the French sense of this word—a vulgarisation of something far more elusive and less familiar. The whole tenor of the New Testament implies that the life of the new aion will be immortal. But, except in parables, there seems to be very little suggestion of any realm of the dead to which all souls at all times have passed in virtue of their intrinsic indestructibility. If they believed in any such Hades, the first Christians seem, as Christians, to take no interest in it. What gives entry to the new aion is not natural immortality but miraculous resurrection (Luke xx. 35). The fact that such resurrection will occur and that men will thus enter such a life is one of the novelties of the new aion. For this very Semitic conception popular belief unconsciously substitutes something with which it can feel more at home—the old idea of ‘life after death’ in some ‘other place’, as it has been believed, surmised, hoped, feared, denied, fondled, or debated by nearly the whole human race.

The process was greatly facilitated by the ambiguity of the noun world; and another linguistic factor co-operated.

In the New Testament the basileia, the reign of kingship, of God is frequently mentioned (Mark i. 15; iv. 11, et passim). No one doubts that this conception is closely connected—it is not for me to say just how—with that of the new aion. Sometimes, instead of ‘the basileia of God’, we find ‘the basileia of heaven’ (Matt. iii. 2; v. 10). These two phrases meant exactly the same, heaven being merely a reverential Hebrew euphemism for God. But it did not sound like that to people who were preoccupied with imaginations of ‘the land of the dead’. It sounded like a place—the very same place, up in the sky, once occupied by Olympus or Asgard. As if this were not enough, the word basileia took on a new colour when it was turned into Latin or English. Regnum and Kingdom, perhaps from the first, and increasingly as time went on, carried a territorial implication. The ‘basileia of God’ had meant ‘the aion, the State of Affairs, in which God’s monarchy is undisputed’. The ‘kingdom of God’ comes more and more to mean ‘the region or heimr in which God is king’. Now substitute heaven for God, and the territorial aspect almost extrudes every other. Heaven is a ‘kingdom’ almost in the same sense as Wessex. The idea of living under the direct kingship of God sinks into the idea of ‘going to heaven when you die’. On top of all this, you have the passage where Peter is given ‘the keys of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. xvi. 19). The picture is now complete. Heaven is the land of the happy dead, surrounded by a wall, with a gate and a gate-keeper.

The result of this is to give world one more meaning. The land of the dead is a world: ‘the other world’. Scott, in bereavement, consoles himself with the reflection, ‘well, there is another world’. Blougram says

As this world prizes action, life and talk;

No prejudice to what next world may prove.

But there is no need to parade examples. You may hear it from simple lips tomorrow.

VII. ‘WORLD’ AND ‘WORLDLY’ (PEJORATIVE, DEPRECIATIVE OR IMPURE)

From the many passages where world translated aion, and aion meant ‘the present evil age’, it contracted a pejorative sense. From passages where the kosmos was belittled as transitory it contracted a sense which is depreciative without being fully condemnatory. Thirdly, from the mere necessity of distinguishing the known and temporal universe for the believed-in and eternal, where no evaluation was being made, it acquired a neutral sense. Between the first two, the fully pejorative and the merely depreciative, confusion can arise. The adjective worldly shares the fortunes of its noun.

I will begin with the fully pejorative.

The most precise and useful development of this sense is seen in the triad familiar to Anglicans from their litany, ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil’. Here the world is no longer synonymous with all the evils of the present aion. It refers to a particular set of evils, distinguishable from others. The firm establishment of this restriction was largely the work of the Middle Ages.

There are, however, passages in scripture which may contain the germ of the later meaning; those where the aion is conceived not as mere moral disorder but as an order—a systematic ethos in rivalry to the Christian ethos. It has its own sort of ‘wisdom’ (I Cor. i. 20; iii. 19). Its ‘children’ may, in terms of their own system, behave more sensibly than the ‘children of light’ (Luke xvi. 8). It has its own appropriate merimna (Matt. xiii. 22) and lupè (II Cor. vii. 10)—its own anxiety and misery. It is this systematic, and even arduous, character that distinguishes the world in its most precise sense. Mere drift—planless lechery or idleness—is not ‘worldly’. The world rebukes the flesh in Clough’s Decalogue—

Do not adultery commit;

Advantage rarely comes of it.(13–14)

To pass from the spiritual to the worldly life is not to become masterless but to accept a new master. And not a soft one. Who does not close Chesterfield’s Letters with the feeling that to become a fine gentleman is as costly as to become a saint; young Stanhope is always being told, in effect, to ‘seek not yet repose’.

The Castle of Perseverance characterises the three members of the triad very clearly. They are ‘the Worlde, the Fende, the foul Flesche’ (29). The Fiend tempts to Anger, Envy and Detraction; the Flesh to Sloth, Lechery, and Gluttony; the World to Pride and Covetousness (31 sq.). Its baits are fine clothes, kneeling flatterers, house and lands (588). The Anglican catechism assigns (unspecified) ‘works’ to the devil, ‘sinful lusts’ to the flesh, ‘pomps and vanity’ to ‘this wicked world’. Spenser’s Mammon, whose realm contains both the house of riches and the court of Philotima (Ambition) proclaims himself ‘God of the world and worldlings’. Chaucer’s Clerk, that devoted student, ‘ne was so worldly for to have office’. Long before Bunyan’s Mr Worldly Wiseman we have ‘worldliche wyse’ in Piers Plowman. Bunyan’s Madam Bubble, ‘one in very pleasant attire, but old’, offers to make Mr Stand-Fast not merely happy but ‘great and happy’; she is marginally glossed as this vain world’.

All these I class as pure examples. But there are also what I would call impure examples; passages where we cannot be quite sure, and where the author was perhaps not quite sure whether world means this wicked aion—the whole set-up of arrivisme and ‘enlightened self-interest’—or this transitory universe where solid satisfactions are not to be had. This was an almost inevitable result of the multiple burden which the noun world had laid upon it in Biblical translation.

The thirteenth-century Poema Morale says that if we don’t take care ‘this world will drown us’ (328). Does he mean that we shall be reduced into accepting the standards of this evil aion by becoming snobbish and ambitious and fixing our eye on the main chance, or only that, if we lose our detachment, all earthly goods, even the most innocent, being perishable, will break our hearts in the end? When Quarles says

O what a crocodilian world is this,

Composed of treacheries and ensnaring wiles

(Emblems, I, IV, 6)

World could bear either sense or both. The following, also from Quarles, is interesting:

Worldlings, whose whimp’ring folly holds the losses

Of honour, pleasure, health, and wealth such crosses.

(Emblems, I, VI, Epigr. 6)

There is, to be sure, a very reasonable sense, in which health, like all the other items, is a ‘worldly’ good; that is, a temporal good, belonging to this transitory kosmos. But honour and wealth are, in addition, ‘worldly’ in the different and narrower sense.

In one passage from Baxter I think we see the mind sliding unconsciously from one sense to the other. He begins by asking his reader ‘Hath not the world from thee that which God hath from the heavenly believer?’ World here need only mean—should mean, if the question is to be as searching as Baxter intended—the kosmos, the temporary. Natural happiness, of however humble and innocent a sort, could be absorbing your whole heart to the exclusion of a higher object. But when Baxter goes on to probe our conscience in more detail he talks solely about ‘worldliness’ in the narrower sense: ‘thou beginnest to feel a sweetness in gain and to aspire to a fuller and higher estate . . . the rising of thy house or the obeisance of thy inferiors’. The result is somewhat unfortunate. An idle, frivolous, feckless reader might be pulled up by the initial question and say ‘that’s me’; reading the subsequent diagnosis he could, truthfully, say, ‘Thank goodness. It wasn’t me after all. I never saved a penny in my life’.

In all these examples, both ‘pure’ and ‘impure’, the context is definitely theological. But world was far too useful a pejorative to be abandoned by speakers when they abandoned the theology it presupposes. The attitude of the devout or ‘elect’ to ‘the world’ is after all sometimes very like that of the aesthetic or intellectual élite to the ‘bourgeois’ or ‘philistines’. The élite take the word over, and so we find it used in sub-Christian, un-Christian and anti-Christian passages; always in a sense which is indebted, but not always equally indebted, to the Christian use.

In Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The world is too much with us’ world is still very close to its source, for it means primarily our economic life (‘getting and spending’). The opposite to the world, what stands to him for the ‘unworldly’, is however neither divine contemplation nor works of charity; it is the enjoyment of external nature. But he would have felt this to be contemplation. In two poems of Arnold’s the world is envisaged in very nearly Christian terms, as an organised and powerful system with its own kind of wisdom. In the sonnet ‘Written in Emerson’s Essays’ it consists of those who draw back from Transcendentalism in ‘wistful incredulity’ being ‘sorrowful and full of bitter knowledge’. In ‘The World’s Triumphs’ he forearms himself against it. He is afraid of becoming—as St Paul would say—‘conformed’ to that sorrowful wisdom; he must throttle that world or it will throttle him. This is very close to the Poema Morale’s warning that the world will ‘drown’ us if we don’t watch. Arnold himself, I fancy, would have maintained that he was, in essence, saying much the same as the Middle English poet, but I think he would have been mistaken. The opposite of the world, for the older writer, was the spiritual life as conceived by Christianity; and with this, however ‘demythologised’, Arnold’s ideal of urbanity and sweet reasonableness would never coincide.

Shelley provides some piquant examples. In the notes to Queen Mab (V, 189) resort to prostitutes destroys those ‘delicate sensibilities’ whose existence is denied by ‘worldlings’. More strikingly still in the same notes we have an obvious, though probably unconscious, echo of the New Testament (Jas. i. 27) when he presses vegetarianism (for its ‘abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity’) on the ‘pure and passionate moralist’ who is ‘yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world’. Finally the ‘broad way’ (Matt. vii. 13) in Epipsychidion (155–6) is appropriated for a very unexpected purpose. The ‘poor slaves’ who tread ‘the broad highway of the world’ are the monogamists.

Despite the use of the religious word ‘martyr’ (in a secularised sense) I think the following, from Yeats, shows a further stage:

        the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

The difference is in the tone. In the three earlier poets the world is still ‘trailing clouds’ of seriousness from its theological use. Wordsworth meets it with grave rebuke; Arnold with (not unpitying) defiance; Shelley with indignation. All, in one way or another, hold up their hands. Yeats lifts his eyebrows. If one disliked all four (I don’t dislike any of them myself) one would say there was more of the prig in the others: more of the snob in him. World (pejorative) is cooling. It may soon be a mere cinder.

Unworldly is now in some danger of acquiring a new, and useless, meaning. I have had pupils who take it as a synonym for unearthly. They would say there was ‘an unworldly atmosphere’ in Christabel. This is a natural enough linguistic result of their unfamiliarity with the Christian background, but I am surprised it has come so quickly. I should have expected it would take a century or so more.

In his Journal Scott, then ruined, speaks of a friend; submission ‘under circumstances more painful than mine—for the loss of world’s wealth was aggravated by the death of his youngest and darling son’ (20 January 1826). The sentence goes down easily enough and we all feel we know why bereavement should be thus distinguished from loss of world’s wealth. But often such a feeling shows only that we are familiar with a way of talking, not that we fully understand it. The expression is in reality not quite easy to analyse. Both losses are equally temporal, things of this kosmos. Neither wealth, nor one’s son, is being condemned by Scott as being worldly (pejorative), as elements only prized by the ‘children’ of the wicked aion. Wealth could be so regarded, but Scott is not so regarding it. The process of thought which, unconsciously, underlies his language is perhaps something like this. Wealth (along with fame, rank, and power), wrongly or excessively pursued, is a feature of the wicked aion. Therefore the whole economic side of life (remember Wordsworth’s sonnet) is closely associated with the aion, is worldly. And the worldly, originally contrasted with the spiritual, was in the nineteenth century equally, if not more, contrasted with ‘the domestic affections’. (Ambition and arrivisme can be rivals to the simple pleasures of the fireside.) Economic wealth is therefore world’s wealth; not condemned, but despised in comparison with something felt to be ‘higher’. But this analysis is doubtful, and it is arguable that we ought to place Scott’s sentence under our next heading.

VIII. ‘WORLD’ AND ‘WORLDLY’ (NEUTRAL)

Side by side with the pejorative use a merely descriptive use of world continued to flourish. It is equally Christian in origin, for it always implies a contrast between this kosmos and the eternal; but the contrast is not drawn for the purpose of condemning the former. The speaker is not evaluating but merely distinguishing.

We can say that a man cast away all woruldcara, all ‘worldly cares’. These cares need not have been Baxter’s ‘the rising of his house and the obeisance of his inferiors’. They could have included political or agricultural activities not only innocent but, for some men, obligatory. They are ‘worldly’ only because they aim at objects that are temporal, that belong to this kosmos. Similarly, one can speak of woruldlicra aehta, ‘worldly possessions’; not passing any judgement on them, but simply making clear that one is not referring to goods of a different kind, such as ‘the means of grace and the hope of glory’. So with worolde wynne (Beowulf 1080). They need not be ‘worldly joys’ in the bad sense (pomps and vanity of this wicked aion); they are merely worldly, merely of this natural and transitory life. A lover can address his mistress as ‘min worldly joy’. The adjective in no way reprobates either her or his love for her. She is to him what lands and social status and health and sunlight and fame are to other men—the principal happiness of this present life, what he most cares for this side of heaven.

But even when world is neutral it can take over from its pejorative use a curious restriction. In As You Like It (I, ii, 36–40) Celia complains that Fortune makes fair women ‘scarce honest’ and honest women ‘very ill-favouredly’. Rosalind replies, ‘Nay, now thou goest from Fortune’s office to Nature’s; Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature’. We may leave on one side as irrelevant to our present inquiry the rather odd view that ‘honesty’ is in Fortune’s gift. What concerns us is that natural goods, such as beauty, should be contrasted with ‘gifts of the world’. Beauty is obviously in one sense a ‘worldly’ gift; temporal, of this kosmos. The explanation I take to be this. Fortune, apart from Celia’s comical view about ‘honesty’, and in serious discourse, is primarily the dispense of wealth and status. Even modern usage, when we speak of making one’s fortune, bears this out; and in Dante, it may be remembered, Fortuna disposes and guides li splendor mondani, the brilliancies of earthly life (for mondo here is earth, not universe). But World (pejorative) in its full medieval development had come to mean, not evil in general, but the evils particularly incident to social and economic life. The spheres of Fortune and of ‘the world’ are therefore identified in Rosalind’s mind and distinct from natural advantages. Her use is not pejorative, but it depends on associations which the pejorative use of world had created. Exactly the same thing happens when the ruined Scott reminds himself of a friend’s fortitude ‘under circumstances more painful than mine—for the loss of world’s wealth was to him aggravated by the death of his . . . son’. World’s here means ‘economic’. This usage, for Scott but perhaps less for Rosalind, though not pejorative, carries a relative depreciation. In a theological context, the kosmos, if not to be condemned like the evil aion, has to be kept in its proper place, to be rated low in comparison with something infinitely more important. Scott’s use of world retains the implication; but the more important something has ceased to be the eternal and become natural affection. Quite possibly he would have felt—I do not say ‘thought’—his usage to be much closer to the religious than it actually is. For it would hardly be going too far to say that for many nineteenth-century people, at many moments, the home, its ‘domestic affections’, tended to be a religion.

To some it may appear that I am making a great pother about a very simple sentence and explaining what everyone understood better without explanation. ‘We all know exactly what Scott means.’ I, on the other hand, have come to distrust the feeling—with which I am very familiar—that we ‘know exactly’ what something ‘means’. I think this feeling often proves not that we have understood but that we have met a familiar turn of expression and therefore feel no shock. I believe we can think we know the meaning of a word when we know only, through imitation and practice, where and when to use it. ‘Security’—the feeling of safety—as we know, is ‘mortals’ greatest enemy’. This is as true of semantic security as of other kinds.

Worldly in its neutral sense is now almost an archaism, kept alive by its occurrence in the Anglican marriage service (‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow’) and by the jocular echo of that phrase when Lear enumerates ‘all the worldly goods’ of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò. It has become archaic because Latin saecularis, from saeculum for aion, has given us the useful word secular. Ælfric’s woruldcara would now be ‘secular affairs’. The penitent Launcelot says to the penitent Guinevere ‘God defend (i.e. forbid) but that I should forsake the world as ye have done’. She has entered a convent: by ‘the world’ he means ‘secular life’. So, by archaism, the Abbot in Browning says ‘So, boy, you’re minded . . . to quit this very miserable world’: that is, to become a monk.

Most readers will not need to be reminded that secular has, however, two meanings. The one we have just been considering descends from the medieval and Christian use of saeculum to translate aion. The other is a learned word which goes back to the classical meaning of saeculum, an age or generation. What lasts for many ages or generations is therefore secular. Milton’s phoenix is ‘secular’ not because it is less ecclesiastical than other birds but because it lives much longer—‘ages of lives’.

IX. ‘WORLD B’ AND ‘EARTH’

World B, as we have seen, has two senses. It can mean either the region of all regions, or else that far smaller region of accessible and practically important regions which we call the Earth. We must now define a little.

It will be noticed that the Earth is seldom called world when we are thinking astronomically. It would sound odd to say ‘the orbit of the world is between those of Mars and Venus’. When we call Earth the world we are usually considering her not as a globe in space but as our habitation, the scene of the human story, the area we travel in. Hence ‘I wish to see the world’ or ‘cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world’, or ‘I still bear on the conquering Tartar ensigns through the world’. The same restriction usually applies nowadays—it did not always—to the plural worlds. Eddington considers ‘the habitability of other worlds’. But habitability is the point. If they were inhabited, then they would be to their inhabitants what ‘the world’ is to us. They are being called worlds by analogy. If there were no question of habitability we should not give them that name; I have never heard anyone call the Sun a world.

Wells’s voyager, on his return journey from the Moon, first saw ‘the earth’ growing larger and larger. Then, a few lines later, ‘it was no longer a planet in the sky but the world of man’. The transition from earth to world exactly expresses a transition from the astronomical to the human point of view. Yet the Earth can be world even in an astronomical context if there is a good emotional reason. Thus Eddington can say ‘the contemplation of the galaxy impresses us with the insignificance of our own little world’. By calling it world he emphasises the contrast between its vastness for us and its paltriness by sidereal standards. By giving it the bigger name he makes it finally smaller.

On the other hand, world is decreasingly used to mean the absolute region of regions; universe tends to replace it. Partly, no doubt, this has happened because the ambiguity of world can cause inconvenience. But the change of name is also connected with a change in our conception of the thing.

For many centuries those who used world in the wider sense had a very clear picture of what they meant. The world (or mundus or kosmos) they had in mind was that depicted by Greek and medieval science, with its unmoving spherical Earth, a tiny speck, at the centre and the successively larger and swifter spheres or ‘heavens’ revolving round it, and the Primum Mobile encircling the whole. This mundus had its internal diversities: a realm of air and change and chance which extended up to the lowest sphere (that of the Moon), and beyond that the immutable realm of ether and necessity. But these made a pattern that could be easily grasped and the whole system had the unity in multiplicity of a vast building. When Marlowe spoke about ‘the wondrous architecture of the world’, the word architecture was hardly a metaphor. The world was the great work of art, matchless (as we have seen) in its ‘elegance’; perfect: neither needing nor allowing any addition.

The language of some text-books carries the suggestion that this model differed from its Newtonian successor principally by being smaller. I think that misses the real point. The important differences were two. First, it had an absolute Up (away from Earth) and Down (towards Earth). This meant that whereas to us the night sky suggests the highly abstract conception of distance, it suggested to our ancestors that very special, and far more concrete, sort of distance we call height. It was a vertiginous world. Secondly, it was both unimaginably large and unambiguously finite. It therefore had shape. The emotional and imaginative difference between this and Newton’s universe is accordingly very great. The old kosmos humbled you by its size, but exhilarated you by its symmetry; the mind could rest in it with full satisfaction. The Newtonian model is less like a building than a forest; illimitable, without horizons. It appeals to a romantic taste: its predecessor appealed to a classical taste. Hence the numerous sky-wanderings in Dante, Chaucer and others never once strike that note of lost bewilderment, loneliness, and agoraphobia which the idea of ‘space’ has aroused in Pascal and other moderns. The new attitude begins, I believe, with Bruno. It first reaches English poetry in Milton’s lines about the Moon riding

Like one that had been led astray

Through the heaven’s wide pathless way.

The way had always been wide; only in the last few centuries has it become pathless.

The long use of world to mean an object so patterned and unified as the geocentric kosmos went far to disqualify it as a name for what we now call the ‘universe’. When once the old model is broken, we become aware that a detailed knowledge of the Region of all regions will be forever unattainable. We now need a word not for some specific and imaginable object but for ‘whatever the totality may be’, and universe is such a word. Furthermore, the same process which broke the old model threw a new meaning on world which, while it lasted, made it impossible, without grave inconvenience, to call the totality the world.

I have already quoted a passage where Eddington speaks about ‘other worlds’. Our ancestors would have misunderstood him: not because they never discussed ‘the plurality of worlds’ but because that expression had for them a different sense. For them, the question about plurality of worlds meant the question whether ‘the world’—the whole geocentric, patterned kosmos—was the only one that existed. Whether the planets which it contained were inhabitable was not the issue.

Plato and Aristotle both maintained that there was only one kosmos. Their view prevailed for centuries and dissent from it finally arose, not from speculation as to what, if anything, might exist outside the mundane shell, but as a by-product of emendments made in our map of its internal economy. Copernicus pointed out the great methodological advantages of treating the Sun, rather than the Earth, as the unmoving centre of the great arrangement. Then Galileo’s telescope showed moons actually revolving round Jupiter just as Earth, on the Copernican hypothesis, was pictured as revolving round the Sun. The analogy was irresistible. Satellite became a key-conception. Other observations suggested that the ‘fixed’ stars, far from being all embedded in a single celestial sphere and therefore all equidistant from Earth, are at very different distances. If you were still to locate them in a sphere, that sphere would have to be of an immense, perhaps of an infinite, thickness. But, if so, there is no longer much point in regarding it as a sphere. What had been the wall of the kosmos turns out to be the indefinite, or possibly infinite, sea of space in which the kosmos floats. And the kosmos itself becomes merely the naked Sun with a few satellites. The question then naturally arises whether any of the stars has similar attendants. If any had, then that star, with its parasites, would be another instance of the same sort of thing as our own system: would in fact be ‘another world’. When, therefore, the earlier natural philosophers talk about plurality of worlds, whatever language they are writing, whether they use mundi or mondes or world, they are really speculating about the plurality of solar systems. ‘Why may we not’, says Burton, ‘suppose a plurality of worlds, those infinite stars visible in the firmament to be so many suns . . . to have likewise their subordinate planets as the sun hath his’; or again, ‘if there be infinite planetary worlds’. So in French. The (hypothetical) planets that circle another star are invisible, says Fontenelle, because their light is too weak to show au-delà de leur Monde, outside their own system; but the star itself must be, like our sun, le centre et l’âme d’un monde. On the other hand, when he considers the Moon as inhabitable he does not call it a world, as Eddington in the like context probably would, but an earth: que la lune est une terre habitée.

Obviously, while this language was current, world could hardly be used to mean also the region of all regions. Now that the old idea of the kosmos is forgotten by all but historians, we can if we wish, where it is stylistically desirable, once more call the universe the world. Thus in Tennyson: ‘Look up thro’ night: the world is wide’. Or, from Eddington:

Not the stars this time but universes stretch one behind the other beyond sight. . . . But there is one feeble gleam of evidence that perhaps this time the summit of the hierarchy has been reached, and that the system of the spirals is actually the whole world.

Neither is common form. Tennyson is writing poetry, in which the native and monosyllabic word usually hits harder and has a richer freight of associations. He is also alliterating; and initial w has always been an enchanter. Eddington obviously could not use universe for the whole just after he has used universe for the parts. But his choice of world also gives a bleaker and more paralysing finality. Universe, as I have said, means ‘whatever the totality may be’. But the author is here suggesting that ‘this time’ we have grasped what it actually is, mentally got to the end of it, and can say, ‘This is all there is’. It thus becomes once more, for the moment, a definite object as the geocentric mundus had been, and like it the only object there is. As such it claims the old word.

Careless readers of Paradise Lost sometimes fail to notice Milton’s careful and sensitive use of world and earth, and thereby miss some of the greatest achievements of his visual imagination. Milton felt a strong need to express the new sort of space-consciousness. But he also wanted to retain a good deal from the old walled and elegant kosmos which is so much richer in plasticity, in associations, and indeed in everything except one particular (and romantic) species of sublimity. His solution was to enclose his world (kosmos or mundus) in an opaque spherical shell, hang this from the floor of his Heaven by a golden chain, and surround it with illimitable Chaos

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,

And time, and place are lost.

The world is an artifact; indeed Book VII describes the making of it. Inside it, safe inside the shell, he can still enjoy the old beauties, ‘all this World beheld so fair’, Libra and Andromeda, ‘innumerable stars’, Earth among them ‘not unconform to other shining globes’, and, supreme, ‘the golden sun’ that ‘gently warms’ the whole enclosure. Outside, in the pathless, the waste infinity, he becomes the poet (our first poet) of space. Indeed, he probably first used the word space in that sense.

X. ‘WORLD B’ AS A MEASURE OF VALUE

In the fifteenth-century Assembly of Ladies (539) we read ‘It was a world to look on his visage’. There is no doubt at all about the meaning. Lady Anne Bacon, translating Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) renders operae pretium est videre by ‘it is a world to see’. And Lady Anne, as anyone can see by comparing her version with Jewel’s original throughout, is an utterly reliable translator; quite as racy as the famous Elizabethan translators and at the same time far closer than most of them. We may be certain that ‘it is a world to see’ meant ‘it is very well worth seeing’.

How it could reach this meaning seems to me very easy to understand, and I should hardly have thought of spending many words on it if I had not met in the works of a scholar whom I respect what seems to me an immensely unlikely explanation. He has noticed that Chaucer says the Tartar king’s music was ‘lyk an hevene for to heere’; and he believes the formula ‘it was a world’ arose from substituting world for heaven. But if world were merely a substitution for heaven it would be pointless. ‘Like heaven’ meant (by hyperbole) ‘as blissful as heaven’. No one could praise anything by saying it was as blissful as the world, for no one thinks the world blissful.

The truth, surely, is that world here becomes a term of value because it is first treated as a quantitative term. Whether world is taken for mundus or for earth, it is, by our standards, a very large object. If anyone could be supposed to own it, he would be immensely rich: if anyone could be supposed to give it away, he would be immensely generous. This idea, easy at any period, would suggest itself even more easily in an age when territorial ownership was the most obvious and frequent sort of riches: an age when cities, provinces, or kingdoms could be given as dowries.

From this point of view ‘it was (or is) a world’ falls naturally into place as the upward limit in an ascending series of hyperbole.

On the lowest level you can assess the prized object by saying it is worth a city, or more than a city. If King Henry offered you Paris, sa grand’ville on condition that you abandoned your beloved, you could reply

J’aime mieux ma mie, ô gué,

    J’aime mieux ma mie.

If a city is not felt to be enough, you can step the price up and say with Du Bellay ma pauvre maison qui m’est une province. If a province is still too little you can, like Hugo, step it up to an empire: enfant, si j’étais roi, je donnerais l’empire, etc. Working along these lines, language is certain to reach the world in the end.

In fact, it reached it at the beginning; for I have been giving these examples in their crescendo of hyperbole, not in their chronological order. We get the usage in the New Testament: ‘What good will it do a man to get the whole kosmos and lose his own psyche?’ (Matt. xvi. 26). It flourishes still in more than one language; for all I know, in every language. Thus we have je n’y manquerais pas pour un monde, or in Italian, la domestica che la spassava un mondo quella mattina (‘the housemaid, who was having a world of fun that morning’). In English we hear daily ‘He thinks the world of her’ or ‘I wouldn’t hurt it for the world’.

Such is the human passion for exaggeration that even the world, on occasion, will not satisfy it. Chaucer’s Troilus says ‘Me levere were than thise worldes tweyne’—I’d like it better than this world twice over, than two such worlds.

Usually, as I have said, the idea of quantity is present only to supply the ground for an idea of value: world means ‘as big as the world and therefore as valuable’; sometimes however it is merely quantitative, as in Milton’s ‘brought into this world a world of woe’. ‘A world of folk’ in Chaucer, and ‘a world of ladies’ in The Flower and the Leaf (136) are probably in the same class. Our colloquial ‘a world of trouble’ and ‘a world of difference’ certainly are.

I am in some doubt how to classify Gower’s statement that someone ‘couthe al the world of tricherie’. This might be merely quantitative, like ‘a world of woe’. It might mean, with more precision, ‘he knew all there is to know of trickery’, his store of trickery being, like the universe, something that could not be added to. But there is a third possibility. It might be an instance of the usage to which our next section is devoted.

XI. SUBORDINATE ‘WORLDS’

Solar systems, we have seen, were mundi or mondes or worlds. This greatly facilitated—I do not say it caused—the usage I am now going to consider. Any region whatever can be called a world if it is being regarded, within a given context, as constituting a (relatively) closed system. The most obvious, and perhaps the earliest, instance of this usage is the geographical. Once America was discovered, it became the ‘new world’, and the land-mass which we already knew became ‘the old world’. Prehistoric America, says Bacon, had ‘far greater rivers and higher mountains than any part of the old world’. Thomas Browne quotes a line from a doggerel prophecy, ‘When the new world shall the old invade’; i.e. when America will invade Europe. By a very slight extension Donne writes ‘Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone’; or Gibbon, ‘Britain was viewed in the light of a distinct and insulated world’.

In these examples the area which is being dubbed a world is an area in the literal sense: somewhere in space. But it can also be an entirely notional area, an intellectual or spiritual milieu. ‘St Thomas Aquinas’, says Chesterton, ‘would have found himself limited in the world of Confucius’—if he had had to confine himself to the range of conceptions and values which Confucius used. ‘The author of the Cloud and Walter Hilton’, says Professor Knowles, ‘move in the same world of ideas and motives’. We are told by another writer that nonsense, for Edward Lear, ‘became ultimately a world in itself’.

The world, in this sense, which a man normally inhabits may be called ‘his’ world. Thus in H. G. Wells we read, ‘Why didn’t I stick to my play? That’s what I was equal to. That was my world and the life I was made for.’

In calling any such notional area a world we always suggest that it has some internal unity and a character that sets it apart from other areas. But the gravity of the suggestion varies with the context and with the style of the writer. When Wordsworth says ‘all the mighty world Of eye, and ear’ the suggestion is strong. Sight and hearing stand together and apart from all other experiences, by being sensuous yet embracing distance. But when Keats speaks of ‘Daffodils And the green world they live in,’ this sally of the esemplastic power frames and so unifies a merely momentary picture. Wordsworth’s phrase would be possible in prose; Keats’s, hardly.

Gower’s ‘al the world of trickerie’ may obviously come in here. Trickery, jugglery, and the like can be a world, as there can be a world of finance or higher mathematics, and an expert could be master of all that world.

When the area or milieu in question has a position in time as well as a distinctive character, it becomes impossible to distinguish this sense from World (State or Period) which we considered in Section II. ‘Christianity’, says Arnold, ‘was a new spirit in the Roman world.’ It is useless to ask whether he means ‘The Roman period, state of affairs’ or ‘The system of thoughts and sentiments in which the Roman mind was at home’. Consciously, I take it, he meant the latter, for he was no Anglist and knew nothing about the medieval usage. But he is, willy-nilly, referring to what Gower would have called a world (period). Thus the exigencies of language which separate meanings also at times reunite them.

XII. ‘WORLD’ (PEOPLE)

We have already had to notice that, just as street can mean those who live in the street, so world—and, for the matter of that, kosmos, mundus, saeculum, and monde—can mean the inhabitants of the world, mankind. Examples will occur to everyone. The Lamb of God ‘takes away the hamartia of the kosmos’ (John i. 50). ‘The hope of the mundus was frustrated.’ ‘Blessed Cross on whose arms hung the ransom of the saeculum.’ ‘Toz li monz [tout le monde] lies in her power.’ ‘The Queen that (i.e. to whom) all this worlde schal do honoure.’

In some of these examples world may mean, quite literally, the whole human race; much more often it is, and is known by the speaker to be, a hyperbole. When the lady says ‘Sir Wowen ye are that alle the worlde worshipes’, neither she nor the poet is ignorant that many people—benighted Saracens and ignorant villeins—have never heard of him. When Johnson ‘undeceived the world’ about the ghost-story, this means he undeceived a few hundreds.

The importance of this (sufficiently obvious) fact is that the hyperbole is one source of the various different meanings which arise within World (People). The hyperbole talks of some men as if they were all men. But the ‘some’ selected for such treatment may vary according to the speaker’s point of view.

It may mean simply ‘the majority’: that is to say, the supposed majority, for there are seldom any statistics behind this usage. What the world thinks is ‘common’ or ‘public’ opinion: what it does is ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ behaviour. Le monde ayt entrepris, says Montaigne, the world has agreed, to honour melancholy with its peculiar favour. ‘Madness’, said Johnson, ‘frequently discovers itself by unnecessary deviation from the usual modes of the world.’ He was thinking about Smart’s habit of suddenly kneeling down to pray in the street or wherever he happened to be. Johnson adds that ‘rationally speaking it is greater madness not to pray at all than to pray as Smart did’, but it does not discover itself as madness because it involves no deviation from the modes of the world, the behaviour of the majority. Scott says of a lady ‘In her case the world is good-natured, and perhaps it is more frequently so than is generally supposed’. In other words ‘most people are kinder than more people think.’

When we speak of the majority, one or other of two implications is often present. We may imply ‘Most people, but of course not ourselves’, or ‘Most people, and therefore of course you and I’. The first is present in the passage just quoted from Montaigne; indeed his previous words have made it explicit. When this happens, world is slightly pejorative and may carry associations derived from the theologically pejorative use. It would be hard to say whether the fastidious and retired man’s distaste for the majority or the Evangelical’s reprobation of the ‘worldly’ is uppermost in Cowper’s

How various his employments whom the world

Calls idle; and who justly, in return,

Esteems that busy world an idler too!

(Task III, 352)

When the opposite implication (‘and therefore of course you and I’) is at work, the world is contrasted with some special circle or way of life which the speaker regards as eccentric, uncouth, restrictive—a ‘hole-and-corner’ affair. When looked at in this way, world is often buttressed with some such adjective as real, adult or actual. Scott speaks of ‘good sense and knowledge of the world picked up at one of the great English schools’. The school rubs off the regionalisms and archaisms and corrects the peculiar perspectives of a provincial home: makes a boy, as the Americans would say, ‘like folks’. Similarly he says ‘One knows nothing of the world if you are absent from it so long as I have been’. As the context makes plain, world here means London, conceived as the centre of politics, fashion, and literary ‘contacts’. A few pages later it has what seems at first to be a startlingly different sense: he ‘knows the world, having been a good deal attached both to the turf and the field’. But the same semantic principle is still at work. London was contrasted, as World (simpliciter), with Edinburgh and Abbotsford because the latter were felt to be special, departmental, not exactly current or standard. Race-meetings and hunts, with their rowdiness and mixture of classes, are similarly contrasted with a more guarded, selective, refined life which can in its turn be thought special or departmental. In all these usages alike, the World is something you meet if you go outside the enclosure in which, willingly or unwillingly, you usually live.

This explains the curious fact that while it is derogatory to call anyone worldly it is complimentary to call him ‘a man of the world’. Johnson would have hotly denied, or (more likely) confessed with shame and trembling, that he was worldly, but he says with some self-complacency ‘I am a man of the world’. That is ‘I am no longer the uncouth schoolmaster from Lichfield, nor the learned Hottentot, nor even the drudging Lexicographer. I know my way about. I know how to behave. I am a very polite man. No one need make allowances for me. I can meet anyone—even, on occasion, Wilkes.’ Hence his indignation at the suggestion that he is not, in this sense, a man of the world: ‘What do you mean, Sir? What do you take me for? Do you think I am so ignorant of the world, as to imagine that I am to prescribe to a gentleman what company he is to have at his table?’

The unwilling Nun in Browning’s ‘The Confessional’ says

‘Lies’, ‘They lie’, shall still be hurled

Till spite of them I reach the world.

World here carries double weight. It is (obviously) saeculum, the world in the sense of secular life. But it is also emphatically the outside: the free, open, common world of humanity.

In all these examples the world is contrasted with a minority (simply) or with some special and restricted circle. But there is also an almost opposite usage. World, with some specifying adjective, can itself mean a particular group of people, and therefore usually a minority. The examples, however, are ambiguous. Addison speaks of ‘reforming the female world’; Arnold of ‘the literary world’ or ‘the Paris world of letters and society’; Johnson, of someone’s behaviour ‘when first he set his foot in the gay world’. They are ambiguous because it is impossible to determine whether they are reached from World (People) or from World (Subordinate Region). My feeling, for what it’s worth, is that Arnold is thinking of a milieu, a relatively closed system, but that Johnson means only gay people. Addison’s ‘female world’ may be intended to reify and unify women somewhat as Keats did the daffodils by his ‘green world’. On the other hand his phrase may have no deeper source than that curious horror of the word woman which has filled our eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetry with nymphs and females. These distinctions are admittedly tenuous.

World, without an adjective, can mean a particular set, but a set which regards itself as the norm, as the realisation of what all sets would be if they could: in a word, Society with a capital S. This is what Warton means when he says that Pope shows himself to be ‘a man of gallantry and of a thorough knowledge of the world’. I believe this usage is not a native English development but an attempt to render French le beau monde (or simply le monde). Often the French expression itself is borrowed, with the same sense: as when Pope writes

This the Beau monde shall from the Mall survey,

or Chesterfield, ‘A man who thinks of living in the great world must be . . . attentive to please the women . . . they absolutely stamp every man’s character in the Beau monde’. ‘Great world’ and beau monde are probably almost synonymous.

The French expression itself was, I suspect, facilitated by a development of monde to which I find no parallel in the history of English world. Both words, in so far as they mean (usually with hyperbole) the human race, can be said to mean people. But monde can mean, as world cannot, any collection of people however small or temporary, whether they have any unifying characteristic or not. In this sense monde could be defined merely as ‘the opposite of solitude’; company is the nearest English equivalent. Thus we have je ne compte pas sur grand monde aujourd’hui, ‘I don’t expect many people today’.

Granted this sense, it becomes natural to ask, say, whether at a given moment there is beaucoup de monde in Paris, just as an Englishman might ask ‘Are there many people in town?’ But the literally truthful answer (there are millions) would show a misunderstanding. The speaker wanted to know whether there were many people of a particular class, people he might call on or dine with. That monde should therefore come to mean that class is no stranger than that society should have come to mean Society. It is not even particularly arrogant. At the beginning of term an undergraduate who said ‘There’s hardly anyone up yet’ would mean ‘There are hardly any undergraduates’, but a don who used the same words would mean ‘There are hardly any fellows’. It is the most natural way of talking in the world; each gives as good as he gets back, neither has any reason to feel offended. It is perhaps by some such process that monde comes to mean ‘fashionable people’. You can make it clearer by saying beau monde, but you needn’t.

Since we have also adopted from French demi-monde and demi-mondaine, a word on these will not come amiss. It is a curious, but by no means unparalleled, story of linguistic waste. Demi-Monde was the title of a play published by Dumas fils in 1855, and in the text he explains very clearly what he means by the expression. The demi-monde consists of women who all have ‘a past’ (une faute dans leur passé, une tache sur leur nom). What is common to them all is l’absence de mari. They are compromised, and therefore no longer members of le monde. They are not to be confused with prostitutes, not even with the ‘top-drawer’ prostitutes, the great hetairai. The whole purpose of Dumas’ neologism was to name a shadowy region on the fringes of the monde which had had no name before. It is therefore with very pardonable chagrin that he reiterates the correct meaning in his Preface of 1868. He complains that everyone takes demi-monde to mean la cohue des courtisanes; whereas in his intention il commence où l’épouse légale finit et il finit où l’épouse vénale commence. Il est séparé des honnêtes femmes par le scandale public, des courtisanes par l’argent. But all this availed nothing. Offered a word which would have supplied a linguistic need, the French, followed by the English, preferred to use it as the name for something which had several names already.

Aspiring neologists will draw the moral. Invent a word if you like. It may be adopted. It may even become popular. But don’t reckon on its retaining the sense you gave it and perhaps explained with great care. Don’t reckon on its being given a sense of the slightest utility. Smart little writers pick up words briskly; but only as a jackdaw picks up beads and glass.

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