literary Philosophy-Draft and Book concept-to be published-prefer an English publisher
The Evolution of Humankind since the Middle Ages to Date
Foreword
This book of philosophical thought proposes to
enlarge the scope of literary experience, as well as to aquiesce the minute
perceiving of several difficult philosophical thoughts.
1.
Romanian Philosophical Thought versus German Philosophical
Layout since the Middle Ages to Date…………………………………………………………………....….1-7
1.1.
Revisiting
GiBoccacio’s “Decamerone”…………………………………………………7
1.1.1. The Main Germanic Philosophic Thinkers influenced by the Greek Philosophers...7-10
1.1.2. The Theory of Knowledge as a
Philosophical Field of Study....…............................10
1.2. Germanic Thought Influencing Romanian exegete Philosophy…………….………….10
1.2.1. A
Short History of Philosophic Idea Development with a Main Cadence on the Revolutionary
Progress of the Logical Concept.................................................................10-15
1.2.2. The Literary Scene of the Middle Ages……................................................................17
1.2.3. New Romanian Assertions on Philosophical Phenomena…………………………….18
1.3. Further Congenial and Funny Representations of Love in
Philosophic Thought in Europe during the Middle Ages and to the Onset of
Modernity……………………………………………..........................................................18
Endnotes on the First Chapter…………………………………………………………….19
2.
The Main Schools of Philosophy in
2.1.1. The Major Breakthrough of Romanian Philosophy…………………………………..21
2.1.2. The Outcome of Romanian Philosophy to Date………………………………………25
2.1.3.Humankind in the Early Stages of the
Development of the Romanian Unitarian State……………………………………………………………………………………..26-27
2.1.4. Rethinking Humankind in
the Early Stages of the Development of the Romanian Unitarian State………………………………………………………………………………26
2.2. The Romanian Philosophical
Schools in the Modern XXth Century……………….27-30
2.2.1. The Main Schools of Philosophy in
2.2.2. Antique Influence on
Romanian Philosophical Schools in the XXth Century……………………………………………………………………………………..31
2.2.3. A Unitary Stylistic Cultural Given within
a Variety of Values……………………….35
2.3. Romanian Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age………………………………….37
2.3.1. The Main Schools of Philosophy in
Romania and their Promoters as main Thinkers and Boosters of Development………………………………………………………………39
2.3.1.1. Romanian Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age……………………………40
2.3.1.2. The Influence of the Romanian
Philosophical Schools in the Modern XXth Century………………………………………………………………………………………40
2.3.1.3. A Unitary Stylistic Cultural given
versus a Variety of Values……………………..40
Endthe
Second Chapter………………………………………………………...50
3. The Concepts per se and their practical daily Usage…….............................................51
3.1.1. The Practical Usage of Philosophic
Belief in Daily Social Life…………………........58
3.1.2. Meontology
(the Existence of the Void, the Negation of the Present)….......................68
3.2. The Personalist Theories
within the School of the Positivist
3.2.1. The Object of Contemplation as seen
apart from the Individual…...……...…...…....80
3.2.2. The Clash of Personalist
Theories within the School of the Positivist Vienna Thinkers…………………………………………………………………………………….90
Endnotes on the Third Chapter…………………………………………………………..100
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..150
Bibliography……………………………..………………………………………………150
I
dedicate this book to L-M, my precious daughter, who hopefully might be
delighted with it.
Foreword
The
book proposes to rearrange a set of very useful ideas by shedding light upon
the main thoughts of the philosophical contribution to the cultural development
of humankind and its openness to innovation and progress. Thus, the positive
and negative evolution of mankind, since the Greek “emancipation” of antiquity,
is marked and highlighted. New and fresh philosophic mainstreams occurred
hence, the main currents that influenced feminism, structuralism, psychology,
deconstruction, postmodernism being hard to be recognized as such.
1.
Romanian Philosophical Thought versus German Philosophical Layout since the
Middle Ages to Date
1.1.1.
The History of Western Philosophical Thought
The
history of philosophical thought went fairly much, hand in hand with the
evolution of humankind, starting with the Greeks and the ancient mind-set and the
Oriental frame of mind. These merged altogether and evolved, since the
counter-sophists Socrates, Aristotle and Plato marked the Greek cultural life
with their emblematic works: Socrates with the “Dialogues”, Aristotle with the “Organon” and the “Metaphysics”
and last, but not least, Plato with “The
Republic”, “Phaedo” and “The Allegory of the Cave”.1
1.1 . 2. Revisiting
Boccacio “Decamerone”
The “Decamerone”
contains a lot of philosophical thinking, especially when the author reaches
out to the readership, trying to highlight how the Middle Ages average citizens
understood love or the unification in love or how they tried to define a
superior force or a superior feeling.2 These
are very funny descriptions that entail a rather naive mood of women and portray
certain somewhat childish misrepresentations of the idea of God. Very much fun is poked at naive women, who feel that they have
reached their peak in love by being misused by complete strangers. Images of female
gratuity and the peculiar naiveté derived from it, predominate the unfolding of
the events, but it is also men i.e. monks that commit childish mistakes,
developing thus a very conspicuous pervert mind and sexual behaviour. ( )
Much is known about the “Middle Ages” to date. However, Boccacio
portrayed the real feelings, the moral behaviour and the daily preoccupations
of citizens, which were either purely materialistic or they reflected reactions
of people, who were solely eager to satisfy their basic physical instincts.
1.1.1.
The main Germanic Philosophic Thinkers
influenced by the Greek philosophers
A seminal thinker of the eighteenth century remains
Immanuel Kant, who was more profoundly concerned with ratio, the psyche and
human understanding as such. Kant distinguishes between psychology and
metaphysics. He renders metaphysics a more poignant role than to psychology per
se and criticizes the capacity of “pure” wisdom to discern the psychological
insight into the human psyche.
1.1.2.1. The Theory of
Knowledge as a Philosophical Field of Study
David Hume who distinguished a subjective, particular and contingent
experience about causality that was shared
by Burke too, undermines the Leibnitz ideal shared by Kant.3 The sceptic Humean conclusions were not only dangerous to
metaphysics, but to sciences too, and moreover to philosophy, as a
predominantly theoretical field, just as well. Frege (the mixing of spheres),
Kirchhoff, Hertz and Mach forewent the Vienna circle.4 Many such kind of
philosophic sentences are devoid of cognitive meaning. Newtonian mechanics is a
focal point of debate during this period. Wittgenstein5 adopts a sceptical attitude towards metaphysics, explained not as a
reality behind realities themselves, hence the former lingers on the
appearances themselves. Antique philosophy as a rigorous science, redefined by
the Husserlian programme as profoundly logical, was considered apart from the
natural sciences, as it was supposed to give a definition to the new philosophy
and to the new metaphysics about sensorial data speech. His phenomenology was
rendered in opposition to naturalism. To him material nature was merely a given
and conscious life experience. The phenomenalist Richard Rorty rethought
philosophy from an experimental angle.[5]
1.1.2.2 A New Perspective
on Philologia Perennis
The modernist twentieth century rethought philosophy up from its
fundament and a new relation with the sciences (Husserl), a change in relation
in the concept of philosophy, figuring
philosophy as simple as metaphysics, emerged altogether. These are all linked
to the logical syntax of speech, based on the principle of tolerance. With Wittgenstein
the principles of confirmability and verifiability were tackled, since not all
grammarly logical sentences were verifiable. According to Kant’s philosophy, it
is possible to reconcile the operative causal determination with the freedom
(as an exercise of morality) of the deed and thought. Left at a bifurcation,
the world of phenomenology (appearances) and the world of the objects
themselves as an experience per se, together with the world beyond experience,
do not always merge completely. “The Lesson of Hume”6,
the objection to causality, generalized with respect to the twelve thinkers in order to overcome the malefic
scepticism and to salvage metaphysics, failed, in the sense that empiric
thinking forgot to rethink individual experience. Kant notes, that as little as
one expects humankind to renounce to research metaphysics, the more one could
expect metaphysics to be further researched, even as paradoxical as this may
seem: “It will continue to exist for every man that reflects.” The critical,
assertive capability discernment (to discern between the new and old), the
theory of knowledge as a single constructive theory (Erkenntnistheorie), the problem of a possibility or impossibility
of a specific metaphysics, generally speaking, emerged as a counter argument to
pure philosophy. The most important philosophers were rather more concerned
with a very much challenged and debated upon metaphysics. They were the peak of
discussion within the frame of the
1.2. A Short History of Philosophic
Idea Development with a Main Stress on the Revolutionary Evolution of the Logical
Concepts
1.2.1. The Literary
Scene of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages were indeed called the Dark Ages and this denomination was very much given, somehow
deservingly. At that particular point in time there was very poor streetlight present
and the people in Britain, for instance emptied their pots with their physical debris
of urchin and urine directly onto the window.
Boccacio’s “The Decamerone”[6]
is set in Italy, Sicily, or in other towns and villages, hence the scenery is
as poor as the intellectual make-up of those people was, and rather randomly
described, in tone and resemblance with the feelings of the poor-minded people
there. If anything at all, the Idea of God should be rather associated with an
intellectual or even a superior being or frame of mind that connects the human being
with this state of mind or feeling. Since the concept of love or the
representation of it, especially of that specific unification that becomes prevalent
in the act of love-making between a woman and a man, fails to appear, the
neglection or total absence of it might be deduced.
1.2.2. Germanic thought
influencing Romanian exegete Philosophy
The main philosophers that had a tremendous influence on Romanian
literature were, among others, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Schlegel, Fichte, Eric Auerbach and Martin Heidegger.
1.2.3. A
Short History of Philosophic Idea Development with a Main Fall on the Revolutionary
Evolution of the Logical Concept
1.2.4. The Literary Scene
of the Middle Ages
1.3. Further Congenial and
Funny Representations of Love in Philosophic Thought in
Love was seen rather differently across the ages. On the other hand,
I had to make a certain split division, respectively to
consider a fraction of a literary excerpt at other spots of the book, between
Romanian philosophical thought, German-British rational layout and the internationally
established philosophical frame of viewing the world. Austria might have been
“dezmădulată” (translated into English “drawn-back”, “retired”, “backwards-modulated”)
since the Habsburg empire had its toll of traumatic impact on highly sensitive
and on artistically gifted people. Maiorescu’s students and disciples were
among others, the philosophers P.P.Negulescu, C.Rădulescu-Motru, Ion Petrovici etc. They all together imposed a certain way of
looking at things. Titu Maiorescu had fairly in view the relation to the
surroundings and especially to the philosophic relations.
The
Union of 1859 was winning a criterion of performance when Maiorescu founded the
literary society “Junimea” (1863),
the publicistic organon of “Convorbiri
literare”, (1867) a literary magazine that promoted the great classical
writers such as: Mihai Eminescu, Octavian Goga, Ion Creangă,
Ion Slavici, Duiliu Zamfirescu, Mihail Sadoveanu. Highly politically involved,
Maiorescu was also the director (between March-July 1877) of the “Timpul” newspaper. Maiorescu thought, among
other things, that the history of mankind did not present all the edicts as
laws as such, and that socialism was not possible to establish itself under
this specific pattern in Romania. This was erroneous and his political activity
thus rather very much contested. The highly influential period of Renaissance is
worth mentioning here, because its social programme used to believe in the laic
thinking and tendency of the human being. Humanism insists on the polyvalent
affirmation of the human being and on the religious, respectively theological
dimension of the human existence in the XIX century. “As a matter of fact, the
criterion referring to the rapport between aim and method/means is corroborated
(confirmed) implicitly or explicitly with another, more powerful criterion, m.e.
that reflecting the importance of the planned, to be satisfied necessities or
to put it differently, those of the defining side of man.” (258)
The ‘middle value’ concept is conspicuous with
Schaler, Nicolai Hartmann, Petre Andrei etc.7
Hartmann is considered an atheist and thus he questions the existence of a
divine grace.
Roşca claims that art is of a fairly superior
value and could act as healing or comforting in times of uncertainty. I do not agree with Roşca’s
argument since not all people could be “healed” by Mozart’s, Bach’s and
Cleiderman’s music and implicitly by liturgical orthodox music even less so. For
instance, the human psyche is not a material basis or ground to start this kind
of argument upon. Roşca
exaggerates thus the healing potential of music and makes Vianu’s argument therefore more powerful. It is to
be considered that music is an important therapy for all kind of people. Hence
not all of them are into it and thus not ready to really understand and
appreciate good music. It is thus important, that these people should be really
musical and very sound sensitive. I also contradict the fact that the material
values, referred to in the second instance of his argument, are of the same
importance as the spiritual ones and this is most of all the case because they
are somewhat associated with dignity. He finally states, by contradicting his
prior argument, that the material values are rather of a superior quality when compared to the
spiritual values. He claims that the form isotonic is rather linked to them than
to the isostenic ones, since they are
more powerful than the latter. Human personality is as a matter of fact
superior to any other possible thing. He also maintans a false conception about
the origin of the material objects. He believes that these were human
creations. His Romanian linguistic skills lack even in consistency, grammarly
speaking, since the adverb “decât” could not be used on affirmative asserts.
Vianu’s ladder of criteria contains a more developed part of evaluation and
that includes also politics and the judicial sciences among the other four
theories: arts, literature, morality and religion. (p.260) The political value
attributed to people is rather superior to a judicial value attributed to
things.
1.3.
New Romanian Assertions on debatable philosophical Phenomena
Adrian Michiduţă groups the pairs of primary notions into two big
categories depending on the domain they refer to, as: “Ontological fundamental categories
of human ontology per se thus each group within them includes several more
subgroups. The proposed systematization
permits, nonetheless, resettlements depending on the concept which a commentator
could have about the problematic area of philosophy and about this connection
or affinity.”
The
supreme principle is for Mircea Florian causality itself. The explanation of
the world via a third element or dimension is at this point visible.
Endnotes on the first
chapter
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
2. The
Main Schools of Philosophy in
The most sought-after schools of philosophy in
Romania functioned in Bucharest, especially at the University of Bucharest and
these were mostly highly influenced by the German philosophy, especially by Kant’s
and Simmel’s. The main promoters of philosophic thinking were Mircea Eliade,
Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica. They revived the autochthonic thought and
gave new impulses to further philosophic thinking.
2.1.
The Major Breakthrough of Romanian Philosophy
The introduction to philosophy per se was initially
achieved by Constantin Noica and Emil Cioran. They might be considered the pioneers that introduced the great
masters of German literature to the general public. Here, a specific reference
to other main philosophers is to be taken into consideration, as for instance to
Gabriel Liiceanu’s philosophical position, just as well.
2.1.2. The Outcome of Romanian
Philosophy to Date Founded
in 1860, the Faculty of Philosophy is an institution which is essential to the
modern Romanian education and culture, being one of the founding faculties of
the University of Bucharest.
Currently, alongside the programmes available for philosophy,
the faculty also offers study programmes in other related domains, such as
European studies and international relationships, community law, public politics,
cultural management, the management of knowledge and others which are led by
professors with plenty of experience.
The structure of the Faculty of Philosophy is based on two departments: the
Department of Theoretical Philosophy and the Department of Practical Philosophy
and the History of Philosophy, which also includes the UNESCO Department for
Intercultural and Inter-religious Exchange.
The Faculty of Philosophy has interests which are deeply rooted in the
development of the philosophical research in the newest directions currently
present on the international level and comprises renowned research centres: the
Centre for the Study of Rationality and Faith, the Centre for Research in
Logics, Philosophy and the History of Science, the Centre for Research of the
History of Philosophical Ideas, the Centre for Phenomenological Research, the
Centre for Research in the Field of Applied Ethics, the Centre of Research for
Intergenerational Justice, Social Responsibility and Sustainability.
The UNESCO Department for Intercultural and Inter-religious
Exchange, which was recently integrated in the structure of the Faculty of
Philosophy, organizes three master’s programmes in English, which benefit from
the participation of professors and prestigious experts from universities and
research institutes abroad. The UNESCO programmes create innovative educational
experiences for the students and they create specialists in the field of
intercultural management, intercultural communication and business management
by offering them a varied array of courses in the fields of philosophy,
history, sociology, political sciences, cultural diplomacy, management,
communication and business management.
The training offered by the Faculty of Philosophy allows its graduates to work in
areas different from education and research, such as fields which require
critical, explicative, interpretive and decisional competences in a creative
manner in analytical, research, creation and development activities, in
political consultancy and analysis, ethical counselling and consultation,
organizational management, communication and journalism, administration etc.
2.1.3.
Humankind in the Early Stages of the Development of the
2.1.4.
Rethinking Humankind in the Early Stages of the Development of the Romanian
Unitarian State
The Romanian
Philosophical Schools in the modern XXth Century The origins of
Romanian philosophical thinking can be traced back to the late Middle Ages. The
first attempts were made in monasteries and princely courts; the language used
was Church Slavonic or Latin. The first original philosophical work in Romanian
dates from 1698 and was written by Dimitrie Cantemir, Prince of Moldavia. The
first Romanian philosophical school, the Transylvanian School, formed in
Transylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, was an expression of
Enlightenment ideas. Romanian philosophical thinking in the nineteenth century
was imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment and Kantianism.
Romanian modern culture and, implicitly, modern Romanian
philosophy were born in the second half of the nineteenth century, under the
influence of Titu Maiorescu, a major cultural personality. At the peak of its
evolution between the two world wars, Romanian philosophy had the following
characteristic features: it was closely related to literature, in the sense
that most Romanian philosophers were also important writers; it showed
excessive preoccupation with the issue of Romanian identity; it was involved in
Romania’s historical, political and ideological debates, fuelling attitudes in
favour of or against Westernization and modernization; it synchronized quickly
with Western philosophical thinking; and it was (and still is) lacking in
ethical thought.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Romanian
philosophers focused mainly on discussing the status of metaphysics and its
right to existence, followed by any individual efforts to set up an original
philosophical system; secondly, they were interested in the issue of identity,
the theme of Romanian-ness, which led to the development of the philosophy of
culture and history, and to the involvement of philosophers in politics. The
most important original philosophical constructions were those of Lucian Blaga
and Constantin Noica.
During the communist regime, an initial period of complete
stagnation of independent thinking was followed, at the beginning of the 1960s,
by a relative liberalization that favoured research in logic, the philosophy of
science, and the writing of literary-philosophical essays.
Romanian philosophy since 1989 has made efforts to restructure
its institutional framework, reclaim the formerly forbidden fields, and
synchronize - through translations and studies - with contemporary world
philosophy.
2.2.
2.3.
Romanian Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age
2.3.1.
The Main Schools of Philosophy in
2.3.1.1 Romanian
Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age
Modern philosophy is, on the other hand, tersely influenced by the enlightenment
and especially the one of the eighteenth century. Nicolae Bălcescu oscillated between deism (Götterglaube, Deismus) and provincialism (insularity) “priveghind evoluţia omenirii”.8(23)
The main initiators of the
Transylvanian school of philosophy were: Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Asachi, Gheorghe
Şincai, Ion Budai Deleanu, Petru Maior, Gheorghe Lazăr etc. Gheorghe Lazăr taught in Bucharest at the “Sfântul Sava” high-school and Gheorghe Şincai founded approximatively three
hundred schools in Transylvania. Grigore Ureche, Miron Costin and Ion Neculce
contributed to the documentation for the manuscript in Latin to the religious
book “Letopiseţul Ţării Moldovei”.
2.3.1.2.
The Influence of the Romanian Philosophical Schools in the Modern XXth Century
Vianu’s ladder of criteria contains a rather
more developed part of evolution and that includes the political and judicial
sciences among the other four theories, too: art, literature, morality and
religion (p.260). The political value conferred to people is superior to a
judicial value attributed to things. Roşca’s view of politics remains hence a
personal view and thus it is not Vianu’s one that the former considers as such.
Vianu’s thinking, that the political value would be solely important, means a fairly
much resolute perseveration to and for this particular time. Thus, the theoretical
values amplify the force and the spiritual content of the conscience. The
political value preserves itself, in the sense that it maintains the role of keeping
the human being as springing from an axiological referential matter within a
certain scope of focus. He, then states that all values are personal and all the
latter could thus not be attributed to objects solely. This is a false
perspective as long as many objects possess qualities, even though the latter
might be exterior ones. Some objects might shun light from the interior upon
the exterior. Thus, the concept of objects is relative by itself, because
people tend to classify objects differently, rendering thus a personal meaning.
Each object possesses a free, adhering feature to exist by itself as such, or
not to do so. The difference was fairly relative and not absolute. Roşca agrees at least that the original is superior to its copy. To
continue, Vianu argues that the moral value is superior to the artistic one,
because the latter is personal and integrative, meaning that it could be
integrated into an axiological, more comprehensive structure, while the
artistic value would be real and non integrative or integrating, respectively
that a certain valuable creation could not be subsumed or subordinated to
another artistic creation. It was nonetheless shown that all values are personal.
Roşca argues, that a certain valuable creation could not be subsumed or
subordinated to another artistic creation. Roşca agrees that a certain moral achievement could be seized and
integrated by another, more refined accomplishment and that each artistic
valuable creation is unsubordinative, being unique, a feature whose
imperishability and eternal character I stress out, too. He thinks that the
signaled difference is relative and not absolute, since each moral creation
presents a certain uniqueness and, vice versa, since each artistic
accomplishment implies a certain progressive evolution, even if solely under
the aspect of the creative technique since each artist wants to express himself
in a very original manner and does not succeed this, except via delimitation,
sometimes via a terse break with the anterior manners of expression, but either
way via rapporting, by taking into consideration the artistic existent speech
at a particular point in time. On the other hand, the integrating character of
a value does not confer him any superiority to another unintegrative one,
because, just as well, from another point of view, the one of originality, he
can state in the other order that the unintegrative value was superior to the
integrative one. Thus, Roşca sustains the artistic value more intensely than
the moral one, because this is his general frame of mind,
Lucian
Blaga is not completely right, when he affirms that all values situate
themselves at the same level, because each of them searches and ascertains
something of the mystery of the world but none of them exhausts this mysterious
fund of existence.
There
are nonetheless really great art works or literary pieces that could not really
compare themselves on the ranking scale with the much lower positioned ones.
Noica is a rather original writer that situates the being within the things themselves. This could be noticed in his
work “The Sophist”. He
differentiates himself from Hegel in the sense that he comprehends human being
as a combination of:
a.) the individual
b.) the determinacies
c.) the general
These
all are simultaneous terms or concepts and not successive, unfolding moments.
He
distances himself from Hegel firstly, via the fact that he understands the
three terms on which reality appears in reality, some realities being able to
be encapsulated by one or another of the three (267) concepts. Secondly, on the
other hand he differs from Heidegger too, by the idea that the being as such manifests
itself in each of the things, not solely in privileged situations and
realities, but, via the understanding of the human being as a model in a
certain project just as well, depending on which, the procedure of the thing
unfolds.
A thematic, quadruple theme via four concepts
thus emerges:
1. Theme-antitheme
2. Thesis enriched theme
Hegel relies on his basis of thinking and
thought pattern,
Lucian
Blaga believes that the human being evolves hand in hand with the deepening and
improvement of language. He remained concerned via the specificity of the
Romanian created literary heritage with the stylistic aspect of language and
its ability to encapsulate and render the spiritual values.
2.3.1.
3. A Unitary Stylistic Cultural given versus a Variety of Values
Noica expresses himself critically about this
kind of cultural type of finitude in man in
his environmental work and as well as in his essay about nature. The Greek Kalokogathia stands for the superior
existence of man or woman. Noica observes that this cultural type did not cross
over this ideal to other peoples, just the same as Christianity passed over its
message and Europe passed and still passes its values and its civilization over
to the
‘‘Apoi, cultura europeană se situează dincolo de natură în sensul că,
ea nu doar depăşeşte natura prin imitaţie sanctifcând-o prin mitologie şi descriind-o şi lăsând-o întocmai, neschimbată, prin ştiinţă, cum se întămplă în celelalte culturi,
ci se raportează la o natură decăzută prin creştinism, ne-firească, supra-realistă prin mitologia născută din legenda
cristică şi în genere, artificializată, trecută în laborator prin ştiinţă şi filosofie.” (Roşca, 279)
The Egyptian, Chinese, Indian and even Greek cultures arrived to a
stagnant state of the arts because of their low contact with other cultures and
their very close contact with nature, Noica considers. (280) European culture
was constantly obliged to recreate novelty and innovation. In the cathedrals, within
music and the arts, European culture in general, resisted like the above
mentioned, while the Greek temples took their Gods to the earth. The exploration
of the surreality and the “underreality”emerged, hence the difference between
Lucian Blaga and Constantin Noica, resides in the fact that the former sees
culture deeply integrated into the “collective” unconsciousness and into a
certain stylistical matrix, more exactly into certain abyssal categories of archetypes
that resonate within the unconsciousness and the latter happened since the
things themselves, the “noumena” detached from their origins.
Noica asserts that the ground basis of culture finds itself not solely in the
unconsciousness of the spiritual life, but in the spirit, too, that developed
further since the more work accumulated in the psyche, furthermore the
unconsciousness had its morphology or certain modalities or even thinking patterns
that corresponded to the parts of speech, whose “content” one immediately
observes and this was done not via “dreams or who knows via which other winding
roads”. (Roşca, 290)
In this sense, he states: “Firstly, it is that you perceive the
concreteness of something, and then that you find the right word, as well as
the concept of the thing. Firstly, it is that which you see: the adjectivity and then that you determine
the adjective, as a thought and a word. It is firstly that one sees the numeral
and afterwards that one counts: “This is how the logics of language are built
by.” (291)
Regarding us and our culture, the Romanian
critic Ion Roşca considers that although they are different and apparently opposite, the
two explanations regarding the basis of culture, the explanation of Noica and furthermore
Blaga’s one do not exclude themselves but are complementary, each of them
expressing a particular truth. Blaga’s concepts and notions are more suitable with
those particular forms of culture that express to a greater extent the
affective and infra-rational elements of human subjectivity, mostly such as the
artistic and religious masterpieces are like. Noica’s mind set is more
appropriate and familiar to the cultural pieces that are especially theoretical,
similar to those scientific, technical and philosophical, original works. What
is to be noticed is the Husserlian phenomenological pillar of the Noican acknowledgement of the spiritual
acquaintance and awareness, according to which it is first of all that one
perceives the general direction of a certain way of thinking (the concreteness and
the quality of it altogether) or in a Husserlian term9, one intends
it altogether, then that one registers “directly” and that thus adds to it,
particularizing the respective position. On the other hand, Husserlianly speaking,
one could intuitively perform it. Thus, with Noica’s concept about culture,
generally, and the European cultural model, especially the philosophy of
culture, Blaga could be situated in a complementary rapport, taking into consideration
the unity of the consciousness and the fact that in each form of culture, the
human being engages itself by means of its whole subjectivity, with all of its
ranges and with all its abyssal and spiritual categories. (Roşca, 291)
The spiritual philosopher
D.D.Roşca stated that existence is at the same time rational and irrational as
well as absurdist and reasonable, too. It is rational in the sense that it
contains necessity and legality.
Endnotes
on Chapter 2
8
9
3.
The Concepts per se and their Practical daily Usage
3.1.The Practical Usage of
philosophic Belief in daily social Life
Noumena in Kant’s words10 are those matters that are experienced in a
new way psychically. These new concepts refer to the out-living and experiencing
of new feelings and mental associations. The humanism of the XVI-XVII century
was very much concerned with form and putting its concept into a right frame
and “wrap up”.
3.1.1.
Meontology (the Existence of the Void, the Negation
of Existence)
The Romanian Enlightenment (at the
onset of Nicolae Balcescu’s time) took place in the eighteenth century, at a
different point in time than in
3.1.2. The Personalist Theories within the School of the positivist
Titu Maiorescu speaks
about the relation of metaphysics with the concept of “art for art’s sake”. I
herby stress the actuality of Titu Maiorescu’s concept of religion and science.11 These explanations of his,
however, lost currency in our modern times. An influential thinker of Romanian
philosophy was Vasile Conta, who thus became the first creator of a
philosophical system that explained materialism and evolutionism.12 His sustenance of
3.1.3.
The Object of Contemplation seen apart from the
Individual
3.1.3.1. The Theory of Fatality
Time and fatality are about, and
thus concern a certain energetic personalism, being eventually considered the
catechism of a new spirituality. The original element (Motru) of antiquity,
time and destiny and the creative factor (medieval philosophy) explained by
Negulescu are reconsidered and reinterpreted.13
Rationalism and the historical complex become thus a scale of measurement. The
unique being is, according to Iorga, mechanically linked
to the others that pointed to and
prompted the events that intuitively led towards a certain direction that
Mircea Florian, a philosopher of
recessivity as a method or structure of the world, (known for his translation
of the “Organon”) reconsidered Hellenistic cosmology, the philosophy of
revival, and was highly revolutionary since anterior philosophy thought the
object of philosophy as clearly separated from the over-empiric intuition of
individuality14 (in the manner of Techner,
Lotze, Edith von Hartmann, W. Wundt, A. Fouille) and irrational intuition
(Bergson, Dielthey, Husserl). The inductive method, rooted from experience, and
the deductive method that altogether overestimated rationality (Aristotle and
Bacon) are therefore established by philosophy so far. The deductive method was
hence rather much more preferred by the newer generations of philosophers. Binary
dialectics, experience and the rapport between experience and rationalism, as a
principle of philosophical reconstruction, were considered breakthroughs in
German philosophy.
The relationist perspective on value, binary
dialectics, experience and the rapport between experience and rationality are
thus very much present at this early period of the twentieth century. Florian
analyzes the given and the experience as an object of philosophy, rather as a
principle of philosophical reconstruction. He also ponders upon the relationist
perspective on value. Peter Andrei took attitude over the philosophy of value,
fascism and the sociology of revolution. Such contribution was offered by the
philosophers that came to influence the Romanian philosophical body of thought
and to contribute to its further development as such.
3.2.
A brief Outline of the Personalist Theories
within the School of the positivist Vienna Thinkers
A collective of renowned philosophers (Kreibig,
Krüger, Th. Lipps, Ehrenfels, Windelband, Schmoller, Simmel) rethought the
inherited body of philosophical thought.
Materialist theories (Meyer,
Münsterberg, Heyn, Höffler, Höffding) were deconstructing Marxist dialectics. The
intentional theory (Max Scheler) became thus the successor of the empiric
overview. Therefore, the modern theories were rather grouped into:
-personalist theories
-materialistic theories
-the intentional feeling theory
Other German
philosophers that were very popular among Romanian philosophers established
among others, specific more or less known theories:
1. Emotionalisms
(Simmel, Meinong) and
2.Voluntarisms
(Wundt, Frischeisen-Köhler, H.Richter, Herman Schwarz)
It
is with Herman Cohen and H. Münsterberg that value is produced solely by pure
willingness, thus the latter dominates in rapport with feelings and logical
acts. The logical researches of Husserl explain that:
·
the
horizon of the curled infinite or the original “mioritical” space (of Romanian
origin, “mioară” meaning a type of local sheep)
·
the
existence of the three-dimensional space within the Transylvanian Saxon
community and its merge with the Romanian space in the field region
·
the
feeling of longing of a soul that needs to pass the obstacles or the “hills” to
get to its final resurrection
There are many arguments against the perceiving of space in a
contemplative manner. The “Minor and Major Culture” is about the creations that
are either in an infinite space such as in the cultured creations that are
either in a finite, limited space in the popular, folk creations. The “aprioricity”
of the various cultural spaces is hence marked as such. The symbolic
communication is very much linked to the artistic expression of the people of
the age. Appository, philosophical positions, substantionalism and
relationalism take over and conquer the cultural scene of the late modernity. Via
the substantial orientation, the old and the modern philosophies (enlightenment
especially) defined the cultural human, substance or essence of living by
itself, while the substantial concepts defined man via rationality, via a
cognitive, epistemological perspective. This is an invariable rationality and people
possess the same valuable configurations that pass from a culture to another. A
cultural imperialism that could be imposed by the force of other cultural
spaces and commandoes shaped the historic relational character of the human
being. Richard Rorty promoted the epistemological relationalism by affirming
that the inter-communitarian exchanges were of an economic and political order,
while the intra-communicational ones were of an authentic kind. The stylistic relationalism (initiated by Nietzsche)
was obvious with and typical of Lucian Blaga and George Bacovia. It was later Spengler15 that sustained the incommunicability of
cultures.
The absurdity portrayed as a
lack of value (243) predominated in the second half of the twentieth century. Gh.
Al. Cazan stressed the ontological meaning of the distinction between the rational
and irrational, fundamental entity. Any value is an illogical and irreducible
entity. As illogical entities, the values are of various species: the
distinction between aim and means, between amplifier and preservative, between
integrative and unintegrative (between personal and real, integrable and
unintegrable. No value exhausts all the mysteries of existence itself,
rationality and faith. The philosophic notions catholita, todetita, horetitia, acatholia, atodetia, ahoretia, (the
disease of non-acting) especially the characters of Waiting for Godot, and those of the Greek abstract painting, even existentialist
literature as such, became the expression of the modern “mood” of the age. Thus,
there are several interpretations of numeric symbols mentioned:
One and its repetition
One and its variation
One or the multiple
A multiple one for the
noun (Middle Ages)
1. The adjective/the adverb
2. Adverbial reference (since during Renaissance
the use of the adverb was in fashion.)
3. The pronoun-frame in the plural form to
use after 1800 was replaced by the singular frame of the pronoun in the
twentieth century.
4. The numeral and the conjunction
5. The preposition (linked with
Eminescu and the sculpturer Brancuşi-seen as a reorientation) became the main linkage between artistic objects
that were to reflect the infinite and the endless search of humankind for
knowledge. Schematicism and systematization were the main pillars of the
philosophic movement of the twentieth century. Hence, Prophologism was introduced as a new term of debate. There was a
preponderantly stylistic characterization ominous, and a stylistic matrix that
resonated in the consciousness of the philosophic being, took over the direction
of the discourse. The affective and infra-rational elements of human
subjectivity, as reflected in the artistic and the religious creations are
ubiquitous and awaiting to be discovered. The perceiving of the general
direction of a certain way of thinking (adjectivity) was rather new for the
twentieth century and Noica adhered to it. The most influential philosophers of
genuine, philosophical thought that marked the period of enlightenment might have
been reconsidered in the instances of: Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, David Hume, Richard Burke and Wilhelm Windelband.16 David Hume was rather interested to claim
empirical thought and discoveries as the most engaging and thus considered the
general frame of the human mind as the most suggestive. Wilhelm Windelband, Richard
Burke, Georg Simmel became thus, important landmarks of modern philosophy.
Kant considered space and time as
individually detectable and thought that the “noumena” were internally
reachable and dependent on the individual psyche. These were the new feelings
or the new inner thoughts of the individual, marking the fact that each
individual was to perceive the environment (space and time) in a new,
relational way.
Endnotes on the 3rd chapter
Conclusion
Philosophy emerged as a revolutionary concept of thinking and
reached out to conquer other disciplines besides sciences just as well. Although
the philosophical movement changed across the ages and the terms given to the
specific thoughts and sensibilities did, too, it is only natural to comprehend
that the human being as such became wiser and richer in intellectual
advancement since the cultural heritage improved a lot altogether.
Glossary of the debated
philosophical terms
1.apriori
2.a posteriori
3.meontology
4.noumena
5.systematic metaphysics (David Malet Armstrong)
A short-listed collection of
anti-philosophical concepts:
1. to alvinize=to stimulate endless talks
by making bizarre remarks
2. to ameliorort=to complicate the
discussion about a theory or any subject matter by the attraction of the
attention over a panoply of distinctions
3. to anscumbe=to lay for a storage
4. Armstrong=a measure for the wavelength
of the beliefs(=10 microsmarts)
5. a rortiori=still for more obscure
rationalities that are continental and in fashion
6. asearliun=an illocutionary act that is
the same with the speaker
7. arthurdentist=a person that strengthens
the teeth of exotic dogmas
8. austintativ=the fancy show off of the
subtlety of the speech
9. to ayera=to oversimplify in a fancy
manner in the direction of a previous generation
10. belnap=a carnap that is defined in a
happy manner from an idiom used in the common speech
11. benettiction=a glorification of a
philosopher for the solving of a problem that was not invented but solely 100 years
after his death
12. bertrand=a profound state of abstraction
of the mind and the spirit that causes illusion
13. blockaj=a rule of stopping that stops
people from maddening when they are exposed to the mental experiments that
exploit the combinatorial explosion
14. carnap=an operating symbol or a special
notation that is formally defined, the loss of conscience by an ill person that
suffered an accident
15. castanieda=a musical elaborated
instrument that sends a peculiar sound when it is shaken
16. cavallieresc=that designates a common
style of writing among the great philosophers of the time
17. chihara-kiri=
death via aleph zero
18.
stoppage=noun; comes from mental stoppage (blockage) or an
outlet of fuse
19.
cast= a musical tool that emits and sends an
elaborated sound when shaken
20.
cavallerian =adj.that characterizes a common writing style among
the great philosophers of speech
21.
chihara-kiri =death via cuts in linkages and batches in
aleph-zero
22.
chomsky= a related
term to the chomskyian linguistic vocabulary, a profound state of mind abstraction of the mind and the spirit, a
trance, about a theory that extrapolates on scientifically established facts
with metaphysical illogical implications
23.
curry= a writing that is very well spiced with
neologisms
24.
dagfinn= one of the potential results of the
cross-breeding of a shark with a dolphin while the other mélange is the
follesdale, an animal that is impulsive and cruel; travelling
symbiotic pairs, the latter are the only one that feel as at their own home in
deep waters.
25.
davidson = about speed, the minimal speed advancement
that is necessary to maintain a research program going, said about a research
program for which this particular speed is zero
26.
denettation =a defining trait of a super name or a nickname,
respectively
27.
dennetta=an artificial enzyme used to curdle the “milk” of the intellectual
dispute and intentional scope
28.
to dequine= to deny strongly the existence of the
importance of something real or significant
29.
derrida =from a French meaningless song
30. desousafon
=
musical instrument, descendant of the harmonica like the faggot to add
comical effects to the musical programs,
full of crazy ideas hence vague and impractible
31.
dreyfus= an arid or conversation that is controversial ad hominem
32.
feyerabend= the last moment of
glow of a conceptual frame before its death and transfiguration
33.
fodor= a fancy hat that is
worn in a cool manner or a fodorgraphy
that refers to the particles which remain after removing the paper, the last
moment of glow
34.
folcloar=a popular philosophy that comes from the twin
earth and that differs from ours and is discernable only by an erudite
folklorist
35.
foucault=nuisance, crazy fault, mistake
36.
frege= to recognize the illogicality of a position
but hence to sustain it
37.
a gadame= a ritual incantation to represent the meaning
of the hidden writings or dreams
38.
gnoam= homunculus
39.
gödelic= said about a fundamental contribution
40.
harmanica= a musical instrument which one plays in
defiance
41.
heidegger= a boring instrument
42.
hilaryu from hilaryc= a very short, hence very important period in
the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher
43.
hintikka= a measure of the convictions, the least
logically discernable difference in the
measure of the convictions
44.
kripkic=misunderstood, but considered brilliant
45.
kripkography= the opposite of cryptography
46.
kuhna =a fox believed to be a hedgehog that is also
accompanied by such a fizzle that it seems double in size
47.
to inhumane = to burn, to bury or destroy a philosophical
position
48.
lacantropy=the transformation via a full moon phase
influence of a philosophical supposition into a susceptible social theory via a
susceptible linguistic theory
49.
Lyotard= the old clothes of the French emperor
50.
lucas pocus= a ritual incantation
51.
mach= a measure of speed of a philosophical program
that becomes superdavidsonic
52.
to marcuse= to criticize from beyond Marxist positions
53. martinize=to overwhelm with carnaps
54.
merleau-pontic =in a wrong order
55.
Noam= a unity of resistance
56.
neurotical= obsessed with protocol
57.
to plating= to use the fertilizers of the nineteenth
century to bring the twentieth to a boost and development
58.
a putname= a presumed expert that is authorized by a
community to name a natural gender to
determine its members
59.
quinti = to
expôse very naturally a philosophical problem in an opaque context
60.
to ramsify=to simplify, the ramsified theory of the types,
to interpret an incorrigible theory
61. ricouerge=to interpret all philosophical
problems via a limited philosophical apparatus
62. rort=an incorrigible presentation but
pretty confusing
63. santayana=a very strong wind that is
very tiring
64. schiffer =someone that uses much innovation to repair a boat
65.superdavidsonic=said about a research program for which this speed
is zero and a
davidsonic boom is the sound
produced by a research program when it arrives at Oxford
66.
suppes= an ordered quadruple formed
of a philosopher, a problem, an axiomatized theory of the crowds and a federal
grant
67. supposition
=a statement that presumes a choice
68. turing=with no mind of itself stupid
69.a ziffuial = a very heated-up philosophical dispute, a hot
philosophical debate
Bibliography:
Primary
- Boccacio,
Giovanni. Decameronul. transl.
Cezar Baltag. vol. 2.
Bucureşti: Editura Jurnalul Naţional. 2003.
2. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Transl. Ileana
Verzea and Barbu Cioculescu. Iaşi: Leda. 2004.
3. Swift, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Swift. The Second
Volume. www.booksgoogle.ro/books/about/The Works of Jonathan Swift .html.1741.
Secondary Readings:
- Bălan, Ion Dodu. Valori
literare. Bucureşti: Editura pentru literatură.1966.
- Boța,
Miluță Theodor. Locul filosofiei în cultura contemporană. Bucureşti: Editura.1999.
- Enescu, Radu. Critică şi valoare. Cluj
Napoca: Editura Dacia. 1973.
- Dahrendorf, Ralf. Conflictul social modern. Eseu despre politica libertății. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.1992.
- Guțan, Ilie. Cercul
literar de la Sibiu. Sibiu:
Imago. 2011.
- Guțan, Ilie. Slavici. De la “România Jună” la “Tribuna“. Sibiu: Imago.2012.
- Hazard,
Paul. Criza conștiintei europene.
Bucureşti:
Editura Univers.1961.
- Hockenos,
Paul. The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe. New
York: Routledge. 1994.
- Revel,
Jean-Francois Revel. Revirimentul democrației. Bucureşti: Humanitas.1995.
- Roşca, Ioan. Repere ale Filosofiei româneşti. Bucureşti: Editura Fundaţiei România
de Măine. 2017.
- Ţurlea, Marin. Introducere în Filosofie. Bucureşti: Editura Pro Humanitate. 2000.
- Vianu,
Tudor. Despre stil și artă literară. Bucureşti:
Editura Tineretului.1965.
- Vulcănescu, Romulus. Izvoare
de Cultură. Bucureşti: Editura
Sport-Turism.1988.
Dante
Quick Facts
born
died
September 13,
1321 or September 14, 1321
Ravenna, Italy
notable works
·
“Literature
in the Vernacular”
movement / style
subjects of study
Early life and the Vita nuova
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself.
He was born in Florence
in 1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained
devoted to his native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a
cavalryman against the Ghibellines,
a banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of
his great teacher Brunetto
Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti,
of the poetic culture
in which he made his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido
Guinizelli, the origins of his family in his great-great-grandfather,
Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the Paradiso
(and from whose wife the family
name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even further, of the pride that
he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the Roman
soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family.
There is no mention of his father or mother, brother or sister in The
Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in the Vita nuova,
and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest between
Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the
exiled Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until
1266, Dante’s father apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant
exile. Dante’s mother died when he was young, certainly before he was 14. Her
name was Bella, but of which family is unknown. Dante’s father then married
Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco, and a
daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante,
having come into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by
his father. The elder Alighieri left his children a modest yet comfortable
patrimony of property in Florence and in the country. About this time Dante
married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict
between the imperial and papal partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs.
Following the middle of the 13th century the antagonisms were brutal and
deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and inflicting
gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period
of ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X,
XXXII), but in 1266 a force of Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies,
was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento, expelling them forever from
Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with postwar pride
and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany. Florentines
compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was
ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was
a returning exile, Brunetto Latini.
When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great
teacher, this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his
master but rather as an encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual
mentor. Latini had awakened a new public consciousness
in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti, Forese
Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as
writers to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the
Aristotelian assumption that man is a social (political) being. Even in the Paradiso
(VIII.117) Dante allows as being beyond any possible dispute the notion that
things would be far worse for man were he not a member of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani,
characterized Latini as the “initiator and master in refining the Florentines
and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our republic according
to political philosophy
[la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most important book, Li
Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was
written in French (Latini had passed his years of exile in France), its culture
is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical citation. The first part of
Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics.
On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca.
And, almost as frequently, when treating questions of government, he quotes
from the Book of
Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as well as the writings
of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these Rome presents the most inspiring source of
identification. The cult of Cicero began to develop alongside that of
Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as fully exemplifying
the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to become
an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame
through a wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno
(XV) Latini is praised for instructing Dante in the means by which man makes
himself immortal, and in his farewell words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor,
through which he trusts his memory will survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic
self-confidence. By the time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he
had already taught himself the art of making verse (chapter III). He sent an
early sonnet, which was to
become the first poem in the Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of
his day. He received several responses, but the most important one came from Cavalcanti,
and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between
Dante and Cavalcanti was a complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita
nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s exhortations that he
wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in the Convivio,
written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, Dante
was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular. His
later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti,
who prevailed upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this
intellectual indebtedness, Dante dedicated his Vita nuova to
Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of
Florence, he was obliged to concur with the
decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the
banishment and died in August 1300. In
the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it
is as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante
records his indebtedness, his fondness, and his appreciation of their great
merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record the facts of separation. In
order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old
friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently
did not have the same appreciation, was Beatrice,
a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated fictionalized women
in all of literature.
In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s thought and the vicissitudes
of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—sanctified in
the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio,
only to be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy
as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La
vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life)
is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the
other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a
work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for
binding together poems composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova
brought together Dante’s poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93;
the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante’s most
important poetic compositions
from just prior to 1294 to the time of The Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello,
or small book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with
commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth
canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose
commentary provides the frame
story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those
alleged). The story is simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of
Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her salutation when they are 18,
Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when
Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of
him, his determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s
virtues, anticipations of her death (that of a young friend, the death of her
father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally the death of Beatrice,
Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis,
and, in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time
about her “that which has never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita
nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly
devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless
to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice).
The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best
friend”; Dante’s sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the
closest proximity of blood.” On the one hand Dante suggests the most
significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he seems to
distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure
in which Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality
of his poetic language are indications of his early and abiding ambition
to go beyond the practices of local poets.
Related Biographies
Dante’s intellectual development and public career
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli,
the poet most responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,”
kind of poetry.
Guinizelli’s verse provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a
remarkable sense of joy contained in a refined and lucid aesthetic. What
increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual,
even philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and
of gentilezza, the virtue that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of
love that he extolled was part of a refined and noble sense of life. It was
Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual
turning point of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI,
Dante experienced a change of heart, and rather than write poems of anguish, he
determined to write poems in praise of his lady, especially the canzone “Donne
ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding of Love”). This
canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which
is clearly an adaptation
of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new
poetic style, the dolce
stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the
simple means by which it transcended
the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the Purgatorio
(XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another
great change in his life, which he describes in the Convivio. Looking
for consolation following the death of Beatrice,
Dante reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly
to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But what was intended as a temporary
reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of the most crucial
intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita
nuova was transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of
Dante’s thoughts. He began attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear
disputations on philosophy, and within a period of only 30 months “the love of
her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every other thought.” In his poem “Voi
che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through Intelligence Move the
Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even
severe, new style associated with philosophy. This period of study gave
expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually to form the poetic basis
for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement
in the affairs of the commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of
physicians and apothecaries (to which philosophers could belong), which opened
his way to public office. But he entered the public arena at a most perilous
time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf and
Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided
city. The ruling Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and
a party of “Whites,”
to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities
following 1295. In May 1300 he was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a
neighbouring town, whose purpose it was to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan
cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and embattled pope Boniface VIII.
When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably was already
recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his
attitudes concerning the extent of papal power. The hegemony of the
Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been restored in Florence in 1266 by
an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy. By 1300,
however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change:
Dante, the Guelf moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of
the ill effects of papal involvement in political matters, become in the Convivio,
in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and most importantly
throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken
defenders of the position that the empire does not derive its political
authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to
papal policies. A new alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the
brother of King Philip IV,
Charles
of Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black
Guelfs. When Charles of Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city
itself was thrown into political indecision. In order to ascertain the
nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss these
matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was
expressed in the legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who
goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered. Boniface dismissed the other two legates and
detained Dante. In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were
permitted entry to Florence. That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously
reentered Florence and for six days terrorized the city. Dante learned of the
deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January 1302 he was
called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so,
was condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not
committed. Again failing to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other
Whites were condemned to be burned to death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The
Divine Comedy he frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed,
he makes it the central dramatic act toward which a long string of prophecies
points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the means by which he triumphed
over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true “divine comedy.”
Exile, the Convivio, and the De monarchia
Information about Dante’s early years in exile is scanty;
nevertheless, enough is known to provide a broad picture. It seems that Dante
at first was active among the exiled White Guelfs in their attempts to seek a
military return. These efforts proved fruitless. Evidently Dante grew
disillusioned with the other Florentine outcasts, the Ghibellines, and was
determined to prove his worthiness by means of his writings and thus secure his
return. These are the circumstances that led him to compose Il convivio
(c. 1304–07; The Banquet).
Dante projected a work of 15 books, 14 of which would be
commentaries on different canzoni. He completed only four of the books. The
finished commentaries in many ways go beyond the scope of the poems, becoming a
compendium of instruction (though they also show his lack of formal training in
philosophy). Dante’s intention in the Convivio, as in The Divine
Comedy, was to place the challenging moral and political
issues of his day into a suitable ethical and metaphysical
framework.
Book I of the Convivio is in large part a stirring
and systematic defense of the vernacular.
(The unfinished De vulgari eloquentia [c. 1304–07; Concerning
Vernacular Eloquence], a companion piece, presumably written in
coordination with Book I, is primarily a practical treatise in the
art of poetry based upon an elevated poetic language.) Dante became the great
advocate of its use, and in the final sentence of Book I he accurately predicts
its glorious future:
This shall be the new light, the new sun, which shall rise
when the worn-out one shall set, and shall give light to them who are in shadow
and in darkness because of the old sun, which does not enlighten them.
The revolution Dante described was nothing less than the
twilight of the predominantly clerical Latin culture and the
emergence of a lay, vernacular urban literacy. Dante saw himself as the
philosopher-mediator between the two, helping to educate a newly enfranchised
public readership. The Italian literature
that Dante heralded was soon to become the leading literature and Italian the
leading literary language of Europe, and they would continue to be that for
more than three centuries.
In the Convivio Dante’s mature political and
philosophical system is nearly complete. In this work Dante makes his first
stirring defense of the imperial tradition and, more specifically, of the Roman Empire. He
introduces the crucial concept of horme—that is, of an innate desire
that prompts the soul to return to God. But it requires proper education
through examples and doctrine. Otherwise it can become misdirected toward
worldly aims and society torn apart by its destructive power. In the Convivio
Dante establishes the link between his political thought and his understanding
of human appetite: given the pope’s craving for worldly power, at the time
there existed no proper spiritual models to direct the appetite toward God; and
given the weakness of the empire, there existed no law sufficient to exercise a
physical restraint on the will. For Dante this explains the chaos into which Italy had been plunged, and
it moved him, in hopes of remedying these conditions, to take up the epic task
of The Divine Comedy.
But a political event occurred that at first raised tremendous
hope but then plunged Dante into still greater disillusionment. In November
1308 Henry,
the count of Luxembourg,
was elected king of Germany, and in July 1309 the French pope, Clement V, who had
succeeded Boniface, declared Henry to be king of the Romans and invited him to
Rome, where in time he would be crowned Holy Roman emperor in St. Peter’s
Basilica. The possibility of once again having an emperor electrified Italy;
and among the imperial proponents was Dante, who saw approaching the
realization of an ideal that he had long held: the coming of an emperor pledged
to restore peace while also declaring his spiritual subordination to religious
authority. Within a short time after his arrival in Italy in 1310 Henry
VII’s great appeal began to fade. He lingered too long in the north,
allowing his enemies to gather strength. Foremost among the opposition to this
divinely ordained moment, as Dante regarded it, was the commune of Florence.
During these years Dante wrote important political
epistles—evidence of the great esteem in which he was held throughout Italy, of
his personal authority, as it were—in which he exalted Henry, urging him to be
diligent, and condemned Florence. In subsequent action, however, which was to
remind Dante of Boniface’s duplicity,
Clement himself turned against Henry. This action prompted one of Dante’s
greatest polemical treatises, his De
monarchia (c. 1313; On Monarchy), in
which he expands the political arguments of the Convivio. In the
embittered atmosphere caused by Clement’s deceit, Dante turned his
argumentative powers against papal insistence on its superiority over the
political ruler—that is, against the argument that the empire derived its
political authority from the pope. In the final passages of the Monarchia,
Dante writes that the ends designed by Providence for humanity are twofold: one
end is the bliss of this life, which is conveyed in the figure of the earthly
paradise, and the other is the bliss of eternal life, which is embodied in the
image of a heavenly paradise.
Yet despite their different ends, these two purposes are not
unconnected. Dante concludes his Monarchia by assuring his reader that
he does not mean to imply “that the Roman government is in no way subject to
the Roman pontificate, for in some ways our mortal happiness is ordered for the
sake of immortal happiness.” Dante’s problem was that he had to express in
theoretical language a subtle relationship that might be better conveyed by
metaphoric language and historical example. Surveying the history of the
relationship between papacy and empire, Dante pointed with approval to specific
historical examples, such as Constantine’s good will toward the church. Dante’s
disappointment in the failed mission of Henry VII derived from the fact that
Henry’s original sponsor was apparently Pope Clement and that conditions seemed
to be ideal for reestablishing the right relationship between the supreme
powers.
The Divine Comedy
Dante’s years of exile were years of difficult peregrinations
from one place to another—as he himself repeatedly says, most effectively in Paradiso
[XVII], in Cacciaguida’s moving lamentation that “bitter is the taste of
another man’s bread and…heavy the way up and down another man’s stair.”
Throughout his exile Dante nevertheless was sustained by work on his great
poem. The
Divine Comedy was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just
before his death in 1321, but the exact dates are uncertain. In addition, in
his final years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north
of Italy, most notably by Guido
Novello da Polenta, the nephew of the remarkable Francesca,
in Ravenna. There
at his death Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men
of letters of the time, and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself.
The plot of The Divine Comedy is simple: a man,
generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake an
ultramundane journey, which leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise. He has two guides: Virgil, who leads him
through the Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice,
who introduces him to Paradiso. Through these fictional encounters
taking place from Good
Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante
learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had, of course, already
occurred at the time of the writing). This device allowed Dante not only to
create a story out of his pending exile but also to explain the means by which
he came to cope with his personal calamity and to
offer suggestions for the resolution of Italy’s troubles as well. Thus, the
exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it
also becomes representative of the fall of humankind. Dante’s story is thus
historically specific as well as paradigmatic.
The basic structural component of The Divine Comedy
is the canto. The poem consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped together into
three sections, or canticles, Inferno, Purgatorio,
and Paradiso.
Technically there are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto,
contained in the Inferno, which serves as an introduction to the
entire poem. For the most part the cantos range from about 136 to about 151
lines. The poem’s rhyme
scheme is the terza
rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.). Thus, the divine
number of three is present in every part of the work.
Dante’s Inferno differs from its great classical
predecessors in both position and purpose. In Homer’s Odyssey
(Book XII) and Virgil’s Aeneid
(Book VI) the visit to the land of the dead occurs in the middle of the poem
because in these centrally placed books the essential values of life are
revealed. Dante, while adopting the convention, transforms the practice by
beginning his journey with the visit to the land of the dead. He does this
because his poem’s spiritual pattern is not classical but Christian: Dante’s
journey to Hell represents the spiritual act of dying to the world, and hence
it coincides with the season of Christ’s own death. (In this way, Dante’s
method is similar to that of Milton in Paradise
Lost, where the flamboyant but
defective Lucifer and his fallen angels are presented first.) The Inferno
represents a false start during which Dante, the character, must be disabused
of harmful values that somehow prevent him from rising above his fallen world.
Despite the regressive nature of the Inferno, Dante’s meetings with
the roster of the damned are among the most memorable moments of the poem: the
Neutrals, the virtuous pagans, Francesca
da Rimini, Filipo Argenti, Farinata
degli Uberti, Piero delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini,
the simoniacal popes, Ulysses,
and Ugolino della Gherardesca impose themselves upon the reader’s imagination
with tremendous force.
The visit to Hell is, as Virgil and later Beatrice explain, an
extreme measure, a painful but necessary act before real recovery can begin.
This explains why the Inferno is both aesthetically and theologically
incomplete. For instance, readers frequently express disappointment at the lack
of dramatic or emotional power in the final encounter with Satan in canto XXXIV. But
because the journey through the Inferno primarily signifies a process
of separation and thus is only the initial step in a fuller development, it
must end with a distinct anticlimax. In a way this is inevitable because the
final revelation of Satan can have nothing new to offer: the sad effects of his
presence in human history have already become apparent throughout the Inferno.
In the Purgatorio the protagonist’s painful process
of spiritual rehabilitation commences; in fact, this part of the journey may be
considered the poem’s true moral starting
point. Here the pilgrim Dante subdues his own personality in order that he may
ascend. In fact, in contrast to the Inferno, where Dante is confronted
with a system of models that needs to be discarded, in the Purgatorio
few characters present themselves as models; all of the penitents are pilgrims
along the road of life. Dante, rather than being an awed if alienated observer,
is an active participant. If the Inferno is a canticle of enforced and
involuntary alienation, in which Dante learns how harmful were his former allegiances,
in the Purgatorio he comes to accept as most fitting the essential
Christian image of life as a pilgrimage. As Beatrice in her magisterial return
in the earthly paradise reminds Dante, he must learn to reject the deceptive
promises of the temporal world.
Despite its harsh regime, the Purgatorio is the realm
of spiritual dawn, where larger visions are entertained. Whereas in only one
canto of the Inferno (VII), in which Fortuna is discussed, is there
any suggestion of philosophy,
in the Purgatorio, historical, political, and moral vistas are opened
up. It is, moreover, the great canticle of poetry and the arts. Dante
meant it literally when he proclaimed, after the dreary dimensions of Hell:
“But here let poetry rise again from the dead.” There is only one poet in Hell
proper and not more than two in the Paradiso, but in the Purgatorio
the reader encounters the musicians Casella and Belacqua and the poet Sordello
and hears of the fortunes of the two Guidos, Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, the
painters Cimabue and
Giotto,
and the miniaturists. In the upper reaches of Purgatory, the reader observes
Dante reconstructing his classical tradition and then comes even closer to
Dante’s own great native tradition (placed higher than the classical tradition)
when he meets Forese Donati, hears explained—in an encounter with Bonagiunta da
Lucca—the true resources of the dolce stil nuovo, and meets with Guido Guinizelli
and hears how he surpassed in skill and poetic mastery the reigning regional
poet, Guittone
d’Arezzo. These cantos resume the line of thought presented in the Inferno
(IV), where among the virtuous pagans Dante announces his own program for an
epic and takes his place, “sixth among that number,” alongside the classical
writers. In the Purgatorio he extends that tradition to include Statius (whose Thebaid
did in fact provide the matter for the more grisly features of the lower
inferno), but he also shows his more modern tradition originating in
Guinizelli. Shortly after his encounter with Guinizelli comes the long-awaited
reunion with Beatrice in the earthly paradise. Thus, from the classics Dante
seems to have derived his moral and political understanding as well as his conception of
the epic poem—that is, a framing story large enough to encompass the
most important issues of his day, but it was from his native tradition that he
acquired the philosophy of love that forms the Christian matter of his poem.
This means of course that Virgil, Dante’s guide,
must give way to other leaders, and in a canticle generally devoid of drama the
rejection of Virgil becomes the single dramatic event. Dante’s use of Virgil is
one of the richest cultural appropriations in literature. To begin, in
Dante’s poem he is an exponent of classical reason. He is also a historical figure
and is presented as such in the Inferno (I): “…once I was a man, and
my parents were Lombards, both Mantuan by birth. I was born sub Julio,
though late in his time, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus, in the
time of the false and lying gods.” Virgil, moreover, is associated with Dante’s
homeland (his references are to contemporary Italian places), and his
background is entirely imperial. (Born under Julius
Caesar, he extolled Augustus
Caesar.) He is presented as a poet, the theme of whose great epic sounds
remarkably similar to that of Dante’s poem: “I was a poet and sang of that just
son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilium was burned.” So, too,
Dante sings of the just son of a city, Florence, who was unjustly
expelled, and forced to search, as Aeneas had done, for a
better city, in his case the heavenly city.
Virgil is a poet whom Dante had studied carefully and from
whom he had acquired his poetic style, the beauty of which has brought him much
honour. But Dante had lost touch with Virgil in the intervening years, and when
the spirit of Virgil returns it is one that seems weak from long silence. But
the Virgil that returns is more than a stylist; he is the poet of the Roman
Empire, a subject of great importance to Dante, and he is a poet who has become
a saggio, a sage, or moral teacher.
Though an exponent of reason, Virgil has become an emissary of
divine grace, and his return is part of the revival of those simpler faiths
associated with Dante’s earlier trust in Beatrice.
And yet, of course, Virgil by himself is insufficient. It cannot be said that
Dante rejects Virgil; rather, he sadly found that nowhere in Virgil’s work—that
is, in his consciousness—was there any sense of personal liberation from the
enthrallment of history and its processes. Virgil had provided Dante with moral
instruction in survival as an exile, which is the theme of his own poem as well
as Dante’s, but he clung to his faith in the processes of history, which, given
their culmination in the Roman Empire, were deeply consoling. Dante, on the
other hand, was determined to go beyond history because it had become for him a
nightmare.
In the Paradiso true heroic fulfillment is achieved.
Dante’s poem gives expression to those figures from the past who seem to defy
death. Their historical impact continues and the totality of their commitment
inspires in their followers a feeling of exaltation and a desire for
identification. In his encounters with such characters as his
great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida and Saints Francis,
Dominic, and Bernard,
Dante is carried beyond himself. The Paradiso is consequently a poem
of fulfillment and of completion. It is the fulfillment of what is prefigured
in the earlier canticles. Aesthetically it completes the poem’s elaborate
system of anticipation and retrospection.
Legacy and influence
The recognition and the honour that were the due of Dante’s Divine
Comedy did not have to await the long passage of time: by the year 1400 no
fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had
appeared. Giovanni
Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373–74 delivered the first
public lectures on The Divine Comedy (which means that Dante was the
first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a
university course). Dante became known as the divino poeta, and in a
splendid edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective
was applied to the poem’s title; thus, the simple Commedia became La
divina commedia, or The Divine Comedy.
Dante Reading
from the Divine ComedyDante
Reading from the Divine Comedy, painting by Domenico di Michelino, 1465; in the
Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence.© Alfred Dagli Orti—REX/Shutterstock.com
Even when the epic lost its appeal and was replaced by other
art forms (the novel, primarily, and the drama) Dante’s own fame continued. In
fact, his great poem enjoys the kind of power peculiar to a classic: successive
epochs have been able to find reflected in it their own intellectual
concerns. In the post-Napoleonic 19th century, readers identified with the
powerful, sympathetic, and doomed personalities of the Inferno. In the
early 20th century they found the poem to possess an aesthetic power
of verbal realization independent of and at times in contradiction to its
structure and argument. Later readers have been eager to show the poem to be a
polyphonic masterpiece, as integrated as
a mighty work of architecture, whose different sections reflect and, in a way,
respond to one another. Dante created a remarkable repertoire of
types in a work of vivid mimetic presentations, as well as a poem of great
stylistic artistry in its prefigurations and correspondences. Moreover, he
incorporated in all of this important political, philosophical, and theological
themes and did so in a way that shows moral wisdom and
lofty ethical
vision.
Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poem that has flourished
for more than 650 years. In the simple power of its striking imaginative conceptions
it has continued to astonish generations of readers; for more than a hundred
years it has been a staple in all higher educational programs in the Western
world; and it has continued to provide guidance and nourishment to the major
poets of our own times. William Butler
Yeats called Dante “the chief imagination of Christendom,” and T.S. Eliot elevated
Dante to a preeminence shared by only one other poet in the modern world, William Shakespeare:
“[They] divide the modern world between them. There is no third.” In fact, they
rival one another in their creation of types that have entered into the world
of reference and association of modern thought. Like Shakespeare, Dante created
universal types from historical figures, and in so doing he considerably enhanced the
treasury of modern myth.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/463802?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Later Medieval Literature 365
Later
Medieval Literature
The
number of literary works written during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries exceeds that of the classical period by far. In addition to
works of the kind that had flourished at the end of the twelfth century, there
were others, such as the drama, short narrative poems («Mären»), didactic works,
and mystical writings. Although many of these can be considered important, one
cannot argue convincingly that any of the literary works of these centuries is
comparable to the great achievements of the classical period. The romances
become longer, the stress is shifted from the development of the individual to
the more superficial aspects of description and action, and there is an
increasing tendency to stress formal religion and morality. Rudolf von Ems
(fl.1220-54) is an excellent example of these developments. His output is vast,
his themes are largely taken from French literature, and he is a conscientious
but uninspired writer. Konrad von Würzburg was roughly a contemporary
(c.1225/30-1287) and presents the same genres with greater talent and technical
skill. The Arthurian tradition appears at its best in this period in the Jüngerer
Titurel (1272) of a certain Albrecht who may be identical with Albrecht von
Scharfenberg (fl.1260-1275).
The
heroic material is represented by the Dietrich epics, but the extant versions
of these are usually very late reworkings. Although the Nibelungenlied
continued to be popular, the only original work in the tradition was the Gedicht
vom Hürnen Seyfried, a thirteenth century work extant only in a
sixteenth-century printed version.
Lyric poetry continued to be composed in the «Minnesang» tradition, and much of
it is nothing more than variations on the clichés of this type of poetry. The
more interesting poets�Steinmar (c.1250-1300), Gottfried von
Neifen (fl.1234-55)� follow the tradition of Neidhart von
Reuental in parodying the «Minnesang» by giving it a peasant background. Other
poets, particularly Frauenlob (c.1250-1318), stress the didactic and religious
elements, whereas Ulrich von Lichtenstein (fl.1198-c.1275) and Johannes Hadlaub
(c.1300-1340) introduce a biographical element, which, whether accurate or not,
makes their poetry more personal. The poetry of Oswald von Wolkenstein
(c.1377-1445) encompasses all these elements, for his poetry is in turn formal,
religious, personal, coarse, and realistic. The lyric poetry of the period is
never far from didacticism, and several poets wrote both love lyrics and
«Sprüche». Longer didactic works are Der Renner by Hugo von Trimberg
(c.1230-c.1313) and Freidank�s (c.1200-c.1233) Von der
Bescheidenheit (c.1215-1230), a collection of pithy sayings, gnomic verses,
and epigrams on topics ranging from religion to ethics, which retained its
influence well into the 16th century.
Although the old types of courtly literature continued to be written, the
audience for them changed completely. The courts of the great nobles ceased to
be the centers of literary
366
Later
Medieval Literature
activity�their place being taken over by the towns.
Here the patrons were naturally the wealthy merchants, and their tastes are
reflected in the literature they sponsored. They mistrusted the idealism of the
courtly literature of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and probably did
not understand the unofficial code of virtues it celebrated. They felt that
literature ought to have an obvious purpose, such as entertainment or moral
instruction. Thus they not only caused the existing types to be modified but
they also encouraged new types, particularly those concerned with moral
behavior. Perhaps the best example of these are the works of Der Stricker
(c.1215-c.1230), whose Pfaffe Amîs, the first German collection of
«Schwänke» or farces, greatly influenced the developed of narrative prose, and
the various «Mären». The latter are short stories with an obvious moral, of
which by far the most effective is Helmbrecht by Wernher der Gärtner
(fl.c.1250-1280). This work also reflects another new aspect of literature:
concern for the peasant. Many of the works in which peasants appear are far
from being sympathetic to them, and we should beware of thinking in terms of �realism.� The village-types are often stereotyped characters in
stereotyped situations, but this does not prevent the scenes presented from
being very amusing and vividly drawn. The two favorites were the peasant
wedding and the drunken brawl, which appear at their most comic in Heinrich
Wittenwiler�s (c.1350-1436) encyclopedic Ring
(c.1400).
Much the
same can be said about the short poems on the relations between man and wife.
Occasionally a virtuous woman is depicted, but far more frequently there are
scenes of quarreling, violence, or sheer eroticism. Such works provided a great
deal of the source material for Hans Sachs� plays.
As might
be expected, the later Middle Ages saw a great advance in prose writing. In
theology in particular a distinctive style was developed and the specialized
vocabulary enlarged by the vernacular works of Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327),
Heinrich Seuse (1295-1366), and Johannes Tauler (1300-1361), who together
virtually created a new means of expression for mystical theology. On a more
mundane level, the great poetical works of earlier ages were put into popular
prose form. Short stories, such as those about Till Eulenspiegel, were also
very popluar. By far the most distinguished prose work of the later Middle Ages
is the Ackermann aus Böhmen (c.1400), a debate between Death and the
Ploughman.
There is
a considerable amount of drama from the later Middle Ages which will be
discussed in some detail in the introduction to the Osterspiel von Muri (c.1250)
and Ain Vastnachtspil (c.1450).
Some of
the most effective writing of the later Middle Ages is in Low German. The
Theophilus play is extant in a Low German version and there are several other
plays in various dialects. By far the best known type, however, is the beast
epic, which is concerned with the struggle between the cunning and amoral fox
Reynard (Reinart, Reineke,
Later
Medieval Literature/Märendichtung 367
Reinke) and the equally
amoral but stupid wolf Isengrim. These epics developed entirely in the Low
Countries, and versions are extant in Latin, French, Dutch, and German. The
various stories in verse, which are known collectively as the Roman de
Renart, appeared in France in the late twelfth and in the first part of the
thirteenth century, but there was a parallel, if less well documented,
development in Holland which resulted in the production of several very similar
versions of the story, in prose at Gouda (1479) and Delft (1485), and in verse
at Antwerp in 1487. The earliest Low German version appeared in verse in Lübeck
in 1498. It was frequently reprinted. The beast epic was a very effective form
of social and political satire and was employed with great gusto by both sides
in the Reformation struggle.
In his Studien zur Märendichtung (Tübingen, 1968), Hanns Fischer added
many new insights to the discussion of the «Märe» as a separate type of short
narrative�as distinguished
from the later «Novelle»�which became rather popular with the beginning of
the decline of traditional courtly culture in the 13th century. Geoffrey
Chaucer�s Canterbury
Tales (c.1387) and Giovanni Boccaccio�s Decamerone (c. 1348-1358) are the
best-known examples of this genre in world literature. «Mären» range from short
exemplary («moralisch-exemplarisch») narratives, legends («legendenhaft»),
courtly short epics, and farces («Schwank», a type of narrative which, incidentally,
was greatly influenced by the lyrics of Neidhart von Reuental whose poetry and
themes already contained the seed for the late fifteenth century collection of
anecdotal strophic poems, referred to as Neidhart Fuchs 1),
to lengthy stories, often written by anonymous authors. In these stories,
courtly ethics are often summarized by a moral, usually at the end of the tale,
in the form of a warning, such as in Helmbrecht�which is often referred to
as the first German �village story,� or «Dorfgeschichte»�or in the form of an
exhortation, as is the case in Schneekind, or Konrad von Würzburg�s Herzmære
which concludes with an appeal to the audience to learn a lesson and to preserve
the ideal of love. So popular were the the various «Mären» that an entire
manuscript is devoted to them, the 1393 Codex Vindobonensis which contains both
the Herzmäre and the Schneekind. The following selections from
the «Märendichtung» represent somewhat of a cross-section of the
above-mentioned variants.
The Middle English period can be taken to begin with the
Norman invasion of 1066 and the subsequent conquest of the whole of England.
Norman French replaced English as the language of the aristocracy and the
church. By the late 11th century the English higher clergy and nobility had
been replaced by French. In the Domesday Book (1086), a detailed record
of land property in England, proposed by William and carried out in his name,
there are virtually no English landlords mentioned — the higher echelons of English
society had been rid of the English.
Sample page from the Domesday Book
A consequence of this is that writing in English only very
slowly regains its position in society. There are some remnants of Old English,
such as the Peterborough Chronicle, with its final entry in 1154, but
these represent the dying throes of a written tradition now virtually extinct.
After this Latin and French are the languages of literacy. It is not until the
late 12th century that works in English slowly begin to appear again — in a
very different guise from the last works in Old English. This time dialectal
diversity, and not the koiné of a central region, characterises the scene. For
this reason it is appropriate to deal with the literary monuments of Middle
English according to geographical provenance.
East Midland
This is the area
which includes London, the new capital of England after the Norman invasion. It
is the region from which the later standard of Britain emerged. Its chief
author is of course Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century whose main work
is The Canterbury Tales and who also wrote a significant amount of
poetry. The remaining literary documents from the East Midland area, in roughly
chronological order, are the following.
Figures from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
The Orrmulum, a verse work of some 10,000 double lines,
written ca. 1200, consists of a recounting of the story of the gospels and
homilies. Its author is Orrm, a monk who termed his work ‘a little book of
Orrm’. This is of linguistic significance because Orrm consistently used double
consonants after short vowels.
Havelok the Dane is a legend in verse, written sometime before 1300 in
Lincolnshire.
King Horn is a poetical romance about largely Celtic themes and was
written ca. 1260 in Surrey.
Handlyne Synne is a translation of a handbook for the lay community in
the form of a series of tales. It is about 12,000 lines long and was written
ca. 1300 by Robert Mannyng.
The Confessio Amantis (ca. 1390) is a long work of some 34,000 rhyming
couplets by John Gower (1330-1408), the next major 14th century poet of London
after Chaucer.
West Midland
In the second half of the 14th century
there was a revival of interest in alliterative poetry (common in the Old
English period). The language of this region can be further subdivided into a
southern type — exemplified by Langland — and a northern type — seen in the
author of Sir Gawain.
Piers Plowman (1362-3) is by
William Langland who died ca. 1399 and about whose life little is known. This
work is several thousand lines long and available in three versions, A, B and
C.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
is an allegorical poem composed in the late 14th century possibly by the same
author as wrote The Pearl another poem from the northwest midlands.
The Brut by one Layamon is a
history of Britain (which starts with Troy) comprising about 16,000 lines of
alliterative verse.
The Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous
prose work from about 1200, which is a practical guide for nuns.
Southern
This area is roughly co-terminous with the
West-Saxon region of Old English and is attested quite early in the Middle
English period through a number of literary works, some only of linguistic
value.
Poema morale is an anonymous work
of some few hundred lines in rhyming couplets from about 1150.
The owl and the nightingale is an anonymous religious
instructional poem, again in rhyming couplets, from about 1200.
The Chronicle by Robert of Gloucester is a history of England of some
12,000 rhyming couplets from about 1300 and contains an account of the Norman
invasion.
The Polychronicon by Higden, a history of the world, was translated from
the Latin original by John of Trevisa (ca. 1350 - 1402).
Kentish
The south-east corner of England was
originally settled by Jutes and features of their language are probably
responsible for the distinct dialect of Old English in this region and which
continued into Middle English. The main documents for this period are 1) the Kentish
Sermons from around 1250 which are translations of a French version of the
Latin homilies and 2) The Ayenbite of Inwyt ‘The remorse of conscience’,
again a translation and rendering from the French by an Augustinian Monk in the
14th century called Dan Michael of Northgate.
Northern
The dialect of this region was the most
progressive in Old English and the first to absorb material — lexical and
morphological — from the language of the Vikings. It is well attested in a
large history of the western world in some 30,000 lines of verse, the Cursor
Mundi. The author is unknown but was probably a monk from Durham.
Scotland
English was brought to Scotland in the Old
English period and co-existed with Irish — brought from Ulster in the Old Irish
period — chiefly in the southern lowlands. Since then there is a continuous
tradition of writing in English. The major poet of the Middle English period in
Scotland is John Barbour (?1320-?1396) from Aberdeen.
John Barbour with others
He composed the Bruce (about 1375) about the life and
deeds of Robert Bruce (1274-1329) one of the major Scottish kings in the late
Middle Ages. In the 15th century other poets were active and contributed to the
literary reputation of Scotland; among these are Robert Henryson (?1425-?1506),
William Dunbar, (1460-?1530) and Gavin Douglas (?1475-1522). They are sometimes
referred to as Makars or Scottish Chaucerians because of the
influence which the work of Chaucer had on the form and content of their
poetry.
The end of the Middle English period is often taken as 1476
the year in which William Caxton (?1422-1491) introduced printing into England.
Caxton is a literary figure of some note as he composed prefaces to many of the
works which he printed.
William Caxton
Documents from the 15th century are quite abundant; one type
should be mentioned for its linguistic value here. Personal letters are
available from this period which give some clues to colloquial English of the
time. For instance, there is a collection of over 1,000 letters from one
family, the Pastons who lived in Norfolk and corresponded frequently
with each other.
Bible translations
In the history of European languages
translations of the Bible play a central role. Such translations often have the
effect of standardising the language — to a large extent in written German with
the translation by Luther (1483-1546) — or indeed of establishing an accepted
written form in the first place as with the Finnish translation by Mikael
Agricola (1509-1557). Translations of the Bible or parts of it have been made
throughout the history of English. For instance in the Old English period the
four gospels were translated into the West Saxon dialect. Another early
translation which should be mentioned is that by John Wycliffe and his
associates, produced in the late 14th century. It was based on the Latin
version by St.Jerome and translated into the East Midland dialect of Middle
English.
There is, however, a particular period — the 16th and early 17th centuries — in
which a number of translations of the Bible appeared which had an influence on
the development of written English.
William Tyndale (c.1494-1536) translated the New Testament in 1525 and
revised this in 1534. This is the first printed version of an English
translation; it appeared in Cologne.
Willian Tyndale
Miles Coverdale (?1488-1569)
produced a translation of the entire Bible from German which was printed in
Cologne in 1535.
Thomas Matthew is associated with the first complete version of the
Bible to be printed in England (1537). It is attributed to Matthew but was
produced by John Rogers, one of Tyndale’s circle and show his influence along
with that of Coverdale.
The Great Bible of 1539 is so called because of its size. Its contents
represent a revision of Matthew’s Bible by Miles Coverdale. It contains a
preface by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) and is one of the first
official versions to be used in Protestant England. This translation was
revised and came to be known as the Bishop's Bible (1568), being adopted
as the official version by the Protestant church in 1571.
The Geneva Bible (1560) derives its name from the fact that it was
printed in Switzerland. It was compiled by Protestant exiles living abroad
during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary.
Title page of the Geneva Bible
The Douai-Rheims Bible (1609-1610) is again called
after the towns in Europe where it was printed (in two stages, one in each
town). This time it was prepared by Catholic emigrant priests using the Latin
Vulgate after the Protestant restoration in England under James I.
The King James Bible (1611) is the main translation of the early modern
period and because of its authoritative standing is also termed the Authorised
Version. The translation was produced after a commission was issued by
James I and is the work of several scholars. The language aspect, while
conservative, is regarded as particularly successful in its style. It has had a
similar dissemination and influence on written English as did The book of
common prayer first produced under Cranmer in 1549, revised on various
occasions as late at 1662.
The Evolution of Humankind since
the Middle Ages to Date
Foreword
This book of philosophical thought proposes to
enlarge the scope of literary experience, as well as to aquiesce the minute
perceiving of several difficult philosophical thoughts.
1.
Romanian Philosophical Thought versus German Philosophical
Layout since the Middle Ages to Date…………………………………………………………………....….1-7
1.1.
Revisiting
GiBoccacio’s “Decamerone”…………………………………………………7
1.1.1. The Main Germanic Philosophic Thinkers influenced by the Greek Philosophers...7-10
1.1.2. The Theory of Knowledge as a
Philosophical Field of Study....…............................10
1.2. Germanic Thought Influencing Romanian exegete Philosophy…………….………….10
1.2.1. A
Short History of Philosophic Idea Development with a Main Cadence on the Revolutionary
Progress of the Logical Concept.................................................................10-15
1.2.2. The Literary Scene of the Middle Ages……................................................................17
1.2.3. New Romanian Assertions on Philosophical Phenomena…………………………….18
1.3. Further Congenial and Funny Representations of Love in
Philosophic Thought in Europe during the Middle Ages and to the Onset of
Modernity……………………………………………..........................................................18
Endnotes on the First Chapter…………………………………………………………….19
2.
The Main Schools of Philosophy in
2.1.1. The Major Breakthrough of Romanian Philosophy…………………………………..21
2.1.2. The Outcome of Romanian Philosophy to Date………………………………………25
2.1.3.Humankind in the Early Stages of the
Development of the Romanian Unitarian State……………………………………………………………………………………..26-27
2.1.4. Rethinking Humankind in
the Early Stages of the Development of the Romanian Unitarian State………………………………………………………………………………26
2.2. The Romanian Philosophical
Schools in the Modern XXth Century……………….27-30
2.2.1. The Main Schools of Philosophy in
2.2.2. Antique Influence on
Romanian Philosophical Schools in the XXth Century……………………………………………………………………………………..31
2.2.3. A Unitary Stylistic Cultural Given within
a Variety of Values……………………….35
2.3. Romanian Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age………………………………….37
2.3.1. The Main Schools of Philosophy in
Romania and their Promoters as main Thinkers and Boosters of Development………………………………………………………………39
2.3.1.1. Romanian Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age……………………………40
2.3.1.2. The Influence of the Romanian
Philosophical Schools in the Modern XXth Century………………………………………………………………………………………40
2.3.1.3. A Unitary Stylistic Cultural given
versus a Variety of Values……………………..40
Endnotes on the
Second Chapter………………………………………………………...50
3. The Concepts per se and their practical daily Usage…….............................................51
3.1.1. The Practical Usage of Philosophic
Belief in Daily Social Life…………………........58
3.1.2. Meontology
(the Existence of the Void, the Negation of the Present)….......................68
3.2. The Personalist Theories
within the School of the Positivist
3.2.1. The Object of Contemplation as seen
apart from the Individual…...……...…...…....80
3.2.2. The Clash of Personalist
Theories within the School of the Positivist Vienna Thinkers…………………………………………………………………………………….90
Endnotes on the Third Chapter…………………………………………………………..100
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..150
Bibliography……………………………..………………………………………………150
I
dedicate this book to L-M, my precious daughter, who hopefully might be
delighted with it.
Foreword
The
book proposes to rearrange a set of very useful ideas by shedding light upon
the main thoughts of the philosophical contribution to the cultural development
of humankind and its openness to innovation and progress. Thus, the positive
and negative evolution of mankind, since the Greek “emancipation” of antiquity,
is marked and highlighted. New and fresh philosophic mainstreams occurred
hence, the main currents that influenced feminism, structuralism, psychology,
deconstruction, postmodernism being hard to be recognized as such.
1.
Romanian Philosophical Thought versus German Philosophical Layout since the
Middle Ages to Date
1.1.1.
The History of Western Philosophical Thought
The
history of philosophical thought went fairly much, hand in hand with the
evolution of humankind, starting with the Greeks and the ancient mind-set and the
Oriental frame of mind. These merged altogether and evolved, since the
counter-sophists Socrates, Aristotle and Plato marked the Greek cultural life
with their emblematic works: Socrates with the “Dialogues”, Aristotle with the “Organon” and the “Metaphysics”
and last, but not least, Plato with “The
Republic”, “Phaedo” and “The Allegory of the Cave”.1
1.1 . 2. Revisiting
Boccacio “Decamerone”
The “Decamerone”
contains a lot of philosophical thinking, especially when the author reaches
out to the readership, trying to highlight how the Middle Ages average citizens
understood love or the unification in love or how they tried to define a
superior force or a superior feeling.2 These
are very funny descriptions that entail a rather naive mood of women and portray
certain somewhat childish misrepresentations of the idea of God. Very much fun is poked at naive women, who feel that they have
reached their peak in love by being misused by complete strangers. Images of female
gratuity and the peculiar naiveté derived from it, predominate the unfolding of
the events, but it is also men i.e. monks that commit childish mistakes,
developing thus a very conspicuous pervert mind and sexual behaviour. ( )
Much is known about the “Middle Ages” to date. However, Boccacio
portrayed the real feelings, the moral behaviour and the daily preoccupations
of citizens, which were either purely materialistic or they reflected reactions
of people, who were solely eager to satisfy their basic physical instincts.
1.1.1.
The main Germanic Philosophic Thinkers
influenced by the Greek philosophers
A seminal thinker of the eighteenth century remains
Immanuel Kant, who was more profoundly concerned with ratio, the psyche and
human understanding as such. Kant distinguishes between psychology and
metaphysics. He renders metaphysics a more poignant role than to psychology per
se and criticizes the capacity of “pure” wisdom to discern the psychological
insight into the human psyche.
1.1.2.1. The Theory of
Knowledge as a Philosophical Field of Study
David Hume who distinguished a subjective, particular and contingent
experience about causality that was shared
by Burke too, undermines the Leibnitz ideal shared by Kant.3 The sceptic Humean conclusions were not only dangerous to
metaphysics, but to sciences too, and moreover to philosophy, as a
predominantly theoretical field, just as well. Frege (the mixing of spheres),
Kirchhoff, Hertz and Mach forewent the Vienna circle.4 Many such kind of
philosophic sentences are devoid of cognitive meaning. Newtonian mechanics is a
focal point of debate during this period. Wittgenstein5 adopts a sceptical attitude towards metaphysics, explained not as a
reality behind realities themselves, hence the former lingers on the
appearances themselves. Antique philosophy as a rigorous science, redefined by
the Husserlian programme as profoundly logical, was considered apart from the
natural sciences, as it was supposed to give a definition to the new philosophy
and to the new metaphysics about sensorial data speech. His phenomenology was
rendered in opposition to naturalism. To him material nature was merely a given
and conscious life experience. The phenomenalist Richard Rorty rethought
philosophy from an experimental angle.[5]
1.1.2.2 A New Perspective
on Philologia Perennis
The modernist twentieth century rethought philosophy up from its
fundament and a new relation with the sciences (Husserl), a change in relation
in the concept of philosophy, figuring
philosophy as simple as metaphysics, emerged altogether. These are all linked
to the logical syntax of speech, based on the principle of tolerance. With Wittgenstein
the principles of confirmability and verifiability were tackled, since not all
grammarly logical sentences were verifiable. According to Kant’s philosophy, it
is possible to reconcile the operative causal determination with the freedom
(as an exercise of morality) of the deed and thought. Left at a bifurcation,
the world of phenomenology (appearances) and the world of the objects
themselves as an experience per se, together with the world beyond experience,
do not always merge completely. “The Lesson of Hume”6,
the objection to causality, generalized with respect to the twelve thinkers in order to overcome the malefic
scepticism and to salvage metaphysics, failed, in the sense that empiric
thinking forgot to rethink individual experience. Kant notes, that as little as
one expects humankind to renounce to research metaphysics, the more one could
expect metaphysics to be further researched, even as paradoxical as this may
seem: “It will continue to exist for every man that reflects.” The critical,
assertive capability discernment (to discern between the new and old), the
theory of knowledge as a single constructive theory (Erkenntnistheorie), the problem of a possibility or impossibility
of a specific metaphysics, generally speaking, emerged as a counter argument to
pure philosophy. The most important philosophers were rather more concerned
with a very much challenged and debated upon metaphysics. They were the peak of
discussion within the frame of the
1.2. A Short History of Philosophic
Idea Development with a Main Stress on the Revolutionary Evolution of the Logical
Concepts
1.2.1. The Literary
Scene of the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages were indeed called the Dark Ages and this denomination was very much given, somehow
deservingly. At that particular point in time there was very poor streetlight present
and the people in Britain, for instance emptied their pots with their physical debris
of urchin and urine directly onto the window.
Boccacio’s “The Decamerone”[6]
is set in Italy, Sicily, or in other towns and villages, hence the scenery is
as poor as the intellectual make-up of those people was, and rather randomly
described, in tone and resemblance with the feelings of the poor-minded people
there. If anything at all, the Idea of God should be rather associated with an
intellectual or even a superior being or frame of mind that connects the human being
with this state of mind or feeling. Since the concept of love or the
representation of it, especially of that specific unification that becomes prevalent
in the act of love-making between a woman and a man, fails to appear, the
neglection or total absence of it might be deduced.
1.2.2. Germanic thought
influencing Romanian exegete Philosophy
The main philosophers that had a tremendous influence on Romanian
literature were, among others, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Schlegel, Fichte, Eric Auerbach and Martin Heidegger.
1.2.3. A
Short History of Philosophic Idea Development with a Main Fall on the Revolutionary
Evolution of the Logical Concept
1.2.4. The Literary Scene
of the Middle Ages
1.3. Further Congenial and
Funny Representations of Love in Philosophic Thought in
Love was seen rather differently across the ages. On the other hand,
I had to make a certain split division, respectively to
consider a fraction of a literary excerpt at other spots of the book, between
Romanian philosophical thought, German-British rational layout and the internationally
established philosophical frame of viewing the world. Austria might have been
“dezmădulată” (translated into English “drawn-back”, “retired”, “backwards-modulated”)
since the Habsburg empire had its toll of traumatic impact on highly sensitive
and on artistically gifted people. Maiorescu’s students and disciples were
among others, the philosophers P.P.Negulescu, C.Rădulescu-Motru, Ion Petrovici etc. They all together imposed a certain way of
looking at things. Titu Maiorescu had fairly in view the relation to the
surroundings and especially to the philosophic relations.
The
Union of 1859 was winning a criterion of performance when Maiorescu founded the
literary society “Junimea” (1863),
the publicistic organon of “Convorbiri
literare”, (1867) a literary magazine that promoted the great classical
writers such as: Mihai Eminescu, Octavian Goga, Ion Creangă,
Ion Slavici, Duiliu Zamfirescu, Mihail Sadoveanu. Highly politically involved,
Maiorescu was also the director (between March-July 1877) of the “Timpul” newspaper. Maiorescu thought, among
other things, that the history of mankind did not present all the edicts as
laws as such, and that socialism was not possible to establish itself under
this specific pattern in Romania. This was erroneous and his political activity
thus rather very much contested. The highly influential period of Renaissance is
worth mentioning here, because its social programme used to believe in the laic
thinking and tendency of the human being. Humanism insists on the polyvalent
affirmation of the human being and on the religious, respectively theological
dimension of the human existence in the XIX century. “As a matter of fact, the
criterion referring to the rapport between aim and method/means is corroborated
(confirmed) implicitly or explicitly with another, more powerful criterion, m.e.
that reflecting the importance of the planned, to be satisfied necessities or
to put it differently, those of the defining side of man.” (258)
The ‘middle value’ concept is conspicuous with
Schaler, Nicolai Hartmann, Petre Andrei etc.7
Hartmann is considered an atheist and thus he questions the existence of a
divine grace.
Roşca claims that art is of a fairly superior
value and could act as healing or comforting in times of uncertainty. I do not agree with Roşca’s
argument since not all people could be “healed” by Mozart’s, Bach’s and
Cleiderman’s music and implicitly by liturgical orthodox music even less so. For
instance, the human psyche is not a material basis or ground to start this kind
of argument upon. Roşca
exaggerates thus the healing potential of music and makes Vianu’s argument therefore more powerful. It is to
be considered that music is an important therapy for all kind of people. Hence
not all of them are into it and thus not ready to really understand and
appreciate good music. It is thus important, that these people should be really
musical and very sound sensitive. I also contradict the fact that the material
values, referred to in the second instance of his argument, are of the same
importance as the spiritual ones and this is most of all the case because they
are somewhat associated with dignity. He finally states, by contradicting his
prior argument, that the material values are rather of a superior quality when compared to the
spiritual values. He claims that the form isotonic is rather linked to them than
to the isostenic ones, since they are
more powerful than the latter. Human personality is as a matter of fact
superior to any other possible thing. He also maintans a false conception about
the origin of the material objects. He believes that these were human
creations. His Romanian linguistic skills lack even in consistency, grammarly
speaking, since the adverb “decât” could not be used on affirmative asserts.
Vianu’s ladder of criteria contains a more developed part of evaluation and
that includes also politics and the judicial sciences among the other four
theories: arts, literature, morality and religion. (p.260) The political value
attributed to people is rather superior to a judicial value attributed to
things.
1.3.
New Romanian Assertions on debatable philosophical Phenomena
Adrian Michiduţă groups the pairs of primary notions into two big
categories depending on the domain they refer to, as: “Ontological fundamental categories
of human ontology per se thus each group within them includes several more
subgroups. The proposed systematization
permits, nonetheless, resettlements depending on the concept which a commentator
could have about the problematic area of philosophy and about this connection
or affinity.”
The
supreme principle is for Mircea Florian causality itself. The explanation of
the world via a third element or dimension is at this point visible.
Endnotes on the first
chapter
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
2. The
Main Schools of Philosophy in
The most sought-after schools of philosophy in
Romania functioned in Bucharest, especially at the University of Bucharest and
these were mostly highly influenced by the German philosophy, especially by Kant’s
and Simmel’s. The main promoters of philosophic thinking were Mircea Eliade,
Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica. They revived the autochthonic thought and
gave new impulses to further philosophic thinking.
2.1.
The Major Breakthrough of Romanian Philosophy
The introduction to philosophy per se was initially
achieved by Constantin Noica and Emil Cioran. They might be considered the pioneers that introduced the great
masters of German literature to the general public. Here, a specific reference
to other main philosophers is to be taken into consideration, as for instance to
Gabriel Liiceanu’s philosophical position, just as well.
2.1.2. The Outcome of Romanian
Philosophy to Date Founded
in 1860, the Faculty of Philosophy is an institution which is essential to the
modern Romanian education and culture, being one of the founding faculties of
the University of Bucharest.
Currently, alongside the programmes available for philosophy,
the faculty also offers study programmes in other related domains, such as
European studies and international relationships, community law, public politics,
cultural management, the management of knowledge and others which are led by
professors with plenty of experience.
The structure of the Faculty of Philosophy is based on two departments: the
Department of Theoretical Philosophy and the Department of Practical Philosophy
and the History of Philosophy, which also includes the UNESCO Department for
Intercultural and Inter-religious Exchange.
The Faculty of Philosophy has interests which are deeply rooted in the
development of the philosophical research in the newest directions currently
present on the international level and comprises renowned research centres: the
Centre for the Study of Rationality and Faith, the Centre for Research in
Logics, Philosophy and the History of Science, the Centre for Research of the
History of Philosophical Ideas, the Centre for Phenomenological Research, the
Centre for Research in the Field of Applied Ethics, the Centre of Research for
Intergenerational Justice, Social Responsibility and Sustainability.
The UNESCO Department for Intercultural and Inter-religious
Exchange, which was recently integrated in the structure of the Faculty of
Philosophy, organizes three master’s programmes in English, which benefit from
the participation of professors and prestigious experts from universities and
research institutes abroad. The UNESCO programmes create innovative educational
experiences for the students and they create specialists in the field of
intercultural management, intercultural communication and business management
by offering them a varied array of courses in the fields of philosophy,
history, sociology, political sciences, cultural diplomacy, management,
communication and business management.
The training offered by the Faculty of Philosophy allows its graduates to work in
areas different from education and research, such as fields which require
critical, explicative, interpretive and decisional competences in a creative
manner in analytical, research, creation and development activities, in
political consultancy and analysis, ethical counselling and consultation,
organizational management, communication and journalism, administration etc.
2.1.3.
Humankind in the Early Stages of the Development of the
2.1.4.
Rethinking Humankind in the Early Stages of the Development of the Romanian
Unitarian State
The Romanian
Philosophical Schools in the modern XXth Century The origins of
Romanian philosophical thinking can be traced back to the late Middle Ages. The
first attempts were made in monasteries and princely courts; the language used
was Church Slavonic or Latin. The first original philosophical work in Romanian
dates from 1698 and was written by Dimitrie Cantemir, Prince of Moldavia. The
first Romanian philosophical school, the Transylvanian School, formed in
Transylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, was an expression of
Enlightenment ideas. Romanian philosophical thinking in the nineteenth century
was imbued with the ideas of the Enlightenment and Kantianism.
Romanian modern culture and, implicitly, modern Romanian
philosophy were born in the second half of the nineteenth century, under the
influence of Titu Maiorescu, a major cultural personality. At the peak of its
evolution between the two world wars, Romanian philosophy had the following
characteristic features: it was closely related to literature, in the sense
that most Romanian philosophers were also important writers; it showed
excessive preoccupation with the issue of Romanian identity; it was involved in
Romania’s historical, political and ideological debates, fuelling attitudes in
favour of or against Westernization and modernization; it synchronized quickly
with Western philosophical thinking; and it was (and still is) lacking in
ethical thought.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Romanian
philosophers focused mainly on discussing the status of metaphysics and its
right to existence, followed by any individual efforts to set up an original
philosophical system; secondly, they were interested in the issue of identity,
the theme of Romanian-ness, which led to the development of the philosophy of
culture and history, and to the involvement of philosophers in politics. The
most important original philosophical constructions were those of Lucian Blaga
and Constantin Noica.
During the communist regime, an initial period of complete
stagnation of independent thinking was followed, at the beginning of the 1960s,
by a relative liberalization that favoured research in logic, the philosophy of
science, and the writing of literary-philosophical essays.
Romanian philosophy since 1989 has made efforts to restructure
its institutional framework, reclaim the formerly forbidden fields, and
synchronize - through translations and studies - with contemporary world
philosophy.
2.2.
2.3.
Romanian Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age
2.3.1.
The Main Schools of Philosophy in
2.3.1.1 Romanian
Philosophical Thought in the Modern Age
Modern philosophy is, on the other hand, tersely influenced by the enlightenment
and especially the one of the eighteenth century. Nicolae Bălcescu oscillated between deism (Götterglaube, Deismus) and provincialism (insularity) “priveghind evoluţia omenirii”.8(23)
The main initiators of the
Transylvanian school of philosophy were: Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Asachi, Gheorghe
Şincai, Ion Budai Deleanu, Petru Maior, Gheorghe Lazăr etc. Gheorghe Lazăr taught in Bucharest at the “Sfântul Sava” high-school and Gheorghe Şincai founded approximatively three
hundred schools in Transylvania. Grigore Ureche, Miron Costin and Ion Neculce
contributed to the documentation for the manuscript in Latin to the religious
book “Letopiseţul Ţării Moldovei”.
2.3.1.2.
The Influence of the Romanian Philosophical Schools in the Modern XXth Century
Vianu’s ladder of criteria contains a rather
more developed part of evolution and that includes the political and judicial
sciences among the other four theories, too: art, literature, morality and
religion (p.260). The political value conferred to people is superior to a
judicial value attributed to things. Roşca’s view of politics remains hence a
personal view and thus it is not Vianu’s one that the former considers as such.
Vianu’s thinking, that the political value would be solely important, means a fairly
much resolute perseveration to and for this particular time. Thus, the theoretical
values amplify the force and the spiritual content of the conscience. The
political value preserves itself, in the sense that it maintains the role of keeping
the human being as springing from an axiological referential matter within a
certain scope of focus. He, then states that all values are personal and all the
latter could thus not be attributed to objects solely. This is a false
perspective as long as many objects possess qualities, even though the latter
might be exterior ones. Some objects might shun light from the interior upon
the exterior. Thus, the concept of objects is relative by itself, because
people tend to classify objects differently, rendering thus a personal meaning.
Each object possesses a free, adhering feature to exist by itself as such, or
not to do so. The difference was fairly relative and not absolute. Roşca agrees at least that the original is superior to its copy. To
continue, Vianu argues that the moral value is superior to the artistic one,
because the latter is personal and integrative, meaning that it could be
integrated into an axiological, more comprehensive structure, while the
artistic value would be real and non integrative or integrating, respectively
that a certain valuable creation could not be subsumed or subordinated to
another artistic creation. It was nonetheless shown that all values are personal.
Roşca argues, that a certain valuable creation could not be subsumed or
subordinated to another artistic creation. Roşca agrees that a certain moral achievement could be seized and
integrated by another, more refined accomplishment and that each artistic
valuable creation is unsubordinative, being unique, a feature whose
imperishability and eternal character I stress out, too. He thinks that the
signaled difference is relative and not absolute, since each moral creation
presents a certain uniqueness and, vice versa, since each artistic
accomplishment implies a certain progressive evolution, even if solely under
the aspect of the creative technique since each artist wants to express himself
in a very original manner and does not succeed this, except via delimitation,
sometimes via a terse break with the anterior manners of expression, but either
way via rapporting, by taking into consideration the artistic existent speech
at a particular point in time. On the other hand, the integrating character of
a value does not confer him any superiority to another unintegrative one,
because, just as well, from another point of view, the one of originality, he
can state in the other order that the unintegrative value was superior to the
integrative one. Thus, Roşca sustains the artistic value more intensely than
the moral one, because this is his general frame of mind,
Lucian
Blaga is not completely right, when he affirms that all values situate
themselves at the same level, because each of them searches and ascertains
something of the mystery of the world but none of them exhausts this mysterious
fund of existence.
There
are nonetheless really great art works or literary pieces that could not really
compare themselves on the ranking scale with the much lower positioned ones.
Noica is a rather original writer that situates the being within the things themselves. This could be noticed in his
work “The Sophist”. He
differentiates himself from Hegel in the sense that he comprehends human being
as a combination of:
a.) the individual
b.) the determinacies
c.) the general
These
all are simultaneous terms or concepts and not successive, unfolding moments.
He
distances himself from Hegel firstly, via the fact that he understands the
three terms on which reality appears in reality, some realities being able to
be encapsulated by one or another of the three (267) concepts. Secondly, on the
other hand he differs from Heidegger too, by the idea that the being as such manifests
itself in each of the things, not solely in privileged situations and
realities, but, via the understanding of the human being as a model in a
certain project just as well, depending on which, the procedure of the thing
unfolds.
A thematic, quadruple theme via four concepts
thus emerges:
1. Theme-antitheme
2. Thesis enriched theme
Hegel relies on his basis of thinking and
thought pattern,
Lucian
Blaga believes that the human being evolves hand in hand with the deepening and
improvement of language. He remained concerned via the specificity of the
Romanian created literary heritage with the stylistic aspect of language and
its ability to encapsulate and render the spiritual values.
2.3.1.
3. A Unitary Stylistic Cultural given versus a Variety of Values
Noica expresses himself critically about this
kind of cultural type of finitude in man in
his environmental work and as well as in his essay about nature. The Greek Kalokogathia stands for the superior
existence of man or woman. Noica observes that this cultural type did not cross
over this ideal to other peoples, just the same as Christianity passed over its
message and Europe passed and still passes its values and its civilization over
to the
‘‘Apoi, cultura europeană se situează dincolo de natură în sensul că,
ea nu doar depăşeşte natura prin imitaţie sanctifcând-o prin mitologie şi descriind-o şi lăsând-o întocmai, neschimbată, prin ştiinţă, cum se întămplă în celelalte culturi,
ci se raportează la o natură decăzută prin creştinism, ne-firească, supra-realistă prin mitologia născută din legenda
cristică şi în genere, artificializată, trecută în laborator prin ştiinţă şi filosofie.” (Roşca, 279)
The Egyptian, Chinese, Indian and even Greek cultures arrived to a
stagnant state of the arts because of their low contact with other cultures and
their very close contact with nature, Noica considers. (280) European culture
was constantly obliged to recreate novelty and innovation. In the cathedrals, within
music and the arts, European culture in general, resisted like the above
mentioned, while the Greek temples took their Gods to the earth. The exploration
of the surreality and the “underreality”emerged, hence the difference between
Lucian Blaga and Constantin Noica, resides in the fact that the former sees
culture deeply integrated into the “collective” unconsciousness and into a
certain stylistical matrix, more exactly into certain abyssal categories of archetypes
that resonate within the unconsciousness and the latter happened since the
things themselves, the “noumena” detached from their origins.
Noica asserts that the ground basis of culture finds itself not solely in the
unconsciousness of the spiritual life, but in the spirit, too, that developed
further since the more work accumulated in the psyche, furthermore the
unconsciousness had its morphology or certain modalities or even thinking patterns
that corresponded to the parts of speech, whose “content” one immediately
observes and this was done not via “dreams or who knows via which other winding
roads”. (Roşca, 290)
In this sense, he states: “Firstly, it is that you perceive the
concreteness of something, and then that you find the right word, as well as
the concept of the thing. Firstly, it is that which you see: the adjectivity and then that you determine
the adjective, as a thought and a word. It is firstly that one sees the numeral
and afterwards that one counts: “This is how the logics of language are built
by.” (291)
Regarding us and our culture, the Romanian
critic Ion Roşca considers that although they are different and apparently opposite, the
two explanations regarding the basis of culture, the explanation of Noica and furthermore
Blaga’s one do not exclude themselves but are complementary, each of them
expressing a particular truth. Blaga’s concepts and notions are more suitable with
those particular forms of culture that express to a greater extent the
affective and infra-rational elements of human subjectivity, mostly such as the
artistic and religious masterpieces are like. Noica’s mind set is more
appropriate and familiar to the cultural pieces that are especially theoretical,
similar to those scientific, technical and philosophical, original works. What
is to be noticed is the Husserlian phenomenological pillar of the Noican acknowledgement of the spiritual
acquaintance and awareness, according to which it is first of all that one
perceives the general direction of a certain way of thinking (the concreteness and
the quality of it altogether) or in a Husserlian terminology9, one intends
it altogether, then that one registers “directly” and that thus adds to it,
particularizing the respective position. On the other hand, "Husserlianly" speaking,
one could intuitively perform it. Thus, with Noica’s concept about culture,
generally, and the European cultural model, especially the philosophy of
culture, Blaga could be situated in a complementary rapport, taking into consideration
the unity of the consciousness and the fact that in each form of culture, the
human being engages itself by means of its whole subjectivity, with all of its
ranges and with all its abyssal and spiritual categories. (Roşca, 291)
The spiritual philosopher
D. D. Roşca stated that existence is at the same time rational and irrational as
well as absurdist and reasonable, too. It is rational in the sense that it
contains necessity and legality.
Endnotes
on Chapter 2
8
9
3.
The Concepts per se and their Practical daily Usage
3.1.The Practical Usage of
philosophic Belief in daily social Life
Noumena in Kant’s words10 are those matters that are experienced in a
new way psychically. These new concepts refer to the out-living and experiencing
of new feelings and mental associations. The humanism of the XVI-XVII century
was very much concerned with form and putting its concept into a right frame
and “wrap up”.
3.1.1.
Meontology (the Existence of the Void, the Negation
of Existence)
The Romanian Enlightenment (at the
onset of Nicolae Balcescu’s time) took place in the eighteenth century, at a
different point in time than in
3.1.2. The Personalist Theories within the School of the positivist
Titu Maiorescu speaks
about the relation of metaphysics with the concept of “art for art’s sake”. I
herby stress the actuality of Titu Maiorescu’s concept of religion and science.11 These explanations of his,
however, lost currency in our modern times. An influential thinker of Romanian
philosophy was Vasile Conta, who thus became the first creator of a
philosophical system that explained materialism and evolutionism.12 His sustenance of
3.1.3.
The Object of Contemplation seen apart from the
Individual
3.1.3.1. The Theory of Fatality
Time and fatality are about, and
thus concern a certain energetic personalism, being eventually considered the
catechism of a new spirituality. The original element (Motru) of antiquity,
time and destiny and the creative factor (medieval philosophy) explained by
Negulescu are reconsidered and reinterpreted.13
Rationalism and the historical complex become thus a scale of measurement. The
unique being is, according to Iorga, mechanically linked
to the others that pointed to and
prompted the events that intuitively led towards a certain direction that
Mircea Florian, a philosopher of
recessivity as a method or structure of the world, (known for his translation
of the “Organon”) reconsidered Hellenistic cosmology, the philosophy of
revival, and was highly revolutionary since anterior philosophy thought the
object of philosophy as clearly separated from the over-empiric intuition of
individuality14 (in the manner of Techner,
Lotze, Edith von Hartmann, W. Wundt, A. Fouille) and irrational intuition
(Bergson, Dielthey, Husserl). The inductive method, rooted from experience, and
the deductive method that altogether overestimated rationality (Aristotle and
Bacon) are therefore established by philosophy so far. The deductive method was
hence rather much more preferred by the newer generations of philosophers. Binary
dialectics, experience and the rapport between experience and rationalism, as a
principle of philosophical reconstruction, were considered breakthroughs in
German philosophy.
The relationist perspective on value, binary
dialectics, experience and the rapport between experience and rationality are
thus very much present at this early period of the twentieth century. Florian
analyzes the given and the experience as an object of philosophy, rather as a
principle of philosophical reconstruction. He also ponders upon the relationist
perspective on value. Peter Andrei took attitude over the philosophy of value,
fascism and the sociology of revolution. Such contribution was offered by the
philosophers that came to influence the Romanian philosophical body of thought
and to contribute to its further development as such.
3.2.
A brief Outline of the Personalist Theories
within the School of the positivist Vienna Thinkers
A collective of renowned philosophers (Kreibig,
Krüger, Th. Lipps, Ehrenfels, Windelband, Schmoller, Simmel) rethought the
inherited body of philosophical thought.
Materialist theories (Meyer,
Münsterberg, Heyn, Höffler, Höffding) were deconstructing Marxist dialectics. The
intentional theory (Max Scheler) became thus the successor of the empiric
overview. Therefore, the modern theories were rather grouped into:
-personalist theories
-materialistic theories
-the intentional feeling theory
Other German
philosophers that were very popular among Romanian philosophers established
among others, specific more or less known theories:
1. Emotionalisms
(Simmel, Meinong) and
2.Voluntarisms
(Wundt, Frischeisen-Köhler, H.Richter, Herman Schwarz)
It
is with Herman Cohen and H. Münsterberg that value is produced solely by pure
willingness, thus the latter dominates in rapport with feelings and logical
acts. The logical researches of Husserl explain that:
·
the
horizon of the curled infinite or the original “mioritical” space (of Romanian
origin, “mioară” meaning a type of local sheep)
·
the
existence of the three-dimensional space within the Transylvanian Saxon
community and its merge with the Romanian space in the field region
·
the
feeling of longing of a soul that needs to pass the obstacles or the “hills” to
get to its final resurrection
There are many arguments against the perceiving of space in a
contemplative manner. The “Minor and Major Culture” is about the creations that
are either in an infinite space such as in the cultured creations that are
either in a finite, limited space in the popular, folk creations. The “aprioricity”
of the various cultural spaces is hence marked as such. The symbolic
communication is very much linked to the artistic expression of the people of
the age. Appository, philosophical positions, substantionalism and
relationalism take over and conquer the cultural scene of the late modernity. Via
the substantial orientation, the old and the modern philosophies (enlightenment
especially) defined the cultural human, substance or essence of living by
itself, while the substantial concepts defined man via rationality, via a
cognitive, epistemological perspective. This is an invariable rationality and people
possess the same valuable configurations that pass from a culture to another. A
cultural imperialism that could be imposed by the force of other cultural
spaces and commandoes shaped the historic relational character of the human
being. Richard Rorty promoted the epistemological relationalism by affirming
that the inter-communitarian exchanges were of an economic and political order,
while the intra-communicational ones were of an authentic kind. The stylistic relationalism (initiated by Nietzsche)
was obvious with and typical of Lucian Blaga and George Bacovia. It was later Spengler15 that sustained the incommunicability of
cultures.
The absurdity portrayed as a
lack of value (243) predominated in the second half of the twentieth century. Gh.
Al. Cazan stressed the ontological meaning of the distinction between the rational
and irrational, fundamental entity. Any value is an illogical and irreducible
entity. As illogical entities, the values are of various species: the
distinction between aim and means, between amplifier and preservative, between
integrative and unintegrative (between personal and real, integrable and
unintegrable. No value exhausts all the mysteries of existence itself,
rationality and faith. The philosophic notions catholita, todetita, horetitia, acatholia, atodetia, ahoretia, (the
disease of non-acting) especially the characters of Waiting for Godot, and those of the Greek abstract painting, even existentialist
literature as such, became the expression of the modern “mood” of the age. Thus,
there are several interpretations of numeric symbols mentioned:
One and its repetition
One and its variation
One or the multiple
A multiple one for the
noun (Middle Ages)
1. The adjective/the adverb
2. Adverbial reference (since during Renaissance
the use of the adverb was in fashion.)
3. The pronoun-frame in the plural form to
use after 1800 was replaced by the singular frame of the pronoun in the
twentieth century.
4. The numeral and the conjunction
5. The preposition (linked with
Eminescu and the sculpturer Brancuşi-seen as a reorientation) became the main linkage between artistic objects
that were to reflect the infinite and the endless search of humankind for
knowledge. Schematicism and systematization were the main pillars of the
philosophic movement of the twentieth century. Hence, Prophologism was introduced as a new term of debate. There was a
preponderantly stylistic characterization ominous, and a stylistic matrix that
resonated in the consciousness of the philosophic being, took over the direction
of the discourse. The affective and infra-rational elements of human
subjectivity, as reflected in the artistic and the religious creations are
ubiquitous and awaiting to be discovered. The perceiving of the general
direction of a certain way of thinking (adjectivity) was rather new for the
twentieth century and Noica adhered to it. The most influential philosophers of
genuine, philosophical thought that marked the period of enlightenment might have
been reconsidered in the instances of: Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, David Hume, Richard Burke and Wilhelm Windelband.16 David Hume was rather interested to claim
empirical thought and discoveries as the most engaging and thus considered the
general frame of the human mind as the most suggestive. Wilhelm Windelband, Richard
Burke, Georg Simmel became thus, important landmarks of modern philosophy.
Kant considered space and time as
individually detectable and thought that the “noumena” were internally
reachable and dependent on the individual psyche. These were the new feelings
or the new inner thoughts of the individual, marking the fact that each
individual was to perceive the environment (space and time) in a new,
relational way.
Endnotes on the 3rd chapter
Conclusion
Philosophy emerged as a revolutionary concept of thinking and
reached out to conquer other disciplines besides sciences just as well. Although
the philosophical movement changed across the ages and the terms given to the
specific thoughts and sensibilities did, too, it is only natural to comprehend
that the human being as such became wiser and richer in intellectual
advancement since the cultural heritage improved a lot altogether.
Glossary of the debated
philosophical terms
1.apriori
2.a posteriori
3.meontology
4.noumena
5.systematic metaphysics (David Malet Armstrong)
A short-listed collection of
anti-philosophical concepts:
1. to alvinize=to stimulate endless talks
by making bizarre remarks
2. to ameliorort=to complicate the
discussion about a theory or any subject matter by the attraction of the
attention over a panoply of distinctions
3. to anscumbe=to lay for a storage
4. Armstrong=a measure for the wavelength
of the beliefs(=10 microsmarts)
5. a rortiori=still for more obscure
rationalities that are continental and in fashion
6. asearliun=an illocutionary act that is
the same with the speaker
7. arthurdentist=a person that strengthens
the teeth of exotic dogmas
8. austintativ=the fancy show off of the
subtlety of the speech
9. to ayera=to oversimplify in a fancy
manner in the direction of a previous generation
10. belnap=a carnap that is defined in a
happy manner from an idiom used in the common speech
11. benettiction=a glorification of a
philosopher for the solving of a problem that was not invented but solely 100 years
after his death
12. bertrand=a profound state of abstraction
of the mind and the spirit that causes illusion
13. blockaj=a rule of stopping that stops
people from maddening when they are exposed to the mental experiments that
exploit the combinatorial explosion
14. carnap=an operating symbol or a special
notation that is formally defined, the loss of conscience by an ill person that
suffered an accident
15. castanieda=a musical elaborated
instrument that sends a peculiar sound when it is shaken
16. cavallieresc=that designates a common
style of writing among the great philosophers of the time
17. chihara-kiri=
death via aleph zero
18.
stoppage=noun; comes from mental stoppage (blockage) or an
outlet of fuse
19.
cast= a musical tool that emits and sends an
elaborated sound when shaken
20.
cavallerian =adj.that characterizes a common writing style among
the great philosophers of speech
21.
chihara-kiri =death via cuts in linkages and batches in
aleph-zero
22.
chomsky= a related
term to the chomskyian linguistic vocabulary, a profound state of mind abstraction of the mind and the spirit, a
trance, about a theory that extrapolates on scientifically established facts
with metaphysical illogical implications
23.
curry= a writing that is very well spiced with
neologisms
24.
dagfinn= one of the potential results of the
cross-breeding of a shark with a dolphin while the other mélange is the
follesdale, an animal that is impulsive and cruel; travelling
symbiotic pairs, the latter are the only one that feel as at their own home in
deep waters.
25.
davidson = about speed, the minimal speed advancement
that is necessary to maintain a research program going, said about a research
program for which this particular speed is zero
26.
denettation =a defining trait of a super name or a nickname,
respectively
27.
dennetta=an artificial enzyme used to curdle the “milk” of the intellectual
dispute and intentional scope
28.
to dequine= to deny strongly the existence of the
importance of something real or significant
29.
derrida =from a French meaningless song
30. desousafon
=
musical instrument, descendant of the harmonica like the faggot to add
comical effects to the musical programs,
full of crazy ideas hence vague and impractible
31.
dreyfus= an arid or conversation that is controversial ad hominem
32.
feyerabend= the last moment of
glow of a conceptual frame before its death and transfiguration
33.
fodor= a fancy hat that is
worn in a cool manner or a fodorgraphy
that refers to the particles which remain after removing the paper, the last
moment of glow
34.
folcloar=a popular philosophy that comes from the twin
earth and that differs from ours and is discernable only by an erudite
folklorist
35.
foucault=nuisance, crazy fault, mistake
36.
frege= to recognize the illogicality of a position
but hence to sustain it
37.
a gadame= a ritual incantation to represent the meaning
of the hidden writings or dreams
38.
gnoam= homunculus
39.
gödelic= said about a fundamental contribution
40.
harmanica= a musical instrument which one plays in
defiance
41.
heidegger= a boring instrument
42.
hilaryu from hilaryc= a very short, hence very important period in
the intellectual career of a distinguished philosopher
43.
hintikka= a measure of the convictions, the least
logically discernable difference in the
measure of the convictions
44.
kripkic=misunderstood, but considered brilliant
45.
kripkography= the opposite of cryptography
46.
kuhna =a fox believed to be a hedgehog that is also
accompanied by such a fizzle that it seems double in size
47.
to inhumane = to burn, to bury or destroy a philosophical
position
48.
lacantropy=the transformation via a full moon phase
influence of a philosophical supposition into a susceptible social theory via a
susceptible linguistic theory
49.
Lyotard= the old clothes of the French emperor
50.
lucas pocus= a ritual incantation
51.
mach= a measure of speed of a philosophical program
that becomes superdavidsonic
52.
to marcuse= to criticize from beyond Marxist positions
53. martinize=to overwhelm with carnaps
54.
merleau-pontic =in a wrong order
55.
Noam= a unity of resistance
56.
neurotical= obsessed with protocol
57.
to plating= to use the fertilizers of the nineteenth
century to bring the twentieth to a boost and development
58.
a putname= a presumed expert that is authorized by a
community to name a natural gender to
determine its members
59.
quinti = to
expôse very naturally a philosophical problem in an opaque context
60.
to ramsify=to simplify, the ramsified theory of the types,
to interpret an incorrigible theory
61. ricouerge=to interpret all philosophical
problems via a limited philosophical apparatus
62. rort=an incorrigible presentation but
pretty confusing
63. santayana=a very strong wind that is
very tiring
64. schiffer =someone that uses much innovation to repair a boat
65.superdavidsonic=said about a research program for which this speed
is zero and a
davidsonic boom is the sound
produced by a research program when it arrives at Oxford
66.
suppes= an ordered quadruple formed
of a philosopher, a problem, an axiomatized theory of the crowds and a federal
grant
67. supposition
=a statement that presumes a choice
68. turing=with no mind of itself stupid
69.a ziffuial = a very heated-up philosophical dispute, a hot
philosophical debate
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Tudor. Despre stil și artă literară. Bucureşti:
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Dante
Quick Facts
born
died
September 13,
1321 or September 14, 1321
Ravenna, Italy
notable works
·
“Literature
in the Vernacular”
movement / style
subjects of study
Early life and the Vita nuova
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself.
He was born in Florence
in 1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained
devoted to his native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a
cavalryman against the Ghibellines,
a banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of
his great teacher Brunetto
Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti,
of the poetic culture
in which he made his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido
Guinizelli, the origins of his family in his great-great-grandfather,
Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the Paradiso
(and from whose wife the family
name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even further, of the pride that
he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the Roman
soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family.
There is no mention of his father or mother, brother or sister in The
Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in the Vita nuova,
and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest between
Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the
exiled Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until
1266, Dante’s father apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant
exile. Dante’s mother died when he was young, certainly before he was 14. Her
name was Bella, but of which family is unknown. Dante’s father then married
Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco, and a
daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante,
having come into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by
his father. The elder Alighieri left his children a modest yet comfortable
patrimony of property in Florence and in the country. About this time Dante
married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict
between the imperial and papal partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs.
Following the middle of the 13th century the antagonisms were brutal and
deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and inflicting
gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period
of ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X,
XXXII), but in 1266 a force of Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies,
was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento, expelling them forever from
Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with postwar pride
and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany. Florentines
compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was
ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was
a returning exile, Brunetto Latini.
When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great
teacher, this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his
master but rather as an encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual
mentor. Latini had awakened a new public consciousness
in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti, Forese
Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as
writers to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the
Aristotelian assumption that man is a social (political) being. Even in the Paradiso
(VIII.117) Dante allows as being beyond any possible dispute the notion that
things would be far worse for man were he not a member of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani,
characterized Latini as the “initiator and master in refining the Florentines
and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our republic according
to political philosophy
[la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most important book, Li
Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was
written in French (Latini had passed his years of exile in France), its culture
is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical citation. The first part of
Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics.
On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca.
And, almost as frequently, when treating questions of government, he quotes
from the Book of
Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as well as the writings
of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these Rome presents the most inspiring source of
identification. The cult of Cicero began to develop alongside that of
Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as fully exemplifying
the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to become
an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame
through a wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno
(XV) Latini is praised for instructing Dante in the means by which man makes
himself immortal, and in his farewell words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor,
through which he trusts his memory will survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic
self-confidence. By the time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he
had already taught himself the art of making verse (chapter III). He sent an
early sonnet, which was to
become the first poem in the Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of
his day. He received several responses, but the most important one came from Cavalcanti,
and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between
Dante and Cavalcanti was a complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita
nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s exhortations that he
wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in the Convivio,
written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, Dante
was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular. His
later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti,
who prevailed upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this
intellectual indebtedness, Dante dedicated his Vita nuova to
Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of
Florence, he was obliged to concur with the
decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the
banishment and died in August 1300. In
the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it
is as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante
records his indebtedness, his fondness, and his appreciation of their great
merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record the facts of separation. In
order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old
friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently
did not have the same appreciation, was Beatrice,
a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated fictionalized women
in all of literature.
In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s thought and the vicissitudes
of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—sanctified in
the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio,
only to be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy
as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La
vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life)
is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the
other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a
work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for
binding together poems composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova
brought together Dante’s poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93;
the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante’s most
important poetic compositions
from just prior to 1294 to the time of The Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello,
or small book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with
commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth
canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose
commentary provides the frame
story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those
alleged). The story is simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of
Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her salutation when they are 18,
Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when
Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of
him, his determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s
virtues, anticipations of her death (that of a young friend, the death of her
father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally the death of Beatrice,
Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis,
and, in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time
about her “that which has never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita
nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly
devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless
to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice).
The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best
friend”; Dante’s sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the
closest proximity of blood.” On the one hand Dante suggests the most
significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he seems to
distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure
in which Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality
of his poetic language are indications of his early and abiding ambition
to go beyond the practices of local poets.
Related Biographies
Dante’s intellectual development and public career
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli,
the poet most responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,”
kind of poetry.
Guinizelli’s verse provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a
remarkable sense of joy contained in a refined and lucid aesthetic. What
increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual,
even philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and
of gentilezza, the virtue that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of
love that he extolled was part of a refined and noble sense of life. It was
Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual
turning point of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI,
Dante experienced a change of heart, and rather than write poems of anguish, he
determined to write poems in praise of his lady, especially the canzone “Donne
ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding of Love”). This
canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which
is clearly an adaptation
of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new
poetic style, the dolce
stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the
simple means by which it transcended
the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the Purgatorio
(XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another
great change in his life, which he describes in the Convivio. Looking
for consolation following the death of Beatrice,
Dante reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly
to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But what was intended as a temporary
reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of the most crucial
intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita
nuova was transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of
Dante’s thoughts. He began attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear
disputations on philosophy, and within a period of only 30 months “the love of
her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every other thought.” In his poem “Voi
che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through Intelligence Move the
Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even
severe, new style associated with philosophy. This period of study gave
expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually to form the poetic basis
for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement
in the affairs of the commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of
physicians and apothecaries (to which philosophers could belong), which opened
his way to public office. But he entered the public arena at a most perilous
time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf and
Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided
city. The ruling Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and
a party of “Whites,”
to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities
following 1295. In May 1300 he was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a
neighbouring town, whose purpose it was to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan
cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and embattled pope Boniface VIII.
When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably was already
recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his
attitudes concerning the extent of papal power. The hegemony of the
Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been restored in Florence in 1266 by
an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy. By 1300,
however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change:
Dante, the Guelf moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of
the ill effects of papal involvement in political matters, become in the Convivio,
in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and most importantly
throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken
defenders of the position that the empire does not derive its political
authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to
papal policies. A new alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the
brother of King Philip IV,
Charles
of Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black
Guelfs. When Charles of Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city
itself was thrown into political indecision. In order to ascertain the
nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss these
matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was
expressed in the legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who
goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered. Boniface dismissed the other two legates and
detained Dante. In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were
permitted entry to Florence. That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously
reentered Florence and for six days terrorized the city. Dante learned of the
deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January 1302 he was
called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so,
was condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not
committed. Again failing to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other
Whites were condemned to be burned to death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The
Divine Comedy he frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed,
he makes it the central dramatic act toward which a long string of prophecies
points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the means by which he triumphed
over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true “divine comedy.”
Exile, the Convivio, and the De monarchia
Information about Dante’s early years in exile is scanty;
nevertheless, enough is known to provide a broad picture. It seems that Dante
at first was active among the exiled White Guelfs in their attempts to seek a
military return. These efforts proved fruitless. Evidently Dante grew
disillusioned with the other Florentine outcasts, the Ghibellines, and was
determined to prove his worthiness by means of his writings and thus secure his
return. These are the circumstances that led him to compose Il convivio
(c. 1304–07; The Banquet).
Dante projected a work of 15 books, 14 of which would be
commentaries on different canzoni. He completed only four of the books. The
finished commentaries in many ways go beyond the scope of the poems, becoming a
compendium of instruction (though they also show his lack of formal training in
philosophy). Dante’s intention in the Convivio, as in The Divine
Comedy, was to place the challenging moral and political
issues of his day into a suitable ethical and metaphysical
framework.
Book I of the Convivio is in large part a stirring
and systematic defense of the vernacular.
(The unfinished De vulgari eloquentia [c. 1304–07; Concerning
Vernacular Eloquence], a companion piece, presumably written in
coordination with Book I, is primarily a practical treatise in the
art of poetry based upon an elevated poetic language.) Dante became the great
advocate of its use, and in the final sentence of Book I he accurately predicts
its glorious future:
This shall be the new light, the new sun, which shall rise
when the worn-out one shall set, and shall give light to them who are in shadow
and in darkness because of the old sun, which does not enlighten them.
The revolution Dante described was nothing less than the
twilight of the predominantly clerical Latin culture and the
emergence of a lay, vernacular urban literacy. Dante saw himself as the
philosopher-mediator between the two, helping to educate a newly enfranchised
public readership. The Italian literature
that Dante heralded was soon to become the leading literature and Italian the
leading literary language of Europe, and they would continue to be that for
more than three centuries.
In the Convivio Dante’s mature political and
philosophical system is nearly complete. In this work Dante makes his first
stirring defense of the imperial tradition and, more specifically, of the Roman Empire. He
introduces the crucial concept of horme—that is, of an innate desire
that prompts the soul to return to God. But it requires proper education
through examples and doctrine. Otherwise it can become misdirected toward
worldly aims and society torn apart by its destructive power. In the Convivio
Dante establishes the link between his political thought and his understanding
of human appetite: given the pope’s craving for worldly power, at the time
there existed no proper spiritual models to direct the appetite toward God; and
given the weakness of the empire, there existed no law sufficient to exercise a
physical restraint on the will. For Dante this explains the chaos into which Italy had been plunged, and
it moved him, in hopes of remedying these conditions, to take up the epic task
of The Divine Comedy.
But a political event occurred that at first raised tremendous
hope but then plunged Dante into still greater disillusionment. In November
1308 Henry,
the count of Luxembourg,
was elected king of Germany, and in July 1309 the French pope, Clement V, who had
succeeded Boniface, declared Henry to be king of the Romans and invited him to
Rome, where in time he would be crowned Holy Roman emperor in St. Peter’s
Basilica. The possibility of once again having an emperor electrified Italy;
and among the imperial proponents was Dante, who saw approaching the
realization of an ideal that he had long held: the coming of an emperor pledged
to restore peace while also declaring his spiritual subordination to religious
authority. Within a short time after his arrival in Italy in 1310 Henry
VII’s great appeal began to fade. He lingered too long in the north,
allowing his enemies to gather strength. Foremost among the opposition to this
divinely ordained moment, as Dante regarded it, was the commune of Florence.
During these years Dante wrote important political
epistles—evidence of the great esteem in which he was held throughout Italy, of
his personal authority, as it were—in which he exalted Henry, urging him to be
diligent, and condemned Florence. In subsequent action, however, which was to
remind Dante of Boniface’s duplicity,
Clement himself turned against Henry. This action prompted one of Dante’s
greatest polemical treatises, his De
monarchia (c. 1313; On Monarchy), in
which he expands the political arguments of the Convivio. In the
embittered atmosphere caused by Clement’s deceit, Dante turned his
argumentative powers against papal insistence on its superiority over the
political ruler—that is, against the argument that the empire derived its
political authority from the pope. In the final passages of the Monarchia,
Dante writes that the ends designed by Providence for humanity are twofold: one
end is the bliss of this life, which is conveyed in the figure of the earthly
paradise, and the other is the bliss of eternal life, which is embodied in the
image of a heavenly paradise.
Yet despite their different ends, these two purposes are not
unconnected. Dante concludes his Monarchia by assuring his reader that
he does not mean to imply “that the Roman government is in no way subject to
the Roman pontificate, for in some ways our mortal happiness is ordered for the
sake of immortal happiness.” Dante’s problem was that he had to express in
theoretical language a subtle relationship that might be better conveyed by
metaphoric language and historical example. Surveying the history of the
relationship between papacy and empire, Dante pointed with approval to specific
historical examples, such as Constantine’s good will toward the church. Dante’s
disappointment in the failed mission of Henry VII derived from the fact that
Henry’s original sponsor was apparently Pope Clement and that conditions seemed
to be ideal for reestablishing the right relationship between the supreme
powers.
The Divine Comedy
Dante’s years of exile were years of difficult peregrinations
from one place to another—as he himself repeatedly says, most effectively in Paradiso
[XVII], in Cacciaguida’s moving lamentation that “bitter is the taste of
another man’s bread and…heavy the way up and down another man’s stair.”
Throughout his exile Dante nevertheless was sustained by work on his great
poem. The
Divine Comedy was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just
before his death in 1321, but the exact dates are uncertain. In addition, in
his final years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north
of Italy, most notably by Guido
Novello da Polenta, the nephew of the remarkable Francesca,
in Ravenna. There
at his death Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men
of letters of the time, and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself.
The plot of The Divine Comedy is simple: a man,
generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake an
ultramundane journey, which leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise. He has two guides: Virgil, who leads him
through the Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice,
who introduces him to Paradiso. Through these fictional encounters
taking place from Good
Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante
learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had, of course, already
occurred at the time of the writing). This device allowed Dante not only to
create a story out of his pending exile but also to explain the means by which
he came to cope with his personal calamity and to
offer suggestions for the resolution of Italy’s troubles as well. Thus, the
exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it
also becomes representative of the fall of humankind. Dante’s story is thus
historically specific as well as paradigmatic.
The basic structural component of The Divine Comedy
is the canto. The poem consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped together into
three sections, or canticles, Inferno, Purgatorio,
and Paradiso.
Technically there are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto,
contained in the Inferno, which serves as an introduction to the
entire poem. For the most part the cantos range from about 136 to about 151
lines. The poem’s rhyme
scheme is the terza
rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.). Thus, the divine
number of three is present in every part of the work.
Dante’s Inferno differs from its great classical
predecessors in both position and purpose. In Homer’s Odyssey
(Book XII) and Virgil’s Aeneid
(Book VI) the visit to the land of the dead occurs in the middle of the poem
because in these centrally placed books the essential values of life are
revealed. Dante, while adopting the convention, transforms the practice by
beginning his journey with the visit to the land of the dead. He does this
because his poem’s spiritual pattern is not classical but Christian: Dante’s
journey to Hell represents the spiritual act of dying to the world, and hence
it coincides with the season of Christ’s own death. (In this way, Dante’s
method is similar to that of Milton in Paradise
Lost, where the flamboyant but
defective Lucifer and his fallen angels are presented first.) The Inferno
represents a false start during which Dante, the character, must be disabused
of harmful values that somehow prevent him from rising above his fallen world.
Despite the regressive nature of the Inferno, Dante’s meetings with
the roster of the damned are among the most memorable moments of the poem: the
Neutrals, the virtuous pagans, Francesca
da Rimini, Filipo Argenti, Farinata
degli Uberti, Piero delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini,
the simoniacal popes, Ulysses,
and Ugolino della Gherardesca impose themselves upon the reader’s imagination
with tremendous force.
The visit to Hell is, as Virgil and later Beatrice explain, an
extreme measure, a painful but necessary act before real recovery can begin.
This explains why the Inferno is both aesthetically and theologically
incomplete. For instance, readers frequently express disappointment at the lack
of dramatic or emotional power in the final encounter with Satan in canto XXXIV. But
because the journey through the Inferno primarily signifies a process
of separation and thus is only the initial step in a fuller development, it
must end with a distinct anticlimax. In a way this is inevitable because the
final revelation of Satan can have nothing new to offer: the sad effects of his
presence in human history have already become apparent throughout the Inferno.
In the Purgatorio the protagonist’s painful process
of spiritual rehabilitation commences; in fact, this part of the journey may be
considered the poem’s true moral starting
point. Here the pilgrim Dante subdues his own personality in order that he may
ascend. In fact, in contrast to the Inferno, where Dante is confronted
with a system of models that needs to be discarded, in the Purgatorio
few characters present themselves as models; all of the penitents are pilgrims
along the road of life. Dante, rather than being an awed if alienated observer,
is an active participant. If the Inferno is a canticle of enforced and
involuntary alienation, in which Dante learns how harmful were his former allegiances,
in the Purgatorio he comes to accept as most fitting the essential
Christian image of life as a pilgrimage. As Beatrice in her magisterial return
in the earthly paradise reminds Dante, he must learn to reject the deceptive
promises of the temporal world.
Despite its harsh regime, the Purgatorio is the realm
of spiritual dawn, where larger visions are entertained. Whereas in only one
canto of the Inferno (VII), in which Fortuna is discussed, is there
any suggestion of philosophy,
in the Purgatorio, historical, political, and moral vistas are opened
up. It is, moreover, the great canticle of poetry and the arts. Dante
meant it literally when he proclaimed, after the dreary dimensions of Hell:
“But here let poetry rise again from the dead.” There is only one poet in Hell
proper and not more than two in the Paradiso, but in the Purgatorio
the reader encounters the musicians Casella and Belacqua and the poet Sordello
and hears of the fortunes of the two Guidos, Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, the
painters Cimabue and
Giotto,
and the miniaturists. In the upper reaches of Purgatory, the reader observes
Dante reconstructing his classical tradition and then comes even closer to
Dante’s own great native tradition (placed higher than the classical tradition)
when he meets Forese Donati, hears explained—in an encounter with Bonagiunta da
Lucca—the true resources of the dolce stil nuovo, and meets with Guido Guinizelli
and hears how he surpassed in skill and poetic mastery the reigning regional
poet, Guittone
d’Arezzo. These cantos resume the line of thought presented in the Inferno
(IV), where among the virtuous pagans Dante announces his own program for an
epic and takes his place, “sixth among that number,” alongside the classical
writers. In the Purgatorio he extends that tradition to include Statius (whose Thebaid
did in fact provide the matter for the more grisly features of the lower
inferno), but he also shows his more modern tradition originating in
Guinizelli. Shortly after his encounter with Guinizelli comes the long-awaited
reunion with Beatrice in the earthly paradise. Thus, from the classics Dante
seems to have derived his moral and political understanding as well as his conception of
the epic poem—that is, a framing story large enough to encompass the
most important issues of his day, but it was from his native tradition that he
acquired the philosophy of love that forms the Christian matter of his poem.
This means of course that Virgil, Dante’s guide,
must give way to other leaders, and in a canticle generally devoid of drama the
rejection of Virgil becomes the single dramatic event. Dante’s use of Virgil is
one of the richest cultural appropriations in literature. To begin, in
Dante’s poem he is an exponent of classical reason. He is also a historical figure
and is presented as such in the Inferno (I): “…once I was a man, and
my parents were Lombards, both Mantuan by birth. I was born sub Julio,
though late in his time, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus, in the
time of the false and lying gods.” Virgil, moreover, is associated with Dante’s
homeland (his references are to contemporary Italian places), and his
background is entirely imperial. (Born under Julius
Caesar, he extolled Augustus
Caesar.) He is presented as a poet, the theme of whose great epic sounds
remarkably similar to that of Dante’s poem: “I was a poet and sang of that just
son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilium was burned.” So, too,
Dante sings of the just son of a city, Florence, who was unjustly
expelled, and forced to search, as Aeneas had done, for a
better city, in his case the heavenly city.
Virgil is a poet whom Dante had studied carefully and from
whom he had acquired his poetic style, the beauty of which has brought him much
honour. But Dante had lost touch with Virgil in the intervening years, and when
the spirit of Virgil returns it is one that seems weak from long silence. But
the Virgil that returns is more than a stylist; he is the poet of the Roman
Empire, a subject of great importance to Dante, and he is a poet who has become
a saggio, a sage, or moral teacher.
Though an exponent of reason, Virgil has become an emissary of
divine grace, and his return is part of the revival of those simpler faiths
associated with Dante’s earlier trust in Beatrice.
And yet, of course, Virgil by himself is insufficient. It cannot be said that
Dante rejects Virgil; rather, he sadly found that nowhere in Virgil’s work—that
is, in his consciousness—was there any sense of personal liberation from the
enthrallment of history and its processes. Virgil had provided Dante with moral
instruction in survival as an exile, which is the theme of his own poem as well
as Dante’s, but he clung to his faith in the processes of history, which, given
their culmination in the Roman Empire, were deeply consoling. Dante, on the
other hand, was determined to go beyond history because it had become for him a
nightmare.
In the Paradiso true heroic fulfillment is achieved.
Dante’s poem gives expression to those figures from the past who seem to defy
death. Their historical impact continues and the totality of their commitment
inspires in their followers a feeling of exaltation and a desire for
identification. In his encounters with such characters as his
great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida and Saints Francis,
Dominic, and Bernard,
Dante is carried beyond himself. The Paradiso is consequently a poem
of fulfillment and of completion. It is the fulfillment of what is prefigured
in the earlier canticles. Aesthetically it completes the poem’s elaborate
system of anticipation and retrospection.
Legacy and influence
The recognition and the honour that were the due of Dante’s Divine
Comedy did not have to await the long passage of time: by the year 1400 no
fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had
appeared. Giovanni
Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373–74 delivered the first
public lectures on The Divine Comedy (which means that Dante was the
first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a
university course). Dante became known as the divino poeta, and in a
splendid edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective
was applied to the poem’s title; thus, the simple Commedia became La
divina commedia, or The Divine Comedy.
Dante Reading
from the Divine ComedyDante
Reading from the Divine Comedy, painting by Domenico di Michelino, 1465; in the
Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence.© Alfred Dagli Orti—REX/Shutterstock.com
Even when the epic lost its appeal and was replaced by other
art forms (the novel, primarily, and the drama) Dante’s own fame continued. In
fact, his great poem enjoys the kind of power peculiar to a classic: successive
epochs have been able to find reflected in it their own intellectual
concerns. In the post-Napoleonic 19th century, readers identified with the
powerful, sympathetic, and doomed personalities of the Inferno. In the
early 20th century they found the poem to possess an aesthetic power
of verbal realization independent of and at times in contradiction to its
structure and argument. Later readers have been eager to show the poem to be a
polyphonic masterpiece, as integrated as
a mighty work of architecture, whose different sections reflect and, in a way,
respond to one another. Dante created a remarkable repertoire of
types in a work of vivid mimetic presentations, as well as a poem of great
stylistic artistry in its prefigurations and correspondences. Moreover, he
incorporated in all of this important political, philosophical, and theological
themes and did so in a way that shows moral wisdom and
lofty ethical
vision.
Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poem that has flourished
for more than 650 years. In the simple power of its striking imaginative conceptions
it has continued to astonish generations of readers; for more than a hundred
years it has been a staple in all higher educational programs in the Western
world; and it has continued to provide guidance and nourishment to the major
poets of our own times. William Butler
Yeats called Dante “the chief imagination of Christendom,” and T.S. Eliot elevated
Dante to a preeminence shared by only one other poet in the modern world, William Shakespeare:
“[They] divide the modern world between them. There is no third.” In fact, they
rival one another in their creation of types that have entered into the world
of reference and association of modern thought. Like Shakespeare, Dante created
universal types from historical figures, and in so doing he considerably enhanced the
treasury of modern myth.
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Later Medieval Literature 365
Later
Medieval Literature
The
number of literary works written during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries exceeds that of the classical period by far. In addition to
works of the kind that had flourished at the end of the twelfth century, there
were others, such as the drama, short narrative poems («Mären»), didactic works,
and mystical writings. Although many of these can be considered important, one
cannot argue convincingly that any of the literary works of these centuries is
comparable to the great achievements of the classical period. The romances
become longer, the stress is shifted from the development of the individual to
the more superficial aspects of description and action, and there is an
increasing tendency to stress formal religion and morality. Rudolf von Ems
(fl.1220-54) is an excellent example of these developments. His output is vast,
his themes are largely taken from French literature, and he is a conscientious
but uninspired writer. Konrad von Würzburg was roughly a contemporary
(c.1225/30-1287) and presents the same genres with greater talent and technical
skill. The Arthurian tradition appears at its best in this period in the Jüngerer
Titurel (1272) of a certain Albrecht who may be identical with Albrecht von
Scharfenberg (fl.1260-1275).
The
heroic material is represented by the Dietrich epics, but the extant versions
of these are usually very late reworkings. Although the Nibelungenlied
continued to be popular, the only original work in the tradition was the Gedicht
vom Hürnen Seyfried, a thirteenth century work extant only in a
sixteenth-century printed version.
Lyric poetry continued to be composed in the «Minnesang» tradition, and much of
it is nothing more than variations on the clichés of this type of poetry. The
more interesting poets�Steinmar (c.1250-1300), Gottfried von
Neifen (fl.1234-55)� follow the tradition of Neidhart von
Reuental in parodying the «Minnesang» by giving it a peasant background. Other
poets, particularly Frauenlob (c.1250-1318), stress the didactic and religious
elements, whereas Ulrich von Lichtenstein (fl.1198-c.1275) and Johannes Hadlaub
(c.1300-1340) introduce a biographical element, which, whether accurate or not,
makes their poetry more personal. The poetry of Oswald von Wolkenstein
(c.1377-1445) encompasses all these elements, for his poetry is in turn formal,
religious, personal, coarse, and realistic. The lyric poetry of the period is
never far from didacticism, and several poets wrote both love lyrics and
«Sprüche». Longer didactic works are Der Renner by Hugo von Trimberg
(c.1230-c.1313) and Freidank�s (c.1200-c.1233) Von der
Bescheidenheit (c.1215-1230), a collection of pithy sayings, gnomic verses,
and epigrams on topics ranging from religion to ethics, which retained its
influence well into the 16th century.
Although the old types of courtly literature continued to be written, the
audience for them changed completely. The courts of the great nobles ceased to
be the centers of literary
366
Later
Medieval Literature
activity�their place being taken over by the towns.
Here the patrons were naturally the wealthy merchants, and their tastes are
reflected in the literature they sponsored. They mistrusted the idealism of the
courtly literature of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and probably did
not understand the unofficial code of virtues it celebrated. They felt that
literature ought to have an obvious purpose, such as entertainment or moral
instruction. Thus they not only caused the existing types to be modified but
they also encouraged new types, particularly those concerned with moral
behavior. Perhaps the best example of these are the works of Der Stricker
(c.1215-c.1230), whose Pfaffe Amîs, the first German collection of
«Schwänke» or farces, greatly influenced the developed of narrative prose, and
the various «Mären». The latter are short stories with an obvious moral, of
which by far the most effective is Helmbrecht by Wernher der Gärtner
(fl.c.1250-1280). This work also reflects another new aspect of literature:
concern for the peasant. Many of the works in which peasants appear are far
from being sympathetic to them, and we should beware of thinking in terms of �realism.� The village-types are often stereotyped characters in
stereotyped situations, but this does not prevent the scenes presented from
being very amusing and vividly drawn. The two favorites were the peasant
wedding and the drunken brawl, which appear at their most comic in Heinrich
Wittenwiler�s (c.1350-1436) encyclopedic Ring
(c.1400).
Much the
same can be said about the short poems on the relations between man and wife.
Occasionally a virtuous woman is depicted, but far more frequently there are
scenes of quarreling, violence, or sheer eroticism. Such works provided a great
deal of the source material for Hans Sachs� plays.
As might
be expected, the later Middle Ages saw a great advance in prose writing. In
theology in particular a distinctive style was developed and the specialized
vocabulary enlarged by the vernacular works of Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327),
Heinrich Seuse (1295-1366), and Johannes Tauler (1300-1361), who together
virtually created a new means of expression for mystical theology. On a more
mundane level, the great poetical works of earlier ages were put into popular
prose form. Short stories, such as those about Till Eulenspiegel, were also
very popluar. By far the most distinguished prose work of the later Middle Ages
is the Ackermann aus Böhmen (c.1400), a debate between Death and the
Ploughman.
There is
a considerable amount of drama from the later Middle Ages which will be
discussed in some detail in the introduction to the Osterspiel von Muri (c.1250)
and Ain Vastnachtspil (c.1450).
Some of
the most effective writing of the later Middle Ages is in Low German. The
Theophilus play is extant in a Low German version and there are several other
plays in various dialects. By far the best known type, however, is the beast
epic, which is concerned with the struggle between the cunning and amoral fox
Reynard (Reinart, Reineke,
Later
Medieval Literature/Märendichtung 367
Reinke) and the equally
amoral but stupid wolf Isengrim. These epics developed entirely in the Low
Countries, and versions are extant in Latin, French, Dutch, and German. The
various stories in verse, which are known collectively as the Roman de
Renart, appeared in France in the late twelfth and in the first part of the
thirteenth century, but there was a parallel, if less well documented,
development in Holland which resulted in the production of several very similar
versions of the story, in prose at Gouda (1479) and Delft (1485), and in verse
at Antwerp in 1487. The earliest Low German version appeared in verse in Lübeck
in 1498. It was frequently reprinted. The beast epic was a very effective form
of social and political satire and was employed with great gusto by both sides
in the Reformation struggle.
In his Studien zur Märendichtung (Tübingen, 1968), Hanns Fischer added
many new insights to the discussion of the «Märe» as a separate type of short
narrative�as distinguished
from the later «Novelle»�which became rather popular with the beginning of
the decline of traditional courtly culture in the 13th century. Geoffrey
Chaucer�s Canterbury
Tales (c.1387) and Giovanni Boccaccio�s Decamerone (c. 1348-1358) are the
best-known examples of this genre in world literature. «Mären» range from short
exemplary («moralisch-exemplarisch») narratives, legends («legendenhaft»),
courtly short epics, and farces («Schwank», a type of narrative which, incidentally,
was greatly influenced by the lyrics of Neidhart von Reuental whose poetry and
themes already contained the seed for the late fifteenth century collection of
anecdotal strophic poems, referred to as Neidhart Fuchs 1),
to lengthy stories, often written by anonymous authors. In these stories,
courtly ethics are often summarized by a moral, usually at the end of the tale,
in the form of a warning, such as in Helmbrecht�which is often referred to
as the first German �village story,� or «Dorfgeschichte»�or in the form of an
exhortation, as is the case in Schneekind, or Konrad von Würzburg�s Herzmære
which concludes with an appeal to the audience to learn a lesson and to preserve
the ideal of love. So popular were the the various «Mären» that an entire
manuscript is devoted to them, the 1393 Codex Vindobonensis which contains both
the Herzmäre and the Schneekind. The following selections from
the «Märendichtung» represent somewhat of a cross-section of the
above-mentioned variants.
The Middle English period can be taken to begin with the
Norman invasion of 1066 and the subsequent conquest of the whole of England.
Norman French replaced English as the language of the aristocracy and the
church. By the late 11th century the English higher clergy and nobility had
been replaced by French. In the Domesday Book (1086), a detailed record
of land property in England, proposed by William and carried out in his name,
there are virtually no English landlords mentioned — the higher echelons of English
society had been rid of the English.
Sample page from the Domesday Book
A consequence of this is that writing in English only very
slowly regains its position in society. There are some remnants of Old English,
such as the Peterborough Chronicle, with its final entry in 1154, but
these represent the dying throes of a written tradition now virtually extinct.
After this Latin and French are the languages of literacy. It is not until the
late 12th century that works in English slowly begin to appear again — in a
very different guise from the last works in Old English. This time dialectal
diversity, and not the koiné of a central region, characterises the scene. For
this reason it is appropriate to deal with the literary monuments of Middle
English according to geographical provenance.
East Midland
This is the area
which includes London, the new capital of England after the Norman invasion. It
is the region from which the later standard of Britain emerged. Its chief
author is of course Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th century whose main work
is The Canterbury Tales and who also wrote a significant amount of
poetry. The remaining literary documents from the East Midland area, in roughly
chronological order, are the following.
Figures from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
The Orrmulum, a verse work of some 10,000 double lines,
written ca. 1200, consists of a recounting of the story of the gospels and
homilies. Its author is Orrm, a monk who termed his work ‘a little book of
Orrm’. This is of linguistic significance because Orrm consistently used double
consonants after short vowels.
Havelok the Dane is a legend in verse, written sometime before 1300 in
Lincolnshire.
King Horn is a poetical romance about largely Celtic themes and was
written ca. 1260 in Surrey.
Handlyne Synne is a translation of a handbook for the lay community in
the form of a series of tales. It is about 12,000 lines long and was written
ca. 1300 by Robert Mannyng.
The Confessio Amantis (ca. 1390) is a long work of some 34,000 rhyming
couplets by John Gower (1330-1408), the next major 14th century poet of London
after Chaucer.
West Midland
In the second half of the 14th century
there was a revival of interest in alliterative poetry (common in the Old
English period). The language of this region can be further subdivided into a
southern type — exemplified by Langland — and a northern type — seen in the
author of Sir Gawain.
Piers Plowman (1362-3) is by
William Langland who died ca. 1399 and about whose life little is known. This
work is several thousand lines long and available in three versions, A, B and
C.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
is an allegorical poem composed in the late 14th century possibly by the same
author as wrote The Pearl another poem from the northwest midlands.
The Brut by one Layamon is a
history of Britain (which starts with Troy) comprising about 16,000 lines of
alliterative verse.
The Ancrene Riwle, an anonymous
prose work from about 1200, which is a practical guide for nuns.
Southern
This area is roughly co-terminous with the
West-Saxon region of Old English and is attested quite early in the Middle
English period through a number of literary works, some only of linguistic
value.
Poema morale is an anonymous work
of some few hundred lines in rhyming couplets from about 1150.
The owl and the nightingale is an anonymous religious
instructional poem, again in rhyming couplets, from about 1200.
The Chronicle by Robert of Gloucester is a history of England of some
12,000 rhyming couplets from about 1300 and contains an account of the Norman
invasion.
The Polychronicon by Higden, a history of the world, was translated from
the Latin original by John of Trevisa (ca. 1350 - 1402).
Kentish
The south-east corner of England was
originally settled by Jutes and features of their language are probably
responsible for the distinct dialect of Old English in this region and which
continued into Middle English. The main documents for this period are 1) the Kentish
Sermons from around 1250 which are translations of a French version of the
Latin homilies and 2) The Ayenbite of Inwyt ‘The remorse of conscience’,
again a translation and rendering from the French by an Augustinian Monk in the
14th century called Dan Michael of Northgate.
Northern
The dialect of this region was the most
progressive in Old English and the first to absorb material — lexical and
morphological — from the language of the Vikings. It is well attested in a
large history of the western world in some 30,000 lines of verse, the Cursor
Mundi. The author is unknown but was probably a monk from Durham.
Scotland
English was brought to Scotland in the Old
English period and co-existed with Irish — brought from Ulster in the Old Irish
period — chiefly in the southern lowlands. Since then there is a continuous
tradition of writing in English. The major poet of the Middle English period in
Scotland is John Barbour (?1320-?1396) from Aberdeen.
John Barbour with others
He composed the Bruce (about 1375) about the life and
deeds of Robert Bruce (1274-1329) one of the major Scottish kings in the late
Middle Ages. In the 15th century other poets were active and contributed to the
literary reputation of Scotland; among these are Robert Henryson (?1425-?1506),
William Dunbar, (1460-?1530) and Gavin Douglas (?1475-1522). They are sometimes
referred to as Makars or Scottish Chaucerians because of the
influence which the work of Chaucer had on the form and content of their
poetry.
The end of the Middle English period is often taken as 1476
the year in which William Caxton (?1422-1491) introduced printing into England.
Caxton is a literary figure of some note as he composed prefaces to many of the
works which he printed.
William Caxton
Documents from the 15th century are quite abundant; one type
should be mentioned for its linguistic value here. Personal letters are
available from this period which give some clues to colloquial English of the
time. For instance, there is a collection of over 1,000 letters from one
family, the Pastons who lived in Norfolk and corresponded frequently
with each other.
Bible translations
In the history of European languages
translations of the Bible play a central role. Such translations often have the
effect of standardising the language — to a large extent in written German with
the translation by Luther (1483-1546) — or indeed of establishing an accepted
written form in the first place as with the Finnish translation by Mikael
Agricola (1509-1557). Translations of the Bible or parts of it have been made
throughout the history of English. For instance in the Old English period the
four gospels were translated into the West Saxon dialect. Another early
translation which should be mentioned is that by John Wycliffe and his
associates, produced in the late 14th century. It was based on the Latin
version by St.Jerome and translated into the East Midland dialect of Middle
English.
There is, however, a particular period — the 16th and early 17th centuries — in
which a number of translations of the Bible appeared which had an influence on
the development of written English.
William Tyndale (c.1494-1536) translated the New Testament in 1525 and
revised this in 1534. This is the first printed version of an English
translation; it appeared in Cologne.
Willian Tyndale
Miles Coverdale (?1488-1569)
produced a translation of the entire Bible from German which was printed in
Cologne in 1535.
Thomas Matthew is associated with the first complete version of the
Bible to be printed in England (1537). It is attributed to Matthew but was
produced by John Rogers, one of Tyndale’s circle and show his influence along
with that of Coverdale.
The Great Bible of 1539 is so called because of its size. Its contents
represent a revision of Matthew’s Bible by Miles Coverdale. It contains a
preface by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) and is one of the first
official versions to be used in Protestant England. This translation was
revised and came to be known as the Bishop's Bible (1568), being adopted
as the official version by the Protestant church in 1571.
The Geneva Bible (1560) derives its name from the fact that it was
printed in Switzerland. It was compiled by Protestant exiles living abroad
during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary.
Title page of the Geneva Bible
The Douai-Rheims Bible (1609-1610) is again called
after the towns in Europe where it was printed (in two stages, one in each
town). This time it was prepared by Catholic emigrant priests using the Latin
Vulgate after the Protestant restoration in England under James I.
The King James Bible (1611) is the main translation of the early modern
period and because of its authoritative standing is also termed the Authorised
Version. The translation was produced after a commission was issued by
James I and is the work of several scholars. The language aspect, while
conservative, is regarded as particularly successful in its style. It has had a
similar dissemination and influence on written English as did The book of
common prayer first produced under Cranmer in 1549, revised on various
occasions as late at 1662.
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