Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 3

[At length, after an absence doubtless not unwelcome, the historian whose heavy hand is responsible for the preceding posts returns, with five weeks’ worth of writing. If he had the opportunity, no doubt, he would completely rewrite the remainder of this Chapter. As is, he must settle for some brief explanatory remarks. The first is that they are largely concerned with what in despair he has decided to call science, though, in fact, as often as not he is concerned with a misconception of science. The reader will not doubt that he has a hearty fascination with the natural world and a clear conviction that it operates according to natural laws; but they will equally realise that he deeply disagrees with the philosophy of Dawkins. He can only plead that the scientist he is writing about did too; and that, as his account of the scientific revolution should show, Dawkins represents only a branch of a branch of scientific philosophy. The second is a philosophical matter. The author’s opinion – so far as I can get it from him – is that we talk too much about ‘science’ in the abstract; and though here he has faced the word directly, and endeavoured to demonstrate its complexity, he thinks anyone wiser than himself would have taken a more roundabout route, by leaving the word science be, and discussing wisdom or curiosity or precision instead, until the idea of science sprang up spontaneously in their mind, without any of the baggage we have hung on it by long usage. The last is a caution. If this section errs, it errs into unclarity. He therefore considers it best that the following five parts be taken together, as one continuous argument, rather than a series of independent essays. And finally, now that he has unburdened his mind from the troublesome task of thinking about science, he has fallen into a deep slumber.]

There are two possible reactions to the foreign quality of Browne’s science. The instinctive response is to suppose that it is not wholly scientific. I suggested, above, that Browne’s science seems to us misguided, when I said that it is unlikely to be misleading. Now it seems to me that his image and opinions of science are not only interesting and stimulating, but positively instructive, and in that capacity important. For the other way we might react to the strangeness of his science is to infer that our own understanding of science is somewhat awry.

This topic will take us into the whole history of the scientific revolution, but that will hardly be a digression. That is, after all, Browne’s immediate context; and he is himself a player in that revolution. Hence some clarification of what science is will help, not only in the study of the man, but also in the study of his times.

The word science is loaded with connotations of a kind that make it dangerous for use in history. It obscures matters, not by being vague, but by being concrete. There are words like ‘faith’ that conjur up only vague images and meaningless, contradictory overtones, but that is not the problem with ‘science’. ‘Goodness’ has always had a hard time defining itself, though it has at various points in the past it has met with some success; in the modern world it has finally given up and settled on retaining one concrete meaning to keep it in business, in the vulgar line of food advertisement. But ‘science’  is not afflicted by this vagueness. We know exactly what science is. We can picture it: and we frequently do. We picture it every time we contemplate the real world. Science, to our understanding, is modern life.

And our picture of it is beyond belief; it is as wild as the wild utopian visions of an imaginative medieval man. Imagine him, as he imagines you: he sits in his stone cell, with a goose feather in his hand, and his trusty iron-gall ink at his side. He has a lump of coarse bread in front of him, though he is too rapt with his fancies to eat it. He is on a wooden stool with a wooden desk and his light is a little candle. There is nothing remotely modern within sight. And this is what he imagines.

‘First: in the world of science, in the future paradise of knowledge, there will be a marvellous renovation of the matter of things. Buildings will be wrought, not of stone or wood or iron, but of secret compound substances the which are most pliable and sturdy, and whereof there shall be no lack. Clothes, likewise, shall not be in dearth, for magic and scientific arts shall have discovered a means whereby fabrics marvellous light and fine shall be had in good supply. From fire, whereby innumerous accidents and tragedies have oft befallen man, shall the danger and labour be disengaged; whereby light and warmth shall be provided at small cost. The life of the sage shall be enlightened and easy, for there shall be nothing in want but the new arts shall amply provide: when he riseth, no servant shall be needed to cook his breakfast or brew his coffee (for coffee and tea and spices and all such luxuries of the east shall be transported by swift means beyond the device of our imagination), but he shall have them. His chariot shall need no horses, but shall be motive through a swiftness wrought within it. His tower, wherein he shall labour, will he ascend without stairs, but by rapid and automatic ascent, so completely will he have harnessed the powers of nature; and all the day shall he pry into the secret and mystical cyphers and numerics whereby the natural forces of the world are ordered. All things that now must be done by man or beast will in that time be accomplished by ingenuity, and nothing shall be debarred from the wise and blessed people of that age: they shall raise themselves aloft in flight and descend to the depths of the ocean.’

This – and much more like it – is what our inspired monk dreams of, as the extreme end of the arts of knowledge – what we call science. This, to him, is its utmost perfection. It is a portrait of the life of a modern drudge in an office. It could well be an accountant.

That is what we mean by science: everything that makes modern life modern; and everything that premodern life lacked. Science, in our minds, is essentially synonymous with 21st century enlightenment. To the medieval man, scientia meant nothing more than specific than ‘knowledge’; and though like all words it has passed through various meanings, its present use is almost ferociously literal. A simple enumeration of human knowledge shows that. We all know that the natural world is the basic subject of science; and we now think we know, in varying degrees of detail, everything from one end of the physical universe to the other. All technology is attributed to science; thus science includes what is man-made as well as what is natural. The present state of morality and religion owes itself to science: so every agnostic or atheist, and most believers too, are convinced that their beliefs are scientific. All rationalism or enlightenment is thought to be scientific, for it is generally believed that before science all thought was simple, superstitious and strange. Indeed, there is a current vogue in what people used to call primitive superstition; and it owes itself to the collective realisation of Western people that they are not simple, superstitious or strange enough themselves. They may talk unscientific, but at the end of the day they still think that science is plain fact. Let us take even the opposite of science; surely the humanities deserve that title. But history, in today’s books, is scientific history, and a belief has gotten around in the philosophy departments, that philosophy, which was once the handmaid of theology, is now the handmaid of science. With so long a train it is a wonder that scientists still talk about progress. It is a heavy weight to drag.

But if everything modern is governed by science, it is not because science is a broad concept. It finds its way into all modern knowledge, but it does not mean simply intelligence. It means a particular kind of intelligence – a certain way of thinking. Consider what we mean by the word ‘scientist’. Though science is the guiding principle of all modern knowledge, not all modern people are scientists. ‘Scientist’ means someone completely guided by empiricism, and impervious, in their official capacity, to emotions and philosophy. It means someone who is systematic and theoretical, whose habitual thoughts are so technical as to be beyond the comprehension of most mere mortals. It means someone who works in a laboratory and studies things so microscopic that ordinary people are not even aware of their existence. It means someone who operates in an array of very rigidly defined Latin terms, or in figures and formulas wherein Greek letters outnumber Arabic numerals. That is our modern opinion on what a scientist is, and because it is modern, we consider it a scientific image of what a scientist is. Consequentially, there is a vague notion around, that science, in our overweening sense, was developed by such people as these. Which, as it happens, is not true. The current breadth of knowledge owes itself to a most motely crowd of individuals, few of whom fit that description. The current ingenuity of technology owes itself to many who do not fit that description at all. So long as we think of science as simply that, a great many who had the intellectual virtues that won us our modern knowledge are dismissed as backward and antiquated. For we consider a person of the past enlightened in so far as they share our worldview, which is itself a harsh and fruitless standard; but for a scientist of the past to be enlightened, they must also fit our image of scientists, which is so brutally specific.

This view of science, and this way of judging scientists, I think, does really exist, which is in itself astonishing; particularly as it exists amongst historians, who of all people ought to oppose it. It is a view that creates a terrible sense of historical claustrophobia, and suffocates the life of the past; and among the unwary it has been suffered to suffocate discipline of history. When the present is used as an absolute measuring rod for the past, it is impossible to learn real lessons. If all modern thought is scientific, then is to the present that we must look to learn science – not the past. And since science means ‘all that makes us enlightened,’ that is a severe restriction on the lessons to be learnt from history. If science is the present state of things, in matters of nature, technology, ethics, religion, scholarship, and philosophy, what can the past teach us? The only ideas from the past we will approve are those that bear resemblance to our own: if our world and worldview is enlightened, then worldviews unlike ours, in the past, must be unenlightened. The only lessons we will be willing learn are the lessons we have already learnt. All the lessons of history will be old lessons, and that means outdated lessons. For it is a profound and terrible truth that if you want to believe in history, you cannot believe in yourself; and a scientific society establishes itself upon a smug self-confidence. To be sure, there is a current reaction against this, which we shall return to in the course of our discussion. For now, we are simply concerned with it as it affects our understanding of the scientific revolution, and more specifically Sir Thomas Browne. And this is the essential principle, without which it is impossible to understand the past: that if we want to learn anything from history, we must get out of our own heads. We must take a broader view of enlightenment than we are used to. We must be take a more scientific view of science.

It is impossible to deny that if we judge by this standard of enlightenment, Browne is not noteworthy at all. He is a century behind the best of his generation on the points that matter most to us, and his methods are as far from our own as one could ask. At best he is a half-committed cousin of Kepler and Galileo, for he is certainly not in their league; and in a revolution it is the half-committed on whom the judgement falls heaviest – and the guillotine. Fortunately the modern historian is rather more sparing than the Jacobin: though we might idly regret the consequent insipidity of modern history books. At worst, the critics first praise his modernity and then castigate him for not being modern enough. At best, they treat him as essentially ignorant and backwards, and then praise the flashes of enlightenment that occasionally break through. At any rate, all are agreed in considering him little more than a curious mediocrity.

Indeed, Browne suffers more from our standards than most of his other great contemporaries. Take up the comparison, or rather the contrast, with Galileo, and the point becomes clear. All that is best in Galileo is still approved today. A great deal has been added, much, perhaps, superseded, but in spirit he is still considered basically praiseworthy. It helps that we give him a selective hearing. What his views on chemistry were, I do not know; it is almost certain that they were cruder than our own. What his views on religion were, I do know: and they are definitely more Catholic than our own, and in some senses more medieval. But these do not matter to us. He did not set up as an expert on chemistry or Catholicism. It is his astronomy that is important, and in astronomy he really was moving towards modern views. It is his physics that matter, and in physics he really was progressive.

The case is different with Browne, simply because there is almost nothing in common between Browne’s project and Galileo’s. They are both part of the scientific revolution. They are both revolutionaries, but they stand for two different revolutions. They almost stand for two contrary revolutions, whose successful union is as surprising as the other great union of the day, the union of England with Scotland. Both revolutions were necessary for the creation of modernity. Galileo stands for one revolution: a mathematical revolution in scientific theory. Browne stands for the other revolution: the revolution in research.

As a mere matter of gratitude we might consider all who contributed, whichever half of the revolution they participated in, as scientists; for what we mean by the scientific revolution is that swift and sweeping change that gave us the knowledge that makes us modern. And it is more than a mere token to call people scientific who carefully and earnestly pursued knowledge, and men like Browne did every bit as much as men like Galileo. But it is pure laziness if we do not make an effort to understand both sides of the revolution. Before concluding that Browne is a half-baked scientist, because he read Aristotle and Galen as well as cutting up cadavers, or because he did not make such sensational discoveries as Galileo, and in general did not meet our modern standards, we have to ask whether he would have wanted to meet our standards. ‘Science’ meant something different to him than it does to us; and rather than hurrying on with the assumption that we know better than him, we might take the time to consider what, in his time, science really was. Then we can start asking whether it was better or worse than our own science. Not before.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 2

Descriptions of Browne as a writer tend to be backwards, in that they present his private face before his public face. The reason is that his private face seems unusually accessible. His greatest work is a kind of personal confession or stylised journal that he never intended to publish. People read Browne for Browne, simply because in an idle hour Browne thought to write a few notes about Browne. He eclipsed himself.

The order must be reversed. His published works must be considered before his pirated works. His published works say what he what he wanted to say – what he said when he was successful in expressing himself. The reader interested in the man, when turning from his published tracts to his religious confession, doubtless feels that they are unmasking him. And, sure, it is the nosy business of a biographer to unmask a man; but it is wrong to assume that when someone says things in private that they would not say in public, the things they say in public must be a mask. Further, it is wrong to assume that the things they say in private are not a mask. We are not more honest and perceptive when we speak to ourselves than when we speak to others; what we say to ourselves may be every bit as full of presumption, flattery, and deceit. Nor are we always more honest when we speak to individuals than when we speak to the public.

Browne’s opinions on religion are perhaps the most enduringly important of the things he has to say, but he would never have pretended to be an authority on religion. Hence he did not publish them, but showed them to his friends. What he published was the fruit of his expertise, and it is therefore far more telling. These books are the products of his ideals. The personal confession fills out our picture of his mind, but it does not add outlines. The contours of his mind are found in all his works. Now, it is certain that the Religio Medici, the masterpiece, tells us more about him, and we shall certainly never blame his shrewd and malicious friends for publishing it for him. But if we are to understand the most important aspects of the writer, we must start with the aspects that carry over into his published works. They are more difficult, but they are rewarding. Their very titles announce their peculiarity: Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Errors; Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial; and The Garden of Cyrus.

Two qualities strike us when we start reading these books, which are primarily scientific in nature. The first is that at times it seems as though he has mistaken English for another language, something continental like Spanish or Italian; and the second, that he seems to have mistaken science for another discipline, something speculative like history or metaphysics. They are both sound observations, except that he was not mistaken in either case.

For in the first place, English is another language. Whatever it is, it is not English, for wherever it is from, it is not from England. Whether or not it be an insular innovation, it is of continental composition. They say, for instance, that Browne’s English is Latinate, in that it relies largely on words of Latin origin. And English itself is Latinate, in that it relies largely on words of Latin origin. In a kinder mood they say that he blends this Latinate with the Germanic; and English itself is a blend of the Latinate and the Germanic. I do not mean to suggest that Browne’s prose is not peculiar, but the reason is not that it is unenglish. What is really peculiar and striking about Browne’s English is that it is pure and essential English, such as only our older authors could write; the English one would produce if one was given a recipe and the ingredients and left to make it oneself. I am happy to take an extreme example. Critics laugh (or scowl) when Browne, in the innocence of old age, ventures to suggest that ‘assuetude minorates iniquity’. Whether or not they understand his point, which is sound, they think that his prose is unjustifiably Latinate (and will not allow anything to minorate this iniquity, though it was assuetude that occasioned it). But they do not say the same about more familiar linguistic equivalents – which can be found by slapping together any three Latin-based words you like, such as ‘circumstances create complexity’ or ‘altitude affects pressure’.

Of course, the real difficulty is that the words are unfamiliar. There are a number of words that have become by tradition part of the English language, and it is true that  Browne, who operated in eight European languages, is not always careful to confine himself to these; and it is true that this occasionally makes Browne’s points a bit unclear. That is natural. Browne is not in the end writing English, he is writing European – for him any word between Greece and the Getae is fair game. But then, English is not English, in the sense of being British – an experiment in reading Briton will confirm this. It too is European. And by this happy accident it comes about that Browne is usually quite comprehensible, whatever admixture of German and English he uses. In other words, English is already a random assortment of foreign words, and therefore it is by nature happy to incorporate more. Even Browne’s simplest prose bears this out, and his most complicated prose simply investigates the boundaries of the language. For we are apt to forget that a simple sentence like this – that ‘Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as religion’ – is a garbling of a foreign conglomeration like this, ‘die Men’ hab’ gelöst ihre ratione in nein dinge so mik’ als religione.’

By themselves these comments would leave a false impression of Browne’s prose. By far more often than not, it is the fact that he uses familiar words in an unfamiliar way that surprises us. For every one minoration of iniquity you will find half a dozen phrases like ‘no slender antiquity’, or ‘we behold him but asquint, upon reflex or shadow’, or ‘they counterfeit some more real substance in that invisible fabric.’ It usually does not take us long to realise what he means, but it leaves the impression of astonishment on us. It is often the case, though not always, that the words have taken a trip back to their roots and returned in different trim.

Hence Browne’s prose is not unremarkable. But the foreign quality is really one of its most English qualities. Its outstanding quality is not the proportion of foreign words, which is impossible in a language entirely composed of foreign words; not the blend of northern and southern elements, Teutonic and Romance; it is not the length of his sentences, though they are usually long, nor the length of his words, though they too are often long; its outstanding quality is creativity. He speaks the English of the England that exists on the moon, as if the language had developed in a different direction. Only, to a large extent, he developed his dialect himself. Needless to say, we owe a lot of our words to him. Now, if one is willing to assay the difficulty of tracing his difficult words through footnotes or endnotes, then there is no reason to react with approval to the words Browne succeeded in giving us, and disapproval to the words he failed to give us. They are all respectable; only the recklessness of Browne’s invention gives a sense of adventure and surprise to his prose.

The same alien quality strikes us in the style of his science. The is not the science we know. It is not a 20th century science. It is not even the naturalism of Darwin or of Huxley. It is barely even the naturalism of Galileo or Newton, who probably knew better than to speculate that a plant could be restored from its ashes.

One tenet may serve as a sample for the quality of it: the tenet that ‘life is an invisible flame’ that runs below the surface of the skin. As it happens, the tenet is not correct. It is not unscientific to be wrong, and doubtless our own scientists are wrong about a number of things, and are no less scientific because of it.

Now in the first place you must note that this fancy of the invisible flame is a modern idea. It is one of the many dead-end doctrines that litter the wake of the history of progress, like Descartes’ vortices, ousted by atoms, and the sufficiency of Newton’s laws, upturned by Einstein. And like any modern scientific theory, the theory of the life-flame provides a physical explanation for the phenomena surrounding organic life, such as body warmth and digestion, without appeal to an immaterial spirit, though Browne, like many scientists greater than himself, believes in the human spirit.

On the other hand, the fancy of the invisible flame has a simplicity and poetry that the reality lacks. It is not of a piece with the scientific doctrines that have survived into the 21st century. Whatever the truth of the matter, it doesn’t sound modern. For there is a lively sense of nature spiritualised in it. Of all the elements to identify with life, fire is the most fitting. Fire is a restless breath, a dancing heat, a vital light; and life surely reminds us of light, warmth, and energy. To say that life is a fire validates our feeling that fire is alive. And in general, in the old philosophy, the elements seems more themselves, and play the parts we would expect of them. There are no inconceivable atoms to explain the solid, tangible realities we daily meet; the reality is what the senses tell us: earth is earthy, and made of earth, just as all liquid springs from the primal water. These old men of science discovered things that other people had not seen, not because they looked where other people could not look, but because they looked where other people did not look. There was not the same sense that science explains what we daily see in a way that we who daily see it would never guess on our own. To give another extreme example, Browne scarcely seems aware that the earth goes around the sun.

Some of the alluring strangeness of Browne’s science arises from mere age and outdatedness. Like everything that is relatively new to the world, his modern 17th-century beliefs leap out at us with the illusion of antiquity. But there is in it a natural fascination; its very character is to be an eternally poetic science. For it is the science of an age of marvels, the imaginative science of an imaginative age, and the science of an ignorant age, though not an ignorant science. It is the kind of science that treats of the Griffin and the Phoenix, even if just to confirm that they do not exist, and therefore it is a science that has a category to contain the elephant and the lamprey, beasts no less outrageous, though as it happens they do exist.

It is furthermore a science predicated on the rule of reason, a Platonic science, and in that regard also not a fully modern science. One of the most significant effects of the scientific revolution was the destruction of reason. The scientists of today believe in logic and law, but only in mathematical logic and arbitrary law. They do not believe in reason, as these antiquated scientists do. They do not believe that the universe is arranged in a reasonable way, they believe it is a chaos of flames and flecks. They do not believe that the planets revolve in reasonable order, they believe that they are irregularly spaced and irregularly revolving due to the conflict of various laws and forces. They do not believe it is reasonable for earth to be inhabited; most believe we have evolved, and none believe it is reasonable that we have; it is what they call a coincidence, even an unbelievable coincidence, and perhaps an unutterably far-fetched coincidence. They believe there are reasons for everything, in the sense that there are explanations for everything, but they do not believe that the endless irregularity that results is reasonable or orderly. They believe there are reasons why things do happen, but they do not think there are reasons why the things that do happen should happen.

Yet the universe of Browne is run on rational principles. Here is the first:  ‘“nature does nothing in vain” is the only indisputable axiom in philosophy.’ Which is to say, ‘every essence, created or uncreated, has its final cause,’ i.e. a purpose. And that the world is in some manner neat and orderly: ‘It is a riddle to me… how so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysics, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of spirits;’ for if there are no spirits, there is a gap between man and God, and nature is left looking irregular.

This kind of science is, by the standards of our day, wonderful, and misguided. For that very reason it is very valuable to us. We are hardly likely to be misled in matters of fact by such books as his, because we are inclined to be skeptical when we read them. And we are hardly likely to be misled in matters of philosophy, because we look on his worldview at a remove, and it is incompatible with our own. It will certainly not mislead us, but it can awaken us. It is easy in a culture that has absorbed science and naturalism so much as our own has to forget what science and naturalism are, and why we took an interest in them in the first place. Enlightenment, when it has revealed many things, makes us forget what it is to be unenlightened, and when we can no longer remember that, we can no longer remember what it is to become enlightened. Here is enlightenment in its glory – enlightenment amidst marvels, which it does not disdain to speak of, though it is sometimes compelled to disbelieve. It reminds us what the world is, how ingenious, how beautiful and how grievous, how spiritual, how divinely fascinating: and it helps, not hinders, that this is done through slogans that now seem unbelievable, and projects that seem over the top; for nature herself, as we are coming to relearn, is unbelievable and over the top.

Today there is still a sense that the science of the world is marvellous and wonderful, but we mean something quite different when we say that. It is wonderful, not because it is full of mysteries and the surprises that lurk behind blind corners or under the earth, but because it is complicated and yet coordinated beyond our wildest expectations. There is a great reversal: Browne believes firmly in the orderliness and rationality of the universe, and sustains his awe fresh by constant discoveries of new marvels and mysteries. He believes that ‘there are no grotesques in nature’ but is constantly discovering new grotesques that he knows must fit in some ingenious way. We, by contrast, believe that all nature is grotesque, that the universe is aimless and luxuriant, like an overgrown garden of galaxies, but we are constantly marvelling at how clever and ingenious nature is in achieving its accidental goals. For Browne beauty is the assumption and mystery is the marvel: for us mystery is the assumption and beauty is the marvel. ‘Wonder’ means something much more tame for us. It is easier for us to patronise the universe even while proclaiming how far beyond us it is.

This sense of mystery is essential to the poetry of Browne’s writings. His science is a dark faculty, an unevenly focused eye flitting through the darkness of the boundless world. What we would tell as facts he tells as hints. There is an enormous difference between hearing on the one hand that the beanstalk, when it splits the seed, uses the nutrients stored therein to feed its first growth, and hearing, on the other, Browne’s curious and inconclusive observation, that ‘In beans the leaf and root sprout from the germen, the main sides split, and lie bye, and in some pulled up near the time of blooming we have found the pulpous sides entire, or little wasted.’ The very uncertainty of the observation makes the content more arresting. And in much of Browne’s work there is the murkiness of time mixed in. We do not always think of scientific botany as rooted in wild gardens, and we never think of it as seated in the gardens of the savage bureaucracy of a bygone age: but Browne’s botany finds a resource in primeval Persia. This is the basis of the essay The Garden of Cyrus, which like much of Browne’s work strikes us as an unusual mixture of antiquarianism and empiricism. It is permeated by a dark logic. A logic whereby, since even the cylinder does not exclude the square, it may be found that the limbs of animals bear out in their form the wisdom of Cyrus. The logic is to us no logic – the link is so tenuous that I will not explain it here – but it is the logic of a man threading a deep maze, the maze of all human knowledge. The result is a constant air of mystery and a constant air of discovery.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 1

Some years ago, the Western world succumbed to the force of its own personality and arrogated itself to one of the most bizarre titles in the history of civilisation. There is something quaint in the old Roman idea that a golden age might come after an iron age and outshine it, as if, having progressed from stone through bronze in stages of increasing technological facility, people suddenly forgot the practical needs of life and ran off in pursuit of a shiny and useless metal. But the charming innocence that conceived gold as the next in a series stretching from stone to iron is not quite so ludicrous as the unassailable logic that put the postmodern age after the modern age. It was the cultural equivalent of Napoleon’s self-coronation, every bit as naïvely arrogant and every bit as dazzlingly insane. For the word postmodern, signifying post-present, could only have occurred to a peculiarly romantic (or unthinking) thinker, and could only have become popular in an age obsessed with time travel. In short, the idea of postmodernity is an outstandingly modern idea. It suits the age that could invent it very well.

That said, it seems to me that it forebodes a tragedy. It reflects a chronic boredom with respectable reasoning and prosaic ‘real life’ – a chronic boredom I respect deeply, as it is one of the key ingredients of commonsense, but one which means that, soon enough, they will become bored with the postmodern too. After the postmodern will come the post-postmodern; that is to say, after the post-present will come the post-future. The idea will tantalise them – there is already talk of it – and eventually they will give in, and post-postmodernity will gain general recognition. Having moved on from the present and now also fallen off the edge of the future, they will be forced to acknowledge, by process of elimination, that their age is not temporal at all, but eternal; and though they will fight the thought for a long time, they will eventually be forced to admit the bitter truth. The instinct that first impelled them, the chronic boredom which is chronological boredom, the fierce urge to maintain that no age is eternal, that even the present must pass and the modern shall be no more, and that human ‘progress’ is not a steady ascent, but, like a planet on an epicycle of an epicycle, a series of regressions and even digressions leading nowhere in particular, though always through new places – this urge will destroy itself, when, in the post-future, they find that there is nowhere left to go.

Like all historical phenomena, this chronic boredom was inevitable as soon as it existed (though not before). It was inevitable because the kind of progress that kept the intellectual elite smugly boasting of its ‘modernity’ from the fifteenth century to just about the present day turned out (600 years in) to be rather uninspiring after all. It turned out to be less artistic, less fulfilling, and less meaningful than they had though. In the 18th century there were still hopes that natural human progress could be made into the greatest of all religions. In the 19th century the notion that it was actually quite poetic had not fully died. By the turn of the 20th century there was still talk of it solving all social problems. But after these several centuries, two world wars, the invention of the atom bomb, and the moon-landing (which, since it meant it was no longer possible to believe the Man in the Moon, was felt to be one giant leap backwards for mankind) people could no longer avoid the fact that progress is only as good as its use. And it is hard to believe that it has generally been used well. It has made the world much more pleasant in some respects, and quite wantonly made it worse in others. Architecture is a prime example. Bauhaus, say some, has a beauty of its own; but Bauhaus, say the masses of mankind, has nothing on the Gothic. Our own generation – even those with an appreciation for modern artforms – is not universally happy to reflect that ‘the great masters’ is a phrase that refers to individuals who have been dead 300 years and more, and that new great poetry has not been seen in the land for nearly a century. A few obscure song-writers make up the meagre exception.

Progress and knowledge and technology and democracy are not to blame for any of this. Most of us are happy to acknowledge that. At the same time, most would agree that modernity has taken its toll on the attractiveness of the world we live in and of the way we live in it. While it hasn’t lessened the number of inquisitions, it has lessened the number of forests. It hasn’t increased the average person’s love for their neighbour, but it has decreased their faith in God. And while it may have increased the amount of things we know, it has also increased the sense that that they are mere facts. Something in the spirit of the world has been weakened by modernity. Secularism has sapped its energy. The human world has lost character.

Perhaps every generation has its own grievance with the past. The scholars of the Renaissance blamed the medievals for leaving them in a sink of ignorance; the romantics blamed the Enlightenment for leaving them too many drawing-room ballads and too few outdoor ramblings. It is true that the modern age is not the first to take its toll. But out of the entire syndicate of tax-collecting eras, it is probably the one that has embezzled the most, and there is some justice in hanging around to see what we can possibly retrieve from it. At least, that would be less insane than hanging around the ancient Assyrian tax-booth to complain.

The intent of these essays is to illustrate the issue of embezzled character, not through a grieved postmodern bitterly looking back on the past, but by something more peculiar and prodigious, a grieved premodern suspiciously looking forward onto the future. I have spent as much time as any frustratedly bumping up against the banality of modern life; here I propose to take a detour and approach it from the other end. The ideal of modernity has not really died, whatever the postmoderns say; really we all do appreciate science and innovation and the less abysmal aspects of the 21st century; but the ideal has been handled poorly for all of four hundred years, and it has become hard to remember what exactly the ideal was. The dissatisfied critic sitting at this end of modernity and trying to get in soon discovers that the door is exit only. But at the other end, the seventeenth century, there is an entry door; and at that door there is also a dissatisfied critic – though not an unhappy one; a medieval man committed with enthusiasm to the modern ideal, but critical of the way he saw it playing out. That man, Sir Thomas Browne, is to be the subject of our study.

Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Preface

Having indulged myself to the full in that vastly superior manner of blogging, to wit, not blogging at all, I take up my pen once more. The definite disadvantage of this new method is that I have to write. The dubious advantage is that other people can read. I am often led to reflect upon the genius of Diogenes Cunctator, the great Epicurean philosopher whose contribution to philosophy was writing nothing. A very Epicurean accomplishment. He always did intend to produce an oeuvrage, but he contrived never to be at his desk at the right time, entered and exited life in total ignorance of the whereabouts of the publisher’s office, and never knew that his innocent assumption that his pen was sharpened and ready whenever he needed it was in fact false. He didn’t realise that he owned no pens. His life, as you can imagine, was the most profound commentary upon the Art of Procrastination ever composed. Bacon’s essay of the same name is also worth consulting.

I myself was determined to imitate this admirable if fabricated philosopher, and indeed had met with some success; but it so happened that I stumbled upon my desk one morning, and found that, unlike Cunctator, I did own a pen, and it was not quite hopelessly blunt either. The damage was done; I discovered with horror that I was disposed to verbal idleness rather than the more innocuous varieties, and that this inclination was incurable. The result was the chapters that follow.

They are about a philosopher who has been pooh-poohed from the academy; a scientist who is regularly denied that honour; a writer whose style is seen as his chief virtue, but whose chief virtue as a stylist is generally thought to be his incomprehensibility. Needless to say, Sir Thomas Bronwe has an exalted rather than a broad following.

Since Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Herman Melville and Borges have all been enamoured of his work, it is hardly necessary to write another eulogy for him. I could hardly find better praise for him than they already have. Well, I come to unbury him, not to praise him: and that labour might not be wholly. For a man who was ancient in his own time, whose works smelt of the grave before they were written, and who was, as it were, buried before he was dead – and he has been dead three centuries and more, now – a little exhumation seems necessary.

That said, it is not my purpose to modernise him. I have standardised his spelling in these essays, but I am convinced that the original spelling should be retained in new editions of Browne, even if that means that they are originall spelynges. Quaint presentation fits quaint thought, and sober spelling can make him sound dull when he is not. But it does no good to put his erratic spelling next to the monotonous rectitude of modern standardised English; it either makes it harder to take him seriously, or it makes it harder to take us seriously. I mention this not because spelling is all that important, but because it illustrates the attitude I have taken toward him generally. I have attempted the same thing with his ideas: I have shown that they are relevant to ourselves, but with a view to showing that they are relevant to issues for broader than the present generation’s. Like all true philosophers, he is eternally up to date because he is eternally out of date; as he was relevant in his own day, though he had no interest in current affairs, so he is relevant in our day though he could not have foreseen our current affairs.

For my contention is that he is not a mere stylist. His philosophy and personality matter more than his prose. That is to say, he is a good writer. No good writer is truly concerned with writing for its own sake. You will hear otherwise from critics and litterateurs who have the advantage (or disadvantage) of days on end with nothing to do other than idle reading, btu the truth is that no book is ever worth reading for its style alone. No book is ever interesting, however fine its style, if it is devoid of content. And if that ever seems to be the case – as it has seemed to many with Browne – then you ought to consider the possibility that it is the style of thought, not the style of the prose, that is gripping your attention. So it is with Browne. And I might as well confess from the start, that I think his works ought to be more popular, because I think his style of thought ought to be more popular.

A Tribute to the Good Old Science of Everything: Part 1

e must be clear from the start that by “History” I mean no mean province of the vast kingdom of Human Knowledge. I scarce mean less than the capital. But it may be well to remind ourselves what exactly that kingdom is. For it is not, as you might suppose, a collection of facts, or a constellation of disciplines; it is not merely the meeting point of Science and Sociology and the theory of Statecraft. It is more like a tavern or a tea room, a meeting place of people; or rather, I think, a meeting of minds. It is a great gathering of specialists. And what specialists they are! Here is Homer, with his fine monograph on heroism; there is Plato, with a dissertation on the Divine. Galileo has that stuff on stars and the Stoics on good sense; the tragedians have their tragics and the comedians their jokes – so many writers, thinkers, songsmiths, wafflers; so many experimentalists and inventors, each in their partial provinces, each bound in a book, sometimes all on the one shelf – and I would put it to you, that that shelf is the shelf of the historian.

must make a careful distinction though. In comparing the kingdom of knowledge to the kind of club you find in the around of universities, I do not mean to suggest that the university is any special part of the kingdom of knowledge. These august souls whom I have ventured to call ‘specialists’ (comparing great things with small) often have nothing to do with the universities. Some of them could scarce be paid enough to go anywhere near a university. The scholar and the genius both specialise. But they specialise in different ways.

he scholar specialises by what we may call the monograph system. This system has been cleverly devised such that of every hundred monographs, ninety-nine are profoundly boring, even if the remaining one is the very epitome of interest. The scholar first chooses some inspiring topic: the crusades will seem sufficiently stark and impressive for our purposes, if you imagine them as they were, that is, all the nations of bickering Europe marching forth under one man’s banner for the cause of a Crucified God; and the scimitars of Syria crying back in the name of Allah who is One. This is actually something frightfully significant; the scholar must start by choosing something of the kind. Next, employing vast amounts of complicated erudition and study, he narrows it down half a dozen times: so that he ends up with “the ruinous effects of rust on Flemish currency dropped in the Black Sea during the first decade after the Fourth Crusade”. He will then find the most obscure publisher available, out of deference to the tastes of the general public, and have maybe twoscore copies printed off.

nce in a while, the process of narrowing unexpectedly makes the monograph that much more interesting instead; but I think this is the same kind of thing as when you accidentally put a negative sign in a maths equation at half way and end up with an answer diametrically opposite to what you expected.

hat is how scholarship works. Knowledge proceeds in the opposite direction. You start with your inspiring topic – we could take the crusades again, but let us choose a scientific example – the sun – and then, using the same labyrinthine apparatus of study and erudition, you enlarge it by what-you-will degrees – so that you end up, with Galileo, discovering the Laws of All Nature. Hence Galileo started as a simple astronomer and ended up a mighty Scientist. Again, Saint Thomas set out to solve a few little technical problems of philosophy, but became the Angelic Doctor, the Expert on Existence.  And any number of clever men who have come up with a good idea about one thing, have gone on to become philosophers with general – usually somewhat deranged – theories about a thousand things.

n this sense scholarship is just a microcosm of the pursuit of knowledge as a whole, but for midgets, and dealing with incredibly small topics; while knowledge works in the same way, but is designed for giants, and deals with incredibly large topics. Fortunately, most people are able to operate – not with complete success, but with reasonable competency – on both levels. If anything, more people can operate on the large scale than can operate on the small scale. But you will understand what I mean better if I say a typical example of enormous matters of Knowledge is mortality, and a typical example of the minuscule matters of scholarship is an unusual bend in a branch on a bush on your street. A good many people would have take an interest in both.1

ndeed, I would iterate and reiterate that everyone is interested in Knowledge. For on my view, it includes, precisely, everything that is of interest to everybody. Let me explain. In the first place, every person is, it has been discovered, a person. So we all have some stake in understanding what a person is. Everyone thinks, so if someone has some general revelations to make about how to thinks, I am sure we would all to some extent appreciate them, if we had time for them. We all do things, so ethics is inevitable – that is, we all want to know how to do things well; and we all say things, so most of us take the time to learn at least one language thoroughly early on in life (sometimes even before the age of two).

hen there are things outside of us. As most of us will never see the south pole, I cannot include the icy stalactite in my enumeration, dear as it is to me; but let us include trees and clouds and houses and the moon. I do not mean that we all feel a deathly urge to identify a nimbostratus or distinguish the Caledonian from the Norfolk pine. But most of us have on occasion stopped to stare at a tree long enough to make our own startling little discoveries; and most of us have advanced far enough in cloud science to be able, with some confidence, to tell when the sky is angry at us.

gain, society and friendship and God and good and evil. These are things that impinge upon us on a daily basis. I dare say you could summarise all this by saying, ‘matters of general interest are… anything you could easily make a decent story about’. Perhaps that is not a bad way of thinking about it.

veryone is really interested in these things. Even if you say your do not care to know useless information about God and ethics and all that mumbo-jumbo, you must realise that you often do want to know how to act in given circumstances, and what would be best for you: which is ethics: and if you were plagued by a doubt that God might be speaking to you directly, you would be pretty quick to take an interest: which is to say, you are only uninterested in God because you’ve already reached your own conclusions about him. They may be right, or they may not be: the point stands that even if you have no theoretical interest in matters of ethics and religion and so forth, you cannot avoid having a practical interest in all these things.

ven if someone had neither, they may well have an aesthetic interest in these same clouds and trees and gods and ideals. They have some poetic or artistic value. They are fascinating. In reality, we tend to have a mixture of all three: theoretical, practical, and aesthetic interest.

t is high time we returned to our original topic whence we digressed – if you recall, the topic was history. I can now explain what I would mean if I said that a historian is a peculiar kind of scholar whose subject is strictly limited to, ‘everything’. – Which is true. A good deal of trickery was involved in gaining this glorious position. First, we divided the whole expanse of time into three parts, past, present, future, and applied for a grant to study one of these categories, viz., the past. Since of course the future is largely nothing from our point of view and the present, proportionwise, is literally nothing, that left us with just about everything. Naturally the powers that be were not too happy with this, so we added the further qualification that we would limit our study to people, which they allowed. But because, as I have described above, the humans we wish to study are really interested in everything – the sun, the moon, the gods, the demons – individual twigs and the south pole – this again left us with pretty much the run of the universe. A historian can write paeans on pomegranates just because the Jews, who lived in the past and were people, used pomegranates in their vestments.  There really is not much that the historian cannot find an excuse to study. For a long time this was actually the case; from the days of Herodotus to the days of J. B. Bury, a historian could actually write on just about anything he had the time for.

aturally their liberty was not always total, and naturally it could not last. It comes with a payoff, namely, that if you want to get anything published, you get, sure, a free pick of everything, but you have to choose one thing and stick to it. Often enough this winds up operating as a kind of penal servitude for historians, who pay for the momentary glory of this beatific vision of Everything with the duty of lifetime’s tedious study on the minutiae of nothing. Well, there is no help for it.

ut let us stop a moment and consider the terrain. History is the study of everything. Everything includes particularly large things that everyone has some interest in, and particularly small things that only very select people are interested in. That is as far as we have come. Well then, what on earth are we to make of this? How are we to make a philosophy of history out of – everything?

think what this shows is that if we are to have a philosophy of history, we must look at something other than its subject. What I propose is its means. History is the study of everything; that is, it is the art of thinking about everything. The subject is everything, and I am not competent to even begin to explain to you how everything works. But the means is thought. So we must turn ourselves to a new question: we must think about thought.

1 Well, of course, you would be hard pressed to convince anyone that your comments on the twig were scholarship, but that is of course quite arbitrary. If you managed to rope your neighbours in to a Society of Whatyouwill-Street Patriotism, the twig would generate a great deal of interest, and you might well get your comments published in the most scholarly paper your street can muster.

Introductory Thoughts on Poetry

ilton: Paradise Lost

oday I have no agenda, not fixed point to argue or theme to express, so I am at my ease. All I really have to say, is this: I enjoy good poetry, and I think good criticism should help us to enjoy good poetry.

hen I first got fairly underway in Paradise Lost I found what I think everyone should find or hope to find: that I could not put it down. Many find it difficult or complain that there are too many long words. It was difficult enough for me, as a fourteen year old; there were words that I didn’t understand, there were occasionally whole chunks that made little sense to me – though you will find these very rare once you get used to Milton’s style – but these things did little to detract from my enjoyment: the plot was clear enough, and the plot is the main thing; the glories of the style are not marred by an occasional misunderstanding, so I did not mind misunderstanding occasionally. Sometimes the mystery and antiquity that linguistic difficulties clothe such a book with may be seen as improvements, not detractions – at least until you clear them up; and even once you understand a difficult and involved passage, you are often enough still expected to enjoy it primarily because you know that it is difficult and can see that meaning has been wrung out of a tight knot of complexity.

think it is crucial, in reading poetry or anything else – especially books written in an olden style – not to get hooked on the little details that we do not understand . This is particularly the case for long poems and epics. We do ourselves a disservice when we pause at every strange word, or foreign name or learned reference, or hint of possible symbolism. We naturally want to know what it all means, but it can all be saved for our second reading. If a poem is not good enough without our understanding all the details and technical matters, then it is not worth so much of our time as researching the details and technical matters might take. To that rule there are exceptions; I venture that next to no one enjoys Pindar without putting some work into understanding him. But it is better to assume the rule than to assume that a classic needs to be studied before it can be read.

never studied poetry at school. My acquaintance with it was entirely contained in my private reading, and I do not think I ever enjoyed it much before reading Milton. Naturally, this meant that I did not know how to read it properly: I did not know whether to stop at the ends of lines, how much to submit to the trotting of the rhythm and how much to strive against it, how much to stress the rhymes. Even where I did know, I had no one to pull me out of the bad habits that inevitably accrue when one reads solely to oneself in one’s head. I had a similar experience when I learned to read Latin and Greek poetry, though there the case was far worse: for the information I obtained was so varied and vague, so contradictory and unclear, that I ended up with bad habits it would never have occurred to me to invent on my own. The online articles of Mr William Harris, a Professor of Middlebury College, were the first clear and practical directions I got with regard to reading Greek and Latin verse. I commend them to students of the classics.

figured it all out in the end, though I still do not read classical verse particularly well. But it left me with this impression: the first responsibility of a literature teacher is to train their students to read well – even if simply by providing them with a good model. You cannot properly enjoy poetry if it sounds like an accelerated rocking horse in your head. I have had teachers who could explain the minutiae of Greek metre to me, but could not read it properly. They made it sound no different from prose. There was an ancient grammarian, as I recall, who defined reading, not as the ability to understand written words, but as the ability to pronounce them clearly, with good emphasis, without stammering or slipping. You cannot properly enjoy poetry if it sounds like an accelerated rocking horse in your head. I have had teachers who could explain the minutiae of Greek metre to me, but could not read it properly. They made it sound no different from prose. Nor do we speakers of English naturally read aloud well. We need to learn it.

fter that, of course, the teacher of poetry must teach poems. We have all heard, or at least heard tell of, literary criticism that ‘ruins’ the subject poem: whereas one of the primary concerns of the critic of a good poem is to enable us to appreciate it better. – I say this with a great deal of confidence, though I know that many schools of modern criticism belie me; but in my defense I will not here say anything more than this: that I like to enjoy what I read when I can and welcome what helps I can get; that I am sure many others concur on that point; and that I am quite certain that most poets of the past hoped and expected that their poems would be enjoyed. I love good literary criticism; but to leave students saying that ‘Shakespeare was ruined for them’ when they were forced to dissect him, leaves me with little doubt that the students were as misinformed – yes, misinformed – about Shakespeare as you or I should consider ourselves to be about the human body if, to borrow the metaphor of C.S.Lewis, we were shown one dissected, and taught all about the internal organs, and then told that there is no such thing as skin, and that anatomy proves that human beauty is an illusion. Is the enjoyment of Shakespeare an illusion caused by ignorance of the symbolism he employed? If not, then why does learning the symbolism kill the enjoyment? Symbolism was not a study for Shakespeare: when we study Shakespeare’s symbolism, we do best to then forget that we learned by studying, and pretend that the symbolism is as natural for us as it was for Shakespeare. And of course, you ought to reread the poem after you have learned about it, and not forget to notice the things you liked about it before you learned about all the details.

hy do I lay so much stress on enjoying things like Paradise Lost? I enjoy it. Why need I encourage others to? Why should I, a devotee of knowledge if ever there was one, rank the pleasure of the poem above the hard facts about it? The reason is this. Most books spring from their authors’ ideals, but poetry – and novels, and what people call imaginative literature in general – seldom gets much further than those ideals. A scientist writes papers because he wants to pursue understanding and truth; his readers need not care about the passions and desires that lead him to that pursuit, so long as they want to learn the facts that he has written. The poet, on the other hand, is filled with the horror of the tragic, or the love of adventure, or delight in the subtleties of language, or admiration of courage, and writes something purely to express these ideals. The reader of poetry who understands the poem properly, who is able to recreate the ideal in their own mind, is none other than the one who enjoys the poem. A student can learn understand the content of a science paper without enjoying it, because the content of the science paper is facts; but no one can understand a poem properly without enjoying it, because the contents of a poem are ideals.

f course, there are poems we justly decide that we should not enjoy. Not all ideals are noble.

ave I wondered far from my subject, Paradise Lost? As this series goes on, I expect that I will be able to stick closer to my chosen books. But I shall relate what I have said to Milton: on first reading him, or any other poet, you ought to read through, looking up as few words as possible, only skipping back up the page when you have completely lost the sense (do not worry about minor lapses), underlining, if possible, nothing – at worst put little dashes in the margins to remind you to come back later. The first thing to learn, with those kinds of books, is not the symbols or the historical significance or the plot structures: the first thing to learn is to enjoy them.

The Primary Sources of History

Subject: Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, Bede, Joinville, Froissart – and the historians of earlier ages in general.

he stalest philosophies are those that claim to be freshest, and the surest opinions are those that have been found wanting.

his seems to me not only true, but in fact very clear. The philosophies that circulate most frequently through our ears are not those that have been around since Plato’s time, but those that have been around since yesterday; they are modern, some times even purely contemporary, not universal. They are things like “be the person you naturally are”, not, “put to death the natural man”. They are things like, “all people have a right to do what they choose and not to be persecuted,” where so many people of the past have accepted earthly sufferings as inescapable facts and worked around them. I do not mean that there is a single set of beliefs that defines the past, let alone that, if there were such a uniformity, it would be uniformly opposed to present beliefs. I do not mean that the current fashions are wrong and those of the past are right. No; but just as each person hears the sound of their own voice louder than they hear the beating of their heart or rhythm of their lungs, which they hold in common with the rest of mankind, so each age hears most clearly its own voice and the pulse and breath which it shares with previous ages is drowned out. At worst, it so cuts itself off from the past that it refuses to breath altogether.

he good historian, more than anyone else, ought to recognise this. They might believe modern principles, but they have no reason to limit themselves to modern principles. The Comte de Tocqueville is, in a sense, a modern historian par excellence: he believed in modern democratic values, but cultivated, in his own attitudes, the best of his aristocratic heritage. As for us, we might expect to be treated in a democratic manner, and have our ‘rights’ recognised, but we ought not think it these political rights are inalienable or part of our proper nature. Chance or the will of God has put us in this age where we have such rights as we do, though, as we see that democracy, in our own day, is good for people, we ought to champion it.

ore importantly, I think our philosophical ideas ought to come at least as much from history as from the present. When I want scientific facts, I will read the most up-to-date books I might find. When I want the facts of history, I do the same. When, however, I want moral, philosophical, theological, artistic, literary knowledge – when I want to find those facts that lie equally within reach, and equally out of reach, for people of all ages, I care not whether my books are as old as the seas or as new as the hair on my head: the seas are unreliable, my hair is undependable, and people are not more trustworthy or clever today than they ever have been.

hristianity – and, in fact, all religions to a greater or lesser extent – besides its primary claim to our attention, preserves the attitudes of the past, and claims to preserve the important attitudes of the past: those that God put there himself. Philosophy, to a far lesser extent, and only among some philosophers, also preserves past attitudes and beliefs against the storms of intellectual fashion.

hat is reason why I, at any rate, am an historian: because I was first a philosopher.

he historian, however, is interested in more than merely the beliefs and literature of the past. There are the annals of kings and rulers, there are the records of battles and revolutions. The observation I intend to make about these things is personal and perhaps subjective, but I hope it may be found, nonetheless, applicable to many others.

university-level course in ancient or medieval history will often prescribe two textbooks: for one, the major primary source, or a collection of primary sources; for the other, a piece of or collection of modern scholarship. For instance, a translation of Herodotus might be paired with a modern study of archaic Greece. The rationale behind this is, of course, that all our knowledge of the past comes from the primary sources, but all our conclusions about the primary sources are recorded in the secondary sources. The idea is that the history student must read both alike, and often the reading schedule will require students to read them simultaneously.

ow my observation is this: very often I tend to break the reading schedule and, ahead of time, read through the primary sources whole and with great avidity, and only after that am I able to find sufficient interest in the modern scholarship. The reasons why the primary sources should be more interesting are many, I think; but the fact is, in most cases they are. Further, the best works of modern scholarship are precisely the ones that cannot be used for textbooks. They are the ones that do not offer quite all the facts, or the most debated or ‘significant’ facts, but offer deep and powerful interpretations of the topic that concerns them. We love narrative, and they give us narrative; we love to see good and evil and all the shades in between, and they show them to us; we love to be sure we are learning something significant, and they assure us we are. Even the worst of old histories give us these things: even those that are mediocre, inaccurate, suspect. Thus far I have been referring, in particular, to literary primary sources, but my argument applies to nearly all varieties of primary sources. To my mind, they are not only the source of all our information about the past, but also the source of a great deal of our interest in the past.

have said that the reasons are many why histories written in the ancient and medieval world interest me more than more accurate modern histories of those periods. One of them, far from the least, is that for the most part the histories which have survived from these periods do offer engaging interpretations of the information, instead of concerning themselves with finding all the verifiable facts and verifying all possible facts. There is an immense variety: Thucydides sought out the nature of humanity in his history of the Peloponnesian War; Tacitus aptly conveyed the sinister quality of the early Roman Principate; Froissart, if I am not mistaken, gave an accurate picture of how the last chivalrous knights saw their wars and tourneys.

ery often these old authors had no philosophical intent. Indeed, even the historians of our own day who least suspect themselves of a philosophical agenda will be found soaked in contemporary philosophies. One mark of difference is that the old historians who are preserved – Herodotus, Plutarch, Geoffrey of Monmouth (that greatest of pseudo-historians) – are often preserved largely because their attitudes and art are vigorous and durable. But the greatest reason why such books of outmoded attitudes appeal to us is that precisely because their attitudes are outmoded, they are not stale to our ears; and in consequence, they may actually teach us something we would not otherwise have thought of.

his is one reason, but there are many, for the commendation I wish to end on: it is that those who wish to enjoy old history, the Ancient, the Medieval, the Oriental, would do very well to start with the best of old primary sources.

On Moralism

oethius: The Consolation of Philosophy

he idea of a ‘classic’ is fraught. It should signify reputation; a classic should be a book people know about. But many of the greatest classics have been elided or forgotten. We have all heard of Shakespeare and Aristotle; but Boethius is one of these ‘classics’ that you have to climb a few steps of learning to hear tell of.

he logic of his Consolation of Philosophy is vigorous and acute, for it is the complaint of a talented statesman, theologian and philosopher betrayed by the senate of waning Rome, sentenced to prison, disgrace, and death. He has neither the taste nor the time for superficiality. He allows every objection, complaint and doubt its full course. What is more, he rises at times to the lyricism and profundity that only a genuine love of poetry and a deep worldview are able to inspire.

could write about his excellent method – and certainly one must take note of what he says about his method in order to fully appreciate him, for he deliberately starts with what is most plain and obvious. But instead I would like to dwell on his view of knowledge. Philosophy is, of course, the branch he is particularly concerned with. The task of philosophy is described by Boethius as that of “forming our habits and whole way of life on the celestial patterns”. That is, Philosophy sat him down and taught him astronomy, not because the pursuit of knowledge is noble, nor because science is healthy for the mind, or useful for society, but rather so that she could make him like the starts and planets: as regular, as orderly, as submissive to the will of God. That is one thing he mentions. Another is this: Philosophy is what we might call an inveterate moraliser. Not only does she give him such simple lessons as ‘follow God’; she goes so far as to repeat it every day. As a matter of fact, Boethius ascribes to the discipline of philosophy the task of providing such weapons as might defend him from misery when misfortunes came upon him. Such views were not unusual in the ancient world, and perhaps they do not sound so very strange even to us. But they should.

et me explain. In the first place, there is his very conception of philosophy. Descartes took up philosophy and made his great forward strides in response to very real doubts, but for that very reason he is closer in spirit to the ancient philosophers than the modern. David Hume, whom we may take as a representative of the enlightenment, confessed without shame that he was not deeply affected by his philosophy: he would write that we can have no certainty about anything substantial in the morning, and live an ordinary, merry life with his friends in the evening. Schopenhauer, again, another great philosopher, let his philosophy draw him to profess ascetic ideals, but he himself was far from an ascetic. And remember that the qualification that a modern professor of philosophy must meet is not commitment to an ideal or consistency of lifestyle, so much as wide and critical learning. Have I made it clear enough that the primary meaning of ‘philosophy’ for us is quite different from what it was for Boethius? It was a life to him, it is a study to us.

n the second place, his blithe ardour for moralising ought to sit uneasily with us. For the educated man, I say bluntly, moralising is immoral. The thought of studying history purely to find moral lessons ought to embarrass us; no one who has sought both accuracy and fine-sounding lessons in history can succeed very well in both aims. A lesson ought to teach us, and though we might find things we already believe, or want to believe, reflected in history, we will seldom learn anything new so far as ethics is concerned. It is easy to find historical examples of virtue rewarded and punished vice. But history does not see the virtuous rewarded and the vicious disgraced any more than it sees the vicious rewarded and the virtuous disgraced. And of course, most of the most virtuous sink below the surface of history, and we never even hear about them.

nd is it not a little peculiar that Philosophy taught Boethius astronomy, so that he could live an orderly and obedient life? Why should the way the stars go round affect the way we go round? Unless he already wants to live an orderly life, the observation that those great mindless fires do will hardly be a great incentive. Even if it were, you see at once that the stars do a very different thing to us; you might as well compare an orderly man to a yo-yo as to the stars.

oralising, as I say, is immoral: for it simplifies matters that God has made complex. The stars teach us very little about how we should live. Historical examples of virtue and vice rarely, if ever, apply directly to the contingencies and complexities of the present.

oethius, see there, is watching us with a puzzled look, incredulous that we should come to such conclusions, that we should so defame Lady Philosophy. He sits unwavering in the moralising party. He never thought to doubt its truth until we said this. For as a matter of fact, very few serious thinkers have doubted its truth until relatively recently. Even – no, especially – the scholars of the Renaissance are with him. History gave them “precepts, exhortations, counsels, and good persuasions, comprehended in quick sentences and eloquent orations”. That is a quote from Elyot, but you need not look far to find the same sentiment in Erasmus, or Ascham, or for that matter Thucydides or Johnson or Gibbon.

f course, we must allow that it is scarcely possible to ignore the great barriers that lie between them and us. I am referring to centuries of experience, a scientific revolution, a great boom in historical accuracy and breadth, in philosophy an Aufklärung or enlightenment, in ethics and politics an irreversible realisation of the full force of material, psychological and cultural influences. Nonetheless, I think there is at least one good reason to take seriously this old image of philosophy and science and history. It is, that it apparently worked. We are not dealing with fools here, yet these men, of outstanding learning and genius, so far from coming to our conclusion, that philosophy is best treated as an academic discipline and that science and history cannot teach moral lessons, actually stood by the cause which we have called ‘moralism’. And that, even though in their age as in ours philosophy, as Bacon observed, could lead to atheism.

o how are we to interpret the idea? How are we to make it acceptable to ourselves? How, in short, are we to come to terms with the fact that many of the most learned and original thinkers in history have been unabashed ‘moralisers’?

shall content myself with explaining what I think are the first two steps, of which the very first is differentiating three classes of ‘moralising’. The first is moralising pure and simple: the lowest kind, whereby say ‘history (or indeed, this or that story) teaches us that we ought to be good’. I do not think much of that kind, though it is not always out of place. Too often, however, it leans its weight on poor reasoning, and in its attempt to teach wise living neglects wise thinking.

he second class is moralising that moralises to the imagination. Livy says that history shows us the deeds whence we can choose “what deeds we will imitate, and what deeds, base from start to end, we will avoid”. Rather than doing our duty merely as our duty, we may do it in imitation of the heroes – whoever we count as our heroes. Athanasius noted that the mere memory of St Antony helped him act in a holier way. At its purest, this is makebelief: as if Athanasius pretended he was St Antony, or a modern soldier pretended to be a patriotic Roman. That is the lowest manifestation of this second kind of moralising, but also the highest. I am sure we will revisit it in a future article.

he third class, the Boethian or philosophical class, is different to both of these. We may call it the moral viewpoint. It sees the world in moral terms, and by extension sees morality in cosmic terms. Justice is a human virtue, but it is also part of the fabric of the history; in fact, it is primarily a historical phenomenon, God’s work, and only our work, a human business, because we share a part of God’s nature. Orderliness, again, is a human virtue; so is logicality. But before they can be human virtues, they must be divine virtues, and so we see them in the courses of the stars. Straightforward, simplistic moralising would say, “therefore, since God moves he stars in an rational pattern, we also ought to act rationally.” The philosophical approach, this moral viewpoint, would reply, “yes; but you see also, of course, that when we are rational, we have the same forces at work in us as are at work in the stars. And because we consciously choose rationality, unlike the inanimate stars, we are actually outdoing the stars and excelling them.”

ou see at once that this third class of ‘moralising’ contains the other two and goes beyond them. As with the lower classes, we learn the lessons of the past and the universe, and also choose to imitate the past and the universe. But the reason why we learn and imitate is that we have first judged the universe and read into the apparently amoral scientific motions and events moral value. There are charming tales about Alfred the Great’s humility and patience when he was exiled from his kingship. The first kind of moral interpretation would tell us, “therefore, be humble and patient”, or, “humility and patience pay.” The second kind says, “be as humble and patient as Alfred was: think about him when you are being humbly patient”. The third tells us little more than that we are not alone when we are humble and patient, and that the same thing that we admire in Alfred we can recreate in ourselves. It says less than either of the others, but naturally allows for the possibility of both of the others. That is, if you admire virtue in Alfred, you might as a consequence tell yourself, “be virtuous”, and you might also tell yourself, “remind yourself of him when you do.”

he full power of this view may be seen by a survey of the literature that preceded the enlightenment, for it is all-pervasive. It is why Dante can speak of ‘the love that moves the sun and other stars’, instead of “inertia and gravity”.

ranted that there are different kinds of moralising, still, it will be asked, are they not all quite as naïve? Not the least of our criticisms of moralising is that it forces into a moral mold what was never meant to be so constrained; and even our ‘moral viewpoint’ does not escape that – in truth, consists of nothing but that. Does it not compel us to take that judgmental view of history that sees the whole polychrome in black and white? Looking at history as the ‘battleground of good and evil’, are we not forced to decide that so-and-so was evil, and such-and-such was good, when if fact so-and-so was as mixed a piece of work as such-and-such?

confess the moral viewpoint does not safeguard us from that, and I stress once more that on my view that kind of thinking is an error I would give a great deal to avoid. In part, it is avoided by seeing not good and bad people, but good and bad in people, or, on the broader scene, not good and bad forces in the universe, but good and bad consequences of those forces. But to navigate this pass with the utmost safety, we must take the second step.

onsider, please, the direction moralising ordinarily proceeds in. Whatever it might pretend, it starts with our own values, and then reads them into the external world. It starts with conceptions like reason, justice, love and wisdom, and then uses the world like a great cross-word to write them in. This is the most basic operation of the moral view point, as of the other classes of moralising we mentioned, and on my view it may be done rightly just as it may be done badly. But the moral viewpoint may be applied in the other direction too, and must be applied in the other direction first, if it is to hit upon solid truth. It is better not to judge historical characters by our standards before we have evaluated ourselves by their examples, and before we view the universe as an enormous person, with rationality, love, hate, irrationality, we should strive to comprehend that people are the universe compressed. We must mind our own business before we poke about in the business of others.

he examples we took from Boethius will make clear what I mean.

1. Philosophy “used to form Boethius’ habits and the manner of his entire life on the examples of the celestial order.”

he educational ploy here, if we may call it that, is this. Boethius is seeking to live a rational life, and in order to make him feel the significance of that, Philosophy tells him that he is reënacting, on a smaller but notwithstanding more significant scale, the action of the universe. She does not say, “the stars are rational, just like humans beings should be;” no; she says, “human beings can be rational just like the stars are”. If we resolve to view this through a clear, untinted lens, we see that Philosphy is not moralising the universe, but rather de-moralising man: for what Boethius might have thought a noble moral effort before – that attempt to be rational – he is now told is merely a scientific phenomenon – the kind of thing the stars have been doing at God’s behest all this long while.

2. Philosophy “gave him such weapons as might have guarded him [from misery] with unconquerable resilience, had he not cast them away beforehand”.

ere we have the same principle spelt out more clearly. Philosophy searches out the nature and composition of the whole universe; but its first purpose is to right and balance the nature and composition of the philosopher themself. Of course, that describes ancient philosophy, not modern: for modern philosophy has chosen another ideal. Yet a modern philosopher may do his modern philosophy to his modern ideal without sacrificing the ancient ideal; and there is surely even in our own day great weight behind Lady Philosophy’s song, that it is shameful for a man to know the courses of the winds and waves, the rise and fall of seasons and suns, and all the while be quite unequal to so crucial a task as knowing himself and governing his emotions: being sui compos.

3. There is Philosophy’s tedious repetition: follow God. – Follow God. – Follow God.

ou see at once that this makes more sense once we have established the foregoing. It is suspect to make this the conclusion of every scientific, historic, or philosophical lesson, for most of the things to be known do not teach this. But if he sees himself as somehow a part of the things he studies, then they teach him practical lessons for himself; and even when he cannot clearly see how they relate to him, he knows that they lay obligation on him to know himself at least as well as he knows them, and so act rightly. This particular maxim, “follow God”, is, of course, inexhaustible. Doubtless we shall return to the topic of maxims in a later article.

nd so it comes about that Lady Philosophy is Boethius’ science teacher; so it comes that amidst all her arcane metaphysics and penetrating logic she finds time to tell him, ‘follow God’; so it comes that she herself is his defense against misery. She is not a trite moraliser, unless we count under that name those who think it valid to believe in the moral nature of the universe: that history is a ceaseless war between good and evil, what is noble and what is base; that the celestial fires hang in a delicate balance between order and chaos. With such a vision, philosophers, scientists, historians, have almost more incentive to virtue than anyone else, since they have constantly before their eyes the nature of good and evil. Naturally, it did not always play out that way in antiquity, and not at all today. But those who hold this view of knowledge can be held to its consequences.

t remains to consider the full consequences of allowing such a view – they are enormous and they are dangerous, but the centuries have judged them worthwhile. There are two methods in the pursuit of knowledge which I consider unstable at best: the first, that it does nothing more than satisfy curiosity with insignificant facts, the second, that it teaches us lessons, and is entirely painted in the black and white of good and evil. I fear both methods, and I put it to you that we must search ourselves to see whether this method, Boethius’ insight, is not the only safe way between them both.

Introduction

reface to a Project

here are several ways to write a review. One may attempt as good a recommendation as possible. Or, one may strain the good from the bad to give a balanced critique. One may assess a book’s significance, or its scholarliness, or its novelty. Many reviews try to do all of these at once.

he forthcoming series takes a different line. To be sure, I hope to do all I can to share an interest in the subject books. But though each is attached to one specific book, our articles will be essays rather than reviews. That is to say, I plan to dilate upon select ideas related to those books, and those ideas will not necessarily be either representative or obvious in the original book. The reviews will introduce the essays; the essays will revive (or resist) the subject books. In some sense they ought to vindicate the subject books: they ought to show that they are worth reading, not by mere assertion, but by a proper demonstration of the effect that they have had on my own ideas and opinions. In this matter, I ask to be understood as a specimen. I wish to be seen as an experiment in reading.

ut what are the subjects to be? Naturally, the sort of thing that I read. Equally they must be the kind of thing I may reasonably expect others to read; or leastwise things I would like others to read. The overlap is large enough: its constituents are philosophy, theology and history, its kings are poetry and prose stories, its domains – the whole of recorded history up to our own day.

any of these books will be classical; many will be mediaeval; many will be modern. Of those from classical antiquity, I have read many in the Greek and Latin, but all the books reviewed and most of the books referred to will be readily available in translation – the best and cheapest editions are often in Penguin Classics, Oxford World Classics and the Everyman’s Library.

o with a book each of philosophy, history and poetry, we shall begin; and once we have tried the waters, made some slight forays into the basic attitudes I shall take to each of those fields, we shall trust our sails to the winds and go forth.

Maps

Searching out the subtle absurdities of the world is an edifying and diverting occupation.

The idea of a map, for instance, is quite inconsistent with itself. The pursuit of knowledge progresses as we cross-question the finer points of the world, and the most profoundly erudite scholars are those who know half a billion insignificant details. The scientific method was not born by taking a broad glance at the world and recording general impressions. Nor was the study of history was born from recording offhand ideas about history is in general.

But after all his intense geographical study, explorations, coasting continents mile by mile, man produces – a map. Something that someone can glance over in a moment, even memorise entirely in just a couple of days.

And yet this is absolutely necessary for any intellectual progress to happen. Intelligence feeds off ignorance. How many geographers today could tell you all about each of the ins and outs of Cape Horn, and the caves on the coast, and the precise measurements of each gulf? Yet in order to produce the maps they studied in primary school, someone had to do it. No one becomes an original genius in any field without first digesting the garbled and overcondensed excerpts from their predecessors which we call ‘maps’ and ‘introductions’ and ‘textbooks’. No one can learn everything that has been learned in their field from start to end. So these travesties we call maps are necessary.

The ‘introductions’ that you find in books of literature, philosophy, and so on, should really be called ‘extraductions’. They are the canned conclusions that people who have done intense and detailed study of texts have reached, not the premises from which they reached the conclusions. Often they are best read after the book itself. They are neither necessary to read the book itself, nor are they likely to introduce the casual reader to further study of the text – introductions are the conclusions of scholars for the general public who don’t have time to read what the scholars write to each other.