The Enchantment Of The Disenchanted

Ernest Renan, Marcus Aurelius, tr. William G. Hutchison (London; New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1904), 229 & 233 (emphasis mine):

Living his [that is, Marcus Aurelius’] life without pleasure, as without revolt, resigned to the destiny which nature had assigned him, he did his everyday duties with the thought of death constantly before him. His wisdom was absolute, which is another way of saying that his ennui was limitless. War, the court, the theatre—all wearied him alike, and, none the less, what he did, he did well, for he did it as a duty. At the point which he had reached, pleasure and pain, men's love and their hatred were one and the same thing. Glory is the last of illusions, and yet how vain a thing it is, and how fast the memory of the greatest man fades away! The most brilliant courts, like that of Hadrian, grand festal displays like those of Alexander, what are they but a theatrical show which passes and is cast aside? The actors change, but the inanity of the play is the same. [...]

In his latter days he came to self-delusion and oblivion of all. But through what struggles he had to pass to reach that consummation! During long years an inward malady slowly consumed him. That despairing effort which is the very essence of his philosophy, that passion for renunciation, at times pushed even to sophistry, hid beneath them a gaping wound. How imperative it must have been to say farewell to happiness in order to attain to such excesses! Never will men understand all the sufferings of that poor, blighted heart, or the bitterness which lay masked behind that pale countenance, ever calm and almost smiling. True it is that that farewell to happiness is the beginning of wisdom, and the surest way of finding happiness. There is nought so sweet as the return of joy that follows the renunciation of joy; nought so keen, so deep, so full of charm as the enchantment of the disenchanted.

The Great Drawback Of Actual Life

Ernest Renan, Marcus Aurelius, tr. William G. Hutchison (London; New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1904), 231:

The great drawback of actual life, that which renders it insupportable to the man of high character, lies in this—that if ideal principles be observed in it, good qualities become faults, so much so, indeed, that very often the perfect man has less success in life than he whose motives are egoism or common routine.

A Nature Delicately Wrought

Ṭāhir al-Tanāḥī, On the Deathbed [ʿAlā Fārash al-Mawt] (Egypt: Dār al-Hilāl, 1939), 110 (al-Tanāḥī is describing the poet Ismāʿīl Ṣabrī Pasha; personal trans.):

Ṣabrī had grown weary of life and had come to hold its pleasures in quite light an esteem, though he had not yet passed beyond the season of youth. He was wont, therefore, to speak often in disparagement of the world, and to lament the folly of placing one’s peace of mind in it, or rejoicing in the serenity of its days. Yet it was not because some cherished end had eluded him, nor because failure had overtaken him, that he found the world burdensome; he had rather tasted of its distinctions enough to whet the appetite of the most covetous; he had attained to offices such as might well have been the envy of others; and in the abundance of fortune, the ease of living, and the honours of renown, he had received a portion exceeding that which had fallen to the lot of many who came after him.

But his was a nature delicately wrought, and his sensibility exceedingly fine: the sudden flash of lightning, if it appeared out of season, was enough to pain him; the lightest breath of the breeze, if it passed where it ought not, could wound him. Thus it was that he wearied of the world, because he wearied of those who dwelt in it; he grew impatient with life, because he could not abide the frailty of the living; and he rose in revolt against society, because he was himself in revolt against its morals.

                The waters of shame have ebbed from every face,
                And left the world, grim-cheeked, a barren waste.
                Virtue’s neglect has spread among mankind,
                Till scarce to return a greeting counts as kind. [From a somewhat long poem by the Pasha]

A portrait of Ismāʿīl Ṣabrī Pasha

Saintly Soul

Aleksándr Púshkin, Boris Godunov (in Leo Wiener, Anthology of Russian Literature (New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1903), vol. II.),143-147: 

Night: A cell in the Chúdov monastery

FATHER PÍMEN, GRIGÓRI (sleeping).

Pímen (writing before a lamp). Once more, one final anecdote, and then

My manuscript will be complete, the task

On me, a sinner, laid by God, fulfilled.

’T is not for naught that during all these years

The Lord hath made me witness many things,

And taught me all the art of writing books.

When in the future some industrious monk

Shall find my hard-accomplished, nameless work,

He will, like me, illume his little lamp,

And, brushing off the dust of centuries,

Will copy down my truthful chronicle.

Then will the children of believers true

Read all the story of their native land,

Recall the labours of their mighty Tsars,

Performed for them, for glory and for right,

And humbly offer prayers that God will blot

The crimes, though dark, of him who wrought for them.

Thus, bent for many years I live anew.

The past before me rose its hurrying flood.

Is’t long ago that like the angry sea

Time’s fateful surges broke in great events?

And now it rests in motionless repose!

Not many men my memory preserves,

Not many words are in my mind engrossed,

And all the rest for ever now are gone.

But day is nigh, my little lamp burns dim,

One more, one final story of the past! (Writes.)

Grigóri (wakes). That dream again? How strange! That cursèd dream!

Thrice have I dreamed it! But the aged man

Still sits before his little lamp and writes.

He hath not closed his eyes the livelong night

In slumber: how I love his peaceful mien,

As, deeply buried in the past, his soul

Broods o’er the secret of his manuscript.

How gladly would I scan his precious line.

What writeth he: the Tatars’ bloody reign,⁠—

The cruel deeds of John the Terrible?

The stormy council of old Nóvgorod?

The glories of the fatherland? In vain!

Nor in his glance nor in his lofty brow

Can one discern the secrets of his mind:

His mien is calm and full of majesty,

As well becomes an aged priest who looks

With cloudless eye on good and evil men

Impartially, detecting right and wrong

Or hatred or compassion knowing not.

Pímen. Art thou awake?

Grigóri. Thy blessing, honoured sire.

Pímen. The Lord His blessing grant thee, oh, my son,

To-day, hereafter, and for evermore!

Grigóri. Long has thy pen been busy, nor has sleep

Once brought thee sweet oblivion this night;

But some strange, diabolic vision hath disturbed

My rest: my enemy hath tormented me.

I dreamed that up the winding narrow stairs

I mounted to the windy tower alone;

Before me from the top all Moscow lay

Diminished like an ant-hill. Far below

The people swarmed and babbled in the square

And jeered at me with senseless ridicule.

Shame mastered me and terror overwhelmed,

And, falling headlong on my face, I waked.

’T is thrice that I have dreamed the selfsame dream.

Is’t not a marvel?

Pímen.’T is thy youthful blood

Makes sport of thee: by prayer and strenuous fast

Thy dreams will be with peaceful visions filled.

’T is e’en not otherwise with me when I,

Dazed with involuntary drowsiness,

E’er fail my soul with earnest prayer to guard⁠—

My aged dreams are then disturbed with sin:

While scenes of banqueting torment me oft,

Now warlike camps or surging battles rude,

Now senseless dissipations of wild youth.

Grigóri. How gaily must have passed thy youthful days!

Thou wast in battle ’neath Kazán’s high walls;

Hast shared the wars in Lithuania’s plains;

Hast seen the wanton court of John the Great.

How fortunate! But I from earliest years

Have been immured in cells a needy monk!

Why should not I have had delight in war

And feasted at the table of the Tsar?

Then, when I reached like thee the term of life,

I might have turned me gladly from the world

And all its vanities, and shut myself

Within the calm retirement of a cell

To meditate upon my holy vows.

Pímen. Lament not, brother, that thou hast so soon

The world abandoned, that a loving God

Hath little of temptation sent to thee.

Take thou my word, a fascination strong

Is exercised upon us from afar,

By glory, luxury, and woman’s wiles.

Long have I lived and much have I enjoyed;

But only true enjoyment have I known

Since to the cloister God hath led my steps.

Recall the mightiest Tsars that have ever lived.

Who stands above them? God alone! And who

Would venture to oppose them? None! What then?

On them so sorely weighs the golden crown

They would exchange it gladly for the cowl.

E’en John the Tsar sought comfort and relief

Within the semblance of monastic rule.

His court, where swarmed his haughty favourites,

The novel aspect of a cloister took;

His body-guard, in sackcloth and in stole,

Appeared like docile monks, the while the Tsar,

Himself, the cruel Tsar, an abbot mild.

Myself have seen, here in this very cell⁠—

(’T was then the abode of that most just of men,

Kiríll, who suffered much, and even then

I also had been led by God to see

The folly of the world)⁠—myself have seen,

Here in this very cell, the mighty Tsar,

Grown weary of his mad designs and wrath,

Repenting, sit amongst us, meek and mild.

We stood before him silent, motionless,

And quietly he would converse with us,

Would hold the abbot and the brotherhood:

“Ye fathers, soon the wished-for hour will come,

When I ’ll appear with hunger to be saved;

Thou Nikodím, thou Sérgi, thou Kiríll,

And all of ye, accept my heartfelt vow!

I’ll come to you a sinner in despair;

I’ll take upon myself the monk’s harsh garb,

I’ll fall, O holy father, at thy feet!”

Thus spoke the mighty ruler of the realm;

And gentle words flowed from his cruel lips,

And tears bedewed his cheeks; and we in tears

Would pray our Lord his sinful, suffering soul

To fill with everlasting love and peace.

But his son Feódor? Upon the throne

Vowed to perpetual silence, like a monk;

He sighed to lead a life of easy peace.

He straightway changed the royal palace-halls

To cloistered cells, the heavy cares of state

Did not at all disturb his saintly soul.

God mercifully gave the Tsar his peace;

And while he lived, our Russia, undisturbed

In taintless glory, owned his gentle sway.

But when he died, a miracle was wrought,

Unheard of: at his couch appeared a man

With face of flame, seen by the Tsar alone.

Feódor talked with him, and called him “Sire,”⁠—

“Great Patriarch.” All around were filled with fear

To see the heavenly apparition there,

Because the holy father was not then

Within the chamber where the Tsar was laid.

When he appeared sweet fragrance filled the halls,

And like the sun his holy visage shone.

Circle Of Chosen Spirits

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civiliastion of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Swannenschein & Co.), 549-550:

But in the hymns of Lorenzo, which we are tempted to regard as the highest product of the spirit of this school [= the Platonic Academy at Florence], an unreserved Theism is set forth—a Theism which strives to treat the world as a great moral and physical Cosmos. While the men of the Middle Ages look on the world as a vale of tears, which Pope and Emperor are set to guard against the coming of Antichrist; while the fatalists of the Renaissance oscillate between seasons of overflowing energy and seasons of superstition or of stupid resignation, here, in this circle of chosen spirits, the doctrine is upheld that the visible world was created by God in love, that it is the copy of a pattern pre-existing in Him, and that He will ever remain its eternal mover and restorer. The soul of man can by recognising God draw Him into its narrow boundaries, but also by love to Him itself expand into the Infinite—and this is blessedness on earth.

Echoes of mediæval mysticism here flow into one current with Platonic doctrines, and with a characteristically modern spirit. One of the most precious fruits of the knowledge of the world and of man here comes to maturity, on whose account alone the Italian Renaissance must be called the leader of modern ages.

Not Seeing Oneself

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966 [1957]), I:23, 83:

Men receive the advice of truth and its precepts as if addressed to the common people, never to themselves; and each man, instead of incorporating them into his behavior, incorporates them into his memory, very stupidly and uselessly.

Schiller & Geniune Literature

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 233-37:

The end of Literature was not, in Schiller’s judgment, to amuse the idle, or to recreate the busy, by showy spectacles for the imagination, or quaint paradoxes and epigrammatic disquisitions for the understanding: least of all was it to gratify in any shape the selfishness of its professors, to minister to their malignity, their love of money, or even of fame. For persons who degrade it to such purposes, the deepest contempt of which his kindly nature could admit was at all times in store. ‘Unhappy mortal!’ says he to the literary tradesman, the man who writes for gain, ‘Unhappy mortal, who with science and art, the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attemptest nothing more than the day-drudge with the meanest; who, in the domain of perfect Freedom, bearest about in thee the spirit of Slave!’ As Schiller viewed it, genuine Literature includes the essence of philosophy, religion, art; whatever speaks to the immortal part of man. The daughter, she is likewise the nurse of all that is spiritual and exalted in our character. The boon she bestows is truth; truth not merely physical, political, economical, such as the sensual man in us is perpetually demanding, ever ready to reward, and likely in general to find; but truth of moral feeling, truth of taste, that inward truth in its thousand modifications, which only the most ethereal portion of our nature can discern, but without which that portion of it languishes and dies, and we are left divested of our birthright, thenceforward ‘of the earth earthy,’ machines for earning and enjoying, no longer worthy to be called the Sons of Heaven. The treasures of Literature are thus celestial, imperishable, beyond all price: with her is the shrine of our best hopes, the palladium of pure manhood; to be among the guardians and servants of this is the noblest function that can be intrusted to a mortal. Genius, even in its faintest scintillations, is ‘the inspired gift of God;’ a solemn mandate to its owner to go forth and labour in his sphere, to keep alive 'the sacred fire' among his brethren, which the heavy and polluted atmosphere of this world is forever threatening to extinguish. Woe to him if he neglect this mandate, if he hear not its small still voice! Woe to him if he turn this inspired gift into the servant of his evil or ignoble passions; if he offer it on the altar of vanity, if he sell it for a piece of money!

‘The Artist, it is true,’ says Schiller, ‘is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favourite! Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when [sic] a suckling from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time; that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the Son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The Matter of his works he will take from the present; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature. Here from the pure æther of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations, which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it. His Matter caprice can dishonour as she has ennobled it; but the chaste Form is withdrawn from her mutations. The Roman of the first century had long bent the knee before his Cæsars, when the statues of Rome were still standing erect; the temples continued holy to the eye, when their gods had long been a laughing-stock; and the abominations of a Nero and a Commodus were silently rebuked by the style of the edifice which lent them its concealment. Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it, and preserved it for him in expressive marbles. Truth still lives in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored.

‘But how is the Artist to guard himself from the corruptions of his time, which on every side assail him? By despising its decisions. Let him look upwards to his dignity and his mission, not downwards to his happiness and his wants. Free alike from the vain activity, that longs to impress its traces on the fleeting instant; and from the discontented spirit of enthusiasm, that measures by the scale of perfection the meagre product of reality, let him leave to common sense, which is here at home, the province of the actual; while he strives from the union of the possible with the necessary to bring out the ideal. This let him imprint and express in fiction and truth, imprint it in the sport of his imagination and the earnest of his actions, imprint it in all sensible and spiritual forms, and cast it silently into everlasting Time.’

Nor were these sentiments, be it remembered, the mere boasting manifesto of a hot-brained inexperienced youth, entering on literature with feelings of heroic ardour, which its difficulties and temptations would soon deaden or pervert: they are the calm principles of a man, expressed with honest manfulness, at a period when the world could compare them with a long course of conduct. In this just and lofty spirit, Schiller undertook the business of literature; in the same spirit he pursued it with unflinching energy all the days of his life. The common, and some uncommon, difficulties of a fluctuating and dependent existence could not quench or abate his zeal: sickness itself seemed hardly to affect him. During his last fifteen years, he wrote his noblest works; yet, as it has been proved too well, no day of that period could have passed without its load of pain. Pain could not turn him from his purpose, or shake his equanimity: in death itself he was calmer and calmer.

Pray Eternity May Be As Sweet

Joseph Ernest Renan, Brother & Sister: A Memoir and the Letters of Ernest and Henriette Renan, tr. Lady Mary Loyd (London: William Heinemann, 1896), 51-52:

The memory of those days is inexpressibly precious to me. The unavoidable delay connected with such work as we were occupied in winding up left me much leisure. I resolved to note down all the thoughts concerning the life of Jesus which had been stirring in my brain since my sojourn in the Tyrian country and my journey into Palestine. The personality of that great Founder had risen very clearly to my mind as I perused the Gospels in Galilee itself. Buried in the deepest conceivable retirement, with the help of the Gospels and of Josephus, I wrote a Life of Jesus, carrying the story while I was at Ghazir as far as the last journey to Jerusalem. Exquisite hours, departed all too quickly! I pray eternity may be as sweet! From morning till night I lived intoxicated, as it were, with the idea unfolding itself before my mental vision. I fell asleep pursuing it, and the first ray of sun shooting above the mountain revealed it to me yet clearer, stronger, than before. Henriette was the daily confidante of the progress of my labour. As fast as I could write a page she copied it. ‘‘I shall love this book,’’ she said, ‘‘because we have done it together, first of all, and then because I like it in itself.’’

The elevation of her thoughts had never struck me more. In the evening we used to walk on our terrace under the stars. Then she would give me the result of her reflections, full of tact and wisdom. Some of them were absolute revelations to me. She was perfectly happy, and this was certainly the most blessed moment in her life. Our intellectual and moral communion had never been so intimate. She repeatedly told me those days had been a paradise to her. A gentle mournfulness of tone pervaded everything she said. Her physical suffering was only numbed, and would wake, now and again, as though in sinister warning. Then she would complain that fate was miserly, and grudged her the few hours of perfect bliss it had ever granted her.

 

Ces jours m’ont laissé un inexprimable souvenir. Les lenteurs inséparables des difficiles opérations que nous achevions en ce moment me laissaient beaucoup de loisir. Je résolus d’écrire toutes les idées qui, depuis mon séjour dans le pays de Tyr et mon voyage de Palestine, germaient dans mon esprit sur la vie de Jésus. En lisant l’Évangile en Galilée, la personnalité de ce grand fondateur m’était fortement apparue. Au sein du plus profond repos qu’il soit possible de concevoir, j’écrivis, avec l’Évangile et Josèphe, une Vie de Jésus que je poussai à Ghazir jusqu’au dernier voyage de Jésus à Jérusalem. Heures délicieuses et trop vite évanouies ; oh ! puisse l’éternité vous ressembler ! Du matin au soir, j’étais comme ivre de la pensée qui se déroulait devant moi. Je m’endormais avec elle, et le premier rayon du soleil paraissant derrière la montagne me la rendait plus claire et plus vive que la veille. Henriette fut confidente jour par jour des progrès de mon ouvrage ; au fur et à mesure que j’avais écrit une page, elle la copiait : « Ce livre-ci, me disait-elle, je l’aimerai ; d’abord, parce que nous l’aurons fait ensemble, et puis, parce qu’il me plaît. » Jamais sa pensée n’avait été si haute. Le soir, nous nous promenions sur notre terrasse, à la clarté des étoiles ; là elle me faisait ses réflexions, pleines de tact et de profondeur, dont plusieurs ont été pour moi de vraies révélations. Sa joie était complète, et ce furent là sans doute les plus doux moments de sa vie. Notre communion intellectuelle et morale n’avait jamais été à un tel degré d’intimité. Elle me dit plusieurs fois que ces jours étaient son paradis. Un sentiment de douce tristesse s’y mêlait. Ses douleurs n’étaient qu’assoupies, elles se réveillaient par moments, comme un avertissement fatal. Elle se plaignait alors que le sort fût pour elle si avare et lui reprît les seules heures de joie parfaite qu’il lui eût concédées.

Life Of Study & Thought

Joseph Ernest Renan, The Future of Science: Ideas of 1848 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1891), xxi (emphasis mine; written to Monsieur Eugène Burnouf, March 1849):

    Monsieur

During the last twelvemonth my thoughts have frequently gone back to that memorable 25th February 1848, when after having scaled the barricades to get to the Collége de France we found our modest room transformed into a guardroom, to which we were welcomed like so many suspected individuals. That day I asked myself more seriously than ever whether a man could do better than devote every moment of his life to study and to thought, and after having consulted my conscience and strengthened my faith in human intellect, I resolutely answered; ‘‘No.’’ If science were nothing more than an agreeable pastime, a kind of diversion for the idle, a mere costly ornament, a hobby for the amateur, in short the least vain of all vanities, there might be times when the savant would have occasion to say with the poet;

Shame to him who sings, the while Rome burns.

But if science be a serious matter, if the destinies of mankind and the perfection of the individual be bound up with it, if it be a religion, it has like matters of religion its value every day, every moment of our lives. To devote to study and intellectual culture only our moments of peace and leisure is an insult to the human intellect, it is tacitly supposing that there is something more important than the pursuit of truth.

Revering The Dreams Of Early Youth

Friedrich Schiller, Don Carlos, tr. R. D. Boylan (in The Works of Friedrick Schiller, vol. III., London, 1872), 159 (the Marquis to the Queen):

Tell him, in manhood, he must still revere
The dreams of early youth, nor ope the heart
Of heaven’s all-tender flower to canker-worms 

Of boasted reason,—nor be led astray 

When, by the wisdom of the dust, he hears 

Enthusiasm, heavenly-born, blasphemed.

Giving of Oneself

Johan Huizinga, ‘‘Historical Ideals of Life (1915),’’ in The Course of Civilizations, tr. James S. Holmes & Hans van Marie (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 106:

We have spoken of the age-old impulse to abandon culture, to flee from the present day and its misery. In times such as these the impulse comes over us now and then more powerfully than ever. What will be the refuge? There are still a number of roads open. Though the past no longer proffers us the lovely dream of a peaceful perfection that may perhaps return in the future, ancient beauty and wisdom still grant sweet forgetfulness to the person who seeks it. Does the future have more to offer? We can observe this raging world from an absurd distance and say that it will take three thousand years for all the madness of the present conflict, the stupidity and the terror, the fate of states and nations, the very cultural values that now seem the highest stake to have become just as unimportant to humanity as the wars of Assyria are today. This is no consolation; that, too, is mere forgetfulness. And such resignation can also be achieved from a briefer distance: we can view all this through the eyes of those who have fallen. That is still the shortest road to liberation. The person who wants to abandon today with its heavy burden of history, has to abandon life. But the person who wants to carry that burden and still climb upward finds a fourth road open: that of the simple act—it makes no difference whether in the trenches or in any other serious work. Giving of oneself is the end and the beginning of every philosophy of life. Liberation is to be found not in the abandonment of culture, but in the abandonment of one’s own ego.

An Open Hand

Maria von Wedemeyer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pätzig, 8 October 1943 (in Love Letters from Cell 92, tr. John Brownjohn (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995)), 96:

In words one so easily talks at cross purposes, but in music one experiences a communion. That’s what all the words you write are like—like an open hand which I can grasp, which I love and want to cling to.

Sad Lucidity Of Soul

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 151-2:

Faith in the exceptional individual tended to replace faith in the group, in the nation, in the mass of mankind. Among men of letters, this revulsion of feeling was reinforced by growing awareness that increased literacy and cheap printing, instead of enlightening the masses, encouraged books with diluted or distorted thought and without art. Unwilling to stoop to meet the demand for literature as a mere commercial product, most of the ablest writers held themselves to exacting standards of art and thought. The extreme of this scorn of popular taste was the doctrine of art for art’s sake proclaimed by Gautier, Flaubert, and Baudelaire in France, by Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, and Pater in England. “Let the Empire run along,” was the celebrated counsel of Flaubert, “Let us climb to the top of our ivory tower, to the last step, the one nearest the sky. It is cold there, sometimes, isn’t it? But what does that matter? You see the stars shine clear, and you do not hear the geese cackle any longer.”

Disgust with the present, with the spectacle of ignorant masses deluded and exploited by a vulgar plutocracy, with the ugliness of crass industrialism, turned many eyes to the past for refuge, for refreshment. In this mood Leconte de Lisle produced Poémes antiques (1852) and William Morris The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870); in this mood Flaubert, Thackeray, and Morris each composed a historical novel— Salammbô (1862), Henry Esmond (1852), and the historical romance A Dream of John Ball (1888). “I am going to write a novel whose action will take place three centuries before Christ,” Flaubert explained, “for I feel the need of escaping from the modern world, . . . which fatigues me as much to reproduce as it disgusts me to observe.” His theme was the “implacable war” of Carthage with her mercenaries brilliantly sketched by Michelet, a savage and remorseless struggle in which neither side engaged his sympathies. For, however refreshing a change from the present, the past was seldom idealized by authors who came to maturity after 1848. They contemplated both past and future with what Matthew Arnold called a “sad lucidity of soul.”

Gazing Irreverently, & Praising Instead Of Praying

Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship To the Writing of History since Voltaire (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1947; repr. 1961), 139-140: 

Michelet’s power of resurrection first comes into full play in explaining how the Middle Ages, especially France of the Middle Ages, “expressed in architecture its most intimate thought.” He repeoples the great churches. “Try to imagine the effect of lights in these prodigious monuments, when the clergy, circulating by aerial ramps, animated the dark masses with fantastic processions, passing and repassing along balustrades, on bridges of lacework, in rich costumes, with candles and chants; when lights and voices turned in circle after circle, while from below, in the shadow, the ocean of people responded. That was for this era the true drama, the true mystery play; the representation of the journey of humanity across the three worlds, that sublime initiation which Dante took from transitory reality to fix eternally in his Divine Comedy. This colossal theater of sacred drama has returned, after the long festival of the Middle Ages, to silence and shadow. The feeble voice one hears there, the voice of the priest, is impotent to fill the arches whose amplitude was designed to embrace and contain the thunder of the people’s voice. The church is widowed, empty. Its profound symbolism, which then spoke so loud, is mute; now an object of scientific curiosity, of Alexandrian interpretations. The church is a Gothic museum, visited by the sophisticated. They move about, gaze irreverently, praise instead of praying.” The very stones of these churches illustrated the philosophy of Vico by the sublime anonymity of the masons who shaped them. “To know with what care they toiled, obscure and lost in their guild, with what abnegation, you must go over the most retired, least accessible parts of the cathedrals. Mount to those aerial deserts, to the ultimate points of those spires where the roofer fears to venture. There you will often find, buffeted by eternal wind, some masterpiece of art and sculpture upon which the poor workman lavished his life. He worked for God only, for the cure of his soul.” Tombs told the same story. “In the first Christian ages, in the time of lively faith, sorrows were patient. Death seemed a brief divorce, it separated, but only to reunite. A sign of this belief in the soul, in the reunion of souls, is that, up to the twelfth century, the body, the mortal remains, seems to have less importance. It does not yet ask for magnificent tombs. Hidden in a corner of the church, a simple slab covers it; enough to mark it for the day of resurrection: Hinc surrectura.”

Divine Souls

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Al-Maṭālib al-ʿĀliya min al-ʿIlm al-Ilāhī, ed. Aḥmad Ḥijāzī al-Saqqā, vol. 1 (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1987), 55–57 (personal trans.):

It has already been established, in our view, that human rational souls differ from one another in quiddity (māhiyyah) and substance (jawhar). Some are noble, divine, and celestial; others are dark, turbid, and profane. . . . Once this has been established, we say: among souls there are those whose very substance and essence are, from the outset, divine souls—disposed toward the Presence of Holiness [or the Holy], endowed with an abundant love for It, and deeply immersed in the degrees of its knowledge. Others possess something of these qualities, yet only in a weak measure. Still others are murky and darkened souls, devoid of these divine attractions and spiritual inclinations, submerged in the sea of passing passion and in the darkness of the world of the senses and fancy. 

To make these meanings more vividly clear, let me offer the following analogy. The mountains and hills of the world are of two kinds: in some there occurs mineral deposits, while in others there are not. Induction shows that mountains devoid of minerals are far more numerous than those in which minerals are formed. Furthermore, among the mountains that do produce minerals, some yield only inferiour, base substances, such as petroleum, sulfur, lime, and salt; while others produce precious, noble minerals, such as gold, silver, ruby, spinel, and the like. Again, induction shows that the mountains containing these precious and noble minerals are vastly fewer than those producing only the inferiour kinds. We may further observe that, among those mountains which contain these precious and noble minerals—the seven principal metallic bodies—the baser the metal, the more abundant its deposits; whereas the nobler the metal, the scarcer its occurrence.

Let human souls be understood by analogy with mountains and hills, and let the lights of the knowledge and love of God correspond to pure, refined gold. Just as most of the mountains and hills of this world contain no mineral deposits at all, so too the souls of most human beings are devoid of any inclination toward the world of spiritual realities. Moreover, even if souls of this kind were to devote themselves to the most rigourous bodily disciplines, they would derive but little benefit from them, just as a mountain lacking any mineral vein yields nothing at all, no matter how much effort one expends in excavating it.

And just as the mountains that do contain minerals differ from one another in degrees of richness and abundance beyond all possibility of precise measurement, so too the ranks of souls differ in strength and weakness, in greater and lesser capacity, by differences that admit of no exhaustive determination. And just as it is not impossible that, on rare occasions, there should exist a mountain containing a cavern filled with gold, so likewise it is not impossible that, in widely separated æons, there should arise a human being whose inward cavern of spirit is filled with the lights of the Divine Majesty.

Once you have grasped this analogy, you will understand that not everyone who undertakes spiritual discipline—even in its most arduous forms—is thereby destined to attain anything. Nor does everyone who attains something thereby reach the final end. Indeed, the ultimate end in this path admits of no limit. For just as there is no end to the Majesty of God or to the sublimity of His Greatness, so there is likewise no end to the degrees of beatitude attainable upon this path.

Therefore, keep this analogy constantly before your eyes and firmly fixed in your imagination, lest you be deceived into thinking that everyone who travels the path arrives, or that everyone who seeks necessarily finds. We do not deny that these spiritual disciplines have certain effects in some respects, for perseverance in practice does indeed produce effects of a certain kind. Yet it is evident that merely applying kohl to the eyes is not the same as possessing dark, thick eyelids.1

How excellent are the words of the Sage of Poets [= al-Mutanabbī]:

The heart is urged to forget you,

Yet innate nature refuses to be transformed.

Aristotle likewise said: ‘‘Whoever wishes to embark upon the pursuit of these divine sciences must acquire for himself another nature’’ What he means is that one must exert oneself to strip the intellect of its attachments to sense, to mere assumptions (wahm), and to fancy.

1 This line is from a line of verse by the poet al-Mutanabbī, which reads more beautifully in Arabic: وليس التكحُّل في العينين كالكَحَل.

The Unhappiness, Faults, & Follies Of Literary Men, & The History Of Genius

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 51-52, 53-54:

If to know wisdom were to practise it; if fame brought true dignity and peace of mind; or happiness consisted in nourishing the intellect with its appropriate food and surrounding the imagination with ideal beauty, a literary life would be the most enviable which the lot of this world affords. But the truth is far otherwise. The Man of Letters has no immutable, all-conquering volition, more than other men; to understand and to perform are two very different things with him as with every one. His fame rarely exerts a favourable influence on his dignity of character, and never on his peace of mind: its glitter is external, for the eyes of others; within, it is but the aliment of unrest, the oil cast upon the ever-gnawing fire of ambition, quickening into fresh vehemence the blaze which it stills for a moment. Moreover, this Man of Letters is not wholly made of spirit, but of clay and spirit mixed: his thinking faculties may be nobly trained and exercised, but he must have affections as well as thoughts to make him happy, and food and raiment must be given him or he dies. Far from being the most enviable, his way of life is perhaps, among the many modes by which an ardent mind endeavours to express its activity, the most thickly beset with suffering and degradation. Look at the biography of authors! Except the Newgate Calendar, it is the most sickening chapter in the history of man. The calamities of these people are a fertile topic; and too often their faults and vices have kept pace with their calamities. Nor is it difficult to see how this has happened. Talent of any sort is generally accompanied with a peculiar fineness of sensibility; of genius this is the most essential constituent; and life in any shape has sorrows enough for hearts so formed. The employments of literature sharpen this natural tendency; the vexations that accompany them frequently exasperate it into morbid soreness. The cares and toils of literature are the business of life; its delights are too ethereal and too transient to furnish that perennial flow of satisfaction, coarse but plenteous and substantial, of which happiness in this world of ours is made. The most finished efforts of the mind give it little pleasure, frequently they give it pain; for men’s aims are ever far beyond their strength. And the outward recompense of these undertakings, the distinction they confer, is of still smaller value: the desire for it is insatiable even when successful; and when baffled, it issues in jealousy and envy, and every pitiful and painful feeling. So keen a temperament with so little to restrain or satisfy, so much to distress or tempt it, produces contradictions which few are adequate to reconcile. Hence the unhappiness of literary men, hence their faults and follies. [...]

Yet among these men are to be found the brightest specimens and the chief benefactors of mankind! It is they that keep awake the finer parts of our souls; that give us better aims than power or pleasure, and withstand the total sovereignty of Mammon in this earth. They are the vanguard in the march of mind; the intellectual Backwoodsmen, reclaiming from the idle wilderness new territories for the thought and the activity of their happier brethren. Pity that from all their conquests, so rich in benefit to others, themselves should reap so little! But it is vain to murmur. They are volunteers in this cause; they weighed the charms of it against the perils: and they must abide the results of their decision, as all must. The hardships of the course they follow are formidable, but not all inevitable; and to such as pursue it rightly, it is not without its great rewards. If an author’s life is more agitated and more painful than that of others, it may also be made more spirit-stirring and exalted: fortune may render him unhappy; it is only himself that can make him despicable. The history of genius has, in fact, its bright side as well as its dark. And if it is distressing to survey the misery, and what is worse, the debasement of so many gifted men, it is doubly cheering on the other hand to reflect on the few, who, amid the temptations and sorrows to which life in all its provinces and most in theirs is liable, have travelled through it in calm and virtuous majesty, and are now hallowed in our memories, not less for their conduct than their writings. Such men are the flower of this lower world: to such alone can the epithet of great be applied with its true emphasis. There is a congruity in their proceedings which one loves to contemplate: ‘he who would write heroic poems, should make his whole life a heroic poem.’

Youth Changed Into A Man

Thomas Carlyle, ‘‘German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1831),’’ in Critical and Miscellaneaous Essays (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), 12-13: 

In the history of the universal mind, there is a certain analogy to that of the individual. Our first self-consciousness is the first revelation to us of a whole universe, wondrous and altogether good; it is a feeling of joy and new-found strength, of mysterious infinite hope and capability; and in all men, either by word or act, expresses itself poetically. The world without us and within us, beshone by the young light of Love, and all instinct with a divinity, is beautiful and great; it seems for us a boundless happiness that we are privileged to live. This is the season of generous deeds and feelings; which also, on the lips of the gifted, form themselves into musical utterance, and give spoken poetry as well as acted. Nothing is calculated and measured, but all is loved, believed, appropriated. All action is spontaneous, high sentiment a sure, imperishable good; and thus the youth stands, like the First Man, in his fair Garden, giving Names to the bright Appearances of this Universe which he has inherited, and rejoicing in it as glorious and divine. Erelong, however, comes a harsher time. Under the first beauty of man’s life appears an infinite, earnest rigour: high sentiment will not avail, unless it can continue to be translated into noble action; which problem, in the destiny appointed for man born to toil, is difficult, interminable, capable of only approximate solution. What flowed softly in melodious coherence when seen and sung from a distance, proves rugged and unmanageable when practically handled. The fervid, lyrical gladness of past years gives place to a collected thoughtfulness and energy; nay often,—so painful, so unexpected are the contradictions everywhere met with,—to gloom, sadness and anger; and not till after long struggles and hard-contested victories is the youth changed into a man.

From Contemplating How Things Should Be To Knowing How They Are

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 99-100 (emphasis mine):

Schiller was, in fact, growing tired of fictitious writing. Imagination was with him a strong, not an exclusive, perhaps not even a predominating faculty: in the sublimest flights of his genius, intellect is a quality as conspicuous as any other; we are frequently not more delighted with the grandeur of the drapery in which he clothes his thoughts, than with the grandeur of the thoughts themselves. To a mind so restless, the cultivation of all its powers was a peremptory want; in one so earnest, the love of truth was sure to be among its strongest passions. Even while revelling, with unworn ardour, in the dreamy scenes of the Imagination, he had often cast a longing look, and sometimes made a hurried inroad, into the calmer provinces of reason: but the first effervescence of youth was past, and now more than ever, the love of contemplating or painting things as they should be, began to yield to the love of knowing things as they are. The tendency of his mind was gradually changing; he was about to enter on a new field of enterprise, where new triumphs awaited him.

Schiller As An Example Of German Character

Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (vol. 5 of the Library Edition of Carlyle’s Collected Works, London: Chapman and Hall), 230-233:

Schiller gives a fine example of the German character: he has all its good qualities in a high degree, with very few of its defects. We trace in him all that downrightness and simplicity, that sincerity of heart and mind, for which the Germans are remarked; their enthusiasm, their patient, long-continuing, earnest devotedness; their imagination, delighting in the lofty and magnificent; their intellect, rising into refined abstractions, stretching itself into comprehensive generalisations. But the excesses to which such a character is liable are, in him, prevented by a firm and watchful sense of propriety. His simplicity never degenerates into ineptitude or insipidity; his enthusiasm must be based on reason; he rarely suffers his love of the vast to betray him into toleration of the vague. The boy Schiller was extravagant; but the man admits no bombast in his style, no inflation in his thoughts or actions. He is the poet of truth; our understandings and consciences are satisfied, while our hearts and imaginations are moved. His fictions are emphatically nature copied and embellished; his sentiments are refined and touchingly beautiful, but they are likewise manly and correct; they exalt and inspire, but they do not mislead. Above all, he has no cant; in any of its thousand branches, ridiculous or hateful, none. He does not distort his character or genius into shapes, which he thinks more becoming than their natural one: he does not hang out principles which are not his, or harbour beloved persuasions which he half or wholly knows to be false. He did not often speak of wholesome prejudices; he did not ‘embrace the Roman Catholic religion because it was the grandest and most comfortable.’ Truth with Schiller, or what seemed such, was an indispensable requisite: if he but suspected an opinion to be false, however dear it may have been, he seems to have examined it with rigid scrutiny, and if he found it guilty, to have plucked it out, and resolutely cast it forth. The sacrifice might cause him pain, permanent pain; real damage, he imagined, it could hardly cause him. It is irksome and dangerous to travel in the dark; but better so, than with an Ignis-fatuus to guide us. Considering the warmth of his sensibilities, Schiller’s merit on this point is greater than we might at first suppose. For a man with whom intellect is the ruling or exclusive faculty, whose sympathies, loves, hatreds, are comparatively coarse and dull, it may be easy to avoid this half-wilful entertainment of error, and this cant which is the consequence and sign of it. But for a man of keen tastes, a large fund of innate probity is necessary to prevent his aping the excellence which he loves so much, yet is unable to attain. Among persons of the latter sort, it is extremely rare to meet with one completely unaffected. Schiller’s other noble qualities would not have justice, did we neglect to notice this, the truest proof of their nobility. Honest, unpretending, manly simplicity pervades all parts of his character and genius and habits of life. We not only admire him, we trust him and love him.

‘The character of child-like simplicity,’ he has himself observed, ‘which genius impresses on its works, it shows also in its private life and manners. It is bashful, for nature is ever so; but it is not prudish, for only corruption is prudish. It is clear-sighted, for nature can never be the contrary; but it is not cunning, for this only art can be. It is faithful to its character and inclinations; but not so much because it is directed by principles, as because after all vibrations nature constantly reverts to her original position, constantly renews her primitive demand. It is modest, nay timid, for genius is always a secret to itself; but it is not anxious, for it knows not the dangers of the way which it travels. Of the private habits of the persons who have been peculiarly distinguished by their genius, our information is small; but the little that has been recorded for us of the chief of them,—of Sophocles, Archimedes, Hippocrates; and in modern times, of Dante and Tasso, of Rafaelle, Albrecht Dürer, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Fielding, and others,—confirms this observation.’ Schiller himself confirms it; perhaps more strongly than most of the examples here adduced. No man ever wore his faculties more meekly, or performed great works with less consciousness of their greatness. Abstracted from the contemplation of himself, his eye was turned upon the objects of his labour, and he pursued them with the eagerness, the entireness, the spontaneous sincerity, of a boy pursuing sport. Hence this ‘child-like simplicity,’ the last perfection of his other excellencies. His was a mighty spirit unheedful of its might. He walked the earth in calm power: ‘the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam;’ but he wielded it like a wand.

Pleasures Of The Soul

Plutarch, Symposiacs, bk. V., tr. T. C. (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies, 1911, vol. III.), 313-314:

What is your opinion at present, Sossius Senecio, of the pleasures of mind and body, is not evident to me;

        Because us two a thousand things divide,
        Vast shady hills, and the rough ocean’s tide.1

But formerly, I am sure, you did not lean to nor like their opinion, who will not allow the soul to have any proper agreeable pleasure, which without respect to the body she desires for herself; but define that she lives as a form assistant to the body, is directed by the passions of it, and, as that is affected, is either pleased or grieved, or, like a looking-glass, only receives the images of those sensible impressions made upon the body. This sordid and debasing opinion is especially in this way confuted; for at a feast, the genteel well-bred men after supper fall upon some topic or another as second course, and cheer one another by their pleasant talk. Now the body hath very little or no share in this; which evidently proves that this is a particular banquet for the soul, and that those pleasures are peculiar to her, and different from those which pass to her through the body and are vitiated thereby. Now, as nurses, when they feed children, taste a little of their pap, and have but small pleasure therefrom, but when the infants are satisfied, leave crying, and go to sleep, then being at their own disposal, they take such meat and drink as is agreeable to their own bodies; thus the soul partakes of the pleasures that arise from eating and drinking, like a nurse, being subservient to the appetites of the body, kindly yielding to its necessities and wants, and calming its desires; but when that is satisfied and at rest, then being free from her business and servile employment, she seeks her own proper pleasures, revels on discourse, problems, stories, curious questions, or subtle resolutions. Nay, what shall a man say, when he sees the dull unlearned fellows after supper minding such pleasures as have not the least relation to the body? They tell tales, propose riddles, or set one another a guessing at names, comprised and hid under such and such numbers. Thus mimics, drolls, Menander and his actors were admitted into banquets, not because they can free the eye from any pain, or raise any tickling motion in the flesh; but because the soul, being naturally philosophical and a lover of instruction, covets its own proper pleasure and satisfaction, when it is free from the trouble of looking after the body.

1 Iliad, I. 156.