Posted By BillHeise on June 14, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
—–
When I was in college, the best class I ever took was Caron Cioffi’s class in The Sources and Analogues of Chaucer. I took it on the eve of getting married. Caron Cioffi was going through a divorce at the time, and I think it drove her nuts that I was constantly being asked about the latest wedding plans. She gave me the only “B” I got during my Masters program. I saw her years later the conference and I thanked her for her class, but I’m sure she did not remember me.

Caron Cioffi introduced me to Virgil, Ovid, and Dante before moving on to reading Chaucer’s Hous of Fame and Troilus and Cressida. He was attacking the class, and convinced me that without a firm knowledge of the ancient and evil classics that I could never hope to compete with Joyce for mastery of the universe. It was on the basis of this class that I switched my interest during the second year of my Masters program from Joyce and the Moderns to the Middle Ages. I simply thought the Middle Ages had a more comprehensive view of the world than the Modern period had. This would be a great decision from my point of view as a person who wanted to solve the problem of modernism. It was, however, not such a good position to have taken into such a conservative field.

One of the reasons that Cioffi’s class appealed to me was that it had elements in it that were absent from the Modern worldview of Joseph Campbell and James Joyce. Chief among these was the works of Ovid.

In graduate school one of my medieval professors gave me Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Seznec’s thesis is that the dark ages were so dark because all but a select few medieval people hated learning. It was up to those select few to cherish learning until the modern world could revive it. In such a world, Ovid’s picture of the universe is generally seen as no more than a kindly portrait of mythological tales such as the tale of Actaeon or of Daphne bathing in the river. As such, they make a basis for subsequent additions to the world of myth by figures like Chaucer and Spenser (and a multitude of others).

This point of view rests on the Renaissance’s Revival of Learning. We don’t really need to investigate the content of Ovid’s mythological tales. Ovid may have in fact been a fool for believing what he wrote. This does not affect our posture towards the Metamorphoses. They are simply the inherited tales of antiquity which modern people used to build upon (until the 19th century at least).

But for me, who had been looking at the Modern point of view as not complete, Ovid’s absence from the Modern tradition was striking. Perhaps, I thought, I should gather as many strands from the tradition as I could. This included Ovid.

If we look at Ovid, not as a source for others, but on his own terms, we find that he was a thinker who was following in the footsteps of Virgil, the chief poet of Roman Empire. In Virgil, we find that thinker who manages to wrap up the strands of science into a neat metaphysical package. This package was exemplified by the figure of Cesar Augustus.

The problem is that Ovid does not believe that the strands of science can be woven back into a neat metaphysical package. If Caron Cioffi was correct, this was something I needed to take into account.

Ovid starts out his poem at the beginning of time and works his way through “the course of time” to “my time”:

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.

Ovid effects of a change from Virgil’s stable metaphysical universe. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the universe is fractured and fragmentary place which depends upon the horizontal protraction of time without the notion that we can have any vertical metaphysical ascent. This notion is given voice in Ovid when Virgil meets the Sybil who will take him to the underworld. She relates her story:

He [Aeneas] sayed: Whither present thou thyself a Goddesse bee,
Or such a one as God dooth love most dearly, I will thee
For ever as a Goddesse take, and will acknowledge mee
Thy servant, for saufguyding mee the place of death to see,
And for thou from the place of death hast brought me sauf and free.
For which desert, what tyme I shall atteyne to open ayre,
I will a temple to thee buyld ryght sumptuous, large, and fayre,
And honour thee with frankincence.

But she corrects him:

The prophetisse did cast
Her eye uppon Aenaeas backe, and syghing sayd at last:
I am no Goddesse. Neyther think thou canst with conscience ryght,
With holy incence honour give to any mortall wyght.
But to th’entent through ignorance thou erre not, I had beene
Eternall and of worldly lyfe I should none end have seene,
If that I would my maydenhod on Phebus have bestowde.
Howbeeit whyle he stood in hope to have the same, and trowde
To overcome mee with his gifts: Thou mayd of Cumes (quoth he)
Choose what thou wilt, and of thy wish the owner thou shalt bee.
I taking full my hand of dust, and shewing it him there,
Desyred like a foole to live as many yeeres as were
Small graynes of cinder in that heape. I quight forgot to crave
Immediately, the race of all those yeeres in youth to have.
Yit did he graunt mee also that, uppon condicion I
Would let him have my maydenhod, which thing I did denye.
And so rejecting Phebus gift a single lyfe I led.
But now the blessefull tyme of youth is altogither fled,
And irksome age with trembling pace is stolne uppon my head,
Which long I must endure. For now already as you see
Seven hundred yeares are come and gone and that the number bee
Full matched of the granes of dust, three hundred harvestes mo,
I must three hundred vintages see more before I go.
The day will come that length of tyme shall make my body small,
And little of my withered limbes shall leave or naught at all.
And none shall think that ever God was tane in love with mee.
Even out of Phebus knowledge then perchaunce I growen shall bee,
Or at the least that ever he mee lovde he shall denye,
So sore I shall be altered. And then shall no mannes eye
Discerne mee. Only by my voyce I shall bee knowen. For why
The fates shall leave mee still my voyce for folke to know mee by. (Book 14)

The message is clear. Virgil has given voice to Aeneas’ longing for vertical (metaphysical) solutions. He actually believes that she is a goddess. But Ovid denies those vertical solutions in favor of a horizontal extension through time that never reaches back to the metaphysical realm. For me as a thinker who engaged too long the Modern perspective, this was a fresh and new perspective on the world, one that Moderns had neglected. [See the Latin introduction to the poem. “In novo” has been left out of the traditional translation of the text  altogether.]

It was exactly here in Ovid that I started to place my faith in opposition to the Virgilian work of the Moderns.

This stood me in good stead throughout graduate school; but, once again, it put me at odds with my professors. My conservative professors had imbibed the Modern worldview and they thought that Ovid was just another of many sources which medieval thinkers use to support their less than complete view of the world. My progressive postmodern professors thought that I was hopelessly naïve to go back over such tired ground as Ovid. They were looking forward to the future. I was stuck in the stale past.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
Tags: