‘He’s a sacramental man is Brasso’ (71)
The sacrament to which Brasso Olenius is loyal is the ‘sacramentum’ of the Roman army. In the inscription Jones produced for the Fulcrum Press edition of ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ the words ‘Idem in Me’ – translated by Jones as ‘the same (holds good) for me’ – occupy the centre space (SL, 43, 42). The phrase, Jones adds, was used by Roman legionaries in ‘ratification of the oath of allegiance or sacramentum’ (SL, 43; Campbell, 19). Drawing on the entry on sacramentum in Oskar Seyffert’s A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (Seyffert, 550–551), Jones highlights the ways in which the oath shifted from a pledge of personal allegiance made by the troops to a particular commanding officer within the Republic to an oath uttered corporately to the emperor and enforced by the threat of divine sanction during the imperial period (SL, 43). Later historians, however, question the degree to which the sacramentum transformed during the transition from republic to empire. J.B. Campbell, for instance, accepts that latterly the sacramentum involved a pledge of allegiance to the emperor, and that it was ‘secured by ties of religion’ (Campbell, 25), but stresses that the oath also fostered a sense of ‘personal’ allegiance between individual soldiers and the emperor (Campbell, 30–31), which is at odds with the formal, corporate and impersonal account of the later sacramentum offered by Jones. Jones’s willingness to press the differences between the oath in the two periods reveals the exemplary value this difference provides; the two oaths highlight the respective characteristics of changing world orders, and in particular the transition from a society that fosters local difference to one that imposes monolithic organisation (see the note on ‘Facts’).
This appreciation of the various shades of sacramentum informs the legionary Crixus’s description of Brasso as a ‘sacramental man’. Brasso is a tough commander. He demands that his soldiers devote themselves to the sacramentum, and in turn the men gripe: ‘Their buggering sacramentum, signs/you on for half a life of this’ (54), referring to the twenty years’ service required of legionaries in the Roman standing army from 13 BCE (Watson, 11). Yet, in demanding that his men meet their obligations, Brasso affords the sacrifice of the sacramentum due reverence. The soldiers bemoan the poor treatment they receive upon retirement and complain that the townsfolk under their protection inevitably fail to confer significant honour or financial reward upon their sacrifices: ‘Here comes an old emeritus from / Berytus Bay / What have you got to give him / today / for keeping his sacramentum’ (56–7). This corporate sacramentum as Jones understands it channels the tensions inherent in Spengler’s division of rooted cultures and cosmopolitan civilization (see note on ‘Dream’), marking both a world newly hostile to local variation – the visiting Tribune dismisses the ‘bumpkin sacraments’ (146) of regional religions – and a means of fostering lasting values.
Such a continuation was facilitated by the second life Christianity afforded the term. Sacramentum was adopted by the early Christian church to ‘refer to any ritual observance of the Church, or to any spiritually symbolic act or object’ and it thereafter informed the English term ‘sacrament’, meaning ‘certain solemn ceremonies or religious acts belonging to the institutions of the Christian church’ (OED 1). While Christian history has been marked by debates as to the ‘ceremonies’ and ‘acts’ deemed worthy of the term, ‘sacrament’ has often referred specifically to the sacrament instituted by Christ at the Last Supper, the Eucharist (OED 2). In exploring elements of the Christian story: Judas’s betrayal and Christ’s Passion, and Roman history in the design of The Grail Mass, Jones thus stages the etymology of ‘sacrament’, while highlighting the various ways in which the Roman Empire sustained, shaped and spread the Christian religion. In the legionaries’ sacramentum, the reader hears not only the Roman oath of allegiance, but also echoes of later Christian usage.
Jones encourages readers to listen out for such references – references lost on the dramatic personages to whom he gives his words and in line with the prophetic register the material took on in later stages of the project (see note on ‘Time’) – by infusing the poem with terminology drawn from contemporary debates in Eucharistic theology. For this, Jones relies on the writer he termed ‘my theologian’ (Dilworth, 2008: 170), de la Taille, a Jesuit priest and author of a three-volume treatise on Eucharistic theology entitled Mysterium Fidei (1921), to whose ideas he had been introduced in 1920–1921 (DJP, CD2/6). The delay in an English translation of de la Taille’s Latin opus meant that Jones was unable to read the first two volumes of Mysterium Fidei until the early 1940s. Before that, he had access to Martin D’Arcy’s The Mass and the Redemption (1926), which drew heavily on de la Taille’s ideas and to de la Taille’s summary of his arguments published by Sheed & Ward in the early 1930s (Callison, 451).
In Mysterium Fidei, de la Taille countered long-standing theological interpretations of the Council of Trent’s (1545–1563) description of the Mass as a ‘holy sacrifice’; interpretations that had been built up, according to another notable Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac, into a series of ‘over-complicated systems’ since the Council (de Lubac, 4). For de la Taille, the bringing together of the idea of sacrifice, Christ’s Passion and the doctrine of the Real Presence – the understanding that Christ becomes present in the bread and wine during the Mass – had led Roman Catholic tradition to interpret the idea of a ‘holy sacrifice’ in terms of the real and repeated destruction of Christ’s physical body (Matthiesen, 521). De la Taille argued that this understanding should be broadened to include not only Christ’s Passion, but also the creative and symbolic activity that occurred at the Last Supper in Christ’s institution of the Eucharist. He ascribed every sacrifice two constituent parts, an act of oblation – a ceremonial gift-giving or offering up – and an act of immolation – a moment of cultic destruction, and saw this pattern exemplified by the Christian story: ‘The Supper and the Passion answer each together. They complete and compenetrate each other. The one presents to our eyes the sacerdotal, sensible, ritual oblation, wherein consists the mystic immolation; the other adds to it the real, bloody, all sufficient immolation of which the first was the figure’ (de la Taille, 13).
In The Grail Mass, de la Taille’s terminology is invoked on numerous occasions. For instance, Jones adapts Isaiah 29:1–2, and has the Jewish high priest, Caiaphas, recommend the verse to Judas:
Woe to Ariel to Ariel
the city where David dwelt:
add year to year,
let them immolate what is oblated,
yet will I distress Ariel. (43)
The King James Version renders the verse: ‘Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! add ye year to year; let them kill sacrifices. Yet I will distress Ariel.’ In Jones’s adaption, this singular ‘sacrifice’ is split into two parts: what is ‘oblated’ is then ‘immolate[d]’. Likewise, the priest’s actions in ‘The Alternative Mass Opening’ draw their power from what was instituted ‘by oblation at the meal by / immolation on the hill’ (215). More widely, the very structure of Jones’s project – a project that strains to accommodate a Passion narrative and an account of the Last Supper – can be traced to the tensions found in de la Taille.
For Jones, de la Taille’s thesis ‘seemed to illumine things outside its immediate theological context’ (A, 37n). The theologian’s ideas ultimately formed the basis of the theory of sign that Jones outlined in his essays, notably ‘Art and Sacrament’ (E&A, 143–179). At the core of this theory is the idea that the creative activity of both God and humankind is gratuitous; the forms to which acts of gratuitous creation give shape take on special significance and became signs (Williams, 62–88). The fact that Christ, the perfect exemplar of humankind, engaged in the making of signs – through his act of oblation at the Last Supper – reveals that men and women are most fully themselves when sharing in the gratuitousness of creation: ‘man is essentially a creature of sign and signa-making, a “sacramentalist” to the core’ (DGC, 222). Sacrament is neither a relic of Roman history nor a specialist area of Christian thought; it concerns issues at the heart of what it is to be human, and to which The Grail Mass attends.
‘That’s the cost/ of empire, Oenomaus, that is.’ (79)
The Grail Mass commends art distinguished by the marks of ‘place incidence, locale and name’ (215). Jones himself expressed a preference for what he described as the ‘Celtic’ in art; a quality he saw as evincing ‘a certain vivid imaged business like a tangled brush with cats coming & going [and a] certain affection for the intimate creatureliness of things – a care for, and appreciation of, the particular genius of places, men, trees, animals, and yet withal a pervading sense of metamorphosis and mutability’ (JE, 11).
For Jones, art marked by ‘place incidence, locale and name’ was distinguished by the presence of various compositional ‘strata’. Musing on the sleeping lord, the poem asks:
And is his bed wide
is his bed deep on the folded strata,
is his bed long
where is his bed
and where have they
laid him from Buelt to Gower? (108)
The intersection of the slumbering subject of this extract with the geography and geology of Wales enables Jones to survey various levels of cultural deposit. He extended his use of this geological metaphor in the ‘Rite and Fore-time’ section of The Anathemata to explore the analogy between human and divine creation (A, 49–82). This interest in the geographic particular informed Jones’s praise for James Joyce as the artist ‘who, more than any other, for all the universality of his theme, depended upon a given locality, for no man could have adhered with more absolute fidelity to a specified site, and the complex historic strata special to that site, to express a universal concept’ (DG, 46). More widely, the metaphor of ‘strata’ is emblematic of the method employed in The Grail Mass itself, which evinces layers both in the approach to history and culture explored over the Celtic insertions and in the wider compositional practice of splitting up manuscripts and nesting texts within texts.
Jones’s exploration of ‘place incidence, locale and name’ in the Celtic insertions takes place in the context of conflict:
Not on fair-height, unbodied, where men
of mind clamber the steep concepts, grope the
damps of unknowing, but now on named
tump, known to this kith where this kin
made this mound without this tun, beyond
this vallum – now is he lord of this locality
who lets blood of this body moist here this cranny
of this rock on this parched alien hill
far side Our Sea. (84)
The ‘lord of locality’ on his ‘mound’ made by kith and kin finds himself at war with the ‘men/of mind’ and their ‘steep concepts’. Within The Grail Mass, it is the universalizing and homogenizing force of the Roman Empire – signified here by intellectual abstraction – that provides this opposition. The ‘old Roman blimp’ (DGC, 192) of ‘The Roman Dinner Conversation’, for example, condescends to the ‘toleration […] and even, in some instances, the protection of’ the rooted cultures the Empire touches, betraying an imperial benevolence that refuses to broach the idea of those cultures having value in and of themselves (159).
In bringing together the Welsh and Roman material, Jones was also minded of what he considered the ongoing English colonization of Wales. For many years, Jones maintained a friendship with Saunders Lewis, the writer, broadcaster and founder of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (the National Party of Wales). Responding to the decision by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to develop a vernacular liturgy in English alone for all regions in their purview following the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Jones complained that ‘scant attention’ had been paid to Welsh-speaking Catholic communities (DJP, CF2–7). The reasoning behind this decision, Jones argues, had been dictated by utile considerations (see note on ‘Facts’). For Jones, there are evident analogies between Roman assimilation of local cultures and English attitudes towards Wales and his attempts to develop these comparisons were buoyed by his reading of Spengler (see note on ‘Time’).
Jones saw utility as the driving force behind imperial expansion, and The Grail Mass surveys the economic motives that drove the Empire’s expeditionary warfare. The poem catches sight of the merchants lining the streets to watch a Roman Triumph: ‘the shopkeepers [who] presume to make/the lupine cry their own’ (60) and ‘the magnates of the Boarium [who] leave their nice manipulations’ (60). The ‘universal graft’ (80) of the international trade from which Rome prospers is made possible by the Empire’s ‘armed peace’ (62) (see Goldpaugh, 2010).
Yet, it is not only the Celtic chieftains and their peoples who suffer as ‘place incidence, locale and name’ are pillaged in service of the Empire’s prosperity. Tragedy befalls even those within its folds. The very people who fight the wars demanded by the aristocratic and mercantile classes, the legionaries, consider themselves ‘orphaned by empire’ (77) and empire itself is termed the ‘great uprooter’ of all whom it touches (79). The betrayal of the local and the dispossessions that follow are what Crixus has in mind when he says: ‘That’s the cost/of empire, Oenomaus, that is’ (79).
‘Mark the changed fact world!’ (42)
‘Factuality is our lode’ (40), Caiaphas claims in a discussion with Judas at the opening of The Grail Mass. Likewise, a commitment to facts lies behind Judas’s act of betrayal itself:
By y’r Grace’s leave, the bargained
silver’s in exchange for facts,
and, in a humble way, y’r Grace,
I’m fond of facts — dreams are
m’ bugbear — that’s why I’m here.
(38)
Such an emphasis even shapes Jones’s version of the Jewish religious outlook. Judas assuages his doubts over his impending act of betrayal with the Sadducees’ practically minded rejection of eschatological doctrines: ‘Let’s fetch our precepts from the Sadducees and fur our tippets in the Zadoc school […] That’s goodish sense — they’re men of fact and dress our antique dogmas up to date’ (239). Jones saw contemporary Roman Catholics giving up on the power of imagination in a comparable fashion, and he discussed the issue with his friend, the historian Christopher Dawson:
He said he found that Catholics, in his experience, since he became a Catholic, were getting far more, not less ‘institutional’ (in the bad sense) and mechanical, so to say. That the age of von Hügel, the ‘belief’ in the Holy Ghost, in the subtlety of where truth resides etc. seemed far away – and a belief in effecting things by organization and formulas etc. etc. (among Catholics) [was] growing rather than lessening.
DGC, 120
In The Mystical Element of Religion – a book Jones read and annotated – Friedrich von Hügel, a philosopher of religion to whom Jones claimed to have once been ‘quite addicted’ (IN, 90) while at work on The Grail Mass, presented personal belief as the product of a negotiation between institutional–historic, rational–scientific and mystical–subjective tendencies within the believer (Tracy, 148); a ‘healthy religion’, as Jones’s friend D’Arcy wrote, requires a balance of all three elements (D’Arcy, 237). On the strength of this reading, Judas and Caiaphas’s unbending commitment to facts – a commitment shared with Jones’s Tribune, though the Roman figure is presented with a far greater degree of nuance – is evidence of a partial and impoverished outlook, prioritizing one element over the others. Judas’s betrayal represents a failure of nerve, evincing a lack of imagination and a preference for clarity, organization and formula.
Such preferences were characteristic of the individuals whom Spengler termed ‘fact-men’ (Spengler, 350; Goldpaugh, 2017, 22). Jones read and annotated Spengler’s two volumes, Decline of the West and Man and Technics while he was at work on The Grail Mass. In Spengler’s account:
[Fact-men] do not broadcast their millions to dreamers, ‘artists’, weaklings and ‘down-and-outs’ to satisfy a boundless benevolence; they employ them for those who like themselves count as material for the Future. They pursue a purpose with them. They make a centre of force for the existence of generations which outlives the single lives.
Spengler, 350
In The Grail Mass, the Roman Empire understands itself in Spenglerian terms and the aims and objectives of these fact-men frequently impinge on the poem: ‘Mark the changed fact world!’ (42); ‘there’s always a Brasso to shout the odds, a fact man to knock hell out of these dream-truths’ (70); and
Suchlike bumpkin sacraments
are for the young-time
for the dream watches
now we serve contemporary fact. (146)
The ‘fact world’ prioritizes political change – in Spengler’s terms, the break up and absorption of local cultures into a new monolithic entity, the megalopolis – over artistic endeavour. The distinction Spengler makes between a fertile, rooted traditional culture and an abstract, cosmopolitan civilization was heir to a German intellectual tradition that ‘insisted on the superiority of Germany’s vision of culture, the transcendent but nationally rooted idea of Kultur, over the superficial, rootless Zivilisation of France and Great Britain’ (Marsh, 8). The racial implications of this narrative were subsequently exploited by the Nazis and the difference between the nuanced depiction of the Tribune – the Roman fact-man – and Caiaphas’s unyielding devotion to fact lays bare the troubling implications of Jones’s use of this material.
Jones’s willingness to explore the various shades of Roman civilization issues in an attempt to find – despite the imperial disdain for the aesthetic – beauty in the works of empire. This is evident in his writing on discipline:
Erect, crested with the open fist that turns the evil spell, lifting the
flat palm that disciplines the world, the signa lift in disciplined
acknowledgement, the eagles stand erect for Ilia
O Roma
O Ilia
Io Triumphe, Io, Io … (60)
Imperial disciplina marks a corporate commitment to the fact world, and yet its exercise – almost in spite of itself – produces unexpected beauty, uniting ‘discipline’ as political control (OED 12) and as training (OED 4). Discipline in the latter sense is bound up with the account of the ‘artistic habit’ provided by the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain in Art and Scholasticism, a book that Jones read with Eric Gill at Ditchling: ‘The innate disposition is clearly indispensable; but without a culture and a discipline, which the ancients considered should be long and patient and honest, it will never turn into art properly speaking’ (Maritain, 33). While Maritain has the apprenticeship requisite for development as an artist in mind here, Jones would broaden this idea of discipline and training, alluding for instance to Henry V’s idea of the ‘disciplines of the war’ (Poole, 91–104). This is matched by the expanded sense of art that Jones would offer in two of his major essays: ‘Art and Sacrament’ and ‘Art in Relation to War’.
This facet of the work responds to Jones’s discomfort with Spengler’s division of periods of history into phases of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ (see note on ‘Dream’) with the former encapsulating a period of artistic development and the latter a period of artistic decline in which art is merely parasitic upon the works of the previous period. In his marginalia to Spengler, Jones complained that this schematization meant that anyone living in the civilizational phase will necessarily be ‘nostalgic and wretched’ (quoted in Miles, 54). The aesthetic latitude The Grail Mass affords imperial discipline stands alongside Jones’s attempt in ‘A, a, a, Domine Deus’ – a version of which appears here at the close of ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ (207–8) – to locate beauty in civilization, however difficult that may be within Spengler’s scheme.
And for eight decades, because
of the song of the birds of the Mother of Penances
the war stood still. (99)
Within The Grail Mass, dream and song stand opposed to the imperial fact-world. We hear of the Celtic lord ‘who dreams his bitter dreams/for the folk of the land’ (109) and the legionaries who console themselves with a song to which there is ‘no end […] in all the guardhouses on/the world-walls’ (126). The opposition between fact and dream staged in The Grail Mass maps onto Jones’s juxtaposition of the utile and the gratuitous in essays like ‘Art and Sacrament’. The utile, fact-based world is marked by economic and purposive activity, while a society that respects gratuitous creation affords the artist room to work in accordance with the excellences of his own art, supporting his sense of purpose and conferring status upon his work.
Art, dream and song are linked in The Grail Mass because Jones considered the most essential human activity to be the act of making; ‘man is essentially a creature of sign and signa-making, a “sacramentalist” to the core’ (DGC, 222). The Anathemata opens with a survey of human and divine creation and Jones found support for his assessment of human nature in Christ’s institution of the Eucharist, which the poet and painter considered to be an exemplary act of sign-making (A, 49–82; E&A, 160–62; see note on ‘Sacrament’). More than merely exemplifying philistinism, the outlook of the Roman fact-world and its modern analogues risks obscuring part of what it is to be human. The emphasis that The Grail Mass places upon dream in both the Roman and the Celtic material enables Jones to explore the impact of the fact-based worldview on a civilization in which creative activity has been pushed to the margins.
Crixus’s dream is the centrepiece of ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’ and it enables the poem to imagine a different kind of empire. In this dream, the sculptured relief of the ‘Terra Mater’ that formed part of the ‘Ara Pacis’ comes to life. The Ara Pacis Augustae was an altar that, as Jones’s footnote explains, ‘was dedicated in A.D. 9 by order of the Senate to mark the peace which Augustus had brought to the world’ (68n). The figure of the Terra Mater, he added, ‘embodies in plastic form the idea and the ideal of the Augustan & Roman pax, the fruitfulness of land and sea, of man and beast, which Roman arms would protect and order’ (68n) – ideals that stand in contrast with the ‘armed peace’ (63) explored over the course of the poem (see note on ‘Facts’). In this dream, Crixus sees the carved figure of the Earth Mother come to life so that she ‘all but touched our bivvy sheets with her strong marble fingers’ (69), and he goes on to observe that ‘all the world seemed at peace deep within the folds of her stola’ (69). Through the medium of a dream, Jones equates the artistic skill that rendered the figure’s drapery with the peace the monument symbolized. This recalls the post-impressionist art theory of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, which for Jones was enshrined in the axiom: ‘the sign must be the thing signified under forms of his particular art’ (DG, 136). The carved figure does not merely represent the Augustinian peace; she instantiates it in the very incisions that delineate her drapery.
In his evocation of pre-imperial Wales, Jones surveyed the role of art in societies that respect gratuitous creation (see note on ‘Time’) and are thus able to accord it greater power than that afforded Crixus’s dream. Alluding to Welsh folklore, Jones writes of ‘the song of the birds of the Mother of Penances’ (99) – the ‘Mother of Penances’ here is Rhiannon who in the Mabinogian is required to undertake what Jones calls the ‘abominable penance at the horse block’ following false accusations of infanticide (98n) – and notes that ‘Because of the melody and the melodic/spell, because of the shrill harmonies/ of the melodious birds’ the ‘war stood still’ (99). In such cultures, art works wonders. Jones’s staging of the conflict between fact and dream in The Grail Mass is part of his exploration of societal organization; one drives expeditionary wars with no end, the other is able to keep the wars at bay. The moment recalls the lull in the trench warfare detailed in In Parenthesis when German and British soldiers exchanged carols and folk songs on Christmas day (IP, 67–68).
Nevertheless, the poem does not always maintain a strict separation between fact and dream. At times, Rome does not so much oppose the creative as manipulate it:
These, if the cult
grows strong, need hope and hope is only given
by the men of rule for their purpose, and so
it will be with your sibyls, baals, the lord
of the gibbet who would free the world.
Let them plant his signum where they choose —
let the empire acclaim him Rex, let Caesar
be the vicar of a Syrian mathematici, let
Roman Jove go hang, call the Great Mother
by some other name — what’s the odds?
The men of rule know all about such
trifles and how to accommodate, if needs
must. (72)
Rome is happy to support the growth of new religious thought – one area in which the creative impulse has sought expression – in order to co-opt it later. Subjects of empire can ‘plant […] signum where they choose’, but as such signs blossom, they are plucked by Rome: ‘call the Great Mother/by some other name – what’s the odds?’ This understanding of Roman religious syncretism jars with Jones’s reported enthusiasm for what Eliot termed the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot, 483; Ward, 84, 131). Jones’s work in this area is exemplified by a central passage in In Parenthesis, where the Crucifixion and King Aud’s ritual murder of his sons – a story that Jones found in J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough – are brought together as parallels (IP, 67–68; Callison, 438–461) and explored at greater length in the third Celtic insertion in the litany of names that conflates Celtic gods and goddesses, Roman and Norse deities and Christian saints (115). The Grail Mass nevertheless remains concerned with the ways in which power is at work within religious syncretism.
You can break the hearts of god and men
but you won’t break Caesar’s
division of time (86)
The Grail Mass is preoccupied with shifts in time. Our text opens with the sight of a priest:
He stands upright now in the weeds
of the young-time, of the sap years.
Under his fair-worked apparels
the tubular blacks of the mean years
of the dead time. (27)
Jones contrasts the aesthetic and historical status of a priest’s embroidered liturgical vestments (‘the weeds’; ‘fair-worked apparels’) with the utility of everyday clerical garb (‘the tubular blacks of the mean years’). Jones was impressed by the sight of the ‘laticlaved tunicles of deacon and sub-deacon’ he saw at High Mass at Westminster Cathedral and by which, he observed, one was taken ‘back to the late Roman world when these garments we have now were the paenula, tunica and linea worn by all respectable citizens of both sexes, but by the sixth and seventh century conserved only by the church and hence have become saturated with sacral associations’ (DJP, CF9). For Jones, the contrast between a priest’s saturated liturgical dress – ‘The Alternative Mass Opening’ explores the artistic craft that produced these vestments in greater detail – and the drabness of his useful everyday clothing exemplified a wider sense of cultural decline.
Jones’s interest in this theme was encouraged by his reading of Spengler’s Decline of the West and Man and Technics. Spengler distinguished between what he described as ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ within particular phases of history, a distinction that as noted above had a long history in the German intellectual tradition (see note on ‘Facts’). An ascendant culture, he explained, develops new symbolic, creative forms of expression, while a descending civilization reuses the now-mummified forms of the previous period of cultural growth and instead prioritizes critical activity (see Miles, 39). Jones praised Spengler for his ‘very special insight into the cyclic character of the periods of decline’ (E&A, 242). In The Grail Mass – Jones had taken a copy of Decline of the West with him on his 1934 trip to Jerusalem, a trip that served as the inspiration for the poem (Dilworth, 2017: 163) – the Roman fact-men are not only presented as ‘technicians manipulat[ing] the dead limbs of our culture’ (84), but also intent upon ending cultural development to facilitate imperial expansion: ‘The culture obsequies must be already sung before empire can masquerade a kind of life’ (150).
Jones responded favourably to Spenglerian notions of decline because they were close to the understanding of culture he formulated with friends in the 1920s and the 1930s: ‘I think Spengler’s distinction between a “culture” and a “civilization”, for all its complexities in a given case, is a much neglected notion; in a sense it corresponds to or has affinity with the business of what we used to call “The Break”’ (quoted in Hague, 18). Jones recalled these earlier discussions of ‘The Break’ in the preface to The Anathemata, where he noted that his conversations had focused on not so much the dogma concerning the sacraments, as ‘how increasingly isolated such dogma had become, owing to the turn civilization had taken, affecting signs in general and the whole notion and concept of sign’ (A, 16).
Jones also responded to Spengler’s periodization of history. Spengler surveyed Classical (Apollonian), Eastern (Magian) and Western (Faustian) periods and, in The Grail Mass, Jones observes how the Eucharist was instituted ‘under Magian constellations’ (215). As he attempted to develop The Grail Mass into cohesive work, Jones sought to underline the analogies he had identified between late Apollonian and late Faustian civilization in prophetic passages:
O man, this is but a beginning — we, who
reckon we suffer so late in
urbs-time, who come late in time, when times
have gone to the bad, are but at the
initiation days of megalopolitan time —
Caesar is but a pallid prototype of what
shall be, and what is shall pale for what shall
come. (127)
‘Megalopolitan time’, Spengler opined, was a mark of the late civilizational phases of both Apollonian and Faustian cultures; it was distinguished by its attempt to assimilate local cultures into a monolithic political and economic system. While the prophetic voice recognizes that the civilizational phase of the Apollonian period was unconducive to the work of the poet, it anticipates the comparable phase of the Faustian period becoming much worse.
The megalopolitan period of Apollonian culture was also marked by the birth of a new way of measuring time in the form of the Julian calendar. The calendar was introduced in 46 BCE, and was distinguished by its ‘regularity, predictability, and conformity to the solar year’ (Stern, 217). Crixus, the Roman legionary, observes: ‘You can break the hearts of god and men/but you won’t break Caesar’s/division of time’ (86). In The Grail Mass, cultural change turns on this ‘new arithmetic’ (66), which ‘measures the duration, from the transit of/a new star’ (66) rather than ‘by the generations of the war dukes/out from Ur’ (66), an exemplar of the way traditional cultures had previously kept records; such irregular calendars were ‘quite normal in the ancient world’ (Stern, 217). This ‘new arithmetic’ places the Roman Empire in a new relationship with the world in which it operates. The critical civilizational attitude – over and above cultural creativity – is evident in the way the Roman Empire came to conceive of time.
The counting of time also preoccupies the legionaries of ‘On the Traverse of the Wall’. Crixus states:
Roll on duration — Private Oenomaus, time-expired
can legally walk-out on the bleeders
hand in his kit
throw in his mitt
then, for an honourable hero, adequate provision
— at a subsistence level. (55)
From 13 BCE, legionaries signed up for 20 years of service, after which they received a pension (Watson, 11). Yet, the deflationary movement of the passage undermines the significance of retirement, where Oenomaus can hope to receive – for all his exertions as an ‘honourable hero’ – merely ‘adequate’ provision at ‘subsistence’ level. Legionaries weather their service for the retirement benefits, but they recognize that their reward is incommensurate with their sacrifice; their resignation is heard in the rhythmical thud of the refrain: ‘from the traverse of the agger, from/the circuit of the wall’ (55). From the soldiers’ perspective, The Grail Mass is concerned not so much with duration as with endurance.