THE ARREST OF PETER VALVOMERES
AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS, an officer of high rank and historian, of the fourth century A.D., the extant portions of whose work describe the events between 350 and 380, reports, in chapter 7 of his book 15, a mob riot in Rome. The text runs as follows:
Dum has exitiorum communium clades suscitat turba feralis, urbem aeternam Leontius regens, multa spectati judicis documenta praebebat, in audiendo celer, in disceptando justissimus, natura benevolus, licet autoritatis causa servandae acer quibusdam videbatur, et inclinatior ad amandum. Prima igitur causa seditionis in eum concitandae vilissima fuit et levis. Philocomum enim aurigam rapi praeceptum, secuta plebs omnis velut defensura proprium pignus, terribili impetu praefectum incessebat ut timidum: sed ille stabilis et erectus, immissis adparitoribus, correptos aliquot vexatosque tormentis, nec strepente ullo nec obsistente, insulari poena multavit. Diebusque paucis secutis, cum itidem plebs excita calore quo consuevit, vini causando inopiam, ad Septemzodium convenisset, celebrem locum, ubi operis ambitiosi Nymphaeum Marcus condidit imperator, illuc de industria pergens praefectus, ab omni toga adparitioneque rogabatur enixius ne in multitudinem se arrogantem immitteret et minacem, ex commotione pristina saevientem: difficilisque ad pavorem recte tetendit, adeo ut eum obsequentium pars desereret, licet in periculum festinantem abruptum. Insidens itaque vehiculo, cum speciosa fiducia contuebatur acribus oculis tumultuantium undique cuneorum veluti serpentium vultus: perpessusque multa dici probrosa, agnitum quendam inter alios eminentem, vasti corporis rutilique capilli, interrogavit an ipse esset Petrus Valvomeres, ut audierat, cognomento; eumque, cum esse sono respondisset objurgatorio, ut seditiosorum antesignanum olim sibi compertum, reclamantibus multis, post terga manibus vinctis suspendi praecepit. Quo viso sublimi tribuliumque adjumentum nequicquam implorante, vulgus omne paulo ante confertum per varia urbis membra diffusum ita evanuit, ut turbarum acerrimus concitor tamquam in judiciali secreto exaratis lateribus ad Picenum ejiceretur; ubi postea ausus eripere virginis non obscurae pudorem, Patruini consularis sententia supplicio est capitali addictus.
The following translation attempts to preserve the strangely baroque style of the original:
While that carrion crew was causing these catastrophes of general destruction, Leontius, governor of the Eternal City, gave many evidences of being an excellent judge—speedy in hearings, most just in decisions, by nature benevolent, though he seemed to some to be severe in the matter of maintaining his authority and over-inclined toward sensual love. Now the first cause of a rebellion breaking out against him was of the basest and slightest. For Philocomus, the charioteer, having been ordered to be arrested, the whole mob following him, as if defending the most precious treasure, set upon the prefect with dreadful tumult, to intimidate him; but he, firm and erect, ordering the police to intervene, had some seized and flogged and, while not a man murmured or resisted, sentenced them to deportation. A few days later, when the mob, again roused to its usual heat, alleging the scarcity of wine, congregated at the Septemzodium—a much frequented place, where the emperor Marcus had erected the ostentatious edifice of the Nymphaeum; there the prefect, purposely proceeding thither, was earnestly entreated by all his officials and attendants not to risk himself among the arrogant and threatening multitude, still angry from their earlier riot; he, being hard to frighten, went straight on, so that some of his following deserted him, though he was hastening into imminent danger. And so, sitting in his carriage, with an imposing confidence, he gazed with piercing eyes into the faces of the packed crowd raging all about like serpents; he steadfastly endured many shameful words; then recognizing one who was conspicuous among the rest by his great stature and red hair, he asked him if he was not Peter, surnamed Valvomeres, as he had heard; and when the man replied in blustering tones that he was, he ordered him, as a leader of the rioters long known to him, over the protests of very many, to be strung up [for a flogging] with his hands tied behind his back. When he was seen aloft, vainly imploring the help of his cronies, the whole mob, which had only a little before thronged together, now diffused through the various arteries of the city and vanished, so that this most fervid inciter of mobs, having had his sides harrowed open as if in a secret judgment chamber, was transported to Picenum; where later, having dared to rape a girl of not unillustrious family, he was sentenced by the consul Patruinus and underwent capital punishment.
Much of what we said in the preceding chapter concerning Tacitus’ description of the soldiers’ revolt applies to the present passage as well; indeed, it comes out even more strikingly here. Ammianus is still less inclined than Tacitus to concern himself with objective problems and to give a thorough analysis of the causes leading up to the riot, or of the condition of the Roman populace. Nothing, it seems to him, except their stupid effrontery is behind the Roman mob’s unrest. It is quite possible that he is right in his attitude. The metropolitan masses had for centuries been spoiled by every government, they had been trained to idleness, and cannot have amounted to much. Yet a modern historian would have taken up the question of how such a state of affairs had come about, he would have discussed the problem of the mob’s corruption, or at the very least have touched upon it. But this does not interest Ammianus at all; and in this attitude he goes much further than Tacitus. The latter acknowledges, after all, that there is a rational and coherently framed set of demands which the soldiers put forward and in regard to which the commanders in the field and the authorities have to take a stand. The parties negotiate; there is an objective and even a human relationship between them. This is apparent for instance in Blaesus’ speech at the end of chapter 18 or in the scene of Agrippina’s departure in chapter 41. However fickle and superstitious the soldiers may be in Tacitus’ description, he never hesitates to admit that they are human beings of a definite culture and with a definite sense of honor. In Ammianus’ scene, on the other hand, there is no objectively rational relationship whatever between the authorities and the rebels, let alone a human relationship based on mutual respect. There is only a physical relation based on magic and brute force. On one side there is a pure mass of bodies, stupid and full of effrontery, like a crowd of juvenile delinquents, and on the other imposing authority, fearlessness, instant decision, flogging. And as soon as the mob sees that one of their number is treated as all of them apparently deserve to be, they lose heart and vanish from the scene. Ammianus supplies as little information as Tacitus about the life these people lead—even less, for he has nothing corresponding to Percennius’ address. He gives nothing from which we might deduce any human contact. He does not make the populace talk (he barely mentions one nickname, Valvomeres, like Tacitus’ Cedo alteram); instead, he clothes the whole incident in the somber splendor of his rhetoric, which is as distant from popular style as possible. Yet the incident is so treated that it produces a strongly sensory impression—to such an extent, in fact, that many readers will find it unpleasantly realistic. Ammianus has oriented it entirely toward gestures: the compact crowd set against the imposing prefect as he domineers over them. This element of the sensory and the gestural is prepared for from the first—through the choice of words and similes, to which we shall return later on—and reaches its climax in the scene at the Septemzodium when Leontius, sitting in his carriage with flashing eyes, confronts the “snakily” hissing mob like an animal tamer, unmoved as they rapidly vanish. A riot, a solitary man trying to quell it by the power of his eyes, then stepping in—some harsh words, a ringleader’s muscular body raised high, finally a flogging. Then all is quiet, and, by way of conclusion, we get a rape and the subsequent capital punishment.
A comparison with Tacitus serves to show how much stronger the magical and the sensory has become at the expense of the human and the objectively rational. From the end of the first century of the Imperial Age something sultry and oppressive appears, a darkening of the atmosphere of life. It is unmistakable in Seneca, and the somber tone of Tacitus’ historical writing has often been noted. But here in Ammianus we find that the process has reached the stage of a magical and sensory dehumanization. That the sensory vividness of the events should profit from this paralysis of the human is indeed notable. It might be objected that I have compared Tacitus’ scene with a mob riot, not with a soldiers’ rebellion. But in that case, there is only one scene which could enter into consideration, the soldiers’ uprising at the beginning of book 20. To me, that scene is highly suspicious; it seems to deal, not with a spontaneous reaction on the part of the soldiers but with a planned mass demonstration in which the instincts of the soldiery are skilfully exploited in a way we know only too well from contemporary history. Such a passage could not be used for my purposes, and so I had to take the popular uprising in Rome. But the characteristics of Ammianus’ style, which we discovered at first sight in this passage, are to be found all through his work. Everywhere human emotion and rationality yield to the magically and somberly sensory, to the graphic and the gestural. Certainly, Tacitus’ Tiberius is somber enough, but he still retains a great deal of intrinsic humanity and dignity. In Ammianus nothing survives but the magical, the grotesque, and, with them, the rhetorically horripilating; we are astonished to see what a genius in this direction has come to flower in a practical, active, serious-minded, high-ranking officer. How powerful must have been the atmosphere which developed such talents in men of this rank and way of life (Ammianus apparently spent a large part of his life in arduous campaigns)! Read for instance Gallus’ death journey (14, 11), or the journey of Julian’s dead body (21, 16), or Procopius’ proclamation as emperor (26, 6): “So there he stood, like a rotting corpse, like a man risen from the grave, without a mantle [because imperial purple could nowhere be found], his tunic embroidered in gold like an attendant at court, from the waist down dressed like a school boy …; in his right hand he bore a lance, with his left hand he waved a piece of purple cloth … you might have thought that a splendidly decorated figure from the painting on a stage curtain or some grotesque part in a comedy had suddenly come to life … in servile flattery he addressed the wire-pullers of his elevation and promised them tremendous spoils and offices. … When he had mounted the tribunal and all were filled with amazement, keeping a gloomy silence, he thought—as he had previously feared—that his last hour had arrived; he trembled so that for a long time he could not speak. Finally he began, in a halting voice, to say a few words like a man about to die, justifying his action by his relationship with the imperial family. …” Again it is the gestural, the graphically imaged, which predominates. A whole gallery of gruesomely grotesque and extremely sensory-graphic portraits can be culled from Ammianus’ work: the Emperor Constantius who never turns his head, never blows his nose, never spits, tamquam figmentum hominis (16, 10 and 21, 16); Julian, the great conqueror of the Alemanni, with the goatee, who is always scratching his head, thrusting out his narrow chest to make it look broader, and taking steps much too long for his short figure (17, 11 and 21, 14); the pleased-looking Jovian, whose body is so big around (vasta proceritate et ardua) that after his unexpected election to the imperial throne, in the middle of a campaign, there is trouble in finding imperial garments to fit him, and who, very soon after his election, at the age of thirty-three, dies an unexplained death (25, 10); the somber, melancholy conspirator Procopius, always looking down, who, scion of an illustrious family, hides among the scum of the people when he is unjustifiably suspected, and who, like many another character in Ammianus, tries to make himself emperor only because he sees no other way of saving his life—in which, to be sure, he does not succeed (26, 6-9); the secretary Leo, later chief of the imperial chancellery, “a Pannonian and a grave-robber, snorting forth cruelty from the grinning jaws of a wild beast” (efflantem ferino rictu crudelitatem) (28, 1); the soothsayer or “mathematician” Heliodorus, a professional informer who has had an incredibly successful career: he is now a gourmet, abundantly provided with money for his whores; he promenades his somber face through the city, where everyone fears him; he frequents houses of prostitution openly and eagerly (he is officer of the imperial bedchamber, cubiculariis officiis praepositus) and proclaims that the pleasures of the beloved father of the country will yet ruin many more subjects; the horrible irony of the words brings to mind Tacitus’ Tiberiolus meus (Ann. 6, 5) but is even more disgusting; when Heliodorus dies suddenly, the entire court is obliged to attend his solemn funeral, bareheaded, barefoot, hands folded (29, 2); the Emperor Valentinian, a remarkable and handsome prince, although with somber and squinting eyes; in a dark mood he orders a groom’s hand to be cut off because he was awkward in helping him mount a shying horse (30, 9); the Emperor Valens, campaigner against the Goths, swarthy, with one eye covered by a white film, with his rather protruding belly and crooked legs (31, 14). It would not be hard to prolong this list of portraits and supplement it with incidents and vignettes of manners of a nature no less grotesquely gruesome. And the background of it all is this: the persons treated live between a frenzy of bloodshed and mortal terror. Grotesque and sadistic, spectral and superstitious, lusting for power yet constantly trying to conceal the chattering of their teeth—so do we see the men of Ammianus’ ruling class and their world. His strange sense of humor might also be mentioned—read for instance the description of the nobles whose pride makes them refuse the customary kiss of salutation, osculanda capita in modum taurorum minacium obliquantes [what a gesture!], adulatoribus offerunt genua suavianda vel manus, id illis sufficere ad beate vivendum existimantes: et abundare omni cultu humanitatis peregrinum putantes, cuius forte etiam gratia sunt obligati, interrogatum quibus thermis utatur aut aquis, aut ad quam successerit domum (28, 4: like threatening bulls they turn aside their heads, where they should be kissed, and offer their flatterers their knees to kiss or their hands, thinking that quite enough to ensure them a happy life; and they believe that a stranger is given an abundance of all the duties of courtesy, even though the great man may perhaps be under obligation to him, if he is asked what hot baths or waters he uses, or at what house he has been put up); or his remark on the dogmatic conflicts in the Christian Church: “Throngs of bishops hastened hither and thither to the synods as they call them, and while each sought to impose upon the other his own interpretation of the faith, they achieved nothing but a complete break-down of the overburdened means of transportation” (21, 16). In this humor there is always an element of bitterness, of the grotesque, very often of something grotesquely gruesome and inhumanly convulsive. Ammianus’ world is somber: it is full of superstition, blood frenzy, exhaustion, fear of death, and grim and magically rigid gestures; and to counterbalance all this there is nothing but the equally somber and pathetic determination to accomplish an ever more difficult, ever more desperate task: to protect the Empire, threatened from without and crumbling from within. This determination gives the strongest among the actors on Ammianus’ stage a rigid, convulsive superhumanity with no possibility of relaxation, expressed for example in the moriar stando which he attributes to Julian: ut imperatorem decet, ego solus confecto tantorum munerum cursu moriar stando, contempturus animam, quam mihi febricula eripiet una (24, 17).
Ammianus, as we hope we have shown, possesses a very strong sensory power of expression. If his Latin were not so hard to understand and so untranslatable, he might well be one of the most influential authors of antique literature. Yet his procedure is by no means imitative in the sense that he builds up his characters before our eyes and ears, out of their own premises, and lets them, as it were, think, feel, act, and speak out of their own nature; he does not let them speak their own natural language at all; he definitely belongs to the tradition of the antique historians in the elevated style, who look down from above and judge by moral standards, and who never make conscious and intentional use of the technique of realistic imitation because they scorn it as fit only for the low comic style. The particular form of this tradition, which seems to have been especially favored in late Roman times (it is already embodied in Sallust, but especially in Tacitus), is very strongly stoic in temper; it delights in choosing exceptionally somber subjects, which reveal a high degree of moral corruption, and then sharply contrasting them with its ideal concept of original simplicity, purity, and virtue. This is the pattern which Ammianus obviously wants to follow, as appears from many passages of his work in which he cites deeds and sayings of earlier times in moralistic contrast. But from the very beginning we sense—and, in Ammianus, the impression becomes unmistakable—that in this tradition the material increasingly masters the stylistic intent, until it finally overwhelms it and forces the style, with its pretension to reserve and refinement, to adapt itself to the content, so that diction and syntax, torn between the somber realism of the content and the unrealistically refined tendency of the style, begin to change and become inharmonious, overburdened, and harsh. The diction grows mannered; the constructions begin, as it were, to writhe and twist. The equable elegance is disturbed; the refined reserve gives way to a somber pomp; and, against its will as it were, the style renders a greater sensoriness than would originally have been compatible with gravitas, yet gravitas itself is by no means lost, but on the contrary is heightened. The elevated style becomes hyperpathetic and gruesome, becomes pictorial and sensory.
The first traces of this development are to be found in Sallust. An important contribution in this direction came from Seneca, who, though he does not belong to the tradition of Roman historiography, exercised a strong general influence. In Tacitus the somberness and weightiness of the historical style, reinforced by the somberness of the events he reports, is charged with sensory perception. Time and again it is there, evoked by the suggestive power of horrible happenings—but only to be quickly repressed again by the refined and pointed brevity of the style, which will not allow such outbursts to prevail (one example among many: the execution of Sejanus’ children, Ann. 5, 9). In Ammianus the sensory, the perceivable, runs riot; it has forced its way into the elevated style, not by vulgarizing it popularly or comically but by exaggerating it beyond all bounds. With glittering words and pompously distorted constructions language begins to depict the distorted, gory, and spectral reality of the age.
Instead of the calm, refined vocabulary which briefly states the sensory or merely alludes to it moralistically, we have a gestural and pictorial vocabulary. For example in the description of the Roman riots, instead of an ethical expression of imperturbability, we have stabilis, erectus, cum speciosa fiducia intuebatur acribus oculis; instead of iter non intermisit we have recte tetendit; whipping is referred to in the pompously periphrastic yet sensory latera exarare; a like effect is produced by pudorem eripere; and where Tacitus says, for example, accusatorum maior in dies et infestior vis grassabatur (Ann. 4, 66), we here read: dum has exitiorum communium clades suscitat turba feralis. All these and many like examples show that this mannerism, this so-called turgidity, is not simply a product of the desire to be different but that it also, indeed above all, serves sensory vividness. We are forced to picture the scene. Then too there are the numerous comparisons of men with animals (serpent and bull are favorites), or of human events with events on the stage or in the realm of the dead. The choice of words is studied throughout, but in complete contrast to classical practice, which saw the choice and the studied in refined periphrases of sensory phenomena and allowed no one but the poet to depict them (though he too had to keep aloof from life in its present realities, if he wanted to avoid the low style of satire or comedy)—in complete contrast to all this, the studied in the elevated style of historiography now serves to depict things occurring in the present. Yet the depiction is not really imitative; the morally judging historian is still there, discoursing in the elevated style and avoiding the lowlands of imitative realism; only now he regularly uses the most glaring colors.
Ammianus’ syntax gives rise to the same observations as his diction. Even though much in it may be explained by the striving for rhythmical cola and the strong Grecization of his style (cf. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 646ff.), enough remains which can be accounted for satisfactorily only by our present approach. His placing of nouns, especially of subject nominatives, his broadly construed use of appositive adjectives and participles, and his tendency to use word order to define and separate his clusters of appositions, all testify to his endeavor at all times to suggest a monumental, striking, and usually gestural perception. Note for example his elaboration of the subjects turba feralis, Leontius regens, ille, Marcus imperator, praefectus, acerrimus concitor; of the objects urbem aeternam, Philocomum aurigam, multitudinem, vultus, agnitum quendam, eumque; his wealth of appositions—Jespersen would call them “extra-positions”—and of quasi-appositional forms, each set out as independently as possible. With Leontius go regens, celer, justissimus, benevolus, then—given different syntactic treatment—acer, and, finally, inclinatior ad amandum; with causa go vilissima and levis in artful differentiation; with plebs, likewise differentiated, secuta and defensura proprium pignus; with ille go stabilis and erectus; with multitudinem, first arrogantem and then-set off from it and against each other—minacem and saevientem; then follow—referring to the Prefect, continuing pergens, and strongly emphasized—difficilis ad pavorem, insidens vehiculo, perpessus; agnitum quemdam is taken up by eminentem, vasti corporis, rutili capilli, and later on sublimi and implorante; and the very name, Petrus Valvomeres, is introduced as an apposition with extreme emphasis. Other descriptively vivid elements of the sentence are likewise emphasized—as ut timidum, nec strepente ullo nec obsistente, operis ambitiosi, enixius, etc.; and the same impression is heightened when we look at longer word groups. Urbem aeternam Leontius regens, followed by a string of appositions, is intentionally monumental; so is Marcus condidit imperator; both dramatic and monumental (as image and gesture) is the opening clause, insidens itaque vehiculo; completely pictorial the anticipation by contuebatur acribus oculis of the showily animated and sonorous object, tumultuantium undique cuneorum veluti serpentium vultus; as is the inter alios eminentem, vasti corporis, rutilique capilli which rolls out after the colorless agnitum quendam. Tacitus would hardly have written a sentence like Quo viso sublimi tribuliumque adiumentum nequidquam implorante, with its inordinate weight of appositions, for the relation of quo viso to the compound apposition (the second member of which is itself overburdened) is completely unclassical. But how graphic it is! It makes us see Peter’s convulsive struggle; we hear him howl.
Judged by classical standards, the style, both in diction and syntax, is overrefined and exaggeratedly sensory; its effects are powerful but distorted. Its effects are as distorted as the reality it represents. Ammianus’ world is very often a caricature of the normal human environment in which we live; very often it is like a bad dream. This is not simply because horrible things happen in it—treason, torture, persecution, denunciations: such things are prevalent in almost all times and places, and the periods when life is somewhat more tolerable are not too frequent. What makes Ammianus’ world so oppressive is the lack of any sort of counterbalance. For if it is true that man is capable of everything horrible, it is also true that the horrible always engenders counterforces and that in most epochs of atrocious occurrences the great vital forces of the human soul reveal themselves: love and sacrifice, heroism in the service of conviction, and the ceaseless search for possibilities of a purer existence. Nothing of the sort is to be found in Ammianus. Striking only in the sensory, resigned and as it were paralyzed despite its stubborn rhetorical passion, his manner of writing history nowhere displays anything redeeming, nowhere anything that points to a better future, nowhere a figure or an act about which stirs the refreshing atmosphere of a greater freedom, a greater humanity. It had begun, of course, in Tacitus, though by no means to the same extent. And the cause of it is doubtless the hopelessly defensive situation in which antique civilization found itself more and more deeply enmeshed. No longer able to generate new hope and new life from within, it had to restrict itself to measures which at best could only check decline and preserve the status quo; but these measures too grow more and more senile, their execution more and more arduous. All this is known, and I need not discuss it. But I should like to add that in Christianity itself—though Ammianus would not seem to be unfriendly in his attitude toward it—he sees nothing that might force a way through the prevailing futureless darkness.
It is clear that Ammianus’ manner of presentation signifies the complete coming of age of something in the making since Seneca and Tacitus—that is, a highly rhetorical style in which the gruesomely sensory has gained a large place; a somber and highly rhetorical realism which is totally alien to classical antiquity. Such a mixture of rhetorical devices of the most refined sort with a glaring and boldly distorted realism can be studied at a much earlier period and on much lower levels of style: in Apuleius for instance, of whose style Eduard Norden—in his work on the art of prose in antiquity, to which we have more than once referred—offers a brilliant analysis. The level of style in a Milesian tale is naturally quite different from that of a historical work. But despite all its playful, amorous, and often silly frivolity, the Metamorphoses exhibits not only a similar mixture of rhetoric and realism, but also (though Norden failed to point it out) the same predilection for a haunting and gruesome distortion of reality. I have in mind not only the numerous metamorphoses and ghost stories, all of which border upon the gruesome and grotesque, but also many other things—the quality of the eroticism, for instance. With an extreme emphasis on desire, which all the spices of rhetorico-realistic art are employed to arouse in the reader too, there is a complete absence of human warmth and intimacy. There is always an admixture of something spectrally sadistic; desire is mixed with fear and horror; though to be sure there is a good deal of silliness too. And this runs through the entire book: it is full of fear, lust, and silliness. If the feeling of the silliness of the whole thing were not, at least for a modern reader, so pronounced, one might be tempted to think of certain recent writers—Kafka for example—whose world of gruesome distortion suggests the consistency of insanity. Let me elucidate what I have in mind by an apparently insignificant passage from the Metamorphoses. It occurs at the end of the first book (1, 24) and relates a purchase which the narrator Lucius makes in the market of a foreign (Thessalian) town. It runs as follows:
… rebus meis in cubiculo conditis, pergens ipse ad balneas, ut prius aliquid nobis cibatui prospicerem, forum cuppedinis peto; inque eo piscatum opiparem expositum video. Et percontato pretio, quod centum nummis indicaret, aspernatus viginti denariis praestinavi. Inde me commodum egredientem continuatur Pythias, condiscipulus apud Athenas Atticas meus; qui me post aliquantum temporis amanter agnitum invadit, amplexusque et comiter deosculatus, Mi Luci, ait, sat pol diu est quod intervisimus te, at hercules exinde cum a Clytio magistro digressi sumus. Quae autem tibi causa peregrinationis huius? Crastino die scies, inquam. Sed quid istud? Voti gaudeo. Nam et lixas et virgas et habitum prorsus magistratui congruentem in te video. Annonam curamus, ait, et aedilem gerimus; et si quid obsonare cupis, utique commodabimus. Abnuebam, quippe qui iam cenae affatim piscatum prospexeramus. Sed enim Pythias, visa sportula succussisque in aspectum planiorem piscibus: At has quisquilias quanti parasti? Vix, inquam, piscatori extorsimus accipere viginti denarios. Quo audito statim arrepta dextra postliminio me in forum cuppedinis reducens: Et a quo, inquit, istorum nugamenta haec comparasti? Demonstro seniculum; in angulo sedebat. Quem confestim pro aedilitatis imperio voce asperrima increpans: Iam iam, inquit, nec amicis quidem nostris vel omnino ullis hospitibus parcitis, qui tam magnis pretiis pisces frivolos indicatis et florem Thessalicae regionis ad instar solitudinis et scopuli edulium caritate deducitis! Sed non impune. Iam enim faxo scias, quemadmodum sub meo imperio mali debeant coerceri. Et profusa in medium sportula iubet officialem suum insuper pisces inscendere ac pedibus suis totos obterere. Qua contentus morum severitudine meus Pythias, ac mihi ut abirem suadens: Sufficit mihi, o Luci, inquit, seniculi tanta haec contumelia. His actis consternatus ac prorsus obstupidus ad balneas me refero, prudentis condiscipuli valido consilio et nummis simul privatus et cena. …
(When my things were arranged in the room, I decided to go to the baths, but first I went to the market place to buy some food for supper. I there saw very good fish for sale, asked the price, and got it down from a hundred to twenty denarii. I was just about to leave when Pythias, a fellow student of mine from Athens, happened to pass by. After some hesitation he finally recognized me, came toward me with a great display of affection, kissed me, and said: “My dear Lucius, how long since I’ve seen you! I believe not since we left our teacher Clytius! But what are you doing here?” “You shall learn that tomorrow,” I said. “But what does this mean? I must congratulate you; I see these servants and verges and yourself in the dress of a magistrate.” “I am the aedile in charge of the market place,” he said. “If there is anything you want to buy, I shall be delighted to help you.” I declined and said that I had already bought enough fish for supper. But Pythias saw my basket, shook the fish to have a better look, and said: “And what did you pay for this stuff?” “With quite some trouble,” I said, “I got the man to let me have them for twenty denarii.” He took me by the hand and led me back to the market. “And from which of these dealers did you buy this stuff?” he asked. I pointed to a little old man sitting in a corner. At once, by reason of his power of office, he began giving him a piece of his mind. “So,” he said, “this is how you treat my friends, to say nothing of other strangers! Selling such cheap fish for such a high price! By your excessive prices you transform this flowering city of Thessaly into a barren rock which no one cares to visit. But this must not pass unpunished. No—I shall show you how evil-doers are disciplined under my administration.” Then he threw the contents of my basket on the ground and ordered one of his servants to step on the fish and grind his heels into them. Delighted with his severity, Pythias advised me to make myself scarce and said: “My dear Lucius, that was quite a disgrace for the old man; I think I shall let it go at that.” Amazed if not stupefied by these occurrences, I went on to the baths. Through the energetic intervention of my smart fellow student I had lost both my money and my supper.)
No doubt there have been and are readers who simply laugh over this story and consider it a farce, a mere joke. But I do not believe that is quite enough. The behavior of Lucius’ long-lost friend, of whom we are told nothing except that they had just been reunited, is either wilfully malicious (which he had no reason to be) or insane (but there is no reference to his not being quite right in his mind). We cannot avoid the impression of a half silly, half spectral distortion of ordinary, average occurrences in human life. The friend has been delighted by the unexpected encounter; he has offered his services and actually insisted on being of help. Yet without the slightest concern for the consequences of his action, he robs Lucius of his supper and his money. As for the fishmonger’s punishment, there is no such thing; he still has his money. And if I am not mistaken, Pythias urges Lucius to leave the market place, because the dealers will not sell him anything after such an incident and might actually attempt to wreak vengeance upon him. The whole affair, with all its silliness, is carefully calculated to fool Lucius and play him a mean trick—but for what purpose and to what end? Is it silliness, is it malice, is it insanity? The silliness of it cannot prevent the reader from feeling bewildered and disturbed. And what a strangely unpleasant, foul, and somehow sadistic idea—that of the fish being trodden to pulp on the pavement of the market place by order of the law!
The same invasion of a glaringly pictorial realism into the elevated style, which we found in Ammianus, and which progressively undermines the classical separation of styles, obtains among the Christian authors too. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, as we have previously pointed out, there was no separating the elevated style from realism; and on the other side, the influence of classical rhetoric upon the Church Fathers—a very strong influence, as we know, especially since many of the Fathers were highly educated men, thoroughly trained in philosophy and rhetoric—began to exert itself only when the undermining process just mentioned had gone quite far, not only in respect to the separation of styles but also in respect to stylistic harmony and restraint in general. Hence, in the Fathers too, we not infrequently encounter a mixture of rhetorical pomp and a glaring depiction of reality. Jerome in particular goes to extremes in these respects. His satirical caricatures, which far outdo Horace and Juvenal, are strongly pictorial; even more so are certain passages in which, without enjoining the slightest regard for convention and decency upon himself, he sets forth ascetic maxims which go into the least details of eating and drinking, of bodily care (or rather carelessness), and of sexual chastity. What extremes of vividness in the gruesome his epideictic style can attain, may be seen from a passage in his letters (66, 5; Pat. lat. 22, 641), which may be the most effective but it is by no means the only one of its kind. A woman of noble lineage, Paulina, has died and her surviving husband, Pammachius, has decided to give his wealth to the poor and become a monk. The eulogistic and hortatory epistle which Jerome writes on this occasion contains the following paragraph:
Ardentes gemmae, quibus ante collum et facies ornabantur, egentium ventres saturant. Vestes sericae, et aurum in fila lentescens, in mollia lanarum vestimenta mutata sunt, quibus repellatur frigus, non quibus nudetur ambitio. Deliciarum quondam suppelectilem virtus insumit. Ille caecus extendens manum, et saepe ubi nemo est clamitans, heres Paulinae, coheres Pammachii est. Illum truncum pedibus, et toto corpore se trahentem, tenerae puellae sustentant manus. Fores quae prius salutantium turbas vomebant, nunc a miseris obsidentur. Alius tumenti aqualiculo mortem parturit; alius elinguis et mutus, et ne hoc quidem habens unde roget, magis rogat dum rogare non potest. Ilic debilitatus a parvo non sibi mendicat stipem; ille putrefactus morbo regio supravivit cadaveri suo.
Non mihi si linguae centum sint, oraque centum,
Omnia poenarum percurrere nomina possim. (Aen. VI, 625, 627)
Hoc exercitu comitatus incedit, in his Christum confovet, horum sordibus dealbatur. Munerarius pauperum et egentium candidatus sic festinat ad coelum. Ceteri mariti super tumulos conjugum spargunt violas, rosas, lilia, floresque purpureos, et dolorem pectoris his officiis consolantur. Pammachius noster sanctam favillam ossaque veneranda eleemosynae balsamis rigat. …
(The shining gems which once adorned her neck and her face serve to make full the stomachs of the needy. The silken robes and interwoven threads of gold have been transformed into soft woollen clothes which are a cover against the cold, not an uncovering of vanity. What was once an instrument of luxury is employed by virtue. That blind man there who often extends his hand and calls out where no one is, becomes Paulina’s heir, Pammachius’ coheir. That other man with mutilated feet, who drags himself along with his entire body, is supported by a tender girl’s hands. The gates, once spewing forth groups of adulating visitors, are now besieged by the poor. The one there with his swollen belly is pregnant with his own death. Another, tongueless and mute, has not even that with which he might implore, and implores the more persuasively because he cannot implore. This one, sickly from childhood, no longer needs to beg [?] for his alms; that one, decomposed by disease [jaundice?], survives his own corpse. “Not, if a hundred tongues were mine and a hundred mouths, could I enumerate the names of all their sufferings.” Accompanied by this host he advances. In them he cares for Christ. In their squalor he is washed white. Thus the treasurer of the poor, the candidatus [i.e., both the loving wooer and one who wears a white toga] of the indigent hurries toward heaven. Other husbands scatter on their wives’ graves violets, roses, lilies, and purple flowers and by these offerings console the grief of their hearts. Our Pammachius sprinkles the balsam of mercy upon the sacred ashes and the venerable bones. …)
The procession of the sick folk and beggars is of course based on the Bible both in content and feeling. The Book of Job, together with the healings of the sick and the ethics of sacrifice and humility in the New Testament, form the basis for such a display of physical horrors. At a very early period, devoted self-sacrifice for the benefit of those suffering from repulsive diseases (spirans cadaver, Jerome says elsewhere), and especially physical contact with them while attending to their needs, were considered among the most important characteristics indicative of Christian humility and aspiration toward saintliness. But it is clear that the rhetorical devices of late antiquity likewise contributed their share to the glaring effect of our passage—and I am inclined to think that it is the lion’s share. The showy pictorial style of this rhetoric is apparent from the very beginning in the contrasting expressions of the greatest luxury and the most pitiful misery, where the opposite poles of style are consciously displayed: ardentes gemmae over against egentium ventres! The same pictorial style is apparent in the play with verbal and conceptual antithesis (lanarum vestimenta quibus repellatur frigus over against vestes sericae, etc. quibus nudetur ambitio—ubi nemo est clamitans—ne hoc quidem habens unde roget, etc.—supravivit cadaveri suo—sordibus dealbatur—and so forth), in the preference given to showy adjectives and images, the emotive use of anaphora (hoc, his, horum). Of course, Jerome differs from his contemporary Ammianus in that the fire of his display (ardentes gemmae) is fed by love and enthusiasm—the lyrical flight of the concluding sentences, with Pammachius soaring heavenward and bedewing the ashes of his beloved with the balsam of charity is magnificent, doubly effective after the procession of the sick; and the flowers which Pammachius does not strew, but which are enumerated one by one, contribute their fragrance. It is a marvelous piece, a delight for lovers of what later on came to be called Baroque; and Ammianus, with his much more rigid and intrinsically frozen splendor, has nothing to compare with it. Yet even Jerome’s hope, which enables him to rise to such moving lyrical heights, has no reference whatever to this world. His propaganda, directed entirely toward an ideal of ascetic virginity, is opposed to generation and intent upon the annihilation of the earthly. It is only with difficulty and halfheartedly that he allows the resistance, which had then just set in, to extract partial concessions from him. His is a somber fire too; in him too, the contrast between the pictorial splendor of the language and the somberly suicidal ethos, the immersion in horror, in distortion of life and hostility to life, is often almost unbearable. He is not the last to clothe such asceticism and murderous hatred of the world in an extravagantly pictorial style; that remains a Christian tradition. But in him the effect is all the more lugubrious because there is a complete lack of the opposing voices of delight in the world, which make themselves heard in all later forms of the Baroque, even in the most profoundly ecstatic devotion. It seems that declining antiquity, somberly and desperately on the defensive, could no longer produce such voices.
However, even in the Fathers there are texts which reveal a completely different, a much more dramatically militant attitude toward the realities of their time—and, with it, a completely different, a much less baroque form of expression, much more under the influence of the classical tradition. The following text, which I shall use to illustrate this, is chapter 8 of book 6 of Augustine’s Confessions. The person referred to is Alypius, a friend of Augustine’s earlier years and one of his disciples. The person addressed (tu) is God.
Non sane relinquens incantatam sibi a parentibus terrenam viam, Romam praecesserat, ut ius disceret; et ibi gladiatorii spectaculi hiatu incredibili et incredibiliter abreptus est. Cum enim aversaretur et detestaretur talia, quidam eius amici et condiscipuli, cum forte de prandio redeuntibus per viam obvius esset, recusantem vehementer et resistentem familiari violentia duxerunt in amphitheatrum, crudelium et funestorum ludorum diebus, haec dicentem: si corpus meum in illum locum trahitis, et ibi constituitis, numquid et animum et oculos meos in illa spectacula potestis intendere? Adero itaque absens, ac sic et vos et illa superabo. Quibus auditis illi nihilo segnius eum adduxerunt secum, idipsum forte explorare cupientes, utrum posset efficere. Quo ubi ventum est, et sedibus, quibus potuerunt, locati sunt, fervebant omnia imanissimis voluptatibus. Ille autem clausis foribus oculorum interdixit animo, ne in tanta mala procederet, atque utinam et aures obturavisset. Nam quodam pugnae casu, cum clamor ingens totius populi vehementer eum pulsasset, curiositate victus et quasi paratus quicquid illud esset etiam visu contemnere et vincere, aperuit oculos; et percussus est graviore vulnere in anima, quam ille in corpore, quem cernere concupivit, ceciditque miserabilius, quam ille quo cadente factus est clamor: qui per eius aures intravit, et reseravit eius lumina, ut esset, qua feriretur et deiiceretur, audax adhuc potius quam fortis animus; et eo infirmior, quod de se etiam praesumpserat quod debuit tibi. Ut enim vidit illum sanguinem, immanitatem simul ebibit, et non se avertit, sed fixit adspectum, et hauriebat furias, et nesciebat; et delectabatur scelere certaminis, et cruenta voluptate inebriabatur. Et non erat iam ille qui venerat, sed unus de turba ad quam venerat, et verus eorum socius a quibus adductus erat. Quid plura? Spectavit, clamavit, exarsit, abstulit inde secum insaniam qua stimularetur redire: non tantum cum illis a quibus prius abstractus est, sed etiam prae illis, et alios trahens. Et inde tamen manu validissima et misericordissima eruisti eum tu, et docuisti eum non sui habere, sed tui fiduciam; sed longe postea.
(He, not relinquishing that worldly way which his parents had bewitched him to pursue, had gone before me to Rome, to study law, and there he was carried away in an extraordinary manner with an incredible eagerness after the gladiatorial shows. For, being utterly opposed to and detesting such spectacles, he was one day met by chance by divers of his acquaintance and fellow-students returning from dinner, and they with a friendly violence drew him, vehemently objecting and resisting, into the amphitheater, on a day of these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting: “Though you drag my body to that place, and there place me, can you force me to give my mind and lend my eyes to these shows? Thus shall I be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.” They hearing this, dragged him on nevertheless, desirous, perchance, to see whether he could do as he said. When they had arrived thither, and had taken their places as they could, the whole place became excited with the inhuman sports. But he, shutting up the doors of his eyes, forbade his mind to roam abroad after such naughtiness; and would that he had shut his ears also! For, upon the fall of one in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirring him strongly, he, overcome by curiosity, and prepared as it were to despite and rise superior to it, no matter what it were, opened his eyes, and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to see, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he on whose fall that mighty clamor was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of his soul, which was bold rather than valiant hitherto; and so much the weaker in that it presumed on itself, which ought to have depended on Thee. For, directly he saw that blood, he therewith imbibed a sort of savageness; nor did he turn away, but fixed his eye, drinking in madness unconsciously, and was delighted with the guilty contest, and drunken with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the same he came in, but was one of the throng he came unto, and a true companion of those who had brought him thither. Why need I say more? He looked, shouted, was excited, carried away with him the madness which would stimulate him to return, not only with those who first enticed him, but also before them, yea, and to draw in others. And from all this didst Thou, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, pluck him, and taughtest him not to repose confidence in himself, but in Thee—but not until long after.) The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated by J. C. Pilkington. Citadel Press. 1943.
Here too the forces of the time are at work: sadism, frenetic bloodlust, and the triumph of magic and sense over reason and ethics. But there is a struggle going on. The enemy is known, and the soul’s counterforces are mobilized to meet him. In this case the enemy appears in the guise of a bloodlust produced by mass suggestion and affecting all the senses at once. When the defense blocks his way through the eyes, he forces his way in through the ears and so obliges the eyes to open too. The defense is still confident of its inmost fortress, the strength of its inner determination, its conscious will to refuse. But this inmost consciousness does not hold out for even an instant; it collapses immediately, and the pent-up forces which a great exertion of will has so far pressed into the service of the defense go over to the enemy. Let us try to see what this means. Against the increasing dominance of the mob, against irrational and immoderate lust, against the spell of magical powers, enlightened classical culture possessed the weapon of individualistic, aristocratic, moderate, and rational self-discipline. The various systems of ethics all agreed that a well-bred, self-aware, and self-reliant individual could through his own resources keep from intemperance and that, against his will, it could find no foothold in him. The doctrine of the Manichaeans too, from which Alypius’ position was not very far removed at the time, relies on man’s ability to recognize good and evil. So Alypius is not overly concerned when he is dragged familiari violentia into the amphitheater. He trusts in his closed eyes and his determined will. But his proud individualistic self-reliance is overwhelmed in no time. And it is not merely a random Alypius whose pride, nay whose inmost being, is thus crushed; it is the entire rational individualistic culture of classical antiquity: Plato and Aristotle, the Stoa and Epicurus. A burning lust has swept them away, in one powerful assault: et non erat iam ille qui venerat, sed unus de turba ad quam venerat. The individual, the man of noble self-reliance, the man who chooses for himself, despiser of excesses, has become one of the mass. And not only that: the very powers which enabled him to remain aloof from mass suggestion longer and with greater determination than others, the very energy which has until now made it possible for him to lead a proud life of his own—these same forces he now puts at the disposal of the mass and its instinctive urges; not only has he been seduced, he turns seducer. What he has despised, he now loves. He raves not only with the others but before them all: non tantum cum illis, sed prae illis, et alios trahens. As is only too natural in a young man of great and passionate vitality, he does not gradually concede a little, he rushes to the opposite extreme. The about-face is complete. And such an about-face from one extreme to the very opposite is also characteristically Christian. Like Peter in the denial scene (and inversely Paul on his way to Damascus), he falls the more deeply the higher he stood before. And, like Peter, he will rise again. For his defeat is not final. When God has taught him to rely on Him instead of on himself—and his very defeat is the first step toward that knowledge—he will triumph. For in the fight against magical intoxication, Christianity commands other weapons than those of the rational and individualistic ideal of antique culture; it is, after all, itself a movement from the depths, from the depths of the multitude as from the depths of immediate emotion; it can fight the enemy with his own weapons. Its magic is no less a magic than is bloodlust, and it is stronger because it is a more ordered, a more human magic, filled with more hope.
Such a text, however much it too may reveal of the somber traits of contemporary reality, is of a wholly different character from the work of Ammianus and the passage from Jerome quoted above. What distinguishes it at first glance from the other texts is the ardor of the dramatic human struggle it represents. Alypius is alive and fights. In comparison, not only Ammianus’ characters but Pammachius too, in Jerome’s letter, are static shadows which reveal nothing of a life within. This is the crucial characteristic which sets Augustine wholly outside the style of his age, so far as it is known to me: he feels and directly presents human life, and it lives before our eyes. The rhetorical devices, which he never disdains to use, either in this text or elsewhere, are closer on the whole, I believe, to the manner of the older, classical, Ciceronian writers than what we have found in Ammianus and Jerome. The extremely dramatic spectavit, clamavit, exarsit, abstulit inde, etc. reminds us of the figure in the second Catilinarian oration, abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit, to which, by the way, its genuinely meaningful crescendo and the ensuing transition to the factual make it vastly superior. Elsewhere too—especially in the second half of the text—there are a large number of figures of speech, antitheses, and clauses in parallel. The rhetorical element makes a more classical impression than in Ammianus or Jerome; yet it is clear—and unmistakably so even at a single glance—that we are not dealing with a classical text. The tone has something urgently impulsive, something human and dramatic, and the form exhibits a predominance of parataxes. Both of these characteristics, either considered individually or in their joint effect, are manifestly unclassical. If, for example, we examine the sentence, nam quodam pugnae casu, etc., which contains a whole series of hypotactically introduced members, we find that its climax is a movement which is at once dramatic and paratactic: aperuit oculos, et percussus est, etc.; and as we try to trace the impression back, we are reminded of certain Biblical passages, which in the mirror of the Vulgate become: Dixitque Deus: fiat lux, et facta est lux; or: ad te clamaverunt, et salvi facti sunt; in te speraverunt, et non sunt confusi (Ps. 22: 6); or Flavit spiritus tuus, et operuit eos mare (Exod. 15: 10); or: aperuit Dominus os asinae, et locuta est (Num. 22: 28). In all of these instances there is, instead of the causal or at least temporal hypotaxis which we should expect in classical Latin (whether with cum or postquam, whether with an ablative absolute or a participial construction) a parataxis with et; and this procedure, far from weakening the interdependence of the two events, brings it out most emphatically; just as in English it is more dramatically effective to say: He opened his eyes and was struck … than: When he opened his eyes, or: Upon opening his eyes, he was struck …
This observation upon the climax of the sentence, aperuit oculos, et percussus est, is but a symptom of a much more general state of affairs: Augustine certainly uses the classical periodic style and the corresponding figures (consciously so, as appears from his explanations in book 4 of his De doctrina Christiana), but he does not allow it to dominate him. The urgently impulsive element in his character makes it impossible for him to accommodate himself to the comparatively cool and rational procedure of the classical, and specifically of the Roman, style, which looks at and organizes things from above. How frequently, especially in the case of a dramatic development, he puts clauses one beside the other, can be observed throughout our text: Trahitis, et ibi constituitis; adero ac superabo; interdixit, atque utinam obturavisset; aperuit, et percussus est, ceciditque; intravit et reseravit; ebibit, et non se avertit, sed fixit, et nesciebat, et delectabatur, et inebriabatur, et non erat iam ille. This would be impossible in classical Latin. It is unquestionably the Biblical form of parataxis—just as the content (the dramatization of an inner event, an inner about-face) is avowedly Christian. Et non erat iam ille qui venerat, sed unus de turba ad quam venerat: this is a sentence which in form as in content is unimaginable as a product of classical antiquity; it is Christian and, more specifically, Augustinian; for no one ever more passionately pursued and investigated the phenomenon of conflicting and united inner forces, the alternation of antithesis and synthesis in their relations and effects. And he did so not only in practical contexts (as in our case) but also in connection with purely theoretical problems, which under his hands become drama. His treatise on the Trinity is the most impressive illustration of this; but anyone who wishes to discover, from a brief though characteristic passage, how much of a problem Augustine sees in growth and development and yet how clear they are to his mind, may read the first sentences of The Confessions (1, 8) where the transition from childhood to adolescence is discussed; such a passage would be unthinkable before Augustine. Parataxis serves Augustine to express the impulsive and dramatic, most often in matters concerned with the inner life; on the other hand, he has almost no trace of what is the primary preoccupation of Ammianus and other authors of the period, even including the Christians among them: the vivid sensory depiction of outward events, especially of the magical, the morbid, and the horrible. In our text there is ample opportunity for vividness, but it is taken care of in a few effective but entirely general terms.
Yet here too the inner, tragic, and problematic event is embedded in concrete contemporary reality. The age of separate realms of style is over. Among pagan authors too, as we have seen, the depiction of reality made its way into the elevated style. And in a much purer form (which begins, and then but occasionally, to be distorted only when it comes into contact with the epideictic style of late antiquity) the principle of mixed styles makes its way into the writings of the Fathers from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The true heart of the Christian doctrine—Incarnation and Passion—was, as we have previously noted (p. 41ff.), totally incompatible with the principle of the separation of styles. Christ had not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest social station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans; he moved in the everyday milieu of the humble folk of Palestine; he talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children. Nevertheless, all that he did and said was of the highest and deepest dignity, more significant than anything else in the world. The style in which it was presented possessed little if any rhetorical culture in the antique sense; it was sermo piscatorius and yet it was extremely moving and much more impressive than the most sublime rhetorico-tragical literary work. And the most moving account of all was the Passion. That the King of Kings was treated as a low criminal, that he was mocked, spat upon, whipped, and nailed to the cross—that story no sooner comes to dominate the consciousness of the people than it completely destroys the aesthetics of the separation of styles; it engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensorily realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base. Or—if anyone prefers to have it the other way around—a new sermo humilis is born, a low style, such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and the highest, the sublime and the eternal. I have discussed these connections elsewhere (“Sermo humilis,” Romanische Forschungen, Frankfurt am Main, vol. 63, 1952) and pointed out the special role played by Augustine. Equally at home in the world of classical rhetoric and in that of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, he may well have been the first to become conscious of the problem of the stylistic contrast between the two worlds; he formulated the problem very impressively in his treatise De doctrina christiana (4, 18) in connection with the cup of cold water mentioned in Matthew 10: 42.
The Christian mixture of styles is not especially noticeable at this early period (in the Middle Ages it can be seen much more clearly), because the Fathers do not often take occasion to concern themselves with current reality or to practice the imitation of it. They are no poets or novelists and, on the whole, no historians of their present. They are preoccupied with theological activities, especially apologetics and polemics, and these fill their writings. Passages like those here quoted from Jerome and Augustine, which depict current reality, are not very frequent. All the more frequently, however, do we find the Fathers pursuing the interpretation of reality—interpretation above all of Scripture, but also of large historical contexts, especially Roman history, for the purpose of bringing them into harmony with the Judaeo-Christian view of history. The method employed is almost exclusively that of figures, which has repeatedly been referred to in this book (pp. 16 and 48f.) and the significance and influence of which I have tried to some degree to clarify elsewhere (“Figura,” Arch. Roman. 22, 436). Figural interpretation “establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the intellectus spiritualis, of their interdependence is a spiritual act.” In practice we almost always find an interpretation of the Old Testament, whose episodes are interpreted as figures or phenomenal prophecies of the events of the New Testament. One example is to be found on pages 48f. above, and a large number of examples, with commentary, are given in the essay just mentioned.
This type of interpretation obviously introduces an entirely new and alien element into the antique conception of history. For example, if an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, so that in the former the latter is as it were announced and promised, and the latter “fulfills” (the technical term is figuram implere) the former, then a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension (if I may be permitted to use this term for a temporal extension). It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding. The horizontal, that is the temporal and causal, connection of occurrences is dissolved; the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omni-temporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event. This conception of history is magnificent in its homogeneity, but it was completely alien to the mentality of classical antiquity, it annihilated that mentality down to the very structure of its language, at least of its literary language, which—with all its ingenious and nicely shaded conjunctions, its wealth of devices for syntactic arrangement, its carefully elaborated system of tenses—became wholly superfluous as soon as earthly relations of place, time, and cause had ceased to matter, as soon as a vertical connection, ascending from all that happens, converging in God, alone became significant. Wherever the two conceptions met, there was of necessity a conflict and an attempt to compromise—between, on the one hand, a presentation which carefully interrelated the elements of history, which respected temporal and causal sequence, remained within the domain of the earthly foreground, and, on the other hand, a fragmentary, discrete presentation, constantly seeking an interpretation from above.
The more cultivated in the antique sense of the term, the more deeply imbued with antique culture the writers of the patristic period were, the more imperatively did they feel the need for casting the content of Christianity in a mold which should be not a mere translation but an assimilation to their own tradition of perception and expression. Here again Augustine is an example; large portions of his Civitas Dei, especially books 15 to 18 where he treats of the progress (procursus) of the City of God on earth, show his constant endeavor to complement the figural-vertical interpretation by a representation of intrahistorical chains of events. As an example, any chapter in which he comments on a Biblical story may be read—for instance 16, 12. Here there is a discussion of the house of Terah, Abraham’s father (that is, of Genesis 11: 26), which Augustine supplements by other Biblical passages, e.g., Joshua 24: 2. The subject of the chapter is Judaeo-Christian and so is the interpretation; the whole stands under the sign of the civitas Dei which, prefigured since Adam, is now fulfilled in Christ. The period of Terah and Abraham is interpreted as a link in the divine plan of salvation, as one of the stations in the figural sequence of preliminary, fragmentary, prophetic prototypes of the civitas Dei, and in this sense it is compared with the distant period of Noah. But, within this frame, there is visible a constant endeavor to fill in the lacunae of the Biblical account, to supplement it by other passages from the Bible and by original considerations, to establish a continuous connection of events, and in general to give the highest measure of rational plausibility to an intrinsically irrational interpretation. Almost everything which Augustine himself adds to the Biblical account serves to explain the historical situation in rational terms and to reconcile the figural interpretation with the conception of an uninterrupted historical sequence of events. The element of classical antiquity which asserts itself here is also apparent in the language—is, indeed, more apparent there than anywhere else; the periods, it is true, seem to be hastily constructed and make no impression of great art (there are too many relatives); but with their abundant display of connectives, their precise gradation of temporal, comparative, and concessive hypotaxes, their participial constructions, they still form a most striking contrast to the Biblical passage cited, with its parataxis and its lack of connectives. This contrast between text and Biblical citation is very frequently to be observed in the Fathers and almost always in Augustine. For the Latin translation of the Bible had preserved the paratactic character of the original. In such a passage as this from the Civitas Dei, one clearly recognizes the struggle in which the two worlds were engaged in matters of language as well as in matters of fact. It is a struggle which might well have led to a far-reaching rationalization and syntactic organization of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It might have, but it did not. The antique mentality was already too shaken. And so the most important and most influential piece of literary work, the translation of the Bible, could only imitate the paratactic style of the original, thus meeting the prevailing trend in the popular language halfway, while the literary language declined; finally came the invasion of the Germanic peoples, who, despite their humble respect for antique culture, were unable to absorb its rationality and its refined syntactic texture.
Thus the figural interpretation of history emerged unqualifiedly victorious. Yet it was no fully adequate substitute for the lost comprehension of rational, continuous, earthly connections between things, for it could not be applied to any random occurrence, although of course there was no dearth of attempts to submit everything that happened to an interpretation directly from above. Such attempts were bound to founder upon the multiplicity of events and the unfathomableness of the divine councils. And so vast regions of event remained without any principle by which they might be classified and comprehended—especially after the fall of the Roman Empire, which, through the concept of the state which it exemplified, had at least oriented the interpretation of political occurrences. There remained passive observation, resigned acceptance, or active exploitation of whatever chanced to occur in the world of practical events—raw material which was absorbed in its rawest form. It was a very long time before the potentialities in Christian thought (mixture of styles, comprehensive penetration of the processes of existence), reinforced by the sensuality of new peoples, could manifest their vigor.