Welford Beaton, and about Anne Royall

In The American Mercury from September, 1927:
Heber Blankenhorn on Anne Royall (b. 1769)
In the late 1820's, before bathing suits existed, President John Quincey Adams, noted for a personal dignity excessive beyond even that of his office, swam of an early morning in the Potomac, a mile from the White House. He was hailed from the shore by an old lady, sitting on his clothes, quill in hand. She called out that she had been repeatedly denied opportunity at the Presidential Palace to question him on his bank policy. Now after she got the interview, he could have his raiment. ... In the end he gave what seems to be the first newspaper interview ever obtained from a President of the United States.

Beaton, from Mad Movie Money:
There is a lake in the center of a park which is in the center of Los Angeles, the most photographed lake in the world and famous for the number of film policemen that have fallen into it. But neither of these lakes would do. Some brilliant genius in the Lasky organization decreed that Huntington Lake in the High Sierras must be the scene of the weeping willow episode. Here a slight difficulty presented itself. There was no water in the lake. There hadn't been any in it for 3 years. So the company hung around for three days in order to give the still photographers an opportunity to record the conditions of the lake that leaked in order that Mr. Lasky would not have to rely upon the unsupported testimony of sixty people.

Continuing with Jesus

From the brilliant ATS:
The reconfigurer, by contrast, would introduce new
practices and a new mood that transformed people’s understanding
of themselves and their world by showing a radically new way of life.
Finally, the work of the reconfigurer would be so radical that peo-
ple could not understand what it called them to do. People would
need an articulator—something or someone that made sense of what
the reconfigurer was up to and spelled it out as a paradigm incarnat-
ing their new world.
In the history of the West we have only two figures who do such
a threefold reconfiguring job. They are an odd pair: ]esus and Des-
cartes. Jesus as presented in the Gospels is a successful reconfigurer
who sets up the Christian World in which there can be a savior as well
as saints and sinners; Descartes sets up our Modern World in which
people and things become subjects and objects. To see how reconfig-
uring actually works, we need to look at the purest example of suc-
cessful reconfiguring we have- the work ascribed to Jesus.
WHETHER OR NOT a person named Jesus actually existed—and
if so, whether he did what Jesus is supposed to have done—is no
doubt a fascinating historical question. But it is not our concern
here. What is relevant for us instead is the phenomenon of recon-
figuring itself. As he is described in the Gospels, ]esus totally trans-
forms people’s understanding of what it is to be a human being. This
is a superhuman thing to do. Like a god the biblical ]esus reveals a
new Christian World. So Jesus’ work as reconfigurer must have a
threefold structure.
First, there have to be some background practices already in place.
There was, of course, the Hebrew understanding of being. These
background practices were behind everything. They had to withdraw
from notice so that people could live on the basis of them. The He-
brews understood that for God to perform this background function
of grounding all intelligibility, he would have to be unrepresentable.
We Will have to wait until we get to Moby Dick before we can spell out
this unrepresentable background function further.
Second there must be an exemplar that embodies the new way
of life-the new understanding of being—and lets it shine. In the
Gospel of John, Jesus tries to express this role when he says: “Anyone
who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). That is, Jesus sees
himself as a shining; example of a new background understanding of
What it is to be a human being. Kierkegaard calls him “The Paradigm”
and drives the point home by saying that after God’s Incarnation in
Iesus all direct access to God the Father is cut off.
The paradigm is more than the background since it makes the style
of the background practices visible. Yet the paradigm is dependent on
the invisible background that it manifests..So Jesus says: “the Father
is greater than I” (John 14:28). But he also says: “the Father and I are
One”  He adds: “you will know for certain that the Father
is in me and I in the Father” (John 10:38). Of course, the disciples do
not understand any of this; they just write down what Jesus says.
Almost one hundred years later St. John is still trying to find the
right words to make sense of the phenomenon of being a paradigm.
One of the most difficult things John says is; “He was in
the world that had come into being through him” (John 1:10). That
sounds impossible, yet there is no better way to describe the phenom-
enon. Being a paradigm has to be described in just that paradoxi-
cal way~ The reconfigurer must be something or someone in the new
world and so it depends on that world, yet it discloses the world and so
the world depends oln it.
Finally, Jesus’ message must be so radical that it is essentially un-
intelligible to those in whose midst he is living. This is a near paradox
for any reconfigurer. If Jesus’ way of life is really radically different
from that of his contemporaries, then he must seem completely un-
intelligible, and so raving mad. By contrast, if he doesn't seem raving
mad then it must be: because his Way of life is not so different from
the current one after all. To reconfigure a culture in the genuine sense,
one must somehow steer between these options. We will see how Jesus
manages to do this in a moment. But first, notice that the Gospels do
present him as a reconfigurer with precisely these characteristics. _
The Gospel of John makes it clear that Jesus’ life totally transforms
the Hebrew understanding of what constitutes a life worth living. But
Jesus has no concepts to express his new understanding and so has to
speak in parables—parables his followers can’t understand even when
he tries to explain them. It’s not even clear that, according to John,
Jesus can understand his own actions and parables. How could he if
the only way of thinking and acting available is the way of life he feels
called to overturn.
Furthermore, according to the Gospel of John Jesus knows he is a
reconfigurer and so he knows that he needs articulators to convey his
message. As he says:
[W/] hen the Spirit of Truth [the Paraclete or Holy Spirit] comes
he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be
speaking of his own accord, but will say only what he has been
told... [John 16:13]
Jesus’ articulators, in other words, will have to come after he is gone to
make sense of what Jesus said and did. Shining through the articula-
tors, The Holy Spirit will manifest Jesus’ joyful, loving mood, remind
people of what Jesus said, and spell it out in its relation to specific
situations, so as to reveal to people how to act in the light of Jesus’ life
and parables. As Jesus puts it:
I have said these things to you while still with you; but the Para-
clete, the Holy Spirit, . . . will teach you everything and remind
you of all I have said to you. [John 14:25-26]
Jesus himself understands, therefore, that his reconfiguring activ-
ity requires the threefold structure laid out above. To put the phe-
nomenon in Christian terms we could say: God the father, with his
mood of righteousness, is the Hebrew background practices on the
basis of which anything makes sense; God the Son is the paradigm
who shows a life that gathers the practices in a new way and manifests
the new mood of agape love; and the Holy Spirit is the shining new
style of life that draws ]ohn and Paul, among others, to articulate the
Christian way of life. The central movements of the next nearly two
thousand years of history in the West can be understood as attempts
to spell out ]esus’ understanding of human existence.
THE FIRST AND MOST important Christian articulator is St. Paul,
who, before any of the gospel writers had written down their mem-
oirs, writes his letters to the early Christian communities, telling them
how to act. Paul does not try, like ]ohn and later theologians, to ap-
propriate philosophical concepts in order to articulate Jesus’ message.
Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas do their best
to explain Jesus’ teachings by using Greek concepts. But, as we shall
see, the Greek concepts only get in the way. Rather, St. Paul, simply
by reporting on his own experience, does a much better job of articu-
lating how a Christian should live than do the theologians. Indeed,
later articulators such as Martin Luther sweep the theologians out of
the way and take up where Paul left off.
]esus, as described in the Gospels, does not provide a worked-out
view of how to live. Rather, as a reconfiguring exemplar, the ]esus
figure offers lots of examples. He is not articulate, but he shows lumi-
nously the new way of life. Paul, in turn, channeling the Holy Spirit,
articulates what it was that ]esus was showing. He spells out how, in
the light of the new Paradigm, the Hebrews must radically change
their behavior.
But how could the Holy Spirit ever make ]esus intelligible? As we
have just seen, if ]esus really revealed a radically new way of life there
could be no current language for expressing it. So, if one tried, one
would either be unintelligible, and so seem to be crazy, or one would
make sense and then the transformation wouldn’t be radical. How
can there be a middle ground? In the New Testament, thanks to Paul,
we get to see before our very eyes an example of how to manage this
seemingly impossible task.
First we need to go back and look at the Hebrew world ]esus was
called to transform. The Hebrew practices were focused on the law.
The Ten Commandments and the whole book of Leviticus are largely
about actions-—what to do and what not to do—six hundred and
thirteen laws in all. What you could and couldn’t do on the Sabbath,
what you could and couldn’t eat, and so on. According to the He-
brews, if you followed the Ten Commandments and the detailed law
you led a righteous life; if not, you led a wicked one.
]esus transforms radically the whole Hebrew understanding of
human being and of what counts as a life worth living. Instead of out-
ward actions, ]esus organizes the worthy life around private, personal,
inward desires. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, jesus says:
“[You] were told, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But what I tell you is
this: If a man looks on a woman with a lustful eye, he has already
committed adultery with her in his heart.”22 This makes the inner
desires of the heart more important than outward actions. From a
Hebrew point of view it is a crazy idea. My desires are private. The law
can’t prohibit looking on a woman with a lustful eye. There can’t be
witnesses who take someone to court because he was caught lusting.
I can’t control my desires, and after all why should I? They don’t hurt
anyone.
In general, then, the idea that one is guilty for one’s desires must
seem crazy to the Hebrews. For ]esus to make sense at all, the idea that
one is guilty for one’s desires requires that the culture must have some
marginal understanding of private desires, and even think that some
are condemnable. Otherwise no one could have understood Jesus’
condemnation of a lustful eye. Imagine someone in Homeric Greece
preaching: “He commits adultery who lusts after a woman in his
heart.” People would not have understood a thing. If you can’t cry or
dream inwardly, how could you lust inwardly? Even if the Hebrews,
unlike the Homeric Greeks, experienced private desires, for a law-
culture such desires shouldn’t have even marginal importance. So how
could the Jews understand the prohibition of lusting in one’s heart?
The answer must be that the Hebrews understood and condemned
a few desires. They just didn't consider it that important. And indeed
that is exactly what we find. Among the Ten Commandments, exactly
one prohibits an inner desire. In particular, the tenth and final com-
mandment prohibits coveting your neighbor’s things, including his
slaves, donkeys, house, and wife. Paul saw the connection between
Jesus’ prohibition of adultery and the commandment prohibiting
coveting. He says:
I had not known sin, but by the Law: for I had not known lust,
except the Law had said, Thou shalt not covet.”
For the Hebrews the coveting prohibition was marginal. It is only
one commandment out of ten, and the last commandment at that.
But Jesus singles out all private inner experience and makes it central.
Happily, we can use the Ten Commandments to quantify the.,differ-
ence between the marginal and the central here. We can see that for
Jesus and Paul desire goes from 10 percent of the things we need to be
concerned about, to something closer to 100 percent.
Jesus changes the prohibition of all the outward actions mentioned
in the Hebrew Law into the prohibition of the inner thoughts of those
actions. Paul emphasizes what was later put down by Matthew, that
“thoughts [of] murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander-
these all proceed from the heart; and these are the things that defile a
man” (Matthew 15:19). In so doing, he switches private inner feelings
in general from the margin of one’s life to one’s central concern.
And what about the law? For the Jews, keeping the Sabbath was
an immensely important practice. As the New Testament writers tell
it, it looks like the Jews were so concerned about not breaking the
law, and were so busy catching lawbreakers and denouncing t em
to the priests, that they didn’t even notice the miracles Jesus was per-
forming. Take, for example, the miracle of the cripple Whom jesus
tells to walk. When Jesus told him to stand up, the man recovered
instantly' “he took up his stretcher and began to walk. [However],
that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been
cured, ‘It is the Sabbath. You are not allowed to carry your bed on the
Sabbath” (John 5:8-10). John continues:
It was works of this kind done on the Sabbath that stirred the
Jews to persecute Jesus. He defended himself by saying, “My
father has never ceased his work, and I am working too. This
made the Jews still more determined to kill him. [John 5:16-13]
Undeterred, Jesus dismisses even the dietary laws in Leviticus simply
by saying: “A man is not defiled by what goes into his mouth, but by
what comes out of it” (Matthew 15:18).
In his new vocabulary Jesus describes his marginalizing of the law
by saying that, rather than obeying the law, he “fulfills it. That means
one does not take the Law and its prohibitions literally, but one is
drawn to act in a way that manifests the spirit of the law. Jesus thus
brings the purity of one’s desires from the margins of the Hebrew
sense ofwhat counts as a worthy life to the center of his Christian sen-
sibility; at the same time he moves the law from the center to the mar-
ginS_ In this way he completely transforms the Hebrew world. The
Christian no longer aims to be righteous instead of wicked. Instead,
he aims to be a saint rather than a sinner. His task in life bfiwmes not
righteous actions but the purification of his desires~
Moreover, purification is not something you can do on your own-
You need a savior to transform you, the Gospel tells us- when You
are reborn then Jesus lives in you; you put on his body- But What
does that mean? It might well mean that Christian salvation occurs by
catching ]esus’ contagious new mood of agape love.” The term agape
in the Gospels, usually translated “charity,” means a joyful, overflow-
ing care for every human being within reach to the point of being
ready to die for them. Your desires are still out of your control, but
entering this mood by hanging out with ]esus and his disciples, you
are reborn a joyful new being with pure desires.
C As described in the Gospels, ]esus is a successful reconfigurer.
Like a god, he let a new world be. In that new world people are de-
fined by their inner desires and intentions, not their external actions.
This is an important move away from Homeric responsiveness to the
power of the shining gods, and also away from the Athenian sense
of the importance of a culture’s background practices dramatized by
Aeschylus. We must now follow the way in which the emphasis on
inner experience rather than overt action combines with Greek phi-
losophy and leads step by step from St. Augustine to St. Thomas
Aquinas, to Luther, to Descartes, to Kant, to the death of God and
Nietzschean nihilism.
To MAKE SENSE OF the new Christian world, Christian thinkers had
to conceptualize the Christian revelation. For more than a thousand
years they tried valiantly to grasp the Judeo-Christian religious experi-
ence using a variety of Greek philosophical concepts. This turns out to
have been a bad idea.
The mismatch should have been obvious. Without thinking yet
about the turn to Christianity, consider the relation between the tra-
ditional Hebrew culture and the Classical Greek. For the Greeks of
Plato’s era, in the fifth century BC, human beings had one, single,
universal essence: at their best they were rational agents who, through
disinterested philosophical argument, could discover objective, uni-
versal, timeless truths of nature and human ethical excellence. They
could contemplate the supreme being Plato called the Good.
For the Hebrews around Plato’s time, by contrast, things looked
very different. For one thing, what gave the Hebrews their essence
and identity was not their rationality, but the special covenant they
had with God. That covenant was anything but a universal feature of
human beings: after all, it distinguished the Hebrews from everyone
else. Furthermore, this understanding of their essence had repercus-
sions elsewhere. For example, the Hebrews felt they grasped the truth
not by detached contemplation of the Good but by total commit-
ment, by being true to their God and keeping his covenant. And the
truths that were revealed to them were therefore of a diflerent char-
acter as well: they were local and historical, rather than universal and
timeless; they needed to be preserved by tradition rather than stand-
ing independent of us as objective and eternal.
Ours is a uniquely conflicted culture, the product of two power-
ful and opposed traditions. Other cultures have multiple traditions
too: China has Buddhism and Confucianism, for example. But these
traditions normally complement each other or ignore each other. No
culture but ours has two traditions so inclusive and at the same time
so opposed. The Greek discovery of detached, disembodied access
to timeless, universal truth contradicts the Hebrew commitment to
an involved, historical God. One side sees as essential our ability to
think; the other our sense of the sacred. For the monotheistic inheri-
tors of this conflicted tradition, it was very natural to try to bring its
two most fundamental ways of life together.
This conflict becomes even more apparent when we consider the
importance of the incarnation in the Christian tradition. As a para-
digm of existence, Jesus’ life cannot be reduced to a set of eternal
truths. It really matters to the Christian tradition that Jesus came into
the world at a certain time and place and that by living in the way he
did he illuminated possibilities of existence for his followers. It mat-
ters that he exemplified the mood of agape love, which others could
catch just by being around him. This mood could not be captured in
universal principles that one can discern by philosophical contem-
plation. It is a way of being attuned to what matters that one can
get in touch with only by being around those who exemplify it. This
embodied aspect of Christianity is essential to its understanding of
the saving mood of agape love, and therefore essential to the notion
of salvation itself. It is precisely the part of Christianity that resists
conceptualization in Greek philosophical terms.
But that did not stop St. Augustine. Augustine was the first impor-
tant Christian to interpret Christianity using the categories of Greek
philosophy. He lived from AD 354 to 430, and his account of Chris-
tianity draws heavily on his understanding of Plato’s account of the
nature of human beings and of the Good.
According to Plato, every soul desires the eternal Good outside
space and time. Augustine followed Plato in embracing eternity over
time, and he agreed too that only the eternal is ultimately real. More-
over, Plato held that human beings could get in touch with this reality
by using their minds to contemplate it. To learn about the abstract
and eternal form of Beauty, for instance, one might start by consider-
ing a particular beautiful person, then ask what that beautiful person
has in common with all other beautiful people; this will lead you to
ask about beautiful souls, and then the beauty of laws and knowledge,
and finally to the nature of beauty itself. A Platonic ascent of this sort
leads ultimately to contemplation of abstract, eternal truths.
But Augustine found something spiritually unfulfilling about this
pure Platonic account. He tells us in his Confessions how, before he
became a Christian, he experienced a Platonic ascent to contempla-
tion of the Platonic Good. But the Platonic Good was too abstract
to satisfy Augustine’s longing for a divine being, and too inert to be a
saving power. He tells God:
I caught sight of your invisible nature, as it is known through your
creatures. But I had no strength to fix my gaze upon them. In
my weakness I recoiled and fell back into my old ways, carry-
ing with me nothing but the memory of something that I loved
and longed for, as though I had sensed the fragrance of the fare
but was not yet able to eat it.”
Notice that what Augustine loves and longs for is not something ab-
stract and eternal, but something that has a delicious fragrance and
that he wishes to eat. This in a word is the confusion of Greek abstrac-
tion and Christian embodiment. Augustine recognizes that he needs
not just the abstract word, which one can contemplate rationally, but
the “word made flesh”:
I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed
to enjoy you, but I could not find this means until I embraced
the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is a man,
like them, and also rules as God over all things, blessed for ever.”
Later, when he has converted to Christianity, Augustine has a
much more concrete experience of the divine. He says to God:
You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I
gasp for your sweet odor. I tasted you, and now I hunger and
thirst for you. You touched me, and I am inflamed with love of
your peace.”
This is precisely the kind of sensuous experience of agape love that
one would expect from an early Christian, an experience that takes
seriously ]esus’ incarnation and the importance of His bodily pres-
ence in one’s salvation.
And yet. At the same time that Augustine is craving the sensu-
ous, embodied presence of God, he cannot resist the Platonic pull to
the abstract, disembodied, and theoretical account of the universe.
Immediately after describing his unslaked thirst for God’s embodied
presence, he describes the incarnate God as one “enfeebled by shar-
ing this garment of our mortality.”28 Indeed, he goes on later to say
that God gave ]esus a body in order to enforce his humility, as if to
endorse Plato’s idea that the ultimate and true reality is not the one
here on earth but the one in some abstract, Platonic heaven.” And ul-
timately it becomes clear that the body was literally an embarrassment
for Augustine. He complains that men can’t control their erections
at will, for example, and he promises that this unfortunate condition
will be corrected when, on the Day of Judgment, all people get back
their bodies. In the meantime, however, the Platonic pull toward the
abstract and theoretical wiped out what was essentially Christian in
Augustine’s experience.
Indeed, this wipeout of the body begins even earlier in Augus-
tine’s account. For although he craves a sensuous relation with God,
he finds a way to interpret this experience so that it involves no bodily
presence whatsoever. Augustine pulls off this marvelous trick by treat-
ing sensuous, bodily experiences entirely in terms of the inner states
they bring about. As we have seen already, for the Greeks from Homer
through Plato inner experiences were almost entirely absent, at best a
curiosity. Homer marveled at Odysseus’s ability to Weep inwardly, but
in his view that was not an important accomplishment, just an un-
usual one. Likewise for Plato, desire (eros in Greek) was not an inner
experience, but the soul’s attraction to a truth outside the self.
It was Jesus as interpreted by St. Paul who first put the emphasis
on one’s desires as the truth about one’s inner self. As we have seen,
saints and sinners were distinguished not by their public actions, or
by their access to eternal truth, but rather by their private impulses.
Either one’s desires were pure or, as in the case of desiring adultery,
they made one a sinner.
But apparently by the time of Augustine, three hundred years after
Jesus, the idea of a special inner mode of access to the truth had still
not caught on. Augustine had to get people to realize that they had an
inner life. So, in his Confessions, Augustine calls attention to the fact
that people came to watch St. Ambrose read the Bible. Why? Because
he read to himself! As Augustine puts it:
When St. Ambrose read, his eyes scanned the page and his
heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue still.
Apparently, in Augustine’s time everyone read aloud. That St. Am-
brose had direct access to the meaning of the text showed that the
inner was not merely the locus of desires but could be a storehouse ,
of experiences of the truth. What was new for Augustine—not found
in Plato’s philosophy nor in Jesus’ contagious love—was that the sav-
ing truth was accessible in one’s heart. St. Ambrose’s reading habits A
showed that the inner was not merely the locus of desires but a recep-
tacle of truth about the world and about God. Augustine notes:
[W/]hen I love [God], it is true that I love a light of a certain
kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the
kind that I love in my inner self. [Confissions]
We end here stressing the importance of the inner in Augustine
because there is a direct path from Paul’s emphasis on the purification I
of our inner desires to Augustine finding God’s truth in his heart. .
This valorization of the human being as an essentially inner domain
lay dormant through much of the next twelve hundred years. But
Descartes picks up the Augustinian thread when he emphasizes the
self-sufficient “cogito” whose inner experiences are cut off from 1 ,
“the external world.” And one hundred fifty years after that Kant fi-
nally brings the idea to fruition when he articulates his conception
of human beings as fully autonomous selves. But before we move on
to Descartes and Kant we will have to take a detour by way of St.
Thomas Aquinas and Dante, who draw on Aristotle rather than Plato
to make Christianity intelligible in Greek terms. And whose failure to
do so is dramatized by Luther.

The progression of Western thought and belief

THE GREEKS OF Homers era lived intense and meaningful lives,
constantly open to being overwhelmed by the shining presence
of the OlYmpian gods. As happy polytheists, their world was the op-
posite of our contemporary nihilistic age. How did the West descend
from Homers enchanted world, filled as it was with wonder and grat_
itude, to the disenchanted world we now inhabit?
To pose the question this way is to mock the traditional story of
the West. At least since Hegel, in the early nineteenth century, the nar-
rative of Western history has been one of progress. We have learned
to think of the Enlightenment, or some more recent period, as the
pinnacle of this steady advance. The self-sufficiency of freedom, the
lucidity of reason, and the security of a world completely explained
and controlled: all these indicate history’s advance
There is, to be sure, a traditional counterstory as well, a story that
sees our current disenchanted state as the result of accumulating de-
cline and loss. Nostalgia pervades this counterview: it rejects the con-
temporary, disenchanted world in favor of an earlier, enchanted age.
The burden of standing as ones own free ground; the arid, ruthless
path of reasons march; the sad inertness of a world explained and
controlled: all these indicate history’s decline.
But what if neither story is right? V/hat if the idea that both sto-
ries share—that wonder and enchantment have been left behind—is
instead a misunderstanding of the contemporary world? What if we
haven’t lost the sacred, shining gods, but have simply lost touch with
the meanings they offer?
Indeed, both smug celebration of our progress and nostalgic regret
at our loss are misguided. The nihilistic burden of our secular age
undermines the idea of progress, while the meaningful possibilities
on the margins of our secular world cast doubt upon the idea of loss.
. The story of how we lost touch with these sacred practices is the
hidden history of the West. Rather than a catalogue of unrecognized
historical facts, this history can be described as a series of stages by
which We obscured the worldly wonders that people in the Homeric
 Age saw everywhere. It is the history of the way the gods were ignored,
not lost; of the way we closed ourselves off to their beckoning call. To
understand this hidden history is to see that this type of engagement
with the world is still available to us. It has been marginalized in our
culture, to be sure, but it stands ready to be cultivated and revivified.
*
The reader may rebel at our steadfast refusal to explain any tran-
sition from one epoch to the next. But whereas the brief engage-
ment with each work is a narrative choice, our inability to explain
the transition between epochs is imposed from without. True, in the
traditional narratives of both progress and loss one expects a rational
account of the process of history. In Hegel’s view, for example, the
transition points in history are not chance occurrences but rational
events: each movement of history is a solution to the contradictions
in the period before. But the movement from Homer’s understand-
ing of human excellence to Aeschylus’s is no more rational than the
movement from Aristotle’s understanding of science to Galileo’s. As
Thomas Kuhn points out, the transition from one scientific paradigm
to the next is a complete Gestalt shift that is inexplicable precisely
because it leaves nothing by means of which to explain it. There is no
rational relation between Aristotle’s account of motion and Galileo’s;
the two are simply incommensurate. And so it is with Homer and
Aeschylus. We can say something about what each has that the other
does not, but we cannot tell a story about why and how history made
the transition from one to the next.
Still, the fact that each work is a part of our history, the history of
the West, is crucial for the contemporary age. For something of these
past practices is preserved in the margins of our contemporary world.
By attuning ourselves to the senses of the sacred that animate each
of the following works of art, we will be able to recognize and bring
back to life those practices that can sustain a sense of the sacred in our
secular age.
and
Aeschylus wrote several hundred years after Homer, at the begin-
ning of the Classical period in ancient Greece, and his gods, though
the same Olympian gods in name, were not Homer’s diverse collec-
tion of moods. Instead, Aeschylus’s gods were radically different. They
had become the forces underlying the Athenian world. In Aeschylus’s
writings the gods govern what matters and determine what it makes
sense to do in every situation. They demand a kind of unity to all
one’s actions, and cannot rest content with the happy diversity that
Homer allowed.
Despite the demand for unity, there is a competing group of gods
in Aeschylus’s age. In the Odyssey, Homer’s gods were a diverse but
tolerant family. They cooperated in guiding and protecting human
beings at home, at war, in lovers’ beds. But Homer and his worship-
ers of the Olympian gods achieved their happy state only by repress-
ing an older group of gods-—the ancient gods of family loyalty, who
stood for fertility, blood relations, and revenge. These ancient moods
of vengeance and blood loyalty—amazingly!—-are simply not a part
of Homer’s world. But according to Aeschylus, there was a price to
repressing these ancient moods. What mattered most in his world was
not the happy diversity of Homer’s Olympian gods, but the opposi-
tion between two total and uncompromising senses of what is right:
the new Olympian gods represent one, the ancient, primitive Furies
the other.
The drama of the Oresteia consists in the fact that the old and new
accounts of justice are completely opposed. The old gods of revenge,
the Furies, who are all women, put the family ahead of all other values;
the new gods, mostly men, are for detached universal law that makes
no exception for particular individuals, families, or cities. Apollo ar-
ticulates the new, detached conception of justice when he proclaims:
Never, for man, woman, nor city . . . have I spoken a word,
except that which Zeus, father of the Olympians, might com-
mand. This is justice}
In contrast with this, the Furies care only about family, and think ofus-
tice in terms of exacting revenge upon those who harm a blood relative:
We drive from home those who have shed the blood of kin.
The Furies’ mafia-like conception of justice had no place in Homer’s
world; Homeric culture repressed the natural tendency toward blood
loyalty. According to Aeschylus, the Furies are outraged at having been
treated this way; they are furious at having been “set apart” and “driven
under the ground” by the sky gods on Olympus. They respond:
. [W]e are strong and skilled;
we have authority; we hold
memory of evil; we are stern
‘nor can men’s pleadings bend us.
The conflict between the old and new gods is central to Aeschylus’s
conception of classical Athenian culture. This conflict plays itself out
in ever increasing and subtle ways. The first and most straightforward
of these takes place in Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy.
*
With civic pride as the society’s most overpowering emotion, and
Athens as the locus of this total devotion, Aeschylus’s conception of
the sacred moves away from Homer’s polytheism toward a more uni-
fied, monotheistic conception of the universe. This poses a peculiar
problem for Aeschylus’s conception of the Olympian gods. In particu-
lar, without Homer’s polytheism there is no place for Zeus in Aeschy-
lus’s Athens; no place, in other words, for the father of the polytheistic
Olympian family of gods. Aeschylus recognizes this problem and has
an amazing, if only barely articulated, solution to it.
For Aeschylus, Zeus is no longer a personified god presiding over
the pantheon. But he isn’t a cultural force like the Furies and the
Olympian gods in the Oresteia either. Instead, Zeus has become the
taken-for-granted way of acting that sustains all these forces. As the
pervasive background, he cannot be described, but he underlies all
significant events. The chorus, for example, refers to “Zeus: whatever
he may be” and adds: “For what thing without Zeus is done among
mortals.”‘
Zeus, in other words, is the hidden and unrepresentable background
that sustains all the meaningful practices of the culture. This is such a
deep and powerful conception of the sacred that it will figure centrally
in the Judeo-Christian account of God the father, but it will not be
evoked as the possible poetical achievement of Western culture until
Melville’s Moby Dick.
Aeschylus’s Oresteia doesn’t just describe a solution to the tensions
in Athenian culture; it actually brings that solution about. As the Athe-
nians march together out of the theater, singing their praise of Athens,
they not only see what is great about their city, the pride for'Athens
wells up around them. But Aeschylus is such a deep thinker that he
even has a sense for the dangers internal to the patriotic mood he estab-
lishes. In particular, he recognizes that overpowering emotions such as
patriotism cannot so easily be made constructive. Once all the citizens
have been led by Athena to share an identity that gives them an over-
whelming mood of patriotism, the feeling is so powerful that they des-
perately desire to hold onto it forever. This temptation goes against the
transience of p/aysis, however. Homer understood that moods, insofar
as they make things matter, necessarily run a transient course: they well
up, dominate everything for a while, and finally fade away. Aeschylus
could see this about the mood of patriotism as well. W/hen the Furies
anxiously ask Athena whether she will “guarantee such honor for the
rest of time?” Athena answers honestly: “I have no need to promise
what I can not do.” But the desire for permanence was built into the
patriotic mood of Athenian culture nevertheless. The seed of Athens’s
undoing was planted with it at its inception.
In the years following Aeschylus’s triumphant play, the Athenians
set out to establish the universality and permanence of Athens by
force. They attempted to guarantee that their city-state would last for-
ever by annexing all neighboring states into an Athenian empire. Col-
onies that did not acknowledge the Athenian gods and pay a yearly
tribute to Athens were destroyed—the men killed and the woman
and children sold into slavery. But rather than securing the empire,
this ruthless rule led to rebellion in the colonies and factionalism and
even civil war at home. In the end, the Golden Age of Athens lasted
only fifty years.
THE ORESTEIA MANIFESTED and focused for all Athenians what they
were up to as Athenians. Heidegger calls anything that performs this
focusing function a work of art. The Greek temple is his primary ex-
ample of an artwork working. The temple, Heidegger says, held up to
and focused for fifth-century BC Greeks everything that was impor-
tant and meaningful in their world. As he puts it:
It is the temple work that first fits together and at the same time
gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in
which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and dis-
grace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for
human being.”
Like the temple, the Odyssey was a work of art for the Homeric Greeks. ‘
It was the sacred work, in other words, that manifested and focused
the practices paradigmatic for the Homeric world. The Odyssey dis-
closed the existential space in which shining heroes like Odysseus and
Achilles and shining examples of the erotic like Helen, as well as bad
guys like the suitors, made sense as possible ways of life. When sung
about, these figures gave direction and meaning to the lives of the or-
dinary Greeks in Homer’s world. The medieval cathedral and Dante’s
Divine Comedy played a similar role in the Middle Ages: they showed
Christians the dimensions of damnation and salvation, and thereby
made possible sinners and saints.“ And so too for the other epochs in
the history of the West: thanks to works of art paradigmatic for the
age, one knew where one stood and what one had to do.
The paradigms from different epochs are fundamentally incom-
mensurate. They literally have no common measure on the basis of
which they can be compared. What makes sense as a life worth aspir-
ing to in one age might well be reviled in another. There could not
have been saints in Homeric Greece, for example. At best there could
have been weak people who let others walk all over them. Likewise,
there could not have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages.
Such people would have been regarded as impulsive and irresponsible
sinners. To be a saint or a hero is not just to behave a certain way; it
is to be held up as worthy for doing so. The paradigmatic works of
art for an age let certain ways of life shine forth. But in doing so they
cover up what is worthy in other—radically different——ways of life.
Temples, cathedrals, epics, plays, and other works of art focus and
hold up to a culture what counts as a life worth aspiring to. Works
of art in this sense do not represent something else--the way a pho-
tograph of one’s children represents them. Indeed, Heidegger says
explicitly that the temple “portrays nothing.”19 Rather, works of art
work; they gather practices together to focus and manifest a way of
life. When works of art shine, they illuminate and glamorize a way of
life, and all other things shine in their light. A work of art embodies
the truth of its world.
Of course the temple or the tragedy can only shine in this way
when it exists in the context of a living community organized around
it. The same Greek temple today, decaying in a desolate rock-cleft
valley, cannot be organizing a culture; it cannot focus, glamorize, and
stabilize a whole understanding of being for the people whose lives
are organized around it. It no longer “gives to things their look and to
men their outlook on themselves.”2° The temple today can, of course,
be an object of aesthetic appreciation. It can elicit “oohs” and “aahs”
from the tourists who are standing beside it. But when a Greek temple
or a medieval cathedral plays this role, it is no longer “working” as a
work of art.
The job of a work of art is to disclose a world, give meaning, and
reveal truth. In this sense, works of art working can be thought of as
sacred. They give meaning to people’s lives and people guide their
lives by them, so people treat them as divine. They venerate them like
gods and make shrines dedicated to them. ‘That is what happened to
the Odyssey, the Orexteia, and The Divine Comedy. Each of these texts
was venerated as sacred by those in the world it illuminated. In this
way artworks can play the traditional role of a god. They are a nonhu-
man authority that gives meaning and purpose to those whose lives
are illuminated by them.
To bring out a culture in its best light, we can say, is to articulate
the culture. A poet like Aeschylus articulated the Athenian world in
which he lived. But it is not only poets who do this job. Statesmen
like Pericles in Athens, Lincoln at Gettysburg, and Martin Luther
King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial each articulated what mattered for
the culture at the time. A philosopher like Kant or a theologian like
Aquinas might also be said to have articulated his culture. Articulators
focus and so renew what is meaningful in a culture; they bring out a
shared—background understanding of what matters, and therefore of
what it makes sense to do.
Since articulators focus a shared background, their audience un-
derstands them immediately. This was certainly the case for Aeschy-
lus, as it was for Dante, Lincoln, and King. But articulation is the
lesser role for a god. A god at its best doesn’t just renew a world by
glamorizing and focusing it; the most potent gods actually transform
the world, turning an old world into a new one. We can call that
transformation-—the most powerful thing a god can bring about——
reconfiguring a culture instead of merely articulating it.“
Reconfigurers change a culture so radically that they cannot count
on an already established language and shared practices to make
themselves intelligible. As a result, reconfigurers are essentially in-
comprehensible to the people of their culture. Indeed, they are barely
intelligible to themselves.
Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is
only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to re-
configure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its
way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new under-
standing of everything that matters and of how to act. The chances are
strongly against this, however. There are always powerful conservative
forces in the culture that tend to destroy the new understanding or
to take it over and mobilize it for the current order. If the new world
fails, therefore, it is necessarily measured by the current understand-
ing, and against this norm it can look ridiculous.

A few gay moments in the life of the Tudors

 The
next year brought the death of one of Elizabeth’s oldest and closest fa-
vorites and friends, Sir Christopher Hatton, a kind of tameA>Robert Dud-
ley who had devoted himself so unreservedly to the queen’s service that
he never married or is even known to have considered marriage. He had
been first brought to court because he amused the queen with his talent
for dancing and theatricals, but as their friendship developed he was
made a gentleman of the privy chamber; this was the rarest of honors,
affording access to the innermost royal sanctum, a place otherwise off
limits except to women. He also became a member of the Privy Coun-
cil, then finally lord chancellor and chancellor of Oxford University. He
receives scant attention in histories of the reign, perhaps because unlike
the other men in Elizabeth’s life he never provoked her to jealousy or
anger and was unfailingly satisfied to do her bidding.

 King Charles' heir presumptive was his brother Henry of Anjou. Anjou definitely
had no interest, speaking contemptuously of his prospective bride as a
“public whore” and (after being told that varicose veins were causing her
to limp) as “an old creature with a sore leg.” If somehow the two had
married, the consequences could only have been disappointing for both
sides. Anjou was more militantly, aggressively Catholic than Elizabeth
was Protestant. His irregular personal behavior, including a passion for
extravagantly lavish, sometimes shockingly feminine attire and a refusal
to engage in hunting or the other customary pastimes of male royalty,
had won for him the epithet “Prince of Sodom.” His very appearance
would have stunned Elizabeth’s court and mortally oficended every Puri-
tan in England. As for his breeding potential, he would live a good many
years more but never have a child in or out of wedlock.

The Greeks from ATS

The Homeric Greeks were open to the world in a way that we, who
are skilled at introspection and who think of moods as private experi-
ences, can barely comprehend. Instead of understanding themselves
in terms of their inner experiences and beliefs, they saw themselves as
beings swept up into public and shareable moods. For Homer, moods
are important because they illuminate a shared situation: they mani-
fest what matters most in the moment and in doing so draw people to
perform heroic and passionate deeds. The gods are crucial to setting
these moods, and different gods illuminate different, and even incom-
patible, ways a situation can matter. The goddess to whom Helen was
most attuned was Aphrodite; she illuminates a situation’s erotic pos-
sibilities and draws one to bring these out at their best. Achilles, by
contrast, is sensitive to Ares’ mood—an aggressive mood in which op-
portunities to shine as a ferocious warrior become the most important
aspects of the situation at hand. Other gods call forth other attune-
ments. The best kind of life in Homer’s world is to be in sync with the
gods. As Martin Heidegger puts it:
[W/]e are thinking the essence of the [Homeric] Greek gods . . .
if we call them the attuning ones.5
At the center of Homer’s world, then, is the sense that what matters
is already given to us, and that the best life is the one that manages to
get in sync with it. This vision speaks eloquently to our own modern
needs. Homer’s Olympian gods give his Greeks a sense of the sacred
that underwrites the joys and sorrows of a truly meaningful existence.
To lure back these Homeric gods is a saving possibility after the death
of God: it would allow us to survive the breakdown of monotheism
-Awhile resisting the descent into a nihilistic existence.
. Homer’s epic poems brought into focus a notion of arete, or ex-
cellence in life, that was at the center of the Greek understanding
of human being.6 Many admirers of Greek culture have attempted
to define this notion, but success here requires avoiding two promi-
nent temptations. There is the temptation to patronize that we have
already mentioned. But there is also a temptation to read a modern
sensibility into Homer’s time. One standard translation of the Greek
word arete as “virtue” runs the risk of this kind of retroactive reading:
for any attempt to interpret the Homeric Greek notion of human
excellence in terms of “virtue”--especially if one hears in this word
its typical Christian or even Roman overtones—is bound to go astray.
Excellence in the Greek sense involves neither the Christian notion
of humility and love nor the Roman ideal of stoic adherence to one’s
duty. Instead, excellence in the Homeric world depends crucially on
one’s sense of gratitude and wonder.
Nietzsche was one of the first to understand that Homeric excel-
lence bears little resemblance to modern moral agency. His view
was that the Homeric world understood nobility in terms of the
overpowering strength of noble warriors. The effect of the ensu-
ing Judeo-Christian tradition, on this Nietzschean reading, was to
enfeeble the Homeric understanding of excellence by substituting
the meekness of the lamb for the strength and power of the noble
warrior.
Nietzsche was certainly right that the Homeric tradition valorizes
the strong, noble hero; and he was right, too, that in some important
sense the Homeric account of excellence is foreign to our basic moral-
izing assumptions. But there is something that the Nietzschean ac-
count leaves out. As Bernard Knox emphasizes, the Greek word arete
is etymologically related to the Greek verb “to pray” (am0maz').9 It
follows that Homer’s basic account of human excellence involves the
necessity of being in an appropriate relationship to whatever is under-
stood to be sacred in the culture. Helen’s greatness, on this interpreta-
tion, is not properly measured in terms of the degree to which she is
morally responsible for her actions.
W/hat makes Helen great in Homer’s world is her ability to live
a life that is constantly responsive to golden Aphrodite, the shining
example of the sacred erotic dimension of existence. Likewise, Achil-
les had a special kind of receptivity to Ares and his warlike way of life;
Odysseus had Athena, with her wisdom and cultural adaptability, to
look out for him. Presumably, the master craftsmen of Homer’s world
Worked in the light of Hephaestus’s shining. In order to engage with
this understanding of human excellence, we will have to think clearly
about how the Homeric Greeks understood themselves. Why would
it make sense to describe their lives in relation to the presence and
absence of the gods?
, Several questions focus this kind of approach. What is the phe-
nomenon that Homer is responding to when he says that a god
intervened or in some way took part in an action or event? Is this phe-
nomenon recognizable to us, even if only marginally? And if Homer’s
reference to the gods is something other than an attempt to pass off
moral responsibility for one’s actions, then what exactly is it? Qnly
by facing these questions head on can we understand whether it is
possible—or desirable—to lure back Homer’s polytheistic gods.
The gods are essential to the Homeric Greek understanding of
if “who try to take credit for favorable events that would properly have
what it is to be a human being at all. As Peisistratus-—the son of wise
old Nestor——says toward the beginning of the Odyssey, All 111611 Hfifid
the gods ”1° The Greeks were deeply aware of the ways in which our
successes and our failures—indeed, our very actions themselves--are
 never completely under our control. They were constantly sensitive
to, amazed by, and grateful for those actions that one cannot perform
on one’s own simply by trying harder: going to sleep, waking up, fit-
ting in, standing out, gathering crowds together, holding their atten-
tion with a speech, changing their mood, or indeed being filled with
longing, desire, courage, wisdom, and so on. Homer sees each of these
achievements as a particular god’s gift. To say that all men need‘ the
‘gods therefore is to say, in part at least, that we are the kinds of beings
-who are at our best when we find ourselves acting in ways that we can-
not—and ought not—entirely take credit for.
. There are many cautionary tales in Homer involving characters
been experienced as beyond their control. Consider the case of Ajax,
for example. After fighting valiantly for the Greeks in the Trojan War
the met with difficulty on his voyage home. In the treacherous sea his
ships were dashed against the giant rocks of Gyrae, though Ajax him-
self somehow managed to escape:
[A] nd he indeed would have evaded fate . . . had he not bragged
with blinded heart. He said that he’d escaped the sea’s abyss de-
spite the gods: Poseidon heard Ajax rave; at once he gripped his
trident in giant hands; he struck the rock of Gyrae and cracked
it. One half stayed in place, but one split and plunged down
into the sea; that part was where the maddened blustering Ajax
sat; it bore him down into the boundless tide. And there, when
he had drunk much brine, he died.“
What are we supposed to make of such a story? Not that some
theological entity named Poseidon played a genuine causal role in
Ajax’s death. That is not what We should hope to retrieve from the
Greeks. Presumably what happened to Ajax, after all, is that once his
ship had been wrecked and he had climbed onto an enormous rock,
an earthquake split the rock in two and sent him to his death. What-
ever we retrieve from the Greeks, it must be consistent with our un-
derstanding of the physical makeup of the universe.
' The Greek position becomes interesting not when it is thought of
as an alternative to our causal explanation of events, but rather when
it offers a fresh account of our particular human kind of excellence.
Indeed, eloquently articulated in the Ajax story is a view of what we
ought to aspire to as human beings. At its heart is the idea that there
is something deeply wrong about Ajax’s attitude in this situation-so
wrong that it is an affront to our self-conception, and that in some
sense it explains and justifies his death. Instead of blindly and selfishly
taking credit for his escape, in such a view, Ajax should have been
grateful that things turned out as favorably as they did. Gratitude, not
braggadocio, is the appropriate response to a happy event.
Indeed, gratitude is more than simply the appropriate response
in Homer’s world; it is essential to a well-lived life. After all, to ex-
plain Ajax’s demise in terms of his self-conceit, as Homer does, is to
insist that his reaction was an affront to everything the Greeks held
sacred. That’s what it means to say that Poseidon struck him down:
for Homer the death of Ajax made sense only in the context of Ajax’s
utter rejection of anything sacred.
So a certain kind of gratitude becomes an essential component
in the Homeric understanding of the best possible life. In one sense,
then, the gods are whatever stands beyond us that requires our grati-
tude. The demand for this kind of gratitude is rather marginal in the
modern world. But the basic phenomenon that motivates this idea is
nevertheless recognizable to us. Imagine an Ajax-like character who
survives the sinking of the Titanic: he’s the guy who sees evidence of
his own greatness in the fact that he was picked up by the rescue boat.
Something in this rankles, even now.

ALTHOUGH IT IS NOT at the center of our conception of ourselves,
the idea that we should recognize and be grateful for favorable events
when they occur is not entirely alien to us. The Greeks experienced
this phenomenon in a particular Way, however. It was not just that
they felt lucky when something they experienced to be beyond their
control turned out well for them. It was that they experienced
favorable events as meaningful for, and directed at, them.
To see this point, consider the difference between the Homeric
Greeks and the Romans living in the second and first centuries BC.
The Romans took very seriously the importance of luck in their lives,
" I ‘and they personified this force in the goddess Fortuna. Often repre-
filsented as blind—indicating that her choices are indifferent to those
iwhom they affect—Fortuna has no natural precursor in the Homeric
world. The goddess Tyche, who is typically considered the Greek
equivalent of Fortuna, doesn’t begin to play an important role in
Greek mythology until the Hellenistic age, at least five hundred years
after Homer.”
. The distinction between Fortuna and the Homeric Greek gods is
important: if Fortune shines upon a Roman citizen then the proper
sentiment is not gratitude, since Fortune didn’t have him in view at
all. Rather, to experience one’s life as ruled by Fortune is, at best, to
cultivate a kind of stoicism and reserve. The Roman Stoic stalwartly
‘endures the vicissitudes of life, inoculating himself against fortunes
and misfortunes alike. This kind of reserve, of willfully enforced de-
tachment, could not be further from the Homeric conception of ex-
cellence in a life. And yet, there is something familiar about it in our
Secular age. The notion that blind luck determines the course of our
lives leads quickly to the nihilistic idea that our lives have no mean-
ing- Roman Stoicism is grandfather to the nihilism of the secular age.
The connection between luck and meaninglessness is a theme
tailor-made for the contemporary world. Woody Allen seems to be
exploring this connection in his 2005 movie Match Point. In the film
Chris Wilton is a social-climbing tennis instructor at a high-end Lon-
don club. The opening scene of the movie shows a static image of a
tennis ball suspended just above the net, as Wilton explains his phi-
losophy of life in voice-over:
I The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply
into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is de-
pendent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s con-
trol. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top
of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or
fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or
maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.
As the movie proceeds, Wilton becomes involved in a love triangle
that he escapes by murdering the less convenient of his two girl-
friends. The question that motivates the story is whether he will be
caught. Wilton himself recognizes what is at stake:
It would be fitting if I were apprehended . . . and punished.
At least there would be some small sign of justice—some small
measure of hope for the possibility of meaning. ‘
The possibility of meaning, however, is cut short. By sheer luck—of
the sort exemplified by the chance event of a tennis ball on the top of
the net—another man is arrested for Wilton’s crime. It follows, with the
force of a syllogism, that there is no hope for the possibility of meaning
in our lives. By emphasizing life’s dependence on luck, Allen is commit-
ted to nihilism.
Being lucky and being cared for are radically different phenom-
ena. If we experience blind luck to be the source of whatever is be-
yond our control, as the Romans did, then it makes no sense to
feel grateful for the favorable things that happen; the cost, however,
is a kind of detachment from the world that makes it impossible
to experience meaning in our lives. The Greeks, by contrast, held
the world in constant wonder. They could not help but be amazed
and grateful whenever anything favorable happened in their lives.
This kind of amazement and Wonder, and the gratitude that follows
naturally from it, is the key to everything sacred in the world of the
Greeks.
To UNDERSTAND BETTER the Greek sense of the sacred, let us con-
sider an example in which it seems natural to Homer to invoke the
presence of the gods. In a representative scene toward the end of the
Odyssey, the suitors throw a host of spears at Odysseus from point-
blank range. Homer describes the event:
Again six suitors cast their shafts with force; but each shot
missed its mark~—Athena’s work.”
The idea here is that it must not have seemed merely arbitrary or
‘fortunate to Odysseus that these enemy spears missed their mark. It
must have seemed to him, rather, that there was some meaning or
purpose in this fact, that he was being cared for in the event. Homer’s
Way of expressing this is to insist that the spears missed Odysseus be-
cause Athena was protecting him from the enemy attack.
There is something one can retrieve from this description and
Something one cannot. Obviously we cannot believe that some super-
natural entity named Athena actually caused the spears to turn aside.
Even if we replace Athena with the Judeo-Christian God, our secular
age typically rebels at the thought (though some, of course, will admit
this possibility). But whatever the precise metaphysical and theologi-
cal facts, let us focus on the phenomenology of the situation. Imagine
yourself, for the moment, in Odysseus’s place. Six of your enemies
have amassed before you at close range; each picks up a spear and
together they hurl them at you all at once. You are prepared, as the
great warrior always is, to die a heroic death in the following instant.
Indeed, it looks inevitable. But instead:
One spearhead struck the sturdy hall’s doorpost, and one, the
tightly-fitted door itself; two other ash-wood shafts, tipped
with stout bronze, just struck the Wall. And though two shafts
drew close, they leveled nothing more than glancing blows.“
What relief, what amazement, what gratitude one must feel! And can
it possibly have been blind chance? By any natural measure, it must
seem to Odysseus, things should have gone the other way. One expe-
riences this—-or at least Homer’s character experienced it—not just
as mere luck or good fortune, but as an event that tells him he is well
cared for. Athena’s work indeed.
ALTHOUGH WE ARE NOT likely to attribute events like this to the
work of a god, there is nevertheless something familiar in Odysseus’s
way of experiencing the situation. Those who escape natural disas-
ters or other dangerous situations, for example, [often do feel that it
was not a mere accident that they were saved. Indeed, it is someémes
difficult—when one is the target of a statistically unlikely event- to
feel otherwise.
and:
. Take one of the simplest examples: sleep.
In the Iliad Sleep is himself a god-—at least once addressed as the “lord
of all gods and of all men” (Hom. Il. 14.230fl).16 In the Odyssey, how-
ever, as we have seen sleep is primarily a power that other gods have to
give. In the opening book of the Odyssey, Penelope weeps and weeps
‘ffor her husband Odysseus, until Athena, gray-eyed goddess, shed
sweet sleep upon her eyelids” (Hom. Od. 1.363). And later in the
poem the messenger god Hermes is revealed to carry a wand “where-
with he lulls to sleep the eyes of whom he will, while others again he
awakens even out of slumber” (Hom. Od. 5.46).
Even when the gods are not explicitly responsible for someone’s
going to sleep, however, I-Iomer’s way of describing the event is deeply
informed by his understanding of human beings as not fully in con-
trol of central aspects of their existence. We have seen already the ex-
traordinary range of ways Homer has to describe the phenomena of
being drawn into and awakened from sleep. In Homer people do not
just go to sleep, as if that was something one could do; sleep itself is a
sacred gift.
The variety of ways Homer has of describing sleep indicates what
an important role it plays in his conception of human existence. For
us sleep is the blank episode that separates our moments of activity;
when we are sleeping we are no longer quite ourselves. By contrast,
in Homer’s world sleep is an event that epitomizes the human condi-
tion. It is often in sleep that the gods visit humans, give them direc-
tion and purpose, formulate their plans for them, quell their anxieties
and refresh their desires. Sleep is a canonical human event in Homer
because it is the paradigm of an activity at which one cannot suc-
ceed by trying harder. And yet, one is not completely powerless in the
face of it either. One can prepare oneself for sleep, be grateful that it
comes, wonder at the transformation it brings about. And all these,
for Homer, are characteristic of us at our best.

A.T.S. as I will call it

From which I will take innumerable excerpts:
Consider the Middle Ages, for example. During this period in the
Christian West a person’s identity was determined by God. To say
this is to take no stand on whether there actually was a God in the
Middle Ages. The classic metaphysical arguments for the existence
of God, or for the necessity of his various attributes, are irrelevant
here. What matters instead is that in the Middle Ages people could
not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God.
Indeed, it was so much a part of the way they understood the world
they lived in, so taken for granted by everything that made sense to
them, that it was virtually inconceivable that one’s identity might be
determined in any other way. This was true, of course, about kings
and queens. To say that they ruled by divine right, as was commonly
understood in the Middle Ages, is to say that they were chosen specifi-
cally by God to be the rulers of society. But it Was not only the kings
and queens who were chosen by divine right: everyone else fell into a
place in society according to the divine plan of God himself. Indeed,
not just people but every item in creation had its place in the divine
order, in the Great Chain of Being: kings above noblemen, noblemen
above townspeople, all these above serfs, and so on, but also all people
above all other animals, all animals above all inanimate objects, and
all these, including people, below the angels and ultimately below
God. This order of things was not a /aelitf that anyone argued for or a
worldview that anyone proposed; it was simply taken for granted by
everyone worth talking or listening to. Members of this society made
sense of everything in terms of this fundamental idea—one could ex-
plain a victory in battle, for instance, or an untimely storm in terms
of the will of God—but the idea that everything had its proper place
in God’s divine plan was not itself a be/iqf one could accept or reject.
It was an entire way of life.
The Way of life of a culture is not an explicit set of beliefs held by
the people living in it. It is much deeper than that. A person brought
up in a culture learns its way of life the Way he learns to speak in the
language and with the accent of his family and peers. But a way of life
is much broader than this. It involves a sense for how it is appropriate
and inappropriate to act in each of the social situations one normally
encounters; a familiarity with how to make sense of things and of how
to act in the everyday world; and most general of all, a style, such as
aggressive or nurturing, that governs the actions of the people in the
culture although they are normally not aware of it. We can think of
it as a cultural commitment that, to govern people’s behavior, must
remain in the background, unnoticed but pervasive and real. In the
Medieval World, when this commitment involves a sense of God’s
divine plan, there is simply no question on what basis a person should
choose who he is or is to become. For after all, that one c/moses one’s
identity at all is inconceivable.
. That is not to say that in the Middle Ages one never made any
choices. Qne could always willfully turn away from God’s plan and
pursue a course that deviated from his desires. Or one could aim for
the course of right action and fall short. In the terminology of me-
dieval Christendom there were not only Saints but Sinners too, not
only those who lived Virtuous lives but those Who succumbed to the
perilous attractions of Vice. Dante’s Inférno, which we shall discuss
in greater detail in Chapter 5,13 contains a large and informative dis-
cussion of the various ways a person of the Middle Ages could go
astray. (Dante wrote around I300, at the height of the Late Middle
Ages.) Despite their extraordinary variety, what is characteristic of all
of Dante’s sinners is that their actions involve deviations from or per-
versions of a path already understood to be laid out by God.
Consider a characteristic example. In the second circle of Hell
Dante discovers Paolo and Francesca, two lovers who in life were
overcome by their overwhelming desire for one another. After being
caught together by Francesca’s husband, who was also Paolo’s brother,
and killed by him for their adulterous affair, the two were condemned
to spend eternity blown about by the tempestuous wind of their un-
controllable passion for one another. We shall consider this example
again in our discussion of Dante later, but for the moment all we need
to notice is the medieval conception of sin that it illustrates. Dante’s
presentation of the case makes it clear that there was one right path
of action for Paolo and Francesca—~to avoid the adulterous affair-
and that their sin lay in succumbing to the attractions of Vice. It has
always been difficult, in certain situations, to act in accord with the
standards for living well——the Greek philosophers called this difficulty
akmsia, or weakness of the will; it is the inability to do what we know
to be the right thing. At least some of Dante’s sinners are victims of
this kind of incontinence.
But in the contemporary World we face a deeper and more dif-
ficult problem. It is not just that we know the course of right action
and fail to pursue it; we often seem not to have any sense for what the
standards of living a good life are in the first place. Or said another
Way, we seem to have no ground for choosing one course of action
over any other.
Consider, by contrast with Paolo and Francesca, the more mod-
ern, nineteenth-century case of Emma Bovary. In Flaubert’s Madame
Bowzry we are told the story of Emma, who is married to the bor-
ing and talentless country doctor Charles. To escape her superficial,
banal, and empty life in the provinces, Emma has adulterous affairs
and lives beyond her means. Things end up badly, of course, but even
so it is not obvious that Emma’s adulterous affairs themselves are what
was wrong. We have some sympathy with her desire to get more out
of life, little sympathy for Charles and his empty mode of existence,
and in some sense are meant to understand and endorse Emma’s de-
sire for escape. The lust for life that she exhibits seems admirable, and
provides a creditable counterweight to the commitment her marriage
engages her in.
Although in some general sense Emma’s adulterous affairs share
much with that of Paolo and Francesca, Plaubert’s treatment of the
situation could not differ more radically from Dante’s. For Emma
is presented by Flaubert as having been faced with the kind of exis-
tential question that Paolo and Francesca, as characterized by Dante,
were not. The medieval couple knew that it was wrong to engage in
an adulterous affair—there was no question about it; unfortunately,
they couldn’t resist the sinful passion of lust. Emma’s situation is
much more complicated. Do we really believe that she should stay
with Charles? Qn the contrary, not only can we understand her desire
to leave him, it seems at least possible that it could be for the best.
Indeed, Charles himself recognizes her actions as admirable: he con-
tinues to idolize her after she dies, never criticizing her, and indeed he
attempts to adopt her way of life. So the question of whether Emma;s
actions were admirable or not is a vexed one, and the confusion she
felt about her course of action is supposed to be immediately recog-
nizable to us. After all, she felt the burden of choice that nowadays
seems so obvious to us all.
HOW DID WE GET from the fixed certainty of Dante’s world to the
existential uncertainty of our own? The story is long and complicated,
and this book is devoted to articulating the bones of that story. But
it may help to get at least a brief sense for one of the major transition
points, which occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
in what is known as the early modern period of the West.
By 1600 the Medieval World was breaking down. In particular, it
was no longer possible to take it for granted that God’s will structures
the universe. Very few people at the time, if any, explicitly recognized
this development. Practices that a whole culture takes for granted are
extremely diflicult to identify. But we can find the clues to this his-
torical development throughout the literature and philosophy of the
time. Let us take two examples.
First, Shakespeare himself seems to have been nearly obsessed
the breakdown of the divine order. Whether he knew it or not, this
development motivates many of his plays. As a great and sensitive
artist, Shakespeare seems intuitively to have sensed that the break-
down of the divine order was one of the world-historical issues of
his day. Many of his most successful characters confront this modern
development in one way or another. Consider Macbeth, for example.
Here we find an individual who by his “o’ervaulting ambition” alone
hopes to leap beyond his natural place in the divine order into a new
and higher place as king. The very idea that one should, by one’s own
will and desire, transform the divine order of the universe would have
been anathema to Dante in the world of the Middle Ages. Indeed, we
shall see that the character whom Dante most associates with this kind
of self-directed ambition is Satan himself, who attempts to substitute
his own will for God’s, and is banished to the bottom of Hell for the
attempt. Far from condemning Macbeth’s ambition, however, Shake-
speare seems fascinated by the way it pulls our intuition in different
directions. On the one hand, Macbeth is in some ways a sympathetic
character: his ambition to improve his position in the world seems
understandable even if his particular strategy for doing so does not.
Indeed, it is not just that Macbeth is in fact a sympathetic character;
the very success of the play absolutely depends on our finding him so.
This is because the tragedy of the play cannot get a grip on us unless
we are rooting for its main character to succeed; there is no tragedy
in a purely evil character getting his due. Despite being in some way
sympathetic, however, Macbeth is doomed to failure. For better or for
worse, the divine order is tenaciously resisting the rise of self-directed
ambition. It is as if Shakespeare can see this ambition as a potentially
admirable trait even though the world he lives in will not yet support
this way of life. The divine order is tenaciously resisting the rise of
self-directed ambition, for better or for worse. In other plays, such as
Yroiius and Cressida, the breakdown of the divine order is presented as
comical at best, and very likely as unambiguously bad. In general, it
seems Shakespeare can see that the way of life based on a divine plan is
crumbling but he can’t figure out exactly what to think about it.
Or consider the case of Hamlet. His famous soliloquy from Act III
Scene 1, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” takes on the funda-
mental issue of whether he should choose to live or choose to die. The
very idea that he understands this as a choice open to him indicates
that his culture no longer takes it for granted that God determines
these fundamental facts of our existence. This is not to say, of course,
that nobody ever contemplated suicide before Hamlet. But the cul-
tural interpretation of what one is up to when one is contemplating
such a thought is radically different for Hamlet than it would have
been for a character of the Middle Ages. In the medieval tradition
suicide is understood as an act of rebellion against God, an attempt
to take over from God a decision that is rightfully his. (Indeed, Dante
puts the suicides in the seventh of the nine circles of Hell, sitting
right beside the blasphemers against God.) Once again, we find an
act of rebellion of the same sort that Satan engaged in when he tried
to organize a rebellion of the angels against the Lord. For Hamlet, by
contrast, the thought that suicide would be an affront to God never
seems to occur. The question is simply “whether ’tis nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms
against a sea of troubles. / And by opposing, end them?” The ques-
tion, in other words, is not whether it is an affront against God, and
therefore obviously the wrong thing to do. The question is whether it}
a better decision—“nobler in the mind”-to suffer or to commit sui-
cide. God, or the understanding of God as the divine planner of the
universe, offers no help to Hamlet in considering this question. The
breakdown of the divine order of the Middle Ages, in other words,
has opened up the possibility for genuine existential questioning.
The freedom to choose who we are to be, however, comes with a
heavy burden. For without God’s divine plan to ground us, on the
basis of what are we to make our existential choices? The desire for a
fundamental ground, for some unshakeable conviction on the basis of
which to build our understanding of ourselves and the universe, can
be seen most clearly in the philosophical tradition.
René Descartes, surely the most important philosopher in
history of modern philosophy, was writing in France approximately
one generation after Shakespeare wrote in England. (Descartes’ most
important works were written around 1630.) One of his main philo-
sophical projects was to show that it is possible to know for certain,
and wit/aaut any doubt at all, the most basic things that we know.
That there is an external world, for instance, or that people other than
ourselves exist.‘ It turns out to be very difficult to prove these things
with absolute certainty. The characters in the movie The Matrix, for
example, seem to be living lives just exactly like ours; it turns out,
however, that although they are having the very same kinds of experi-
ences that we all have, in their case there is no world at all of the sort
they seem to be experiencing. The idea that the world is as it seems to
be is a very basic idea. Descartes showed, however, 550 years before
Hollywood, that it is very difficult to know this basic fact wit/aaut
doubt. But the idea that this is the kind of thing we could doubt at all,
and the even more extreme idea that we should have to try to find out
Whether we could know this kind of fundamental thing for certain, is
an idea that wouldn’t occur to someone who lived in a world in which
these kinds of questions don’t really make sense. The Cartesian project
itself would be understood as an act of hubris in the Middle Ages.
The idea that we have to prove to ourselves that God isn’t tricking us
rakes as a background assumption that, well, for all we know God is
tricking us. But this kind of assumption doesn’t even make sense in
a world in which God is from the start understood to be the divine
and benevolent architect of the universe. The fact that Descartes not
only could ask the skeptical question, but could be taken seriously—
indeed, could be held up as a paradigm of philosophical thinking—
shows that by the time he was writing in the early 1600s the medieval
assumptions were no longer taken for granted. And if something so
basic as whether there is an external world at all can be shown to be in
need of philosophical grounding, then how much less grounded must
be our existential choices about how to act?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, the great German philosopher of the late
nineteenth century, famously claimed that God is dead. What he
meant by this is that we in the modern West no longer live in a culture
where the basic questions of existence are already answered for us.
The God of the Middle Ages played the role of answering existential
questions before they could be asked; but such a role is no longer
conceivable. This is true for modern religious believers and skeptics
alike, as the contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor points out.”
Even if there is, as some have claimed, a Third Religious Awakening
in the modern United States, the kind of religious belief available ig
our culture today is not sufficient to quell existential questioning. It
is no longer taken for granted that nonbelievers are outside the realm
of the human. That was the case in medieval Christendom: to be a
nonbeliever was ipso facto to be evil, to have set yourself against the
delights of all that is humanly worth attaining. Perhaps there are some
fanatical religious subcultures that manage to sustain this exclusionary
belief today. But insofar as a religious believer’s belief in God is consis-
tent with the idea that there are admirable people who nevertheless do
not believe, as for the most part is the case in the modern West, then
religious belief cannot by itself close off existential questioning. For
the idea that a nonbeliever is not ipso facto execrable means that non-
belief is a choice that even a believer must take seriously. To say that
we live in a secular age in the modern West is to say that even religious
believers face existential questions about how to live a life.
Facing existential questions is not such a bad thing if one has the
resources to answer them. Perhaps some religious believers in the
modern West do have such resources; Taylor’s recent work begins
from this premise. Indeed, Taylor sees the radical proliferation of re-
ligions and spirituality-—a veritable explosion of religious lives-as
the central feature of the modern age. The idea that there is no reason
to prefer any answer to any other, however, is called nihilism, and
Nietzsche thought this the better description of our current condition
after the death of God.
Nietzsche thought that nihilism was a great joy, since it frees us to
live any life we choose, but many find it horrifying instead. As Dos
toyevsky puts it, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.
Our view is that nihilism is every bit as closed-minded as fanaticism,
and that neither is a sufficient ground on which to base a livable life.
But We are more skeptical than Taylor that ]udeo-Christian monothe-
ism can be culturally satisfying in the modern age. Even if it Could be,
there are other religious traditions in the history of the West that allow
one to live a life guided by something experienced as beyond oneself.
Chapter 5 considers one such tradition, the tradition of Greek poly-
_theism as it is portrayed by Homer. Before we turn to that, however,
~ we will look at the most sensitive current account of the sadness and
lostness of the present age.

Thom Crom

Reading "Wolf Hall" with enjoyment after making no headway in "Bring Up The Bodies". His piggy portrait by Holbein.

The last excerpts from the marvelous Tudor bio by Meyer:

My wonderful, wonderful Cliff Edwards

singing Night Owl

More from Gombrich's History

Since the Olympic Games took place once every four years, and were attended by all the Greeks, they provided everyone with a convenient way to measure time. This was gradually adopted throughout Greece. Just as we say вс meaning 'Before the birth of Christ' or ad for after the birth of Christ (Anno Domini which means the year of our Lord in Latin), the Greeks would say: 'At the time of this or that Olympiad'. The first Olympiad was in 776 вс. Can you work out when the tenth would have been? But don't forget! They only happened every four years.

But it wasn't only the Olympic Games that brought all the Greeks together. There was another sanctuary which they all held sacred. This one was at Delphi, and belonged to the sun god Apollo, and there was something most peculiar about it. As sometimes happens in volcanic regions, there was a fissure in the ground from which vapour issued. If anyone inhaled it, it literally clouded their mind. It was as if they were drunk or delirious, and nothing they said made any sense.

The very meaninglessness of these utterances seemed deeply mysterious to the Greeks, who said that 'the god himself speaks through a mortal mouth'. So they had a priestess - whom they called Pythia - sit over the fissure on a three-legged stool, while other priests interpreted her babble as predictions of the future.

The shrine was known as the Delphic Oracle, and at difficult moments of their lives Greeks from everywhere made pilgrimages to Delphi, to consult the god Apollo. The answer they received was often far from clear, and could be understood in a variety of ways. And in fact we still say that a vague or enigmatic answer is 'oracular'.

Let us now take a closer look at two of Greece's most important cities: Sparta and Athens. We already know something about the Spartans: they were Dorians, who, when they arrived in Greece, in around 1100 вс, enslaved the former inhabitants and put them to work on the land. But the slaves outnumbered their masters, and the danger of rebellion meant that the Spartans had to be constantly on the alert lest they find themselves homeless again. They only had one aim in life: to be fighting fit, ready to crush any uprising by their slaves, and to protect themselves from the surrounding peoples still at liberty.

And they really did think of nothing else. Their lawgiver, Lycurgus, had already seen to that. A Spartan baby that appeared weak, and unlikely to grow up to be a warrior, was killed at birth. A strong infant had to be made stronger. From a very young age he must train from dawn till dusk, learn to endure pain, hunger and cold, must eat poorly and be denied all pleasure. Boys were beaten just to harden them to pain. A harsh upbringing is still called 'spartan' today, and as you know, it worked: at Thermopylae, in 480 вс, in obedience to their law, the Spartans allowed themselves to be massacred by the Persians. Knowing how to die like that isn't easy. But knowing how to live is, perhaps, even harder. And this is what the Athenians aimed to do. They weren't looking for an easy, comfortable life, but one which had meaning. A life of which something remained after one's death. Something of benefit to those who came after. You shall see how they succeeded.
Had they not lived in fear - fear of their own slaves - the Spartans might never have become so warlike and brave. Athenians had fewer reasons to be afraid and they didn't live under the same pressures. Things were different for them even though, as in Sparta, the nobles who once ruled Athens imposed harsh laws drawn up by an Athenian named Draco. (These laws were so strict that people still speak of 'Draconian' severity.) But the people of Athens, who had roamed the seas in their ships, and had heard and seen so many different things, did not consent to this for long.
It was, in fact, a nobleman who had the wisdom to try to give the little state a new system of government. His name was Solon, and the laws he introduced in 594 вс - at the time of Nebuchadnezzar - were named after him. They stated that the people, that is, the city's inhabitants, should decide the city's affairs themselves. They should assemble in the marketplace of Athens and vote. The majority should decide and should elect a council of experts to put those decisions into effect. This sort of government is called democracy, or 'the rule of the people', in Greek. This didn't mean that everyone who lived in Athens was entitled to vote in the Assembly. Citizenship depended on wealth and influence, and many people, including women and slaves, played no part in government. But many Athenians could at least have their say, and so they took an interest in how their city was run. 'Polis' is Greek for city, 'polities', the affairs of a city.

For a while individual noblemen curried favour with the people to win their votes, and then seized power. Rulers like these were called tyrants. But the people soon expelled them and took better care next time to ensure that it was they themselves who really governed. I have already told you about the wayward nature of the Athenians. And it was this, together with a real fear of losing their freedom once again, which led them to banish any politician who showed signs of becoming too popular, lest he seize power for himself and rule as a tyrant. The same free people of Athens who defeated the Persians later treated Miltiades and Themistocles with just such ingratitude.

But there was one politician who avoided this fate. His name was Pericles. When he spoke in the Assembly, the Athenians always believed that it was they who had made the decisions, whereas in fact it was Pericles, who had made up his mind long before. This wasn't because he held any special office or had any particular power - he was simply the wisest and the most intelligent. And so 
he gradually worked his way up until, by 444 вс - a number as beautiful as the time it represents - he was, in effect, the city's sole ruler. His chief concern was that Athens should maintain its power at sea, and this he achieved through alliances with other Ionian cities who paid Athens for its protection. In this way the Athenians grew rich and could at last afford to make use of their great gifts.

And now I can hear you asking: 'But what exactly did they do that was so great?' And I can only say 'everything'. But two things interested them most and these were truth and beauty.
Their assemblies had taught the Athenians how to discuss all matters openly, with arguments for and against. This was good training in learning how to think. Soon they were using arguments and counter-arguments, not just when they were debating everyday matters like whether or not to increase taxation, but in discussions about the whole of nature. The Ionians in the colonial outposts may have been ahead of them here, for they had already reflected on what the world was actually made of, and what might be the cause of all events and experiences.

This sort of reflection is what we call philosophy. In Athens, however, their reflecting - or philosophising - went much further. They also wanted to know how people should act, what was good and what was evil, and what was just and what was unjust. They wanted to find an explanation for human existence and discover the essence of all things. Of course, not everyone agreed on matters as complex as these - there were various theories and opinions that were argued back and forth, just as in the people's Assembly. And since that time, the sort of reflection and reasoned argument we call philosophy has never stopped.

But the Athenians didn't only pace up and down their porticos and sports fields talking about things like the essence of life and how to recognise it, and where it came from. They didn't just picture the world in a new way in their minds, they saw it with new eyes. When you look at the works of Greek artists, and see how fresh and simple and beautiful they are, it is as if their creators were seeing the world for the first time. We spoke of the statues of Olympic champions earlier. They show fine human beings, not posed, but looking as if the position they are shown in is the most natural one in the world. And it is because they seem so natural that they are so beautiful.

and 

However, another invention of the time was to have an even greater impact on the world. This was gunpowder. Once again, the Chinese had probably known about it for a long time, but they mostly used it to make fireworks. It was in Europe, from 1300 onwards, that people began to use it in cannons for shooting at fortresses and men. And before long, soldiers were carrying massive and cumbersome guns in their hands. Bows and arrows were still much faster and more effective. A good English bowman could release 180 arrows in fifteen minutes, which was roughly the time it took for a soldier to load his thunderbox, set a slow-match to the charge and fire it once. Despite this, guns and cannons were already in evidence during the Hundred Years War, and after 1400 their use became widespread.

But such weapons were not for knights. There was nothing chivalrous about firing a bullet into a man's body from a distance. As you know, what knights did was to gallop towards one another and try to knock each other out of the saddle. Now, to protect themselves against the bullets, they had to abandon their chain mail in favour of increasingly heavy and solid armour. Dressed in this from top to toe they looked like iron men and must have been a fearsome sight. But the armour was unbearably hot and impractical and the knights could hardly move. For this reason, no matter how bravely they (ought, they were no longer so intimidating. In 1476 a famous, warlike knight and prince of the Duchy of Burgundv - known as Charles the Bold on account of his fearlessness - led an armv of knights in armour to conquer Switzerland. But when thev got there the free peasants and burghers of Murten surprised them and, righting on foot, simply knocked all the knights off their horses and clubbed them to death. They then made off with all the magnificent and valuable tents and rugs that the knights had brought with them on their campaign of conquest. You can see these today in Bern, the capital of Switzerland. Switzerland remained free, and the knights had had their day.

and

This movement to re-awaken the piety of old, not through a separation from the Catholic Church, but through the renewal of that Church, and thus to actively challenge the Reformation, is known as the Counter-Reformation. People became very austere and strict during this period of religious warfare. Almost as austere and strict as Ignatius of Loyola himself. The delight Florentines took in their leaders' magnificence and splendour was over. And once again, what was looked for in a man was piety and readiness to serve the Church. Noblemen stopped wearing bright and ample robes and now looked more like monks in severe, black, close-cut gowns and white ruffs, over which their sombre, unsmiling faces tapered away into little pointed beards. Every nobleman wore a sword on his belt and challenged anyone who insulted his honour to a duel.

These men, with their careful, measured gestures and their rigid formality, were mostly seasoned warriors, and never more implacable than when fighting for their beliefs. Germany was not the only land riven by strife between Protestant and Catholic princes. The most ferocious wars were fought in France, where Protestants were known as Huguenots. In 1572 the French queen invited all the Huguenot nobility to a wedding at court, and on the eve of St Bartholomew, she had them assassinated. That's what wars were like in those days.

No one was more stern, more inflexible or more ruthless than the leader of all the Catholics. King Philip II of Spain was the son of the emperor Charles V. His court was formal and austere. Every act was regulated: who had to kneel at the sight of the king and who might wear a hat in his presence. In what order those who dined were to be served at the high table, and in what order the nobles were to enter the church for Mass.

King Philip himself was an unusually conscientious sovereign, who insisted on handling every decision and every letter himself. He worked from dawn to dusk with his advisers, many of whom were monks. His purpose in life as he saw it was to root out all forms of unbelief. In his own country he had thousands of people burned at the stake for heresy - not just Protestants, but Jews and Muslims who had lived there since the time when Spain was under Arab rule. And because he saw himself as Protector and Defender of the Faith, just as the German emperor had before him, he joined forces with a Venetian fleet and attacked the Turks, whose sea power hadn't stopped growing since their conquest of Constantinople. The allied Christians were victorious, and the Turkish fleet was completely destroyed at Lepanto, in 1571.

His war against the Protestants went less well. He may have succeeded in exterminating them at home in Spain, but this was not the case elsewhere. As in his father's time, the Low Countries (meaning Belgium and Holland) were also part of his empire. And many of the burghers who lived there were Protestants, especially in the rich northern towns. He did all he could to make them renounce their faith, but they wouldn't give in. So he sent a Spanish nobleman to be their governor, and he was even more fanatical and inflexible than Philip himself. The Duke of Alba, with his thin, pale face, his narrow pointed beard and icy gaze, was just the sort of warrior that Philip favoured. In cold blood the Duke of Alba sentenced a great number of burghers and noblemen to be hanged. Finally, people could stand it no longer. There was a fierce and bloody battle which ended in 1579 with the liberation of the Protestant towns of the Low Countries and the expulsion of the Spanish troops. Now, as free, rich, independent and enterprising trading cities, they too could try their luck across the seas, in India and America.

But King Philip II of Spain's most cruel defeat was yet to come. In England, Queen Elizabeth I, the daughter of King Henry VIII, was on the throne. Elizabeth was very clever, strong-willed and determined, but she was also vain and cruel. She was determined to defend England against the many Catholics still present in the country whom she persecuted relentlessly. Her cousin, Mary Stuart, the Catholic queen of Scotland, was a woman of great beauty and charm, and she, too, believed she had a right to the English throne. Elizabeth had her imprisoned and executed. Elizabeth also helped the Protestant burghers of the Low Countries in their war against Philip of Spain. Philip was furious. He resolved to conquer England for Catholicism or destroy it.

At immense cost he raised a huge fleet of 130 great sailing ships with around two thousand cannon, and more than twenty thousand men. It takes no time to read, but just try to imagine 130
sailing ships at sea. This was the Invincible Armada. When it set sail from Spain in 1588, loaded with heavy cannon and weaponry and food and supplies for six months, it seemed inconceivable that England's small island might ever succeed in resisting such a mighty force. However, the heavily laden warships were cumbersome and hard to manoeuvre. The English avoided confrontation and darted in and out in their nimbler vessels, attacking the Spanish ships. One night they launched fireships into the midst of the Spanish fleet, creating panic and confusion and sending them in all directions. Many ships drifted along the English coast and went down in severe gales. Barely half the Armada reached home and not one ship succeeded in landing on an English shore. Philip betrayed no sign of his disappointment. It is said that he greeted the commander of the fleet warmly and thanked him, saying: 'After all, I sent you to fight men, not the wind and waves.'

and

If I wished, I could write many more chapters on the wars between Catholics and Protestants. But I won't. It was a dreadful era. Events soon became so confused that people no longer knew why or against whom they were fighting. The Habsburg emperors of Germany - ruling now from Prague, now from Vienna - had no real power outside Austria and part of Hungary. They were pious men who wished to re-establish the sovereignty of the Catholic Church throughout their empire. Nevertheless, they did for a while allow Protestants to hold religious services. Until one day a revolt broke out in Bohemia.

In 1618, discontented Protestants threw three of the emperor's Catholic councillors out of a window at Prague castle. They landed in a pile of manure, and so came to little harm. Nevertheless, this event - known as the Defenestration of Prague - gave the signal for a dreadful war to begin which lasted for thirty years. Thirty years. Just imagine! If someone heard about the Defenestration at the age of ten, they would have had to wait until they were forty to experience peace. If they experienced it! For in no time the war had turned into a dreadful massacre as hordes of ill-paid soldiers from countries far and wide rampaged through the land, looting and killing. The expectation of plunder was what drew the vilest and most brutal men of all nations into the ranks of these armies. Religious faith was long forgotten. Protestants fought in Catholic armies, Catholics in Protestant ones. Friend and foe suffered alike from their rapacity. Wherever they pitched their tents they demanded food and, above all, drink from the local peasants. And if a peasant refused to give them what they wanted, they took it by force, or they killed him. In their improbable patchwork of rags and their great plumed hats, swords dangling from their belts and pistols at the ready, they rode around burning, killing and tormenting the defenceless peasantry out of sheer wickedness and depravity. Nothing could stop them. The only person they would obey was their commander. And if he won their affection, they followed him with blind devotion.