Poe, Sir Thomas Browne, Suetonius, Tiberius

Despina, an inveterate mystery reader, mentioned that the epigraph to Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is this line from Chapter 5 of Sir Thomas Browne's HYDRIOTAPHIA, Urne-Buriall OR, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk.

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.

Sir Thomas appends a note that says "The puzling questions of Tiberius unto Grammarians. Marcel. Donatus in Suet."

So I went to Suetonius and found the following entertaining bits about Tiberius and exile, along with the question about the sirens:

10 At the flood-tide of success, though in the prime of life and health, he suddenly decided to go into retirement and to withdraw as far as possible from the centre of the stage; perhaps from disgust at his wife, whom he dared neither accuse nor put away, though he could no longer endure her; or perhaps, avoiding the contempt born of familiarity, to keep up his prestige by absence, or even add to it, in case his country should ever need him.... At the time he asked for leave of absence on the ground of weariness of office and a desire to rest; and he would not give way either to his mother's urgent entreaties or to the complaint which his step-father openly made in the senate, that he was being forsaken. On the contrary, when they made more strenuous efforts to detain him, he refused to take food for four days. Being at last allowed to depart, he left his wife and son in Rome and went down to Ostia in haste, without saying a single word to any of those who saw him off, and kissing only a very few when he left.

11 From Ostia he coasted along the shore of Campania, and learning of an indisposition of Augustus, he stopped for a while. But since gossip was rife that he was lingering on the chance of realising his highest hopes, although the wind was all but dead ahead, he sailed directly to Rhodes, for he had been attracted by the charm and healthfulness of that island ever since the time when he put in there on his return from Armenia. Content there with a modest house and a villa in the suburbs not much more spacious, he adopted a most unassuming manner of life, at times walking in the gymnasium without a lictor or a messenger, and exchanging courtesies with the good people of Greece with almost the air of an equal.

****

13 He also gave up his usual exercises with horses and arms, and laying aside the garb of his country, took to the cloak and slippers; and in this state he continued for upwards of two years, becoming daily an object of greater contempt and aversion. This went so far that the citizens of Nemausus threw down his statues and busts, and when mention was once made of him at a private dinner party, a man got up and assured Gaius that if he would say the word, he would at once take ship for Rhodes and bring back the head of "the exile," as he was commonly called. It was this act especially, which made his position no longer one of mere fear but of actual peril, that drove Tiberius to sue for his recall with most urgent prayers, in which his mother joined; and he obtained it, although partly owing to a fortunate chance. Augustus had resolved to come to no decision of the question which was not agreeable to his elder son, who, as it happened, was at the time somewhat at odds with Marcus Lollius, and accordingly ready to lend an ear to his stepfather's prayers. With his consent therefore Tiberius was recalled, but on the understanding that he should take no part or active interest in public affairs.

****

70 He was greatly devoted to liberal studies in both languages. In his Latin oratory he followed Messala Corvinus, to whom he had given attention in his youth, when Messala was an old man. But he so obscured his style by excessive mannerisms and pedantry, that he was thought to speak much better offhand than in a prepared address. He also composed a lyric poem, entitled "A Lament for the Death of Lucius Caesar," and made Greek verses in imitation of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, poets of whom he was very fond, placing their busts in the public libraries among those of the eminent writers of old; and on that account many learned men vied with one another in issuing commentaries on their works and dedicating them to the emperor. 3 Yet his special aim was a knowledge of mythology, which he carried to a silly and laughable extreme; for he used to test even the grammarians, a class of men in whom, as I have said, he was especially interested, by questions something like this: "Who was Hecuba's mother?" "What was the name of Achilles among the maidens?" "What were the Sirens in the habit of singing?"

[I should mention that Sir Thomas Browne is one of my favorite guys, I wrote a piece many years ago based on The Garden of Cyrus, which oddly enough happens to be being performed tonight in NYC(!)]

disdain a natural condition

When the Queen of Egypt arrived for an extended visit, in 46 B.C., with a large entourage, Caesar put her up at his villa in the suburbs. Compared with gorgeous, cosmopolitan Alexandria, the filthy, ramshackle city of a million people which the Queen saw from her perch in the hills "qualified as a provincial backwater," Schiff writes. "Disdain," she observes, "is a natural condition of the mind in exile," and it came naturally to Cleopatra.

Judith Thurman quoting Stacy Schiff's "Cleopatra" in "The Cleopatriad", The New Yorker, 15 November 2010

Louise Glück Parable

This was published in the NYTimes on 5 Nov 10, so I think it's okay to reprint it here:

Parable

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

— LOUISE GLÜCK

misc quotes I

I'm going to add some additional texts here that may or may not be interesting or useful to the project, but I thought it'd be good for them to be available in one central place. Here's something that I thought may be useful in thinking about Clement and the embedding of ideas of exile into the Christian journey:

They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

Hebrews 11: 13-16

archive of (odyssean) exile

I'm beginning to 'get' it, I think - how our material constitutes an 'archive of exile'. The point is that the Odyssey has generated an enormous body of interpretation across time - from the Church Fathers (who see in Odysseus's journey a 'type' of the Christian life) to Lewis Hyde (for whom Odysseus is a manifestation of that disruptive consciousness that he also finds in North American and West African trickster narratives). This great corpus of response is an archive. And, actually, it has a material reality, although it isn't all gathered together in one place. What is more, it is an archive that responds to Odysseus' exile, and this is particularly interesting because it requires a certain effort of reading to make Odysseus into an exile at all. (He does, after all, arrive 'home' at the end of the poem: Clement reads that 'home' as outside this material reality and Hyde sees Odysseus' trickiness as intertwined with his mobility.)

In fact, maybe the archive doesn't constitute the body of responses to the Odyssey in the sense of the Homeric poem. Perhaps it is better to see the Odyssey itself as the first text in the archive - the first one that responds to the myth of Odysseus.

orpheus and odysseus

This is just a quick note to gather together some of my thoughts on this pair of Siren-heroes: Odysseus and Orpheus. What strikes me is that they fulfil different symbolic functions for Early Christian commentators. Odysseus is the *human* figure, in exile in the world, avoiding attachments that would enmesh him too closely in the texture of earthly life. Orpheus is the *Christ*, entering the underworld to bring back his bride, herself a symbolic representation of humankind, exiled in a dark place and in need of redemption. But if the patterns of identification here are different - Odysseus and humankind, Orpheus and Christ - they are not simple, because the figure of Odysseus at the mast evokes the figure of Christ on the Cross, and Orpheus, in fact, failed to bring Eurydice out of the underworld, thus manifesting as a human shadow of Christ, the divine.

I suppose this complexity shouldn't be surprising because, in Christianity, Christ is both human and God, both the same as and different from us. What is more, the interaction of Christian and pre-Christian material draws out a kind of exilic dimension in both bodies of narrative. And, as I've said before, there are voices everywhere - the voices of the Sirens, the songs of Orpheus, bodies of narrative moving back and forth across languages and interpretive traditions, narratological layers in both the classical and the Christian texts, a layering of voices that might perhaps be thought of as an archive.

more reflections (archive/exile)

Last Thursday I wrote (at length – sorry!) about the idea of exile-as-ideal and its uses as a way of reflecting upon the self. Looked at in this way, a project on exile can focus not only on other people’s experiences of exile – though these are important –but also on one’s own aspirations to see ‘like an exile’. Today I thought I would write something about where I am now with the concept of ‘archive’. In particular, I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to compile an archive with the notion of exile-as-ideal in mind.

I *think* an archive has to be something collected or curated, and, for me, the interest of the concept lies in exploring what is collected and who curates it. The phrase ‘archive of exile’ opens onto a wide variety of possible dynamics here:

At one end of the spectrum, an ‘archive of exile’ might simply be an archive made by exiles. So, the fragments of ‘home’ that are carried into exile might be labelled in this way, as might relics of the process of displacement itself (the train tickets, diaries, maps, etc) . Here the archive consists of the remains of a certain kind of experience and it is curated by those who underwent that experience. And this might lead us to think about what ‘they’ preserved and why.

But another – very different – way to read the terms is to see an ‘archive of exile’ as an archive (of anything) made with the idea of exile-as-ideal in mind. Making an archive of exile in this sense requires one to turn the act of curation into a process of unlearning or getting outside. I might curate the material of my own life (photographs, memorabilia, etc) in this way, in which case the challenge would be not to present it as evidence for some authentic self of which I have privileged knowledge but to view it as if from the outside. And, as I wrote in the earlier post, I don’t think it is literally possible to do this in a voluntary way – the point, rather, would be to make the aspiration a part of the project in whatever way one could.

Increasingly it has struck me that your journey down the Mississippi involves both of these dynamics. (Obviously the journey isn’t only about archives of exile but, to the extent that it is, both versions of the ‘archive of exile’ seem to be in play.) At one level, the journey provides plenty of opportunity to engage with archives of exile in the first sense – the present traces of histories of displacement are everywhere along the route – but it also seems to have had a decentring effect that is evident in some of your blog posts.

In this context, I was very struck by a couple of postings that you made back in November (here and here) and that I commented on at the time (here and here). In the first post you talk about attending a black church and finding that not everyone is 100% pleased to see you, an experience that leads you to make this comment:

If I were a child of slavery and sharecropping and lynchings and all that, I’m not sure how much loving-kindness and openheartedness I would be ready to muster for every white stranger who walks in the door.

And in the second you talk about your experience of hearing an elderly man who ‘has lived and worked side by side with black people all his life’ use a term that ‘wound[s] [your] sensibilities’, something that also leads to a moment of self-reflection:

Let’s be real here: his daily life is in certain ways more integrated than the new music scene in New York City, uptown, downtown, or midtown. That’s part of the reason I’m not in New York right now, I’m trying to get some perspective on my own provincialism.

Both of these comments seem to me to have something of the texture that I am talking about. Both suggest a moment of finding oneself no longer at the centre of things, of getting ‘outside’ one’s situation. And so what I *think* I see here is a kind of relay between the archives of exile that are preserved along the Mississippi itself and the emergence of a particular mode of seeing, and hence of curating what one collects, that has exile as an aspiration.

It’s striking that this latter ‘mode of seeing’ comes in flashes – particular moments of experience – and I suspect that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to consolidate such moments of insight into a state in which one can live permanently, unless of course the catastrophe happens and one actually has to embrace exile as a literal reality. In an certain sense, it is a blessing not to have to see ‘like an exile’, whatever the clarity of that vision is. So how can that sense of momentary, exilic insight be built into the process of curation? In particular, how can it be built in in a way that reads neither as a form of posturing (look at me taking on the role of the exile) nor as an expression of liberal guilt (I feel so bad about all of this)?

I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about this since last summer and I’m beginning to develop some views about how it might be done through the medium I usually work in, i.e. writing. Would love to hear your thoughts…

a few more thoughts (exile)

Last time we spoke you talked about the fact that your work has never really been 'confessional' - it's about things in the outside world and not primarily about you (although it does, of course, present your particular vision of those external things). And we also talked about the idea that this project actually seems to invite some reflection on the self - what it is to be a traveller - in a way that is complementary to the exploration of what is out there in the world.

In some ways, the concept of 'exile' works very well from that perspective precisely because the state of exile has been described, at various times and by different people, as a sort of ideal to which we should actively aspire, from the early Christian idea that life should be seen as an exile in the world up to a modern scholar like Erich Auerbach, who, driven into exile from Nazi Germany, wrote his masterwork, Mimesis, in Istanbul and claimed that it could have been written under no other conditions. In both cases, exile is viewed as an ideal position from which to view the world: one that makes the world more experientally immediate, perhaps, while also holding it at a distance, or, to put it another way, one that radically reorders one's investment in the world.

In this context, I've been thinking a lot about the word 'ideal'. It is self-dramatising and self-deluding, I think, to suggest that we will voluntarily 'go into exile'. Well, I suppose we could, potentially, but the fact is that we aren't going to burn all our bridges, give up the privileged status of being US or EU citizens, and trust ourselves to fortune in any very radical sense. So for me to figure the mild strangeness of my summer in the headwaters as an 'exile', for example, would be self-deluding and entirely lacking in moral integrity. However, if 'exile' is an ideal state which it is almost impossible to realise in a voluntary way and which, when it comes, usually comes as a catastrophe, then it acquires quite a different use in reflections on the self. It becomes that against which we measure the limitations of our perception and our moral awareness.

It was this idea that I was grasping at when I posted about James Alison back in November (here and here). Alison isn't writing directly about exile, but, in his interpretation of the story of the 'man blind from birth', he is pointing towards the importance and the extreme difficulty of 'getting outside' one's situation. The challenge of the story, as he has it, is to stop congratulating ourselves on how much we despise the Pharisees and come to understand that we are in a sense the Pharisees. It is almost impossible for us to live in this state of 'outsideness' - we keep finding ourselves 'back inside' - and this is why the term 'ideal' is so important. To figure onself as the blind man against the Pharisees is an act of self-delusion but to see the process of stepping outside as an ideal condition which we often (usually?) fail to achieve is quite a different proposition.

Also in November, I posted a few times on Raymond Williams (here and here) and his idea of 'unlearning'. I realise now that these points were also gesturing towards the idea I am trying to articulate here. The issue there was that both liberal (Williams actually says 'socialist') and conservative commentators often articulate ideas with the goal of 'laying hands on life and forcing it into our [yes 'our'] own image'. And, once again, this is an 'inside' position. To understand that there might be any wisdom elsewhere requires a kind of 'unlearning' which, like Alison's call to identify with the 'villains' of the gospel story, is very difficult to achieve.

Thought of in this way, the concept of exile-as-ideal might provide a way into the process of reflecting on the self. It has the advantage of focusing less on 'how I feel' and more on 'what I aspire to'. And it also has the advantage of not being a figure for 'how things are' but a sort of parable of 'how they should be'. Thought of in this way, the point of evoking images of exile (in the myth of Odysseus, the figure of the viator, and so forth) is not so much to say 'this is me' but rather 'this not me, alas'. Or it might be to ask 'could this be me?'

As I write this, I'm already beginning to find my articulation of the idea rather over-simple or reductive and this is exactly what I like about the Odysseus material. The image of exile-as-ideal developed there is so complex and open-ended that it invites a kind of inventive, imaginative, acrobatic interpretation that is richer than the literal 'spelling-out' that I'm doing here. It provides powerful, vexing, resistant material for thinking about these questions of being-inside/being-outside, learning/unlearning, settling/passing through, etc etc etc.

Biblical Sirens: Isaiah 43, 20

The fourth appearance of sirens in the Septuagint is particularly interesting for us, I think:

Behold I will do a new thing;
now it shall become visible:
I will even make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
Then shall the beasts of the field praise me
the sirens and the daughters of the ostriches,
because I give waters in the wilderness.

It's the combination of the sirens and the river that struck me particularly! The river here is a blessing (as it is in Gilfillan's quotation from Isaiah - well, actually, it's used there to figure the peace that would have followed from obedience to God's commandments). And this river waters the wilderness which is home to the sirens.

Biblical Sirens: Isaiah 34, 13

The Sirens appear a third time in Isaiah 34, 13. Here, as usual, is Rahner's translation:

Thorns grow up in their cities
and in their strong places.
It will be a dwelling-place for sirens
and a fold for ostriches.

Like the last one, this text comes from a prophecy of destruction - in this case, the destruction of Edom. Again, the Vulgate does not mention Sirens at all:

et orientur in domibus eius spinae et urticae et paliurus in munitionibus eius et erit cubile draconum et pascua strutionum

And the King James version has this:

And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

And the Greek phrase is:

Personally, I'm finding these images of destroyed cities interesting - but wait till you see the next passage! :o)

Biblical Sirens: Job 30, 29-30

So, the first passage in the Septuagint to mention Sirens is in the book of Job (30, 29-30). This is Rahner's version of the text:

I am a brother to sirens
and a companion of ostriches.
My skin is black and falleth from me
and my bones are burned with heat.

Here Job is lamenting the afflictions he has suffered and the terms he uses suggest that his estrangement from God is a figurative exile in the desert. I notice that in the King James translation, we have 'a brother to owls', and in the Latin Vulgate, 'frater ... draconum'. The relevant phrase in Greek is:

I've mentioned Job on this blog before. It was when Gilfillan was writing about the shape of Lake Itasca and suggesting that it was an image of the Trinity, written into the heart of the North American continent. The quotation he uses comes from Job 19, 24 and my post is here.

Sirens in the Bible (oh yes!)

Having discussed the dual nature of the Sirens in Greek mythology, Hugo Rahner goes on to talk about the use of the word seirēnes in the Septuagint:

The reason why the symbolism developed around these figures continued for so long a period of time to be a living influence was that, when reading the Scriptures in his own tongue, the Greek Christian could find certain words there which acted as entry ports through which the imagery of profane mythology merged with the Christian interpretation of the Bible.

The Alexandrine translators who produced the Septuagint found six places in the ancient Hebrew books where there was a mention of mysterious beasts referred to as tannîm and benôt and ya'anâh, terms which mean literally "jackals" or "hen ostriches". They render these words by the
Greek Seirēnes (Sirens). What inspired this gross but most interesting mistranslation in the minds of these Hellenistic translators is a mystery which has hitherto remained unsolved. The result, however, is plain enough: for over a thousand years Greek Christians read the word "Sirens" in the passages concerned, and the association of ideas connected with these mystical beings, so universally familiar in the folk-lore of antiquity, was sufficiently strong to arouse in the Christian Greek much the same horror that these deadly creatures had inspired in pagan forerunners and contemporaries.

So, where do these mentions of Sirens appear? More on that later, but - by way of preview - we need to look at the books of Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah.

Sirens in Plato

Some more on Odysseus and the Sirens. (Perhaps I should just send you a copy of Rahner’s article! Well, yes, but I’m quite enjoying digging the interesting bits out of it and, in fact, today’s post isn’t going to be a quotation from the article itself but a chunk of Plato’s Republic, which I looked up as a result of my reading.)

Rahner’s point is that, in pre-Christian mythology, the Sirens are sometimes seen as the guardians of divine wisdom. They are pretty much always dual in nature – destructive yet alluring – but the notion that their duality involves a combination of danger and something other than erotic allure is obviously very important for these more interesting Patristic interpretations. And one source of this idea is Plato. In the eschatological ‘Myth of Er’, which comes in the last book of the Republic, Plato describes the ‘spindle of necessity’ around which the eight circles of the universe turn:

The spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The eight together form one harmony; and round about, at equal intervals, there is another band, three in number, each sitting upon her throne: these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens – Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the future; Clotho from time to time assisting with a touch of her right hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl or spindle, and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then with the other. (Republic 617 B)

As Rahner puts it: ‘The Sirens ultimately thus become angels who help the soul in its ascent to God. An eloquent fragment of Euripides has been preserved for us by Clement of Alexandria: “And now golden wings are laid upon my back and the sweet soles of the Sirens. I rise up into the heights of the aether to become the companion of Zeus” (Stromata IV, 26, 172, I). So, in Plato, the Sirens are both chthonic deities associated with the underworld and heavenly beings that sing the music of the spheres – strange, no?

Clement on Odysseus

Following on from yesterday's post, this is a passage (quoted by Rahner) in which Clement of Alexandria develops his interpretation of the story of the Sirens. It is from Stromata, II, 89, I. (Where Rahner cites a Greek term, I've transliterated it because I can't get my Greek font to work in Blogger.)

It seems to me, that most of those who subscribe to the name of Christian are like the companions of Odysseus; for they approach our doctrine (logos) without any sense for a high culture. It is not so much the Sirens that they sail past and put behind them as the rhythms and melodies (of the genius of Greece). They stop their ears by their rejection of learning (amathia) because they would never find their way home again once they had opened those ears to the wisdom of Greece (hellenikois mathemasin). Yet he who seeks to choose what is serviceable in all that for the instruction of catechumens - especially since many of these are Greeks (for the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof) - should in no wise turn aside from the love of wisdom (philomathia) like a beast without reason. On the contrary he should make a kind of beggar's collection (eranisteon) - and that on as liberal a scale as he can - of helpful thoughts (from the wisdom of the Greeks). All that we must guard against is that we should dally there and go no further instead of returning home again to the true philosophy.

Rahner helpfully provides a gloss of the term eranisteon, which - he says - 'suggests the practice according to which a group of friends would arrange a feast, each friend making a contribution'.

Odyssey XII 53-60

This is the section of Odyssey XII where Circe tells Odysseus how to protect himself from the Sirens:

And this is Robert Fagles' translation of the passage:

Race straight past that coast! Soften some beeswax
and stop your shipmates' ears so none can hear,
none of the crew, but if you are bent on hearing,
have them tie you hand and foot in the swift ship,
erect at the mast-block, lashed by ropes to the mast
so you can hear the Sirens' song to your heart's content.
But if you plead, commanding your men to set you free,
then they must lash you faster, rope on rope.

Odysseus and the Sirens

When I was writing about the notion of exile as a kind of ideal, I posted here about Christian appropriations of the story of Odysseus/Ulysses and I mentioned an essay by Hugo Rahner on this topic. I've recently been looking at Rahner's book, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery and, as a result, I'm becoming more and more interested in the Odyssey and its interpreters. It seems that the legend of Odysseus' encounter with the sirens is particularly important in this context. This did emerge in the paragraph from Gerhart Ladner's article that I quoted in the earlier post:

[T]he Christian stranger on earth, the peregrinus, could be said to travel through strange and awesome seas in a ship, which is the Church, affixed to the mast of the Cross, absorbing the sweet and far from meaningless Siren songs of the world, without being deflected from the right course.

But Ladner's comment misses out one very significant aspect of the story: the fact that Odysseus had his men fill their ears with wax so that they couldn't hear the voices of the sirens, whereas he himself chose to experience their voices while having himself tied to the mast so that he could not act upon his desire to succumb to them. Rahner cites Clement of Alexandria as an example of someone who places importance on this aspect of the myth:

There is a passage in the writings of Clement that has considerable relevance here and is indeed of the utmost importance for the whole history of Christian humanism. In it the writer seeks to defend his own breadth and generosity of mind against the more narrow-minded Christians of the day and his conviction that Greek culture should in no wise be denied a place within the Christian scheme. The incident of Odysseus and the Sirens proves an apt text for his discourse. Certain kinds of petty and hypercritical Christians, he avers, are like the companions of Odysseus who stop their ears with wax in order not to succumb to the sweet peril of the Sirens. Odysseus had been a different kind of man. Knowingly and with his ears open, he had approached the Siren's isle without yielding to its temptation.

There is something about this that I like. Indeed, from our perspective, I really LOVE the fact that this is a myth about VOICES and how we might respond to them.

Ulysses

Another quotation from Ladner. Here he talks about the myth of Ulysses/Odysseus, which is sometimes contrasted with the Biblical stories of exile on the grounds that Ulysses does in the end find his way home - his is not a permanent condition of exile. However, early Christian appropriations of the myth take a different line:

In this connection, I may mention a famous essay by Father Hugo Rahner, in which he has shown how the Fathers of the Church could beautifully interpret the heroic travels of Ulysses as a type of the Christian's journey through terrestrial life. Ulysses had himself tied to the mast so that he would not be lured to disaster by the songs of the Sirens. Similarly, the Christian stranger on earth, the peregrinus, could be said to travel through strange and awesome seas in a ship, which is the Church, affixed to the mast of the Cross, absorbing the sweet and far from meaningless Siren songs of the world, without being deflected from the right course.

The essay is in Rahner's book, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, which was published in 1963 and sounds as if it might be really interesting...

more from Ladner

Another fragment from Ladner's essay, "Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order":

The metaphor [...] of the viator, the traveller, who seeks only temporary comfort in an inn on the road is found in Augustine's works, whence Gregory the Great may have taken it. The topoi of xeniteia and peregrinatio, of pilgrimage, of homelessness, of strangeness in this world, are among the most widespread in early Christian ascetic literature, and not a few ascetics, monastic and otherwise, practiced it by voluntary and migratory exile from their fatherland.

In a footnote Ladner refers to a work on self-exile as spiritual discipline that I so want to read but which sounds so long and German that it really might defeat me!

H.v. Campenhausen, Die asketische Heimatslosigkeit im alterkirchen und frümittelalterlichen Mönchtum (Tübingen, 1930).

Will see if I can even find a copy...

gregory the great on exile

Looking at James Alison's work (which I am still trying to find in electronic form) has got me interested in the way exile is constructed as a kind of ideal within the Christian tradition (or, better perhaps, within Christian traditions). I think this is especially interesting, given Jess's focus on the idea of exile in Jewish thought. I've been looking at an article published in the 1960s in Speculum (which is a journal for medievalists). It's by Gerhart B. Ladner and is called "Homo Viator: Mediaeval Ideas on Alienation and Order". Here's a short excerpt where Ladner begins by summarising something that Gregory the Great says in the Moralia (his commentary on the Book of Job):

There the great Pope says that temporal comfort on this earth is to the just man what the bed in an inn is to the viator, to the traveller on his journey: he will rest in it bodily, but mentally he is already somewhere else. And sometimes the just on his travels through life will even seek out discomfort and refuse to dwell in the pleasantness of transitory surroundings, lest by delight found on the journey he be delayed from reaching his fatherland, and by attaching his heart to the road of peregrination he lose his reward when the heavenly patria finally comes into sight. The just, therefore, do not settle for good in this world - they know that they are only pilgrims and guests in it. They desire to rejoice where they belong and cannot be happy in a foreign land. [...]

According to that great anonymous document of the mentality of the early Church which is the Epistle to Diognetus, the terrestrial lot of Christians is eminently that of strangers:

They reside in their own fatherlands, but as if they were non-citizens; they take part in all things as if they were citizens and suffer all things as if they were strangers; every foreign country is a fatherland to them and every fatherland is to them a foreign country ... They dwell on earth, but they are citizens in heaven ...

The mention of the inn in the first quotation made me think of the motels we stayed in in Minnesota and that you've occasionally stayed in during the journey. One may rest in them bodily but, to be a viator, one must mentally be 'already somewhere else'.

John 9

I'm still trying to find an electronic version of James Alison's essay but, in anticipation, here is the text it discusses - chapter 9 of the Gospel of John:

9:1 And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. 9:2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? 9:3 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. 9:4 I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. 9:5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. 9:6 When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, 9:7 And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.

9:8 The neighbours therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged? 9:9 Some said, This is he: others said, He is like him: but he said, I am he. 9:10 Therefore said they unto him, How were thine eyes opened? 9:11 He answered and said, A man that is called Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam, and wash: and I went and washed, and I received sight. 9:12 Then said they unto him, Where is he? He said, I know not.

9:13 They brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was blind. 9:14 And it was the sabbath day when Jesus made the clay, and opened his eyes. 9:15 Then again the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. He said unto them, He put clay upon mine eyes, and I washed, and do see. 9:16 Therefore said some of the Pharisees, This man is not of God, because he keepeth not the sabbath day. Others said, How can a man that is a sinner do such miracles? And there was a division among them. 9:17 They say unto the blind man again, What sayest thou of him, that he hath opened thine eyes? He said, He is a prophet.

9:18 But the Jews did not believe concerning him, that he had been blind, and received his sight, until they called the parents of him that had received his sight. 9:19 And they asked them, saying, Is this your son, who ye say was born blind? how then doth he now see? 9:20 His parents answered them and said, We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind: 9:21 But by what means he now seeth, we know not; or who hath opened his eyes, we know not: he is of age; ask him: he shall speak for himself. 9:22 These words spake his parents, because they feared the Jews: for the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. 9:23 Therefore said his parents, He is of age; ask him.

9:24 Then again called they the man that was blind, and said unto him, Give God the praise: we know that this man is a sinner. 9:25 He answered and said, Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see. 9:26 Then said they to him again, What did he to thee? how opened he thine eyes? 9:27 He answered them, I have told you already, and ye did not hear: wherefore would ye hear it again? will ye also be his disciples? 9:28 Then they reviled him, and said, Thou art his disciple; but we are Moses' disciples. 9:29 We know that God spake unto Moses: as for this fellow, we know not from whence he is. 9:30 The man answered and said unto them, Why herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes. 9:31 Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth. 9:32 Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind. 9:33 If this man were not of God, he could do nothing. 9:34 They answered and said unto him, Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us? And they cast him out.

9:35 Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when he had found him, he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? 9:36 He answered and said, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? 9:37 And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that talketh with thee. 9:38 And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him. 9:39 And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind. 9:40 And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also? 9:41 Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.

It's the language of inclusion and exclusion that Alison's interpretation particularly focuses on.