Mimesis (16 page)

Here too the forces of the time are at work: sadism, frenetic bloodlust, and the triumph of magic and sense over reason and ethics. But there is a struggle going on. The enemy is known, and the soul’s counterforces are mobilized to meet him. In this case the enemy appears in the guise of a bloodlust produced by mass suggestion and affecting all the senses at once. When the defense blocks his way through the eyes, he forces his way in through the ears and so obliges the eyes to open too. The defense is still confident of its inmost fortress, the strength of its inner determination, its conscious will to refuse. But this inmost consciousness does not hold out for even an instant; it collapses immediately, and the pent-up forces which a great exertion of will has so far pressed into the service of the defense go over to the enemy. Let us try to see what this means. Against the increasing
dominance of the mob, against irrational and immoderate lust, against the spell of magical powers, enlightened classical culture possessed the weapon of individualistic, aristocratic, moderate, and rational self-discipline. The various systems of ethics all agreed that a well-bred, self-aware, and self-reliant individual could through his own resources keep from intemperance and that, against his will, it could find no foothold in him. The doctrine of the Manichaeans too, from which Alypius’ position was not very far removed at the time, relies on man’s ability to recognize good and evil. So Alypius is not overly concerned when he is dragged
familiari violentia
into the amphitheater. He trusts in his closed eyes and his determined will. But his proud individualistic self-reliance is overwhelmed in no time. And it is not merely a random Alypius whose pride, nay whose inmost being, is thus crushed; it is the entire rational individualistic culture of classical antiquity: Plato and Aristotle, the Stoa and Epicurus. A burning lust has swept them away, in one powerful assault:
et non erat iam ille qui venerat, sed unus de turba ad quam venerat
. The individual, the man of noble self-reliance, the man who chooses for himself, despiser of excesses, has become one of the mass. And not only that: the very powers which enabled him to remain aloof from mass suggestion longer and with greater determination than others, the very energy which has until now made it possible for him to lead a proud life of his own—these same forces he now puts at the disposal of the mass and its instinctive urges; not only has he been seduced, he turns seducer. What he has despised, he now loves. He raves not only
with
the others but
before
them all:
non tantum cum illis, sed prae illis, et alios trahens
. As is only too natural in a young man of great and passionate vitality, he does not gradually concede a little, he rushes to the opposite extreme. The about-face is complete. And such an about-face from one extreme to the very opposite is also characteristically Christian. Like Peter in the denial scene (and inversely Paul on his way to Damascus), he falls the more deeply the higher he stood before. And, like Peter, he will rise again. For his defeat is not final. When God has taught him to rely on Him instead of on himself—and his very defeat is the first step toward that knowledge—he will triumph. For in the fight against magical intoxication, Christianity commands other weapons than those of the rational and individualistic ideal of antique culture; it is, after all, itself a movement from the depths, from the depths of the multitude as from the depths of immediate emotion; it can fight the enemy with his own weapons. Its magic is no less a magic than is
bloodlust, and it is stronger because it is a more ordered, a more human magic, filled with more hope.

Such a text, however much it too may reveal of the somber traits of contemporary reality, is of a wholly different character from the work of Ammianus and the passage from Jerome quoted above. What distinguishes it at first glance from the other texts is the ardor of the dramatic human struggle it represents. Alypius is alive and fights. In comparison, not only Ammianus’ characters but Pammachius too, in Jerome’s letter, are static shadows which reveal nothing of a life within. This is the crucial characteristic which sets Augustine wholly outside the style of his age, so far as it is known to me: he feels and directly presents human life, and it lives before our eyes. The rhetorical devices, which he never disdains to use, either in this text or elsewhere, are closer on the whole, I believe, to the manner of the older, classical, Ciceronian writers than what we have found in Ammianus and Jerome. The extremely dramatic
spectavit, clamavit, exarsit, abstulit inde
, etc. reminds us of the figure in the second Catilinarian oration,
abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit
, to which, by the way, its genuinely meaningful crescendo and the ensuing transition to the factual make it vastly superior. Elsewhere too—especially in the second half of the text—there are a large number of figures of speech, antitheses, and clauses in parallel. The rhetorical element makes a more classical impression than in Ammianus or Jerome; yet it is clear—and unmistakably so even at a single glance—that we are not dealing with a classical text. The tone has something urgently impulsive, something human and dramatic, and the form exhibits a predominance of parataxes. Both of these characteristics, either considered individually or in their joint effect, are manifestly unclassical. If, for example, we examine the sentence,
nam quodam pugnae casu
, etc., which contains a whole series of hypotactically introduced members, we find that its climax is a movement which is at once dramatic and paratactic:
aperuit oculos, et percussus est
, etc.; and as we try to trace the impression back, we are reminded of certain Biblical passages, which in the mirror of the Vulgate become:
Dixitque Deus: fiat lux, et facta est lux
; or:
ad te clamaverunt, et salvi facti sunt; in te speraverunt, et non sunt confusi
(Ps. 22: 6); or
Flavit spiritus tuus, et operuit eos mare
(Exod. 15: 10); or:
aperuit Dominus os asinae, et locuta est
(Num. 22: 28). In all of these instances there is, instead of the causal or at least temporal hypotaxis which we should expect in classical Latin (whether with
cum
or
postquam
, whether with an ablative absolute or a participial
construction) a parataxis with
et
; and this procedure, far from weakening the interdependence of the two events, brings it out most emphatically; just as in English it is more dramatically effective to say: He opened his eyes and was struck … than: When he opened his eyes, or: Upon opening his eyes, he was struck …

This observation upon the climax of the sentence,
aperuit oculos, et percussus est
, is but a symptom of a much more general state of affairs: Augustine certainly uses the classical periodic style and the corresponding figures (consciously so, as appears from his explanations in book 4 of his
De doctrina Christiana
), but he does not allow it to dominate him. The urgently impulsive element in his character makes it impossible for him to accommodate himself to the comparatively cool and rational procedure of the classical, and specifically of the Roman, style, which looks at and organizes things from above. How frequently, especially in the case of a dramatic development, he puts clauses one beside the other, can be observed throughout our text:
Trahitis, et ibi constituitis; adero ac superabo; interdixit, atque utinam obturavisset; aperuit, et percussus est, ceciditque; intravit et reseravit; ebibit, et non se avertit, sed fixit, et nesciebat, et delectabatur, et inebriabatur, et non erat iam ille
. This would be impossible in classical Latin. It is unquestionably the Biblical form of parataxis—just as the content (the dramatization of an inner event, an inner about-face) is avowedly Christian.
Et non erat iam ille qui venerat, sed unus de turba ad quam venerat
: this is a sentence which in form as in content is unimaginable as a product of classical antiquity; it is Christian and, more specifically, Augustinian; for no one ever more passionately pursued and investigated the phenomenon of conflicting and united inner forces, the alternation of antithesis and synthesis in their relations and effects. And he did so not only in practical contexts (as in our case) but also in connection with purely theoretical problems, which under his hands become drama. His treatise on the Trinity is the most impressive illustration of this; but anyone who wishes to discover, from a brief though characteristic passage, how much of a problem Augustine sees in growth and development and yet how clear they are to his mind, may read the first sentences of
The Confessions
(1, 8) where the transition from childhood to adolescence is discussed; such a passage would be unthinkable before Augustine. Parataxis serves Augustine to express the impulsive and dramatic, most often in matters concerned with the inner life; on the other hand, he has almost no trace of what is the primary preoccupation of Ammianus and other authors of the
period, even including the Christians among them: the vivid sensory depiction of outward events, especially of the magical, the morbid, and the horrible. In our text there is ample opportunity for vividness, but it is taken care of in a few effective but entirely general terms.

Yet here too the inner, tragic, and problematic event is embedded in concrete contemporary reality. The age of separate realms of style is over. Among pagan authors too, as we have seen, the depiction of reality made its way into the elevated style. And in a much purer form (which begins, and then but occasionally, to be distorted only when it comes into contact with the epideictic style of late antiquity) the principle of mixed styles makes its way into the writings of the Fathers from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The true heart of the Christian doctrine—Incarnation and Passion—was, as we have previously noted (p. 41ff.), totally incompatible with the principle of the separation of styles. Christ had not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest social station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans; he moved in the everyday milieu of the humble folk of Palestine; he talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children. Nevertheless, all that he did and said was of the highest and deepest dignity, more significant than anything else in the world. The style in which it was presented possessed little if any rhetorical culture in the antique sense; it was
sermo piscatorius
and yet it was extremely moving and much more impressive than the most sublime rhetorico-tragical literary work. And the most moving account of all was the Passion. That the King of Kings was treated as a low criminal, that he was mocked, spat upon, whipped, and nailed to the cross—that story no sooner comes to dominate the consciousness of the people than it completely destroys the aesthetics of the separation of styles; it engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensorily realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base. Or—if anyone prefers to have it the other way around—a new
sermo humilis
is born, a low style, such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and the highest, the sublime and the eternal. I have discussed these connections elsewhere (“Sermo humilis,”
Romanische Forschungen
, Frankfurt am Main, vol. 63, 1952) and pointed out the special role played by Augustine. Equally at home in the world of classical rhetoric and in that of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, he may well have been the first to become conscious of the problem of the
stylistic contrast between the two worlds; he formulated the problem very impressively in his treatise
De doctrina christiana
(4, 18) in connection with the cup of cold water mentioned in Matthew 10: 42.

The Christian mixture of styles is not especially noticeable at this early period (in the Middle Ages it can be seen much more clearly), because the Fathers do not often take occasion to concern themselves with current reality or to practice the imitation of it. They are no poets or novelists and, on the whole, no historians of their present. They are preoccupied with theological activities, especially apologetics and polemics, and these fill their writings. Passages like those here quoted from Jerome and Augustine, which depict current reality, are not very frequent. All the more frequently, however, do we find the Fathers pursuing the interpretation of reality—interpretation above all of Scripture, but also of large historical contexts, especially Roman history, for the purpose of bringing them into harmony with the Judaeo-Christian view of history. The method employed is almost exclusively that of figures, which has repeatedly been referred to in this book (pp. 16 and 48f.) and the significance and influence of which I have tried to some degree to clarify elsewhere (“Figura,”
Arch. Roman
. 22, 436). Figural interpretation “establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension, the
intellectus spiritualis
, of their interdependence is a spiritual act.” In practice we almost always find an interpretation of the Old Testament, whose episodes are interpreted as figures or phenomenal prophecies of the events of the New Testament. One example is to be found on pages 48f. above, and a large number of examples, with commentary, are given in the essay just mentioned.

This type of interpretation obviously introduces an entirely new and alien element into the antique conception of history. For example, if an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, so that in the former the latter is as it were announced and promised, and the latter “fulfills” (the technical term is
figuram implere
) the former, then a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension (if I may be permitted to use this term for a temporal
extension). It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding. The horizontal, that is the temporal and causal, connection of occurrences is dissolved; the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omni-temporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event. This conception of history is magnificent in its homogeneity, but it was completely alien to the mentality of classical antiquity, it annihilated that mentality down to the very structure of its language, at least of its literary language, which—with all its ingenious and nicely shaded conjunctions, its wealth of devices for syntactic arrangement, its carefully elaborated system of tenses—became wholly superfluous as soon as earthly relations of place, time, and cause had ceased to matter, as soon as a vertical connection, ascending from all that happens, converging in God, alone became significant. Wherever the two conceptions met, there was of necessity a conflict and an attempt to compromise—between, on the one hand, a presentation which carefully interrelated the elements of history, which respected temporal and causal sequence, remained within the domain of the earthly foreground, and, on the other hand, a fragmentary, discrete presentation, constantly seeking an interpretation from above.