Ron Murrison

Faculty Essay, 2015-2016

In Homer’s Iliad, men die in agony, shrieking as their guts spill out onto the sand.  Horrendous blows of piercing bronze shatter skulls, splattering brains.  Heads are hacked off, and marrow bubbles up from the severed neckbones.  In each case, the shade of the miserable victim flees:

winging down to the House of Death,

wailing his fate, leaving his manhood far behind,

his young and supple strength. (16.1003-1005)

Women too suffer agony when their cities are sacked.  They are dragged off as slaves to draw water or labor at the loom by day and to serve in the beds of their masters by night.  (6.487-490, 533-553).  Children fare no better.  Hector’s son Astyanax, whose name means “lord of the city,” perishes along with Troy, the very city his father had hoped he would grow up to defend, when the triumphant Achaeans, rampaging through the city throw the infant from the walls that were intended to save him and others like him from such fury (24.852-877).  Agonizing and terrible death may strike in other ways.  Countless Achaeans die when Apollo rains down arrows of plague on the Achaean army for no other reason than that Agamemnon has spurned Chryses his priest (1.51-61).  The ineluctability of death hangs over the Iliad.

The Iliad is filled with gods.  They intervene often in human affairs.  They are an essential element of the poem, but it cannot be said that they temper the bleakness of the Iliadic world.  When Hector is prompted to challenge “Achaea’s bravest man / to duel in bloody combat to the death (7.58-59), Apollo and Athena settle together atop a towering oak “for all the world like carrion birds, like vultures” (7.67), eager to feast upon the spectacle.  Even the favor of the gods is not something in which to place great trust.  The fate of the minor character Pherecles is emblematic: Pallas Athena loved him dearly yet Meriones killed him, driving his spear through the unfortunate Trojan’s right buttock and bladder (5.59-68).  Even figures loved by Zeus, the most powerful of the gods, such as Sarpedon and Hector, meet similarly dreadful ends.  And Achilles knows that he too will soon die, even though he is the son of a goddess.  His mother can intercede for him with Zeus and thus sway the course of the war, but she can do nothing to divert his fate or save his life.  Even Zeus seems helpless.  When his heart is torn as he contemplates the imminent death at the hands of Patroclus of his son Sarpedon, “the man I love the most,” Hera protests that Sarpedon is no more than “a man, a mere mortal, his doom sealed long ago” (16.525-527), and Zeus, though he showers the earth with tears of blood, complies at once (16.543-548), and Sarpedon is struck down, “sprawled and roaring, clawing the bloody dust” (16.574), “far from his fatherland,” (16.548), a telling effect found throughout the poem, evoking the pathos of a warrior’s end (Griffin 104 -112).  The greatest and most powerful of the gods cannot or will not save his own son.  In the world of the Iliad, there is no salvation, no redemption.  Even Odysseus whose poem allows him a safe homecoming, recovery of his kingdom, and a tranquil death in old age, will go down to the underworld, the terrors and horrors of which are made manifest in books 11 and 24 of the poem.  Odysseus knows in advance what awaits him.  The Odyssey belongs to the genre of romance rather than tragedy.  Accordingly, it does not stress the tragic implications for us of Odysseus’s tranquil end, namely, that he will descend to the world of grieving shades, more fully aware than most of all the joys and wonders of life, and aware too that they must be lost for ever.  Even for the greatest of heroes Achilles, there are no rewards in the afterlife that could compensate in the least for the life that has been lost (11.547-558).

Millennia after Homer, Martin Luther composed a now celebrated hymn that embodies a very different conception of the human condition and of the relation between the human and the divine, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, “a safe stronghold our God is still” in Carlyle’s translation (Church Hymnary #526).  The hymn is a reworking of Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and our strength.”  The psalm assures us that the Lord of hosts, the God of Jacob is with us and reveals that the tutelary power of this deity is such that we need fear nothing.  Unlike the original, the diction of Luther’s version is distinctly martial in character.  Like a mighty fortress, his God protects us from all the dangers and vicissitudes of the world in a way that Troy’s walls never could.  This God is a “trusty shield and weapon.”  In the struggle against the forces of darkness, we may be easily overcome, but our champion Christ is not and will “conquer in the battle.”  And even though the forces of darkness succeed in taking from us the things that we value most such as “life, / Goods, honour, children, wife,” the very things that are most dear to Homeric heroes such as Hector and whose loss is a catastrophe, it would avail them little, because “[t]he city of God remaineth.” The allusion to Augustine’s city of God is Carlyle’s invention.  Luther wrote simply  das Reich muss uns doch bleiben (“Yet the Kingdom remains with us”). Nevertheless, the intent is the same in both text and translation.  The city of man will fall as Troy fell, but the city of God endures for ever.  God is our only secure refuge.  However, by Luther’s time after a millennium and a half of Christian theology, the idea of God as refuge and strength had acquired a deeper metaphysical resonance than is apparent in the original psalm.

The Christian metaphysics of life is providential in nature.  However incoherent, incomprehensible, and terrible the world may seem to be, it unfolds according to a plan.  God’s ways may seem inscrutable to us, but since God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, the history of the world must constitute a meaningful and a moral order.  Though the Iliad contains expressions such as “the will of Zeus was fulfilled” (Dios eteleieto boule) (1.5) and “fate” as in Zeus’s concern that the Achilles may lay waste the Trojan walls against fate (hyper moron) (20.30), there is not the slightest hint in the poem that Zeus has a plan that encompasses all space and time. Peter Green argues that boule refers specifically to Zeus’s promise to Thetis (25).  Theodicial thinking has no place in Homer.  The gods are not to be relied upon: they are no stronghold or refuge.  Nature, in turn, is utterly indifferent to our concerns.  

In a “famous and terrifying passage” (21.99-135), as Bernard Knox describes it in his introduction to the Fagles’ translation, Achilles first addresses the suppliant Lycaon and then slaughters him.  He seizes the corpse by the foot and throws it into the eddying waters of the river Scamander to be borne away eiso halos eurea kolpon (125), “to the wide gulf of the sea” (Green), “down the sea’s broad bosom” (Fagles), and thus to perish unburied without due funeral rites and to become food for fish.  The term kolpos, the primary meanings of which are “bay,” “hollow,” “depth,” can also denote the fold of a garment.  However, it has further connotations that inform the translations of Fagles and Green.  Fagles chooses those that suggest natural growth, nurture, and maternal care, namely, “bosom,” “womb,” while Green’s “gulf” is closer to the more literal rendering, “bay,” suggesting the indifferent depths of the alien realm of the sea, the “unharvestable sea,”  (pontos atrugetos) (Od. 2.370) compared to the” life-giving earth” (phusizoos aia) (Il. 3.243), upon which all human enterprise, including the provision of due funeral rites, rests and depends.

A few lines earlier Achilles has taunted the corpse of Lycaon, claiming that the fish will lick the blood from his wounds, akedees, (“quite indifferent to you” (Green) (21.123).  Fagles rendering, “so much for your last rites,” is freer, anticipating the later passage in which Lycaon, swept out to sea, will never be placed on a bier and receive proper funeral rites (21.141).  One might compare this scene with that in which the healer Machaon sucks the blood from Menelaus’ wound and applies epia pharmaka, “healing salves” (4.249-252). The essential contrast here, I take it, is between care and indifference, between the care that we devote to those dear to us, the essential fabric of human association, and the utter indifference to our concerns of the world in which we find ourselves.  To be swept out to sea, the fate Achilles envisages for the dead Lycaon, is to be removed from all possibility of human care or tendance, even in death.  

The sound of the sea as it is heard along the shore is associated throughout the poem with the forces of destruction, with the indifference of the natural world to any human concern, and with the utter solitude of each one of us in extremis. At the beginning of the Iliad, the priest of Apollo Chryses comes to the Achaean camp to beg for the return of his daughter Chryseis whom Agamemnon has taken as a prize.  He is brutally repulsed by Agamemnon, the anax andron, “king of men,” who has power and who revels in the use of that power.  Terrified, the old man turns away along the shore.  Apart from the fact that we know already that we are on a beach in the vicinity of Troy, the scene is not localized at all. Be d’akeon para thina poluphloisboio thalasses.  (“He went away along the shore of the loud-sounding sea”  (1.34). It could be any shore, anywhere, and that disconsolate figure walking away in grief and silence could be any one of us, then or now.  The echoing sound of the surf and the echoing of this line have troubled western thinking ever since.  Indeed, one might say that one of the central concerns of western thought has been to deny or hide from the stark objectivity and grim implications of Homer’s line and the metaphysics it implies  (Lewis 25) .  The line is unusual in that the principal caesura occurs in the second foot.  Chryses walks away, grieving and alone, and as he goes all that is heard is the sound of the surf beating on the shore utterly indifferent to the old man’s anguish.  The contrast is arresting, shocking even.  The entire realm of human concerns, the gedeutete Welt (“interpreted world”), as Rilke was to call it millennia later, means nothing in the world of nature in which it is embedded (130).  Nature is essentially alien despite all our efforts to make nature a part of the meaning of our lives by means of philosophy, religion, or literature.  Perhaps because of his profound Christian faith, C. S. Lewis seems to me to have been especially sensitive to this aspect of Homer’s poetry, noting that Homeric diction emphasizes the “unchanging human environment” (22) and the “permanence, the indifference” of the world of nature, “the heartrending or consoling fact that whether we laugh or weep the world is what it is” (23). In a particularly noteworthy passage, he suggests that while:

[m]uch has been talked of the melancholy of Virgil,  . . . an inch beneath

the bright surface of Homer we find not melancholy but despair. ‘Hell’

was the word Goethe used of it.  It is all the more terrible because the

poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint. It comes out casually

in similes. (30)

I am not persuaded that “despair” is the correct word.  One despairs when one gives up hope of achieving that which had seemed attainable.  The devils who lost heaven might despair.  Their existential condition might have been very different, but never once does Homer suggest that the world in which we find ourselves could be different.  We must accept the unchanging, indifferent order of nature as it is.  There is nothing else to be done.

In summarizing the nature of Homeric epic, Lewis claims that:

its greatness lies in the human and personal tragedy built up against

this background of meaningless flux.  It is all the more tragic because

there hangs over the heroic world a certain futility. (31)

For Lewis, Homer’s tragic vision must seem futile because it offers no possibility of transcendence, redemption, or purpose, no metaphysical consolation.  Lewis thinks of the Homeric world in a manner akin to such philosophical materialists as Richard Dawkins or Jacques Monod, who picture the universe as nothing but the meaningless interactions of matter.  We can, of course, conceive of the realm of nature in this way, and sometimes it suits us to do so, e.g. when we study physics, chemistry, or even biology.  But that is not the world we inhabit.  We live in Rilke’s gedeutete Welt, a cultural world woven of meanings, an intentional world, infused with all our conflicting goals, our hopes, our aspirations, our purposes, our dreams.  I can think of myself as nothing more than an assemblage of molecules or cells, deploying the latest vocabularies of the natural sciences, but to do so demands a degree of abstraction that must make one pause.  The fact that my biological death almost certainly means my extinction as the conscious being I am does not suggest to me the futility of my life as Lewis seems to imply.  On the contrary, the necessary finitude of my existence is a source of gratitude, awe, and amazement.  It seems to  me astonishing that I and others like me should exist at all, and that we should have been granted decades to experience and contemplate the endlessly fascinating realms of nature and culture, both the horrors we have perpetrated as a species and the countless small acts that sometimes, it seems to me, may redeem us.

Whether or not futility pervades the Homeric tragic vision as Lewis implies, it is certainly a view that most in the West would subsequently shun.  As Robert Pogue Harrison observed in Forests, “the Christian era put an end to tragedy as the highest form of wisdom” (101).  The aleatory contingency of tragedy has nothing in common with the teleological optimism of Christian providentialism.  We should remember, however, that before Christianity, the development of philosophy in Greece, especially the philosophy of Plato, offered a very different conception of human beings in relation to the world in which they found themselves from that to be found in Homer..  In the two hundred years of Ionian thought from Thales through Pythagoras to Plato, we may follow the emergence of an unprecedented view of the world, namely, that it is a comprehensible unity, exhibiting an eternal rational order that may be apprehended by means of human reason.  The Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic is at once an epistemology, an ontology, and a sketch of an educational program that will lead the student toward grasping the true nature of things (514a-520a).  In Plato, or at least, in one aspect of Plato’s complex and ambiguous thought, we are told that the world is rational in its nature and that our minds, properly trained, can ascend to a vision of the eternal unchanging Forms.  Such a metaphysics necessarily entails a different way of living in the world, and, in Plato’s portrayal of Socrates, we are given a new understanding of how to live and how to face death.

In the Crito, Socrates contemplates his imminent death with an unnerving equanimity that continues to disturb, while Alcibiades’ account of Socrates in the Symposium establishes the latter’s courage and self-control as a soldier, his extraordinary ability to to endure physical adversity, and even suggests that he is the truest human embodiment of Eros (the god of Love), that Socrates, the philosopher, is the model of the true erastes (220a-221b; 203c-203d).  At the end of the dialogue, after drinking through the night with Agathon and Aristophanes, the representatives of tragic and comic poetry, Socrates leaves them both asleep and departs into the bright new dawn for the agora where, as is his custom, he will engage the young in philosophy.  I do not think it far-fetched to suggest that we have just witnessed a representation of the triumph of the new way of philosophy over the older forms of Greek wisdom (223b-223d)..  

This new philosophical wisdom is the expression of a rational optimism, perhaps unprecedented in the history of human thought.  In as much as we value science and reason, we continue to live within the horizon of that vision.  Plato’s own justified pessimism concerning the immediate political prospects of the Greek-speaking world and perhaps the fact that the Greeks had not learned to think in terms of la longue durée meant that the signicance of his insight, indeed, of his reconfiguring of the ways in which we think about ourselves, was not fully recognized in his own time.  However, over two thousand years later, a young German philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, would recognize the importance of what had occurred.

In Nietzsche’s “Attempt at Self-Criticism” added to The Birth of Tragedy (1871) in 1886, he looked back at his earliest reflections on Greek tragedy and sought to align them with his later thinking.  He argued that Greek tragedy was born from a psychology of strength, that the early Greeks were a people with “an intellectual predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence,” and that this predilection arose from “well-being, overflowing health, the abundance of existence” (3).  Here he attributes to the Greeks as a people the strength of soul necessary to affirm existence in all its aspects that finds its most memorable expression in his later doctrine of amor fati.  The Greeks, he claimed, were pessimists, but their pessimism was not a pessimism of resignation, which he attributes to Hinduism, nor the despairing nihilistic pessimism of his contemporaries.  It is rather a “pessimism of strength” (3).  While pessimism might be thought to be a symptom of decline, though why it should be so Nietzsche does not say, Greek pessimism, arising from joy and strength, is the origin of tragedy.  Thus, Nietzsche finds in the Greeks an existential attitude that is not nihilistic and that is also opposed to the optimism of Christian eschatology.  This view of the Greeks, which perhaps owes much to Nietzsche’s own psychological needs at the time, allows him to offer his first answer to a question that would concern him throughout his career, namely: what is the value of existence?  This is a question that may become pressing for those who no longer have faith in a divine plan.  Nietzsche’s answer is an extrordinary one.  The Birth of Tragedy identifies art and not morality as “the properly metaphysical activity of man” (7).  Hence, it is a mistake to seek a moral justification of existence.  There is none, as he learned from his teacher Schopenhauer.  Instead, “the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (8).  We see here an anticipation of his later thinking.  Only those who have the requisite psychic strength can bear a tragic view of things, and thus tragedy as work of art reflects back to them and celebrates their own strength.

It could not last, Nietzsche seems to think, and the emergence of philosophy put an end to tragic wisdom.  The death of tragedy was brought about by “the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, modesty and cheerfulness of theoretical man” (4), in other words, of the philosopher.  Socratism, Nietzsche suggests, is “a symptom of decline, fatigue, infection and the anarchical dissolution of the instincts” (4).  Henceforth, Dionysus god of tragedy will be set against the iconic figures of Socrates (philosophy) and Jesus (religion) in Nietzsche’s writings, the pessimism of strength against views of the world expressive of weakness and decline.

The curious presumption that existence must be justified, that we need a cosmodicy, indicates the degree to which Nietzsche’s thinking was always deeply rooted in the post-Darwinian debates of the later nineteenth century.  While Christian eschatology did provide such a justification and continues to do so for very many people, in its absence, there is no obvious reason why there should be any single mode of justification, and especially not of existence as such.  Nevertheless, as David McPherson has pointed out recently the problem of cosmodicy concerned Nietzsche throughout his life (41).

In developing his ideas on Greek tragedy and the justification of existence, Nietzsche seems to have sought to avoid the nihilistic implications of pessimism as he understood it, notably the nihilistic conception of tragedy that he found in Schopenhauer, namely that the tragic spirit consists in recognizing that “the world and life can give no true satisfaction and are therefore not worth our attachment to them” (10), which leads to resignation, and also what he believed were the delusory consolations of Christian eschatology.  However, neither Homer nor Shakespeare ever offered such a justification.

If one discounts the Renaissance reception of the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, which is anyway a pre-Christian composition, Shakespeare’s King Lear is the first major work of literature to bring into question the idea of a divinely ordained providential order that had dominated and shaped western thought since ancient times.  It does so by setting a providential view of existence against a tragic one within the same drama.  The play is not a philosophical treatise and offers no definitive answer as to which of these two competing visions is true, but it does capture our hopes and fears concerning what we wish the world and the course of our lives might be like  and what we fear they may prove to be.  In addition, as John Danby noted many years ago, the play contains two distinct views of nature.  The first envisages nature as a moral order so that we may rightly speak of proper or natural relations among human beings of loyalties and obligations that stem from one’s place in the hierarchy of nature.  Both Cordelia and Gloucester refer to this natural moral order when they allude to “the bond of nature” (I.i.102; I.ii.115).  Thus, this view of nature encompasses the personal, social and political realms.  The notion of a community is presupposed, and the entire fabric of society, which is hierarchically ordered, mirrors the hierarchical order of God’s creation, the Great Chain of Being.  These ideas were central in the vision of reality worked out in the Christian Middle Ages, (Dante’s Commedia is its finest expression) and were still powerfully operative in Shakespeare’s time.  However, in King Lear, Shakespeare was careful to locate this view in a drama set in pre-Christian times in which the gods, though referred to often, are never seen.  In fact, the play is striking for the absence of supernatural events of any kind.  The second view of nature anticipates the amoral world of Hobbes’ state of nature.  It regards social ties and obligations not as part of a natural moral order, but as mere conventions.  In place of the fabric of society, there are only individuals, such as Edmund, Goneril, and Regan, pursuing their own desires and interests at the expense of others.  The play’s admirable characters all embrace some version of the older conception of nature, but the action of the play frustrates their hopes, and perhaps ours too as we contemplate the bleakest, most terrible episode of the drama, the death of Cordelia.  In acts IV and V, Cordelia has the air of a redemptive figure, in her presiding over the restoration of her father’s shattered self and in their moving reconcilation as the two are taken away to prison, which A. D. Nuttall has called a “Christian commedia” (Shakespeare the Thinker 307).  At one point in the text, Shakespeare even allows Cordelia to speak in Christ’s own words (IV.iv.24).  And yet, Shakespeare deliberately destroys his commedia.  Cordelia’s death is a consequence of Edmund’s malice and political opportunism but also of contingency.  It might not have happened, it was not fated to happen, but it did, and neither her goodness nor the profound sympathy the audience has come to feel for her can save her.  So things are, Shakespeare seems to say.  We can create happy endings in works of art for a multitude of purposes, but when we do, we do not take full measure of the reality of our lives.

I have said that in King Lear, Shakespeare anticipates Hobbes’ brutal vision of human beings living in a pre-social state of nature as ruthlessly selfish, isolated, individual creatures for whom the notion of fellow-feeling or, indeed, any of the social virtues, would be incomprehensible.  The history of the last century furnishes so many examples of such treatment of human creatures by others of their kind that it is hard if not impossible to comprehend the enormity of human behavior.  Consider, for example, Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, Ian Kershaw’s To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands.  Yet despite the horrendous evidence, the Hobbesian view is implausible and inadequate as a depiction of who we are.  It is also, as Shakespeare shows us in King Lear, ultimately self-destructive.  Nevertheless, versions of this picture continue to play a disturbing role in our culture.  Think, for example, of Edmund’s first cousin, “economic man,” that embodiment of rational self-interest, or of the cluster of ideas that crystallized in mid-twentieth-century existentialism, descendants of the Nietzchean heroic individual in which the individual is viewed as fully formed prior to the existence of any society.  The most recent expression of this tendency is to be found in the work of certain biologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers of a reductive cast of mind.  We are asked to accept the claim that “human beings are nothing but . . .”  Usually, this means that we are invited to consider ourselves as biological machines, or some such thing, and nothing more, with the presumption that the rich fabric of human existence is, if not an illusion, ultimately and in principle, reducible to and explicable in terms of the physiology of our brains (Midgley 1-18).

Like Nietzsche and indeed many others, the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrestled with the implications of what Nietzsche called “the death of God” (Gay Science 180).  In his most famous poem “Dover Beach,” he seems at first sight to endorse the reductive vision that I have just described.  He seems to deny many of the essential features of the human world.  The poem begins as a meditation upon the sound of the surf breaking upon the shore,

the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Unlike Homer, who gives us the simple invariant fact of the breaking surf set against Chryses’ anguish, Arnold seeks to direct our emotional response, to evoke a mood of gentle melancholy.  The speaker informs his beloved that Sophocles heard the same sound on the Aegean, and it brought into his mind “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery.”  “[W]e /  Find also in the sound a thought,” he tells his companion.  Thus, rather than an expression of the objective condition of the world and its tragic essence, as in Homer, Arnold finds in the sound of the surf a suggestion of his own concern, not simply a Sophoclean awareness of human misery, but the ebbing of the sea of faith, the very notion that for most of our history had offered us consolation in the midst of suffering and that seemed to imply that the tragic vision of Homer was mistaken.  The first two verse paragraphs refer to the ebb and flow of the sea, an unending cyclical process.  In the third, however, Arnold speaks of the “melancholy long withdrawing roar” of the tide of faith, going out forever.  As a result he concludes that  the world:

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

Faith for Arnold was the palliative or salve that made life bearable and gave it meaning.  Without it, the world seems emptied of all value.  Like many of his thoughtful contemporaries, Arnold contemplated the waning of the Christian age and wondered what the consequences would be.  

Nietzsche’s response was strikingly individualistic and strikingly grandiose.  McPherson notes that the doctrine of the will to power involves “an atomistic or individualistic mode of being related to others” (55 n52).  Since we have killed God, we must become worthy of that deed, and thus we must become gods ourselves.  We must embark upon a revaluation of all values; we must transform ourselves until we become Ubermenschen, we human beings who can bear the burden of creating the moral world anew.  The anguish and responsibiliity of moral legislation for humanity will fall upon those individuals who live truly authentic lives until we find in yea-saying and amor fati the justification of our existence.  Arnold’s response seems risibly limited in comparison.  “Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” he says to his beloved who stands beside him at the window, listening to the sound of the surf on the shore.  Nevertheless, Arnold’s modest plea seems to me incomparably more promising than Nietzsche’s strenuously heroic demand that the individual transform the moral universe through the transformation of himself.  Arnold invokes quite simply, and in a way that Nietzsche never does in his published works whatever his private longings may have been, one of the most important of our needs -- our need for each other, for community, for communion.  We are ineluctably social creatures and to deny or ignore that fact is to do terrible violence to the kind of beings we are.  In the history of our culture, it has been poets, in the fullest sense of that word, that is all whose making and creating is an effort to find meaning in the flux of our experience, who have shown us and reminded us of all the inexhaustible possibilities of our existence.  Poetry in this sense embodies a wisdom that cannot be replicated by the reductive sciences nor even by a philosopher with the literary gifts of a Nietzsche.  Let us call it, without seeking to define it further, a literary wisdom.

Arnold wrote simply, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.”  Poor lonely Nietzsche never had the opportunity to utter such words, and his ultimately inhuman philosophy is much the worse for that sad contingency.  It is all the more instructive and emblematic, therefore, that his last act as he descended into a madness from which he would never recover should have been the embrace of another suffering creature.  Around January 3rd., 1889, in a street in Turin, Nietzsche saw a coachman savagely beating a horse (Chamberlain, 208-210),  and in Milan Kundera’s retelling of the story in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Nietzsche went up to the horse, and before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears” (290). “And that is the Nietzsche I love,” Kundera continues, “the Nietzsche who came to ask the horse for forgiveness for Descartes,” namely the Descartes who had claimed that animals were merely machinae animatae without feelings or emotions (290).  At this point in Kundera’s novel, Tereza, one of his principal characters, has been thinking of the heifers she tends on a collective farm.  Once all the animals had names, but now there are too many.  She has named one only, “Marketa,” who has befriended her.  Forty years earlier all the cows in the village had names, and writes Kundera as narrator, “if having a name is a sign of having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite Descartes.” But now the nameless animals have become “mere machinae animatae.  The world has proved Descartes correct” (290).  At this same moment, Tereeza is caressing the head of her dying dog Karenin and thinking of the moral failings (défaillite) of humanity in relation to other animals.  Kundera links the two images, that of Tereza and Karenin and that of Nietzsche and the abused horse, whose name, if he ever had one, we do not know.  He imagines the two, Tereza and Nietzsche stepping away together from the road on which humanity, “master and possessor of nature” in Descartes’ phrase pursues its foward course, no doubt presumed to be one of progress.  

Among contemporary writers, Kundera is particularly attuned to the interweavings of literature and philosophy.  His brilliant, imaginative account of Nietzsche’s last moments as a philosopher and what they may signify in the cultural history of our species reveals that literature (poesis) continues to offer us the richest, sanest, most comprehensive view of what it can mean to be human.  Tereza’s Karenin has a distant ancestor.  His name was Argos.  The compassion, understanding, and wisdom of those few lines of the Odyssey (17.317-356) devoted to Argos’ death, following at once upon his recognition of his master Odysseus, composed in a culture utterly remote from our own, can somehow reach out across millennia and touch us as much as Kundera’s poignant accounts of Nietzsche’s tragic end and of the dying Karenin.  We should remember also, simply as readers, that the tragic world of the Iliad contains almost everything the absence of which Arnold lamented in “Dover Beach,”  joy, love, light, help for pain, and peace.  The exception is certitude in the providential religious sense in which Arnold uses the term.  Even the married couple true to one another are there.  One thinks of Hector and Andromache with their son.  That tender loving encounter between husband and wife is enacted within the tragic frame of Homer’s vision, and yet it is profoundly moving and profoundly human, in part for that very reason (6.556-589).  

Homer allows us to contemplate the essentially tragic circumstances of our lives with a degree of detachment and equanimity rarely afforded his characters.  The exceptions are among the most memorable episodes in the Iliad such as Hector’s awareness that he will die, that Troy must  fall and that his dear wife Andromache will be dragged away as a slave after he, her protector and the bulwark of his city, has perished, (6.534-555) and Achilles’ reflections at the end of the poem in the presence of Priam upon the nature and significance of the action at Troy and his part in it (24.591-646).  While Hector contemplates the inevitability of defeat and utter ruin, determined to fight to the last to avert that fate, Achilles reflects upon the significance of the poem’s events for those like himself who triumph and realizes that his brief and brilliant days at Troy are both a compelling imperative and ultimately futile.  It especially fitting that Achilles, the only character in the poem shown to be aware of poetry (9.223-230), and thus the only character who has an inkling of Homer’s true purpose in composing the poem whose subject is Achilles’s own rage, should be the character who is granted an awareness of the significance of the events of the poem that rivals Homer’s own.  Though his actions at Troy have won for him the undying kleos (fame or glory) that has resonated through western literary history down to our own time, the reflective Achilles at the end of the poem is troubled by the fact that being at Troy means that he neglects his father.  It is one of the great and stirring achievements of literature that the utterly self-absorbed warrior should evince his concern for others, for his companion Patroclus, for his guests at the funeral games over which he presides with an aristocratic grace that comes as a surprise, and for his neglected, aged father.  The poet of the Odyssey was likewise aware of the depth  of Achilles’ character.  When Achilles and Odysseus encounter one another in the underworld, Achilles has no illusions about the attenuated existence to which he is now condemned.  It is better to be alive as a slave rather than king over all the dead.  Even in the underworld, Achilles is concerned with events in our world and, in particular, with the fate of his father, lamed by old age, whom, he fears, must be oppressed by men who have descended on his household.  Beyond life, in the dreadful underworld of the Greek imagination, Achilles wishes that he might return to his homeland briefly to destroy with his “invincible hands” “all those men / who abuse the king with force and wrest away his honor” (11.562-574).   His words anticipate Odysseus’ own deadly reckoning with the suitors.  The great pathos, the tragic pain of Achilles’ condition is that he can imagine his father suffering and yet is powerless to act, though in life he was the most powerful and terrible of warriors.  His sole consolation is pride in his son of whose success as a warrior Odysseus informs him, and he goes away:

loping with long strides across the fields of asphodel,

triumphant in all I had told him of his son,

his gallant, glorious son. (11.614-616)

One can hardly imagine a poet more distant from Homer, more inward than Rilke, and yet one whose  poetic career, rooted in circumstances entirely unknown to Homer and presumably incomprehensible to him, led in the end to the realization of a vision expressed in terms that Homer might have recognized -- the sudden presence of Orpheus, the archetypal poet, a startling late epiphany that transformed his conception of both poetry and the nature of human existence.  The young Rilke had been fascinated by Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.  As Robert Hass has noted, in this work, Nietzsche had given a name to that yearning place that the young poet had already hollowed out in the heart of his being.  Nietzsche called it “the death of God.”  Rilke’s greatest work The Duino Elegies is fundamentally an expression of endless, unsatisfied longing, a poetic embodiment of the lived experience of the hollow at the heart of existence that follows from the death of God.  And yet, the old dichotomies of Platonic and Christian thought remain.   The angels of the poem symbolize all that we are not in our inadequate finitude.  They are, as Robert Hass says, “absolute fulfillment,” something we can never attain (xxxv).  Throughout the poems, Rilke seems to struggle to discover and articulate something that might assuage the emptiness that threatens always to overwhelm or annihilate him, an emptiness that is, as Hass notes, “a spiritual loneliness so deep, so lacking in consolation, that there is nothing in modern writing that can touch it.  The company it belongs to is the third act of King Lear and certain passages in Dostoevsky’s novels” (xxxv).  Hass’s comment alludes to some of the most harrowing expressions of existential abandonment in the long history of our literature, in other words, texts that reveal to us to some degree the ineluctably tragic conditions under which we must conduct our lives.

The composition of the Duino Elegies is one of the most extraordinary stories of creation in the history of western literature.  In the winter of 1911-1912, Rilke was staying at Duino Castle on the Adriatic as a guest of his friend Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.  In her Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria von Rilke (Memories of Rainer Maria von Rilke), the Princess recalls that one morning in January when a violent north wind was blowing over a sunlit sea, Rilke was walking back and forth on a path at the edge of the cliffs above the ocean, turning over in his mind how to deal with a tedious business letter he had received.  Suddenly, “it seemed that from the raging storm a voice had called to him: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? (“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?”).  He wrote down these words and some lines that “formed by themselves without his intervention.  He knew that the god had spoken.”  He returned to his room and answered the letter.  “By evening the whole of the first elegy had been written” (Rilke 315). The second followed almost immediately.  The third was begun around the same time and completed in the fall of 1913. The fourth was composed over two days in 1915.  Rilke worked on the short sixth elegy between February 1912 and late fall 1913, but it remained incomplete.  And then, the voice that had called to him on the cliffs at Duino seemed to abandon him, until after years of silence and depression, in February of 1922, Rilke experienced  the sudden irruption of an inspiration, the like of which has not been witnessed since the time of Homer, the Sonnets to Orpheus.  Far from Duino, he had arrived at his final dwelling in this world, the little Château de Muzot in the Rhône valley in Switzerland.  In the sestet of sonnet XIX of the  Sonnets from China (1938), W. H. Auden refers to the extraordinary gift received then by Rilke:

Who for ten years of drought and silence waited,

Until in Muzot all his being spoke,

And everything was given once for all. (194)

In Rilke’s own words drawn from letters to friends:

These strange Sonnets were no intended or expected work; they appeared,

often many in one day (the first part of the book was written in about three

days), completely unexpectedly . . . when I was, moreover, about to gather

myself for the continuations of those other poems - the great Duino Elegies.

I could do nothing but submit, purely and obediently, to the dictation of

this inner impulse,

and

Even to me in the way they arose and imposed themselves on me, the

Sonnets to Orpheus are perhaps the most mysterious enigmatic dictation

I have ever endured and achieved; the whole first part was written down

in a single breathless obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February

1922, without one word being in doubt or having to be changed.  And that

at a time when I had braced myself for another great work and was already

occupied with it.  How can one help growing in reverence and endless

gratitude, through such experiences in one’s own existence. (Rilke 335-336)

Auden, great poet also, recognized the importance of that last sentence and wrote in the final tercet of the sonnet referred to above that:

Awed, grateful, tired, content to die, completed,

He went out in the winter night to stroke

That tower as one pets an animal. (Auden 194)

Rilke’s reaction upon completing his greatest work is strange but perfectly comprehensible.  Auden’s words imply that he saw the finished elegies as the achievement of his life’s purpose.  It seems to me fitting that his awe and gratitude should embrace the house that had sheltered him,  that final refuge in which he had been granted the most profound and transformative vision of his life, as if for a brief supremely charged passage of time, Muzot had become Delphi, as if the god had spoken.  In less than a month, Rilke produced the fifty-nine sonnets of the Sonnets to Orpheus and completed the Duino Elegies, the greatest works of his career, to be numbered among the supreme exemplars of poetry as vision and wisdom.

Orpheus represents something entirely new in Rilke’s poetry, a reordering of his perception and understanding of the world and our place in it.  When Orpheus sings, the animal realm is hushed, as in the ancient myth, but in Rilke’s version the animals attend to and hear the world in a new way.  In place of what he calls the makeshift shelter of their darkest longings in which to receive Orpheus’ music, Orpheus has built them a temple in their hearing, thus transforming their mode of experiencing the world (226).  The music of Orpheus means a new attentiveness.  The passionate music of unassuageable longing, characteristic of Rilke’s earlier poetry, should be forgotten because Gesang ist Dasein, (“Song is existence”), the true music is reality, this world as it is (230).  No longer does Rilke seek an escape from the transience of this life.  “Just let the rose bloom each year for his sake,” he writes. Denn Orpheus ists (“For it is Orpheus”) (232).  The task of the poet is not to dream of an elsewhere, but to attend to this reality around us and to praise it:

Rühmen das ists!  Ein zum Rühmen Bestellter,

ging er hervor wie das Erz aus des Steins

Schweigen.  Sein Herz, o vergängliche Kelter

Eines den Menschen unendlichen Weins. (234)

To praise, that is it!  One [i.e. Orpheus] summoned to praise

emerged like ore from the stone’s

silence.  His heart, o fleeting winepress

of an infinite wine for human kind.  (My translation)

The imagery upon which Rilke draws in this sonnet are of the everyday things of this world.  They echo ancient poetry, and yet their resonance seems deeper.  He evokes hills, vineyards, grapes, wine, and bowls of ripe fruit.  In a single quatrain, he delineates the essential task of the poet as it has been revealed to him -- to praise this world.  Like ore from the stone, the poet emerges from the natural realm of which he is a part, and his heart, the source of all he brings forth, though fleeting, will press out an endless wine for all humanity.  If we think of all the connotations of wine in our cultural tradition, then we must recognize in these lines Rilke’s realization that the poet is the one tasked with revealing to us, his fellow human beings, the wonder and splendor of the only world we know, or will ever know, and that the voice of poetry will outlive the brief transience of any poet’s life, as it has since Homer first voiced this insight for us.

The advent of Orpheus enabled Rilke to return to the elegies.  Between February 7th and February 22nd he completed the great work he had begun ten years earlier.  The “Seventh Elegy,” begun and largely written on February 7th, embodies the themes of the sonnets.  No longer will the cry with which the elegies began on the cliffs at Duino be a wooing or yearning for that which he does not possess, but rather like the pure song that a bird will sing in due season, almost forgetting that he is a suffering creature.  The bird’s song is a song of affirmation and acceptance of the way things are.  The bird sings, we may say, as Homer once sang.  As the elegy proceeds, Rilke finds the song everywhere.  It is the reiner bejahender Tag (“pure affirmative day”), the fountain, summer days, flowers and treetops, a late storm, deep-breathing freshness, lofty summer nights, and the stars.  It is our world as we experience it here and now, and it leads to one of Rilke’s greatest expressions of affirmation, the virtually untranslatable Hiersein ist herrlich (“Being here is glorious”) (188).  It is an experience in which all can share, even, writes Rilke, abandoned girls in the filthiest streets of the city.  They too experience for an hour or a moment this sense of everything (da sie ein Dasein hatte), and their veins are for a time filled with reality.  The lines are laconic, compressed.  He abandons the complexities of syntax, but he attributes to the girls, presumably prostitutes, that sense of belonging to something greater than themselves  that has been an essential element in western spirituality since the ancient Epicureans first developed what Pierre Hadot has called “spiritual exercises” to cultivate this state of mind (81-125).  However, as Rilke acknowledges in this passage, such moments do not last.  We are acutely aware of our transience in a way that  animals are not.  Where we see the future, the animal sees all time and itself within all time, forever healed (194).  Rilke appears to suggest that animals live in an atemporal or eternal present, unaware of transience, whereas we live here forever taking leave (so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied) (196).  Ineluctably we are transient beings: the world flows away inexorably from us.  At this point, toward the end of the “Eighth Elegy,” we seem to to have returned to the yearning with which the elegies began, but we have not.  In the astonishing “Ninth Elegy,” which seems to me to be the culmination of Rilke’s poetic thinking, he returns to the great insight of the Sonnets to Orpheus that Hiersein viel ist, “Being here is so much” (198), and yet more astonishing, and perhaps the supreme expression of Rilke’s vision, that this fleeting world needs us, the most fleeting of creatures (198).  

We, the most fleeting of all, are here just once, and never again, but (aber), and it is one of the greatest “buts” in all poetry:

Aber dieses

ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal:

irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar. (198)

But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

To have been one with the earth, to have dwelt fully in this world surpasses anything else we might hope for and cancels all dreams of transcendence.  Here Rilke recognizes, as Homer had, the essentially tragic condition of our existence and embraces it.  He does not attempt a cosmodicy in the manner of Nietzsche.  Rather, he has arrived at a place where he can simply accept the way things are, however horrendous they may be.  There is much wrong with the world as he knew.  The Duino Elegies are among other things a fierce anticipatory critique of the shallow consumerism that has been eating away at our souls for decades and lately at the wellbeing of the planetary systems upon which our existence depends.  And yet, he recognizes, this world is all we have, and it is glorious.  Though the registers and tones of Rilke’s verse differ from those of Homer, the metaphysics of experience expressed in the “Ninth Elegy” seems to me to approach Homer’s vision of what it means to be human.

Homer never attempts a cosmodicy.  Indeed, it is unlikely that the idea would have made any sense to him, yet he does claim that the events he depicts may be rescued from the flux of time to become the matter of song (Il. 6.423-426, Od. 8.649-651).  There is a presumption that song, the subject matter of which is the heroes and their deeds, will preserve their glory and transmit it to future generations so that their kleos will live forever (Il. 7.101-105).  Homer’s world was an unchanging one in its essential lineaments.  The seasons give way to one another in due course; the rivers flow in their appointed channels as they have since time began.  Nature is experienced as an unvarying cycle, in comparison with which, the grandest efforts of human beings are insignificant.  After the fall of Troy, Apollo and Poseidon sweep away the great rampart built by the Achaeans to protect their ships until no trace of it remains, and yet, at crucial moments in the poem, such as the harvest depicted on the shield of Achilles, Homer celebrates the joy that human beings find in a world that each one of us will lose soon enough to death (18.629-719).  Homer does not try to justify this state of affairs.  It is simply part of the world he describes. That fact is not surprising.  It is surprising, however, that Rilke, a keen student of Nietzsche who, as we have seen, was obsessed with the task of cosmodicy should have made no attempt to do so either.  In the late elegies, Rilke tells us that we are here to name the ordinary things of this world and to say:

Haus,

Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, --  (198)

House,

Bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window --

to be attentive to them, to bear witness to their being, to praise them and through them to praise our world, whatever we may suffer or endure.  As he observes:

Zwischen den Hämmern besteht

unser Herz wie die Zunge

zwischen den Zähnen, die doch,

dennoch, die preisende bleibt.  (200)

Between the hammers our heart

endures just as the tongue does

between the teeth and, despite that,

still is able to praise.

As we saw above, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had claimed that tragedy was born from “the overflowing health, the abundance of existence of the Greeks” (3) while C. S. Lewis had suggested that Homer’s vision “is all the more terrible because the poet takes it all for granted, makes no complaint” (30).  By the time Rilke composed the “Ninth Elegy,”  he seems to have worked through and beyond these claims to embrace this world as it is in all its horror and splendor.  No longer does he seek to escape or transcend it.  “See, I live,” he writes toward the end of the elegy, and in the final lines, he reveals to us what that living can mean:

Uberzähliges Dasein

entspringt mir im Herzen. (203)

Abundant existence

Wells up in my heart (Gass 215)

where once there had been an emptiness, a spiritual loneliness hollowed out at the heart of his being.

 In Gass’s translation of these final lines, we see how Rilke’s long journey as a poet and the unanticipated transformative visitation of the Sonnets to Orpheus, which must somehow have had its roots in the workings of Rilke’s psyche beyond our and even his apprehension, have led to an affirmation of this world akin to that which the young Nietzsche attributed to the Greeks, a  belated acceptance that one must affirm this world because there is no other for creatures who live according to our limitations.  Hiersein ist herrlich.  Homer’s epics are our greatest elucidation of this insight.  Thus, Rilke’s late poetry may be seen as a response to Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead,” a directive concerning how we may live in the absence of former Christian and providential certainties, and one that takes us back to the immediate origins of our culture to Homer and to the pre-philosophical tragic vision of the great dramatists, especially Sophocles.

In the Duino Elegies, Rilke created a work that is not a philosophical treatise, and not even a philosophical text in Nietzsche’s manner, but an endlessly resonant work of art, a matchless embodiment of what I have called literary wisdom, to which readers like myself, drawn by temperament and experience to a tragic view of our existence can return, time after time, to contemplate in an extraordinarily rich way what the possibilities of our lives may be. As Rilke  himself wrote,  “How can one help growing in reverence and endless gratitude, through such experiences in one’s own existence?” (335-336).  His readers may well think the same about the gift he has bequeathed to us.

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