The Cambridge Companion - Fatalism, Dispense di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Cambridge Companion - Fatalism e più Dispense in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! JOSEPH B. TRAHERN, JR Fatalism and the millennium A M O N G the major concerns of the Anglo-Saxons, as the surviving Old English prose and poetry attest, were the questions of fate and free will, providence and individual responsibility. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a great deal of scholarly attention was given to a search for a common philosophical background for Germanic literature (distinct from the Latin learned tradition) to complement the readily identifiable shared elements in diction, style and verse form among Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German. One school of thought, once espoused widely and not without adherents today, holds that the belief in fate was a key feature of paganism, and that the degree to which human- kind is seen to be controlled by fate in Old English literature shows the extent to which the inherent paganism of the text comes through untar- nished or unalloyed. When fate is in competition with God, the text has been 'contaminated', usually by a 'pious interpolator', whose 'spurious' additions obscured the underlying Germanic heroic fatalism (never clearly defined or exemplified in any extant text). The key Old English word in these discussions is wyrd, which glosses Latin words as various as fortuna, 'fortune', fatum, 'fate', and mere eventus, 'event' or 'what happens'. Most modern scholars would probably agree with Morton Bloomfield that 'the widespread tendency to use the word "wyrd" as evidence of Germanic Paganism seems to be dangerously simplistic, for wyrd was soon given a Christian meaning', or with Dorothy Whitelock that, the word used for fate can mean simply 'event,' 'what happens,' and though there are passages where some degree of personification is present, such as 'the creation of the fates changes the world under the heavens' or 'woven by the decree of fate,' I doubt if these are more than figures of speech by the time the poems were composed. If they are inherited from the heathen past, they may indicate that men then believed in a goddess who wove their destiny, but the poet who says 'to him the Lord granted the webs of victory' is unconscious of a heathen implication in his phrase.1 If this is the case, and given the fact that all surviving Old English literature is a product of the Christian era, we should be able to examine 160 9 Fatalism and the millennium 161 attitudes toward destiny in that literature without the attendant baggage of earlier scholarship which insisted on a fatalistic underlayer surviving from paganism which has no surviving texts to attest to its existence. We can view the literature, in short, as a body of writing which has no known antecedents in a pagan Germanic past but which occasionally addresses, as part of the subject matter of both its fiction and its philosophical, historical and homiletic prose, pagan times and pagan beliefs. Let us begin with a glance at the subject of the previous chapter, Beowulf, a poem about a 'pagan' society by a poet with a clearly Christian perspective, and a poem in which from time to time the Christian God appears to be directing the events in the lives of men, even though they are ignorant of His existence and beyond His salvation. Robinson has recently demonstrated the effective use by the poet of words which we know refer to one thing in the Christian present but to other, darker things in the unenlightened past. He notes that when Beowulf says that the outcome of his battle with the dragon shall be, 'swa unc wyrd geteoS, / metod manna gehwaes' (2526-7): 'as wyrd, the measurer of each person, shall decree for us'. This surely is the meaning that the words have for Beowulf, and editors like von Schaubert who specify that metod here means 'fate' are clearly right. And yet Klaeber and others who insist that metod means '(Christian) God' are also right; they are simply viewing Beowulf's statement from the perspective of the narrating poet, for whom 'metod manna gehwses' could only seem like an appositive gloss to 'wyrd', explaining providentially the true nature of wyrd, which, as Christians knew, was but the accomplishment of God's determinations. 'Metod eallum weold / gumena cynnes, swa he nu git deS.' ['Metod ruled all of the race of men, as he now still does'] says the poet (1057-8), but metod has undergone a momentous seman- tic change since the time when He was presiding over the noble heath- ens of the tale of Beowulf, and this, I believe, poet and audience fully understood.2 This is an especially important distinction for readers previously unfami- liar with Old English literature to understand as well, since it allows an inexperienced reader a more ready insight into a number of apparent ambiguities in both the verse and the prose than would be gained through extensive reading in inconclusive secondary discussions on genres and perspectives. Other than Beowulf, the poems which concern themselves most with the inevitability of fate and its working on both men and on the things of the world are a group conveniently if not altogether convincingly classed as elegies and containing at least two masterpieces, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. The Wanderer begins, 164 J O S E P H B. T R A H E R N , J R personification of a kind of fate or destinal agent from either Germanic or classical antiquity, but it is equally difficult to say that the poet means 'God prevented the event' and no more. In prose, the major discussion of the problem of fate comes in King Alfred's translation of the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius. The Consolation, written in the early sixth century, became a key text in the history of Western humanistic thought and was translated and adapted again and again in England first by Alfred, then by Chaucer, and later by many others including Queen Elizabeth I. Although Boethius was unquestionably a Christian, his Consolation is not distinctively Christian in tone and is drawn almost entirely from the tradition of classical (especially Platonic) philosophy. For Boethius, the world was created by a divine and immutable reason which governs all things: when the govern- ing is joined to the foresight of the divine mind, it is providential when it is viewed in relation to the things governed (that is, temporally), it is fatum. Boethius wrote for a world which believed in an all-powerful God and which viewed life as a pilgrimage through an alien land in which the true way to the eternal good would frequently be obscured. The Consolation became, therefore, a popular authority in later times for other societies which sought solutions to the same problems from relatively similar perspectives. And just as Boethius himself offered a synthesis of a number of popular philosophical and theological ideas, so his revisers and translators, in adapting the Consolation, both modified Boethius and introduced into his work aspects of other classical and medieval treatises. In the case of the Alfredian Boethius, neither the nature of the modifi- cations nor the reasoning which dictated them is always clear. Scholars have argued for years, for example, over the significance of King Alfred's use of the word wyrd in his translation and adaptation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. On a simpler level, most hand- books and literary histories use Alfred's famous simile of the wheel of destiny, which replaces Boethius's intricate discussion of necessity through a simile involving orbiting spheres, to illustrate how Alfred modified the Consolation of Philosophy. More immediately interesting for our purposes, however, is the direct statement which precedes the introduction of the simile: Sumu j>ing J?onne on J?isse weorulde sint underSied {?aere wyrde, sume hire nanwuht underSied ne sint; ac sio wyrd ond eall Sa )?ing J?e hire underSied sint, sint underSied Saem godcundan forejxmce. (ed. Sedgefield, p. 129) Some things, then, in this world are subject to fate; some are not a whit subject to it; but fate and all things that are subject to it, are subject to divine forethought (i.e. providence). Fatalism and the millennium 165 In this instance, Alfred is using wyrd to gloss Latin fatum; sometimes, though not always, he uses it to gloss fortuna as well, though when he discusses the gifts associated with fortune he uses scelSa and woruldscelda. One thing is clear, however; both here and in a passage immediately preceding (ed. Sedgefield, p. 128, 18—20) in which Alfred equates wyrd with 'God's work, which he does each day', God controls fate, just as in Beowulf (1056--8) he did in pagan Denmark and 'he now still does'. The complex and continuing scholarly debate over the nature of Alfred's alterations is beyond the scope of this introductory essay. The debate concerning wyrd in Alfred's Boethius, however, must be recognized as but one of a number of facets of a much larger issue which has at least three sides: the first (the proponents of which appear to be diminishing rapidly) holds that many of the differences between the Latin and Alfred's adaptation of it result from Alfred's (or his translator's) inability to make appropriate translations either due to the inadequacy of English as they knew it or the inadequacy of their grasp of the philosophical concepts. The second view is that Alfred's alterations were deliberate and purpose- ful, informed by Augustinian and Gregorian perspectives (and perhaps by a knowledge of commentaries on Boethius), and possessed of a Christian dogmatism which dealt both metaphorically and literally more with matters of this world than with speculative philosophy (and therefore more emotionally than rationally). A third view is that Alfred gave to his subjects a Boethius which had been filtered through not only commen- taries but had been made almost into a source book for political ideas - what one scholar calls 'the only Boethius that late ninth-century Europe knew and hence virtually the only Boethius that anyone had known since the work was written'.5 While Alfred could see wyrd as a force operating under the control of God, yElfric saw the belief in fate as an act of folly. For him, God gives free choice to all, but in his divine foreknowledge knows how his people will behave through their own will. Unbelievers perish 'Surh agenne eyre . . . na Surh gewyrd, forSan 3e gewyrd nis nan Sing buton leas wena; ne nan Sing soSlice be gewyrde ne gewyrS, ac ealle Sing J?urh Godes dom beoS geendebyrde' [Catholic Homilies, ed. Thorpe I, 114: 'through their own choice, not through fate, for fate is nothing but a false expectation, for nothing happens through fate, but all things are arranged through the judgement of God'). If one aspect of the Anglo-Saxon thought-world was fatalism, another of equal importance was the concept of a world in decline. Christians in the Anglo-Saxon period (those who wrote the texts under consideration here and the audience for whom they were written) apparently believed they were living in the last age of the wrorld, that their sojourn through this life was a pilgrimage of sorts to the next, and that there was no permanence to be expected in the earthly existence. It is a thoroughly 166 J O S E P H B. T R A H E R N , J R Boethian perspective: 'Eala', Alfred translates, 'J>aet nanwuht nis fseste stondendes weorces a wuniende on worulde' ('Alas, that there is nothing of firm standing work ever remaining in this world'). The weakness in the moral sense was the sort which for Augustine in The City of God led to the coming of the Goths to punish the Romans, just as for ^lfric and Wulfstan the Danes were sent by God to punish the degenerate English for their sins. In the later eschatological homilies it eventually leads to the coming of Antichrist and the appearance of the signs of Doomsday. But it is a perspective supplemented (and to a degree complicated) by another fascinating eschatological tradition - one which views the 'ages' of both the world and of man as directly related to one another.6 A terse poetic example of the theme occurs in The Seafarer 87—90: wuniaS \>a wacran ond J?as woruld healdaj?, brucaS |?urh bisgo. Blaed is gehnseged, eor)?an indryhto ealdaS ond searaS, swa nu monna gehwylc geond middangeard. Weaker ones live on and rule the world, enjoy it through their efforts. Glory is bowed down, the nobility of the earth ages and dries up, as does now every man throughout the world. The idea goes back to Cyprian and is prominent both in Gregory and Augustine and continues through Bede. A similar manifestation of it occurs in Guthlac A: Woruld is onhrered, colaj? Cristes lufu, sindan costinga geond middangeard monge arisene, swa \>3dt geara iu godes spelbodan wordum ssegdon ond J?urh witedom eal anemdon, swa hit nu gongeS. (37-42) The world is stirred up, the love of Christ grows cold, many troubles have arisen throughout the world, just as long ago God's messenger predicted in words and through prophecy, so now it has come to pass. This is based on the Bible, Matt. XXIV. 12, quoniam abundauit iniquitas, refrigescet caritas multorum, 'because iniquity abounds, charity cools', and concludes two lines later, 'EaldaS eorj?an bked', 'the joys of the earth grow old'. The degree to which the concern with the decay of the world as a sign of its end was connected with the approach of the year 1000 has been the subject of considerable debate over the years. There can be little doubt that those who lived in England during the waning years of the first millennium of the Christian era had cause for concern. Early historians wrote of a tropical climate which attracted the Angles and the Saxons;