To be one thing is inexorably not to be all other things; the confused intuition of this truth has induced men to imagine that not to be is more than to be some thing, and that, in some way, it is to be everything. This fallacy is to be found in the words of that legendary king of Hindustan who renounces power and goes out to beg in the streets: “Henceforward I have no kingdom, or my kingdom is unlimited; henceforward my body does not belong to me, or the entire earth belongs to me.” Schopenhauer has written that history is an interminable and perplexed dream on the part of generations of humans; in the dream there are recurring forms; perhaps there are nothing but forms; one of them is the process described on this page.
— Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Forms of a Legend
People find the sight of an old man, an invalid, or a corpse, repugnant, and yet everyone is subject to death, illness, and old age. The Buddha declared that this thought led him to abandon his home and parents and put on the yellow robe of the ascetics, a testimony to be found in one of the books of the canon. Another book records the parable of the five secret messengers sent by the gods: a child, a stooped ancient, a cripple, a criminal on the rack, and a dead man, and they announce that our destiny is to be born, decline, fall ill, suffer just punishment, and die. The Judge of the Shadows (in the mythologies of Hindustan, Yama fulfills this function, inasmuch as he was the first man to die) asks the sinner whether he has not seen the messengers; the sinner admits that he has, but has not deciphered their admonishment; the myrmidons shut him up in a house full of fire. Perhaps the Buddha did not invent this menacing parable; it is enough for us to know that he stated it (Majjhima nikaya, 130) and that he may never, perhaps, have related it to his own life.
Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legend recreates it in a manner which is only accidentally false and which allows it to go about the world, from mouth to mouth. In both the parable and the Buddha’s declaration there figure an old man, an ill man, and a dead one; time made the two texts one, and made, out of the confusion, another story.
Siddhartha, the Bodhisattva, the pre-Buddha, is the son of a great king, Suddhodana, of the lineage of the sun. On the night of his conception his mother dreams that an elephant enters her right side, an elephant the color of snow and with six tusks.48 The interpretation put upon this dream by the soothsayers is that the child would reign over the world or would make the wheel of doctrine turn49 and show men how to free themselves from life and death. The king would prefer that Siddhartha achieve temporal rather than eternal greatness and he has the boy shut up in a palace, from which all things that might reveal to him that he is corruptible have been removed. In this situation Siddhartha passes twenty-nine years of illusory happiness, devoted to the pleasure of the senses. But one morning he ventures out in his carriage and beholds with amazement a man bent double, “whose hair is not like that of others, whose body is not like that of others,” who supports himself on a cane as he walks and whose flesh trembles. He asks what manner of man is that. The coachman explains that he is an old man and that all men on earth will become as he is. Disquieted, Siddhartha gives orders for an immediate return to the palace. But then, in the course of a new sally, he sees a man devoured by fever, covered with the sores of leprosy and with ulcers. The coachman explains that he is a sick man and that no one is exempt from this danger. In still another sally, the prince sees a man being borne on a bier. That inert figure, they explain, is a dead man, and to die is the law of all who are born. On yet another sally, the last, he sees a monk of the mendicant orders who does not desire either to live or to die; in his face there is peace; Siddhartha has found the way.
Hardy (Der Buddhismus nach älteren Pali-Werken) extolled the colorful quality of this legend; a contemporary Indologist, A. Foucher, whose mocking tone is not always intelligent or urbane, writes that, considering the prior ignorance of the Bodhisattva, the story is not lacking in dramatic climax and philosophic value. At the beginning of the fifth century of our era, the monk Fa-Hien went on a pilgrimage to the kingdoms of Hindustan in search of sacred books and he saw the ruins of the city of Kapilavastu and four statues which Asoka had erected to the north, south, east, and west of the walls in commemoration of the Bodhisattva’s four encounters. At the beginning of the seventh century a Christian monk composed the novel called Barlaam and Josaphat; Josaphat (= Bodhisat, Bodhisattva) is the son of a king of India; the astrologers foretell that he will reign over a greater kingdom, the Kingdom of Glory; the king shuts him up in a palace, but Josaphat discovers the unfortunate condition of men specifically in the persons of a blind man, a leper, and a moribund man, and is converted, finally, to the faith by the hermit Barlaam, This Christian version of the legend was translated into many languages, including Dutch and Latin; at the instance of Hakon Hakonarson, a Barlaams Saga was created in Iceland in the middle of the thirteenth century. Cardinal Caesar Baronio included Josaphat in his revision (1585-90) of the Roman Martyrology. In 1615, Diego de Couto pointed out, in his continuation of the Decadas, the analogies between the feigned Indian fable and the true and pious history of Saint Josaphat. All this and much more may be found by the reader in the first volume of the Origenes de la novela, by Menendez y Pelayo.
The legend which in Western lands determined that the Buddha be canonized by Rome possessed, nevertheless, one defect: the encounters which it postulates are effective, but also incredible. The four sallies of Siddhartha and the four didactic figures are not in concert with the habits of chance. Less attentive to esthetics than to the conversion of nations, the Doctors of the Church wished to justify the anomaly; Koeppen (Die Religion des Buddha, I, 82) notes that in the later form of the legend, the leper, the dead man, and the monk are simulacra which the divinities create for the instruction of Siddhartha. Thus, in the Third Book of the Sanskrit epic Buddhacarita, we read that the gods created a dead man, and that no one saw his body as it was borne along except the coachman and the Prince. In a legendary biography of the sixteenth century the four apparitions become four metamorphoses of a god (Wieger: Vies chinoises du Buddha, 37-41).
The Lalitavistara had gone even further. It is customary to speak with some scorn of this compilation of prose and verse written in an impure Sanskrit; in its pages the history of the Redeemer is distended until it becomes oppressive, until it produces vertigo. The Buddha, surrounded by twelve thousand monks and thirty-two thousand Bodhisattvas, reveals the text of the work to the gods; from out of the fourth heaven he fixed the era, the continent, the kingdom, and the caste into which he would be reborn to die for the last time; eighty thousand timbals accompany the words of his discourse, and the force of ten thousand elephants inform the body of his mother. The Buddha, in this strange poem, directs each stage of his destiny; he has the four divinities project the four symbolic figures and, when he interrogates the coachman, their identity and significance he already knows. Foucher sees this as an example of mere
servility on the part of the authors, who apparently can not tolerate the Buddha’s not knowing what a servant knows. To my mind, the enigma deserves another solution. The Buddha creates the images and then asks a third person their meaning. Theologically it would be possible for this person to furnish the Buddha an answer, for the book belongs to the school of Mahayana, which teaches that the temporal Buddha is an emanation or reflection of an eternal Buddha; the heavenly Buddha directs all things, the temporal one suffers them or carries them out. (Our century, possessed of another mythology or vocabulary, speaks of the unconscious.) The human nature of the Son, the Second Person of God, may cry out from the Cross: My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?; the person of the Buddha, analogically, could be dismayed by the forms his own divinity had created. . . . But such dogmatic subtleties are not indispensable, however, for the unraveling of the problem. We need merely remember that all religions in Hindustan, and Buddhism most particularly, teach that the world is illusory. Lalitavistara means, according to Winternitz, Detailed Account of the Game (of a
Buddha); for Mahayana Buddhism, the life of the Buddha on earth is a game or a dream, and the earth itself another dream. Siddhartha chooses his country and his parents. He fashions four forms which will fill him with astonishment. He disposes that another form declare the meaning of the first four. All this is reasonable, if we assume that it is a dream of Siddhartha’s; even better if we think of it as a dream in which Siddhartha plays a part (as the leper and the monk play a part), but a dream no one actually dreams, because, in the eyes of Northern Buddhism,50 the world and the proselytes and Nirvana and the wheel of transmigrations and the Buddha are all equally unreal. No one is extinguished in Nirvana, as we read in a famous treatise, for the extinction of innumerable beings in Nirvana is like the disappearance of a phantasmagoria which a magician at a crossroads creates by occult art; in another place it is written that everything is mere emptiness, mere name, including the book which says so and the man who reads it. Paradoxically, the poem’s numerical excesses—twelve thousand monks and thirty-two thousand Bodhisattvas—do not add, but rather take away reality. The vast forms and the vast ciphers (Chapter XII includes a series of twenty-three words which indicate the unit followed by an increasing number of zeros, from 9 to 49, 51 and 53) are only vast and monstrous bubbles, emphasizing Nothingness. Thus the unreal progressively riddles the story; first it made the figures fantastic, then it did the same to the prince, and, along with the prince, all ages and the universe itself.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde proposed a variant: the happy prince dies in the seclusion of the palace without having discovered sorrow, but his posthumous effigy discerns it from the height of his pedestal.
The chronology of Hindustan is uncertain; my erudition is even more so; Koeppen and Hermann Beckh are perhaps as fallible as the compiler who risks the present note; I should not be surprised if my story of the legend were legendary, compounded of substantial truth and accidental errors.
— Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
From Allegories to Novels
For all of us, allegory is an aesthetic mistake. (I first wrote, "is nothing but an error of aesthetics," but then I noticed that my sentence involved an allegory.) As far as I know, the genre of allegory has been analyzed by Schopenhauer (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, 50), De Quincey (Writings XI, 198), Francisco de Sanctis (Storia della letteratura italiana VII), Croce (Estetica, 39), and Chesterton (G. F. Watts, 83); in this essay I will limit myself to the last two. Croce rejects allegorical art, Chesterton defends it; to my mind, right is on Croce's side, but I would like to know how a form that seems unjustifiable to us now can once have enjoyed such favor.
Croce's words are crystalline; I need only repeat them:
If the symbol is conceived of as inseparable from artistic intuition, then it is synonymous with that intuition itself, which is always of an ideal nature. If the symbol is conceived as separable, if the symbol can be ex pressed on the one hand, and the thing symbolized can be expressed on the other, we fall back into the intellectualist error; the supposed symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept; it is an allegory; it is science, or an art that apes science. But we must also be fair to allegory and caution that in some cases it is innocuous. Any ethics whatsoever can be extracted from the Gerusalemme liberata; and from the Adone, by Marino, poet of all that is lascivious, the reflection that disproportionate pleasure ends in pain may be educed. Next to a statue, the sculptor may place a sign saying that the statue is Mercy or Goodness. Such allegories added to a finished work do it no harm. They are expressions extrinsic to other expressions. To the Gerusalemme is added a page in prose that expresses another thought by the poet; to the Adone, a line or stanza that expresses what the poet wished to be understood; to the statue, the word mercy or goodness.
On page 222 of La poesía (Bari, 1946), the tone is more hostile: "Allegory is not a direct mode of spiritual manifestation, but a kind of writing or cryptography."
Croce admits of no difference between content and form. Content is form and form is content. Allegory strikes him as monstrous because it seeks to encode two contents—the immediate or literal (Dante, guided by Virgil, reaches Beatrice), and the figurative (man finally attains faith, guided by reason)—into a single form. In his view, this way of writing entails laborious enigmas.
Chesterton, in defense of allegory, begins by denying that language fully expresses all reality.
Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless and more nameless than the colors of an autumn forest. . . . Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
Once our language has been declared insufficient, room is left for others; allegory can be one of them, like architecture or music. Allegory is made up of words, but it is not a language of language, a sign of other signs. For example, Beatrice is not a sign of the word faith; she is a sign of the valiant virtue and secret illuminations indicated by that word. A sign more precise, richer, and more felicitous, than the monosyllable faith.
I do not know with any certainty which of the two eminent parties to this dispute is right; I know that allegorical art seemed enchanting at one time (the labyrinthine Roman de la Rose, which lives on in two hundred manuscripts, consists of twenty-four thousand lines) and is now intolerable. And not only intolerable; we also feel it to be stupid and frivolous. Neither Dante, who represented the history of his passion in the Vita nuova, nor Boethius, the Roman, writing his De consolatione in the tower of Pavia under the shadow of an executioner's sword, would have understood this feeling. How can this discord be explained without recourse to the petitio principii that tastes change?
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The Platonists sense intuitively that ideas are realities; the Aristotelians, that they are generalizations; for the former, language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols; for the latter, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian, may be an error or fiction resulting from our partial understanding. Across latitudes and epochs, the two immortal antagonists change languages and names: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone invokes Aristotle, master of human reason (Convivio IV, 2), but the nominalists are Aristotle; the realists, Plato. George Henry Lewes has opined that the only medieval debate of some philosophical value is between nominalism and realism; the opinion is somewhat rash, but it underscores the importance of this tenacious controversy, provoked, at the beginning of the ninth century, by a sentence from Porphyry, translated and commented upon by Boethius; sustained, toward the end of the eleventh, by Anselm and Roscelin; and revived by William of Occam in the fourteenth.
As one would suppose, the intermediate positions and nuances multiplied ad infinitum over those many years; yet it can be stated that, for real ism, universals (Plato would call them ideas, forms; we would call them abstract concepts) were the essential; for nominalism, individuals. The his tory of philosophy is not a useless museum of distractions and wordplay; the two hypotheses correspond, in all likelihood, to two ways of intuiting reality. Maurice de Wulf writes: "Ultra-realism garnered the first adherents. The chronicler Heriman (eleventh century) gives the name ‘antiqui doctares’ to those who teach dialectics in re; Abelard speaks of it as an 'antique doctrine,' and until the end of the twelfth century, the name moderni is applied to its adversaries." A hypothesis that is now inconceivable seemed obvious in the ninth century, and lasted in some form into the fourteenth. Nominalism, once the novelty of a few, today encompasses everyone; its victory is so vast a
nd fundamental that its name is useless. No one declares himself a nominalist because no one is anything else. Let us try to under stand, nevertheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the fundamental thing was not men but humanity, not individuals but the species, not the species but the genus, not the genera but God. From such concepts (whose clearest manifestation is perhaps the quadruple system of Erigena) allegorical literature, as I understand it, derived. Allegory is a fable of abstractions, as the novel is a fable of individuals. The abstractions are personified; there is something of the novel in every allegory. The individuals that novelists present aspire to be generic (Dupin is Reason, Don Segundo Sombra is the Gaucho); there is an element of allegory in novels.
The passage from allegory to novel, from species to individual, from realism to nominalism, required several centuries, but I shall have the temerity to suggest an ideal date: the day in 1382 when Geoffrey Chaucer, who may not have believed himself to be a nominalist, set out to translate into English a line by Boccaccio—"E con gli occulti Jerri i Tradimenti" (And Betrayal with hidden weapons)—and repeated it as "The smyler with the knyf under the cloke." The original is in the seventh book of the Teseide; the English version, in "The Knightes Tale."
[1949] —Translated by Esther Allen
The Innocence of Layamon
Legouis saw the paradox of Layamon but not his pathos. The preamble to the Brut, written in the third person at the beginning of the thirteenth century, contains the facts of his life. Layamon writes:
There was in the land a priest named Layamon; he was the son of Leovenath (may God have mercy on his soul!), and he lived in Emley in a noble church on the banks of the Severn, a good place to be. It came to his mind the idea of relating the exploits of Englishmen, what they were named and where they came from, the earliest owners of our En gland, after the Great Flood. . . . Layamon traveled throughout the land and acquired the noble books that were his models. He took the English book made by St. Bede; he took another in Latin made by St. Albin and St. Augustine, who brought us the faith; he took a third and placed it in the middle, the work of a French cleric named Wace, who knew how to write well, and gave it to the noble Leonor, queen of the great Henry. Layamon opened those three books and turned the pages; he looked at them lovingly—may God have mercy on him!—and picked up the pen and wrote on parchment and summoned the right words and made the three books into one. Now Layamon, for the love of God Omnipotent, begs those who read this book and learn the truths it teaches to pray for the soul of his father, who begot him, and for the soul of his mother, who bore him, and for his own soul, to make it better. Amen.