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Abstract
This article is in two parts. It opens with a synoptic view of how Dante-poet connects the particular purview of his fictive character (whom critics typically name 'Dante-pilgrim') with a worldview - a philosophical theology, a cosmology and an ethics - shared fairly commonly among Christian intellectuals in the late Middle Ages. This worldview includes certain general assumptions about the nature of time and some detailed ideas about how a human person, an individual psyche, is contextualized by time. Included are some reflections on the medieval figure of the cosmos as God's "book" and of divine creativity and providence as a 'narrative' art. Dante, particularly in the Paradiso, is perhaps the greatest elaborator of that figure. The article's second part is a detailed textual analysis of the episode of the barrators (those who illicitly offer or receive political favors) in Inferno XXII-XXIII. A psychology of uncertainty and terror is dramatized poetically in these cantos in terms of the differences (and some likenesses) between one trapped sinner's experience of time and the pilgrim's participation in it. Virgil's guidance, fidelity and extraordinary discernment are also figured by Dante in temporal terms.
This essay does not propose an exercise in historiography. Though it presents evidences of difference with respect to what may be “medieval” or “Renaissance” or “Enlightenment” values, its end is not to elaborate clear periodicity in Western history. It argues that historical and cultural changes are cumulative and that positive change, as opening to a future, is recognized experientially in terms of a certain perdurance of the past. It has little to say about well-studied Renaissance developments—the Reformation, advances in technology and cosmology—in favor of important cultural shifts that have been somewhat less emphasized: Petrarchan humanism as a balance between the idiosyncratic and the sacred, history as ideally an “heterology” (M. de Certeau), syncretism as the instantiation of temporal “recursion” (Giambattista Vico), the evolution of Western Christian icons, missionary propaganda and doctrinal pluralism, new balances between faith and reason—including the possibility of “things indifferent” (Richard Hooker), irenism, and the early discourses of human liberty. What follows also responds to a unique scholarly context—the June 2014 Beijing conference on “Time and Change in China and the West.” Specific points are adduced here in the light of contemporary tensions and dialogues between the West and China; brief references to Machiavelli and Bacon are especially apposite to that Beijing context. This paper—synthetic of necessity—concludes in the terms of how the eighteenth century philosopher Giambattista Vico looked at the Western Middle Ages and Renaissance, that is to say, at his own, immediate past.
Abstract
This paper reads out two very well-known moments in Books 3 and 1 of Virgil’s epic poem in order to address a Virgilian tactic, a poetic strategy, that has not been fully requited in the criticism. These are moments in which the poet chooses to foreground absurd, excessive, epiphenomenal and short-lived things that time seems to bring about. Aeneas, Virgil’s unlikely hero, struggles as much with such moments as he does with all the sworn enemies of the Trojans. He struggles especially with the temptation toward a poignant, nostalgic fixation on his tragic past. He is told that he must become devoted religiously to the greatest of Troy’s enemies, the goddess Juno. It is inside a Carthaginian temple dedicated to Juno that the hero experiences the ‘newness’ that a great work of art is always able to proffer. But Virgil knows that Carthage and Juno’s temple and the works of art themselves will all become follies of time, left in ruins by the romanitas that Aeneas has just been encouraged to prepare.
Abstract
Both the theory and the terminology of Albertus Magnus’s philosophical psychology in the thirteenth century bear an extraordinary resemblance to twenty-first century descriptions of emergent systems. In Albert’s description of the temporal drama of human foetal life, the emergent, ‘intellectual’ energies of human psychê or anima or soul cannot be at all predicated on the material or psychic agents that give rise to them. Though standing in a real continuity with those natural, causal agents, human psyche knows itself as existing discontinuously from them and as enacting, in and through the dimension of time, kinds of knowledge and types of experience which display complex potentialities that appear to be irreducible, or, at the least, not fully measurable: in art, in science, and also in cultic action.