Hannibal,
Thank you for this explanation. I'm afraid that I betray my lack of
knowledge of scholarship each time I post a comment to this list. I
would not have guessed that the readings you describe for either Teresa
or Donne would exist. But that's surely because I generally shun
critical writing (I'd read more of it if I could, but I have too little
time left and too many original texts I still want to study).
Your last statement:
> I think my broad point is that we need to take greater pains to
> understand early modern religious experience in its own terms.
is so telling. To truly understand religion, or art, or even science
from late Medieval times within that period's own frame of reference --
rather than through projection our own age's common viewpoint, with all
its laughable errors (future generations will readily identify these,
though we can't easily see them ourselves) -- would appear to be almost
impossible.
For example, the possibility of a representation such as "Petrarchan"
appears not to have been conceivable to humans until centuries after
Petrarch's own time -- if Owen Barfield's study of the past is to be
believed. In his "History in English Words" he says that the
identification of a world view with a particular human being was not
something that was ever conceived until the Renaissance; or, there is
no record of such a conception prior to that time.
I mean, it wasn't conceivable then that the world could "validly" be
seen in a "Petrachan" manner or in "Aquinas's way", etc. You couldn't
just select a perferred point of view and move on, as we do today. No,
in those times, there was only ONE world, and it existed outside of
humans, "out there" in the perceivable phenomena. And most of those
phenomena themselves were actually objective living organisms, or else
representations of creatures, gods, nymphs, who normally chose to
remain invisible to humans, wrapping themselves within, or hiding
behind, the veil of the perceivable phenomena. Try "seeing" the world
that way today. It's difficult!
Hence, to appreciate what Petrarch, or Dante, or Teresa were
experiencing and thinking as they wrote their works is indeed almost
impossible for a modern person. How do we wipe away from our eyes, our
own vision, the mechanical universe (which didn't exist in Medieval
times) and see and feel the sun as a living being, image of God, every
day when we walk outside? How can we read their writings within the
reference frame of the reality they themselves lived?
It's quite difficult -- if not impossible.
Just one example of our difficulty: invocation of the muses. To us,
this looks like artifice; perhaps we even think it "cute". I highly
doubt Medieval and earlier writers looked at it that way. To them, it
was a prayer to the actual, literal source of the words that would
(they hoped) be transmitted to them from the gods, which they would
then record. They conceived themselves as "scribes". Hence, Dante:
When Love inspires me with delight,
Or pain, or longing, I take careful note,
And as he dictates in my soul, I write.
[Purgatorio, Canto 24]
I don't think he was lying to us, or saying this with tongue-in-cheek.
This is how he felt what we would call "the artistic process" happened,
how he felt his work was formed, deposited within him. His job was not
to create (only Love and the gods can create realities out of nothing),
but rather to sift and sort and select and, ultimately, record/write.
Well.. I'm again surely showing my lack of scholarship, since I have
read almost no criticism of Dante, either! These are merely my own
opinions.
I do thank you very much, Hannibal, for your very interesting initial
comment and especially for taking the time to provide further
explanation.
Regards,
Kevin
----------------------------------------------------
On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:37:55 -0500
HANNIBAL HAMLIN <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Kevin,
>
> I didn't express myself very well, I'm afraid. I didn't mean that I
> don't take her seriously (I do), but that many, especially American
> academics who assume a particular secular worldview, tend to read her
> religious experience in non-religious terms (sexual, psychological,
> political). The same thing has often happened with Donne, another
> writer who blurs boundaries between the sexual and spiritual/secular
> and sacred (so that "Batter My Heart," for instance, becomes a
> homosexual rape fantasy).
>
> I think my broad point is that we need to take greater pains to
> understand early modern religious experience in its own terms.
>
> Hannibal
>
>
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