In this regard -- re C.S. Lewis and the Platonic dance of the cosmos into
the Middle Ages -- see also James Miller: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and
Christian Antiquity (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1986, reviewed and summarized
at some length in Speculum, April, 1988: 438-44. And note the relevance to
"Acidale" in the Spenser Encyclopedia, where my point might be, when Colin
says "Looke how the Crowne" (VI.x.13: see dedication for AnFQ with Gr.
stephanos), he is almost necessarily talking about the night sky, and thus
something wellnigh virtual, if the fourth Grace has eclipsed the great Sun
of the World, and is yet visible and fully apprehended in the dark. (For
the sun "eclipses" our view of the stars.) If Colin can point to the night
sky, how can Calidore also be seeing the Fourth Grace, she being naked in
the night?
Alpers might say that that Spenser's rhetoric has merely shifted from the
narrator's mind for beauty to Colin's mind for astronomy, diachronically:
though along a diurnal course, as it were from noon on Acidale to midnight
in the sky above it--from the enchanted show on the ground of the mount, to
the astral one in the apogee of the heavens aligned above.
But I might say we should (perhaps) be talking more synchronically, as in
the case of the somewhat subjective show that the belated Adamic peasant
sees at the end of Book I of Par. Lost [1667, 1674] ("midnight Revels ...
while over-head the Moon / Sits Arbitress"): which epiphany or anti-epiphany
of "The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim" co-ordinates with the cosmic show
of Cherubim that gathers ground at the Adamic Laborer's heel at the end of
Book XII ("fixt Station ... bright array ... meteorous ... blaz'd / Fierce
as a Comet ... torrid ... Libyan Air adust / Began parch that temperate
Clime" [--or zone--see John Salkeld, cited by M.Y. Hughes, saying Aquinas
says "the sword which the angel held before Paradise, is nothing else but
the mighty heate of the _torrida zona_" [A Treatise of Angels (1613),
290]).
The explanation that "literalizes" the angelic sword, or else makes it
purely allegoric ("physice"), suggests the Royal Society (b. 1660) closing
down or discarding of the image of Lewis' mythopoetic universe -- or
treating that universe as merely a fiction or a Baconian idol, a fiction,
that is, one ultimately like that of the historical existence of Eden
itself, upon The Eclipse of (the) Biblical Narrative. -- Jim Nohrnberg
On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:58:08 -0400
THOMAS HERRON <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hello -- hope springs eternal: C.S. Lewis and Ruskin in the NYT op-ed
>page
> (by David Brooks):
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22brooks.html?ref=opinion
>
> Sincerely, Thomas Herron
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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