Das grosse Sterben

The great dying. How the Viennese referred to the years 1896-99, with the deaths of Bruckner, Brahms, Johann Strauss II. The passing of an age.

1897 was a hinge year. The age of Lueger in the Rathaus and Mahler at the Hofoper began then. Hitler arrived in Vienna in early 1908 and stayed there until 1913. I did a post on Lueger a few days ago. Gavin Plumley has just done one at Entartete Musik.

The Great Transition

Peter Brown (currently at Princeton) reviews

Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th-9th Century), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 14-July 8.

I don’t know how I have missed other pieces by him recently in the New York Review of Books, but here is a list. He is one of the few historians whose collected works I’d consider for desert island reading.

“We have been taught to see late antiquity and [the early period of Islam] in exclusively religious terms. In the words of Finbarr Flood, the period has suffered from an ‘excessive focus on religiosity.’ Anna Ballian warns us not to assume that ‘religion permeated every aspect of medieval society and in importance far outweighed secular matters.’ For this was by no means the case. There was always room for a ‘religion of the world’ – a tenacious conviction that there was more to life than piety. There was also something thrilling and almost numinous about wealth, good health, and the gift of children.”

We look at Iran this way today. If you go there, there is also sensuality, and fun to be had. In a week in Tehran in 1994 I never even heard a call to prayer.

The exhibition covers some of the ground of Holland’s new book (April 25 post).

Unanimity in ubiquity

In the latter part of the second century of the Roman Empire’s existence, Saint Irenaeus of Lyon – a Christian Father who was an approximate contemporary of the pagan Greek man of letters Publius Aelius Aristeides [post] – was paying an implicit tribute to the Empire in extolling the unity of the Catholic Church throughout the Hellenic World.

“Having received this gospel and this faith, … the Church, in spite of her dispersal throughout the World, preserves these treasures as meticulously as if she were living under one single roof. She believes in these truths as unanimously as if she had only one soul and a single heart, and she preaches them and expounds them and hands them down as concordantly as if she had only one mouth. While the languages current in the World are diverse, the force of the [Church’s] [bracket in original] tradition is one and the same everywhere. There is no variety in the faith or in the tradition of the churches that have established themselves in the Germanies or in the Spains or among the Celts or in the East or in Egypt or in North-West Africa, or, again, of the churches that have established themselves at the World’s centre. Just as God’s creature the Sun is one and the same throughout the World, so likewise the Gospel of the Truth shows its light everywhere.” [Footnote: Irenaeus: Contra Haereses, Book II, chap. x, § 2 (Migne, J.-P.: Patrologia Graeca, vol. vii, cols. 552-3) [...].]

Irenaeus, a Greek, was aware of Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism. Others were in the future.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Ashoka’s missions

Açoka has left us a notice of the philosophic missions which he sent to the realms of five of Alexander’s successors in the second generation, but no record of his emissaries’ activities has come to us from their mission field, and, whatever their fortunes may have been, they made no discernible effect upon the history of Mankind. In seeking to propagate the philosophy of Siddhārtha Gautama beyond the western limits of his own Mauryan Peace, Açoka was unlucky in his generation, for the Achaemenian Peace, which had proved so conductive a medium for Judaism and Zoroastrianism, and had perhaps conveyed to the Hellenic World the Zoroastrian and Indic elements that are to be found in Orphism, had been broken up by force of Macedonian arms two generations before Açoka’s time, and the anarchy that racked the Syriac and Hellenic worlds, with little intermission, from this break-up of the Achaemenian Peace to the establishment of the Roman Peace was particularly unpropitious for missionary work.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Holland and Davies

Not a Jermyn Street shirt shop, but authors of two books I would like to read.

Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World, Little Brown, 2012 will get the same mass readership as his others: Rubicon, Persian Fire, Millennium. The Romano-Persian Endgame and the Birth of Islam could be an alternative subtitle.

Michael Scott, Telegraph: “‘Is it possible,’ [Holland] asks, ‘that Islam, far from originating outside the mainstream of ancient civilisation, was in truth a religion in the grand tradition of Judaism and Christianity – one bred of the very marrow of late antiquity?’” Well, yes. Is that controversial?

Contents of Norman Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, Allen Lane, 2011:

Tolosa: Sojourn of the Visigoths (AD 418-507)

Alt Clud: Kingdom of the Rock (Fifth to Twelfth Centuries)

Burgundia: Five, Six or Seven Kingdoms (c. 411-1795)

Aragon: A Mediterranean Empire (1137-1714)

Litva: A Grand Duchy with Kings (1253-1795)

Byzantion: The Star-lit Golden Bough (330-1453)

Borussia: Watery Land of the Prusai (1230-1945)

Sabaudia: The House that Humbert Built (1033-1946)

Galicia: Kingdom of the Naked and Starving (1773-1918)

Etruria: French Snake in the Tuscan Grass (1801-1814)

Rosenau: The Loved and Unwanted Legacy (1826-1918)

Tsernagora: Kingdom of the Black Mountain (1910-1918)

Rusyn: The Republic of One Day (15 March 1939)

Éire: The Unconscionable Tempo of the Crown’s Retreat since 1916

CCCP: The Ultimate Vanishing Act (1924-1991)

Ben Wilson, Telegraph.

Christian Socialism in Austria

“Christian Socialism was an attempt to touch pitch and not be defiled.”

AJP Taylor in the last post. 2 Corinthians 6:14.

Dr Karl Lueger and Christian Socialism

Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring in Vienna is renamed Universitätsring. BBC. In any German city, this would have happened decades ago.

Lueger was Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. Hitler paid tribute to him in Mein Kampf.

Lueger is pronounced Lu-eger, not Lüger.

Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Platz remains. So does the Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Gedächtniskirche (memorial church) in the Zentralfriedhof (central cemetery). There is sycophancy in these chains of hyphens.

AJP Taylor in The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918, Hamish Hamilton, 1948 edition:

“The ‘Austrian idea’ in its last version – an idea which in shaky form survived dynasty and Empire – was of Roman Catholic manufacture. The Christian Socialist party organised by Lueger was the first real attempt of the Church to go with the masses, more democratic – and more demagogic – than the Centre, its German counterpart. Christian Socialism appealed to the traditional clericalism of the peasant and yet freed the peasant from dependence on the landowner; more, despite the peasant’s hostility to the town, it brought the peasants into alliance with the shopkeepers and artisans who were threatened by the advance of great industry. In fact, the Christian Socialist party was the Austrian version of the Radical party in France (or even of Lloyd George radicalism in England), except that it worked with the Church instead of against it. It aimed to protect the ‘little man’ from limited companies and trade unions, from banks and multiple stores, and also from great estates and mechanised farming. It sought to divert the rising political passions into channels not dangerous to the Church: it was anti-liberal, anti-Jewish, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist. The leaders of the movement knew exactly what they were about: though they appealed to base passions, especially anti-Semitism, they supposed that they could always control the passions which they evoked. Lueger declared, ‘I decide who is a Jew,’ and firmly protected any Jew who kept clear of liberalism and Marxism. Seipel, a later leader, said of his party’s anti-Semitism: ‘That is for the gutter.’ He had no inkling that the gutter would one day murder his successor [Dollfuss]. Christian Socialism was an attempt to touch pitch and not be defiled. As the party of the ‘little man,’ it was Imperial ‘by appointment’; its supporters knew the value of the Archdukes’ custom. Traditional Austrians were at first shocked by the Christian Socialist demagogy; and, in the ’nineties Francis Joseph four times refused to confirm Lueger as Mayor of Vienna. In 1897 he was accepted; and the dynasty acknowledged that it had found a new ally.”

___

Mahler’s reign at the Hofoper was nearly coterminous with Lueger’s at the Rathaus: 1897-1907.

I learned at the tram stop shown in the BBC story, as it happens, of the death of Arnold Toynbee, through a copy of The Times that I bought at its kiosk on October 24 or 27 1975. “A great historian” was the obituary’s headline.

Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Gedächtniskirche; architect: Max Hegele; Flickr credit: elrina753

Degradation of Italian

Giovanni Caselli, an Italian historian, archaeologist and illustrator, offered a comment on the Italian language under yesterday’s post. I’d like to publish it again here. I have already posted his description of the modern Appian Way.

He writes about the substitution, since unification, of an impoverished “national” Italian, both spoken and written, for the old Tuscan/Florentine lingua franca. This happened all the more easily because there was no strong literary tradition in much of Italy to offer resistance.

Giovanni’s summary is broad-brush, but it is interesting. We are used to the phrase “loss of wisdom” to describe a consequence of the disappearance of minor languages. Here, it refers to a consequence of the decay of a major language. (By major language, I mean the language of an advanced culture in which important literature has been written.)

I have added some links.

___

“Italy is a nation state and one may speak about a nation called Italy. To speak historically about ‘the Italians’, one must qualify, and explain which Italians one is speaking of.

But since the introduction of television in Italy exactly [?] half a century ago, there has been a loss of regional identity, and no national identity has [ever] been achieved except in a negative sense. All that may have been regarded as good and positive about the Italians as described by the Grand Tour writers has been lost, whereas all that is generally regarded as bad has become part of the national character.

With mass immigration into Italy from Albania and Romania in particular, the Italians (speaking of whatever national identity has been achieved) have gained further negative traits. The former dictatorships of Eastern Europe, and particularly those countries where the highest peak of civilization had been reached under the Ottoman Empire, have lost most of their positive cultural traits, and paradoxically their ways are emulated or copied by the Italians (still in the sense expressed above).

The only region in Italy that has a history of literature is Tuscany. The Italian language from the 14th century to the 19th century was in fact Tuscan or Florentine. Since unification there has been a reaction against this cultural supremacy, and a hybrid language has gradually been introduced, especially since television. 70-80% of the vocabulary has become obsolete, since people from outside Tuscany would not understand such words. Paradoxically, upwards of 40% of the entries in the Italian equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary consists of words no longer used by anyone. They have been replaced by less specific terms or by foreign words. Example: chiocciola (snail) has been relegated to the description of a spiral staircase only, it no longer means a snail. This animal is called a lumaca (slug). When I look at a menu and see the word lumaca, I feel like leaving, my stomach is upset. Since language is the instrument for thought, one can imagine the loss of thinking ability and the loss of wisdom which has occurred in the process of language degradation which is taking place in Italy.

I must mention an exception: Sicily, where brilliant writers such as Bufalino, Sciascia and Camilleri have boosted the language of Sicily, which is one of the places of origin of the Italian ‘vernacular’. [Giovanni has explained the Sicilian role in the development of Italian vernacular in an email to me. I hope to summarise some of this in a post soon.] Their Italian has successfully reclaimed some of the Sicilian syntax and vocabulary. Modern Italian writers outside Sicily fall into two categories, obligatory for any success with the tiny population of readers in the country: on the one hand are writers with a vocabulary as thin as a notebook, and a high percentage of totally misunderstood English words, and on the other are potentially good writers who do not dare to use 80% of their own vocabulary and must copy the others since they would not otherwise be understood. One of the reasons why Italians don’t read – they may buy some books occasionally, but they don’t read them – is the fact that Italian writing is tedious.

The bottom line is: When a people or a population denies its own culture – a regionally-based peasant culture in the case of Italy – it will end up with no culture at all. Italy is a nation of conspicuous consumers (see Veblen) and not a nation of proletarians like our President said he wanted it to be when he was a Stalinist.”

Migrating words

Schadenfreude is an English word, wellness a German one.

Siegfried Idyll

Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI, Turin, June 6 1952

Fields and chimneys, 1902

Accrington vs Church cricket match, Saturday, July 5 1902, filmed by Mitchell and Kenyon in their usual high definition

Cotton mills.

The Lancashire Cricket League had been formed in 1892.

FDR’s inauguration

Franklin D Roosevelt’s inauguration was the last to take place in March.

In terms of facilities for human intercourse no point in the Oikoumenê was so remote from Washington in A.D. 1952 as Georgia and New Hampshire had been when, in A.D. 1792, [footnote] the Congress of the United States had provided for a four months’ delay in the inauguration of a President after the election of his electors [in November], in order to give the successful candidate the time that he would need for winding up his affairs at home and making his way to the seat of the Federal Government on horseback.

Wouldn’t it have been more to the point to say Georgia and Massachusetts? The footnote says:

In an Act approved on the 1st March, 1792, the Congress of the United States laid down that the members of the Electoral College, provided in the Constitution (Art. II, § 1, par. 2) for electing the President, should themselves be elected on the Tuesday following the first Monday in the November of a presidential election year, and that the term of office of the President elected by the Electoral College should run from “the fourth day of March next succeeding” the date of election. The initial date of the President’s term of office was eventually advanced from the 4th March to the 20th January by the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, which was proclaimed on the 6th February, 1933 – a date by which the United States had moved out of the Horse Age through the Railroad Age into the Air Age.

The music at the beginning is, of course, Hail to the Chief. It is hard to imagine a more American-sounding tune, but it was originally a setting by an Englishman, James Sanderson, of Scott’s verse for a theatrical version in London, c 1812, of The Lady of the Lake.

In 1815 the tune alone was played, under the name Wreaths for the Chieftain, at a ceremony honouring George Washington and commemorating the War of 1812. Later, new lyrics were written in America, but it is rarely sung.

The Star-Spangled Banner was also originally an English song, with a tune by John Stafford Smith.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

Franklin D Roosevelt, inaugural address, March 4 1933.

Tyler Cowen quotes Jonathan Mead on getting things done.

“The hardest part is often just starting. I’ve found that it’s especially hard for me to start when a task is difficult or complex. The more importance and weight a certain activity has in my life or business, the more I seem to put off starting.

However, if I can just get moving on it, even for a few minutes, it tends to get easier.

Because I know this about myself, rather than setting the intention to finish something, I resolve myself to start. The more often I start, the easier things get finished. Overcoming that first bit of inertia is the biggest challenge (just like getting started on a run, or the first push of getting a car moving).

Once things are moving, momentum is on your side.”

Mead’s point is an everyday illustration of Roosevelt’s. There is more.

Which famous English novelist wrote a book on time management? Arnold Bennett, with his How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

Great elementary things

“The mind refers naturally to the beauty of the great elementary things – the sky, the sunshine, and the hills, rivers, fields, and trees; and in people to those things which suggest beauty, activity, and health. We all have a longing for the perfect things.”

___

George Clausen, from Taste, in Aims and Ideals in Art, second series of Royal Academy lectures, Methuen, 1906.

The government you deserve

“Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite” (de Maistre, J.: Lettres et Opuscules Inédits (Paris 1851, Vaton), vol. i, p. 215, 15th August, 1811).

Joseph de Maistre was a Savoyard philosopher and from 1803 to 1816 Sardinia’s ambassador to Tsar Alexander I. The Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, including Savoy, was under French occupation until 1815 and sent this anti-revolutionary, pro-Church emissary to Russia.

De Maistre wrote the letter in St Petersburg. It is about the possibility of constitutional change in Russia. The phrase Pougatscheff d’université in it means nihilist. In the 1873 Vaton edition I have seen, it is addressed “A M. le chevalier de …”. I don’t know whether we know from the context of the collection who he is.

Joseph de Maistre’s brother Xavier, a military man, arrived in Russia before him and stayed after the overthrow of Napoleon.

Their descendant Xavier de Maistre (born 1973) is a harpist.

Haydn, Piano Concerto in D major, Hob XVIII: 11, c 1780-83, arranged by?, first movement, Bertrand de Billy, ORF Radiosinfonieorchester Wien, Schloss Esterházy, Eisenstadt, 2009

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

Abandoned roads

The roads built by the British authorities in the Ionian Islands during the British protectorate of 1815-64 have been partly abandoned, or at least they have considerably deteriorated, since the termination of the British connexion and the incorporation of the islands into the Kingdom of Greece. And the same fate has overtaken the roads that were built by the Allied Armies in Greek Macedonia in 1916-18, and by a British force in Eastern Persia (to the Persian city of Mashhad from the British-Indian rail-head in Baluchistan) during the same years.

The Ionian Islands were successively Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Napoleonic French, British and Greek. Mashhad is the second largest city in Iran and the only major Iranian city with an Arabic name.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Pevsner on England

Talking about Germans and Austrians in England (post before last), below, in three stages, is Nikolaus Pevsner – who became the learned authority on the Buildings of England for the post-war owners and occupiers of the buildings and for car-drivers and other explorers of the countryside – talking about Constable and English ideas of landscape in the penultimate of his 1955 BBC Reith Lectures.

“Outdoor life [...] required moderate weather: too warm not to want to be outdoors, too cool to be idle outdoors. Hence sports, hence gardening. And surely such weather turns up for some time on nearly every day in England, however much moisture there may be in the atmosphere, lying in wait to condense into rain and to drip off your sandwiches which you have taken to enjoy the sunshine on top of Bowfell or the Gog Magogs or Porlock Hill.” Hence, one could say, exploring England with your Pevsner.

His Reith lectures were called The Englishness of English Art. They are fairly demanding for radio, unless you know the artists. You can hear all of them here, but we really need a YouTube illustrated version. There is an illustrated book.

The Geography of Art

Hogarth and Observed Life

Reynolds and Detachment

Perpendicular England

Blake and the Planing Line

Constable and the Pursuit of Nature

Architecture and Planning: The Functional Approach

Alexander Cozens as the first abstract expressionist. Impressionists in the 1860s?

I associate Pevsner with the early post-war years. A certain exiguousness in those years suited the style of English country houses, but encouraged an unhealthy preference for the threadbare, for buckets catching leaks, over the vulgarity of a place “done up”. A fear developed that doing a place up to modern standards would urbanise it, make it turn in on itself, alienate it from the landscape.

Over-restoration, the removal of the effects of time on buildings, is, in fact, a German habit. Perhaps Pevsner enjoyed rural England’s comparative immunity from it.

Urban buildings can also lose their history. When the oldest restaurant in London, Rules, installed halogen “downlighting”, it immediately lost all its feeling of age. It is hard to say why that small change seemed such a serious offence against history, but it did.

This blog on the Reith Lectures generally: work back from here. On Toynbee’s 1952 Reith Lectures: go here and here, but there will be more from them.

Glenny on Germany

Very good first part of a three-part BBC radio series on Germany by Misha Glenny. On BBC iPlayer permanently.

People got to know Glenny in the ’90s for his journalism on the breakup of Yugoslavia, but he’s a full-fledged historian.

Schama meets Hobsbawm

Simon Schama talks to the 94-year old Eric Hobsbawm at Hobsbawm’s house in Hampstead. At BBC iPlayer until April 21.

When I was growing up, there was much more of this kind of thing on BBC radio, because more of these educated central Europeans, exiles and children of exiles, were still living. They lent a certain flavour to postwar English life, and to the BBC itself, as staff and as subjects. Many lived in Hampstead. Hobsbawm and Alfred Brendel must be the last two still there. I lived for a time in my twenties in part of the Hampstead house of one of them, Fred Uhlman.

Geometry of limbs

in French classicism.

Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego (The Shepherds of Arcadia), late 1630s, Louvre

David, Leonidas at Thermopylae, 1814, Louvre

First image Wikimedia Commons, second (the Commons version is excessively photoshopped) from analepsis.wordpress.com

Ritual, reason and revelation

In the encounter between a dawning philosophy and a traditional paganism there had been no problem of reconciling Heart and Head because there had been no common ground on which the two organs could have come into collision. The pith of Primitive Religion is not belief but action, and the test of conformity is not assent to a theological creed but participation in ritual performances. For the vast majority of the faithful, the correct and alert execution of their ritual duties is the alpha and omega of Religion; primitive religious practice is an end in itself, and it does not occur to the practitioners to look, beyond the rites which they perform, for a truth which these rites convey. The truth is that the rites have no meaning beyond the practical effect which their correct execution is believed to have upon the human performers’ social and physical environment. The so-called “aetiological myths”, which purport to explain a traditional practice’s historical origin, are not taken as statements concerning matter[s] of fact that can be labelled “true” or “false”; they are taken in the spirit in which, in a more sophisticated state of society, a child takes a fairy-story or a grown-up person takes poetry. Accordingly, when, in this primitive religious setting, philosophers arise who do set out to make a chart of Man’s environment in intellectual terms to which the labels “true” and “false” apply, no collision occurs so long as the philosopher continues to carry out his hereditary religious duties – and there can be nothing in his philosophy to inhibit him from doing this, because there is nothing in the traditional rites that could be incompatible with any philosophy.

Awkward situations do, no doubt, occasionally arise, as when, in a ritually conservative Athens, the intellectually adventurous Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (vivebat 500-428 B.C.) got into trouble for having made public his opinion that the heavenly bodies were not living gods but inanimate material objects. A more celebrated case was the prosecution, conviction, and judicial murder of Socrates by his Athenian fellow countrymen in 399 B.C. on three charges, [footnote: Plato: Apologia Socratis, 24 B.] of which the second was that Socrates did not pay due worship to the gods who were the official objects of worship at Athens, and the third was that he paid worship to other divinities who were strange gods. Yet it may be doubted whether legal proceedings involving Anaxagoras would have been taken, some twenty years after the Clazomenian philosopher had ceased to reside in Athens, if these had not served the current political purpose of “smearing” Pericles; and it may equally be doubted whether Socrates would have suffered the death-penalty that Anaxagoras escaped if Socrates’ attitude towards religion had been all that his enemies had had against him. Socrates was – and remained to the last – a scrupulous performer of his ritual duties; and, on the religious counts, Aristophanes’ malicious caricature of him in The Clouds might have remained the limit of the penalty exacted from him, if he had not also been under fire in 399 B.C. on another count – the political charge of “corrupting the young” – which, significantly, figured first in the indictment. Socrates was the victim, not so much of conservative Athenian religious fanaticism, as of democratic Athenian resentment over the final defeat of Athens in the long-drawn-out Atheno-Peloponnesian war and democratic Athenian vindictiveness towards a fascist-minded Athenian minority who had seized the opportunity opened to them by the discrediting of the democratic régime through military defeat in order to overthrow the democratic constitution. Socrates’ past personal association with Critias, the moving spirit among “the Thirty Tyrants”, was the offence that the restored democratic régime could neither forget nor forgive. It was Politics, not Religion, that cost Socrates his life.

Where the issue was not confused, as it was in Socrates’ case, by political animus, Philosophy and Primitive Religion encountered one another without colliding. The death of Socrates was an exception to a rule of which the life of Confucius was a classical example. Confucius reconciled a conservative reverence for the traditional rites of primitive Sinic religion with a new moral philosophy of his own making by presenting his personal ideas as the meaning which the rites had been intended to convey. Fortunately for himself, Confucius found no Sinic Critias to be his political pupil in his own lifetime; and – thanks to this failure, which was the great disappointment of his life – he died peacefully in his bed. Confucius’s attitude and experience were characteristic of the normal relations between Philosophy and Primitive Religion; but a new situation arose when the higher religions came on the scene.

The higher religions did, indeed, sweep up and carry along with them a heavy freight of traditional rites that happened to be current in the religious milieux in which the new faiths made their first appearance; but this religious flotsam was not, of course, their essence. The distinctive new feature of the higher religions was that they based their claim to allegiance, and their test of conformity, on personal revelations received by their prophets; [footnote: This was true in some degree in practice even if not in theory of the “Indistic” higher religions as well as the “Judaistic”. Ipse dixit came to be a criterion of truth, not only for the followers of Jesus and Muhammad, but also for the followers of Siddhārtha Gautama and of the philosophic prophets of a post-Buddhaic Hinduism.] and these deliveries of the prophets were presented, like the propositions of the philosophers, as statements of fact, to be labelled either “true” or “false”. Therewith, Truth became a disputed mental territory; for thenceforward there were two independent authorities – on the one hand prophetic Revelation and on the other hand philosophical or scientific Reason – each of which claimed sovereign jurisdiction over the Intellect’s whole field of action; and, when once the hypothesis that the spheres of Revelation and Reason were even partially coincident had been accepted – and both parties did accept this as axiomatic – it became impossible for Reason and Revelation to live and let live on the auspicious precedent of the amicable symbiosis of Reason and Ritual. “There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that Truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.” [Footnote: Gosse, E.: Father and Son, chap. 5.] In this new and excruciating situation, there were only two alternative possibilities. Either the two rival exponents of a supposedly one and indivisible Truth must convert their rivalry into a partnership by agreeing that their expositions were mutually consistent, or, finding themselves unable to agree, they must decide the ownership of an apparently unpartitionable disputed territory in an ordeal by battle that would have to be fought out until one or other party had been driven right off the field.

The Hellenic world and China have been the only two places where advanced philosophy has preceded “higher religion” (if we regard the Vedic origins of Hinduism as belonging to that category).

Where did the conflict occur in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions? Is there even a serious gulf between philosophical/scientific and religious thought in the Indian tradition? In Hinduism, revelation is implied in the terms Apaurusheyatva and Śruti. Can one speak of revelation in Buddhism?

Anaxagoras, young crater near the lunar north pole

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

London – Hong Kong

Mark Wright, who has “a soft spot for Asia”, sets off tomorrow, Saturday, April 14, 10.30 am from Buckingham Palace to cycle alone to Hong Kong. According to his site, he will pass through

France

Belgium

the Netherlands

Germany

Austria

Slovenia

Croatia

Montenegro

Macedonia

Greece

Turkey

Iran

Turkmenistan

Uzbekistan

Kyrgyzstan

China.

You can’t go from Montenegro to Macedonia without passing through either Albania or Kosovo.

___

Support him at Breast Cancer Care.

Follow his blog. I envy him the experience.

Mark Wright at Facebook.

Leone Caetani

“Certainly Muhammad was guilty of errors, some of which were involuntary, but others not; besides these, he also perpetrated not a few acts that would be classified by us to-day as common crimes inspired by the basest of human passions; but it will be the task of future generations of historical critics to elucidate how far, in all this, the Prophet’s personal responsibility is engaged, and to what extent his acts are, on the contrary, to be regarded as being an impersonal expression of the specific conditions of a society that was still in a primitive stage of development. Our own belief is that the errors and defects discernible in the Prophet, and in the religious system that he created, are to be attributed to the society in which he lived. To this society Muhammad was superior in many respects, but in others he was its native child and, as such, was necessarily a party to all its vices, imperfections and prejudices.” [Footnote: Caetani, L.: Studi di Storia Orientale, vol. iii (Milan 1914, Hoepli), p. 295.]

Words which do not quite square with “but others not”.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Fleeting contacts

The contact of China with [...] medieval Western Christendom during the brief period when the Mongol universal state extended continuously from the coasts of China to the coasts of the Black Sea and the Baltic was a curiosity of history which, like Alexander’s raid on India, had no lasting effect.

This refers to Alexander’s crossing of the Indus. His effect on the right bank of the Indus was lasting, and his Bactrian successor Demetrius made a more lasting impact in northwest India.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)

D 960

Alex Ross posts this collage by nnamffohsaile of various pianists playing the opening of Schubert’s D 960 sonata, arranged “approximately in order of ascending strangeness”. It stays with Maria Judina at the end. The first, Brendel in 1971, is the recording I grew up with.

The Toynbee convector: Criticism

I have clarified (rather than corrected) the page listing critical articles about Toynbee.

Ignatius’s prayer

The surrender of Man’s will to God was the first and last commandment of a religion whose Founder had chosen this watchword to be its name; and islām was offered for love’s sake in the prayer of Saint Ignatius Loyola:

“Suscipe, Domine, universam meam libertatem; accipe memoriam, intellectum et voluntatem omnem. Quidquid habeo vel possideo, mihi largitus es; id tibi totum restituo, ac tuae prorsus voluntati trado gubernandum. Amorem tui solum cum gratiâ tuâ mihi dones, et dives sum satis, nec aliud quidquam ultra posco.”

[Footnote: In The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, edited by Rickaby, S. J., Joseph (London 1915, Burns & Oates), p. 209, the original Spanish text is given with the following English translation:

“Tomad, Señor, y recibid toda mi libertad, mi memoria, mi entendimiento, y toda mi voluntad, todo mi haber y mi poseer: vos me lo distes; á vos, Señor, io torno, todo es vuestro, disponed á toda vuestra voluntad. Dadme vuestro amor y gracia, que esta mi basta.”

“Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will, all I have and possess: you have given it to me; to you, O Lord, I return it; all is yours; dispose of it entirely according to your will. Give me your love and grace, because that is enough for me.”]

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The significant experience

In the encounter between the world and the West that has been going on by now for four or five hundred years, the world, not the West, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the West; and that is why, in the title of this book, the world has been put first.

The World and the West, OUP, 1953

Outdoor and indoor

The Christian Church is indebted for its very name to the technical term employed, in the city-state of Athens, to denote the general assembly of the citizen-body when it was meeting to transact political, as distinct from judicial, business [...] [footnote: When the “outdoor” Hellenic Civilization gave place to the “indoor” Orthodox and Western Christian civilizations, the word ecclesia, in its local meaning, came to be applied, not only to the local Christian community, but to the parochial building in which it assembled for congregational worship.]

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Musical signature

The word “Brahms” sounds like one of his own final chords. “Klemperer” is like a clap of thunder.

Der Rosenkavalier ends with a flourish, a miniature coda, which is in effect Strauss’s signature. If I were directing it, I’d choreograph this scene so that Mohammed, the Marschallin’s black page, enters stage left and, running around to retrieve the lost handkerchief, describes the letters RS on the stage before exiting on the right. Hasn’t anyone done that?

Tragic Overture

Brahms. Klemperer, Philharmonia.

Very light soil

The nineteenth-century diplomatists’ idea of a desert was that it was a region of no economic or political value because it was incapable of supporting life. Accordingly, while they were prepared to haggle, and, in the last resort, to go to war, over a few square metres in Alsace or Oregon, they amicably partitioned the Arabian Desert and the African Sahara by blithely drawing straight lines of enormous length across small-scale maps. In this cavalier way they disposed of the sovereignty over vast areas which, in the atlases of the day, were the “perfect and absolute blank” commended as the ideal kind of map by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. During the late-nineteenth century partition of Africa between European states there was an occasion on which Lord Salisbury – under fire in the House of Commons at Westminster for having acquiesced in the annexation of startling numbers of African square kilometres by France – made the celebrated reply that most of this territory that he had let slip [in essence, Niger] was “very light soil”. Some of it, however, was the soil under which the French oil-prospectors have recently discovered what they believe to be rich oil-bearing strata; and the time has long ago passed when diplomatists negotiating international frontiers in either the Sahara or Arabia were carefree. The desert-girt Buraymi oasis is at this moment an object of acrimonious dispute between the governments of Saʿudi Arabia and Great Britain. The “idea formed” of a desert has in fact been transformed – in regions in which deserts overlie an oil-bearing subsoil – by the late-nineteenth century discovery of the economic value of mineral oil and the twentieth-century development of techniques for tapping it at ever greater depths below surface-level. The Arabian desert is just as inhospitable to life today as it ever was, yet it has now become a key part of the environment of the peoples of Western Europe.

In the agreement of 1890, the town of Say, in southwest Niger, was taken as the western end of an imaginary line which ran eastward to Barrua on Lake Chad. This is roughly the border between Nigeria and Niger. The “light soil” of the Sahara was recognised as French.

Niger has oil, but if you look at all the countries which once formed the colonial federation of French West Africa (1895-1960) – Mauritania, Mali (French Sudan), Niger, Senegal, Guinea (French Guinea), Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Benin (Dahomey) – none, even today, whether of light or heavy soil, is a significant producer. In 1890, the industrialised world was getting its oil from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Azerbaijan, the US, Canada, not yet from Iran or Iraq, much less from the area now comprising the GCC.

The Buraymi oasis, or Al Buraimi, is in Oman, at the border with Abu Dhabi. The dispute arose from Saudi Arabia’s claim, first made in 1949, of sovereignty over a large part of Abu Dhabi where oil was suspected to be present and an area in a 20-mile circle around Buraymi. Both Oman and the Trucial States were British protectorates.

The Saudi claim was backed by the American oil company Aramco. In 1952 a small group of Saudi Arabian guards crossed Abu Dhabi and occupied Hamasa, one of three Omani villages in the oasis. The Sultan of Muscat and Imam of Oman gathered their forces to expel them but were persuaded by the British, who were no doubt under American pressure, to exercise restraint.

On July 30 1954, it was agreed to refer the dispute to international arbitration. Saudi Arabia began a campaign of bribery to obtain declarations of tribal loyalty. It even extended to Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahayan, the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi (he overthrew him in 1966), who is said to have turned down an offer of $20 million. In 1955 arbitration proceedings began in Geneva. They collapsed when the British abitrator, Sir Reader Bullard, objected to Saudi attempts to influence the tribunal. A few weeks later, the Saudi party was forcibly ejected from Hamasa by the Trucial Oman Levies (later known as the Trucial Oman Scouts), a British-backed force based in Sharjah (Trucial States), taken to Sharjah and dispatched to Saudi Arabia by sea. The dispute rumbled on and was settled in 1974 by an agreement, known as the Treaty of Jeddah, between Sheikh Zayed (then President of the UAE) and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.

1961, Lance Corporal (later General) Saif Bin Mubarak sends morse code on a Trucial Oman Scouts dhow; Flickr credit: laponik

A Study of History, Vol XII: Reconsiderations, OUP, 1961

~~~

Back April 10.

Mount Kenya

Good Friday

And some Easter sheep

The Gospel according to St Matthew

Pasolini, 1964.

Missa Luba

Arranged by Father Guido Haazen, 1958 or earlier. Recorded 1965.

I suppose one should dedicate an Easter hearing to Fabrice Muamba.

’20s and ’30s

From an old post:

The horse-crowded streets of enchanted late-Victorian and Edwardian London had been full of swaggering energy. The streets of the ’30s were also noisy and busy, but in a mechanical, less muscular way, and it was a great age of style in signage, tube stations, posters, shop fronts, the smooth shapes of cars and buses. In the ’20s, on the other hand, the vehicles are still a bit rickety and rackety and square and there’s an in-between feeling: the animals and the pre-war commercial raucousness have left the streets, but no evolved visual modernity has yet taken their place.

Silent movie streetscapes.

Barbirolli on pre-1914 London

Only the first one minute, eleven seconds. This is the first of three YouTube clips, together lasting half an hour, in which John Barbirolli talks to CB Rees in 1960. The sequence is a filler on a CD of his recording of Mahler 3 with the Hallé in the BBC Legends series.

Below, Barbirolli rehearsing, obsessively, the scherzo of Bruckner 7 with the Hallé at the beginning (first few minutes of this first clip of seven) of a 1965 television film for the BBC Monitor series, narrated by Huw Wheldon. We have met Wheldon already here narrating a couple of early films by Ken Russell.

Barbirolli’s 1964 EMI Mahler 9 with the Berlin Philharmonic is a marvellous recording. The third appearance of the “weak heart” motif, the first thing you hear in the symphony (it’s followed by a vaguely Chinese row of four notes), in the latter part of the first movement, is the most shattering sound on record.

“There are no bad orchestras, only bad conductors.”

He was a wonderful Haydn conductor. The last few minutes of the third clip of the Rees talk, not shown here, give an impression of his dedication to his craft. (Is the photograph Barbirolli? It looks more like Tippett.) His music sometimes suffered, towards the end, from the same thing that (sometimes) undermined Bernstein’s: excessive love and care.

A life in London

Enchanted London

The last year of the Horse Age

Theodosius I

Adrian Murdoch’s Emperors of Rome reached Theodosius (ruled 379-95), the last ruler of a united Roman Empire and contemporary of St Ambrose, last week. After Theodosius, East and West go nominally separate ways. Adrian is staying West.

Theodosius proscribes all non-Christian religions except Judaism, abolishes the Olympic Games and makes Nicene orthodoxy the state religion. The Goths secure the hold south of the Danube which they had won at Adrianople in 378. After his reign, the Roman Empire begins to disintegrate in the West.

In the last chapter of the history of the Roman Empire, which may be taken, for this purpose, as having begun with the death of the Emperor Theodosius the Great in A.D. 395, [footnote: [...] the year 378, which saw the overthrow of the Roman infantry by the Gothic cavalry at Adrianople, is perhaps a better conventional date for signalizing the end of the Pax Romana. [...]] there had been, at first, a notable differentiation in the fortunes of the Hellenic universal state in its Latin provinces on the one hand and in its Greek and Oriental provinces on the other. In the Latin provinces there had been an immediate financial, political, and social collapse; the framework of the Empire had broken up and disappeared, and the political vacuum had been occupied by the automatically emancipated proprietors of great agricultural estates and leaders of powerful barbarian war-bands, while the Church had stepped into the social breach. Meanwhile, in an age which thus saw the dissolution of the Empire in the West, the Imperial régime in the Greek and Oriental provinces succeeded in riding one after another of the waves by which its counterpart in the Latin provinces was being broken up. [Footnote: See Bury, J. B.: “Causes of the Survival of the Roman Empire in the East”, reprinted from The Quarterly Review, vol. cxcii, No. 383, pp. 146-55, in Selected Essays of J. B. Bury (Cambridge 1930, University Press).]

On the admission by Theodosius of Goths into the army:

Theodosius tipped the hazardous balance in the post-Diocletianic Roman Army in the barbarians’ favour. [Footnote: See Zosimus: Book IV, chaps. xxx and xxxi, cited by Grosse, op. cit., p. 260.] [Grosse, R.: Römische Militärgeschichte von Gallienus bis zum Beginn der Byzantinischen Themenverfassung (Berlin 1920, Weidman).] He drafted them into the Roman regular formations in a ratio so high as to produce a break in the Roman military tradition and discipline. [Footnote: The effect, according to Zosimus, chap. xxxi, §§ 1-2, was a dissolution of military discipline and a breakdown of the system of registering effectives [soldiers fit and available for service] – with the result that the professed “deserters” from barbarian tribes beyond the Roman imperial limes who had been registered as serving soldiers in the Roman regular army took to going home, sending substitutes to fill their places, and falling into the ranks again whenever it took their fancy.] The disastrous consequences are reflected in Vegetius’s picture [footnote: cited as evidence by Grosse, op. cit., p. 261.] of the Army going to pieces. The troops can no longer be induced to submit to training, [footnote: Vegetius: Book I, chaps. 20 and 28. Compare Book I, chap. 26, Book II, chaps. 18 and 24, and many other passages.] drill, [footnote: Ibid.: Book I, chap. 8.] or assaults at arms; [footnote: Ibid., chaps, 11, 12, and 18.] they are unwilling to carry burdens; [footnote: Ibid., chap. 19.] they are slack in the performance of their military duty in general; [footnote: Ibid.: Book III, chap. 8.] and they are unwilling to undertake the hard labour of fortifying camps. [Footnote: Ibid.: Book I, chap. 21; Book III, chap. 10.] “The Roman Army had ceased to exist. It had never succumbed to the Germans; it had simply been supplanted by them.” [Footnote: Grosse, op. cit., p. 262.]

The Roman Army, and consequently the Roman Empire itself, was thus confronted, by Theodosius’s ill-judged abandonment of all restrictions on the admission of barbarian recruits, with the imminent threat of a barbarian ascendancy. This doom was not accepted by the Roman element in the Army without a struggle; but, while the Roman reaction was ubiquitous, the results were quite different in different sections of the Empire. In the East and Centre the untoward effects of Theodosius’s error were reversed in the nick of time, while in the West the vantage surrendered by him to the barbarians was not, in the end, retrieved.

He traces the story in east and west. Does he place too much emphasis on the re-hellenisation of the army in the East as a factor in the survival of the most important provinces of the Eastern Empire over the next two centuries?

On religion:

The terms “Catholic Christian” and “Roman citizen” [had become] almost interchangeable. [...]

It is significant that this sinister departure from the Constantinian modus vivendi between Christianity and Paganism was made in A.D. 382, four years after the Roman military disaster at Adrianople, and that the author of the new militant policy was Theodosius I, who was striving to save the Empire from immediate dissolution. When the news of the great catastrophe of A.D. 378 reverberated through the Roman World, a panic-stricken population – faced with an imminent prospect of seeing the familiar secular social framework of its life fall in ruins about its ears – instinctively closed its ranks round the standard of an oecumenical religious organization that gave promise of being able to weather the storm; and this flustered majority turned with savage resentment upon a minority of archaistic-minded grandees and backward peasants who, as the rest of Mankind saw it, were wantonly thwarting Mankind’s one hope of social as well as spiritual salvation.

Pagan opposition expressed itself first in

a […] constitutional struggle over an altar and statue of Victory (A.D. 382-94) [footnote: The altar and statue of Victory were removed from the Senate House at Rome by the orders of the Emperor Gratian in A.D. 382; and this act – which was intended to be, and was taken as being, symbolic – moved the cultivated pagan aristocracy of the capital to protest with all the vigour that was compatible with their loyalty to the Imperial Government. The last petition for restitution was rejected in A.D. 394. The statue had been brought to Rome from Tarentum and set up in the Curia Julia by Caius Julius Caesar.] and finally in a military pronunciamiento – engineered by the pagan Frankish mercenary Arbogastes – in which the Christian soldier-emperor Theodosius’s title to the Imperial office was audaciously disputed by the pagan professor of literature Eugenius (A.D. 392-4).

Eugenius was, in fact, nominally a Christian, but he defended paganism. The Church also stood up to Theodosius.

The insistence of Ambrose that Theodosius the Great should do public penance for the sin of the Salonica Massacre was [...] a magnificent display of clerical courage which happened to be crowned with success.

In 390 the population of Thessalonica had rioted against the presence of the local Gothic garrison. The garrison commander was killed. Theodosius ordered the Goths to kill all the spectators in the circus as retaliation. St Ambrose threatened him with excommunication and told Theodosius to imitate David in his repentance as he had imitated him in guilt (story of Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite). He readmitted him to the Eucharist after several months of penance. Toynbee compares Ambrose’s principled interference in a matter of state with similar interventions by John Chrysostom under Theodosius’s successor in the east, Arcadius.

There is more in other volumes.

Anthony van Dyck, St Ambrose Forbids Theodosius to Enter Milan Cathedral, London, National Gallery; the story is told by Theodoret

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

The City

“You said: ‘I’ll go to another country,
go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried
as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years,
wasted them, destroyed them totally.’

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets,
grow old in the same neighbourhoods,
will turn grey in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city.
Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.”

___

The City, from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, translators; George Savidis, editor, CP Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1992, at cavafy.com.

I have split the lines in the original beginning “You said”, “and my heart”, “where I’ve spent”, “the same streets” and “You will always” into two to make them fit here, and have anglicised the spelling.

Walls

“With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind –
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!]
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.]”

___

Walls, from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, translators; George Savidis, editor, CP Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1992, at cavafy.com.

Che fece … il gran rifiuto

“For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes forward in honour and self-assurance.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he would still say no. Yet that no – the right no –
undermines him all his life.”

___

Che fece … il gran rifiuto, from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, translators; George Savidis, editor, CP Cavafy, Collected Poems, revised edition, Princeton University Press, 1992, at cavafy.com. Spelling anglicised.

The title is from Dante, Inferno, Canto III:

“Poscia ch’io v’ebbi alcun riconosciuto,
vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colui
che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto.”

Longfellow’s translation:

“When some among them I had recognized,
I looked, and I beheld the shade of him
Who made through cowardice the great refusal.”