Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey

Rome 2: Odysseus, Prufrock, and the Philosopher’s Cave

Invocations - The Half-Deserted Streets - The Philosopher’s Cave

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Invocations

Odysseus gave his offering to the world below so he could talk to the dead. Virgil followed in his footsteps and found the underground city of Dis, as well as the jilted Dido standing silent and unforgiving in a grove of trees. Dante made his journey across the Acheron and the swampy Styx, the boiling blood of the Phlegethon and the icy Cocytus. He saw the pitch lake of the Malebranche devils and he saw Satan frozen in the ice. He then rode on Beatrice’s coat-tails into the nine circles of Heaven, and watched, as his human eyes saw more than they could understand. He did what one of his characters tells him is impossible — giammai di questo fondo / never from this abyss / Non torno vivo alcun / Has anyone ever returned alive — and lived to tell the tale.

Or, at least, he said he did.

Prufrock, inheriting the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante, imagines that he too might uncover the secrets of this life and the next. His journey is even prefaced with a direct reference to the abyss from which non torno vivo alcun / no one has returned. But Prufrock’s a Modern man, worried about the bald spot on his head and about the arms of women, “braceleted and white and bare / [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]. However much he would invoke the gods, or see himself as a sage or prophet, he knows that he doesn’t know enough and can’t see deeply enough. Although he imagines an epic journey to the afterlife, he knows that he can’t escape being a plaything of Death:

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

In the first stanza, Prufrock intends to take his readers on a Dantean journey to the depths of Heaven and Hell, yet he leads us instead into “half-deserted streets” that highlight both the lofty aim of the epic and the deflating reality of the Modern Age. He takes us into

Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

What, you wonder, if any, is the danger of asking too many questions? And can you believe the answers once you get them? Or would it be better to accept the impossibility of questions, pre-empting them with the assertion that nobody knows the answers? And yet, to be truly skeptical, don’t you need to be skeptical of skepticism as well? You may not know the answers, but someone else might.

So, you raise your glass to the night air of the Campo dei Fiori, and hope that the ancient philosophers, the gods, Mary, Saraswati, or whoever circles in the wide heavens, will grace you with words of wisdom. You think of Plato and Augustine, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, Socrates and Heraclitus. But above you looms the statue of Giordano Bruno, and behind you looms the shadows of Prufrock, which is to say, the shadows of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the crushing conclusion of evolution, cuneiform, genetics, X-rays and the Modern world.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

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The Half-Deserted Streets

You stumble out of the restaurant and onto the cobbled streets. You’re determined to follow the lines you drew on your map, from the statue of Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori, to Piazza Navona, to the Trevi Fountain, to the Forum, and back to Bruno.

In Piazza Navona you imagine the Roman racecourse beneath you, the hoofs clattering on the dark stones. At the Trevi Fountain you watch as Oceanus tames the sea-horses. The fountain was built in the 18th century, yet the source of its conception lies deep in the world of the Classical Greeks.

So much of what you see comes from Greece — not just the gods and the pagan stories, but also the roots of Christianity, the writings of Paul, the art depicting Mary, and the art galleries they call churches. And yet the Greeks got so many things wrong, from how the body works to how the planets revolve. You remember the Dordogne and how it flowed up the Gironde and into the ocean, far north of the Pillars of Hercules that divide Africa from Europe. The Greeks didn’t understand the nature of the Atlantic Ocean, much less the Pacific Ocean, and yet here’s a work of art that celebrates the great waters in all their majesty, the Titan Oceanus overseeing the Tritons with their powerful sea-horses. In Greek myth, Oceanus rules the rivers and is identified with the great river Oceanus, which was believed to surround the world.

You imagine a group of Greek philosophers working this one out. What kind of a river surrounds the world? What’s on the other side? How can Oceanus be a god and yet also a river?

You imagine the Greek philosophers huddled in a Platonic Cave in the sky, puzzling over the year 1492.

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The Philosopher’s Cave

You wander south to the Forum, yet it’s closed, so you go through the old Jewish quarter back to Campo dei Fiori. You look again into the dark blue sky and try to see the face beneath the heavy hood. Giordano Bruno towers above the square. It was here that 400 years ago he was burned at the stake because he didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. Instead, he believed in reincarnation, witchcraft, other worlds, and infinite space.

Your imaginary group of Greek philosophers frown at this talk of Bruno. They still don’t want to think about what they did to Socrates. In their defence, they note that at least Socrates agreed he was a menace to society and reconciled himself to drinking the hemlock. His toes didn’t burn. His body didn’t writhe while the fires leapt at his heart and brain.

And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’

The philosophers are happy to change the topic and look at the colourful map you’ve marked up. Fans of geometry, they applaud the eloquent quadrangle, neatly placed within the bend of the Tiber. They applaud even more when they see you walk up Rinascimento toward the old racecourse, take a right into the side streets, and stumble upon the Pantheon.

To these old Greeks, gathered together in their heavenly Cave of Philosophy, the Pantheon is a jewel, hidden deep in the labyrinth of ancient sights. It reminds them of the Parthenon, although they know the Pantheon doesn’t tower over the city like the Castel Sant’Angelo or Saint Peter’s. Yet this doesn’t bother them, for they’ve accepted the notion that the most powerful influences aren’t always the most obvious. They know that the Pantheon was built by the Romans, but still it seems a tribute to their gods and their vision of the universe.

For those who haven’t heard of the Cave of Philosophy, it’s not surprising, since it is after all a cave and very hard to locate. It’s also completely made up, like so much of what the Greeks and Romans believed. Still, it would be a poetic thing to imagine the old Greek philosophers sitting around a candle, debating the meaning of the shadows cast on the walls of the Cave. All of human history is there, like screen reels from the past. They watch the procession and argue about it all: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, flying machines, a man on the moon itself. The old men are fascinated by the advance of democracy, noting that the word itself comes from their Greek dēmokratiā, from dēmos (people) and kratos (rule). They beam with pride, until that is they get to the 21st Century and Donald Trump. Quickly, they put a lamp-shade over the candle and and change the subject.

The old men mutter something about de Tocqueville, and note that there are more important things to discuss. Specifically, the state of the ecology, from οἶκος (house) and -λογία (study of).

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If you were to look for their heavenly Cave of Philosophy, you’d find it in the constellation of Aquarius, which comes from the Babylonian Ea, the god of the sweet waters who saved humanity from the flood unleashed by the high god Enlil. There’s no point bringing up this business of Mesopotamia to the Greek philosophers, however. Don’t even mention astronomy. They’ve convinced themselves that Art, Science, Philosophy, & Literature started in Greece, that their world of Ideas is original and eternal, and that everyone outside Greece is a nitwit.

No one denies that the Greeks are the main source of Western Classical wisdom, the spread of Christianity, and the New Testament itself. It was they, along with the Berber Augustine, who fused pagan philosophy and Christian theology. And yet Christian theology is steeped in the quasi-historical accounts of the Hebrews, and these stories are themselves steeped in mystery. For instance, in the original story of the Flood it was the god Ea who saved the human race from the anger of the high god Enlil. The details of the story of Noah are identical in many ways to the story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the origins of which are buried in time yet which can be verified with extant fragments to at least the end of the third millennia B.C.

In understanding origins, we need to pluralize Montaigne’s three little words: we don’t know where our views about truth really come from. The Hebrews and the Greeks made invaluable contributions to the Classical and Christian worlds, yet the world has many rivers, many mountain ranges, and many caves. Beyond the Jordan and the Tiber lie the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Indus and the Nile. Beyond Mount Sinai lie the Zagros Mountains, with the Shanidar Cave containing Neanderthal remains, and with the Takht-i Suleiman fire temple of the Zoroastrians, whose theology was once attractive to Augustine. Behind the Zagros Mountains lie the Himalayas.

Plato has his cave, but so do the Hindus. In E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) the characters take a day-trip to the caves in the Marabar Hills. Forster’s understanding of Hinduism was in many ways limited, yet his depiction of the Marabar Caves takes on all sorts of challenging meanings. In one of these, the cave is “entirely devoid of distinction” and humans are left with a sense of monotony that borders on evil:

Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. “Boum” is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or “bou-oum,” or “ou-boum,”—utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce “boum.” Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful. And if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of small snakes, which writhe independently.  (Ch. 14)

Forster seems to be suggesting the type of vision Sartre writes about in Nausea (1938) when he looks at the root of a chestnut tree and sees a big black alien snake, something that only makes him feel more detached from the natural world and from any sense of unity in the universe. Yet in A Passage to India the caves also symbolize a transcendent God or Force in the universe that unifies everything. It’s only from a limited human perspective that it all seems like a muddle, like an alienating experience, or like a snake in the grass. You remember the old Hindu story about the man who sees a snake, but it’s only a stick.

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Next: Rome 3: The Eye of the Gods

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