North Indian Classical Music in the ‘Long’ 1940s

 

Amlan Das Gupta

 

Two Photographs

 

Let me start by telling you about two photographs (that I usually show), one taken probably in the early or mid- 1930s; the other in the early 1950s. The dates are approximate and based on internal evidence. The first photograph depicts a a fairly intimate group of male musicians and patrons: some of the figures are difficult to identify but the four musicians standing in the first row are Ustad Manji Khan and his father Ustad Alladiya Khan of Jaipur-Atrauli; Ustad Faiyaz Khan of Agra; and Ustad Abdul Karim Khan of Kirana. The presence of Alladiya, Faiyaz and Abdul Karim, undoubtedly the three most influential and versatile male vocalists of the early twentieth century in the same frame makes the photograph a rarity. The first three decades of the century, as we know, constitutes a period of intense uncertainty and experimentation. Artists grappled with altered conditions of patronage and performance, the presence of new technologies of sound recording and dissemination, new norms of pedagogy, and above all, changes in taste and audience expectation impel artists to engage with new strategies of self definition and stylistic innovation. Three of the most important vocal styles to achieve prominence were clearly the Jaipur-Atrauli, the Kirana and the Agra, setting the scene for the next half century or so. Legend has it of course that the relationship among the three was sometimes stormy, and in a condition of decaying patronage, occasionally riven with rivalry and prejudice. Even at this late date, one might speculate, the photograph expresses the power of the patron, whose august presence holds together these angular and brilliant artists in a formal and grave unity. A point about habitus if one likes: five figures have walking sticks, the invaluable accessory of wealthy civility: others make do with umbrellas.

The second photograph, probably dates from the early 1950s (Ustad Vilayat Khan reportedly said he thought that was taken in 1952). Rajendra Prasad, the figure in the centre of this photograph, became president of India in 1950, and it captures in essence the world of North Indian music in early independent India. Most obviously, it is marked by absences. The “long” 1940s, if I could call it that, is most significantly marked by a number of deaths. First, the figures in the earlier photograph. Abdul Karim and Manji Khan dies in 1937; Alladiya in 1946; Faiyaz Khan in 1950. Other significant deaths around the same time are that of Ramkrishnabua Vaze in 1945; Abdul Wahid Khan of Kirana in 1949; and equally significantly, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande in 1936. The dazzling array of talent surrounding the symbol of the unified source of patronage, honour and reputation, is actually an attenuated one, marked by absence and erasure. There is no significant Agra or Kirana singer in the photograph: the single representative of Jaipur-Atrauli is Kesarbai. What the photograph prophetically suggests is the ascendancy of instrumental music in the post-independence decades: consider the second line of musicians: from the fourth figure on the left we have Keramatullah Khan, tabla; Radhikamohan Maitra, sarod; Ilyas Khan, sitar; Bismillah Khan, shehnai; Kishan Maharaj, tabla; Yususf Ali, sitar; Ravi Shankar, sitar, Ali Akbar sarod; Vilayat Khan, sitar. The seated figures in the front row are appropriately an older generation of artists: Allauddin Khan and Hafiz Ali; Omkarnath, Krishnarao and Anantamanohar Joshi; Mushtaq Husain and Nisar Husain, Burhanpurkarbua, Ahmedjan Thirakwa and Kanthe Maharaj. Another aspect to reflect upon would be the uneasy memory that the photograph bears of the jagged fissure caused in the musical community by Partition: a notable absence in the photograph is the sarangi maestro, Ustad Bundu Khan: absent too is Bade Ghulam Ali, who went over to Pakistan after independence, only to return in the 1950s.

The single woman in the second photograph is appropriately Kesarbai, seated cosily next to Rajendrababu. Her unparallelled reputation as the great exponent of Alladiya Khan’s gayaki and standing in the musical world, make her an appropriate inclusion, but she also appears here as a single exclusion to the general prurience of the cultural policy of new state. This is, as far as I can tell, one of the earliest examples of a formal “group” photograph which has a woman artist in it: there are of course earlier examples of family groups, or tawayefs with their male accompanists. The significance of this inclusion is not difficult to judge. B V Keskar had famously laid down that “no one (woman) whose life was a public scandal would be patronized” by the radio and presumably in the wider world of state ceremonial.  Women artists were sought to be recruited from music schools, or from “respectable” familiies. As a result the great bulk of women artists – who had kept, for instance, the gramophone industry going – were excluded from the radio. In point of fact, this system of screening was far less effective than one would have expected. Partly this was due to the general lack of interest in classical music among radio administrators: more importantly, at the local level, programme executives and station directors made and followed their own policies, with apparently little central interference. As a result, a number of woman artists were recorded in the 1940s and 1950s and some of these recordings still exist: the relatively longer formats make them a valuable supplement to the extant body of sound recordings. It would, I think, be more accurate to see this as an index of the popularity of woman artists and the popular demand for their music rather than a mark of special favour and generosity on part of the administrators. Thus though Kesarbai is silently coopted into the grand durbar of Hindustani shastriya sangeet, Mogubai, Laxmibai, Hirabai, Gangubai to say nothing of Rasoolan and Siddheswari do not figure in the photograph. It may well be that Kesarbai jibbed at their inclusion: reportedly,  she gave up singing for radio because Gangubai had been given a National programme!

Arrivals and Departures

What I have tried to suggest then is that the “long” 1940s marks a kind of watershed in the troubled and tension ridden history of North Indian classical music. If age, disease and accident cause a significant rupture, it also sees the arrival of a generation of artists, largely born in the first two and a half decades of the century, who come into musical maturity around the moment of Indian independence. From an archival point of view it would be important to point out that this is the first generation of artists whose reputations are significantly tied up with the means of mechanical reproduction. Many of them traverse the whole distance from 78 rpm shellac records to digital media. It is also this generation, which would include Ali Akbar, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan among instrumentalists and Amir Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali, Mallikarjun Mansur and the slightly younger Sharafat Husain Khan, set the norms for a new kind of performance culture. By this time the “music conference” is firmly established as the principal site of performance: along with the radio, the other great institutional presence in the field, it signals the emergence of a large heterogeneous audience whose tastes and inclinations must figure largely in the performance strategies of musicians.

In more intimate and reflective moments practising artists may be persuaded to slip out of the heroic tales of selfhood that they so often construct and retail, and reflect on the lachari, the force of necessity, that works upon the musician. Such reflections appear to me to recapitulate the history of music from its origins in the performative arts traditionally practised by occupational groups. If one looks at the condition of classical music around the middle of the 20^th century, one sees the presence of a number of powerful and charismatic artists, who on the one hand are closely rooted in traditional and orthodox discipline, but themselves achieve musical maturity at a time in which social and political change is as it were felt on the pulse. It is in this generation which would include Ali Akbar, Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan and Bismillah Khan among instrumentalists, and Amir Khan, Bade Ghulam, Mallikarjun Mansur and Sharafat Husain among vocalists, that the condition of modernity in Indian music is most clearly experienced, a process that probably began with the decay of traditional patronage of music in and around Delhi in the  mid-19^th century, and proceeded in the negotiations of classical artists with the changing maps of listenership and patronage. From the early the 20^th century musicians encounter first the technology of mechanical reproduction and somewhat later the technology of radio transmission. By the mid-century, the exclusive patronage of the aristocracy was more or less a thing of the past:  artists looked also to concert audiences, radio performances, recording sessions and teaching as avenues of sustenance. From the end of the 40s for some artists who were able to engage with the vagaries of the nation-state as musical patron – which effectively meant dealing with individuals who commanded influence in government circles – were able to add to these means the opportunities of foreign travel, first as part of cultural delegations and then by the end of the 60s cashing in on the increased possibilities of international concert tours.

It is interesting to speculate on the different kinds of audiences that artists were habitually addressing. Some were still familiar in terms of their scope, small performances for elite audiences, but others were unseen and heterogeneous, like those of radio performances or gramophone discs. The large concert audiences that emerge in a big way from the 1940s would also club together the expert and the novice, the committed listener and the philistine, in increasingly unequal mixtures. I think that the nature of audiences inevitably affects the ways in which artist project their musical identities. Since the artists that I have just mentioned (and others of the time) were recorded widely, both commercially and privately, and large parts of these recordings still survive, the archive illuminates these vital questions of competence, repertoire and performative choice. Ali Akbar for instance began his career as a radio staff artist, went on to become court musician at Jaipur, an unparalleled concert performer, made extensive commercial recordings and spent the last four decades of his life as a near-permanent resident of California. Some artists reveal themselves as being unwilling to engage in all these available fields: Vilayat Khan abjured the radio for the better part of his life, others showed little interest in seeking to project their music abroad. Yet all artists when they were performing for local audiences implicitly assumed a cultural connection with their listeners inasmuch as there could be no confusion about the recognition of music as music. Performing in metropolitan centres – where there  were the largest number of listeners, and also by the same token the most diverse audiences in terms of taste or expertise – artists often privately expressed their dissatisfaction with the lack of comprehension or the predictability of taste.

 

Evidence from the Archive

Till the 1940s, the only recording medium used commercially was the shellac disc. In its sole reign for about 4 decades, it acquired considerable importance, and became the site for displays of immense skill and virtuosity.  Kesarbai herself recorded seven Broadcast discs around 1936, shortly after her talim from Alladiya. Many of her recordings are from the 1940s., though: the thirties and the forties also saw recordings from nearly all the artists who would assume canonical status in the post independence era: Ali Akbar recorded his first discs in 1945. But the field of commercial recording, reviled and disdained in its early years, also received the patronage of an older generation: for example, Faiyaz Khan and Krishnarao Shankar Pandit (who cut his only two discs in 1946). But there are surprises here as well. Mallikarjun Mansur, notably, stopped recording in the 1940s, even after having released 18 discs in his Gwalior phase. After his talim from Manji Khan he recorded just two 78 rpm discs of supreme artistic merit. From the 1940s, however, other recording means were in use, at first sparingly and then in much more widespread manner, as new technology became more widely available. Let me begin this part of the survey with the radio. Early broadcasts were “live”, with radio broadcasts of artists singing in the studio. However, from the late 1940s studio discs were used for recording, facilitating deferred (and presumably repeated) broadcasts. Descriptions suggest that the medium used was the 16” transcription disc, perhaps those manufactured under the Presto label. They could record, existing reproductions suggest, up to 20 minutes of sound continuously. The discs themselves have not survived apart as collectors’ curiosities, but a small fragment of recordings made from them were transferred on to other media usually while they were being broadcast. The radio later shifted later to the use of reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders and they were in use until very recently. It appears that radio archives still contain some part of the great wealth of recordings made by them over the decades. The entire corpus of radio recordings of Faiyaz Khansheb have survived through these means. Agra connoisseurs consider them a pale shadow of the ustad at his prime, but admit that they obviously provide invaluable data for the archivist and historian. The less snobbish, like us, of course think that they are are marvelous in every respect. The only surviving recording of any length of Abdul Wahid Khan, a two part Darbari of about 40 minutes, also owes its existence to this technology.

However, from the late 1940s reel-to-reel wire and tape recorders started being available in India, giving patrons and enthusiasts a chance of recording longer recitals. The most important fact about the very large body of music that exists in magnetic tape, and is still accessible, is that it was managed neither by commercial organizations, nor by broadcasting companies: they remained entirely in private hands. Spools were not sold commercially with “pre-recorded” music: they were directed towards private efforts, and music of all kinds – and of course all other kinds of recordable sound – were preserved in this format. A small part of this did at a later stage work its way back into the commercial sphere, but the greater part of this remained in private hands. These are obviously of great archival value, because they were in most cases unique copies: only after the advent of cassette tapes was there some dissemination of these recordings, again within a fairly small band of music enthusiasts. The reasons for prizing them so highly are many. Firstly, they are often of performances given in intimate surroundings, with often a knowledgeable and appreciative audience, who might spur the artist to produce an exceptional recital. The problem of time was all but eliminated: for the duration of the spool was usually more than that of the longest single concert. The concert recording also gives us a privileged understanding of the aesthetics of the mehfil or baithak, the conversation between artist and audience, the codes of appreciation appropriate to different kinds of concerts, explanation and comments by musicians. Briefly, the body of tape recordings gives us an insight into the practices of the musical world with an intimacy that is often missing in the more clinical sound of commercial recordings, or even of recordings made in large concert halls. 1940s and 50s recordings are prized highly for their relative rarity, and many of them have iconic status in collector’s circles.

 

Epilogue: Alarums of State

The new Indian state embraced classical music with great fervor. Veterans of the All India Radio at this time remember the common perception that the radio under Keskar and Vallavbhai Patel promoted classical music excessively: undoubtedly there was a concerted attempt at many levels to incorporate the wealth of traditional music into the ceremonial of state. The notion of classical music therein expressed of course bears little similarity to the realm of practice: the official discourse, inevitably, remained depressingly mired in the rhetoric of reform, familiar to all alike from British orientalist and nationalist musicology. The famous Keskar report placed the blame for the decay on music on North Indian Muslims, who “had appropriated and distorted the ancient art, turning it into the secret craft of exclusive lineages”: in Muslim hands music was no longer ‘spiritual’; it had become ‘erotic’, the special preserve of ‘dancing girls, prostitutes, and their circles of pimps’. With the state increasingly taking over as both patron and consumer, such an opinion, when part of an official policy document,  sounds dangerous in the extreme.  The great thing about absolutist state policy of course is that the more it seeks to create homogeneity and unity, the more things tend to fall apart: the gharenadar ustads who continued to perform merely made appropriate noises, reinvented their life stories, and continued much as before. Undoubtedly two great names in post independence khayal singing are Amir Khan and Bade Ghulam; in instrumental music we have Vilayat Khan and Ali Akbar. Earlier musicians had negotiated the wilfulness of aristocratic patrons; post-independence artists had to do the same with the pomposity of state officialdom.

The real casualties of the alarums of state I have argued elsewhere were the professional women artists, both singers and dancers: some managed to reinvent themselves forging kulin identities, or by sheer artistic genius commanding enough respect to keep questions of identity in abeyance. The presence of Kesarbai and the absence of Rasoolanbai in the darbar photograph of 1952 are alike indications of this. But even Rasoolanbai enjoyed respect and recognition for the better part of her singing career (sadly, only to die in utter penury and destitution). So many others simply disappeared, erased by repressive legislation, and middle class prejudice. Let me conclude by citing Munirbai of Lucknow, herself a reputed dancer and student of the kathak dancer Shambhu Maharaj, who attributed the final breakup of the tawayef community to three principal causes: Gandhiji, independence and the Arya Samaj:

“The Arya Samajis were always against us. They said we were a corrupting influence and deserved no place in civilized society.”

Munirbai’s testimony locates a major point of disjuncture in the history of women performers in India. Perhaps it also allows us to consider more clearly the legacy of the 1940s.

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Amlan Dasgupta is Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

 

Augustine on Memory: A Note on Confessions 10.8-37

Amlan Dasgupta 

 

The Greek word for truth – or more correctly, one of the several words that appear to have been used – is aletheia. The word figures largely in NT Greek and is usually rendered in Latin by the word veritas.  Literally, however, aletheia, from the verb lanthanō with the alpha-privative, would mean that which is unconcealed or even unforgotten, that which does not escape memory.  The river Lethe in the Greek underworld is the river of forgetting, by crossing which mortals forget their past lives.  This view was famously held by Heidegger, who pointed to the pre-Socratic, specifically Homeric, sense of the word. In the oral world of the Homeric epic it is the poet’s commemorative power that enables him to cross the boundary between the living and the dead, between presence and oblivion. Charles Segal writes: “what is truthful for the archaic poet is not the so much what is factually exact as what successfully resists the corrosive darkness of forgetting”.

There are many powerful characterizations of memory and remembering in Greek philosophy which may usefully serve to contextualize Augustine’s own reflections on the subject. Starting from the Platonic discussion of memory in the late dialogues, through Aristotle’s subtle distinction of recollection and memory, to the Stoics, there were a number of important theoretical statements to choose from.  Even as Augustine inaugurates a new ethic of memory, there is much he carries over from the past, which is only natural considering his deep immersion in classical culture in his early life. Augustine was certainly familiar with the main arguments of his predecessors, and his own treatment has certainly both Platonic and Stoic resonances. We might briefly point to the fact that Augustine tacitly adopts a position popularized in Stoic physical doctrine, that the human soul, or a part of it, is the controlling principle of the human organism. It is to this regulating, rational faculty that the Stoics gave the name hegemonikon; technically part of the soul, pneuma, it regulated ideally the other parts, namely the five senses, the reproductive faculty and the speech faculty. It was the hegemonikon which received sense-data and retained it either as “imprinting” (tuposis) or an” alteration” (alloiosis). The fundamental power of the hegemonikon was to form presentations or phantasiai, which were conveyed by the senses. Memory was stored phantasiai, but they could produce complex structures: conceptions (ennoemata) or even fictional and non-existent things. Marcia Colish points out that Augustine’s own notion of the soul, while retaining traces of the Stoic position, is immeasurably more complex: he integrates into the Stoic concept of the faculties the distinction between the vegetative, animate and rational soul as put forward by the Peripatetics and the Neoplatonic  valuation of the spiritual over the physical aspects of human nature:  to this Neoplatonized and Aristotelianized conception of the Stoic hegemonikon he adds “the Christian goal of spiritual renewal and communion” (1990:206).

There are three major locations for studying Augustine’s thought on memory and remembering, though the subject is an important one to him, and one to which he frequently turns.  Significantly they span a great part of his career, and it is quite obvious that there are some differences in approach. The three primary texts are De Magistro, dating from about 389, Confessions 10, probably composed somewhere between 397 and 401, and De Trinitate, completed not before 422. I shall look today solely at one of these texts for reasons simply of easy accessibility: but also the Confessions are not only the most widely read of Augustine’s works, but from the point of view of the present discussion, clearly one that allows us to form a cogent idea of some of the leading notions that inform Augustine’s thought on the memory.

The first 9 books of the Augustine chart the story of his early life bringing us to the critical point of his baptism, his abandonment of the study of classical rhetoric and his consequent entry into the Christian life. The 9^th book describes also a number of personal tragedies: the death of his mother Monica and the death of his friends.  The 10^th book is in some senses the beginning of a new section, which includes the discussion of memory, time (11) and language (12). The reflections in this concluding section turn back on the nature of personal recollection: what kind of truth value can be attributed to this narrative of personal experience? Do past memories influence behavior, and if so is the result for the better or the worse? The discussion of memory in Book 10 thus introduces a new form of self reflexivity into the narrative: the product of memory now leads to a discussion of the faculty of memory and the process of remembering. Augustine encounters memory in the course of a journey of self realization and self expression: to realize himself through his record of personal experience, and to present to his readers a life that can be read, that is turned into writing. Thus Augustine’s “confessions” in front of God has another kind of audience, that of the readers and hearers of the Christian community for whom it must be an exemplary exercise.

In 10.7.11 Augustine says that will transcend even the natural power by which he lives and has the experience of the senses, as this is enjoyed by baser animals too: and in doing so he encounters memory, which for Cicero distinguished man from beast (Tusc. 1.24.57ff).  The wide fields and roomy palaces of memory that Augustine describes in the inaugural section (10.8.12) are a storehouse (thesaurus) of images (imagines) which are conveyed to it by the senses. It appears thus to be a repository, a place, essentially a passive faculty, in which the information provided by the senses is stored up: all that which has not been taken away (absorbuit et sepelevit, lit. devoured and buried) by oblivion. It may be noted that the use of memoria is however not wholly fixed, sometimes referring to something like a “container”, sometimes encompassing imagination and conception. In De Magistro,12,  Augustine makes the curious observation that when we consider the sense data of past experience, i.e. the primary content of memory, “we do not speak about the things themselves, but of images impressed from them on the mind and committed to memory”. Gareth Matthews points out how Augustine seems to be saying that instead of speaking of the things themselves, we change the subject and talk about the memory images instead. Augustine here seems to be making some kind of distinction between the experience of the present (where there is knowledge of things themselves) and the past (where there is knowledge only of traces left behind by sense perception). The early view seems to be closer to the Stoic (specifically Zeno’s) view about sense data” imprinting” itself on memory  (tuposis); in Confessions even though the passive nature of the memory per se is retained, it is seen as being interpenetrated by other, and more active, faculties.

Augustine marvels at the apparently inexhaustible resources of memory. All the evidence of the senses are stored up it, neatly docketed and labelled, in its “indescribable departments”, waiting to be recalled to the present. Whatever he seeks to summon appears immediately: Augustine is struck by the fact that even in silence and darkness he can relive sight and sound. The ensuing sections (17-18) are particularly dense and change our understanding of the memory simply as a receptacle for sense data. For when we hear a word being spoken we form an image of the thing that the word indicates. However the thing itself is not an object of sensory experience. The sound of the word fades away as soon as it is uttered, but the things remain in our minds. Augustine here seems to move towards a Platonic assertion that knowledge is pre-existent in the mind (Augustine uses cordi, in the heart) but not in memory.

In my heart then they were, even before I learned them, but in my memory they were not. Where then? or wherefore, when they were spoken, did I acknowledge them, and said, “So is it, it is true,” unless that they were already in the memory, but so thrown back and buried as it were in deeper recesses, that had not the suggestion of another drawn them forth I had perchance been unable to conceive of them? 10.10.17

 

It is here that one might also insert a role for language even though Augustine does not directly allude to it. All that we remember is already present in the mind: the function of the learning process is to take what is “random and unarranged”, and organize them into a systematic body. Language may hold the key here.  Augustine writes:

 

I do indeed hold the images of the sounds of which those words be composed, and that those sounds, with a noise passed through the air, and now are not. But the things themselves which are signified by those sounds, I never reached with any sense of my body…

 

The structure of language mirrors the contents of memory, newly retrieved from their disorganized state in the human heart, and stored up for use. The memory itself is a site in which the objects of knowledge continually shift and exchange places. We find out things and place them close at hand and say that we have learned these things. But soon as we cease to call them up, they slide into deeper recesses of memory, and if again required for use must be drawn together again. The object of thinking (cogitare) is really that of re-collection, not that which is collected anyhow (cogere).

 

Augustine probes into several of the psychological singularities of memory. He explores for instance the problem of knowing falsehoods (in that we truly know that we remember false things) and also that we remember things differently at different times. I may in fact remember knowing something in a certain way at one point of time, and in a different way at another. We thus remember remembering: at a later time I shall be able to recall that at such I time I remembered these things. We also recall past emotions: moments of pain and fear can be recollected without the sensations of pain and fear. In fact we might remember sorrow with joy and joy with sorrow. Augustine applies a striking analogy at the end of 14.21, saying that the memory is the belly of the mind: it contains joy and sadness as the stomach contains sweet and bitter food. The memory, like the belly, is unable to determine the nature of the emotion by itself. That we contain the experience of intense suffering within oneself does not affect one all the time: even when they are recalled from the memory by the mind, one might not have to undergo the same suffering. Yet there does seem to be a difficulty here. Undoubtedly we find in the memory the affect of experience, which is not something which inheres in the nature of experience but the affectations of the mind which receives them.

 

And yet how could we speak of them, if we did not find in our memory, not only the sounds of the names according to the images impressed by the senses of the body, but very notions of the things themselves? Things we never received by any avenue of the body, but which the mind itself perceived by the experience of its own passions, and committed to the memory? How could the memory  retain the passion of the mind without experiencing that passion?  14.22

 

The relationship of mind and memory remains difficult to understand.  At one point Augustine seems to willing to give up this relation: “Does the memory perhaps not belong to the mind? Who will say so?” (14.21) Augustine returns to the problem of mental images once again in the context of naming.  Images take their place with conceptual entities, affections of the mind and bodily states as being the content of memory. But at every step there arise new difficulties: when I name forgetting I remember it and understand it. Not only do I know the word “forgetting” but I also know what it means, which is a privation of memory. So the memory knows both itself, that is memory remembers “memory” and also remembers its absence. Consequently, we cannot say that forgetfulness itself is present in our mind when we remember it but only its image, for  “if forgetfulness were present through itself, it would not lead us to remember, but only to forget. Now who will someday work this out? Who can understand how it is?”  The text at this point falters, and reveals the strain of pursuing this line of thought. For it is not some abstruse, distant question that we are considering, like the distance between the stars or the weight of the earth. It is strictly personal, for “it is I – my mind – who remember”. There is nothing which is closer to me than myself obviously, and he seems to conclude that the question of forgetfulness is at the end a paradox of self-knowledge, that exists but cannot be rendered fully as a rational argument.

 

In 17.26 Augustine goes on to distinguish finally among the knowledge of sensory things present to us as images (imagines) , the knowledge of sciences through their  methods (praesentia) and the knowledge of emotional states through a kind of mental system of notation (notiones vel notationes).  Augustine is deeply moved and even fearful at this manifold power of the memory, as of the human mind of which it is the characteristic faculty.

Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing (horrendum) my God, a deep and boundless multiplicity. And this is the mind and this is me. What am I then, O my God, of what nature am I? …Behold in the plains, and caves, and caverns of my memory, innumerable and innumerably full of innumerable kinds of things, either through images, as all bodies; or by actual presence, as the arts; or by certain notions or impressions, as the affections of the mind, which, even when the mind doth not feel, the memory retaineth, while yet whatsoever is in the memory is also in the mind—over all these do I run, I fly; I dive on this side and on that, as far as I can, and there is no end. So great is the force of memory, so great the force of life, even in the mortal life of man. 10.17.26

Brian Stock astutely observes that Augustine’s concern with memory is never at a purely philosophical level, and that he is adept at creating decoys behind which his practical objectives are masked.  In the Confessions his discussion brings him to the paradox that God cannot be contained in the memory.  The curious vacillations that we have seen serve to define the problem of the knowledge of God: is it something that is contained in memory or is it beyond memory? Both remembering and forgetting have a part to play in setting out the problem. In 18.27 he uses the parable of a woman who has lost her money but finds it after she searches for it with a light. When she finds it she is happy, because she has found her money, the one that she was looking for. The women needs to forget to have the pleasure of rediscovering: and this turns out to have a greater significance, for like the woman Augustine has also searched for many things and has been confronted with many objects with the question “Is this it?” His answer has been “No” until he recognizes the object that he actually lost.  This is what appears to be the case when is looking for God. For searching for God is searching for the good life, the life in which the soul lives. It is something that has to be forgotten for us to seek it, and that appears to be the nature of human life: the inevitability of forgetting as well as the need for continuing the search incessantly. But how is happiness to be recognized? Did it pre-exist in his soul? Or to put it differently, did God exist within him so that he is able to recognize happiness when he experiences it? Evidently this is not like remembering Carthage, for it is not an object or assemblage of objects.  Augustine is at pains to demonstrate that happiness in this supreme sense is not the object of any possible kind of physical perception, thus entirely different from the memory of joy. But we have not experienced God, nor have we experienced happiness. Those who are content with the joy that conforms to their expectations and experiences are evidently different from the seeker who seeks God.  Stock describes the situations succinctly:

It is clear why individuals are not happy. They are unable to break with the past. They take greater pleasure in things that will not make them permanently happy, since these are easier to recall..(.)

If Augustine began by praising the infinite capacity of the memory to contain experience, he now feels that creates an over-dependence on the past, a slavery to habit and custom, and consequently an orientation to vice than to virtue. God is known neither by experience nor properly by pre-existent knowledge, but by the grace of God himself in making available to us: I  discover nothing about God that God has not taught me.

If God enters the memory at all it is not by finding a place in the container. God remains in man’s changeable mind through an act of his own willing, not that of human design.

For thou art the Lord God of the mind and of all these things that are mutable; but thou abidest immutable over all. Yet thou hast elected to dwell in my memory from the time I learned of thee. But why do I now inquire about the part of my memory thou dost dwell in, as if indeed there were separate parts in it? Assuredly, thou dwellest in it, since I have remembered thee from the time I learned of thee, and I find thee in my memory when I call thee to mind. 26.37

Augustine finally finds a place for God in the memory by delocalizing him. God exists in memory as much as outside it. We go backward and forward, he says, but there is really no place which may be assigned to God “save in thyself beyond me”. It is as the interior teacher that God exists in us. In the remainder of Book 10 Augustine “remembers” the sins and temptations that have assailed him up to now, but only to seek deliverance from them with divine aid. The act of confession, an act of memory, now inaugurates a process of self-remaking and reform.

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Amlan Dasgupta is Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

 

The Dead Body

Manindra Gupta  (Trans. Abu Hossain)

The fable of the Brahmin and the Brahmani used to be an amalgamation of the mythical and the folk. The duo lives in that hutment right at the yonder corner of the village. The Brahmin, a simple guy, partly a simpleton even. The Brahmani, a termagant—a long life of travail and tribulation has made her utterly irritable at the fag end. The story could take different turns once you reach this juncture. For instance, he discovers a pot full of mohurs, guarded by the yaksha, among the ruins in the jungle, or impresses the lord of the land with his witticism and makes a fortune, or gets swindled by a conman, suffers harsh words from the Brahmani and chooses exile.

This story of the twosome is actually our story—mine and my friends’. We get swindled everyday and our predicament worsens. As long as we were working, we were fishes secure within our respective shoals. A retired life is one of needless, sundry humiliation.

How and where our fulsome sons and daughters spend their time, what drives their lives, I am rather unsure. Internationally acclaimed pundits doing the circuit or surefooted asocial danseuses adept at social dos—whatever their trade be—they have traversed a long way from us indeed. We oldies are vulnerable like the groping Brahmin couple of the tale. We queue up at the bus-stop, hear someone holler ‘get up, do get up.’ Soon the bus waves past, an anomalous bell ringing. We are left standing. An odd shove here, a thrust there in the crowd, (we hope to parry, but invariably fail) easily leaves us cold, downbeat, fallen.

I recall the visage of old, weary Dhritarashtra, at the conclusion of the battle at Kurukshetra, returning with blooms and supplicating water—hungry, weak with fasting, trembling, superannuated, rapidly losing interest with living. Soon he enters the entrails of the forest with Gandhari, Kunti and Sanjay. And a fierce forest fire engulfs them. Sanjay entreats the old king to flee. The feeble king replies that he would rather scorch himself up. It is ideal to give up ones life to water, wind, fire and fasting. You may take leave Sanjay.

King Bimbisara died of fasting too. I have noticed unwell creatures, nearing death, hunt down a quiet spot—quit food and await stilly until death arrives. Possibly their being wishes to touch some primordial pulse before departing for good. The threesome in Mahabharata also sat motionless.

Modern death is a messy, troublesome affair. Face to face with death one realizes how perilous our circumstances are. These days there are hardly any treatment options at home. And nursing homes are veritable leeches. And then at the threshold of his last breath, the patient is pushed into a ventilator: artificial respiration initiates. Four or five days in that state, stark pale with death long ago, the nursing home declares the patient to be brain dead. The dead body and a bill of few lakhs are easily handed out.

In the name of wellness and treatment, partial dead-bodies thus enter the chain of transaction. And a complete and spectacular disrespect for the dead starts right there. On one hand, the abhorrent antarjali-jatra, on the other, this horrendous ventilation: is there no simpler, more natural route for the patient on the death roll? Howsoever agreeably we lead our lives, in death we proceed towards the grandeur of the infinite and the unseen. These last couple of hours, at their very moment of disappearance, let not the dead suffer contempt from those who stay back.

I would not have been so garrulous but for a jolt that I received the other day. I had gone to the samshan-ghaat, in solidarity, to witness the last rites of a neighboring friend. The gentleman, his wife, his kids—the whole family is illustrious, scholarly and free-minded. Probably the luster of scholarship had dried up the humidity of their bereavement.

In every civic, popular or natural society, the disposal of the dead merits some procedural aspects. Various as the formalities are, one basic thread binds them: that we do not consider the dead to be gone, vanished, non-existent. The idea is to see that a modicum of love and benediction guide us even as we dispose off a body who had been possibly a fellow traveler with the living for so long and so richly. And to wonder and consider the remains before it surpasses touch and feel.
The Eskimos of North Pole are an ancient lot. How do they resolve this conundrum of the wobbly, unsure old age? Once the old man realizes that he is unable to hunt, is dependent on his kinsman for food, the lumbering weight of life is getting better of him—he gets holds of a catamaran, and one evening quietly ventures on to the sea. Night in front, the ocean wide, below 30 degree Celsius the temperature. But he won’t return. What would happen to him, his body, his existence? The community is there by the sea-shore to bid him adieu. There are all kinds of traversing that final expanse: sometimes with such communal approval, at times alone and fasting—awaiting passage, and who knows, may be denying certain treatments even in the midst of mortal pain.

There is a breed of sanyasis whose mortal remains are left to be eaten by the creatures of the wild. The whole of the Tower the Silence precisely hinges on such an understanding of the relationship of the living and the dead. Some practitioners are given water-burial, so that they enter the food chain via fishes and other aquatic creatures only to re-emerge materially. There is nothing demeaning about returning this earthly body back to the earth. Now, the usual rites are either internment or cremation. Two kinds of mentality work behind these differing procedures. Burial implies that he is around, his existence being mysterious now and he has left secretly to live elsewhere. The pyre suggests his unencumberdness, his transparency, the voyaging out: one can well glimpse the clarity of the blue sky through his being.

Bereavement ties us up with the dead, to his bodily existence. Our minds remain shrouded and turgid at that point. Once that cloud gets uplifted, with tonsured heads, we re-enter our natural existence again. Before returning to this naturalness, we propitiate the dead with water, rice and prayers even. This formal rites are pretty divergent and yet not uncommon. The Yui Indians would trim their long hair as a mark of their grieving. The Yuis had no recourse to blades and scissors. So, they would bunch and hold their hair and burn patches over a slow flame.

Closer to us, there are certain natural and humane practices associated with the disposal of the dead. After death, the body, in its own course, excretes. So, the idea is to give the body a thorough bath, change accoutrements and get it ready for the pyre. And someone will keep on a tactile connection to the body. You are not abandoned, we feel and touch you—this assurance the dead receives. Will these be considered counter to progressive norms? Is there anything ritualistic or transcendental about this ongoing and newly forged relationship? If the artistry and rites of information dissemination is so carefully maintained, why be so fleeting with the dead? Life is being so color fully garnished every passing moment; can we not dye the dead with the color of joy for a day?

Let me get back to that samshan-ghaat where we left my free-minded neighbor. This is a study in precision. The hearse brought the dead unostentatiously, accompanied by the young son of the dead and other well-wishers. In a few minutes the necessary permits were obtained from the undertaker. The hearse left with its due once the body on the stretcher got unloaded. The funerary retainers, those accompanying, meeting after a period may be, softly exchanged pleasantries. The dead body—the forlorn Mr. Mukherjee, slept there lonesome with his neat rimless glasses and kurta-pyajma. After an hour or so, the furnace got vacant and was available, as it belched out curious smelling smoke all around. Unwashed, thirsty and hungry Mr. Mukherjee had no chance to bid adieu or exchange a few parting words with his escorts. The furnace door got bolted, the button pressed and the flames leaped out in earnest. Wonderful, now he will burn on his own. Nothing more to be accomplished. The whole retinue—son, grandkids and hordes of kin and friends took off in a few minutes for their respective homes. Mr. Mukherjee kept on burning alone. And once he leaves the crematorium, who knows, clueless,  where will he wander off all on his own!

Manindra Gupta is a poet and narrativist, working from Kolkata.  His collection of critical essays on poetry–The Otherside of Moon and his autobiography–The Ageless Mulberry, are pathbreaking quests on the nature of the human predicament within the cosmos.

The Rienzi Effect

 

Hans Rudolf Vaget

Joachim Köhler, in his Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, goes so far as to suggest that the German dictator was “merely” the executioner of Wagner’s ideas. Köhler argues that Hitler’s entire political program was essentially an attempt to turn the mythologically coded world of Wagnerian opera into a social and political reality. “The achievement of the Wagnerian world of the ‘work of art of the future’.” In everything he did, Hitler acted as the “agent” of the Bayreuth Circle, accomplishing the task originally set by that great prophet of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust: Richard Wagner.

Recently, Frederic Spotts, the author of a fine history of the Bayreuth Festival, took up the whole vexed matter and re-examined Hitler’s multifarious meddling with the arts – primarily architecture and music. In a thought-provoking and useful new study, boldly entitled Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Spotts laudably ignores those endless speculations about psychic and sexual abnormalities – the most eagerly pursued red herrings in Hitler studies – and proposes instead that the Führer’s social, racial, and geopolitical agenda was ancillary and subordinate to the realization of what was fundamentally an aesthetic project, namely, to create “the greatest culture state since ancient times, or perhaps of all time.”

What was the role of aesthetic experience in general and of Wagnerian opera in particular in the identity formation of Adolf Hitler? For the conscientious historian, however, the task is not to construct “Wagner’s Hitler”, despite that clever titular reversal, but rather to reconstruct Hitler’s Wagner. This is a far more difficult matter.

Some of the difficulties were duly noted by Joachim Fest in his 1973 biography. Striking as the affinities between Hitler and Wagner may at first sight appear – the outsider’s resentment against the bourgeoisie; the bohemian affect of an artistic existence; the basically non-political relationship to the world; the uncertainty about their ancestry; the morbid hatred of Jews – none can be simply attributed to the so-called influence of a widely idolized cultural figure. Much of what we find in young Hitler represents a constellation of phenomena perfectly typical of the era in which he grew up. The most characteristic elements of his Weltanschauung – nationalism, Darwinism, anti-Semitism – were in the air in Vienna at the time, which he could not help but breathe. Still, in Fest’s view, the Meister emerges both as the young man’s ideological mentor and as Hitler’s great exemplar.

Fest’s own assessment of the matter, though, is not free from contradiction. On the one hand he argues correctly that no direct succession from Wagner to Hitler can be established; on the other, he identifies Wagner as the Führer’s decisive teacher. He disputes the claim that Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism can and must be traced back to Wagner: the Führer’s racial anti-Semitism was uncompromising, he argues, whereas Wagner’s hostility towards Jews was selective and inconsistent.

Saul Friedländer, who noted (at the Schloss Elmau Symposium of 1999 on Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich) that Hitler, in all his speechmaking, never once invoked Wagner’s well-known hostility towards das Judentum. Why not? He could easily have argued that if the great Richard Wagner called for the elimination of Jews from German culture, then how could our current anti-Jewish laws and policies be wrong? We are simply carrying out what Wagner intended. But Hitler never said anything of the sort. Friedländer offers two explanations.

First, perhaps Hitler considered Wagner’s position insufficiently radical since both Das Judentum in der Musik and Parsifal leave open the possibility that Jews can find redemption by shedding their Jewish identity, as Ludwig Börne had done, and as the figure of Kundry implies. Second, perhaps the Führer’s very adulation of Wagner simply “did not allow for any disclaimers or any ambiguity”, so as not to call into question the lofty standing of Richard Wagner as one of the patron saints of the Third Reich. Third, if we may add a reason of our own, perhaps Hitler was astute enough to realize that mining Wagner for proto-Nazi ideas, and exploiting Wagner for crude propaganda, might have diminished his standing as the supreme example of the creator of an art that was thoroughly German, heroic, sublime, and highly auratic. A non political cult could be more effective than any propagandist exploitation.

This, then, throws into relief the crucial methodological problem and underlines the need for a new way of looking at the entire Hitler-Wagner complex. The crux of the matter, it seems to me, lies in the fixation of historians on the notion of influence. We can no longer use this term as trustingly as Viereck, Fest, Köhler, and a host of others have done. In reception theory, “influence” has given way to notions of reception and appropriation, denoting a more complex and indirect mode of intellectual transfer, and shifting attention from the source to the recipient. Thus, what may look to the untrained eye like a direct line from Wagner to Hitler could in fact be an optical illusion – the result of multiple refractions. For what we call influence accrues from an entire constellation of factors involving language, media, cultural practices of remembering, and the various ways in which these factors interact within a sharply defined historical space. As in all cases of intellectual precursorship, the basic tenet of reception theory fully applies to the case of Hitler and Wagner: a tradition does not perpetuate itself; rather, it is appropriated and adapted to the needs of the recipient and, in the process, bent and deformed.

As with “influence”, then, the very notion of mentor seems incongruous with Hitler’s study habits, which were those of an autodidact and dilettante. Furthermore, from what we know about young Hitler, the experience of Lohengrin and of Rienzi preceded his reading of Wagner’s prose tracts. And that adolescent aesthetic experience – more irrational and thus more idiosyncratically formative than the traditional master-disciple relationship – was by no means solitary or unique: Hitler shared it with great numbers of his contemporaries.

Wagner’s “grand tragic opera”, Rienzi, an early work that never became part of the Bayreuth canon, offers the most promising starting point for accessing the peculiar nature of Hitler’s Wagnerianism. As we know from the memoir of August Kubizek, a budding musician and Hitler’s boyhood friend, the two youths attended a performance at the Linz Landestheater early in 1905, when Hitler was fifteen, that appears to have had the impact of an epiphany. “In that hour”, he is reported to have said later on several occasions, “it all began.” But what, precisely, began in that hour?

His enthusiasm for Wagner? This is improbable, since he had earlier seen Lohengrin, at age thirteen. No, what more likely began was the elaboration of a particular fantasy triggered by Wagner’s opera – the fantasy of becoming the leader of the Germans and of restoring Germany’s greatness, just as Rienzi, the last tribune in medieval Rome, had attempted to do for Rome. As we shall see, Rienzi set one of the fundamental patterns of Hitler’s life. The significance of this youthful experience, then, can hardly be exaggerated. It shows, to begin with, that to young Hitler, as for untold numbers of Germans (and not only Germans), Wagner was primarily a great purveyer of overwhelming emotions, and only secondarily a purveyer of political ideas. Hitler’s youthful experience is furthermore crucial as much for the psychological pattern it reveals as for its content.

 Indications are that we no longer cringe when Hitler and art are discussed together in a serious fashion. This is terribly important. Much is to be gained from looking at young Hitler through the lense of a typology of the artist, for strictly speaking, as Otto Werckmeister has argued in “Hitler the Artist” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1997), he was “a professional artist”, though clearly one “at the lowest level of the artistic proletariat”.

Once we look closely at the peculiar complexion of Hitler’s shaky status as an artist, a psychologically portentous aspect of the structure of his personality begins to come into focus. We see that two very dissimilar artistic sensibilities co-existed. In painting and architecture, his artistic impulse had but a modest potency. In music, on the other hand, he appears to have possessed an unlimited capacity for emotional transport, albeit of a purely receptive nature, as evidenced by his youthful Rienzi experience. Hitler may thus be regarded as a fairly typical dilettante in the sense that this term had acquired at the turn of the century, denoting as it did, one who led an inauthentic life based, in the last analysis, on imitation. Dilettantes populate the work of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, of Heinrich and Thomas Mann.

In Hitler, the interaction of those two different artistic dispositions – one excessive, the other deficient – was controlled by no intellectual discipline. This appears to have led to a blockage and, eventually, a re-routing of his artistic ambitions to the field of politics, where he then was able to indulge his architectural fantasies on a much grander scale. As a budding painter, he was unable to imagine himself rising to the lofty level to which, the example of Wagner in mind, he secretly aspired. In music, however, where he had no practical skills, he seems to have had unlimited powers of emotional involvement which he would have had to invest in something altogether different – by becoming a populist leader like Rienzi. Such a realization seems to have dawned on him in 1919, when he discovered his talent as a political orator.

By reinventing himself as a politician in the image of Wagner’s operatic hero, Hitler the thwarted artist followed to perfection the typical psychological pattern of the dilettante – a stock figure of German literature since Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Indeed, it was Goethe who provided the classic definition of the dilettante as a would-be artist who “attempts to produce effects with the effects that affected him.” This was precisely Hitler’s case. Having failed as an artist, Hitler hitched his fate to a cultural icon whose national standing and international renown were beyond question. He began to practice a demonstratively non-political cult of Wagner, referring to the composer in public as the greatest genius that Germany had yet produced. This proved to be highly effective in the political arena: perceived as a devoted admirer of Wagner, Hitler was able to win respectability and cultural legitimacy and, eventually, to create a charismatic aura of genius for himself.

 In all of this, a key role must be attributed to the metapolitical notion of Erbe. It represents a privileged, even auratic form of reception in which the inheritor masks its basic character of appropriation by pretending merely to heed a call from the past. The importance of the notion of cultural inheritance to our understanding of the Hitler-Wagner nexus becomes immediately clear as we cast a brief comparative glance at the case of Anton Bruckner, who in June 1937, in a pompous induction ceremony at Walhalla, was inducted in the German Hall of Fame. The case of Bruckner, unlike Wagner, is one of wilful appropriation in the narrowest sense of the word.

Wagner had thematized again and again, from Rienzi to Parsifal, the idea of Erbe, even of Welterbe – world dominion. German Wagnerians thus grew up with the expectation that the Master’s heritage would one day be claimed. After Wagner’s death, the Bayreuth Circle, especially Houston Stewart Chamberlain, proceeded to radicalize the notion of a Wagnerian heritage by linking it to the hegemonic ambitions of Wilhelminian Germany. And throughout that post-Wagnerian era, a diffuse but vaguely appealing expectation was kept alive that one day a Parsifal-like savior would appear when Germany needed it most. Thus, when Hitler claimed that he was now wielding the sword that had been forged by Wagner and Chamberlain (as he did in his 5 May 1924 letter to Siegfried Wagner), he was in effect claiming to be Wagner’s political heir. The reference to Nothung, the magic sword handed down from Wotan to Siegmund and on to Siegfried, resonated not only for Hitler but also for his followers with powerful mythological and cultural overtones that lent him the aura of a potential savior in the manner of a Lohengrin, a Siegfried, or a Parsifal and, with that, the glamorous semblance of historical legitimacy.

Perhaps the most potent side-effect of Hitler’s cult of Wagner was something altogether different – the setting in motion of a messianic anticipation of the coming of a savior. The link to Wagner needed no explanation since the creator of Die Meistersinger, through the figure of Hans Sachs, had portrayed himself as a new John the Baptist – as someone who was merely preparing the way for the One who would not only sing, ‘Wach auf’, but who would truly awaken all Germany.

 Ian Kershaw, in his monumental biography of Hitler, has identified the widespread efforts to “work towards the Führer” – “dem Führer entgegenarbeiten” – as the key to understand precisely “how the Third Reich operated”. Hitler’s highly personalized charismatic rule “invited radical initiatives from below” and offered them backing as long as they stayed in line with his Weltanschauung.In other words, his followers were encouraged to tap into their own emotional reserves, their Wagnerian dreams, to help Hitler become the heroic leader and saviour that he wanted to be.

Against this background, then, we can now gauge more realistically the extent to which Wagnerian opera contributed to the identity formation of Hitler and his rise to power. I shall attempt, in this concluding section, to shed some additional light on this nexus by briefly assessing Hitler’s response to the three Wagnerian works that meant the most to him: Rienzi, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. I hope to show that the psychological as well as the political significance of the Hitlerian cult of Wagner derived primarily not from Hitler’s engagement with these works but from that engagement’s interaction with other forces within the cultural space in which he chose to operate.

At crucial stages in his apprenticeship – in Karl Luegers Vienna and in the post-war Germany of l9l8/l9 – Hitler seems to have read history through the looking glass provided by Wagner’s Rienzi. It was evidently this opera that enabled him to see in Karl Lueger, as he wrote in Mein Kampf, the prototype of the modern popular tribune, “den gewaltigsten deutschen Bürgermeister aller Zeiten”. Historical reality seemed to validate Wagner’s vision of the charismatic Volkstribun and convince him of its viability as a political ideal. There are intriguing indications that, as he took his first steps in the political arena of post-war Munich, Hitler looked to Rienzi for guidance, as though this opera were his metapolitical compass. As Brigitte Hamann tells us in Hitlers Wien, he had observed that at the meetings of the Pan-German groups the overture to Rienzi was played. He adopted this custom for his political rallies in Munich and made it a ritual element of the massive Party rallies in the Third Reich. That piece – both military and solemn in character – served as a kind of signature tune of the Hitler movement and of the political liturgy celebrated annually at Nuremberg. So attached was Hitler to this music that, as Albert Speer reports in his reminiscences, he refused to replace it with any of the laudable pieces composed for the occasion by eager Nazi musicians.

In a particularly revealing conversation of 1930 (reported by Otto Wagner in Heny A. Turner’s Hitler Memoirs of a Confidant), Hitler pointed out that he had learned an important lesson from Rienzi. Wagner’s hero fails, he observed, because he has no political party behind him and because he neglects to destroy his enemies. And indeed, from the outset of his career we see Hitler determined not to repeat the “mistakes” of his operatic model For his fiftieth birthday, Hitler requested and received, among other Wagnerian treasures, the autograph manuscript of Rienzi. What may at first strike the observer as a whim was surely motivated by his emotional bond to this particular work. Far from being capricious, his request breathes the air of inevitability. Eerily, having refused several urgent entreaties to allow the precious documents to be taken out of Berlin to a safe place, he apparently took all his Wagner autographs with him to the Führerbunker, the final stop of his catastrophe bound life, where all further traces of them vanish. Even his pathetic end in the Bunker is reminiscent of Rienzi’s demise in the burning ruins of the Roman Capitol.

But the most striking similarity is that between Rienzi’s turn against Rome and Hitler’s turn against Germany. The end in sight, Hitler, in his Political Testament, cold-bloodedly dismissed his own people as the loser in a historic struggle, undeserving of the greatness he had intended for it. Given all the echoes of Rienzi in Hitler’s career, it was almost inevitable that his end would point back to the concluding lines from Wagner’s tragic grand opera: “The last Roman curses you. / Cursed be this city! / Decay and wither, Rome! / That is the will of your degenerate people.”

The political repercussions of the historical Cola di Rienzi upon the 19th and 20th centuries are today often overlooked. It seems indicative of the intellectual milieu that sparked Wagner’s interest in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi. The Last of the Tribunes (1835), the book from which he culled his libretto, that approximately at the same time the twenty year old Friedrich Engels drafted a play on the same subject, also based on Bulwer-Lytton and intended as libretto for an opera. Not only Hitler but also Benito Mussolini chose Rienzi as a model. This is presumably the reason why in some early analyses of National Socialism, such as Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), Cola di Rienzi, rather than Cesar, is identified as the true historical prototype of modern fascism.

It is not difficult to see why Die Meistersinger also occupied a special place in Hitler’s mind. The community Wagner imagined and glorified in that opera comes close to the völkisch ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft, as opposed to a modern society. The corporate principles on which Wagner’s Nuremberg functions, the emphasis on community with its concomitant rejection of universalist values, clearly appealed to Hitler. Nor is it too obvious to mention that Wagner’s Volksgemeinschaft is led by a charismatic artist who enjoys the affection of the people. Unlike Parsifal, with its two momentous scenes of disarming and its message of compassion, Die Meistersinger contained nothing that could be perceived as undermining the war effort, which is probably the reason that this opera was played during the so-called “Kriegsfestspiele” of 1943 and 1944 almost to the bitter end.

The “Day of Potsdam” culminated, in a specially arranged, festive performance of Die Meistersinger in the Prussian State Opera. Wagner was to provide the capstone to this most successful propaganda effort of the new regime. At that performance on 21 March 1933, the people of Nuremberg were instructed, during the “Wach auf” chorus, to turn to Hitler’s box, thereby transferring their homage from Hans Sachs to Adolf Hitler. Perhaps no other moment better encapsulates the political uses of Wagner in the Third Reich than this unashamedly operatic gesture. The identification with Prussian tradition in Potsdam during the day and with Wagner at the opera at night achieved for the new regime an incalculable strengthening of its claims to historical and cultural legitimacy. It almost goes without saying that at the Bayreuth Festival that year, this theme was repeated in full orchestration and in deafening fortissimo: “As we listened to the conclusion of Die Meistersinger today”, wrote Hans Alfred Grunsky, “it seems to us as though we were hearing in our in- Parsifal provides the most illuminating example of the way in which the Wagner cult catapulted Hitler into the role of designated saviour of Germany. After Hitler’s first visit to Wahnfried, 30 September l923, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner provided open letters which the aspiring politician gratefully used for his own purposes. It was the first time that Hitler received an enthusiastic endorsement from a widely respected cultural institution in Germany. Of particular interest are Chamberlain’s letters of 7 October l923 and of l January l924. Ailing and suffering since l9l4, he casts himself in the role of Amfortas who now feels comforted and relieved knowing that the new Parsifal has appeared on the scene: “Germany in the hour of her greatest need gave birth to a person such as Hitler.” Like Wagner’s Parsifal, Hitler is called upon to perform a “Heiltat”, but this time for Germany as a whole. His mission is to rid Germany of the lethal influence of Judaism – the “todbringendem Einfluß des Judentums auf das Leben des deutschen Volkes”. Chamberlain pointed out to the faithful that no one in Germany had the courage and the determination to carry out that necessary task – no one, that is, except Hitler.

Whereupon he virtually anoints the new Parsifal. In fact, Chamberlain gave Hitler a double role, that of Parsifal, the healer, and that of Siegfried, the liberating hero. When Hitler famously wrote that the spiritual sword with which he was fighting was forged in Bayreuth, he was actually taking a cue from Chamberlain. Apparently, Hitler had no difficulty imagining himself both as Parsifal and as Siegfried and encouraged his followers to see him in those mythical roles.

Those familiar with the Wagnerian code understood the implications of Hitler’s endorsement by Wahnfried. Hitler did not need to give explanations, nor did the public need them. From that moment on, Hitler could be certain that he was the bearer of a mission and that he could present himself as the political heir to Wagner. No transgression or misappropriation was required here. The role of the guardian of the Wagnerian legacy and of the future savior of Germany, as defined by Chamberlain, was offered to him, the devout, ostensibly non-political admirer of the Meister, on a silver platter.

Hans Rudolf Vaget, Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Homeric-Thersitic

 

Robert H. Bell

 “But after all, what is the whole subject matter of that revered poem the Iliad but ‘the broils of foolish kings and the foolish populace’?”—Desiderius Erasmus (The Praise of Folly)

Human folly at Troy is rampant, starting with the Greek king and commander Agamemnon, who recklessly insults Achilles, refuses to apologize, and suddenly, inexplicably, decides to test the resolve of his army. Declaring the end of the siege, the king is flummoxed when his troops flock eagerly to their ships. The Greek cause ap­pears lost. Suddenly steps forth a remarkable, puzzling figure: “Thersites of the endless speech,” who “knew within his head many words, but disorderly;/vain, and without decency, to quarrel with the princes/with any word he thought might be amusing to the Argives.”

Who is Thersites? Not even Homer seems to know. The single orator in the Iliad unidentified by rank, patronymic, or place of origin, his name suggests “loud-mouth” and “courage,” in the sense of boldness, impudence. Reputedly the ugliest man at Troy, he surpasses his glowing, glowering peers for sheer repul­siveness. Since only one other Iliadic character is individuated by appearance and few ever described physically, the elaborate delineation of an apparently minor, fleeting figure is striking. The bard oddly highlights and seemingly undermines Thersites. De­formed and despised, Thersites seems utterly grotesque.

Despite conspicuous disqualifications, reviled Thersites seizes the stage and delivers a sixteen-line speech to the entire assembly. Astonishingly, this scorned freak publicly upbraids Agamemnon for greed and lust: you’ve already claimed valuable bronze and the choicest women, “whom we Achaians/give to you first of all whenever we capture some stronghold/Or is it still more gold you will be wanting, that some son/of the Trojans, breakers of horses, brings as ransom out of Ilion.” All this ransom and booty are the spoils “that I, or some other Achaian, capture and bring in? / Is it some young woman to lie with in love and keep her/all to yourself apart from the others? It is not right for/you, their leader, to lead in sorrow the sons of the Achaians.”

After excoriating Agamemnon, and flaunting the principles of rhetoric, Thersites assails his audience (“Achaian girls . . . women, not men”), repudiates their mission, and urges abandonment. Although Thersites’ rabble-rousing is unavailing, it provokes an immediate, decisive reaction from Odysseus, who abuses and scourges Thersites. Everyone laughs over him happily. Entertained and amused, the soldiers forget their incipient mutiny and return to ranks. So much, it seems, for Thersites, basest wretch at Troy. Humiliated, a pathetic, obnoxious creature, he disappears into oblivion. As is right and proper, according to Odysseus, and to most right-thinking people. Reading Homer in the nineteenth century, Prime Minister Gladstone found the speech “not a good one.”

Because Thersites is so flamboyantly over the top, he is not always credited for being on the mark. Critics tend to agree with the soldiers and Odysseus. They have marked Thersites’ ten­dentious description, his physical ugliness and moral turpitude. Is Thersites a monstrosity by heroic standards? Martin argues that the speech of Thersites, “quite literally, ‘without meter,’” is “over-determined to look bad by a number of criteria,” including slurring his words. Evidently “just an entertainer,” he “deserves no respect.”

Much like the Hephaestos sequence, another intervention by a disabled figure prompting mocking laughter, this episode is disconcerting, and fruitfully so. But ought we to dismiss Thersites so precipitately? Notwithstanding the soldiers’ contempt, the nar­rator’s malice, and the PM’s condescension, Thersites’ “words of revilement” are words of power provoking instant reaction from Odysseus. Thersites is no blithering madman or prating malcon­tent, and Agamemnon’s reckless conduct he himself eventually acknowledges as folly or madness, até. Impertinent yet pertinent, speaking truth to power, Thersites is seriously threatening. He says that Agamemnon “dishonoured Achilles, a man much better/than he is.” Thersites sarcastically echoes and ironically lauds Achilles: “there is no gall in Achilles’ heart, and he is forgiving.” Ha! “Oth­erwise,” he says to Agamemnon, “this were your last outrage.” Thersites locates (one might say) the Achilles heel of the antagonistic chiefs. Shrewdly, he recognizes the gravity of the king’s transgression, and intuits how close Agamemnon was to be­ing killed by the infuriated Achilles.

Laughed at, willing to “say any word he thought might be amusing,” Thersites is an unusual yet recognizable comic figure. Aristotle conceives comic types as “worse” than men are, mean­ing less admirable in appearance, character, and conduct. While “high mimetic” characters like Achilles live for an ideal (glory, say, or arête), “low mimetic” figures like Thersites are more fully embodied. Thersites’ physical freakishness exposes the sexual and appetitive motives of Agamemnon and Achilles, and for his pains is pummeled and harried. Aristotle’s brief remarks On Rhetoric, identifying three types of comic characters, bear upon Thersites. He is a buffoon, jesting to amuse others; he is an eiron, feigning ideals to mock Agamemnon; he is also an alazon or imposter, strutting and blustering to aggrandize himself.

It’s possible to regard Thersites as comic relief or as a foil to set off the solemnity of the heroes and their epic mission. In this view, Thersites is a lightning rod, like those Shakespearean commenta­tors who exist, observes William Empson pungently, “not at all to parody the heroes but to stop you from doing so: ‘If you want to laugh at this sort of thing laugh now and get it over.” Arguably, Thersites absorbs the destructive capability of purely derisive cynicism. To sustain a potent, viable heroic spirit, one might conclude, Homer inoculates his characters to resist more devastating, potentially fatal, strains of irony.

Though tempting, this model fails to account for the extent of Thersites’ disruptive force. Like Shakespeare who develops Thersites into a major character in Troilus and Cressida, Homer con­jures not a stock buffoon but a truth-teller, a wise fool. Certainly Thersites is foolish and reckless: “disorderly;/vain, and without decency,” he thwarts order, propriety, and decorum. Thersites presumes the fool’s remarkable license to speak harsh truths. However abusive and merciless, his invective is inventive and amusing. Thersites is a self-conscious performer, mocking the heroic enterprise and eviscerating his superiors. For which of course he pays the price. The fool is a scapegoat or pariah; ques­tioning the legitimacy of authority, he risks banishment (or worse) for what is always called impiety or treason. Odysseus castigates Thersites for “playing the fool,” threatens to cast him out “bare and howling,” and scourges the fool with Agamem­non’s royal scepter; thus the divine symbol of authority is literally the tool of enforcement.

If we are inclined to preserve authority or decorum, we can enjoy the spectacle and stress the anomaly of Thersites, so weirdly different from our heroes! Yet Thersites, “worst of Greeks,” echoes and recapitulates Achilles, pride of the Greeks; Thersites satirizes what Achilles epitomizes. The parallels are inescapable: at pre­cisely the same moment in Books 1 and 2, a character bursts out to attack the authorities. Vituperative, insulting, intemperate, they are reckless figures, kamikaze pilots, outraged and outrageous. Both assault Agamemnon and deprecate the soldiers. Each is isolated for his transgressions, Achilles in splendor, Thersites in ignominy. Thersites is a disgraceful, ridiculous caricature of the hero’s tragic grandeur, greater stature and complexity. To regard Thersites as a conventional foil makes sense but begs the question: why does Homer make Thersites so eerily like Achilles in several minute particulars?

A more subversive possibility is that Thersites is Achilles’ second self. In satirizing and parodying the hero, Thersites dem­onstrates intimate familiarity and implicit affinity with Achilles. Agamemnon tells Achilles that he speaks “abusively,” that “forever quarrelling is dear to your heart,” while Thersites is known for the “shrill noise of his abuse,” and his propensity to “quarrel with princes.” Achilles “dashed to the ground the sceptre,” that emblem of authority used by Odysseus to thrash Thersites. Even more telling is the similarity of their articu­lation. Both say that Agamemnon hogs the booty and demands the prettiest concubines. Both claim to fight nobly, to deliver captives. Each urges the troops to return home, and both remark that it will teach Agamemnon a sorely-need lesson. Both Thersites and Achilles “quarrel with the princes”—in Greek (though not in Lattimore’s translation) the same phrase is used for both. Thersites repeats Achilles verbatim at certain points.

Such multiple correspondences between Thersites and Achil­les are far more elaborate than necessary to contrast epic hero and satiric slanderer. Alarmingly, the basest wretch too exactly parallels the exalted hero, as if Thersites intuits Achilles’ feelings and speaks on his behalf, closely echoing several sentiments. Not even the exigencies of oral poetry explain why or how Thersites concludes his speech, “Otherwise, son of Atreus, this were your last outrage”—a daring, rash threat reiterating Achilles word for word. That last utterance is quite uncanny, since Thersites was not present to hear Achilles.

While Thersites parodies or satirizes Achilles, once can see that he functions as a double or doppelganger, a version of Achilles seen through a glass darkly. With such evocative affinities hero and outcast are a little more than kin. We’ve seen that Thersites’ abuse is hyperbolic, over-the-top, yet apposite, spot on. Both in what he says (he “knew within his head many words,”) and what he is, Thersites doubles meanings. Thersites’ parody humorously degrades the sublime. Homer’s he­roic and mock-heroic elements are imbricated. Thersites is a dark shadow of Achilles, sacrificed instead of the untouchable hero: Perhaps Achilles is a tragic, as Thersites is a comic, scapegoat.

Disabled like Hephaestos, Thersites is enabled too. Thersites is an avatar of comic energy that disrupts events, complicates issues, eludes closure, and generates inquiry. One particularly slippery Homeric crux suggests a calculated ambiguity of identity. The Greeks, we are told, “were furiously angry with him, their minds resentful. (Latimore translation).” Or, “furious with him, deeply offended”(Fagles translation). Angry or furious with whom? Alexander Pope makes clear that the Greeks were “Vext” at/with Thersites. But in Greek, the pronoun reference is ambiguous; the soldiers could be angry with either Thersites or Agamemnon. Leaf’s massive commentary says “clearly Agamemnon,” that Thersites is “at the moment the accepted spokesman of the mob, who are indignant with Agamemnon.” Surely that meaning is available. “Homer is here conveying the idea of general Achaian support for Achil­leus’ stance,” articulated by Thersites and supported by ordinary soldiers, says Norman Postlethwaite. If so, the fickle mob experi­ences fluctuating sympathies, more various and complex attitudes than simple derision.

Typically fools are marginal characters, heedless of social im­peratives, challenging hierarchy, flouting norms, turning things topsy-turvy. A mocker and a jester, Thersites is Homer’s wise fool and crucial chorus. Repulsive and pathetic, outrageous and ridicu­lous, his trenchant critique is potent. This isn’t merely detrimental to morale; it is seditious and subversive. That Thersites strikes a nerve, and threatens the whole enterprise, is evident in Odysseus’ heavy-handed over-kill. It’s not just that Odysseus lacks humor or cannot suffer fools gladly. Thersites raises substantive issues that are tellingly ignored by Odysseus and essentially unanswerable. Without really responding to Thersites’ argument, Odysseus orates, not very persuasively. After Thersites’ sinewy and insinuating lan­guage, Odysseus sounds bombastic and flaccid. In Homer’s Greek, he crudely threatens to expose Thersites’ genitals.

In the inauspicious person of Thersites, Homer endows the disloyal opposition. Many-minded Homer is—I have argued—far more receptive to humor and sympathetic to Thersites than his crit­ics, as Pope recognized: “there is nothing in this Speech but what might have become the mouth of Nestor himself, if you except a word or two. And had Nestor spoken it, the Army had certainly set sail for Greece; but because it was utter’d by a ridiculous Fel­low whom they are ashamed to follow, they are not reduc’d, and satisfy’d to continue the Seige.” Pope’s translation conveys the blazing force of Thersites—the fearless, foolish satirist whose “wit­ty malice” Pope cherishes and emulates in his “own” satires.

 Thersites only clamour’d in the throng,

Loquacious, loud, and turbulent of Tongue:

Aw’d by no shame, by no respect controul’d,

In scandal busy, in reproaches bold;

With witty malice studious to defame,

Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim.

But chief he glory’d with licentious style

To lash the great, and monarchs to revile.

At first he seems to endorse the heroic code; gradually Thersites reveals the iron fist beneath the velvet glove. “Whate’er our master craves, submit we must,/Plagu’d with his pride, or punished for his lust.” The damning truth condemns Agamemnon, locked into that couplet rhyming “submit we must” and “punished for his lust.”

Thersites is bright and brassy, insufferable and indispensable. He defies constraints and turns things topsy-turvy. Adroit at im­personation, an acute parodist, he marches to his own rhythms. There is a nice comic reversal with a satiric twist: introduced as one who loves to provoke laughter, Thersites leaves to jeering laugh­ter. But this humor ricochets and boomerangs: if the mocker is mocked, so is the audience. Thersitic energies are both centrifugal and centripetal. No wonder Thersites provokes such intense and disparate reactions from commentators: he has multiple purposes and contradictory consequences. Values clash like contending war­riors. Homer’s technique is dialogic and dialectical. Thersites and Odysseus debate fundamental principles of heroic conduct.

Homer suggests that the sublime and the ridiculous are much closer than single-minded Odysseus can afford to believe. The Thersites se­quence is a midnight foray from the heroic fields of glory to the shifting terrain of startling satiric humour, not a comfortable place to stand but a vantage point Homer insists we visit.

Robert H. Bell is Frederick Latimer Wells Professor of English, Williams College, Massachusetts.

Liturgical Architecture

Dennis R. Mcnamara

We live in an era that is not known for making beautiful churches. In fact, the sensus fidelium seems to indicate that something is indeed severely wrong with the unprofane architecture erected in the last few decades. Sometimes modern churches claim a vague Christian symbolism or association through shape or general motif, which is nonetheless found largely unsatisfactory. In other cases, purposeful attempts are made to avoid eschatological sacramentality. Many churches of the last half century seem to live up quite well to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s (who, along with Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, sought to offer an intellectual, faithful response to theological modernism) claim, adapted from Karl Barth, that without enthralling pangs of  beauty, theology does not inspire. If it is in the very nature of beauty to transport us to rupture, Balthasar asks, how could we then possibly dispense with the concept of the beautiful that is sharp and yet tangible, something that abstract modernism undermines?

This description certainly fits much of the church architecture of recent years. Yet, an unconsidered return to the Romantic historicism of nineteenth-century architecture cannot be a solution to today’s problems, despite the calls for traditional architecture appearing today. Even Ralph Adams Cram, twentieth century’s great proponent of a renewal of liturgical architecture through a return to medieval precedent, critiqued the nineteenth-century revivalists for their history-driven formalism. He called the Modernist “revolt” against the period’s parade of styles a laudable thing, but could not agree with its solutions, since “they were measurably inferior to what they have decried.”   We find ourselves in a similar dilemma. A return to a purely Romantic approach to architecture is not a true solution though the romantic spirituality of the Christian artists and aesthetic philosophers of the last two centuries (from 1860 to the present) is strongly brought out by their preserving a sense of the unity of beauty and religion, art and religion, when they had almost no support from theology.

A Balthasarian approach to liturgical architecture can avoid the pitfalls of both Romanticism and Modernism. To canonize a particular “style” of architecture only because of a historical association is an architectural aesthetic theology. However, the Modernist denial of historical styles precisely because of their historicity is also an architectural aesthetic theology. A Balthasarian solution beckons: begin by conceiving liturgical architecture as the form of Christ (Christus totus) in his sacramental, ecclesiological dimension in the liturgy. Liturgical architecture can therefore best be evaluated in light of its ability to bear the Christian message, that is, the “ontological secret” of the liturgical event, which by definition reveals beauty and results in joyfully rapturous discovery.

Balthasar writes about the apologetic nature of his “fundamental theology,” saying “the heart of the matter should be the question: ‘How does God’s revelation confront man in history? How is it perceived?’” One could ask the same question in architectural terms: “How does God’s revelation confront man in liturgical architecture? How is it perceived?” Here we have an architecture that is claimed to reveal the divine, and that, on the basis of this claim, demands that we should believe and therefore expend our resources in a certain way despite the clear, rationalistic overarching demands of economy, functionalist utility, and the Zeitgeist. What basis acceptable to the liturgical-architectural establishment can we give these authoritative claims?

Although the answer may seem redundant at first, it is worth stating that liturgical architecture is first and foremost liturgical, a bearer of the mystery of the anticipated eschatology of the Banquet of the Lamb. Balthasar speaks of the Church as an “event” in which the “power of the Christ-form expresses and impresses itself,” in which “the Lord becomes present in the assembly manifesting himself within it.” Both the Eucharist and the scriptures are described as making no sense unless enjoyed as a means of “impressing the Christ-form in the hearts of men.” Liturgical architecture can be understood in a similar manner. Liturgical architecture (and of course, figural art), as symbol of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb of the Heavenly Jerusalem, would make no sense without the Christian’s partaking in the invisible liturgy that it represents.

As part of an architectural theological aesthetic, liturgical architecture is not primarily an example of the trends popular in Architectural Record, a neutral setting for the horizontal activities of an improperly understood “People of God,” or a “skin for liturgical action . . . which need not look like anything else.” Rather, liturgical architecture should be capable of becoming part of the cluster of symbols that make up the liturgical rite. In other words, it should be considered sacramental, making present by way of foretaste the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the Heavenly Jerusalem. “If beauty is conceived of transcendentally, then its definition must be derived from God himself.”

This emphasis on the sacramental, eschatological nature of Christian worship and its liturgical architecture finds a decided sympathy with Balthasar’s writings. The liturgy is certainly one place where the encounter with Christ is made available to us. In fcat, liturgy is made up of two distinct movements. “First God is made present through words, signs, and symbols,” then “people respond to God’s presence in their midst through word, song, and action.” This second movement is not a separate event, but a spontaneous response to the first. If architecture is part of the system of symbols that make God known, then it is not simply the neutral beige background common to the post-conciliar era, but part of the “eschatological orientation” that “endeavors to make the divine present through a type of eschatological anticipation.”

Through its positive, beautiful images and sounds, and by its confident celebration of the eschatological banquet, it steps beyond the present-day signs of the kingdom’s distance and anticipates the time of the kingdom’s fullness. Thus, liturgical celebrations avoid the chaos, contingency, moral confusion, and existential anxieties that mark our transient lives. Liturgy needs the kind of eschatological anticipation implied by these characteristics if it is to offer the believer an encounter with God, since most do not have the contemplative vision to find God in the type of muck found in our everyday lives. If the salvific narrative, the “theo-drama,” is to captivate us and elicit our response, we must encounter it in its fullness so that we can perceive its divine rendering.

These claims are easily transferable to liturgical architecture, which, along with its art, should present this eschatological dimension of the liturgy. The altar should be read more as the banqueting table of the Lord than merely a community table. The figural imagery is more than abstract mood-evoking shapes or simple devotional imagery; it makes sacramentally present the Christus totus, including the heavenly assembly. The church building can present an image of the heavenly banquet in a building that images the Heavenly Jerusalem.

# Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press/Crossroads, 1983).

# Balthasar’s well-known writing on aesthetic theology and theological aesthetics can be applied to architecture directly. While a theological aesthetics begins with God’s transcendent beauty and his desire to allow man to participate in his divine life, “aesthetic theology,” by contrast, begins with the creaturely concept of rupture and attempts to universalize it.

Denis R. Mcnamara is assistant director and faculty member at the LiturgicalInstitute of the University of Saint Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in Chicago.

Spritual Politics as Marriage of Opposites

Vasanthi Srinivasan

Ananda Coomaraswamy, known primarily as an art historian, deserves attention also as a philosopher of spiritual traditions. As a keeper of the Indian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for three decades, he relentlessly espoused the spiritual basis of Indian, especially Hindu art. For him, spirituality was essentially about tuning in to the ‘true reality’ and the ‘one immortal source’ that manifested itself both immanently and transcendentally. Saying that ‘he never thought for himself’, he devoted himself to clarifying and expounding the metaphysics or first principles as articulated in different religious traditions. In his words, ‘philosophy or rather metaphysics represents a theory or vision and religion a way to the verification of the vision in actual experience.’ While philosophy was contemplative, religion was an active quest. But this did not mean that philosophical exegesis was only an academic exercise. For him, it prescribed the right order both within the soul and society.

 Consider the opening lines of his Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government: ‘It may be said that the whole of Indian political theory is implied and subsumed in the words of the marriage formula “I am That, thou art This, I am sky, thou art Earth” and so forth addressed by the Brahmin priest, the Purohita, to the King in Aitareya Brahmana. Focusing mostly on the ritual texts (Brahmanas), he sets forth a ‘traditional’ theory according to which right order requires that temporal power be guided by and subordinated to spiritual authority. According to him, the marriage formula invoked during the coronation rites, is uttered not so much by the king as is generally held but by the Brahmin priest thereby establishing the primacy of the contemplative over the active life. Given that the king is the feminine party in the marriage, he claims, it is ‘inconceivable’ that they could have been uttered by him.

 The king, in his turn, is the masculine party in the relationship towards the earth/realm. In this role, he is the ‘voice’ that gives effect to the purposes of spiritual authority. The marriage brings together “counsel and power, intellect and will, right and might. Through this marriage, the ‘purohita (priest) becomes the alter ego of the kshatriya (king)’. He insists that in this marriage, there is no reciprocal equality; the relation of the king to the priest is that of part to the whole. Underlying this relationship is a metaphysic that counsels the rule of the intellect over the emotional—a rule that implies right and proportional ordering of the emotional and erotic elements in the psyche and society.

In ritual terms, this marriage re-enacts the sacred marriage of divine archetypes of priesthood and rulership namely Mitra and Varuna or Agni and Indra mentioned in connection with the Soma and fire altar sacrifices. This marriage of the priest and king, as a homologue of sacred marriages, brings about peace and prosperity to the realm. The priest supposedly mediates with and evokes intra-cosmic deities through his ritual expertise. Coomaraswamy also compares the priest to Plato’s philosopher-educator who ‘fathers’ strength and skilful speech in the temporal power through counsel. The priest seems to acquire wisdom through the study of scriptures and meditative reflection on the cosmic vision underlying them. Without priestly guidance, he insists that the ship of the state will destroy itself. Throughout, Coomaraswamy alludes to Plato, Neoplatonists such as Philo and Christian theologians in order to make his point about right ordering of the sacred and temporal powers.

But it appears that the establishment of right order even in the cosmos involves considerable conflict and violence between naturally antagonistic principles. Coomaraswamy recognizes the references in the texts to the natural opposition between Mitra (representative of priesthood) and Varuna (representative of royal power). Further, the Satapatha Brahmana says “the ksatra takes no delight in the Brahma, nor does the brahmavarcasa delight in the ksatra. But he goes on to add that the marriage effects a reconciliation that reflects their ‘transcendental unity’. For him, this unity emanates from the common source of both which is Brahma; the latter is described as the Infinite that encompasses the finite. The Brahmin priest is apparently representative of this ‘infinite source’. But the texts do not unequivocally confirm the priority of the Brahmin priest nor do they identify him solely with the contemplative life over the passion-ridden active life or the masculine over the feminine. The Brhadaaranyaka Upanisad is quite ambiguous and mentions in the same passage that there is nothing superior to the ruling power and also that the priestly power is the womb of the ruling power and ought not to be harmed.

 Secondly, the priest is not presented as a benevolent philosopher guide. The ‘purohita is originally Agni Vaisvanara of the five wraths, and if he not be pacified and endeared, he repels the sacrificer from the world of heaven It has been noted that the priests did not just perform priestly functions but also warrior-like functions as charioteers and generals. Aitareya Brahmana, which he cites often, also presents the priest who, as a ritual expert is, ‘a receiver of gifts, a drinker of soma, a seeker of food and liable to removal at will.’ The king is provider of food for the Brahmin. Far from being independent, the priest was dependent on royal power and needed the protection of the latter. In the rajasuya, the royal consecration ceremony, the Brahmin pays homage to the Kshatriya from a lower position. Also, every sacrifice involved a fee and lavish bestowal of gifts.

Coomaraswamy interprets this exchange from the standpoint of the priest; he claims that this patronage is only ‘proper’ to the king because he follows the path of action, a path that implies virtues such as generosity. Thus, royal bestowal of gifts should not be seen as one of gratitude for advantages or a fee for services. For that would compromise the superiority of the Brahmin. Rather, by receiving gifts, the Brahmin gives the king an opportunity to be magnanimous. In a similar vein, he contends that the marriage transforms the King’s self so that he is more attuned to the claims of the sacred but denies that this marriage also implies the transformation of the priest into a devourer of gifts which impel more conquests for booty. This transaction entangled the priest in the vicious cycle of violent conquests undertaken by the king and compromised his transcendental authority thus rendering his purity open to ridicule. The Brahmin priest and the barber are often linked in popular tales. More than harmony, the texts register the conflict-ridden dependence and cooperation between the two iconic figures associated with authority and power.

Coomaraswamy himself notes some of the ambivalences but glosses over them consistently through esoteric readings. Hostile as he is to historical and literary treatments of the texts, he champions a theological method. For him, subsequent texts simply explicate what is always already there in nuce in earlier texts. As such, criticisms that his approach is ahistorical and nostalgic, that it is Brahminical and masculinist and that he is constructing a ‘high tradition’ may, however valid, appear external to his approach. For him, the context does not completely determine the meaning of a text; he probes the texts for philosophia perennis or eternal truths. While one may disagree with the very idea of such truths, an effective critique of his work must proceed from within his framework. Here, such an immanent critique is pursued. It may be asked whether we should not contextualize his readings; sure, for he fulminates at length against the ‘proselytizing fury’ of the colonial and modern west which only sees idolatry and flawed revelation in eastern religions. But his search for some eternal truths is not simply a product of his context; the texts in question do speak of cosmic truths and eternal principles of order. What he does not foreground is the ambivalence in the same texts about the extent to which such eternal principles and truths are realizable in the mundane world.

For him, traditional civilization is one where ‘everything is seen as an application and extension of a doctrine whose essence is purely intellectual or metaphysical.’ Echoing Plato, he claims that the paradigmatic order is one where the superior rule over the inferior for the latter’s good. He writes enthusiastically about the ‘marvelous city of wooden automata’ in Katha Sarit Sagara, where “the whole citizenry consists of wooden engines or automata, all behaving as if alive […] (ruled by) a comely man […] the only sole consciousness there […] (who is) enjoying the sport of a King, as a God all alone by himself.’ In another portrayal of the city of resplendent wisdom, he writes of ‘the prince (who) instructed by his wife, has become a free man and performs his royal duties like an actor on stage and following his example and instruction, all citizens, no longer motivated by their passions although still possessing them, were playing at life and citizenship spontaneously and intelligently.’ Predictably, Coomaraswamy interprets these myths as articulating the right order within the soul and the city, where the “Self, inner controller, the immortal One” of the Upanisads (which are analogous to the daimon of Socrates or Plato’s Idea of the Good) rules over the passions and appetites.

These charming visions of cities organized according to first principles evoke not only wonder but also our curiosity. After all, Plato’s Republic, which informs Coomaraswamy’s reading, leaves enough doubt about the feasibility and desirability of the dream-picture. Plato’s Socrates suggests that only a rare combination of chance factors will bring about a coincidence of philosophy and politics. Besides, Socrates’ references to his daimon provoked deep suspicion in the city. As mentioned earlier, Aristotle introduces practical reason to moderate tyrannical desires to achieve wholeness in politics. Could it be that this issue never cropped up in the so-called traditional civilization of India? If the above-mentioned ambiguities are probed seriously, then the texts definitely seem to recognize the tension between the naturally antagonistic principles of brahma and kshatra and refuse to reconcile this tension in a conclusive transcendental unity.

This refusal to reconcile antagonistic forces is loud and clear in the puranicm myths of divine marriages. From the Siva Purana, it is clear that even Siva’s marriage to Sati/Parvati is open to breakdown, violence, destruction, recovery and remarriage often in some holy spot on earth. The establishment of harmony and order is often temporary and vulnerable to some demon’s tricks or the other. And the marriage of Siva and Parvati cannot yield children in the normal sense; they both produce sons without the participation of the other. On the one hand, Siva’s dangerous asceticism has to be tamed and his marriage to Parvati is necessary for cosmic welfare; on the other hand, Siva’s excessive erotic play with Parvati is equally threatening for cosmic welfare. Marriage as the guarantor of harmony and fertility between opposites is at once affirmed and questioned in these myths. Divine marriage has to be disrupted and broken up for worldly good. Further, some myths and rituals suggest that divine marriages cannot take place on earth and are deferred indefinitely. A good example here is that of Kanyakumari whose marriage to Siva is delayed till the time of universal destruction so that her virginal powers may be deployed to kill demon-foes. Similarly, there is a well-known tradition that Meenakshi’s marriage is postponed every year because someone sneezes before the ceremony is completed. The goddess has to be married but then her chastity also has to be preserved for cosmic fertility.

 David Shulman observes how ritual thus accomplishes the ‘elusive synthesis of conflicting ideals’. In a similar vein, could it be that the Brahmana texts were also registering the ‘elusive synthesis of conflicting ideals’ in their appeal to sacred marriage between King and Brahman? Even if we interpret the divine marriage to be an internalized order within the soul (as Coomaraswamy does repeatedly), it is not unambiguously good as evidenced by the myth of Parasurama, the brahmin-warrior but also matricide and killer of Kshatriyas. To quote Shulman, ‘Parasurama carries to a mythic extreme an enduring Brahmin conflict; on the one hand, restraint, purity, non-violence, detachment; on the other, inherent power, and the recurrent temptation to use it in the violent pursual of an uncompromising vision. Indeed the myth implies that the Brahmin can never be wholly free of violence….’

Coomaraswamy is championing Brahminical superiority but in the process, the Brahmin figure is bereft of the inner conflict with consuming passions that the texts express. Coomaraswamy admitted that he was supporting ‘relatively unpopular sociological doctrines’ in his interpretations of classical texts. In part, he was reacting to the modern reduction of philosophy to epistemology and politics to socio-economic issues. But then he also argued for traditional institutions such as the caste order as natural and proper. Expressing his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi he writes of the great leader as one who ‘consistently refused to disassociate politics from religion and has never repudiated the caste system but would only reform its working.’ And adds that the ‘justice and freedom in the social order can only mean that it is just that every man should be free to earn his daily bread by following that vocation to which his natural abilities imperiously summon him’. Alluding to those who are untouchables because of no caste or loss of caste status, he concedes there may be ways of ‘lifting up qualified outcastes’ and quotes Swami Vivekananda who said that ‘if the outcastes would improve their status, let them learn Sanskrit.’ While admitting that there may be kinds and conditions of work to which none should be subject, he affirmed the hierarchy of caste order.

 Given that Coomaraswamy’s theological interpretation resonates with many Hindu ideologues, it may be useful to reiterate the tradition’s ambivalence surrounding conflicting ideals as expressed in myths. Mythic ambiguities and ritual improvisation hint that sacred marriage between opposite principles or figures is often elusive and/or explosive involving violence and disorder. In this light, there is much to be learnt from Hindu myths and rituals about the possibility and desirability of a marriage between spiritual and political realms. At the same time, the realm of gods and demons, as much as that of humans is ridden with factionalism and conflict; restoration of right order requires ingenuity and tactful redistribution of power and honor. This need not result in ideals being abandoned; their paradoxical nature is explored and affirmed as well as undermined in myths and ritual strategies. Obviously, recalling ritual or textual elisions may not make the ideologues embrace the liberal separation between the spiritual and the political; but it might serve to moderate simplistic visions of the so-called spiritual realm in favor of a richer, nuanced understanding of its limits and possibilities. # Brahmanas are prose texts explaining the meaning of liturgy and clarifying ritual performance; they constitute the second portion of each veda; Aitereya Brahmana belongs to Rig Veda while Satapata Brahmana belongs to (white) Yajur Veda.

Vasanthi Srinivasan is Reader, Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad.