The epic human: 2

Lukács and Bakhtin both treat the epic as a product of the particular tradition of epic literature that begins with the Homeric pieces. While other accounts of the epic genre attempt to take a more global perspective, including literature from many diverse cultures in their discussion, the reality is that the epic in the West has been framed by an ongoing conversation with the Homeric tradition. For example, the Japanese scholar Masaki Mori attempts to expand the number of texts to be considered as ‘epic’ by listing three basic elements of works that are classified as epics – elements which can be found in texts outside the Homeric tradition. These are 1) an epic is long and 2) an epic is a narrative. That’s as much as Mori will say about the formal characteristics of the epic. To these he adds a thematic element, which he calls 3) ‘epic grandeur’.[1]  Mori’s ‘epic grandeur’ emerges on his account from three underlying thematic elements: the hero’s attitude toward his mortality, his communal responsibility, and the dual dimension of time and space ‘he and the entire work must cope with’.[2]

 

Mori notices that the epic hero is fundamentally human. Even if he is the son of a goddess (as is Aeneas), he is not immortal. Even Achilles alleged invulnerability emerges from later legends, and is not part of the Homeric tradition. He must act, therefore, within the limits of his humanity, since he cannot transcend death, or invoke some particular special power. As Mori writes, “How the protagonist comes to terms with the end of his life and what he can achieve within a limited life span determine his status as an epic hero”.[3] Nevertheless, this hero is not simply interesting because of who he is; rather, he must act on behalf of a community, or within the context of a community. Bakhtin somewhat clumsily names this as a ‘nation’. However, the community in question need not be so neatly demarcated; and indeed, one of the most compelling things about epic is the way in which the universally human is reached through the narrative of the particular.

Mori’s third criterion for epic grandeur is the sense that the narrative occurs within an vast expanse of time and space. The epic’s relationship to time stretches back and forwards. The traditional beginning of the epic in media res allows for a retelling of the past. This is then interwoven with a prophecy of the future, and the powerful sense of a telos binding the past and the future together in one line. Geographical space is also expansive in epic. Even if the action is compressed into a present moment in a particular place (as with The Iliad), the audience is made very much aware that it takes place on much larger stage. The scope of the story thus overspills the momentary and the local because it is so comprehensive.

Mori’s attempt to open up the epic to works that do not belong to the Homeric tradition is both useful and unsatisfactory at the same time. Broadening the scope of the genre enables us to see epic themes in works that are not strictly speaking ‘epic’ – for example, works written in prose rather than in verse. It also enables the consideration of works that belong to the oral and written traditions of other cultures. The notion of ‘epic’ as a device for the classification and analysis of literary works still retains its Western heritage, though, which largely begins with Homer as its first exponent and Aristotle as its leading theorist. It is arguably impossible – even if it were desirable – to simply cast off the Homeric perspective on epic. Thus: while it would be better not to be trapped into a classification of epic containing virtual no works other than the Homeric, it is still the case that the place of the Homeric poems within the tradition of epic is unparalleled. As Louise Cowan writes:

It has been customary to say that Homer invented the epic; it would be more accurate, however, to say that he discovered it, for the epic is the portrayal of something potential in the human soul from the beginning, though not known until expressed in poetic form. [4]     

In the previous chapter I cited Charles Bazerman: ‘Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life, ways of being’.[5] From this conversation with Bakhtin, Lukács, and Mori we may begin to venture a number of propositions about the theological anthropology of the epic – propositions which we will test with reference to the epics of Virgil and Les Murray. The first, and most striking of these (1), is that in epic the human being inhabits a world which is highly teleological. The narrative may well be impeded at a number of points – indeed, it has to be if there is to be any dramatic interest in it – but there is no doubt about the outcome. World history is what it is because of the divine desire and direction. As Hegel put it: “In the epic individuals act and feel; but their actions are not independent, events [also] have their right.” “Events” in epic are not, however, are not the creation of the author of the epic. They belong to the divine will. The divine will is revealed to the characters and/or to the readers, but never completely, which allows for the route to destiny to appear somewhat indirect.

Hegel rightly raises the question of the individual’s independence; for in the epic, the question of human freedom is always being negotiated (2). Human beings are indeed viewed as genuine agents and not merely as puppets without conscious awareness of their need to act upon the vast stage of the epic cosmos. But the secret of true human agency in the epic is to act in line with fate and not against it. Their duty is to recognize their destiny and to follow it. Events turn against them when they do not do this.

This means that (3) the epic human being is not much given to the internal dilemmas and deliberations so characteristic of the novel (to concur with Lukács). Authentic humanity – human being realized as true to its nature – is not discovered by reconciling tensions internal to oneself. In fact, it might be possible to argue that the epic does not have a view of the human being as a self at all – if by that we are indicating the self-reflexivity so characteristic of other narrative forms. There are no true soliloquys in epic. Dido commits suicide in book IV of the Aeneid, but the causes of this are not complex. She is not depressed: she is in love, and fate has taken her love from her. Her suicide is as much an act of piety as Aeneas’ departure is.

The epic seeks to make or recover an identity for a community or group (5). Sometimes that is a “nation”, though the value of this term is questionable. The individual’s identity as against other identities is not the issue. Rather the community recalls its own identity through the story of its origins, or the story of its survival through military struggles. The question of ‘who am I?’ is subsumed by ‘who are we?’ In epic, then, heroism is a matter of representation: the hero is an embodiment of the community’s view of the ideal human life. This is why he is not super-heroic, since to be endowed with gifts surpassing those of ordinary mortals makes him unfit to be an exemplar. He exemplifies a virtue, which is capable of imitation in ordinary.

This is why (6) the epic hero does not deny his human limitations, least of all his own mortality. It is also why genealogy is important for epic, since that is the only means that the mortal has for transcending death. The epic hero (as Mori notes) is a human being, and will one day die. Even after he achieves his goal, he must leave behind a legacy.

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[1] Mori, p. 47.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 48.

[4] Louise Cowan, "Epic as Cosmopoesis," in The Epic Cosmos, ed. James Larry Allums, Studies in Genre (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1992), p. 24.

[5] Charles Bazerman, "The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom," in Genre and Writing : Issues, Arguments, Alternatives, ed. Wendy Bishop and Hans A. Ostrom(Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook : Heinemann, 1997), p. 19.

An epic view of the human? 1

Of all the literary genres, it is epic that is experienced by contemporary critics as most alien and obsolete. There is no doubting that the Homeric tradition of epic still exerts an extraordinary influence over the telling of stories, and even overspills literature to speak into art, culture, politics and war. The great Greek and Latin epics of the past are still read, but are arguably not emulated; or, at least, they are incorporated by way of ironic reference. There is, then, by no means a consensus as to whether epic has an ongoing relevance – which is not a question of whether the Iliad or the Aeneid cannot be read with any benefit today, but of whether the epic mode enables an author to say about the human condition that which needs to be said in our present time. Frederick Turner suggests:

Perhaps, in a skeptical and self-critical time, we are embarrassed by the emotions and partisanships aroused by the half-remembered nobility and grandeur of the old stories. We are so much more conscious, self-aware, and disillusioned than that now.[1]

That’s as may be. Though Turner is at pains to show that there are contemporary epics being written, including his own, he also has to concede that epic is not the preferred form of contemporary literary authors. 

As with each of the genres of literature, the definition of the genre is not simply a matter of ticking off a list of formal structures. There is with most theorists an agreement that different formal features arise because of different thematic concerns; and in turn, the preference for certain formal features generates a particular perspective on the world that then becomes characteristic of that genre. Thus, we may validly speak not only of an epic in formal terms but also of an ‘epic sensibility’.  

As we shall see, two of the best-known twentieth century theorists, György Lukács[2] and Mikhail Bakhtin[3], compare the epic with the novel (as opposed to say ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’). The Hungarian theorist Lukács published his The Theory of the Novel in book form in 1920 (English translation, 1963).[4] Ostensibly, it is a work about the development of the novel; however, it is subtitled A historico-philosopical essay of the forms of great epic literature. For Lukács, the novel is what the epic has become. The narrative that underpins the work is a description of how the great epic poems flourished under historical conditions that no long prevail. Lukács begins with an arresting description of the ‘happy ages’ – by which he means chiefly the era of Homer - in which

…there is not yet any interiority, for there is not yet any exterior, any ‘othernesss’ for the soul. The soul goes out to seek adventure, it lives through adventure, but it does not know the torment of seeking and the real danger of finding; such a soul never stakes itself; it does not yet know that it can lose itself, and it never thinks of having to look for itself. Such an age is the age of the epic.[5]

That is: the inner struggle which engenders the psychological inwardness of the novel – the struggle to overcome the self’s otherness to itself. The Greek epic is a world in which there is already an answer to the question ‘how can life become essential?’[6] The epic describes a ‘totality’, in which the world is almost oppressively coherent. Meaning oozes out of every passing event: every goose flying north for summer may turn out to be an omen of the future. It is (though Lukács doesn’t use this term) a theological vision of the universe in which destiny is perhaps impeded for a time but never ultimately diverted from its course. ‘For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle.’[7] The epic poet did not have to struggle to explain transcendent realities, since the gods frequently walked on the ground.

For Lukács, the era of Greek civilization was echoed by the world of the Christian Middle Ages, in which once again the whole created order was thought to be suffused with transcendence and redolent with meaning. All human actions were enclosed with the divine providence. The Enlightenment has unraveled this enclosed and total system and introduced a radical open-endedness and uncertainty to the world, and separated out the transcendent from the immanent, as Kant did with his description of the noumenal and the phenomenal realms. The novel inserts itself in this moment of history as an attempt to give totality to a world in which totality is no longer obvious or directly revealed by a deity. Totality may indeed be discovered in the novel; but it is no longer something that is to be presumed upon. Lukács writes gnomically: ‘The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.’[8]

What of the human being? Lukács makes a number of comments about the contrast between the epic view of the human and the human being that emerges from the world of the novel. In the epic hero we do not encounter an individual meeting his destiny but an individual carrying the burden of the destiny of a community. There is not a personality as such. Interiority is simply not the interest of the epic, since the individual is not interesting in and of himself; what he does has import because he represents a people. Epic heroes are unlikely to be low-born for this reason, for they are connected by destiny to many others; as Lukács says, ‘the epic hero, as bearer of his destiny, is not lonely [in contrast to the hero of the novel], for this destiny connects him by indissoluble threads to the community whose fate is crystallised in his own.’[9]

The theo-anthropology of the epic is, as Lukács sees it, governed by the way in which the empirical world of space and time encloses human life with its order and beauty. Man knows his place in this cosmos under the government of the gods, a government which is constantly (though opaquely) being revealed to him. There are no Nietszchean übermensch here; even the rage of Achilles is not exercised in any defiance of the gods. Lukács writes:

Living empirical man is always the subject of the epic, but his creative, life-mastering arrogance is transformed in the great epics into humility, contemplation, speechless wonder at the luminous meaning which, so unexpectedly, so naturally had become visible to him, an ordinary human being in the midst of ordinary life.[10]

The appearance of the divine subdues the human. This gives the impression that Lukács views the epic as emerging from a kind of pre-fallen world in which, even though there is struggle and death, it is all at least a facet of the extraordinary design of Zeus. The epic has little to do with madness or crime: these are not explanations in the epic, since these are chiefly psychological categories in which the epic has so little actual belief.

Lukács limits his analysis of epic to the world of the Greeks, indeed to Homer, who alone he recognizes as a proper epic poet. He concedes a place to Dante, but only to the first two books of the Divine Comedy. This narrowness of this field seems to jar against his attempt to see the novel as the epic carried on under new conditions. The contrast between the novel and the epic in terms of interiority and the totality of life seems so crucial to him that it is difficult to imagine what the continuity between the two categories might be. Nevertheless, Lukács has recognized that a particular theo-anthropology is deeply embedded in the epic genre: it is a narration of the human experience according to a particular arrangement of time and space and those (the gods) who organize them.

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[1] Turner.

[2] Gyœrgy Lukács, The Theory of the Novel : A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans., Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971).

[3] M. M. Bakhtin, Michael Holquist, and Caryl Emerson, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, University of Texas Press Slavic Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

[4] In an later introduction to the work, Lukács speaks almost with embarrassment of his earlier writing. Nevertheless, political conditions in the Hungary of the 1960s were scarcely congenial to scholarly free speech.

[5] Lukács, p. 30.

[6] Ibid., p. 35.

[7] Ibid., p. 46.

[8] Ibid., p. 88.

[9] Lukács @ p. 67

[10] Lukács, p. 50.

Free grace is worth everything you have - a last sermon in the Moore College Chapel, for now

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it”

                                                          Matthew 13:45-6

What is the most valuable thing that you own?

At first it sounds like a relatively simple question, and it perhaps wouldn’t be hard to think of the answer in terms of some simple possession or perhaps an investment. It may be that you have in fact answered one of those insurance questionnaires in which you are asked to put a number of dollars next to each of your possessions, just in case they are destroyed in fire or tempest, or in case they are seized by a thief; and so you actually specifically know which is the most valuable item on your list.

Is it your car perhaps? Or some real estate – that investment property? Or a piece of jewelry you’ve inherited?

Our most valuable possession is our holiday house down the South Coast of NSW. And it is curious how much time and money you have to spend to protect the value of your most valuable possession; and indeed how much of your heart gets invested in it. Being on the South Coast, the house sits on top of what is in effect an enormous termite mound. And it is made of wood – all of it, except the nails, pipes and window frames. So I recently spent money getting the thing inspected for termites and other pests. It was with great fear and anxiety that I read the report – which was basically all clear I am happy to say. For now. At night I could swear I could hear the terrible chewing jaws of the monstrous termites eating away at my treasure – and that’s from my bed in Newtown.

But the idea that value is to be measured in monetary terms is very one-dimensional and neglects the personal and human dimension of our attachments. What we value most are the things that are beyond value; or the things that are not worth anything in and of themselves but have become invested with a particular significance. They are better described as ‘precious’. Recently, my parents moved out of a large family home to a somewhat smaller residence. This meant trawling through all the strange things that they had kept, like my stamp collection and my primary school assignments. Now, these things have no dollar value at all. But they were of value to me. In fact, for me, some of these things were irreplaceable and incredibly precious. No doubt my descendants will throw them out in time.

More than that: when I think of preciousness I think of, not the things I like, but the people I love: my wife, my children. When someone in grief says ‘I would give anything to have back the one I have lost’, it is not too hard to get the impact of what they are saying. When a court tries to compensate a person for, say, the loss of their spouse in an accident, we get something of the absurdity of even trying to put a price on the loss.

In his parable of the pearl, Jesus wants to us to think very deeply about what is precious to us. Imagine a merchant. His business is perhaps the sale of fine jewels and luxury goods.

And he’s in search of fine jewels. Why? Because he is a merchant. He’s a businessman, looking to make a profit. Perhaps we should think of him traveling as far as the Red Sea – a location we know pearls were found in the 1^st Century – in search of his goods.

And make no mistake, he is after the most precious jewel of the ancient world. This was at least the opinion of the Roman author Pliny, writing in the 1^st Century. The historian Suetonius wrote that the Roman general Vitellius, emperor for 8 months in 69 AD, financed an entire military campaign by selling just one of his mother's pearl earrings. Cleopatra is said to have dissolved one of her pearl earrings in a glass of wine and drank it, just so she could win a bet with Mark Anthony that she could consume the wealth of an entire country in a single meal. Recounting the story (and no doubt exaggerating a bit, who doesn’t?) Pliny estimated the value of the pair of pearls at 60 million sesterces. It is impossible to say exactly what that means in today’s money, but that an ordinary soldier would have been 1000 sesterces per annum puts it in perspective. It is a phenomenal sum.

So this merchant is after the kind of goods that might make him a very tidy profit, if he plays it right. That’s his business.

But then he makes a surprising discovery: a single pearl of very great value. And, finding this one pearl of very great value, he does something rather odd: he goes out and sells all he has to buy it..

It’s a slightly strange moment, because we are led to think of him as a businessman, and it is unusual for a wise businessman to confine his portfolio to a single product. It is an inherently risky strategy from a commercial point of view, because he has concentrated his entire wealth on this one object. He has made no contingency plan. It is not as though he has found a bargain, either: Jesus doesn’t tell the story as if he has found the pearl at the back of some antique shop somewhere in Alexandria going for a few pieces of silver. This pearl is of great price, and it costs the merchant everything he has.

You can imagine him returning to his family after his business trip and trying to explain to his wife why the family home and its contents is up for sale.

What has enticed him?

It is the pearl.

This single fine pearl has hooked him. There’s something almost obsessive about his behaviour - as if he has not simply found a way to make a fortune, but has fallen in love with the jewel. It has become the thing he must simply possess, even if it destroys him as a businessman and makes his family life extremely difficult.

His behaviour suggests that the pearl is not simply a white rock, but a gem of extraordinary fascination and beauty. That’s the interesting thing about precious stones; they are valuable because of their rarity and because of their beauty. They have no particular function that makes them valuable, at least not primarily. They do not gain their worth because we can put them to use in the service of some industry; they do not help us to feed a city, or to guarantee our health, or to protect us from enemies. They don’t do anything.

They just are. They are simply compelling for their own sakes. Their value lies in the awe that they create. And in this case, the single great pearl is so compelling that it makes this merchant behave almost like a drug addict – with such singular focus that it makes ordinary life almost completely impossible. Desire for the pearl has completely taken over.

He reminds me of no-one as much as Gollum. His pearl is his ‘precious’. We would think of him as an unbalanced person - a man who has lost interest in everything except this one pretty thing. What would he do with the pearl once he obtained it? Would he keep it in his pocket, and just look at it when he was sitting on the train? Or would give it to his wife to wear, knowing that it could fall out of a clasp or off a chain and be lost forever?

This, says Jesus, is what the kingdom of heaven is like.

Now, that should make us think carefully. Notice in the first place that Jesus didn’t say that the kingdom of heaven is like the pearl of great value, but that it is like the merchant seeking the pearl of great value, and his actions when he finds it. I don’t want to overstate the point: but it helps us to see that Jesus is directing our attention not simply to the pearl but to the response the pearl gets from the one who recognizes its beauty.

It isn’t the only reference to searching and seeking we can think of in Matthew’s gospel of course. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says ‘seek first the kingdom and its righteousness’. Indeed, a theme of the Sermon on the Mount is that the place where God rules in his justice and peace and righteousness is something that you have to long for. It is given to those who look for it – those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who ask, seek and knock. It is worth being obsessive about. If we only knew what it was, we’d give up anything and everything to be a part of it. Our whole understanding of the value and significance of things would be transformed if only we knew how singularly precious the kingdom of heaven is.

But the complication of the parable for me is this: God’s grace comes for free but it costs you everything you have.

How can this be?

Well we do need to recognize the limits of the analogy in the parable. The merchant purchases the pearl. It is expensive. A poor man would simply not have a chance in this story. He has been priced out of the kingdom of heaven.

But that’s not what Jesus is saying here. He is saying rather: the grace of God is free, but it is not cheap. Our mental habit is to think of those things that don’t cost us anything as not really worth having – as somewhat disposable. I know of instances where people have put a dollar value on an event they were putting in just to give the impression it was worth coming to – as a kind of mental trick.

The kingdom of heaven is not disposable or even recyclable. It is not made of plastic. It is, like the pearl, rare and beautiful. It is utterly compelling - to such a degree that if you grasp it the right way, it will take over your life. ‘When Christ calls a man’, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘he bids him come and die’. And that’s right.

But this is not sad news, since the one who dies for the sake of Jesus and the gospel, the one who leaves behind all he has, the one who hates her mother and brother even – that one is blessed. That one has in the kingdom of heaven all that she has left behind, and more again.

Ah, we always want to think of it in terms of the economics though. We think: well, then, isn’t this actually selfish thinking? Isn’t seeking the treasure of the kingdom of heaven simply a displaced form of greed? Isn’t it just self-interest, the result of a sound calculation?

But the kingdom of heaven is not simply a transaction. Remember the disturbing obsessiveness of the merchant, that he loved the beautiful, singular pearl for its own sake, and not for its usefulness. It was not a means to some end for him. It was simply itself. So it is with the kingdom of heaven: to long for it, and to seek for it is not to wish yourself rich. It is to long for God himself; and to long to belong to the world where God’s peace, and justice, and righteousness are established everywhere; and to long for the world finally bear the fruit that even now is ripening. The kingdom of heaven is beautiful: and the significance of its beauty is that to long for it is not to calculate your own selfish ends, but to long to be part of its way of being. It is not to long to own it, but to long to owned by it.

The kingdom of heaven is valuable in just the way the people we love are precious to us. It is beyond economics. And it is like this because in it God shows us, not his accounting skills, but his costly love. Love is what makes this treasure priceless. Since God himself out of his great love gives himself to us freely in his Son, then it makes sense that in response to him we give him ourselves.

This parable asks us to remember that we here have a magnificent obsession. If we ‘get’ the kingdom of heaven, then we should not be surprised to find that what we value and how we count value are completely changed. We should be less surprised than we are at the baffled stares of our family and friends.

We should be happier to take risks with our worldly goods in light of our heavenly treasure. We should be less concerned than we are to be socially acceptable and – worst of all - nice.

And we should never forget that the proper complement to the free grace of God is to follow Christ with everything we have. It is striking to me that Jesus’ parables of grace aren’t simply about telling us that God freely forgives: they always point us to the fact that truly grasping free forgiveness means having an utterly altered life. We are not meant simply to be believers, but followers; or, better, being a believer means being a follower.

And that is the gospel you and I are called to preach. Have we got the nerve to preach it? Have we got the guts not simply to offer people a salve to their consciences, but to show them that no riches compare to the pearl of great price? Have we got the courage to call people not simply to tick a box but to a whole new way of life? Let us pray for God’s help.