Stravinsky’s Many Phases

Many readers will be familiar with Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and at least a few will be aware of The Firebird, but his career as a composer passed through many stages, and was influenced both by the events of his life as well as by the music of other composers.

Some scholars divide Stravinsky’s works into three periods: The Russian Period, the Neoclassical Period, and the Serialist Period. During the Russian Period, his compositional style was shaped by his mentor, Rimski-Korsakov, he was commissioned by Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, and he incorporated elements of Russian folk music. During the Neoclassical Period, he redirected his compositional style toward European traditions. During the Serialist Period, he worked with variants of the twelve-tone technique, sometimes moving into atonal or posttonal compositions.

The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music gives this overview:

In the course of his exceptionally long creative life he employed a wide variety of styles and techniques, including rhythmic and and melodic ostinatos, elements of jazz, the diatonicism of the so-called neoclassical works, extremes of dissonance sometimes resulting from the juxtaposition of diatonic elements, and the serialism of works composed after 1952.

The Schüler Duden identifies both impressionistic and expressionistic strands in Stravinsky’s work.

In this schema, the Russian Period would be approximately from 1907 to 1919, the Neoclassical Period from 1920 to 1954, and the Serialist Period from 1954 to 1968.

But this system of categorizing Stravinsky’s work into three periods is probably oversimplified. First, it ignores entirely the thematic content manifested in the lyrics and librettos of the vocal work, and the titles, subtitles, and explanatory comments given to the instrumental work. Second, it ignores how Stravinsky morphed his style within each of the alleged periods. Third, it ignores the overlap and transformation from one period to another. There are possibly other ways in which this schema of his compositional history is overly simplistic.

Yet it can serve at least as an introduction to the development of Stravinsky’s writing. Eric Walter White gives an overview of the early phase:

Stravinsky’s apprentice works, written under the supervision of Rimski-Korsakov, included a Symphony in E♭ (1905 - 1907) and groups of songs. Shortly after Rimski-Korsakov’s death in 1908, Stravinsky’s Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks were heard at an orchestral concert by Sergei Diaghilev, who was so favorably impressed that he asked him to write a ballet score for the 1910 season of the Russian ballet. This was The Firebird (first performance, Paris, 1910), in which Stravinsky showed how fully he had assimilated the romantic idiom and orchestral palette of his master. The success of The Firebird was so complete that he became known overnight as one of the most gifted of the younger composers, and Diaghilev was anxious to secure his continued cooperation. Petrouchka followed in 1911. The first performance of The Rite of Spring (Paris, May 29, 1913) caused a near-riot in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, but this, in the long run, did much to consolidate Stravinsky’s growing reputation. The following year Diaghilev’s company produced his first opera, The Nightingale, in Paris and London. The vocal score of The Wedding, a dance cantata based on Russian peasant wedding customs, was written during 1914-17, though it took another six years to discover the right instrumental formula.

Stravinsky’s work on The Wedding began in late 1913, and he finalized the score only in 1923, a full decade later, marking a process which cuts across the boundary between the proposed Russian Period and the proposed Neoclassical Period.

In any case, Stravinsky took his music in different directions over the decades, steering it into various compositional techniques at assorted times.

Not only his musical style changed markedly from time to time; his spiritual life, which often shaped his music, took its twists and turns over the decades.

As historian Patrick Kavanaugh writes, Stravinsky, born in 1882, began with a form of religion which was more-or-less typical for Russians of the time:

In the church of his childhood, Stravinsky had been required to read the Bible. He began criticizing and rebelling against the church when he reached his teens, and he parted ways with orthodoxy for nearly three decades.

Lurching away from the faith of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was infatuated for a time by paganism, as Patrick Kavanaugh narrates:

In his early twenties, Stravinsky became the private student of Russian composer Rimski-Korsakoff. Soon, his genius came to be recognized by the musical world. He gained international attention with the premieres of three great ballets, commissioned by Diaghilev, the renowned director of the Russian Ballet. These works, Firebird; Petrushka; and the indomitable Rite of Spring, subtitled “Pictures of Pagan Russia,” remain in the repertoire of every major orchestra in the world today.

The larger Romantic and Romanticist era in which Stravinsky found himself at the beginning of his career was often fascinated with the paganism of pre-Christian Europe, and, for Rimski-Korsakov and Stravinsky, the paganism of pre-Christian Russia. Some artists espoused it whole-heartedly, while others did not personally adopt it, but found that it provided material for artworks. Richard Wagner would be an example.

After distancing himself from Russian Orthodoxy, pagan themes certainly appear in Stravinsky’s work. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to determine whether he personally adopted some form of paganism, or whether he merely used pagan elements artistically.

It is clear that Stravinsky later returned to Christianity. In contrast to his childhood experiences, in which the faith was to some extent imposed on him perhaps more than it was embraced by him, in his later reengagement with the faith was more autonomous. He participated in Christianity with his passion, intellect, and energy. While bonded to the Russian Orthodox Church, he acknowledged the full smorgasbord of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Lutheranism.

This reconnection with Christianity seems to have happened not at some specific point, but over a period of time, in the 1920s, as Patrick Kavanaugh explains:

Stravinsky’s early ballets explore secular and even pagan subjects that offer no clue as to the personal religious faith he possessed later in life. These great works were written when Stravinsky was in his late thirties and had long since abandoned the Russian Orthodox faith of his upbringing. Yet in the mid 1920s, Stravinsky experienced a permanent conversion to Christianity.

There seems to have been a gradual shift from an infatuation with paganism to a re-exploration of Christianity:

Late in life he would explain, “For some years before my conversion, a mood of acceptance had been cultivated in me by a reading of the Gospels and by other religious literature.”

Stravinsky seems to have steered his career as a composer and his intellectual exploration of faith through a complex series of phases. To him, the two journeys were one.

Olivier Messiaen: Birdsongs, Global Melodies, Unorthodox Instrumental Groupings, and Spirituality

Two qualities mark the life of Olivioer Messiaen: his powerful genius and his spiritual sensitivity. Born in 1908, he was already studying music at a conservatory by the time he was eleven years old, as Rollo Hugh Myers writes:

As a child he studied music at Grenoble and Nantes and in 1919 entered the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Marcel Dupre, Maurice Emmanuel, and Paul Dukas. In 1931 he was appointed organist of the church of La Trinite, Paris, and about this time he began to study medieval music and many aspects of exotic music including Greek and Hindu modes and the rhythms and music of China, Japan, Peru, Bolivia, and Bali. Later he turned to the study of birdsong. In 1936 he founded, with the forward-looking composers Andre Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Yves Baudrier, the group Jeune France and in the same year began teaching at the Schola Cantorum and the Ecole Normale in Paris. As a soldier in World War II he was taken prisoner and interned at Görlitz, Germany, where he wrote Quatuor pour la fin du temps, performed at the prison camp in 1941. Repatriated in 1942, he became professor of harmony, and later of composition, at the Paris Conservatoire.

Messiaen sampled music from around the globe, and employed rhythms, harmonies, and melodies from many cultures in his own compositions. He likewise heard and transcribed birdsongs and inserted parts of them into his work.

He experimented with various groupings of instruments, not allowing himself to be confined to the traditional arrangements. Messiaen had a special fondness for percussion. Rollo Hugh Myers gives examples:

His most important works are the Turangalila (“Love Song”) symphony (1948), in ten movements, containing a prominent solo piano part and in which percussion instruments used in the manner of the gamelan of the Sunda Islands are combined with the ondes martenot, and Chronochromie, for 18 solo strings, wind, and percussion (1960). Le Reveil des oiseaux (1953), Oiseaux exotiques (1956), Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958), Sept Haikai (1963), and The Transfiguration (1969) incorporate meticulous notations of birdsong. Important later works include Couleurs de la Cite Celeste, for piano, three clarinets, three xylophones, brass, and percussion (1964), and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1966).

Messiaen influenced the musical world not only through his works, but also through his students. The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music notes that “his pupils include Boulez, Barraque, Amy, Henry, Stockhausen, and Xenakis.”

The Schüler Duden (1989) notes that he was part of a broader movement among composers to write masses which were suitable for use in the church. Previous composers — Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart — had written masses which were designed for a concert hall. They were too unwieldy for a practical worship event. Messiaen, by contrast, worked in a church on a regular basis, and wrote masses which were user-friendly for actual worship. This did not prevent him from using contemporary compositional techniques.

The fact that he worked in Roman Catholic churches and composed Roman Catholic masses did not limit Messiaen from connecting with other forms of faith, as Patrick Kavanaugh explains:

Although Messiaen’s background was within the Catholic Church, he recognized that God’s truth abounded through all of Christianity. He remarked, “I’m a Christian, we’re all Christians and I think that in the present age of ecumenism — as, furthermore, in every era — we shouldn’t attach too much importance to religious differences.” His emphasis was the central point of all Christian faith, Jesus Christ: “He appears to us — came to us and tried to make Himself comprehensible in our language, in our sensations, in our attitudes of mind. That’s the most beautiful aspect of the God-head: the Mystery of the Incarnation, and that’s why I’m a Christian. In saying this, I’m not thinking about differences between Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Catholics — and a Christian is a person who understands that God came.”

In sum, Messiaen’s music is characterized by adventurous instrumental groupings, influences of musical cultures all around the world, the melodies of birdsongs, and a strong spiritual orientation.

The Endlessly Fascinating Augustine and His Confessions

Large numbers of readers start reading Austine’s Confessions every year, including many who are not assigned by a professor or a teacher to do so. This book is both a classic and perennially popular. Why?

One reason is that the author’s biography is both powerful and relatable. His life’s path started in a way familiar to many, and he progressed successfully along that path to a point which many envy: a solid education, and the beginnings of a career which could lead to a position of financial, political, and social power, as James Smith writes:

A promising young man from the provinces, both he and his family had dreams of him making it to the center of cultural power and influence. He believed his education would be a ticket to the upper class and “the good life.”

Many people have lived lives like that. Many others want to. Augustine was climbing: he was on his way to becoming an elite.

Another reason for interest in the Confessions is that it is a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted book. It combines, and alternates between, autobiography, philosophy, psychology, theology, and personal counselling. Without being explicitly a “self-help” book, its insights have offered guidance to many readers over the centuries.

In addition to the pursuit of money, power, and influence, “Augustine also thought sex would satisfy his deepest cravings.” Augustine ultimately found his enviable career path to be unsatisfying. His situation speaks to both modern and postmodern audiences. The superficial happiness which he attained was insufficient. He sought a deeper peace, contentment, and joy. Augustine’s search for a better life readily translates to the twenty-first century, as James Smith explains:

Despite being a citizen of ancient north Africa, Augustine was well-acquainted with the demons that plague us in late modern America: the pressure to succeed; the driving ambition to climb social and professional ladders; the disorienting thrill of so-called “freedom”; the anxieties that beset our quests for power and pleasure; and the persistent frustration of foisting inordinate expectations upon our accomplishments and possessions. Like us, Augustine knew the exasperation of looking for love in all the wrong places.

Augustine was young, upwardly-mobile, and had a promising career. He was unsatisfied. He hadn’t yet found what he needed. He was continually on the move, whether travelling physically through the world, or moving through the realm of ideas and philosophies, yet found himself feeling stuck. He was free, and yet felt captive. He felt restless and anxious.

He didn’t find a solution to his problem. The solution found him, as James Smith describes it:

The opening prayer of his Confessions — “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” — has turned out to be a perennial insight into the human condition. Augustine’s writings are like a been-there-done-that theological account of the young and the restless.

Looking at the last half of the twentieth century, and the first quarter of the twenty-first century, one sees that life in first-world countries share some common features with Augustine’s life in the late Roman Empire:

Our culture begins to resemble the fractured, frantic world of Augustine’s waning Roman empire.

To be always on the move, always exploring, is never to feel at home. To be always pushing the limits, seeking maximum freedom, is never to know contentment or peace. He had lived this first-hand:

Augustine understood this human penchant for quests. But he also experienced the disappointments of a life lived in perpetual exile. Never arriving means you’re always leaving.

Augustine found this paradigm built into the narrative of the Prodigal Son, as James Smith reports:

Augustine structures his analysis of the human condition around the travels and travails of the Prodigal Son, the tale of an ungrateful son who runs off with his premature inheritance having effectively told his father, “I wish you were dead.” And this odd, surprising Father acquiesces: “Here you go,” he says. “I love you.” The son spends everything, wasting these gifts on loose living that calls itself “freedom,” losing himself in the process. He is no longer himself. But at rock bottom, “in a distant country” Luke tells us, the son wakes up and remembers who he is, and Whose he is, and makes his way home to his father’s grace.

“And there, in the grace of God, he finds what” so many others, before him and after him, “were longing for: He finds himself.” To know one’s self as loved is a cornerstone of identity. To know one’s self as unconditionally, powerfully, meaningfully, and eternally loved is the cornerstone for a confident identity. The ‘he’ is both Augustine and the Prodigal Son.

Paradoxically, the peace and contentment of this confident identity is the launchpad for adventure. Augustine did not become tamed and domesticated. He traveled and debated. He could move throughout the world precisely because he had a home. He could engage in passionate intellectual debate precisely because he was at peace.

The Prodigal Son is an archetype:

The reason Augustine tells his story is because he thinks it is simply an example of the human story. We are all prodigals. And he wants us to ask ourselves a question: “What if I went home?” But what’s interesting is that it also traces his own geographical excursions from Africa to Italy, from the fringes of the empire to its heart. And it’s precisely when Augustine is as far away from home as he’s ever been, in Milan, that the still small voice of God reaches him and sets him on a path back home — to his heavenly Father, but also back to Africa, where he will serve God for the rest of his life.

He went home. Physically, he went home to Africa. Spiritually, he went home to God. So even when he traveled away from Africa to discuss or debate, he was still at home.

This allowed him to encounter conflict or hostility without being overcome by anxiety — to be sure, he had times of anxiety, but they did not master him. He had changed, but the world around him had not. When he was in the capital city, he was surrounded by “the mix of paganism and politics in Rome.” He was intellectually and spiritually now an alien in those places in which he’d formerly been at home. Just as anxiety didn’t master him, neither did this feeling of being stranger.

Augustine must have constantly felt like an outsider wherever he went. Indeed, the experience probably started at home. The child of an African mother and a father who was a Roman official, Augustine was bicultural (and quite likely biracial): He lived in two worlds from the time he was born. When he ventured to Rome, he would arrive as an outsider. And even when he returned to Africa, as a product of the Roman education system, he would be an outsider again.

He effectively lived in two worlds. If the Confessions is his most popular book, The City of God is certainly in the top five. Augustine uses the metaphor of living in a city — or rather, of living in two cities — to express this sense of being an alien, and yet being content to be an alien.

The young African would later come up with the concept of the Christian living in the tension between two cities — the City of God and the city of the earth.

He wrote The City of God to explain not only his outsider status, but the outsider status of his fellow believers. A century after Constantine, Christians in the Roman Empire, and in the city of Rome, were still a minority. The city had been attacked, sacked, and looted by the Goths in 410 AD, and the pagan majority blamed the Christians. According to the pagans, the Christians had weakened the city by failing to appease the pagan gods. The gods, feeling insulted, had not helped the city defend itself against the Goths.

It was a classic case of “blame the outsiders” and “blame the numerically small minority group.” In this context, Augustine, who’d been an up-and-coming member of the Roman establishment, was now explaining to that establishment how and why this oppressed little group wasn’t to blame for Rome’s failed foreign policy and for the inability of Rome’s military to defend the city. He argued that the presence of Christians in the empire was in fact beneficial to society.

He understood his audience. He knew that they’d view Christianity as a set of childish fables. He knew this, because he had also once viewed it this way. Now Augustine was changed. He saw inestimable value in the teachings of Christianity. Augustine had been shaped by experiences he’d had with Ambrose, whom Augustine had heard speak many times. “Bishop Ambrose made” a difference “in his life.”

When Augustine arrived in Milan, he still thought sophisticated, learned people couldn’t believe in the “fables” of Christianity. But then he heard Ambrose preach — erudite, empathetic, unapologetic — and something in Ambrose’s witness helped Augustine imagine himself coming home to God.

Ambrose was less about debating and proving the truths of the faith, and more about inviting listeners to explore and experience it. Ambrose was “not so much ‘defending’ the faith as showing how it could be believable.” Augustine learned much from Ambrose and employed it in his own writings and lectures.

These early lessons from Ambrose appear in The City of God and Augustine, who himself had formerly mocked Christianity, knew how to formulate his words for the Roman readers.

The audience to whom Augustine wrote The City of God is not too different from twenty-first century Americans, as James Smith explains:

Given that we’ve spent generations looking for love in all the wrong places, and have experienced the pain and disappointment that results from idolizing wealth, power and sex, perhaps our culture is finally ready to consider Augustine’s radical solution: Our rest lies not in acquiring, but in being found.

Augustine not only helps us find home, he also helps us be brutally honest about the Christian’s ongoing penchant to run away.

Augustine’s narrative is not a simple “happily ever after” story. He continued to wrestle spiritually. His former life of material wealth, social influence, and indulgence still called to him. It was at times a struggle for him.

As James Smith phrases it,

Even when we are in Christ, the pull and tug of the mythical “open road” can lull us into thinking the grass is greener elsewhere, that freedom is the absence of obligation, that the goods of creation could be a substitute for the Creator. But Augustine’s honesty about his own continued struggles with ambition and vanity are oddly encouraging. They remind us that we can never reach the end of God’s grace, that the Father is always waiting for us at the end of the road, ready to forgive and throw a feast. His grace is the fetter that sets us free.

What other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, John Steinbeck) did in fiction, Augustine did in his autobiography. He sought fulfillment in the sparkling attractions of society, didn’t find it there, and was grasped by a spiritual power — a higher power.

Vienna — Designing the World’s Capital: Architectural Achievements During One of Civilization’s Highpoints

The Belle Époque was an era in European history which lasted from 1871 to 1914. Unlike other eras — e.g., the Renaissance — the Belle Epoque is more specifically defined in terms of its beginning and end. A quick survey of textbooks shows that the Renaissance has no clear agreed-upon beginning date or ending date, nor any concrete events to mark a beginning or end. By contrast, the Belle Epoque is understood to begin with the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and to end with the start of WW1. To be sure, there are dissenting voices who would suggest different chronologies for the era, but they are few in number.

The name of this era refers to the flourishing of art, science, and culture in general during an era of peace in Europe. While there were wars in other parts of the world, this era featured more than 40 years of tranquility, which facilitated cultural development.

Although, as the nomenclature suggests, this era is conceptualized largely with regard to France, and even more specifically with regard to Paris, the era applied to large parts of Europe, and at times was more significantly instantiated in places like Berlin and Vienna.

In architecture, one noteworthy example of this era is a grand Austrian project: a large monumental boulevard with major buildings along it, interspersed with parks and sculpted monuments. This is the Ringstrasse (Ringstraße) in Vienna.

Vienna was, and is, the capital — but of what? When the project began, of the Austrian Empire; by the time the project was completed, it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; both of those are more generally called the Habsburg Empire; in 1918, Vienna became the capital simply of Austria. In any case, Vienna was the political and cultural center of most of central Europe, an area much larger than the area of Austria at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The medieval shape of Vienna was bounded by massive walls and moats. By the early nineteenth century, modern methods of warfare had made these anachronistic and of no practical value. They even impeded travel from point to point within the city, because the city had grown well past the former boundaries which they marked. Therefore the emperor, Franz Josef I, ordered them removed in 1857.

Where the walls and moats were once located, the grand boulevard began to take shape. Not a mere city street, the boulevard was nearly as wide as a football field is long. The boulevard itself, and the structures along it, were a showcase for some of Europe’s finest architects, as historian Angus Robertson writes:

As the Belle Epoque period developed across Europe, peace, growing prosperity and urban technological progress could be felt in Vienna too. 1879 was a year of jubilee celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the marriage of Emperor Francis Joseph and Empress Elisabeth. At its heart was a historic inspired pageant around the Ringstrasse with more than 14,000 participants. It was organized by Hans Makart, the most popular Vienna artist of the age. Although the via triumphalis was formally opened in 1865, it would take a number of years for the first main buildings to be erected and further decades to be completed. All were designed in the historicist architectural style, inspired by historical eras thought to be fitting to their modern function: a Hellentic temple from the home of democracy for the parliament, Renaissance palaces for the museums, Roman grandeur for the imperial residence, Flemish urban splendor for the municipal government.

Many of the original buildings still stand intact in Vienna, and segments of the Ringstrasse look much as they did a century ago. Other parts of the Ringstrasse, especially those damaged in WW2, are now home to more modern architecture.

Each of the buildings along the grand boulevard is a specimen for the student of architecture, and has its own rich history. This history is developing even in the twenty-first century.

In 1928, the Denkmal der Republik (‘Monument of the Republic’) was unveiled to celebrate the first decade of the new government, which had begun when the monarchy ended. The National Socialist government, which replaced the Republic, at first hid the monument behind flags, and then dismantled and placed it into storage, in 1934. It was restored to its place in 1948, and in 2009 the city government of Vienna expanded the monument by adding an area next to it with an informational tablet.

Only a few steps from the Monument of the Republic is the Gedenktafel für die sowjetische Kommandantura (‘Plaque for the Soviet Commandant’) which bears the inscription sunt lacrimae rerum to recall the suffering of the Viennese under the military occupation by the Soviet Socialists. The tablet was unveiled in 1993.

The Austrian Parliament building was completed in 1883, and a fountain in front of it was completed in 1902. After being closed for renovations for several years, a phased reopening of the building occurred, and by 2023, the building was largely back to normal usage.

Many sculpted monuments — honoring scholars, artists, military leaders, political leaders, and members of the aristocracy — stand along the boulevard.

Visitors to the city will look in vain for street signs proclaiming Ringstraße. The Viennese long ago divided the boulevard into segments, each with its own name: Stubenring, Parkring, Schubertring, Kärntnerring, Opernring, Burgring, Dr.-Karl-Renner-Ring, Universitätsring, and Schottenring.

Much of the cultural life of the city takes place along the Ringstrasse, as Angus Robertson notes:

The first public building completed on the new Ringstrasse was the Vienna Court Opera (now State Opera) in 1869. The Neo-Renaissance-style building, which accommodates a seated audience of 1,700, with room for another 500 standing guests, is one of the foremost opera houses in the world. At the time of its construction, however, it was very controversial, which led to one of the architects, Eduard van der Nüll, dying by suicide. Over the years, Gustav Mahler and Herbert von Karajan have been among the many leading conductors of its opera company and orchestra, which provides the musicians for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The Vienna State Ballet is based at the State Opera, which also hosts the annual Vienna Opera Ball.

The ball season begins on November 11 each year. There are several hundred balls during the season. There is a strict dress code: men must wear either a tuxedo or a tailcoat, and women must wear floor-length evening dresses. The exact details of the dress code vary from one ball to another, and will be printed on the invitations. The balls occur in a variety of elegant buildings, among which are the Hofburg Palace, the City Hall of Vienna, the Musikverein (‘Music Society’), and the Staatsoper (‘State Opera’). The ball season comes to an end on Shrove Tuesday, i.e., the day before Ash Wednesday.

The Ringstraße not only unifies the city geographically in terms of transportation, but also culturally, as a connecting point for history, architecture, and elegant social events.

The Rise and Fall of Empires — And of Languages

To oversimplify a bit, empires are like bell curves: a founding, a rising, a peak, a falling, and an end. Empires are associated with languages: Rome with Latin, Britain with English, etc.

The languages of empires also follow a bell curve, but a slightly different “normal distribution” than the empires themselves. There is a curious mathematical consistency in the relationship between the bell curves of empires and the bell curves of their associated languages.

The Greco-Macedonian Empire, for example, can be seen as peaking during the time of Alexander the Great (336 to 323 B.C.), having risen from the empires of the Greek city-states and their forced merger under the Macedonian Philip, and declining as Alexander’s empire fragmented, for lack of an articulated plan of succession, into smaller successor empires ruled by his former subordinates. Yet the peaking of the Greek language, in terms of its widespread and frequent use, will happen centuries later.

The same is true of the Roman Empire, which arguably peaked around 100 or 150 A.D., and its language. Not only was the empire’s peak long past, but the empire itself was gone, having fallen in 476 A.D., by the time Latin peaked. More Latin was spoken, heard, written, and read after 476 A.D. than before this date.

Other examples abound. France was no longer a major player in geopolitics when the use of the French language as a standard for international diplomacy, trade, and travel later peaked.

This pattern can be visualized as two bell curves mapped on the same Cartesian plane, with the x-axis representing time, and the y-axis representing widespread use of the language. The two curves will be offset but overlapping. The curve with its peak to the left, i.e., earlier in time, will represent the rise and fall of the empire. The curve with its peak to the right will represent the rise and fall of the use of the language, which lags behind the empire’s curve. Obviously, both curves will begin to the right of the y-axis, i.e., when the value for the time variable is a positive number.

This principle seems still to be in effect. English is in widespread use around the world, long after the British Empire has ceased to dominate the globe.

Beowulf: A Text Which Continually Fascinates

Scholars do not know precisely when and where this fascinating story was written. Some suggest that it was composed as early as the late 600s and others propose dates as late as 1000. The location of the writing is often thought to be England, but there are reasonable arguments to be made for either Denmark or northern Germany. The location of the plot is most probably in or around Denmark.

This book is a story, a poem, and a song. It is narrative, its form has an importance of its own, and whether sung or read aloud, it was designed not only to communicate but also to sound. The book has no title in its surviving manuscript, so the name of the protagonist has become the title.

The text has attracted a steady stream of readers and researchers for over a thousand years, and this for multiple reasons.

Linguists consider it a valuable example of Old English, which was spoken and written from approximately 450 to 1050. Much of the Old English language is nearly indistinguishable from Old High German and Old Low German, which were spoken around the same time. These three languages are siblings, descending from a parent language, West Germanic.

Literary scholars consider it perhaps the only surviving example of a genre of which we otherwise have no remaining texts. Its poetic style and structure are landmarks.

Historians and cultural anthropologists mine the book for clues about the society in which it was composed, and the slightly different society which was its subject matter. The plot is fictional — or rather, contains fictional elements — but also refers accurately to historical events which took place in the late 400s or early 500s, more than a century before the story was written.

The book is also a book of contradictions. As indicated, reliable historical data pinpoints certain events, places, and people. But other elements in the book are not only fictional; they are fantasy. Fact and fiction are interwoven throughout. The characters are warriors, dragons, and monsters. The names will sound ancient to the twenty-first century American ear: Hrothgar, Grendel, Beowulf. The mother of the monster Grendel, herself a monster, plays a major role in the narrative.

A second tension lives in the text: the poetry, the plot, and presumably the author manifest traces of both sincere Christianity and Germanic paganism. The heathen belief systems native both to Europe north of the Alps and to Britain didn’t disappear in an instant when the Christian faith arrived. The two worldviews were interwoven in cultures for many years, and the characters in Beowulf demonstrate certain inconsistencies reflecting their society’s embrace of two incompatible conceptions of the world.

The poet knit Christian and pre-Christian motifs into a single fabric, as scholar Rosemary Jean Cramp writes:

Christianity has so deeply penetrated the language, metaphor, and thought of the poem that we must assume an audience with some tradition of Christianity and most probably Christian poetry behind it. The poet naturally presupposes also a wide knowledge of traditional heroic stories but he penetrates below the surface of such stories and their conventional situations, sympathetically considering the sufferings of innocent participants, the impermanence of success and happiness, and the courage of the heroes who had to live without the consolation of Christianity.

The pre-Christian pagan narratives remain on the surface of the characters. Christianity will introduce an exploration of the inner life. The text of Beowulf gives more occasional glimpses of the protagonist’s inner life than one generally finds in the purely pagan Germanic sagas.

In 1939, the archeological discovery of a burial site from the 700s provided confirmation that the “poet’s descriptions of the equipment and lavish burials of kings was neither exaggerated nor dependent on pre-English traditions.” The discovery, in Suffolk, revealed “a curious mix of heathen and Christian elements in the burial.” Rosemary Cramp adds that “there was no trace” in the burial area “of the human or animal sacrifices which were a feature of fully pagan burial rites.”

While traces of paganism are certainly present and clearly visible in the text, it is no longer the full-throated paganism of pre-Christian Scandinavia, because it lacks human sacrifice.

The dual nature of the text shows, on the one hand, a pagan warrior-code with ruthless familial feuds, a powerful concept of fate, immortal fame being earned by heroic deeds, and an honor culture which drives characters to self-aggrandizement and glory-seeking. On the other hand, with a touch of dissonance, the narrative contains Christian concepts like forgiveness, a framework of good versus evil, biblical allusions, prayer to a benevolent Savior, and a merry afterlife.

The times and places of the plot, and later of the writing, were “rather newly Christian,” writes Burton Raffel: “Layers of morality and tenderness and piety are intermixed,” with the pagan “glorification of war, death, and fame.” In the lingering paganism, on its way out and yet making itself felt in culture, “such humdrum occupations as farming, fishing,” and “the care and feeding of both adults and children are all denigrated, casually, when they are mentioned at all. Slavery is taken for granted.”

The introduction of Christianity into the culture brings about a more sympathetic eye, seeing the humanity of the slaves, servants, and craftsmen.

In this harsh heathenism, “battle is a way of life, a necessary function of the worthiest members of society,” Raffel notes. Among the leadership class of the pre-Christian Germanic tribes, “death being the supreme product of their occupation,” the warriors found honor in killing and in being killed. Christianity refuses to glorify killing.

“This morality, born of its time and its circumstances,” does not “sound particularly Christian. And yet the poem is full of Christian sentiments, joined with or superimposed onto this more or less pagan code of battle-heroism-kingship.” The reader might be tempted to think that the story is the result of a collaboration between two or more authors, so great is the tension between the pagan elements and the Christian elements. Yet Raffel states: “It seems fairly clear, however — and I myself have no doubt — that Beowulf is the work of one man and that its author was a Christian.”

Early in the text, the description of the natural world is such that “whoever wrote it was plainly a Christian.” The reader might think that such a passage was inserted into the narrative by a later hand, but Raffel argues that

Most of the Christianity in Beowulf is not so easily dismissed as interpolation. “Let God be thanked!” (Alwealdan Þanc), cries Hrothgar, for example, when the Danes assemble to celebrate Beowulf’s victory over Grendel. These are his first words; he goes on, almost at once, to assert with great feeling that

... the Almighty makes miracles
When He pleases, wonder after wonder, and this world
Rests in His hands …

It is God, as I have already noted, who leads Beowulf to victory over Grendel’s vicious mother, once Beowulf has proved that he is willing and able to help himself. The examples could be multiplied many times over: the essential nature of this Christianity may not be quite the same as that practiced in twentieth-century London or in California, but it is an integral part of the poet’s thought and view of life.

Trying to imagine how a poet would compose a text in which the heathen worldview and the Christian worldview coexist, sometimes harmoniously, and sometimes dissonantly, Robert P. Creed notes that “Beowulf is the work of a Christian poet.” But this Christian poet set his narrative in times and places in which the Christian faith had not yet arrived. Britain and northern Europe were still solidly pagan in the 400s and 500s. The poet would have heard and read about names, places, and events; he integrated those into his own narrative.

What was this poet’s creative process? Robert Creed offers two options. In the first option, the poet sees latent Christian virtues in the stories of the heroes in a pre-Christian society:

At some point after the arrival in England of the Christianizing mission of St. Augustine in 597 a traditional singer who was also a Christian told again the story of the noble hero. To this Christian singer the notion that this magnanimous warrior was not a Christian was unthinkable. Beowulf’s conduct showed that he had been the willing servant of the true God.

Alternatively, the poet might have heard a song about a warrior, and detecting that both the song and the warrior lacked spirituality, added this dimension to the narrative, and created from scratch a new poem:

Or it might have happened in this fashion. The Anglo-Saxon singer heard a crude song of monster-wrestling and tribal warfare and decided to make a better man out of the hero of these savage doings. God, the singer had learned, was the fountain of all virtue, and the noblest adventure of all was the imitation of Christ. His noble hero would in his fashion have to imitate Christ.

That is, after all, what Beowulf does in this poem. Hearing that the Danes are at the mercy of that devilish son of Cain, Grendel, one of “a brood forever opposing the Lord’s Will,” the hero leaves his home in southwest Sweden and sails to the rescue. He wrestles with and defeats Grendel in the hall that becomes for that moment symbolic of the whole world.

The text names specifically Cain and Abel, and does so once at the beginning of the narrative and once toward the end. The monsters are in a “lake” that “burns like a torch.” These are clear biblical references. In the end, Hrothgar tells Beowulf, “our only help lies with you,” making Beowulf into a Christ figure. In Raffel’s words, Beowulf obliges by being “the man who died to save his people.”

Beowulf’s funeral retains the faintest hint of paganism, as his body is laid atop a funeral pyre. The Christian element is present in the funeral narrative, too: Bewulf’s soul drawn into eternal paradise, as “Heaven swallowed up the billowing smoke.”

The deceased goes up, not down.

Burton Raffel offers two slightly different hypotheses about how the pagan and Christian elements were mingled into the text. There may also be other possible scenarios. In any case, however, the two influences are braided intricately with each other, and organically, reflecting the two influences in the larger society: both present and detectable, but paganism on its way out, and Christianity on its way in.

These two belief systems moved past each other, one on the descent and the other on the ascent, in fits and starts, but generally at glacial speed. It took centuries to root out pagan practices like human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, and the payment of wergeld — a practice in which a human life was given a monetary value, and a killer need merely to pay this sum to the victim’s family in order for justice to be declared satisfied. Other pagan practices — the buying and selling of women, infanticide, and the kidnapping and enslaving of outsiders — extend and continue this general tone of devaluing human life.

So it is, then, that Allen Kent Hieatt writes: “The Christianity of the poet’s England was still strongly influenced by pagan habits of thought.” The narrative belongs to a “great body of partly heathen, partly Christian Germanic poetry and prose.”

The pagan and Christian strands have perhaps one common point: the clear sense of loyalty — to one’s family, friends, tribe, or king — as an ethical principle. Yet this shared ideal is soon split: in the pagan instance, the response is to kill without exception anyone who is disloyal; in the Christian instance, the response is to endure the disloyalty with patience and forgive the traitor.

“The transmutation of Germanic mores from personal vengeance to the fight against evil depends partly on the Christianity of the author,” writes Hieatt. This author’s “Christian milieu influenced his choice of supernaturally evil figures rather than men as Beowulf’s enemies (although of course these figures belonged originally to the realm of folklore).”

Hieatt continues:

There are a number of plainly Christian references in the body of the poem: to an Almighty who is just, to a shepherd who cares for souls and a malicious being who attacks them when they are not vigilant.

Additionally,

There are also definite biblical reminiscences. Grendel is said to be descended from Cain; the sword hilt which Beowulf brings back to Hrothgar from the underwater battle with Grendel’s mother has an inscription referring to an ancient race of giants, alien to God and flood-whelmed, reminiscent of the Nephilim of Genesis.

After offering a few examples of Christian influence, Hieatt points to the competing heathen ideology:

On the other hand, frequent references to an inscrutable, all-controlling fate; to being fated, i.e., doomed to die; and to a man’s fame as the only thing that will live after him are all in accord with what we know of Germanic pagan habits of thought, although there are no references to the ancient Germanic divinities.

Agreeing with Burton Raffel, Kent Hieatt argues that the two disparate worldviews in the text are not “later interpolations.” Instead, “what might seem to be discrete Christian elements and remnants of pagan thinking appear together” organically “and plainly come from the mind of a single author.”

Such elements are capable of residing in a text side-by-side, even if they are capable of generating a small amount of cognitive dissonance:

They are perhaps better described as elements of the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, which assimilated older views rather than completely discarding them.

In contrast, scholar Frederick Rebsamen allows for an outside chance that the author of Beowulf was not a Christian:

The Beowulf poet was either a Christian or very familiar with and influenced by Christianity. The very tone of the poem in places, especially in the final third, reflects the Christian patristic influence that pervades much of Old English poetry. But some of the principal characters are historically North Germanic pagans, and much of this tradition is retained by the poet, notably in some of the characteristics of Beowulf.

The author, argues Frederick Rebsamen, whether he was a Christian or not, addressed implicitly if not explicitly the fact that his audience lived in a culture and a society which was Christian, but only recently so, and which was well aware of its pagan past:

The way in which the poet solves the problem of religion in this heroic-elegiac poem composed for a Christian audience is one thing that leads me to believe that the poem was composed not long after 700. At that time, although the Anglo-Saxons were generally converted to Christianity, they were also strongly aware of their pagan past. Thus the poet, while introducing the idea of only one god, a kind of Old Testament god whose name is spelled exactly as today, does not push things further, makes no mention of Christ or anything else in the New Testament.

The author mentions “not one pagan god,” and the English/Germanic word wyrd is used in the text to refer to a concept of fate. The word had been used, prior to the writing of Beowulf, to refer to a Germanic god. The author thus reduces wyrd from a personal god to an impersonal concept. The demotion of wyrd goes even farther, when Beowulf’s “courage withstood wyrd.”

Frederick Rebsamen points out that God “is mentioned thirty-two times as God and at least sixty times” in the text “under several other names.” He concludes:

Though the pagan Germanic tradition is reflected in many ways, one god, named God and introduced through Christianity, is in charge.

As a man, Beowulf was, Rebsamen surmises, “a curious blend of pagan and Christian.”

Writing about the many scholars who’ve analyzed Beowulf over the years, Seamus Heaney suggests:

They devoted themselves to a consideration of the world-view behind the poem, asking to what extent (if at all) the newly Christian understanding of the world which operates in the poet’s designing mind displaces him from his imaginative at-homeness in the world of his poem — a pagan Germanic society governed by a heroic code of honour, one where the attainment of a name for warrior-prowess among the living overwhelms any concern about the soul’s destiny in the afterlife.

Heaney proposes that such investigations are reasonable, but that they perhaps miss a greater investigation: the literary merit of the work. Beowulf is, after all, a poem, and as such, the structure, form, and sound are as important as — or more important than — its meaning and its analysis. He hopes that the reader can enter into a fantasy of monsters and dragons and the heroes who slay them, without having to be bogged down in critical apparatuses or interpretations.

What is the structure that houses the two worldviews which are at work in Beowulf? Heaney posits that the narrative contains an inner and an “outer” perspective, which allow to comment on the plot from two different viewpoints. The inner, internal, viewpoint is that of the pagan Germanic world.

But there is another, outer, rim of value, a circumference of understanding within which the heroic world is occasionally viewed as from a distance and recognized for what it is, an earlier state of consciousness and culture, one which has not been altogether shed but which has now been comprehended as part of another pattern. And this circumference and pattern arise, of course, from the poet’s Christianity and from his perspective as an Englishman looking back at places and legends which his ancestors knew before they made their migration from continental Europe to their new home on the island of the Britons. As a consequence of his doctrinal certitude, which is as composed as it is ardent, the poet can view the story-time of his poem with a certain historical detachment and even censure the ways of those who lived in illo tempore:

As evidence, Heaney cites lines 175 to 180, in which the poet reports that the ancestors “vowed offerings to idols” and “swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people.” These things happened at “pagan shrines.” The poet distances himself from his ancestors: “that was their way.”

The poet’s own worldview appears in line 188, where he explains that the souls of the dead come to rest “in the Father’s embrace.”

Of course, Heaney offers this data from his own translation of the text; other translations confirm his presentation.

The poet offers a glimpse of the transition from the world of his ancient ancestors to his own world. He does this by showing how materialism receded. In the world of Beowulf, gold is a greatly valuable, perhaps the most valuable, possession. Over the course of the narrative, the status of gold changes:

By the end of the poem, gold has suffered a radiation from the Christian vision. It is not that it yet equals riches in the medieval sense of worldly corruption, just that its status as the ore of all value has been put in doubt.

The dragon, in Heaney’s estimation, is part and parcel of Beowulf’s world, and it is a sort of litmus test for the warrior: Can Beowulf slay the dragon? But the dragon has meaning beyond the mere physical test of skill:

Dragon equals shadow-line, the psalmist’s valley of the shadow of death, the embodiment of a knowledge deeply ingrained in the species which is the very knowledge of the price to be paid for physical and spiritual survival.

It has often been observed that all the scriptural references in Beowulf are to the Old Testament. The poet is more in sympathy with the tragic, waiting, unredeemed phase of things than with any transcendental promise.

The text of Beowulf offers many onramps for exploration: it can be read aloud for a purely auditory and musical experience; it poses fascinating questions about society’s metamorphosis from blood-thirsty Germanic paganism to a humane Christianity which values every human life; it highlights the tension between outer-directed and inner-directed psychologies, between the narrative of warriors who attend only to being shamed or praised and the narrative of characters who have an internalized sense of honor or guilt; the book blends solidly documented historical realities with fantasy creatures, like blending oil and water.

The many different aspects of this text, and the many different types of questions which it poses, explain the large amount of intellectual energy which scholars from different disciplines have expended in their investigations of it.

Teaching Marcus Aurelius in Introductory Humanities Courses — Find an Approachable Translation

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has long been a staple in interdisciplinary Western Civilization courses at the secondary and post-secondary levels. The text offers connections to both history and philosophy, reflects the influence of Greek thought on Roman thought, and when compared and contrasted with Epictetus, can be used to explore the late Roman version of Stoicism.

In whole or in part, it is included in many anthologies, reading lists, and syllabi.

Many students, however, encounter a significant but unnecessary obstacle to this text: its translation.

In the early twenty-first century, many anthologies, being reprints or slightly revised editions of textbooks published in the twentieth century, offer the Meditations, or excerpts of it, in translations which were done in the nineteenth century — and many of those translations deliberately affected an English prose style which was even older. Imagine an eighteen-year-old in the year 2025 pausing his video game long enough to look at this:

This also thou must consider, that many things there be, which oftentimes unsensibly trouble and vex thee, as not armed against them with patience, because they go not ordinarily under the name of pains, which in very deed are of the same nature as pain; as to slumber unquietly, to suffer heat, to want appetite: when therefore any of these things make thee discontented, check thyself with these words: Now hath pain given thee the foil; thy courage hath failed thee.

This passage was translated into English by Meric Casaubon in the 1600s, and it is still occasionally inflicted on students today.

If the topic of study were English prose style in the seventeenth century, such an assignment might be justified. But if the object of study is Roman Stoicism, then the translation poses an obstacle without any benefit to the student.

A specialist who is studying the history of ancient philosophy may have the patience and ability to untangle Casaubon’s prose, but an introductory course should not burden the student with this reading.

Why are these texts still assigned? Often the reason is, directly or indirectly, money. Older texts are no longer copyright protected, and can be printed and reprinted for free.

More accessible translations are available.

In 2002, brothers and Montana natives C. Scot Hicks and David V. Hicks offered The Emperor’s Handbook, published by Scribner.

In that same year, Random House published the Meditations as translated by Gregory Hays.

Both of these recent translations make Marcus more comprehensible to twenty-first century teenagers than renderings in Elizabethan or Victorian pseudo-Elizabethan English.

Classical scholars can explore and debate the philological merits and weaknesses of these translations, but the classroom instructor can vouch for their practical value. These twenty-first century translations make Marcus Aurelius intelligible and user-friendly.

This example is one of many. Students are introduced to Aristotle and Plato, to Sophocles and Vergil. A student’s first exposure should be in an enjoyable text.

There are many obstacles which hinder the scholar’s goal of helping young people find the humanities engaging. Difficult-to-read translations of assigned texts needn’t be one of them.

Or, as the Hicks brothers phrase it, “Whether speaking to the Senate or to the humblest person, use language that is respectful, but not affected. Let your speech be plain and honest.”