Nine Lives (of the Poets): Horace!

Our book today is Archibald Campbell's big fat dense opinionated 1924 volume Horace, which is, pound for pound, my favorite book on Quintus Horatius Flaccus, that most beloved and approachable of Roman poets. So approachable, in fact, that Campbell's book had to win its spot in my heart against some incredibly fierce competition: there have been thousands of good books written about Horace in the last three hundred years, arguing over every single possible aspect of the poet and his work - from the details of his life to the order of his poems to his influence on every poet who's come after him.  W. Y. Sellar, Gil Highet, D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Eduard Fraenkel ... the list of first-rate scholars, writers, and popularizers who've taken Horace as their subject is very long. Campbell himself is alive to this fact (he himself was writing in Sellar's shadow) and fills his donnishly chatty book with reasons why Horace would enjoy such an appeal:

He is certainly a great artist; the purest Roman literature can show us, Virgil having more of genius and inequality. Horace has indeed, as I have remarked already, a strictly limited array of themes; though all are good ones. He has even, if my analysis of his form is not most grossly out - he has even, in by far the greater portion of his maturest and most characteristic work, but one single type of poem! Yet not even by his own custom can his infinite variety be staled. It is what he does that tells, and he hardly ever does the same thing twice. His subjects he repeats innumerably, he almost never repeats himself. What the ancients cared about in poetry was two things: the soul of the poem, and its body; the structure, and the surface; the composition, and the style. His treatment is always unique, his language always individual. He takes over all the conventions that were available for him; but he used them for his own ends; they are but a medium for his meaning. He cannot be translated; metre and language are fused into his work; the effect cannot be extricated from them.

But many writers sing Horace's praises - the fact that Campbell does that isn't the only reason I go back to his book over and over. No, the rest of the reasons are harder to pin down. I like the fact, for instance, that he under-estimates Horace ("Horace's poetry is good for this age; but not sufficient"), as so many scholars tend to do - it makes both him and Horace seem more human; I like the fact that he seems to have discovered the semi-colon about ten minutes before his book went to the printers and over-uses it like a child running wild on Christmas morning; I like the fact that his book is unapologetically soup-to-nuts, giving us Horace's life and times, a complete overview of poetry's place in the ancient world (an excursus he actually tells readers they can skip if they like! Let's hope none of them did!), and a full explication of everything Horace wrote; and I like the old-world certainty with which Campbell assumes his readers already know their Horace. That last one is a pleasure rapidly vanishing from the world of classical studies, if it isn't entirely vanished already: the assumption of classical knowledge on the part of the reader. Writers who make such an assumption might occasionally paraphrase things in French, but they'll feel no obligation to translate anything older:

We see, then, that the standpoint vulgarly known as classical is that which Horace is opposing; and more explicit proof soon follows. Horace, too, in his turn, appeals to the Greeks; but he uses the appeal of antiquity in the right way. In language which ought never to be forgotten he tells his generation that the great classics were in their own day great innovators:

quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset

quam nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?

That is unanswerable.

The same is true for Campbell's anecdotes (believe it or not - and in the context of the rest of this entry, how on Earth could you? - he's actually quite a funny writer, happily willing to tweak the noses of snobs and dilettantes alike), which gain their maximum punch through the fact that our author doesn't feel the need to stop and annotate them:

There is not getting over the fact that, as Pindar pointed out, Typhon does not like music; and people who do not care for music are generally, I think, not fond of Horace's Odes.

I'm not sure there are 100 readers left in the world today who would smile, as I did, at that reference - who would nod upon seeing it and then keep reading. Probably not everybody in Horace's own reading public got such a reference, but the audience he had always in his mind while he wrote understood him perfectly - or so he hoped.

Campbell goes over every single line of Horace with minute and comprehensive attention, and that, too, is refreshing. Sometimes the raw work of scholarship happening right in front of you is the perfect anecdote for an afternoon spent re-writing textbooks for schoolchildren. As noted, other studies of Horace have come and gone since this one was published ninety years ago, but work and thought and spirit like this are evergreen, or should be.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Pindar!

Our book today is Anne Pippin Burnett's 2008 entry in the great Bristol Classical Press "Ancients in Action" series, Pindar. As might be guessed, the book deals with the Theban poet Pindar, who achieved massive success in the first half of the 5th century BC. A great many books have been written about Pindar, and as Burnett points out, a great many verdicts about Pindar have been handed down by scholars, historians, and especially other poets. He's always been more discussed than known, due at least in part to how difficult it is to know him.

Part of the problem is that we know so little about him. In the centuries since his heyday, biographical accretions have crusted around his name, but very few actual facts have come down to us, and most of those can only be derived from his verses themselves (always a perilous attempt). We know he was a master of virtually every kind of public poetry in existence in his day. His fame eventually reached a point where commissions were coming in from all directions, from Thessaly and North Africa and Sicily and all of Greece. He wrote great choral odes for public occasions like temple dedications; he wrote virginal hymns designed for virtuoso solo vocals; he wrote laments, in which pure, non-bathetic sadness was wrought like fine-spun gold until the purity of it was almost unbearable; he wrote lover-songs, praise-works often done in multiple, mutually complexifying voices ... he had, in other words, a vast repertoire of work, much of it designed to encourage improvisation, much of it as polychromatic as jazz.

He also wrote hymns of praise for victorious athletes - for boys back from local or inter-city games, for men back from pan-Hellenic great games and festivals, for various rulers, celebrating their rules by holding a mirror to some corresponding physical glories. These would have been works for hire, as Burnett takes pains to make clear:

Every Pindaric ode was a bought product. Distinguished achievements were paid a 'wage' of praise, and he who made that praise likewise received a wage, as Pindar was more than willing to note. One group of singers suggested that their Muse's 'whispering songs, faces painted with silver', went out as prostitutes into the world where 'money makes the man' (Isthmian 2.6-11.) This was said in an ode made for an old acquaintance from Akragas ... who presumably delighted in the savoury metaphor, but the sense is generally applicable, for the victory performance was designed to provide a client with exactly the pleasures he wanted.

It's permissible to suspect that bought products may not have elicited the poet's highest and mightiest achievements; any study of Pindar must in part be a longing to have more of his work than we do. What were those other kinds of poetries like, when handled by this master from Thebes? Barring some miraculous discovery in some dusty basement of some Coptic monastery, we'll never know except in fragments - the vast majority of what we have from him, and about him, comes in the form of these bought products, these written remnants of an institutionalized kind of performance poetry that all subsequent ages have found very strange - alien, off-putting. These victory-odes, most of them, were intended to be performed as if they were extemporized - a group of the victor's young friends, maybe a little flushed with wine, bursting into vivid, rambling song in celebration of him. But how can spontaneity be so carefully planned, so metrically perfect? How can fraternal intimacy be achieved by a group of young hired singers, most of whom will never have clapped eyes on the victor before? It all requires a phenomenal amount of imaginative participation from the audience. Ancient Greek audiences were always willing to do that, but more phlegmatic modern ones seldom are. In a tradition started by Petrarch and so indelibly stamped by Wordsworth, Pindar can't help but seem incredibly odd.

Aristophanes and Horace politely disparaged him; Dryden and Tennyson grudgingly admitted that something poetic was going on in the victory odes but grumbled at the work necessary to unearth it; T. S. Eliot, in one of the 20th century's most noted instances of a pot calling a kettle black, called him "the prize wind-bag of all ages." We sense his consummate skill, but it's such a foreign skill we're often left, as Dryden put it, "at a gaze." It can lead to wayward interpretations, and throughout her slim book, Burnett does what she can to correct the ones she catches, as when she runs up against a common misreading of the 7th Nemean ode, in which an invocation of Achilles' lethal warrior-son Neoptolemus crops up at the conclusion of a victory-song to a young athlete named Sogenes:

Ignoring the magnificence of the hero's final resting place, critics of the present day see this episode as a deliberate outrage that Pindar has wrought, for one reason or another, upon his own victory song. Neoptolemos, they say, was the Greeks' first great war-criminal, guilty of sacrilegious cruelty at the fall of Troy, and justly punished for his atrocities by the god Apollo. Consequently he can have no function in the praise of young Sogenes, and must appear here because the poet is pursuing some misplaced purpose of his own. This view, however, while it honours the gossip of Hellenic scholars, forgets the perfect warrior and ideal son that Odysseus describes in the Odyssey (11.505-37). What is worse, it further ignores the dynamic of Pindar's actual song and also the fact that, to be preserved, the piece must have pleased Thearion, the host and father who set this performance before his friends for their entertainment.

We will likely never read anything close to the full range of this poet, and we're equally unlikely to come across any firmer biographical basis than we already have. What we have instead is perhaps more pure: the man's work, and dynamic examinations of that work by scholars like Burnett, who chooses to use a prose style that's direct and evocative:

A layer of the population not only admired, but also scrutinised itself through private rituals of this sort, saying, this is what we are - let us continue to be so! Such was the function of the traditional ode with its invocations, its lists of victory locations, its revival of ancestral achievements, its prayers, and its bits of gnomic wisdom sprinkled everywhere like salt.

There's gnomic wisdom aplenty in this book as well, as fine an introduction to this enigmatic poet as a modern reader can hope for. Granted, an almost totally unknown life is an off-kilter place to start a string of biographies, but there's an appeal, too, in taking a person on the strength of his work alone. We've been doing that with Homer even longer than we've been doing it with Pindar, and it hasn't hurt him any.

Penguins on Parade: Ovid's Metamorphoses!

Some Penguin Classics certainly qualify as secular scripture, which we probably need after a dose of the holies. We all have a shelf of such books that qualify as such personal scripture, and my tastes being what they are, many of mine are included in the Penguin Classics line. The foremost of these, my single favorite book, is Ovid's Metamorphoses, and it was curiously ill-treated by Penguin in the 20th century. The Penguin Classics edition, definitely aimed at the same school-textbook niche had had made their prose Iliad such an astonishing success, was a 1955 prose translation by Mary Innes, who "spent over twenty years proving to schoolgirls that the classical languages can and should be enjoyed" (as we're told in a bio-note clearly - and tellingly - dictated by her). Under her careful, accurate, bowdlerizing touch, we get Ovid's fifteen-book epic as a changed thing itself: gone is the glitter, the liquid grace, the jazzy contrapunction. Gone is the wordplay, the teasing irreverence, and all the wit. What's left is a big miscellany of 'tales of gods and goddesses' in the vein of Edith Hamilton, perfect for Scottish schoolgirls, even though its original author, drunk and flushed from some unsuccessful boy-chasing at a party on the Esquiline, would have extemporized the most exquisite execration of the end result.

Mainly because it's lifeless, and Ovid's great poem, more than any other from the ancient world, absolutely teems with life (as a certain wise man once hopefully described the universe). He wrote it in the blinding fullness of his talents, after his journeyman work and the challenges to orthodoxy were out of his system, after he finally began to understand what Virgil, for example, knew right away: that there's nothing inherently wrong (or worse, embarrassing) about working in canonical terms. In this as in all things, the performance is all - Ovid at last saw this and determined to embrace it. Change is the theme of his masterpiece, and not the least among the changes it signaled was his own: "We have laughed and reveled together, you and I," the Metamorphoses told its readers, "now let me sing you a different song." It's in every way a transcendant work, richly meriting the immortality Ovid himself predicts for it, and it deserves better than Miss Innes calling it a "treasure trove" and calling its author "the prince of story-tellers."

It deserves, first, verse. Yes, this is difficult - not only because Ovid's dactylic hexameter fits poorly in mouth-breathing English iambs, but also because Ovid intended it to be difficult; he weaves more complexity into a couple of lines than any poet after him until John Donne (the problem works both ways, incidentally: if you want to ruin a perfectly good hour, try translating one of the Holy Sonnets into Latin) - this is bound to be a translators' graveyard.



Nevertheless, Penguin could have done better than a prose outline, and I kept expecting them to. I wanted to see a Penguin Classic of Arthur Golding's 1567 masterpiece, still possessing all its unmistakeably Elizabethan crashing suavity. Even better, I wanted to see Horace Gregory's fantastic 1958 translation, still, to my mind, the finest English version of Ovid's poem ever made. But I had to wait and look elsewhere during the 20th century, and in 2004 Penguin Classics published a verse translation by David Raeburn, and my wait was over. Raeburn's Metamorphoses doesn't have the power of Golding's nor the assurance of Gregory's, but it does a good job of convincing me that it doesn't aspire to such things. Instead, it's got a supple, conversational charm all its own. Listen to the rhythms he manages in the famous scene where poor Actaeon surprises the goddess Diana while bathing and is instantly changed:

As she splashed his hair with revengeful drops,

she spoke the spine-chilling words which warned of impending disaster:

'Now you may tell the story of seeing Diana naked -

If story-telling is in your power!' No more was needed.

The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag;

the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips;

she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender

forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin;

last, she injected panic. The son of Autonoe bolted,

surprising himself with his speed as he bounded away from the clearing.

But when he came to a pool and set eyes on his head and antlers,

'Oh, dear god!' he was going to say; but no words followed.

All the sound he produced was a moan, as the tears streamed over

his strange new face.

Right after the publication of the Metamorphoses (while it was itself still changing, in fact, constantly being revised by its fretting author), a horrible transformation came upon Ovid himself: he was banished from Rome, sent into exile at Tomis on the edge of the Roman world (I've written about it here). He begged to be returned (or at least exiled someplace with decent food), but his pleas, like those of his heroes and heroines, his hapless mortals, went unheeded. I myself think he would have found it poor comfort indeed that we're still reading his books two thousand years after his misery dried to dust, but I can hope I'm wrong.

At least his work is now properly enshrined as a Penguin Classic! This volume also sports an Introduction by Denis Feeney that's not to be missed.

The Golding Ovid!

Our book today is not just Ovid's epic, twisty-delightful poem The Metamorphoses but one particular English version of it: the translation by Arthur Golding begun sometime in the early 1560s and given its more of less final form in 1567.

Although Golding probably did most of the early work on his translation while staying on the estate of that ultimate Elizabethan courtier William Cecil, nobody should mistake Golding himself for a courtier, at least not of the polished, refined kind that's become synonymous with the word. Golding came from money, it's true, but it was the money of a grounded, four-square landowning family out in the hills and dales of Essex, not a newly cosmopolitan clan like the Cecils. Golding came from livestock-keeping, cony-catching, ruddy-faced rural stock. He was what a later writer of genius would term a country booby squire. A great English novelist could have been describing Golding's father:

He was a short, stumpy man, with red cheeks and a round face; who was usually to be seen till dinner-time dressed in a very old shooting coat, with breeches, gaiters, and very thick shoes. He lived generally out of doors, and was almost as great in the preserving of game as in the breeding of oxen. He knew every acre of his own estate, and every tree upon it, as thoroughly as a lady knows the ornaments in her drawing-room. There was no gap in a fence of which he did not remember the exact bearings, no path hither and thither as to which he could not tell the why and the wherefore.

Unfortunately for Golding, when his father and brother left the world, they left behind a mass of financial entanglements and debt, but it would likely not have mattered in any case: Golding was terrible with money and it was terrible with him - when he died in 1606 (after having spent a couple of stints in debtors' prison), he had scarcely an unattached farthing to his name.

He always had hopes of money, however, and never more so than when his sister married one of the foremost peers of the realm, John de Vere, the 16th Earl of Oxford. That John's son - and therefore Golding's nephew - was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, has been catnip to conspiracy theorists for over a hundred years, for obvious reasons. Shakespeare's plays are absolutely rife with allusions to Ovid, echoes of Ovid, thefts from Ovid, and in one case Ovid's book as an actual prop on stage. Shakespearean scholars have proven to their own satisfaction that their boy (despite Ben Jonson's claim) could read Latin with handy skill, but even if this is true (it isn't, but even if), it's still certain he knew Ovid in English translation front to back - and that means he knew the Golding Ovid, since there were no other serious contenders for the whole of that generation. Authorship theorists naturally say young Edward had a hand in writing Golding's translation, and even if he didn't, they say, surely the presence of his uncle-in-law translating away right under his nose is the reason Ovid's work is so heavily represented in Shakespeare's - that is, Edward's - famous stage plays.




Golding certainly dedicated works to Edward, no doubt in hopes of financial consideration, and the dedications themselves are enough to satisfy the authorship theorists, despite the fact that Golding's prose reads nothing like Edward's, and despite the fact that his signature iambic heptameter (his rolling "fourteeners," a meter that's gone entirely out of fashion, alas) is both better and worse than - and in any case totally dissimilar to - anything Edward wrote. There comes a point, always, with authorship theorists where you just have to declare a pace on all their houses and walk away from the whole subject. If Edward de Vere wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare, well then his connection to Golding makes all that much more sense. If Shakespeare wrote his own plays, his debt to Golding - and his ease of contracting it - is obvious.

In either case, we come back to the Golding Ovid itself, the poem Ezra Pound was fond of calling the most beautiful in the English language (rather embarrassing that, even for Golding fans such as myself). Critics have pounded on Golding's clumsy inaccuracies since the ink was first wet on them, and more than one august modern authority has pronounced him shallow, wayward, and thoroughly obtuse - bad Latin and worse English. These authorities always grudgingly admit that his version of The Metamorphoses is fun to read (one recent editor compares Golding to a sports caster), but that's about as far as they'll go - as a translation of Ovid, they're all quick to point out, Golding is a travesty.

Let's see an example from one of these killjoys, in this case John Frederick Nims:

In XIV the Sibyl tells Aeneas that nothing is impossible for human worth to achieve: "Invia virtuti nulla est via." The point is in the words: no via is invia. If one believes, with Goethe and Valery, that what one wants from a translator of poetry is not mere paraphrase of thought but a rendering of equivalent effect, then one will not be satisfied with a translator who ignores such points, as Golding does with "No way to vertue is restreynd."

But is this so unsatisfying? Ovid's word order is intentionally inverted, to start the line with its own obstacle, literally something like "Impassible to virtue, there is no way" (by smoothing this out to 'no via is invia,' Nims is, ironically enough, misserving Ovid) - and Golding preserves this by starting his line with that flat 'no way.' He also preserves the liquidity of Ovid's agent in the line - his 'to vertue' very neatly acts as both a path and a personification: vertue is both the seeker and the destination.

A best-seller in his own day because of how incredibly damn lively his verses were, Ovid would certainly have approved of how lively Golding's version of his great poem is. Examples are everywhere (his time in William Cecil's house wasn't wasted), and in order to enjoy them, all the Latinless modern reader has to do is a) overlook the less formal spellings of the day, and b) train the ear to hear the bawling, anthem-at-the-ballpark rhythm of the 'fourteener' at its best. Here's poor Cadmus in the horrifying process of becoming a snake:

He falleth groveling on his breast, and both his shankes doe growe
In one round spindle Bodkinwise with sharpnd point below.
His armes as yet remayned still: his armes that did remayne,
He stretched out, and sayde with tears that plenteously did raine
Adowne his face, which yet did keepe the native fashion sownd:
Come hither wyfe, come hither wight most wretched on the ground,
And whyle that ought of mee remaynes vouchsafe to touche the same.
Come take mee by the hand as long as hand may have his name,
Before this snakish shape doe whole my body over runne.
He would have spoken more when sodainely his tongue begunne
To split in two and speache did fayle: and as he did attempt
To make his mone, he hist: for nature now had cleane exempt
All other speach.

And his wife's misery at witnessing this transformation is no less riveting:

His wretched wyfe hir naked stomack beete
And cryde: What meaneth this? Deare Cadmus, where are now they feete?
Where are thy shoulders and thy handes? thy hew and manly face?
With all the other things that did thy princely person grace
Which now I overpasse?

And Golding's lifelong protestations of extreme devout (even Puritan) religious belief - in his dedication to the Earl of Leicester, he actually tries to maintain that reading Ovid is good for your moral fiber - are constantly undercut by this translation of his, since staying true to Ovid means giving readers (including Robert Dudley, who needed no instruction in the ways of princely persons) time after time things they won't find in their Sunday psalters, as, to look no further, Cadmus' serpentine reaction to his wife's entreaties:

When this was spoken, Cadmus lickt his wyfe about the lippes,
And (as a place with which he was acquaynted well) he slippes
Into hir boosome, lovingly embracing hir, and cast
Himself about hif neck, as oft he had in tyme forepast.

Purists (from whose ranks Golding has had the bad luck to draw virtually all his editors) will protest that whatever this is, it isn't Ovid - and technically they'll be correct. Ovid's Latin is whittled and supple, cascading over the listener with the transparent mastery of water. He achieves metrical effects that even Marlowe, attempting to translate, couldn't duplicate.

Those purists will point out that even if Golding's conscious response to this steep gradient was therefore to embrace the effusive prolixity of English, to make a country song out of what was a city entertainment, he largely fails, stuffing Ovid's gorgeous lines with inept circumlocutions that a better poet - even a better 16th century versifier - would have avoided.

To which I say, fine, yes, you're probably right. But Golding was good enough for Shakespeare (even a heroically Latinate Shakespeare), who knew a thing or two about versifying, and if you spend even half an hour reading Golding's Ovid, you'll see why. There's life here, in leaping, quarreling, laughing abundance. That's pretty good, for a country booby squire. I'm no poet, but I think Ovid would have approved.

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

Our book today is Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, John Boswell's immensely researched and groundbreaking 1980 study of, as his subtitle says, "Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century." Boswell gained his greatest amount of fame (he died on Christmas Eve, 1994, from AIDS) for his 1994 book The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, in which he indulges in some dodgy textual analysis to suggest that the Catholic Church not only tolerated homosexuality but even in some cases officially recognized it. The book was born of deep-seated anger and frustration, and it duly caused those same emotions in Boswell's many friends, colleagues, and readers - mainly because it was overreaching in exactly the way our book today is not.

Instead, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is a hugely authoritative, widely read, and persuasively argued bombshell, a loud and unswerving assertion that for most of its history, the Christian church simply didn't consider homosexuality that big a deal. Threading its way through Boswell's book (which is lucidly written but not exactly easy going for the layman, since much of its original sourcework is untranslated - Boswell was a whiz with languages - and footnotes positively abound) is the implicit assumption that one of the many classical legacies the Christian era absorbed was the comparatively laid back attitude the classical world took toward most aspects of homosexuality. In most classical societies, no furor was raised over men paying romantic and erotic attention to teenage boys - it was seen as a natural part of the socialization of those boys, since it was usually assumed that the men would be teaching the boys things while they were together (oh calm down Beepy - I mean social, cultural, and literary things) (and there was, traditionally, something emasculating seen in a man romantically besotted with a woman), provided it didn't get taken too far - the men were still expected to marry women and produce male heirs, and it was seen as a weird and dangerous subversion of the norm for the man to be the submissive member of the pair (taking it up the ass, once you're a full-grown tax-paying adult, in other words, was seen as weird).

Boswell is on largely comfortable ground while he's dealing with classical and even late classical antiquity. It's only when he gets to the Middle Ages that he starts to encounter more formalized language in his sources, and it's here he starts needing to organize himself for the massive, systemic persecutions he knows are coming:

It can hardly be maintained that the relatively indulgent attitude adopted by prominent churchmen of the early Middle Ages toward homosexual behavior was due to ignorance of it. It is in the first place not ignored but treated lightly. In the second place, there is evidence of gay sexuality throughout the period, despite the disappearance of a subculture. The barbarians themselves were not necessarily strangers to gay sexuality. Aristotle observed that the Celts publicly honored homosexual relations, Strabo that they considered it a dishonor to decline a homosexual liaison, and Diodorus Siculus that they were "absolutely addicted to homosexual intercourse." Similar observations were made about other groups.

And something of the scope of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality can be seen in the broad extent of the sources Boswell cites. All throughout his book, he deals not only with Christian attitudes toward homosexuality but Islamic ones as well:

Homosexual love imagery was a standard currency of Islamic mystical writings both in and out of Spain. Many of the authors of gay erotic poetry on the Iberian peninsula were teachers of the Qur'an, religious leaders, or judges; almost all wrote conventional religious verse as well as love poetry.

And of course Amis and Amiloun gets a workout - Boswell accurately reports that the abiding love of its title characters was celebrated, not condemned, throughout the Christian world. Boswell's biggest weakness, unfortunately, was an ongoing almost willful misunderstanding of what allegory is and is not, how people indulge in it and how they don't (his was the least allegorical mind imaginable), and as he himself elsewhere was fond of pointing out, there are none so blind as them that will not see ... but then, readers of this book (and despite its formidable textual apparatus, you are all urged to read it) shouldn't be coming to it for sensitive aesthetic interpretations of the works it considers, but rather the sociological stunners Boswell derives from them:

As if from nowhere, love in a thousand guises invaded the landscapes, townships, and monasteries of in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and its warmth revived from long hibernation the fiery passions of ancient Europe. It transformed the ascetic spirituality of the desert fathers into the passionate mysticism of Saint Bernard, breached the barriers of Basil's isolated monastic cells with the tender friendships of Saint Anselm and Aelred, dissolved patristic theology of purely functional sexual relations into the Christian romance that seemed to sweep all before it in the High Middle Ages.



It's a slightly idealized painting of what was going on during the so-called "renaissance of the twelfth century," but by the time readers get that far, they'll be very nearly convinced. The only point where Boswell falters, the only place where he shows the germ of the overreaching that will get him into so much trouble in his more famous book, comes when he attempts to dice logic with none other than Saint Thomas Aquinas. As some of you may know - and as generations of students have learned to their dismay - this simply can't be done (or at least the logician who can do it hasn't been born yet - maybe when we make first contact with the Vulcans ...). When Boswell tries it, he's reduced to intentionally misconstruing context and very nearly misreading the Latin:

In the end, Aquinas admits more or less frankly that his characterization of homosexual acts as "unnatural" is a concession to popular sentiment and parlance. Since theologically sins are necessarily "unnatural," it is simply redundant to argue that homosexuality is sinful because it is "unnatural"; homosexual acts would have to be shown to be sinful apart from their "unnaturalness" to be immoral from a theological point of view; but Aquinas could bring to bear no argument against homosexual behavior which would make it more serious than overeating an admitted, moreover, that homosexual desire was the result of a "natural" condition, which would logically have made behavior resulting from it not only inculpable but "good."

A disquisition on Aquinas and the "natural" would consume the resources of the entire Internet, but suffice it to say, Boswell is in this passage on very weak ground. Aquinas condemns homosexuality not because it's what the gals on The View are doing but because as far as his education was concerned, the Bible condemns homosexuality. Fortunately, Boswell regains his lost ground almost immediately, with a spirited discussion of the history of mis-translation of key Biblical and classical terms relating to homosexuality ... a discussion that'll leave you wondering just how much the late Medieval church understood about what it was increasingly condemning.

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is an important little revolution of a book, one man's passionate attempt to shake some sense into the religion he himself professed (Boswell was, despite many and lengthy attempts by friends of his during his days as a used bookstore-trolling Harvard student to talk him out of it, a convert to Catholicism), to say to that church and the big intolerant world of which it was a microcosm, "I myself am homosexual, and I will use the brain God gave me - and the texts on which your beliefs are based - to prove categorically that this is no evil thing."

Boswell's later work evoked a great deal of pointed textual criticism of the type he would have loved, which only adds to the sadness of his death. But if any part of his subject interests you, do what he would have done: find your nearest gay and lesbian bookstore and search its shelves for treasures. This book is one of them.