Master Drawings I: Jerome

In honour of the incipient Master Drawings exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford, I have decided to append a string of texts or books to some of the pictures which I find most striking, culled from the exhibition slideshow on the Guardian website.

The first is Lucas van Leyden's rendering of Jerome, the saint who is said — historically speaking — to have roamed the Mediterranean brink from somewhere between 347 – 420 A.D. Van Leyden was, aptly enough, of Leyden in the Netherlands; he lived from 1494 to 1533 and thus was a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer, who drew his picture.

The text is from the Golden Legend (Jacobus de Voragine, c. 1275), as it was transferred into English by William Caxton in the 15th century and edited by F.S. Ellis into the tolerably comprehensible modern tongue.

Illustration: Saint Jerome (1521) by Lucas van Leyden, from the Ashmolean [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

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St. Jerome and the Lion

"ON a day towards even¹ Jerome sat with his brethren for to hear the holy lesson, and a lion came halting suddenly in to the monastery, and when the brethren saw him, anon they fled, and Jerome came against him as he should come against his guest, and then the lion showed to him his foot being hurt. Then he called his brethren, and commanded them to wash his feet and diligently to seek and search for the wound. And that done, the plant² of the foot of the lion was sore hurt and pricked with a thorn. Then this holy man put thereto diligent cure, and healed him, and he abode ever after as a tame beast with them.

Then St. Jerome saw that God had sent him to them, not only for the health of his foot, but also for their profit, and joined to the lion an office³, by the accord of his brethren, and that was that he should conduct and lead an ass to his pasture which brought home wood, and should keep⁴ him going and coming, and so he did. For he did that which he was commanded, and led the ass thus as a herdsman, and kept him wisely going and coming, and was to him a right sure keeper and defender, and always at the hour accustomed he and the ass came for to have their refection⁵ and for to make the ass to do the work accustomed.

ON a time it happed that the ass was in his pasture, and the lion slept fast, and certain merchants passed by with camels and saw the ass alone, and stole him and led him away. And anon after, the lion awoke and when he found not his fellow, he ran groaning hither and thither, and when he saw that he could not find him he was much sorrowful and durst not come in, but abode at the gate of the church of the monastery, and was ashamed that he came without the ass.

And when the brethren saw that he was come more late than he was wont⁶, and without the ass, they supposed that by constraint of hunger he had eaten the ass, and would not give to him his portion accustomed, and said to him: Go and eat that other part of the ass that thou hast devoured, and fill thy gluttony.

And because they doubted, and they would wit⁷ if he had so eaten, they went to the pastures of the town to see if they could have any demonstrance of the death of the ass, and they found nothing, and returned and told it to Jerome, and then he commanded them to enjoin him to do the office of the ass⁸. Then they hewed down bushes and boughs and laid upon him, and he suffered it peaceably.

Donne's Meditation XVII

[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

John Donne is a staple of English Literature classes, as I know from personal experience. In my Lit class during the last year of high school we devoted a good day or three to the works of this so-called "metaphysical poet." The reign of Elizabeth I had ended, and Shakespeare was on the point of dying, when Donne flourished. But the "New Learning," the late English incarnation of the Renaissance, was unfolding a new leaf of learning and science, and a peculiar but fruitful intermingling of religion (vide George Herbert) and a fascination for science and exploration ensued in the arts. There was likewise already a strain of the earthiness and weighty seriousness which were, in my view, to distinguish the 17th century at its height.

The tale goes that John Donne was, when a young man, very fond of women and a trifle wild, and his breathlessly animated poetry of that period duly reflects it. What is indubitable is that he was also very fond of metaphysical "conceits." Maps and compasses, astronomy and metallurgy, and so on and so forth, furnish the metaphors which he, like his contemporaries, employed elaborately and lavishly in his verse to illustrate, almost as abstractly as possible, the felt and seen realities of life. Peculiarly enough he was no armchair traveller, but did in truth go on seafaring expeditions, and even whilst in England go to Oxford, study law at Lincoln's Inn, earn his bread as a secretary and diplomat, and otherwise lead a diverse and interesting life. Then he married. This was initially awkward, given the hearty un-consent on the part of the bride's father and a resultant stint in the clink, but the couple was happy and their children numerous.

Later, his wife having died and he being left alone, he became a minister of the church, and the passionate intensity with which he once celebrated love was redirected into the worship of God. Fortunately his sense of religion appears to have been a large-minded and open one, so that he did not figure among those who

Compound for sins they are inclin'd to,
By damning those they have no mind to.

The "holy sonnets" that he wrote after this conversion are interesting especially due to this intensity, which in some cases appears to be inspired as much by the old passion as the new. There is the very famous one, "Death be not proud," and then this one:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

[Poetry Foundation: John Donne]

Which sounds not a little masochistic; still, de gustibus non est disputandum, after all.

So far, at least, my favourite work is Meditation 17, which is famous in its own right as well as in its capacity as Ernest Hemingway's (last-minute) source for the book title, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the bells of a church, phrases of this sermon have the effect of echoing in one's memory long after one has encountered it, or at least that has been my experience. The thesis of the sermon is that we, as humans, are connected to each other, and that the good or bad that befalls one of us in a way befalls us all. So we cannot remain unmoved by the lives of others, and nor should we, and nor is it in our moral interest to do so. Donne is also of the opinion that "tribulation is treasure," i.e. that suffering improves us. [N.B.: This is not an opinion that I share; to me it's how we react to our suffering or happiness that improves us.]

At any rate, I should like to post the meditation in its entirety, but it is quite long, so here is an excerpt:

[A]ll mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

This is probably the most famous passage:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

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Meditation XVII [Online-literature.com]
An e-text of the Meditation.

John Donne [Poetry Foundation]
An overview of Donne's life and writings, and links to much of his verse.

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N.B.: To add a trivial note about Holbein's Ambassadors at the top of this post, it was one of the paintings in London's National Gallery that I already knew; so when my sister and I went there, I paid special attention to it and was shocked by the vivid, electric green of the curtains in the background. It was one instance where it may have been preferable if the painting were left in its natural, unrestored state. At any rate, I've included it for the sake of its concise illustration of the intellectual pursuits and scientific devices which fascinated Donne's contemporaries, and because my Lit 12 textbook employed it on the same grounds.
[The portrait of John Donne is likewise available at Wikimedia Commons.]

Sunday: The Parable of the Rings

The central message of Lessing's Nathan der Weise is embodied by the famous Parable, which Nathan recounts to Saladin, who has asked him which is the true religion. In summary:

A man of the east possesses an opal ring whose quality it is to make the bearer agreeable to God and to man. This ring is passed down to his most dearly beloved son, independent of order of birth, etc., and so on down the generations. Eventually there is a father who loves all three of his sons equally, and has promised his ring to all three of them. So he asks an artist to make two identical rings. Then, when he is on his deathbed, he gives each of them a ring and a blessing, and then dies. Afterward his sons squabble over who received the true ring, but it is never discovered.

But this tale is not without holes in its logic. In some indignation, Saladin asks Nathan whether this is the answer to his question, and Nathan humbly replies, "Shall I ask forgiveness if I do not trust myself to choose among the rings, which our Father made in the intention that they bear no difference?" Saladin counters that the religions are different, so much so that even the food and drink diverge. But, says Nathan, the origins of these religions are the same, and these religions are histories that all describe the same thing. He then explains why he chooses to be Jewish if other religions are equally valid. The traditions of Judaism have been transmitted to him by his parents, and is it not natural that we would prefer, and trust in, a history that has been recounted to us by persons who have proven over and over again that they love us, and that they would not lie to us?

Another flaw is that all three of the sons are behaving quite disagreeably, which should not be the case if one of them had the ring. And this apparent plot-hole is addressed in the second part of the parable:

The brothers take their complaints to a judge. He asks if two of the brothers love the third more. They evidently do not, and the judge, waxing wroth, says that they only love themselves, and that none of the rings is the right one. This one ring has presumably been lost, and three replacements made. Even if the ring hadn't been lost, the father would not have wanted one of the sons to be favoured at the expense of the other two, or to endure the tyranny of the one ring any longer. So the judge, in a fine oration, exhorts the sons to find the true ring by practicing its virtues:

Es strebe von euch jeder um die Wette,
Die Kraft des Steins in seinem Ring' an Tag
Zu legen! komme dieser Kraft mit Sanftmut,
Mit herzlicher Verträglichkeit, mit Wohltun,
Mit innigster Ergebenheit in Gott
Zu Hilf'! Und wenn sich dann der Steine Kräfte
Bei euern Kindes-Kindern äussern:
So lad ich über tausend Jahre
Sie wiederum vor diesen Stuhl. Da wird
Ein weisrer Mann auf diesem Stuhle sitzen
Als ich; und sprechen.

In other words, "Let each of you contend to show the power of the stone in his ring! Come to the aid of this power with a mild spirit, with hearty concord, with beneficence, with the most profound submission to God. And if, then, the powers of the stones should become apparent in your children's children, I invite you again before this chair in a thousand years' time. Then a wiser man than I shall sit in this chair, and speak."

So, I suppose I should be commenting on this, but I prefer to leave the parable as is, and let the reader make up his own mind about it. I will only say that religious strife, in my view, has much more to do with the pursuit of power than with the pursuit of truth.

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Tale in the Decameron (First Day, Novel III):
English, Italian

Sunday: The Spider

After finding the Catholic Bible readings for today, and not finding them any good in my evidently not-so-humble opinion, I have stepped over temporarily to the Other Side. So I will discourse of one and a half verses in our Koran (Oxford University Press, 1983), which was nicely translated by Arthur J. Arberry (1905-69). The verses in question form the beginning of the chapter, or sura, known as "The Spider."

Do the people reckon that they will be left to say
'We believe,' and will not be tried?
We certainly tried those that were before them,
and assuredly God knows those who speak truly,
and assuredly He knows the liars.
Or do they reckon, those who do evil deeds, that
they will outstrip Us? Ill they judge!
Whoso looks to encounter God, God's term is coming;
He is the All-hearing, the All-knowing.

Whosoever struggles, struggles only to his
own gain; surely God is All-sufficient
nor needs any being.
And those who believe, and do righteous deeds,
We shall surely acquit them of their evil
deeds, and shall recompense them the best of
what they were doing.

What struck me first is how very like the New Testament, or other Christian texts, these verses are. Lines 10-12 are echoes of Milton's in "On His Blindness" — "God doth not need / Either man's work or his own gifts." — or, as the Koran is the older text, rather vice versa. What also struck me was that the verses are agreeably mild, as religious texts generally have no shortage of blood-and-thunder passages.

There are two points, to diverge from literary criticism to theological criticism (if one can dignify my musings with that name), with which I take issue. The first is the concept of God testing his believers. If one argues that He is omniscient, it must follow that He already knows how people would respond to the trial. As for the trial of Job, it is hard to believe much in a God who would kill off a family and use the paterfamilias as a guinea pig in order to settle an argument with Old Nick. So, in my view, there are far more convincing ways to account for the presence of trouble in the world. But, oddly, even Voltaire accepts the concept, as he writes in Zadig, "il n'y a point de hasard: tout est épreuve ou punition, ou récompense ou prévoyance."*

The second point is that I don't believe that good deeds should be an alibi for bad deeds, though perhaps the underlying statement is that people who do bad deeds should not have to fear eternal damnation if they strive to do well.

Altogether there are no passages in these verses that will linger happily in my memory, like "Blessed are the meek," and yet the assurance that good will prevail is, I guess, heartening.

*"There is no such thing as chance; everything is a test or punishment, or reward or admonition."

"The Persian or the Scholar?" (Time article on Arthur J. Arberry, 1950)
The Koran (Index of links to Koran chapters)
"The Koran" (Encyclopaedia entry on the Koran)