ISSUE#7

C.O.B.A.C. EVERLASTING

International Art Magazine

JESUS EDITION

87th

In his year, the artist Michelangelo (1475 -1564) is believed to have said, .......

CRITICISMIN Reason Clash and THEFaith RENAISSANCE

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Issue# 7 March 2011

NEA ARTS number 4 2010

Fresno

Kankakee

Providence

In the Neighborhood arts & community

Houston

New Orleans

New York

A STAR ALLIANCE MEMBER

C.O.B.A.C. EVERLASTING

International Art Magazine

JESUS EDITION

Issue# 7 March 2011

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87th

In his year, the artist Michelangelo (1475 -1564) is believed to have said, .......

CRITICISMIN FAITH AND CLASH THEREASON RENAISSANCE

c.o.b.a.c. international art magazine MARCH 2011 Director: Ali Saadat R&D: Mehdi Darafshi Cover: jesus painting forgiven cobac.a.c@gmail.com cobac.blog.com facebook.com/COBACMAGAZINE Google group: cobac-internatioanl-art-magazine Publishing texts and photos of this magazine can not be reproduced without permission of the owners.

All Rights of photos used in the content of this magazine belongs to the owners.

Special Thanks to: Revolution Art Magazine( Nelson Medina), Babak Ghanaat, Ebrahim Golabbakhsh

THE GIRL WHO NEVER GREW

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CONSTRUCTED 1163-1285 THE EARLY GOTHIC ERA

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A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE RENAISSANCE

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RICHARD SHIFF ON LEO STEINBERG

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In his 87th year, the artist Michelangelo (1475 -1564) is believed to have said, .......

"We must remind ourselves that these monumental structures, although they remain ........

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE INFLUENCE OF ITALY IN THE ORMATION AND .........

Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the .........

The Concept of the Renaissance Today: What is at Stake? . . . in the years 1940 to 1944, the German occupying power in Europe designated all resistance ..........

When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible.

My question is simple: how shall we Christians deal with apparent conflicts between faith .........

Italian Dramatic Criticism of the Renaissance THE Italian Renaissance, bringing with it as it did a re-birth of interest in the art and literature .........

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We talked about publishing an edition as “Jesus” edition. Well, it was a difficult and definitely very time consuming. We were unfortunately unable to finish it in the intended timeframe. however, I am sure that we were able to produce an outcome to keep Cobac’s name shinning.

By talking of Jesus and/or “Jesus” edition, a lot of debates and arguments and many prejudices and disagreements are naturally raised. In the course of the years we all learned to respect each others opinions and I am not an exception to this tradition. This issue was called “Jesus” just because it was the first one in 2011 and after Christ’s birthday, it was also an excuse to get to talk about events related to Christianity and art.

We tried to cover subjects like the collision of faith and reason, the perpetual conflict of religion and art and the events that occurred before and after the Renaissance and even more.

It was tried to avoid subjects that could be found offensive and/or insulting to some or a certain group in our discussions. If such thing has occurred it was only because it was the narrator’s opinion and is not necessarily supported by the magazine.

As stated before, Cobac has started changes in its structures and has the intentions to transform them. After discussions and negotiations with partners and related staff it was decided to add new divisions to the future issues. We would try to give the opportunity to artists in various branches of art to have a special page in our magazine to them where they can have the chance to be known and introduced to the public. We would also try to make informing you about seminars and exhibitions all around the world as a part of our magazine.

Here I postulate to thank Mr. Darafshi because of his effective effort for the magazine’s advancement; I can now proudly declare that we have over 27000 readers worldwide, this success is nothing other than a result of his intelligence. We must hope and wait to see the day that Cobac crosses 100,000 downloads per issue and witness the real power of art.

Cobac intends to show the world the accomplishment of the highest hills of success.

At the end I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the Cobac readers, fans and sponsors.

Best wishes Ali Saadat cobac.a.c@gmail.com

Editorial

The girl never gr In his 87th year, the artist Michelangelo (1475 -1564) is believed to have said, "Ancora imparo" - "I am still learning." Hence, the name for my monthly observations and comments. - Rick Rader, MD, Editor-inChief, EP Magazine Classics are called classics for good reason; they endure.

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earl S. Buck left us several. She was the only American woman to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature; giving you enough reason to read her without getting the nod from Oprah.

Her most widely read book, The Good Earth, published in 1931 is the story of Wang Lung, a peasant who founded a powerful dynasty. Martha Jablow writing about Buck provides us with this great introduction to the other side of Pearl S. Buck. "The vast majority of readers never suspected

that Wang Lung's sorrow "that his eldest girl child neither spoke nor did those things which were right for her age..." was drawn from the author's life."

In 1950 Buck published a small book, The Child Who Never Grew. It is her views, perspectives and narrative of parenting a child with an intellectual disability. It endures. While the book is replete with politically incorrect language and perhaps some ideology that portrays low expectations it remains a classic in disability literature.

Buck's daughter Carol was born at a time when there were little options for parents. Buck decided to institutionalize her. It is clear this was not an easy decision. While institutionalization is no longer an option, her reflection on making that decision is reflective of the agonizing decisions that exceptional parents make throughout their lifetimes.

"There is infinite relief in a decision. It provides a goal. A guiding

rope was flung into the morass and I clung to it and dragged myself out of despair day by day, as the goal became more clear to me.

Knowing what I was going to do and thinking how to do it did not heal the inescapable sorrow, but it helped me to live with it. I ceased to use all my spiritual energies in rebellion. I did not ask why so continually. The real secret of it was that I began to stop thinking of myself and my sorrow and began to think only of my child. This meant that I was not struggling against life, but slowly and sometimes blindly coming into accord with it."

In many ways Exceptional Parent magazine embodies the essence of Buck's struggle and eventual acceptance of her decision. The ability of "coming into accord with it (life)," is one of the mainstream reasons for Exceptional Parent magazine. One can ponder the alternative routes that might have been taken by the first wave of exceptional parents if

l who rew

Rick Rader, MD, Editor-in-Chief; Director, Morton J. Kent Habilitation Center Orange Grove Center, Chattanooga, TN COPYRIGHT 2011 EP Global Communications, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale, Cengage Learning

the decision to "place" a child "out of harm's way" often meant placing them in a far away setting, isolated and inaccessible.

Buck began The Child Who Never Grew in explaining what inspired her to write the book (first published as an article in the Ladies Home Journal in May 1950). "Some of the reasons are in the many letters which I have received over the years from parents with a child like mine. They write to ask me what to do. When I answer I can only tell them what I have done.

They ask two things of me: first, what they shall do for their children; and, second, how shall they bear the sorrow of having such a child?"

Buck goes on to say that she can answer the first question. "But the second is difficult indeed, for endurance of inescapable sorrow is something which has to be learned alone."

While this might be true, and the "learning" is different for everyone it is the belief of Exceptional Parent that it does not have to be learned

"alone."

Carol Buck lived out her life at the Training School in Vineland, New Jersey pursuing her two main interests of music and sports. She died in 1992. Carol was a PKU baby and unfortunately never received the benefits of the newborn screening test that could have prevented her disabilities.

While the title of the book, The Child Who Never Grew is reflective of the pervasive mythology of the 1950's, Carol's sister Janice Walsh addressed that in the Afterward of the book's updated 1992 edition.

"The title of my mother's book was somewhat misleading. Despite her PKU, Carol did grow, both physically and mentally.thanks to the loving care and concern of the dedicated staff of the Training School at Vineland. They helped her each step of the way, taking to heart their responsibility to ensure the success of those whose lives and growth were entrusted to them."

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EP was available to them. Without options, promising programs and success stories there was no need or place for a publication like EP. But of course the significance of EP is not simply in its existence, but in society's high expectations, new laws insuring the attainment of these expectations and the channeling of parents like Buck who screamed for and demanded options. EP is however more than a chronicler of the parent's movement; it's a movement itself. It's the voice of the parent's movement that started with Pearl Buck and like minded parents. Parents who made decisions; good and bad ones, and with it, the need to share it.

One can only imagine the torment experienced by the exceptional parent "pioneers" who laid out all their options, opportunities and choices.

They were few, meager and unappealing, but nonetheless decisions had to be made. While perhaps not in the same vein of "Sophie's Choice"

Constructed 1163-12 The early e

goth ic

The early g

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n thinking of Gothic architecture, our thoughts always ascend. For that which embodies Gothic style most is lofty; Rose windows of stained glass, ornately crafted spires, and the guardians of grand cathedrals, the Gargoyles. Each is distinctly Gothic, and all distinctly Notre Dame de Paris.

Many diversified characteristics will help identify a structure as Gothic: ogee archways, ribbed vaults, and the wondrous flying buttresses are a few. Yet, it is always the craft placed high above, which captures our eyes and imaginations most effectively.

Since all works of religious art rise beyond mere artistic expression, bearing potent symbolic reference, we must accept that our attention was intended to be focused upwards.

Within the span of the passing centuries, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages themselves rise up above other cultural achievements. At the center of these towering legacies resides Notre Dame de Paris, 'Our Lady.'

It does not belittle other cathe-

drals to refer to Notre Dame de Paris as the 'World Ambassador of Gothic Cathedrals.' History's winding ways have already decreed as much. For many, their first concept of Gothic derives from some reference to this grand structure. It matters not whether we have physically visited Notre Dame, its persona dominates the Gothic landscape. Victor Hugo's famous novel featuring the moving characterization of the hunchback, Quasimodo, has served the notoriety of the cathedral well. Yet, factual history has claimed this aged lady as a prominent figure near the center stage of its own story.

Notre Dame de Paris, more than seven hundred years old, is only the most recent of holy houses to occupy this ancient sacred ground. The Celts held their services on this island in the seine, and atop their sacred groves the Romans built their own temple to Jupiter. In the early years of Christianity, a basilica dedicated to St. Etienne was constructed around 528 by Childebert. A church

in the Romanesque manner replaced the basilica, and this stood until 1163 when work began on the structure which stands today.

Constructed in three stages, the cathedral was completed in 1250.

This period witnessed Paris coming into its own force as a center of political power and commerce.

No expense was spared in creating a church that would reflect the capital's newly won prestige. These were the 'development' years of early Gothic architecture, it was essential that Paris should contain an impressive cathedral featuring innovations to surpass such smaller towns as Sens and Noyon. An advantage which Paris possessed over other sites, was that the construction efforts were supported and encouraged by the the king, Louis VII. King Louis VII must be considered among the handful of influential figures during the rise of the Gothic style in France. It is certain that without the influence of the King's support, Abbot Suger would never have realized his vision of reconstructing

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Saint-Denis. At the Abby of SaintDenis, the sparks of inspiration were kindled which would ignite the fires of the cathedral building age. Some twenty years later, the king lent this same support to the construction of the new cathedral of Paris. Louis supported the work with generous and gracious contributions. Clearly he had motivations for strengthening France's eminence as the stronghold of Christendom, but his piety must be considered authentic in the perspective of history.

"Gothic architecture had a magnificent opportunity of development in the construction of the great cathedrals, which, in France, were all built at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries.

These were civil as well as ecclesiastical buildings; in fact, the distinction between the two provinces was a thing unknown at the time, and is wholly a modern idea, which we never probably would have had ex-

cept for the differences in religious belief which arose among us at the Reformation. The state is merely the community acting in combination for those purposes in which combined action is more convenient than individual. With us these are now almost confined to justice, police, war, and possibly education. But when religious belief was uniform, as in the Middle Ages, state action included religion. The bishops and abbots were feudal barons, with civil jurisdiction; and, on the other hand, all state action had some religious character and sanction. The cathedrals were the great meeting-places of the city, used for secular purposes, such as the administration of justice, and even for histrionic performances (which, again, were religious in character), as well as for mass." —John J. Stevenson, Gothic Architecture; Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1876

The early twelfth century was a time of great activity and excitement within Europe. The Church was in a state of great transformation due to the reforms of Pope Gregory VII. The monasteries as the primary avenue of distribution for the new order, directed by Bernard of Clairvaux, were centers of learning and creativity.

The First Crusade was underway and the holy city of Jerusalem had been taken from the very heart of Islam.

Within the swirl of these influences arose the new abbey of SaintDenis. Visiting bishops took home with them inspirations for new cathedrals of their own. In the following decades these visions arose as a wondrous reality across France.

Witnessing the early development of Saint-Denis was a subdeacon of Paris, Maurice de Sully. In 1159 he became archdeacon, with building ambitions of his own, and scantly one year later was elected Bishop. Almost immediately, Maurice

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"We must remind ourselves that these monumental structures, although they remain intensely alive, are merely the skeletons of the cathedrals of medieval times. Compared with what it was when first created, the cathedral, as we see it now, is like a venerable old lady whose noble carriage barely suggests the striking belle she must have been in her youth. We should not only recall the past splendor of the cathedral, most of whose external adornment is now lost, but also attempt to understand what the cathedral was during the progress of its own creation; the role it played at the heart of the city that saw its birth among the people whose stubborn or enthusiastic will alone caused its skyward thrust." —Zoe Oldenbourg, 'With Stone and Faith'

went to work organizing resources for the commencement of the cathedral's construction. Funds were raised, crews were gathered and the site was cleared of surrounding buildings. In just three years from his consecration, the cornerstone was laid and full production began.

Throughout northern France, at this time, churches and cathedrals were rising up in several towns. It was not hard to secure skilled crews from professional guilds for the site in Paris. Organized teams of workers would migrate from town to town according to the stage of construction which required their expertise.

As for the raw material for the building itself, this too was readily available from local sources. The region surrounding Paris was rich in a variety of quality stone. The majority of material used in Notre Dame was taken from nearby quarries. Still, transporting stone was costly, even over a short distance. To economize weight, much of the cutting and rough preparation of the blocks was accomplished at the quarry sites. Final dressing of the stone elements was executed within the masons' lodge, adjourning the cathedral.

We do not know the name of the first master mason of Notre Dame de Paris. The title of Architect, did not come into use until centuries later.

From the quality and consistency of the work during this early period, we can accept that the bishop had found someone quite capable of overseeing the realization of his intention.

To his own credit, Maurice proved to be a competent overseer of the works. The books remained balanced through the production, maintaining a steady and methodical level of growth. The choir, apse and chancel were completed first so that there would be a place for services though the later stages of construction.

The subsequent phases of the works were to realize the grand scale of the bishop's original vision.

The aims of Paris would push many

of the limits of the new style beyond anything yet attempted. The breadth of the vaults and their height would surpass all previous achievements.

An important innovation at Paris was the combination of triangular ribs with subtle transverse arches.

The result of this technique was to open wide the interior of the cathedral without the visual interruption of supporting elements. This achievement is impressive to view even by contemporary perspectives.

By the time of Maurice's death in 1196, the nave had been completed and the cathedral was well on the way of rising to its full, intended glory. Within the following fifty years the remaining elements would be finished without major interruption.

What extended the date of the completed cathedral was the intervention of Maurice's successor Bishop Eudes de Sully. (The similarity of the name indicates that the two bishops were born in the same town, there was no relation between them.)

Unlike his predecessor, Eudes was a wealthy noble, and contributed a good deal of funds to the cathedral works. It was within the bishop's means to enlarge on the original designs, and he did so. This was most evident in the west facade which took twenty five years to complete up to the level of the rose window.

It would take yet another twenty five years to finish the twin towers.

The remaining elements of the cathedral were accomplished over the following five decades; the north rose, the transept facades and the chapels of the ambulatory. The expansion to the west facade excluded, the finished cathedral was true to its original design, it would remain so until the end of the seventeenth century. Under the reign of Louis XIV the cathedral's original form suffered greatly. Four hundred years had passed since Notre Dame was completed. Naturally styles and tastes had changed a great deal during the centuries.

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The manner known now as 'Gothic' in a negative sense, was perceived as crude and barbaric at best. Within an effort to adapt the cathedral to Baroque standards, stained glass was smashed out, tombs were destroyed and a new high altar was constructed. As a finish, after fifteen years of reconstruction, the interior of the cathedral was completely whitewashed.

The succeeding centuries were equally unkind to the Lady of Paris.

During the Revolution, a great deal of the features of the cathedral were stolen defaced. Churches and cathedral throughout France were rededicated to the cult of Reason. Just prior to the Revolution, countless ornaments, sculptures and gargoyles were removed because contemporary architects found them tasteless.

This great destruction paled by comparison to what occurred during the height of the Revolution. After all the wealth had been stripped from away, all traces of religion and monarchy were ordered removed. Perhaps the greatest destruction was the pulling down and smashing of the gallery of kings. In an act of ringing of primitive tribalism, the heads of the statues were distributed like war trophies amongst the communes of Paris.

The broken bodies lay in pieces for before the shamed lady for three years before they were removed to the city coal yards. For the following years the cathedral was utilized primarily for secular gatherings and commemorations.

It would not be until the full passion of the Romantic movement swept across France, in the mid nineteenth century, that a sincere restoration was undertaken. The hearts of the Romantic era prized works of the past which were felt as distant reminders of a more meaningful life than could be apprehended through modern lifestyles. One of the movements young stars is still very much associated with the grand lady of Paris, though many today are not

aware of how significant a role he played in its rescue.

Victor Hugo was just twenty eight years old when he wrote his novel: Notre Dame de Paris. (Later known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) Set in the medieval period, it tells the story of the deformed Quasimodo, ward of the cathedral, and his ill-fated love for the beautiful Gypsy dancer, Esmeralda. Published in 1831, the novel held up architecture in a noble light. Through the eyes of this young, impassioned writer, the cathedrals of the middle ages were 'books in stone,' works to be treasured and cared for. He showed no restraint for attacking the indignities that had been heaped upon Notre Dame over the centuries.

What he could not have foreseen, was the fertility of the popular mind, at this time, for such a message. The novel achieved widespread acceptance, sparking a keen interest in the fate of the cathedral.

Among the audience captured by Hugo's tale, was a young man who had just entered school for the study of architecture. Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, a talented, young Parisian, was to become the commander of this growing crusade for restoring and preserving the wonders of an elder Paris.

In particular, Notre Dame, itself, would become the centerpiece of his life's work. Viollet-le-Duc was appointed to head a new commission dedicated to the preservation of historical monuments. His knowledge of medieval building techniques allowed for a reconstruction true as possible to original intentions.

In sharp contrast to the accepted views of the preceding centuries, Viollet-le-Duc, valued the views of the Gothic era. What he saw in the works of the middle ages was clear evidence of authentic intent.

Exemplified in Notre Dame, a pure style, whose utility did not sacrifice its visual significance, could still be recognized. At the dawn of the In-

dustrial age, such honest, traditional expressions were valued as evidence of stability within prevailing transitions. In the 23 years which the restoration occupied, commencing in 1845, Viollet-le-Duc never lacked for public or financial support, even during periods of turmoil. Under his meticulous guidance, much of the early splendor of the cathedral was reborn. Once more, the gallery of kings looked proudly unto the crowds below, gargoyles settled into their lofty places, the damaged elements throughout Notre Dame were carefully restored and the whitewash paint was scoured away.

Little else has changed since the completion of Viollet-le-Duc's work, little has needed to. The twentieth century seemed intent on compensating the aged lady for the neglect and abuse of earlier times. In 1909 the cathedral hosted the beatification of Joan of Arc, an event which moved spirit of the nation itself. As Paris became the artistic center of Europe, so Notre Dame became the heart of Paris. Slightly damaged by shelling in 1914, the cathedral survived both World wars virtually intact. Today there is an extensive program of maintenance being undertaken, expected to reach completion in 2001.

Under the managed care of the National Trust for Historic Monuments, it is assured that the Grand Lady of Paris shall safely bear her legacies into the centuries of the new millennium.

'And the cathedral was not only company for him, it was the universe; nay, more, it was Nature itself. He never dreamed that there were other hedgerows than the stained-glass windows in perpetual bloom; other shade than that of the stone foliage always budding, loaded with birds in the thickets of Saxon capitals; other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; or other oceans than Paris roaring at their feet.' —Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, 1831

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Sadegh Hedayat 1903-1951 writer of prose fiction and short stories

by Shapour Suren

POST-WAR CINEMA www.100latpolskiegofilmu.pl

A HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE RENAISSANC

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE INFLUENCE OF ITALY IN THE ORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN CLASSICISM

BY JOEL ELIAS SPINGARN New York PUBLISHED FOR THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD 1899 All rights reserved

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HE GROWTH OF THE CLASSIC SPIRIT IN ITALIAN CRITICISM THE growth of classicism in Renaissance criticism was due to three causes, humanism, or the imitation of the classics, Aristotelianism, or the influence of Aristotle's Poetics, and rationalism, or the authority of the reason, the result of the growth of the modern spirit in the arts and sciences. These three causes are at the bottom of Italian classicism, as well as of French classicism during the seventeenth century.

I. Humanism

The progress of humanism may be distinguished by an arbitrary but more or less practical division into four periods. The first period was characterized by the discovery and accumulation of classical literature, and the second period was given up to the arrangement and translation of the works thus discovered. The third period is marked by the formation

of academies, in which the classics were studied and humanized, and which as a result produced a special cult of learning. The fourth and last period is marked by the decline of pure erudition, and the beginning of aesthetic and stylistic scholarship.

The practical result of the revival of learning and the progress of humanism was thus the study and imitation of the classics. To this imitation of classical literature all that humanism gave to the modern world may be ultimately traced. The problem before us, then, is this: What was the result of this imitation of the classics, in so far as it regards the literary criticism of the Renaissance?

In the first place, the imitation of the classics resulted in the study and cult of external form.

Elegance, polish, clearness of design, became objects of study for themselves; and as a result we have the formation of aesthetic taste, and the growth of a classic purism, to which many of the literary

tendencies of the Renaissance may be traced.

Under Leo X. and throughout the first half of the sixteenth century, the intricacies of style and versification were carefully studied. Vida was the first to lay down laws of imitative harmony; Bembo, and after him Dolce and others, studied the poetic effect of different sounds, and the ono matopœic value of the various vowels and consonants; Claudio Tolomei attempted to introduce classical metres into the vernacular; Trissino published subtle and systematic researches in Tuscan language and versification. Later, the rhetorical treatises of Cavalcanti ( 1565), Lionardi ( 1554), and Partenio ( 1560), and the more practical manuals of Fanucei ( 1533), Equicola ( 1541), and Ruscelli ( 1559), all testify to the tremendous impulse which the imitation of the classics had given to the study of form both in classical and vernacular literatures.

In Vida Ars Poetica there are

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pealed to the Renaissance; and

Tasso gives expression to a similar notion when he calls it the poet's noblest function "to make of old concepts new ones, to make of vulgar concepts noble ones, and to make common concepts his own." In a higher and more ideal sense, poetry, according to Shelley, "makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."

It is in keeping with this rhetorical ideal of classicism that Scaliger makes electio et sui fastidium the highest virtues of the poet. All that is merely popular (plebeium) in thought and expres sion is to be minutely avoided; for only that which proceeds from solid erudition is proper to art. The basis of artistic creation is imitation and judgment; for every artist is at bottom somewhat of an echo. Grace, decorum, elegance, splendor are the chief excellences of poetry and the life of all excellence lies in measure, that is,

moderation and proportion. It is in the spirit of this classical purism that Scaliger minutely distinguishes the various rhetorical and grammatical figures, and carefully estimates their proper place and function in poetry. His analysis and systematization of the figures were immediately accepted by the scholars and grammarians of his time, and have played a large part in French education ever since. Another consequence of Scaliger's dogmatic teaching, the Latinization of culture, can only be referred to here in passing.

A second result of the imitation of the classics was the paganization of Renaissance culture. Classic art is at bottom pagan, and the Renaissance sacrificed everything in order to appear classical. Not only did Christian

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abundant evidences of the rhetorical and especially the puristic tendencies of modern classicism.

The mechanical conception of poetic expression, in which imagination, sensibility, and passion are subjected to the elaborate and intricate precepts of art, is everywhere found in Vida's poem. Like Horace, Vida insists on long preparation for the composition of poetry, and warns the poet against the indulgence of his first impulses.

He suggests as a preparation for the composition of poetry, that the poet should prepare a list of phrases and images for use whenever occasion may demand. He impresses upon the poet the necessity of euphemistic expressions in introducing the subject of his poem; for example, the name of Ulysses should not be mentioned, but he should be referred to as one who has seen many men and many cities, who has suffered shipwreck on the return from Troy, and the like. In such mechanical precepts as these, the rhetoric of seventeenthcentury classicism is anticipated. Its restraint, its purity, its mechanical side, are everywhere visible in Vida.

A little later, in Daniello, we find similar puristic tendencies. He requires the severe separation of genres, decorum and propriety of characterization, and the exclusion of everything disagreeable from the stage. In Partenio's Della Imitatione Poetica ( 1560), the poet is expressly forbidden the employment of the ordinary words in daily use, and elegance of form is especially demanded. Partenio regards form as of superior importance to subject or idea; for those who hear or read poetry care more for beauty of diction than for character or even thought.

It is on merely rhetorical grounds that Partenio distinguishes excellent from mediocre poetry. The good poet, unlike the bad one, is able to give splendor and dignity to the most trivial idea by means of adornments of diction and disposition. This conception seems to have particularly ap-

literature seem contemptible when compared with classic literature, but the mere treatment of Christian themes offered numerous difficulties in itself. Thus Muzio declares that the ancient fables are the best poetic materials, since they permit the introduction of the deities into poetry, and a poem, being something divine, should not dispense with the association of divinity. To bring the God of Israel into poetry, to represent him, as it were, in the flesh, discoursing and arguing with men, was sacrilege; and to give the events of poetic narrative divine authoritativeness, the pagan deities became necessities of Renaissance poetry. Savonarola, in the fifteenth century, and the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth, reacted against the paganization of literature, but in vain. Despite the Council of Trent, despite Tasso and Du Bartas, the pagan gods held sway over Parnassus until the very end of the classical period; and in the seventeenth century, as will be seen; Boileau expressly discourages the treatment of Christian themes, and insists that the ancient pagan fables alone must form the basis of neo-classical art.

A third result of the imitation of the classics was the development of applied, or concrete, criticism. If the foundations of literature, if the formation of style can result only from a close and judicious imitation of classical literature, this problem confronts us: Which classical authors are we to imitate? An answer to this question involves the application of concrete criticism. A reason must be given for one's preferences; in other words, they must be justified on principle.

The literary controversies of the humanists, the disputes on the subject of imitation, of Ciceronianism, and what not, all tended in this direction. The judgment of authors was dependent more or less on individual impressions.

But the longer these controversies

continued, the nearer was the approach to a literary criticism, justified by appeals to general principles, which became more and more fixed and determined; so that the growth of principles, or criteria of judgment in matters of literature, is in reality coterminous with the history of the growth of classicism.

But one of the most important consequences of the imitation of the classics was that this imitation became a dogma of criticism, and radically changed the relations of art and nature in so far as they touch letters and literary criticism. The imitation of the classics became, in a word, the basis of literary creation. Vida, for example, affirms that the poet must imitate classical literature, for only by such imitation is perfection attainable in modern poetry. In fact, this notion is carried to such an extreme that the highest originality becomes for Vida merely the ingenious translation of passages from the classic poets: "Haud minor est adeo virtus, si te audit Apollo, Inventa Argiv没m in patriam convertere vocem, Quam si tute aliquid intactum inveneris ante.".

Muzio, echoing Horace, urges the poet to study the classics by day and by night; and Scaliger, as has been seen, makes all literary creation depend ultimately on judicious imitation: "Nemo est qui non aliquid de Echo." As a result, imitation gradually acquired a specialized and almost esoteric meaning, and became in this sense the starting point of all the educational theories of the later humanists. The doctrine of imitation set forth by John Sturm, the Strasburg humanist, was particularly influential. According to Sturm, imitation is not the servile copying of words and phrases; it is "a vehement and artistic application of mind," which judiciously uses and transfigures all that it imitates.

Sturm's theory of imitation is not entirely original, but comes through

Agricola and Melanchthon from Quintilian. Quintilian had said that the greater part of art consists in imitation; but for the humanists imitation became the chief and almost the only element of literary creation, since the literature of their own time seemed so vastly inferior to that of the ancients.

The imitation of the classics having thus become essential to literary creation, what was to be its relation to the imitation of nature? The ancient poets seemed to insist that every writer is at bottom an imitator of nature, and that he who does not imitate nature diverges from the purpose and principle of art. A lesson coming from a source so authoritative as this could not be left unheeded by the writers of the Renaissance, and the evolution of classicism may be distinguished by the changing point of view of the critics in regard to the relations between nature and art. This evolution may be traced in the neo-classical period through three distinct stages, and these three stages may be indicated by the doctrines respectively of Vida, Scaliger, and Boileau.

Vida says that it is the first essential of literary art to imitate the classics. This, however, does not prevent him from warning the poet that it is his first duty to observe and copy nature: "Pr忙terea haud lateat te, nil conarier artem, Naturam nisi ut assimulet, propiusque sequatur."

For Vida, however, as for the later classicists, nature is synonymous with civilized men, perhaps even further restricted to the men of the city and the court; and the study of nature was hardly more for him than close observation of the differences of human character, more especially of the external differences which result from diversity of age, rank, sex, race, profession, and which may be designated by the term decorum. The imitation of nature even in this restricted sense Vida requires on the authority

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is beautiful that is not true, and nothing is true that is not in nature. Truth, for classicism, is the final test of everything, including beauty; and hence to be beautiful poetry must be founded on nature. Nature should therefore be the poet's sole study, although for Boileau, as for Vida, nature is one with the court and the city. Now, in what way can we discover exactly how to imitate nature, and perceive whether or not we have imitated it correctly?

Boileau finds the guide to the correct imitation of nature, and the very test of its correctness, in the imitation of the classics. The ancients are great, not because they are old, but because they are true, because they knew how to see and to imitate nature; and to imitate antiquity is therefore to use the best means the human spirit has ever found for expressing nature in its perfection.

The advance of Boileau's theory on that of Vida and Scaliger is therefore that he founded the rules and literary practice of classical literature on reason and nature, and showed that there is nothing arbitrary in the authority of the ancients. For Vida, nature is to be followed on the authority of the classics; for Boileau, the classics are to be followed on the authority of nature and reason.

Scaliger had shown that such a poet as Virgil had created another nature more perfect than that of reality, and that therefore we should imitate this more beautiful nature of the poet.

Boileau, on the contrary, showed that the ancients were simply imitating nature itself in the closest and keenest manner, and that by imitating the classics the poet was not imitating a second and different nature, but was being shown in the surest way how to imitate the real and only nature.

This final reconciliation of the imitation of nature and the imitation of the classics was Boileau's highest contribution to the literary criticism of the neo-classical period.

II. Aristotelianism

The influence of Aristotle Poetics is first visible in the dramatic literature of the early sixteenth century.

Trissino Sofonisba ( 1515), usually accounted the first regular modern tragedy, Rucellai Rosmunda ( 1516), and innumerable other tragedies of this period, were in reality little more than mere attempts at putting the Aristotelian theory of tragedy into practice. The Aristotelian influence is evident in many of the prefaces of these plays, and in a few contemporary works of scholarship, such as the Antiquce Lectiones ( 1516) of Cælius Rhodiginus, whom Scaliger called omnium doctissimus prœeptor noster. At the same time, the Poetics did not immediately play an important part in the critical literature of Italy.

From the time of Petrarch, Aristotle, identified in the minds of the humanists with the mediæval scholasticism so obnoxious to them, had lost somewhat of his supremacy; and the strong Platonic tendencies of the Renaissance had further contributed to lower the prestige of Aristotelianism among the humanists.

At no time of the Renaissance, however, did Aristotle lack ardent defenders, and Filelfo, for example, wrote in 1439, "To defend Aristotle and the truth seems to me one and the same thing." In the domain of philosophy the influence of Aristotle was temporarily sustained by the liberal Peripateticism of Pomponazzi; and numerous others, among them Scaliger himself, continued the traditions of a modernized Aristotelianism.

From this time, however, Aristotle's position as the supreme philosopher was challenged more and more; and he was regarded by the advanced thinkers of the Renaissance as the representative of the mediæval obscurantism that opposed the progress of modern scientific investigation.

But whatever of Aristotle's authority was lost in the domain of philosophy was more than regained in the domain of literature. The beginning of the Aristotelian influence on

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of the ancients. The modern poet should imitate nature because the great classical poets have always acknowledged hersway: "Hanc unam vates sibi proposuere magistram."

Nature has no particular interest for Vida in itself. He accepts the classics as we accept the Scriptures; and nature is to be imitated and followed because the ancients seem to require it.

In Scaliger this principle is carried one stage farther. The poet creates another nature and other fortunes as if lie were another God. Virgil especially has created another nature of such beauty and perfection that the poet need not concern himself with the realities of life, but can go to the second nature created by Virgil for the subject matter of his imitation. "All the things which you have to imitate, you have according to another nature, that is, Virgil." In Virgil, as in nature, there are the minutest details of the foundation and government of cities, the management of armies, the building and handling of ships, and in fact all the secrets of the arts and sciences.

What more can the poet desire, and indeed what more can he find in life and find there with the same certainty and accuracy? Virgil has created a nature far more perfect than that of reality, and one compared with which the actual world and life itself seem but pale and without beauty. What Scaliger stands for, then, is the substitution of the world of art instead of life as the object of poetic imitation.

This point of view finds expression in many of the theorists of his time. Partenio, for example, asserts that art is a firmer and safer guide than nature; with nature we can err, but scarcely with art, for art eradicates from nature all that is bad, while nature mingles weeds with flowers, and does not distinguish vices from virtues.

Boileau carries the neo-classical ideal of nature and art to its ultimate perfection. According to him, nothing

modern literary theory may be said to date from the year 1536, in which year Trincaveli published a Greek text of the Poetics, Pazzi his edition and Latin version, and Daniello his own Poetica. Pazzi's son, in dedicating his father's posthumous work, said that in the Poetics "the precepts of poetic art are treated by Aristotle as divinely as he has treated every other form of knowledge." In the very year that this was said, Ramus gained his Master's degree at the University of Paris by defending victoriously the thesis that Aristotle's doctrines without exception are all false. The year 1536 may therefore be regarded as a turning-point in the history of Aristotle's influence. It marks the beginning of his supremacy in literature, and the decline of his dictatorial authority in philosophy.

Between the year 1536 and the middle of the century the lessons of Aristotle Poetics were being gradually learned by the Italian critics and poets. By 1550 the whole of the Poetics had been incorporated in the critical literature of Italy, and Fracastoro could say that " Aristotle has received no less fame from the survival of his Poetics than from his philosophical remains." According to Bartolommeo Ricci, in a letter to Prince Alfonso, son of Hercules II., Duke of Ferrara, Maggi was the first person to interpret Aristotle Poetics in public.

These lectures were delivered some time before April, 1549. As early as 1540, Bartolommeo Lombardi, the collaborator of Maggi in his commentary on the Poetics, had intended to deliver public lectures on the Poetics before a Paduan academy, but died before accomplishing his purpose. Numerous public readings on the subject of Aristotle and Horace followed those of Maggi, among them those by Varchi, Giraldi Cintio, Luisino, and Trifone Gabrielli; and the number of public readings on topics connected with literary criticism, and on the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, increased greatly from this time.

The number of commentaries on the Poetics itself, published during the sixteenth century, is really remarkable. The value of these commentaries in general is not so much that they add anything to the literary criticism of the Renaissance, but that their explanations of Aristotle's meaning Were accepted by contemporary critics, and became in a way the source of all the literary arguments of the sixteenth century. Nor was their influence restricted merely to this particular period. They were, one might almost say, living things to the critics and poets of the classical period in France.

Racine, Corneille, and other distinguished writers possesed copies of these commentaries, studied them carefully, cited them in their prefaces and critical writings, and even annotated their own copies of the commentaries with marginal notes, of which some may be seen in the modern editions of their works. In the preface to Rapin RĂŠflexions sur l'Art PoĂŠtique ( 1674) there is a history of literary criticism, which is almost entirely devoted to these Italian commentators; and writers like Chapelain and Balzac eagerly argued and discussed their relative merits.

Several of these Italian commentators have been alluded to already.

The first critical edition of the Poetics was that of Robortelli ( 1548), and this was followed by those of Maggi ( 1550) and Vettori ( 1560), both written in Latin, and both exhibiting great learning and acumen. The first translation of the Poetics into the vernacular was that by Segni ( 1549), and this was followed by the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro ( 1570) and Piccolomini ( 1575). Tasso, after comparing the works of these two commentators, concluded that while Castelvetro had greater erudition and invention, Piccolomini had greater maturity of judgment, more learning, perhaps, with less erudition, and certainly learning more Aristotelian and more suited to the interpretation of

the Poetics. The two last sections of Trissino Poetica, published in 1563, are little more than a paraphrase and transposition of Aristotle's treatise.

But the curious excesses into which admiration of Aristotle led the Italian scholars may be gathered from a work published at Milan in 1576, an edition of the Poetics expounded in verse, Baldini Ars Poetica Aristotelis versibus exposita. The Poetics was also adapted for use as a practical manual for poets and playwrights in such works as Riccoboni brief Compendium Artis Poeticœ Aristotelis ad usum conficiendorum poematum ( 1591). The last of the great Italian commentaries on the Poetics to have a general European influence was perhaps Beni, published in 1613; but this carries us beyond the confines of the century. Besides the published editions, translations, and commentaries, many others were written which may still be found in Ms. in the libraries of Italy. Reference has already been made to Salviati ( 1586).

There are also two anonymous commentaries dating from this period in Ms. at Florence, -- one in the Magliabechiana and the other in the Riccardiana. The last work which may be mentioned here is Buonamici's Discorsi Poetici in difesa d' ristotele, in which Aristotle is ardently defended against the attacks of his detractors.

It was in Italy during this period that the literary dictatorship of Aristotle first developed, and it was Scaliger to whom the modern world owes the formulation of the supreme authority of Aristotle as a critical heorist.

Fracastoro bad likened the importance of Aristotle Poetics to that of his philosophical treatises. Trissino had followed Aristotle verbally and almost literally. Varchi had spoken of years of Aristotelian study as an essential prerequisite for everyone who entered the field of literary criticism.

Partenio, a year before the publication of Scaliger Poetics, had asserted that everything relating to tragedy and epic poetry had been settled by Ar-

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influence of the Poetics may be found in Sidney and Ben Jonson, in Milton and Dryden, as well as in Shelley and Coleridge. Lessing, even in breaking away from the classical practice of the French stage, defended his innovations on the authority of Aristotle, and said of the Poetics, "I do not hesitate to acknowledge, even if I should therefore be held up to scorn in these enlightened times, that I consider the work as infallible as the Elements of Euclid." In 1756, a dozen years before Lessing, one of the precursors of the romantic movement in England, Joseph Warton, bad also said of the Poetics, "To attempt to understand poetry without having diligently digested this treatise would be as absurd and impossible as to pretend to a skill in geometry without having studied Euclid."

One of the first results of the dictatorship of Aristotle was to give modern literature a body of inviolable rules for the drama and the epic; that is, the dramatic and heroic poets were restricted to a certain fixed form, and to certain fixed characters. Classical poetry was of course the ideal of the Renaissance, and Aristotle had analyzed the methods which these works had employed. The inference seems to have been that by following these rules a literature of equal importance could be created. These formulĂŚ, were at the bottom of classical literature, and rules which had created such literatures as those of Greece and Rome could hardly be disregarded. As a result, these rules came to be considered more and more as essentials, and finally, almost as the very tests of literature; and it was in consequence of their acceptance as poetic laws that the modern classical drama and epic arose. The first modern tragedies and the first modern epics were hardly more than such attempts at putting the Aristotelian rules into practice. The cult of form during the Renaissance had produced a reaction against the formlessness and invertebrate character of ediĂŚval

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istotle and Horace. But Scaliger went farther still. He was the first to regard Aristotle as the perpetual lawgiver of poetry. He was the first to assume that the duty of the poet is first to find out what Aristotle says, and then to obey these precepts without question. He distinctly calls Aristotle the perpetual dictator of all the arts. "Aristoteles imperator noster, omnium bonarum artium dictator perpetuus."

This is perhaps the first occasion in modern literature in which Aristotle is definitely regarded as a literary dictator, and the dictatorship of Aristotle in literature may, therefore, be dated from the year 1561.

But Scaliger did more than this.

He was the first apparently to attempt to reconcile Aristotle Poetics, not only with the precepts of Horace and the definitions of the Latin grammarians, but with the whole practice of Latin tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry. It was in the light of this reconciliation, or concord of Aristotelianism with the Latin spirit, that Aristotle became for Scaliger a literary dictator. It was not Aristotle that primarily interested him, but an ideal created by himself, and founded on such parts of the doctrine of Aristotle as received confirmation from the theory or practice of Roman literature; and this new ideal, harmonizing with the Latin spirit of the Renaissance, became in the course of time one of the foundations of classicism. The influence of Aristotelianism was further augmented by the Council of Trent, which gave to Aristotle's doctrine the same degree of authority as Catholic dogma.

All these circumstances tended to favor the importance of Aristotle in Italy during the sixteenth century, and as a result the literary dictatorship of Aristotle was by the Italians foisted on Europe for two centuries to come. From 1560 to 1780 Aristotle was regarded as the supreme authority in letters throughout Europe. At no time, even in England, during and after that period, was there a break in the Aristotelian tradition, and the

literature. The literature of the Middle Ages was infinitely inferior to that of the ancients; ediæval literature lacked form and structure, classical literature had a regular and definite form. Form then came to be regarded as the essential difference between the perfect literatures of Greece and Rome, and the imperfect and vulgar literature of the Middle Ages; and the deduction from this was that, to be classical, the poet must observe the form and structure of the classics. Minturno indeed says that "the precepts given of old by the ancient masters, and now repeated by me here, are to be regarded merely as common usage, and not as inviolable laws which must serve under all circumstances." But this was not the general conception of the Renaissance. Muzio, for example, specifically says: "Quests legge ch'io scrivo e questi esempi Sian, lettore, al tuo dir perpetua norma;" and in another place he speaks of a precept he has given, as "vera, ferma, e inevitabil legge."

Scaliger goes still further than this; for, according to him, even the classics themselves are to be judged by these standards and rules. "It seems to me," says Scaliger, "that we ought not to refer everything back to Homer, just as though he were the norm, but Homer himself should be referred to the norm." In the modern classical period somewhat later, these rules were found to be based on reason: "These rules of old, discovered not devised, Are nature still, but nature methodized."

But during the Renaissance they were accepted ex cathedra from classical literature.

The formulation of a fixed body of critical rules was not the only result of the Aristotelian influence. One of the most important of these results, as has appeared, was the rational justification of imaginative literature.

With the introduction of Aristotle Poetics into modern Europe the Renaissance was first able to formulate a systematic theory of poetry; and it

is therefore to the rediscovery of the Poetics that we may be said to owe the foundation of modern criticism.

It was on the side of Aristotelianism that Italian criticism had its influence on European letters; and that this influence was deep and widespread, our study of the critical literatures of France and England will in part show.

The critics with whom we have been dealing are not merely dead provincial names; they influenced, for two whole centuries, not only France and England, but Spain, Portugal, and Germany as well.

Literary criticism, in any real sense, did not begin in Spain until the very end of the sixteenth century, and the critical works that then appeared were wholly based on those of the Italians. Rengifo's Arte Poética Española ( 1592), in so far as it deals with the theory of poetry, is based on Aristotle, Scaliger, and various Italian authorities, according to the author's own acknowledgment.

Pinciano Philosophia Antigua Poética ( 1596) is based on the same authorities. Similarly, Cascales, in his Tablas Poéticas ( 1616), gives as his authorities Minturno, Giraldi Cintio, Maggi, Riccoboni, Castelvetro, Robortelli, and his own countryman Pinciano. The sources of these and all other works written at this period are Italian; and the following passage from the Egemplar Poético, written about 1606 by the Spanish poet Juan de la Cueva, is a good illustration, not only of the general influence of the Italians on Spanish criticism, but of the high reverence in which the individual Italian critics were held by Spanish men of letters : "De los primeros tiene Horacio el puesto, En numeros y estilo soberano, Qual en su Arte al mundo es manifesto.

Eacaligero [i.e. Scaliger] hace el paso llano Con general enseñamiento y guia, Lo mismo el docto Cintio [i.e.

Giraldi Cintio] y Biperano.

Maranta es egemplar de la Poe-

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two centuries, and then passed away.

But while modern ĂŚsthetics for over a century has studied the processes of art, the theory of poetry, as enunciated by the Italians of the sixteenth century, has not diminished in value, but has continued to pervade the finer minds of men from that time to this.

III. Rationalism

The rationalistic temper may be observed in critical literature almost at the very beginning of the sixteenth century. This spirit of rationalism is observable throughout the Renaissance; and its general causes may be looked for in the liberation of the human reason by the Renaissance, in the growth of the sciences and arts, and in the reaction against mediĂŚval sacerdotalism and dogma.

The causes of its development in literary criticism may be found not only in these but in several other influences of the period. The paganization of culture, the growth of rationalistic philosophies, with their all-pervading influence on arts and letters, and moreover the influence of Horace Ars Poetica, with its ideal of "good sense," all tended to make the element of reason predominate in literature and in literary criticism.

In Vida the three elements which are at the bottom of classicism, the imitation of the classics, the imitation of nature, and the authority of reason, may all be found. Reason is for him the final test of all things : "Semper nutu rationis eant res."

The function of the reason in art is, first, to serve as a standard in the choice and carrying out of the design, a bulwark against the operation of mere chance," and secondly, to moderate the expression of the poet's own personality and passion, a bulwark against the morbid subjectivity which is the horror of the classical temperament.

It has been said of Scaliger that he was the first modern to establish in a body of doctrine the principal consequences of the sovereignty of

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sia, Vida el norte, Pontano el ornamento, La luz Minturno qual el sol del dia. . . . .

Acuden todos a colmar sus vasos Al oceano sacro de Stagira [i.e.

Aristotle], Donde se afirman los dudosos pasos, Se eterniza la trompa y tierna lira."

The influence of the Italians was equally great in Germany. From Fabricius to Opitz, the critical ideas of Germany were almost all borrowed, directly or indirectly, from Italian sources. Fabricius in his De Re Poetica ( 1584) acknowledges his indebtedness to Minturno, Partenio, Pontanus, and others, but above all to Scaliger; and most of the critical ideas by which Opitz renovated modern German literature go back to Italian sources, through Scaliger, Ronsard, and Daniel Heinsius. No better illustration of the influence of the Italian critics upon European letters could be afforded than that given

by Opitz Buch von der deutschen Poeterei.

The influence of Italian criticism on the critical literature of France and England will be more or less treated in the remaining portions of this essay. It may be noted here, however, that in the critical writings of Lessing there is represented the climax of the Italian tradition in European letters, especially on the side of Aristotelianism. Shelley represents a similar culmination of the Italian tradition in England. His indebtedness to Sidney and Milton, who represent the Italian influence in the Elizabethan age, and especially to Tasso, whom he continually cites, is very marked.

The debt of modern literature to Italian criticism is therefore not slight.

In the half century between Vida and Castelvetro, Italian criticism formulated three things: a theory of poetry, a rigid form for the epic, and a rigid form for the drama. These rigid forms for drama and epic governed the creative imagination of Europe for

the reason in literature. That was hardly his aim, and certainly not his attainment. But he was, at all events, one of the first modern critics to affirm that there is a standard of perfection for each specific form of literature, to show that this standard may be arrived at a priori through the reason, and to attempt a formulation of such standard for each literary form. "Est in omni rerum genere unumprimum ac rectum ad cuius tum norman, tum rationem cĂŚtera dirigenda sunt."

This, the fundamental assumption of Scaliger Poetics, is also one of the basic ideas of classicism. Not only is there a standard, a norm, in every species of literature, but this norm can be definitely formulated and defined by means of the reason; and it

is the duty of the critic to formulate this norm, and the duty of the poet to study and follow it without deviating from the norm in any way. Even Homer, as we have seen, is to be judged according to this standard arrived at through the reason. Such a method cuts off all possibility of novelty of form or expression, and holds every poet, ancient or modern, great or small, accountable to one and the same standard of perfection.

The growth and influence of rationalism in Italian criticism may be best observed by the gradual effect which its development had on the element of Aristotelianism. In other words, rationalism changed the point of view according to which the Aristotelian canons were regarded in the Italian Renaissance. The earlier Italian critics accepted their rules and

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precepts on the authority of Aristotle alone. Thus Trissino, at the beginning of the fifth section of his Poetica, finished in 1549, although begun about twenty years before, says, "I shall not depart from the rules and precepts of the ancients, and especially Aristotle." Somewhat later, in 1553, Varchi says, "Reason and Aristotle are my two guides." Here the element of the reason first asserts itself, but there is no intimation that the Aristotelian canons are in themselves reasonable. The critic has two guides, the individual reason and the Aristotelian rules, and each of these two guides is to serve wherever the other is found wanting. This same point of view is found a decade later in Tasso, who says that the defenders of the unity of the epic poem have made "a shield of the authority of Aristotle, nor do they lack the arms afforded by the reason;" and similarly, in 1583, Sir Philip Sidney says that the unity of time is demanded "both by Aristotle's precept and common reason." Here both Tasso and Sidney, while contending that the particular law under discussion is in itself reasonable, speak of Aristotle Poetic and the reason as separate and distinct authorities, and fail to show that Aristotle himself based all his precepts upon the reason. In Denores, a few years later, the development is carried one stage farther in the direction of the ultimate classical attitude, as

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when he speaks of "reason and Aristotle Poetics, which is indeed founded on naught save reason." This is as far as Italian criticism ever went.

It was the function of neoclassicism in France, as will be seen, to show that such a phrase as "reason and Aristotle" is a contradiction in itself, that the Aristotelian canons and the reason are ultimately reducible to the same thing, and that not only what is in Aristotle will be found reasonable, but all that reason dictates for literary observance will be found in Aristotle.

Rationalism produced several very important results in literature and literary criticism during the sixteenth century. In the first place, it tended to give the reason a higher place in literature than imagination or sensibility. Poetry, it will be remembered, was often classified by Renaissance critics as one of the logical sciences; and nothing could be in greater accord with the neo-classical ideal than the assertion of Varchi and others that the better logician the poet is, the better he will be as a poet. Sainte-Beuve gives Scaliger the credit of having first formulated this theory of literature which subordinates the creative imagination and poetic sensibility to the reason; but the credit or discredit of originating it does not belong exclusively to Scaliger. This tendency toward the apotheosis of the reason was diffused throughout the sixteenth century, and does not characterize any individual author. The Italian critics of this period were the first to formulate the classical ideal that the standard of perfection may be conceived of by the reason, and that perfection is to be attained only by the realization of this standard.

The rationalistic spirit also tended to set the seal of disapprobation on extravagances of any sort. Subjec-

tivity and individualism came to be regarded more and more, at least in theory, as out of keeping with classical perfection. Clearness, reasonableness, sociableness, were the highest requirements of art; and any excessive expression of the poet's individuality was entirely disapproved of. Man, not only as a reasonable being, but also as a social being, was regarded as the basis of literature.

Boileau's lines: "Que les vers ne soient pas votre éternal emploi; Cultivez vos amis, soyez homme de foi; C'est peu d'être agréable et charmant dans un livre, Il faut savoir encore et converser et vivre," were anticipated in Berni Dialogo contra i Poeti, written in 1526, though not published until 1537.

This charming invective is directed against the fashionable literature of the time, and especially against all professional poets. Writing from the standpoint of a polished and rationalistic society, Berni lays great stress on the fact that poetry is not to be taken too seriously, that it is a pastime, a recreation for cultured people, a mere bagatelle; and he professes to despise those who spend all their time in writing verses. The vanity, the uselessness, the extravagances, and the ribaldry of the professional poets receive his hearty contempt; only those who write verses for pastime merit approbation. "Are you so stupid," he cries, "as to think that I call any one who writes verses a poet, and that I regard such men as Vida, Pontano, Bembo, Sannazaro, as mere poets? I do not call any one a poet, and condemn him as such, unless he does nothing but write verses, and wretched ones at that, and is good for nothing else. But the men I have

mentioned are not Poets by profession." Here the sentiments expressed are those of a refined and social age, the age of Louis XIV. No less than that of Leo X. The irreligious character of neoclassic art may also be regarded as one of the consequences of this rationalistic temper. The combined effect of humanism, essentially pagan, and rationalism, essentially sceptical, was not favorable to the growth of religious feeling in literature. Classicism, the result of these two tendencies, became more and more rationalistic, more and more pagan; and in consequence, religious poetry in any real sense ceased to flourish wherever the more stringent forms of classicism prevailed. In Boileau these tendencies result in a certain distinct antagonism to the very forms of Christianity in literature: "C'est donc bien vainement que nos auteurs déçus, Bannissant de leurs vers ces ornemens reçus, Pensent faire agir Dieu, ses saints et ses prophètes, Comme ces dieux éclos du cerveau des poëtes; Mettent à chaque pas le lecteur en enfer; N'offrent rien qu'Astaroth, Belzébuth, Lucifer.

De la foi d'un chrétien les mystères terribles D'ornemens égayés ne sont point susceptibles; L'Évangile à l'esprit n'offre de tous côtés Que pénitence à faire et tourmens mérités; Et de vos fictions le mélange coupable Môme à ses vérités donne l'air de la fable."

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Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956 poet, playwright, and theatre director theatre practitioner

RICHARD SHIFF ON LEO STEINB

Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas, Austin.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group Portrait of the author. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui. Leo Steinberg, Leonardo's Incessant Last SupperEVERY LEONARDO NEEDS A LEO STEINBERG. Every critic of expansive vision and intellect, every Leo Steinberg, needs a Leonardo--or a Michelangelo, Borromini, Velazquez, or Picasso (Steinberg's choices): an artist sufficiently profound to repay a lifetime of looking and sustain the critical response.

Steinberg's writing explores human emotion, retrieves arcane cultural signs, finds humor and wisdom in-

tertwined, gathers up the fullness of experience. All inclusive, it suits Leonardo's immensity.

Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, which reworks and extends an essay Steinberg published in Art Quarterly in 1973, attributes inclusiveness to each and every constructed element of the painting, from the central figure of Christ down to reconstructed details of the architectural setting. How many turns of meaning does it take to convert

simplicity into inclusive complexity, as opposed to mere complication?

One of Steinberg's chapters demonstrates that the hands of Leonardo's Christ perform no less than seven functions; among their multiple pictorial achievements, they cause the surrounding walls to align, or rather emanate, in proper perspective. Yet, Steinberg implies, the inclusiveness that really counts involves but one function or meaning and its alternative. In the hands of a master of rep-

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in the picture seems disarmingly obvious, look for its opposite. The rewards are immense." To think and see in duplexity-this is what Leonardo's art demands. Reading Steinberg requires it of us.

During the time he was composing the first version of his Leonardo study, Steinberg was arguing a series of radical propositions in disparate realms of art-historical research, all based on long bouts of looking. Rather than identifying modern pictorialism with a shift from "Renaissance" three-dimensional illusion to the literal, two-dimensional flatness favored by formalists, he offered an angled alternative. He contrasted the naturalistic pictorialism that one would project onto facade, wall, or canvas bearing easel, to the cultural collage that one might assemble on floor, worktable, or flatbed (Rauschenberg was his central example). Think of this as a conceptual rotation through 90 degrees, a right-angle turn as opposed to a 180-degree reversal. At the same moment, Steinberg was arguing that many of Picasso's "standing" figures might actually be reclining or recumbent; they appeared upright only because of the verticality of their pictorial format. Here, another instance of critical reorientation by 90 degrees. While formalists were converting to social history and iconographers were absorbing gender theory, Steinberg didn't just switch methods--he saw things afresh.

In the case of Leonardo, his interpretation (initiated during the '60s) created still another 90-degree performative revolution, this one a bit harder to grasp. Generations of Last Supper critics, he perceived, had insisted on disambiguation; generally, they had privileged the theme of Christ's betrayal, to the diminishment or even exclusion of the equally evident theme of the institution of the Eucharist. Steinberg realized that the betrayal theme unfolds along the transversal plane of the picture-scan-

ning along the supper table, a viewer observes the disciples' array of emotional response to Christ's "one of you shall betray me." Simultaneously, the eucharistic theme projects outward, with Christ, by extended arms and enveloping perspective, addressing you to partake of the bread and wine. Here Leonardo was "thinking in two and in three dimensions at once, across the field and right through." Along the transversal plane, in flatness, one reads the proleptic narrative of Christ's betrayal; this is history, and it happens only once. Along the orthogonal projection into space, the figure of Christ institutes the eucharistic sacrament; this is ritual, to be repeated as long as human time lasts. In flat ness, a story is told as planar sequence. In perspective, a viewer is set before the presence of Christ, who occupies both picture plane and worldly domain. These are two fundamentally different senses of space, two fundamentally different senses of time, captured in a single pictorial event by means of a right-angle turn. The key to interpreting Leonardo becomes inclusiveness: Christ's "two-natured hand in its congruent godhood [instituting the Eucharist] and frailty [announcing betrayal] is the profoundest pun in all art." Puns, of course, are duplex.

Steinberg's final chapter makes a different claim to Leonardesque punning, concerning form as opposed to narrative content. How should we regard the prominent coffered ceiling in the Last Supper is it a trapezoid, or a rectangle in dramatic perspective? See it in duplex "co-presence," suggests Steinberg, for "to doubt the rectangle is unreasonable; to deny the trapezoid, unseeing." As if it were a story being told, we attribute to the rectangle a rational structure. The trapezoid, to the contrary, presents itself in immediacy; we see it as it appears, whether illusory or real.

This distinction affords Steinberg his conclusion: "the trapezoid is, daedally

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resentation, doubleness is complexity enough.

Ever precise, Steinberg will call it "duplexity." The word is unusual, but the concept is so fundamental that one wonders why this lexical choice finds no everyday application. Is it because "duplicity," with its connotation of deception, has been serving our culture better, putting doubleness under suspicion for the single-minded?

To wonder at "duplexity" versus "duplicity" is already to approach Steinbergian analysis, which illuminates the unseen and probes what passes unremarked. But not just any unseen: What separates Steinberg from the crowd of revisionist historians is the cultural force of his choices, which remain remarkably independent of academic fashion. Strangely, despite Steinberg's renown and younger art historians' embrace of multiplicity, it's never been, nor has it become, fashionable to be Steinbergian. Is his method too risky, too difficult, too personal? His discoveries tend to angle off the professional grid. He doesn't merely reverse or invert, nor select interpretation B only because others have already chosen A. "Cautious colleagues," he predicts, won't disprove his details, but will instead disapprove of the intricate whole, never having imagined its possibility, even negatively.

Specifics: Throughout the long history of Leonardo interpretation, critics have sought the meaning or story line that would reduce the Last Supper's complex form to a single accounting of its observed contradictions. To no good purpose, Steinberg implies, for the painting "has been more grossly wronged by simplistic underinterpretation than by surfeit of subtlety." The coexistence of meanings-or better, Leonardo's systemic principle of coexistence, his duplexity-has remained inapparent to artists and intellectuals alike. Against their reductiveness, Steinberg argues that Leonardo's creation "converts eitheror into both. ... Where something

speaking, the ineluctable modality of the visible." What? He's just said what? The trapezoid, an ideal rectangle in "real" one-point perspective, constitutes the sign of visibility itself, as it conjoins momentary sight with timeless (divine) reason. By Steinberg's understanding of Leonardo, the trapezoid, a shape assumed also by the Christ figure, is a "gift" from God. Easy enough to see; hard to explain or describe.

Why, nevertheless, has Steinberg phrased his thought so weirdly? Why "the ineluctable modality"? He's playing with another's words; reading him, you have to play along.

Will millennial readers recognize his specific reference? It isn't obscure, but ... Steinberg has created the kind of elaborate literary pun for which a writer might think it worthwhile to construct a whole book, just to reach the point where the pun becomes literal. This is why his "quotation" requires no quotation marks.

"The ineluctable modality" happens to open the "Proteus" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, which is the book that long ago taught Steinberg, not a native, how to write in deep English.

There Joyce's character Stephen Dedalus muses over what we perceive spatially (the immediately visual) and what temporally (the sequentially audible). Stephen's thoughts approach the protean, multisensed morphing that Steinberg attributes to Leonardo's forms. "Daedally" is the intentional giveaway. Literally, it refers to intricate, ingenious invention, like that of mythological Daedalus (and Leonardo, too); figuratively, it alludes to Stephen Deda-

lus, who speaks daedally.

What is Steinberg doing? He's performing. Read Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper extra slowly, savoring the sounds, from the inaugural title page with its assonant vowels and repetitions of "I" and "s," to the acknowledgments at the end. There we find "deft Sheila, daedal Don and I colluding" -- editor, designer, and author. Now "d" and "I" predominate, as in the key word "daedal" itself, which appears unexpectedly in this

supplement to the text proper; the word literalizes Steinberg's theme of intricate invention, through to the book's outermost margins. As Steinberg thinks, he senses and plays on the vehicle of his thought (rather like Joyce's Dedalus). Known as a brilliant lecturer, he uses sounds as Leonardo used colors--as the ineluctable modality of his medium of communication. Even when set to writing, sounds underlie sentences.

They matter to this scholar as they did to novelists like Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov, another Steinberg favorite: "the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth" (Nabokov on the name Lolita); "aits of original pigment afloat in flat washes" (Steinberg on the microscopic fragments of Leonardo's paint matter, now suspended within layers of conservators' potions--"aits" is deep English for tiny islands). Steinberg's description is graphically accurate, succinctly indicates his opinion of the painting's present condition, and despite its ominous implications, is beautiful to hear as one reads it. Yes, Leonardo's Last Supper is "incessant," echoing through Western culture, copied and commented upon. Yet physically, there's little left to see. We recover its daedal intricacy only through critical writing that attains Steinberg's heights of discernment and sensitivity. In ancient times, Daedalus invented human flight--wax wings with famously mixed results.

Leonardo reinvented flying for the Renaissance, a sort of helicopter. Now human flight is as commonplace as reproductions of the Last Supper, but Leonardo's creative ingenuity and humanistic insight are lost. So Leo Steinberg has had to reinvent Leonardo. Through his example, he's also reinvigorated the practice of art history. He makes his written art history a sensory art. Daedally speaking (no quotation marks), few others are likely to fly as successfully as he has.

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CathĂŠdrale Notre Dame de Paris www.cathedraledeparis.com

The Concept of t . . . in the years 1940 to 1944, the German occupying power in Europe designated all resistance movements, in France and elsewhere,as terrorists.

Almost every state defends its claim to hold amonopoly of organized violence, in the name of peace and security,by defining the violence of its adversaries— those who do not equate legality with legitimacy—as terrorist.

Sam Weber, “War, Terrorism, and Spectacle: On Towers and Caves,” 2002

Preamble: a provocation

I

have been thinking and writing about the limits of conceptualizing the Renaissance for a long time, and for this reason I am delighted to be included in the present discussion, but at the same time I am wary: Jim Elkins describes our collaboration as a joint interest in “optimal and competing ways of representing the Renaissance. . . . the question is now to theorize the Renaissance, especially given the history of previous conceptualizations, and given our current position. . . .”

My wariness stems from the conviction that our current position behooves us for a number of political reasons to reframe the concept “Renaissance” in light of historical interactions between the nationstates and their precedent collective entities that gave us the retrospective term “Renaissance” in the first place.

Revisiting the “Renaissance Problem” in 1995, I urged the subbfield of Renaissance art history to consider how much more is involved in reassessing the history of Renaissance art than trading one

modern category for another, less restrictive one that includes a wider range of cultural activities, such as rituals and popular images, with regard to a wider range of purposes than the category usually implied by “work of art.” The aesthetic system of classification that gradually emerged over several hundred years grounded Jacob Buckhardt’s writings in a humanist model of culture, despite his inclusion of popular culture to characterize the “Italian national spirit” in the early modern period.

The problem that Burckhardt did not consider is that of circumscribing “Renaissance” within the limits of European art whereas “Renaissance art” was exported from various locations on the Italic peninsula and circulated globally during the early modern period, and meanwhile works of art and other cultural products from all parts of the world were imported into Europe, where they formed prize specimens in early modern collections and made an impact on European ideas of art and on the practices of European artists.

Much less is known about these processes.

Nor can “Renaissance” the con-

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cept or the period be hermetically sealed, separated from the space in which we historians write about the past. In the words of Serge Gruzin-

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the Renaissance

Today:

hat is at Stake?

Claire Farago

culture:

If we knew the sixteenth century

better—the century of Iberian expansion—we would no longer discuss globalization as though it were a new, recent situation. Nor are the

phenomena of hybridization and rejection that we now see on a worldwide scale the novelty they are often claimed to be. Our understanding of

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ski, anthropologist of Mesoamerican

Renaissance culture, fundamentally shaped by Burckhardt’s study of Italy, has been changed and enriched by generations of debate over his characterization of historical periods, of individuality, of the Middle Ages, and of his treatment of gender. Yet we still need integrated accounts that allow the disparate voices that.

Renaissance Theory

have contributed to European conceptions of art to be heard. Parallel accounts that represent the same events from mutually exclusive points of view do not offer this perspective.

Why have Renaissance art historians remained largely isolated to this day from debates regarding the questions of intercultural exchange? Modern national identity, colonialism, and capitalism did not emerge fully grown in the nineteenth century. Yet there seems to be even less interest now than there was a decade ago, when I first raised the preceding questions and made the arguments to support them in Reframing the Renaissance, in undercutting anachronistic cultural and aesthetic boundaries that interfere with our ability to see the complexity of artistic interactions during the time we identify with the term “Renaissance.” Part of the challenge of defining “Renaissance” in terms that address broad issues relevant to contemporary intellectual needs, stems from the circumstance that the geographical, cultural, chronological, and conceptual boundaries of the Renaissance as it is usually defined need to be redrawn. In fact, the term “Renaissance” itself may be so fundamentally part of the problem that the term cannot be part of the solution. There is a pressing need to revise disciplinary practices at an epistemological level. The fundamental lesson for historians today is the responsibility to recognize the undigested projections of past generations in our present-day theoretical extensions of existing scholarship.

Connections between what is still vi-

able and what is no longer tenable need to be considered fully if our heritage is to be truly relevant today.

The central premise of the category “Renaissance” suffers from metalepsis, or chronological reversal, meaning that the object of study seems to justify its presence on the basis of a preexisting historical context, whereas “Renaissance” is the construction of a context based on the historian’s prior understanding of history’s significance. The question for us today is the extent to which contemporary theoretical projects can follow the alternatives of the past.

In the social network of contemporary society, individuals play specialized roles that discourage (although they do not prevent) reflection on the broad social effects of the information/knowledge they produce.

Cultural historian bell hooks addresses the crucial issue Concept of the Renaissance Today of self-reflexivity to the field of cultural studies in the following blunt way: “Participants in contemporary discussions of culture highlighting difference and otherness who have not interrogated their perspective, the location from which they write in a culture of domination,” create “a field of study where old practices are simultaneously critiqued, re-enacted, and sustained.”

To what extent is it our responsibility as scholars operating in today’s social networks to feel responsibility for the effects of the knowledge we produce? What is the relationship of ideology to commerce within the frame of academic practices? Historians commonly argue that scholarly publications are not driven by profit motives in theory or fact. From the standpoint of the intellectual’s ethical responsibilities to society, however, it matters not at all whether the profit is going directly into the pockets of publishers or scholars. To what extent are the historical circumstances in which the category “Renaissance” originated and the manner in which these circumstances are reproduced

in current cultural relations not our responsibility today? Today, the entertainment industry and the mass media perpetuate the racial stereotypes on which the modern discipline of art history was founded in the nineteenth century. The common presence of dated ideas in popular culture may partly explain why art history the discipline and Renaissance art history the subdiscipline continue to rely on categories rooted in theories of cultural evolutionism, but it would be a serious short circuit of logic to blame the current situation on individuals operating in a vast network of diffused power/ knowledge relations.

By analyzing the connections among individuals structurally, on the other hand, we can try to understand the ways in which contemporary discriminatory practices are grounded in historical circumstances in order to change them, not justify them. Mieke Bal’s analysis of collecting as a form of narration is relevant to the current status of the concept “Renaissance”: when the object collected is re-contextualized in a new syntegmatic field of relations, the status of the object as a thing remains the same, but the object as a sign becomes radically different.

The narratives entailed at “the intersection of psychic and capitalist fetishism,” as Bal puts it, where signs have exchange value, turn collecting into a “tale of social struggle.”

Let us consider our current practices as art historians, at this unnegotiated intersection of conflicting vested interests. A historical artifact of human manufacture—a work of art in the most generic sense of the word—is one of those peculiar objects of historical inquiry that, in seeming defiance of time itself, is still with us today.

As Michael Ann Holly articulated the conundrum at the core of the art historical enterprise, “works of art are both lost and found, both present and past, at the same time.” We

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critique regarding the disengagement of Renaissance art historians from politics and society at large.

Why? In their own words, because they “explicitly signaled” the connection of their discussion to Benjamin’s reception of Surrealism and to a body of “highly creative prewar thinking about the temporality of the figure,” and because their own effort is consequently “by its nature a challenge to enlightened [sic] historical models.”

Why are we still circling the same geographically and figuratively circumscribed destinations as our historical predecessors who served imperialistic nation-states by writing histories of their “national cultures”?

Why does there seem to be no way for most art historians to connect the political present—signaled in Sam Weber’s discussion of terror, excerpted at the beginning of this essay—with the shape of the past cast in nineteenth-century terms as “The Renaissance”? Why must we still work IN the Renaissance to be “Renaissance art historians”?

Shouldn’t part of the responsibility be to question relentlessly what being “in the Renaissance” entails?

(Why should I feel like a terrorist for questioning this status quo?) Is not the most fundamental problem at hand for conceptualizing the discipline as an ethical practice the notion of identity itself? Art historians assume the role of “managers of consciousness” who fabricate, maintain, and naturalize the individual and collective identities of modern subjects.

Adequate solutions must substantively rethink the polity of practice as such. The problem, in other words, is no longer simply one of “adequate” representation, but of “representation” itself imagined as being unproblematic. In the present era of transnational megacorporate capitalism and neo-colonial labor practices, certain very different accounts of the formation of the modern subject of-

fer productive directions for rethinking the ethical practice of intellectual work in the global community of citizenship. “In the post-cold war period of ‘globalization’ and transnational capitalism,” Sam Weber writes in the same essay on terrorism I just cited, “a new ‘enemy’ seems to be needed to consolidate the role and to reinforce the legitimacy of nationstates that are ever more openly dependent on, and agents of, transnational corporate interests.” The issues I am discussing in terms of the category “Renaissance” in the field of art history have been the preoccupation of philosophers and critical historians such as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler who insist upon “acknowledging our complicity in the law that we oppose”: “there is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence or properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality.”

A case study: the body

Discussions of idolatry and art emerged in the context of European colonization, based on the same inherited theories of human cognition as their counterpart arguments in Europe. The Scottish theologian John Major was one of the principal authors of the neo-Aristotelian theory of the “natural slave,” described in Books I and 3 of the Politics as lacking in the higher faculties of the human soul, and elaborated in the sixteenth century to discuss the Amerindians’ mental capacity.

Although the famous debates on the issue held in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550–51, left the legal status of Amerindians unresolved, these records and discussions of the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas that preceded them established the conceptual framework for modern pseudo-scientific theories of “race” two centuries later. The mental capacity to recollect—that is, to draw a series of inferences, as Aris-

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understand works of art as objects whose significance transcends the historical circumstances of their making. Precisely—paradoxically—it is the materiality of the object that is at once affected and unaffected by time.

Unless we comprehensively attend to the epistemological underpinnings of our intellectual heritage, rather than selecting what seems personally most compelling to study, that which is indefensible will continue to haunt contemporary history writing in precisely the sense that Michel de Certeau defined the mnemic trace as “the return of what was forgotten, in other words, an action by a past that is now forced to disguise itself.”But can one draw the line between individual and collective responsibility?

The subdisciplinary boundaries that divide the study of Italian Renaissance art from English Renaissance art from Spanish Colonial art from Native American art—the list of compartmentalizations goes on and on— renders the complicities of historians with nation-state ideology (to name but one pernicious alliance of knowledge/ power relations) invisible to the individual scholars working in the specialized subfields in which academic practice is encouraged and to which it is largely confined. We may tend, therefore, to discount the sorry history of imperialism or make it out to be trivial or disconnected to us by hindsight, but it is certainly not invisible, trivial or a fait accompli on all sides of the social equation.

As the first part of my contribution to the Cork roundtable, I circulated my response to Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s “Interventions: Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism” (Art Bulletin, September 2005), to which the authors responded that “they concur with virtually everything” I had to say about disciplinary responsibility and self awareness and about the ideological force of the discourse of chronological reason, but they “do not actually feel addressed” by my

totle and his commentators defined the distinction between the human faculty of memory and the retentive memory of animals—was both directly cited and indirectly implied throughout sixteenth-century discussions of the Amerindians’ mental capacities.

By 1539, the terms on which the Indians’ mental capacities were judged were part of an international discourse in which the culturally dispossessed also participated—at least to the limited extent of a few assimilated members of the Amerindian elite.

Consider in this context of historical debates on what constitutes humanness that the fifteenth-century Dominican Archbishop of Florence Saint Antonine’s Summa theologica was among the earliest books recorded in New Spain. Archbishop Antonine urged his readers to learn the art of projecting sacred concepts into memory figures. Drawing on the same Aristotelian concept of recollection, and conceivably on this exact text, the Flemish Franciscan lay brother Pedro de Gante established innovative methods for teaching Christian doctrine to Amerindian neophytes at his school in Mexico City San José de los Naturales, in operation as early as 1526.

De Gante and other missionaries used visual images extensively during the early years of the Conquest when language was an extreme barrier to communication, as is known from numerous sources, including the Italian publication of an important pedagogical text in Latin, De Rhetorica Christiana (Perugia, 1579), written and illustrated by de Gante’s pupil Diego Valadés, a Christianized, assimilated Aztec nobleman. Valadés, like Antonine, focused on the role played by the art of memory in teaching sacred doctrine to neophytes. Valadés provided engraved illustrations of catechism classes being taught in the open-air atrium of the Franciscan mother church at San

José using rebus-like visual signs in this manner. He also introduced a sort of pictographic syllabry of his own, involving signs with connotations on both European and Mexican sides of the cultural and linguistic divide. Some of Valadés’s heart signs include recognizable elements from Nahuatl pictograms. Although their exact meaning has never been de-

in order to understand why and how questions of idolatry arose simultaneously in New Spain and Europe. In studying the discourse about art and idolatry in a transcultural context, it is important to bear in mind that the same neo-Aristotelian theory of human cognition that justified the use of images also justified their condemnation. The sixteenth-century

ciphered, the manner in which they function in his text makes the important point that they are a culturally hybrid means of communication among fully human creatures capable of recollection, that is, of drawing a series of inferences.This bare armature of philosophical issues in relation to political events is necessary

condemnation of costly religious art is not novel—in the twelfth century, when St. Bernard of Clairvaux condemned elaborate displays of carved monstrosities for attracting and distracting pilgrims, he cited the needs of the poor as a more legitimate expense. In the sixteenth century, Ulrich Zwingli and others identified

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charges about idolatry arising first in the mind, all of these writings are variants in a longstanding literature about the nature of images made by art.

Both the Protestant theological arguments against images and the Italian defenses of the arts appear to be unprecedented in one significant

respect: they re-directed the connections traditionally made between the image made by art and its divine referent. Renaissance art historians are more accustomed to considering as novel the claims made for and against the inventive powers of the artist to determine the appearance of the work, yet in both cases, theoretical interest shifted in the early modern period from the referent in the image (the holy person represented) to the maker of the image (the artist or patron).

Let’s consider what is at stake in refocusing theories of images to a concern with the mentality of imagemaker, beginning with the orthodox account. Briefly stated, the difficulty on both sides of the controversy over images since the inception of the discussion in sixth-century Byzantium consisted in grasping the hypothetical nature of duplicating the powers of the original that are signified in art.

Decisive here, writes Agamben about the manner in which the problem was articulated in Scholastic texts, is the idea of an inessential commonality. This relationship, which Agamben aptly calls “takingplace,” is not conceived as the persistence of an identical essence in single individuals (which might otherwise be described as a chip-offthe-old-block theory). Rather, in the passage from the idea to the common human form [that is, in the transfer of power from the original], what belongs to common nature and what is proper become absolutely indifferent. In the passage from potentiality to act, one is contained wholly by the other. This difficult notion can be illustrated by the image of the line of writing in which the ductus of the hand passes continually from the generic form of the letters to the individual marks— so too in a face, human nature continually passes into existence and this incessant emergence constitutes the dynamic expressivity of the face.

To explain how divine immanence plays out in the concrete

work of art in devotional practice, Byzantinist Robert Nelson has articulated the exchange between a Greek Orthodox icon and a worshiper in modern semiotic terms as being governed by an existential relation to what is signified. The “code” in the icon is only comprehensible in the present-oriented, spatially and temporally coextensive relation that the “speaker” and “listener” maintains with the work of art. Like their grammatical counterparts in the pronoun relationship of “I/you,” visual “shifters” such as the figure of Christ that faces and looks directly at the beholder, create and are created by an event their referents are dependent upon that situation. The frontal gaze visually establishes an internal dialogue directed from the beholder to the image that is articulated in the Orthodox theology of the icon.

As the human face and the icon face one another, what belongs to common nature and what is proper are considered “absolutely indifferent.” According to Nelson, Greek Orthodox doctrinal theory, as this practiced system of communication demonstrates, is “performative” in simultaneously animating and personalizing the cultural message contained in material form. The icon, then, is a mediator a way for the believer to comprehend God existentially through an interactive medium. To return to what is at stake in refocusing theories of images to a concern with the mentality of image-maker, sixteenth-century arguments against idolatry and writings on the artist’s powers of invention introduced what might be called “meta-signifiers” of the work of art as a sign: that is, the person responsible for fabricating the image, whether this is the patron-as-artist or the artisan who fabricated the object. Imagining, for the sake of the present argument, that the work of art functions as a screen onto which interpretations can be projected, sixteenth-century theoretical writings on images offer new

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the Abgott in the patron’s soul as the source of idolatry that finds its external, monstrous expression in/as works of art. As reductive as it may be in terms of content to connect arguments made by writers such as Leonardo da Vinci on the discursive powers of the painter’s ingegno or Vasari’s praise of Michelangelo’s “divino intelletto,” with Protestant

trajectories in an existing chain of semiosis that runs between the sign and its signified(s). Locating the new discourses on idolatry and artistic invention in a larger discursive formation in this manner, the relationship between signifier and signified can be seen as offering numerous possibilities. As new concerns entered the debate on theories of images, a confusing range of new possibilities emerged. What we want to focus on in the present context of discussion is the unprecedented relation being worked out in early modern texts between subjects and objects. The following analysis of Mexican painted

manuscripts indicates that the frame of reference for discussing the relationship of the work of art (the sign) to its contents (the signified) underwent a similar destabilization and opening up of new possibilities for the role of art in New Spain as it did in Europe. In focusing on the signifying chain of idolatry in its Spanish colonial context, it is nonetheless important to bear in mind the European discourse on the grotesque and monstrous.

Zwingli’s condemnation of idolatry as an inner monstrosity leading to outward manifestations is one extreme position in the critical spec-

trum. Other, mostly Italian, writers discussed the artist’s inventive powers in positive terms using the same metaphors connoting the difference between the rational intellect and the sub-rational powers of the imagination. For example, Paolo Giovanni Lomazzo, writing in the 1580s, considered grotteschi synonymous with invention and the highest test of the painter’s powers: “because in the invention of grotteschi more than in anything else, there runs a certain furor and a natural bizarria, and being without it they are unable to make anything, for all their art.”

Most of Lomazzo’s contempo-

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solute person and the true visions of a prophet. This distinction is also the pivotal point in a wide variety of sixteenth-century discussions of art and idolatry by Protestants and

by Catholic missionaries. Thomas Aquinas provided the terms of discussion when he differentiated the eternal substance of an object from its accidental, external appearance: the mutation in appearance was external to the visionary’s eyes, but the imagination of the dissolute person caused him to mistake the image for the thing itself, thus he was captivated by demonic illusions (Summa theological 3.76.8). Writing in 1582, Paleotti condemned the representation of monstrous races, of infernal rites and demonic gods, idol worship and human sacrifice for the same reasons: they are evidence of the imagination of a dissolute person. The significant difference in the sixteenthcentury text is that the grotesque sign refers to the maker of the image. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the most famous European apologist for the Americans in the sixteenth century, was acutely aware of the problem of classifying his converts and potential converts as lacking in the higher faculties of the human soul. Though he believed that Amerindians possessed the full potential for civility, he still imposed Christianized norms. The faint but distinct echo of ideas recorded by Vincenzo Borghini, Benedetto Varchi, Vasari, and others who contributed to the rising status of painting, sculpture, and architecture as liberal arts in Europe, can be heard when Las Casas writes that the Indians possessed skill in the mechanical arts which were a function of the rational soul (habitus est intellectus operativus). Yet with the same words, Las Casas helped to construct an inferior collective identity for the indigenous cultures of the “New World” when he argued that the Indians were capable of assimilating European culture under European guidance.

Nearly all the Mexican painted manuscripts known today are located in European collections, where they were originally valued as trophies, gifts, souvenirs—exotic items sought by European collectors.

These colonial productions derived from pre-contact screenfold books, a format known in a few copies, none of which are indisputably pre-Columbian in date. Recent scholarship has stressed that the body of Mexican pictorial manuscripts document a process of transculturation, not simply acculturation. This process is readily seen in the evidence internal to the manuscripts, which are based on a combination of Nahuatl and European models. These hybrid compilations document the operations by which “idolatrous” content unacceptable to Christian compilers was isolated from “scientific” content admired by the same missionary audience and their European patrons.

In the process of reframing the indigenous material, not only was the “idolatry” singled out and objectified, it was gradually eliminated entirely from the reader’s consciousness.

The discourse on idolatry preserved in Mexican pictorial manuscripts is complex. Figures alone could pass unnoticed by the censors as mere curiosities. Verbal descriptions of idolatrous practices overlay indigenous knowledge provided by informants whose own memories and knowledge were compromised by distance from the pre-conquest culture they described. Reframed as phobic projections of European fears, native information was not returned to its pure state by successive generations of copying and editing. Native knowledge became increasingly attenuated and divorced from its cultural context as it was successively reformatted in conformity with European modes of knowledge production. As Walter Mignolo has suggested using other examples, indigenous, pictorial forms of record keeping gradually lost their authority to European

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raries were more cautious in their assessment of the artist’s productive imagination following the Council of Trent’s 1563 decree on images. Invoking the same contrast between reasoned imagination and the capricious fantasy, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, author of an influential treatise on painting (1582;Latin edition of 1594), introduced extensive new qualifications drawn from the standard authorities. He constructed a theory of style that, in effect, favored the scientific embellishments of optical naturalism, but retained the artist’s right to depict grotteschi as long as these vivid representations were not capricious figments of the imagination. Paleotti developed his position in consultation with his lifelong friend Ulisse Aldrovandi, the renowned naturalist and collector of New World materials, as documented in their correspondence.

Heseems to have taken to heart Aldrovandi’s advice concerning the proper principles guiding artistic llustration when, for example, he admitted that painters should be allowed to represent novel things that seem to lie outside the order of nature (se bene fuori dell’ordine suo), as long as they actually do exist.

These include “monsters of the sea and land and other places.” The difference is that embellishments that have counterparts in nature are “proportioned to reason” ( proporzionati alla ragione) while grotteschi refer to fantasms, things “that have never been, that could not exist in the manner in which they are represented.”

These condemned forms of artifice are [contra Lomazzo] the capricci of painters, products of their irrational imaginations (irragionevoli imaginationi).

The central point in Paleotti’s considerations of grotteschi, and similar considerations of the time

by Federico Borromeo, Carlo Borromeo, Lomazzo, Pirro Ligorio, and other Italian writers, is the distinction between the delusions of a dis-

forms of textual documentation.The otherness of Nahuatl beliefs is neutralized in the mediated process of passing from a native artifact to its European imitation to a thoroughly Europeanized format. Otherness is domesticated, the grotesque “idol” is transformed into an intriguing exotic decoration. One could even venture further to postulate a certain fear of contagion, as if the very representation of the idolatry of other peoples, either verbal or visual, were enough to make the same monstrosity spring up spontaneously in Europe.

The process of successive copying and editing of Mexican painted manuscripts provides a clear case of the manner in which Europeans misrepresented Mexica cultura by reframing it within a western system of beliefs. Gruzinski argues that the category of “the grotesque” enables indigenous pictorial traditions to coexist comfortably with ancient European mythological signs. It is important to bear in mind that this “coexistence” positions indigenous truth values in a subaltern relationship to European knowledge. The same hierarchical, two-way process of cultural interaction can be discerned in the hybrid style of all Mexican painted manuscripts. They are all culturally hybrid documents, compilations of ideas, statements, and representations functioning in an “enunciative network,” to borrow Foucault’s formulation, driven by the political importance of defining Amerindians.

The Mexica regarded the figures of their ritual calendar as sacred, while the Spanish inscribed them as false.

An inquiry into the categories of representation and language indicates that they are governed by identifiable structures of knowledge and power.

While the style may be hybrid, the order, structure, and message of the ritual calendar are not. The use of the category “grotesque” has traditionally served to label cultural differences. This is an ethnocentric approach to the pursuit of knowledge

because it imposes the ideology of the European observer and thus occludes other cultural meanings. The earliest European viewers of Mexican pictorial manuscripts would have projected their imaginary, symbolic, and real fears onto their images: imaginary insofar as the depictions corresponded to the preexisting and current European vocabulary of the fantastic and monstrous; symbolic insofar as the practices described in the accompanying texts fed their programmed fears of “false gods” in both appearance and behavior (such as demanding human sacrifice); and “real” insofar as that which was excluded because it did not fit into the Eurocentric categories of description was gradually erased from view— the violence of cultural projection was masked, its effects supposedly neutralized by the means that generations of copyists (from the sixteenth-century Dominican missionary Bernardino da Sahagun to the eighteenth-century Creole nobleman Mariano Fernandez Veytia) practiced to eliminate obvious signs of idolatry while embedding the discourse of idolatry at a deeper level, continuing the same process of objectification and fetishization that they claim to eschew.

Staking a claim: implications for the framing of Renaissance art All three conditions the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real are simultaneously at work in art history’s institutional history. The “cause” or origin of Mexican painted manuscripts as the record of idolatry is erased through editing. What is left in the material record reveals both the compiler’s desire to understand Mexica religious practices and his need to disavow them. Mexican painted manuscripts of the early contact period are an excellent case of the manner in which hybrid cultural products in which “Renaissance” art combines with the representational system of a previously unrelated culture serves as a site of cultural

translation: two types of semiotic systems, one native American and the other European, are combined.

Central to the compiler’s ambivalent attitude is the multivalent, shifting presence of the grotesque figured in its various familiar guises of the ridiculous, the laughable, the monstrous, the abhorrent, the repulsive, the fabulous, and the fantastic. Far from providing insight into cultural differences, projections of conflicting European ideas of the monstrous or grotesque co-exist with the subjectivity of the compiler in the ethnographic record. The coupling of semiotic systems with different cultural origins under these conditions creates complex tensions within the text. The superimposition of different representational practices is difficult to interpret, not just for the modern scholar but probably for each attentive reader since it was compiled. We can safely infer that the contestation of signs that constitutes the material object bears traces of the power struggle that produced it. These are the complex circumstances of production and reception that defeat any attempt to distinguish among the vested interests of authors/producers in binary terms of colonizer and colonized.

Critical understanding of the institutional history of the discipline of art history calls for integrated attempts to define the issues that produced the narratives of our current disciplinary formations.

Idolatry is one such problematic, with the potential to integrate art historical studies around significant questions involving the formation of modern individual and collective identities. Idolatry is also a topic of major historical and theoretical consequence that bears on significant contemporary preoccupations elsewhere with the criteria for what it means to be human and, ultimately, what it means not to be human. The history of these contemporary preoccupations deserves to be better un-

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between previously unrelated societies constitute under-utilized forms of historical evidence, especially when they fall outside the range of modern categories of art or do not correspond to the recognized “styles” and “periods” associated with the European “fine arts.”Studies of cultural interaction lead to questions of whether and how the historical complexities of collective identity formation and dissolution might reorganize research protocols at the institutional level. Consider in this context the statement by Walter Benjamin, excerpted from a letter to Max Horkheimer in which Benjamin offered a corrective to his colleague’s view of the closure of the past: “History is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance [Eindenken].” For Benjamin, the manner in which art and cultural history were to be integrated was the subject of investigation rather than its methodological premise. Benjamin’s attempts to reject the humanist notion of periods of decline and progress—his admiration for Aloïs Riegl’s success in this regard is well known to art historians—were in part catalyzed by the symptomatic difficulties that the experience of art poses. Unlike the position of the humanist Aby Warburg, who viewed works of art as privileged sites for the harmonious reconciliation of psychological tensions in society, Benjamin understood culturalproduction in more explicitly Marxist terms as the document of economic oppression: “art and science owe their existence not only to the great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or another, to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.” Benjamin developed his ideas regarding the work of art’s social relevance beyond the lifetime of its original producers in a Marxian framework as a foil to the commodity, the foundational concept in Marx’s economic theory. The “surplus value” of what Marx called the commodity-fetish is the inverse

of the “surplus value” of the work of art. In his recent reading of Marx, Jacques Derrida summed up the dialectical relationship between these two kinds of objects in the terms that Benjamin had recognized: “if a work of art can become a commodity, and if this process seems fated to occur, it is also because the commodity began [historically] by putting to work, in one way or another, the principle of art itself.” The early modern work of art, because of the extraordinary value attached to it, anticipates Marx’s concept of surplus value in the industrialized mass production of commodities, the source of both the capitalist’s profit and the worker’s exploitation. However, because the work of art is too complex to be explained in terms of base and superstructure alone, it provides a test case for developing a theoretical model sufficiently complex to explain the political economy.

Art, as Benjamin recognized in 1937, is not a timeless, universal category. On the basis that the category “art” emerged in specific cultural and historical circumstances, he challenged the separation of specialized fields of history. He put into question the integrity of a discipline that decides in advance on the nature of objects and practices as “art.” He further argued that the work of art is never complete because it is by virtue of its after-history that the work of art’s fore-history is recognizable.

Since the process of embodying and distinguishing itself from the world is continued in the interpretations of the work, the work of art is never completely present. Consequently, objects of the past cannot be fully possessed and they will always disrupt the efforts of the present to contain them within its categories or forms of narrative. For Derrida, the play of infinite substitutions is similarly inexhaustible because the “field” is missing a center that grounds it. This is the movement that Derrida refers to as “supplementarity,” the inability of

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derstood. At present, however, when we study the theology of idolatry, we segregate the primary texts and their historical contexts. Although David Freedberg’s Power of Images (1989), written for a broad intellectual audience, is a notable exception, it remains an isolated occurrence. As for interactions across longer times and distances, art historians isolate the peripatetic histories of objects and texts from deeper levels of historical relatedness such as those that have been the focus of the foregoing discussion. In keeping with entrenched routines, despite extensive critical interest in the institutional history of art history for the past three decades, the profession treats theories of images as if the historical discussion of art somehow did not belong to the same sphere as the objects themselves. Yet the questions: Why maintain this disconnection today? Who benefits from it? Who doesn’t? remain important.

They are legitimate, but as long as our disciplinary formations remain undisturbed at the institutional level, the primary lessons that institutional critiques offer go unheeded.

The contours of research continue to evolve within the set parameters of categories such as “Northern” and “Southern Renaissance,” “Italy,” “France,” and so on. These formations have been maintained in various institutional settings to define the expertise of scholars, the latter playing a significant role in determining how and what subjects of inquiry are framed and investigated.

What is lacking, perhaps, is a clear correspondence between historical entities and the categories by which we understand them.

Contemporaneous events in northern and southern Europe and in the Americas (and elsewhere for that matter) did not take place in separate universes during the sixteenth century. Artifacts circulated in trading networks of immense scale.

The products of intensive contact

the “meaning” of any work of art to be complete in the present, or ever for that matter.

It is in this sense of history’s unavoidable incompleteness that the experience of the past exceeds both individual and collective remembrance [Eindenken]: “history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance.” This condition of the artwork’s dynamic ongoing production makes the work of art anexemplary case of the impossibility of ever possessing the past.

As such, Benjamin’s critique is also addressed to the empiricist methodology of art history practiced as a “science” of objects. For Benjamin, the possibility of a dialectical cultural history depends on utilizing the “destructive element” of the past’s effect on the present.

The “reserve of the past” enables the past to destroy aspects of the present and open it to the future.In the final analysis, the movement of “supplementarity” includes not only the “objects” we write about, but also our writing about them. The critique of art first mounted by Protestant Reformation writers noted that inanimate material objects might replace human understanding of the world rather than enhance it. The same fear was invoked by Marx’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries. In the Romanticist reading of fetishism, clearly audible in Marx’s arguments, when “the mind ceases to realize that it has itself created the outward images or things to which it subsequently posits itself as in some sort of subservient relation,” it lapses into passivity, “seeing a world of dead relations rather than living images.” Marx’s explanation of value is based on the essential contradiction between “variable capital,” i.e., labor-power, which adds more than it costs in the production process, and “constant capital” which refers to the objective factors (such as the machinery needed to produce more commodities at a faster rate in order to compete successfully in the marketplace). Viewing profit in these terms, writes Teresa Brennan in an analysis of the role of time in Marx’s theory of the political economy, ultimately “depends on the difference a living subject makes to a dead object.” By definition, art historians are the labor-power in the production process of art history, just as artists are the labor-power in the production of art. If we forget that the discipline is our own creation, we not only

exploit ourselves, we produce a world of dead relations instead of the living conditions that made our objects of study possible in the first place. The study of what art was considered idolatrous, and why, and to whom it pertained, highlights the arbitrary and transitory nature of established disciplinary and sub-disciplinary formations. While Protestant Reformation theologians denounced lavish religious displays and material aids as idolatrous, their ecclesiastic counterparts in New Spain levied charges of idolatry against their newly colonized subjects. How often are these contemporaneous events involving the discourse of idolatry and art considered within the same frame of reference? The relationships of power that materialized in such complex exchanges simultaneously taking place at close range and over long distances are ignored as long as historians maintain models of scholarly specialization such as those based on modern nation-state identities that—in fact—only fully materialized some three centuries later. Left with a magnificent but inert treasury of inherited objects, art historians who do not stray from their inherited categories are consequently unlikely to articulate complex questions of self-other relationships that produced these storehouses in the first place. Nor are they likely to develop an interest in the marginal position of the culturally dispossessed and the politically disempowered who leave no provenances of ownership or even their names in the historical record.

For writing to be “a writing,” Derrida maintains, it must continue to “act” and to be readable even when the author is absent in all senses of the word. What is our responsibility to our students and to future generations of students of “Renaissance” art? A lot more is at stake than might appear to the naked eye. Jim Elkins argues, in his own contribution to this Roundtable, that “critical thinking on modern art seems to have jettisoned the Renaissance, letting it drift into the isolation of specialized scholarship.” Further, he adds, that, as lifeless a remnant of some inaccessible past the Renaissance seems, it is also “the heavy anchor of the entire project of modernism.” I agree, but as I hope I have argued effectively, a lot more is at stake in remembering the Renaissance than connecting Giotto to Beckmann and other artists “working in the same tradition.”

Whose tradition are we talking about?

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When Faith and Reason Clash

Evolution a Alvin Plantinga University of Notre Dame Christian Scholar's ReviewYXVA (September 1991) Used by permission.

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y question is simple: how shall we Christians deal with apparent conflicts between faith and reason, between what we know as Christians and what we know in other ways, between teaching of the Bible and the teachings of science? As a special case, how shall we deal with apparent conflicts between what the Bible initially seems to tell us about the origin and development of life, and what contemporary science seems to tell us about it? Taken at face value, the Bible seems to teach that God created the world relatively recently, that he created life by way of several separate acts of creation, that in another separate act of creation, he created an original human pair, Adam and Eve, and that these our original parents disobeyed God, thereby bringing ruinous calamity on themselves, their posterity and the rest of creation.

According to contemporary science, on the other hand, the universe is exceedingly old-some 15 or 16 billion years or so, give or take a billion or two. The earth is much younger, maybe 4 1/2 billion years old, but still hardly a spring chicken. Primitive life arose on earth perhaps 3 1/2 billion years ago, by virtue of processes that are completely natural if so far not well understood; and subsequent forms of life developed from these aboriginal forms by way of natural processes, the most popular candidates being perhaps random genetic mutation and natural selection.

Now we Reformed Christians are wholly in earnest about the Bible. We are people of the Word; Sola Scriptura is our cry; we take Scripture to be a special revelation from God himself, demanding our absolute trust and allegiance. But we are equally enthusiastic about reason, a God-given power by virtue of which we have knowledge of ourselves, our world, our past,

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and the Bible. to tread. Whether or not it is an area where angels fear to tread, it is obviously an area where fools rush in. I hope this essay isn't just one more confirmation of that dismal fact.

But first, a quick gesture towards the history of our problem. Our specific problem-faith and evolutionhas of course been with the church since Darwinian evolution started to achieve wide acceptance, a little more than a hundred years ago. And this question is only a special case of two more general questions, questions that the Christian Church has faced since its beginnings nearly two millennia ago: first, what shall we do when there appears to be a conflict between the deliverances of faith and the deliverances of reason? And another question, related but distinct: how shall we evaluate and react to the dominant teachings, the dominant intellectual motifs, and the dominant commitments of the society in which we find ourselves? These two questions, not always clearly distinguished, dominate the writings of the early church fathers from the second century on.

Naturally enough, there have been a variety of responses. There is a temptation, first of all, to declare that there really can't be any conflict between faith and reason. The no-conflict view comes in two quite

different versions. According to the first, there is no such thing as truth simpliciter, truth just as such: there is only truth from one or another perspective. An extreme version of this view is the medieval two-truth theory associated with Averroes and some of his followers: some of these thinkers apparently held that the same proposition can be true according to philosophy or reason, but false according to theology or faith; true as science but false as theology. Thinking hard about this view can easily induce vertigo: the idea, apparently, is that one ought to affirm and believe the proposition as science, but deny it as theology. How you are supposed to do that isn't clear.

But the main problem is simply that truth isn't merely truth with respect to some standpoint. Indeed, any attempt to explain what truth from a standpoint might mean inevitably involves the notion of truth simpliciter.

A more contemporary version of this way of thinking-the truth-froma-standpoint way of thinking-takes its inspiration from contemporary physics. To oversimplify shamelessly, there is a problem: light seems to display both the properties of a wave in a medium and also the properties of something that comes in particles.

And of course the problem is that these properties are not like, say,

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logic and mathematics, right and wrong, and God himself; reason is one of the chief features of the image of God in us. And if we are enthusiastic about reason, we must also be enthusiastic about contemporary natural science, which is a powerful and vastly impressive manifestation of reason. So this is my question: given our Reformed proclivities and this apparent conflict, what are we to do? How shall we think about this matter?

When Faith and Reason Clash If the question is simple, the answer is enormously difficult. To think about it properly, one must obviously know a great deal of science. On the other hand, the question crucially involves both philosophy and theology: one must have a serious and penetrating grasp of the relevant theological and philosophical issues. And who among us can fill a bill like that? Certainly I can't. (And that, as my colleague Ralph McInerny once said in another connection, is no idle boast.) The scientists among us don't ordinarily have a sufficient grasp of the relevant philosophy and theology; the philosophers and theologians don't know enough science; consequently, hardly anyone is qualified to speak here with real authority. This must be one of those areas where fools rush in and angels fear

being green and being square, which can easily be exemplified by the same object; the problem is that it looks for all the world as if light can't be both a particle and a wave. According to Niels Bohr, the father of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the solution is to be found in the idea of complementarities.

We must recognize that there can be descriptions of the same object or phenomenon which are both true and relevantly complete, but nonetheless such that we can't see how they could both hold. From one point of view light displays the particle set of properties; from another point of view, it displays the wave properties. We can't see how both these descriptions can be true, but in fact they are. Of course the theological application is obvious: there is the broadly scientific view of things, and the broadly religious view of things; both are perfectly acceptable, perfectly correct, even though they appear to contradict one another. And the point of the doctrine is that we must learn to live with and love this situation.

But this view itself is not easy to learn to love. Is the idea that the properties in question really are inconsistent with each other, so that it isn't possible that the same thing have both sets of properties? Then clearly enough they can’t both be correct descriptions of the matter, and the view is simply false. Is the idea instead that while the properties are apparently inconsistent, they aren't really inconsistent? Then the view might be correct, but wouldn't be much by way of a view, being instead nothing but a redescription of the problem.

Perhaps a more promising approach is by way of territorial division, like that until recently between East and West Germany, for instance. We assign some of the conceptual territory to faith and Scripture, and some of it to reason and

science. Some questions fall within the jurisdiction of faith and Scripture; others within that of reason and science, but none within both. These questions, furthermore, are such that their answers can't conflict; they simply concern different aspects of the cosmos. Hence, so long as there is no illegal territorial encroachment, there will be no possibility of contradiction or incompatibility between the teachings of faith and those of science. Conflict arises only when there is trespass, violation of territorial integrity, by one side or the other. A limited version of this approach is espoused by our colleague Howard van Till in the Fourth Day. Science, he says, properly deals only with matters internal to the universe.

It deals with the properties, behavior and history of the cosmos and the objects to be found therein; but it can tell us nothing about the purpose of the universe, or about its significance, or its governance, or its status; that territory has been reserved for Scripture. The Bible addresses itself only to questions of external relationships, relationships of the cosmos or the things it contains two things beyond it, such as God. Scripture deals with the status, origin, value, governance and purpose of the cosmos and the things it contains, but says nothing of their properties, behavior or history.

Now van Till means to limit these claims to the prehistory of the cosmos; he does not hold that science and Scripture Cannot both speak on matter of human history, for example? - This means that his view doesn't give us a general approach to primafacie conflicts between science and Scripture; for it says nothing about such apparent conflicts that pertain to matters of human history, or to matters concerning how things have gone in the cosmos since the appearance of Human beings. Van Till limits his approval of this approach for very

good reason; taken as a general claim, the contention that Scripture and science never speak on the same topic is obviously much too simple.

First, there are many questions such that both science (taken broadly) and the Bible purport to answer them: for example, was there such a person as Abraham? Was Jesus Christ crucified? Has anyone ever caught fish in the Sea of Galilee? Do ax heads ever float? Indeed, even if we restrict or limit the claim, in van Till's way, to the prehistory of the cosmos, we still find questions that both Scripture and science seem to answer: for example, has the cosmos existed for an infinite stretch of time?

Further, it is of the first importance to see that when we remove that limitation (and here, of course, van Till would agree), then it isn't true at all that the Bible tells only about status, value, purpose, origin, and the like. It tells us about Abraham, for example, and not only about his status and purpose; it tells us he lived in a certain place, made the long journey from Ur to Canaan, had a wife Sarah who had a son when she was really much too old, proposed at one time to sacrifice Isaac in obedience to the Lord, and so on.

Even more important, the Bible tells us about Jesus Christ, and not simply about his origin and significance.

It does tell us about those things, and of course they are of absolutely crucial importance to its central message; but it also tells us much else about Christ. We learn what he did: he preached and taught, drew large crowds, performed miracles. It tells us that he was crucified, that he died, and that he rose from the dead.

Some of the teachings most central to Scripture and to the Christian faith tell us of concrete historical events; they therefore tell us of the history and properties of things within the cosmos. Christ died and then rose again; this tells us much about some of the entities within the cosmos. It tells us something about the history,

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Science. But the serious Christian will also take our grasp of Scripture to be a proper source of knowledge and justified belief. Just how does Scripture work as a source of proper belief? An answer as good as any I know was given by John Calvin and

endorsed by the Belgic Confession: this is Calvin's doctrine of the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit.

This is a fascinating and important contribution that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves; but here I don't have time to go into the matter.

Whatever the mechanism, the Lord speaks to us in Scripture.

And of course what the Lord proposes for our belief is indeed what we should believe. Here there will be enthusiastic agreement on all sides. Some conclude, however, that when there is a conflict between Scripture (or our grasp of it) and science, we must reject science; such conflict automatically shows science to be wrong, at least on the point in question. In the immortal words of the inspired Scottish bard William E. McGonagall, poet and tragedian, When faith and reason clash, Let reason go to smash.

But clearly this conclusion doesn't follow. The Lord can't make a mistake: fair enough; but we can.

Our grasp of what the Lord proposes to teach us can be faulty and flawed in a thousand ways. This is obvious, if only because of the widespread disagreement among serious Christians as to just what it is the Lord does propose for our belief in one or another portion of Scripture. Scripture is indeed perspicuous: what it teaches with respect to the way of salvation is indeed such that she who runs may read. It is also clear, however, that serious, well-intentioned Christians can disagree as to what the teaching of Scripture, at one point or another, really is. Scripture is inerrant: the Lord makes no mistakes; what he proposes for our belief is what we ought to believe.

Sadly enough, however, our grasp of what he proposes to teach is fallible.

Hence we cannot simply identify the teaching of Scripture with our grasp of that teaching; we must ruefully bear in mind the possibility that we are mistaken. "He sets the earth on its foundations; it can

never me moved, says the Psalmist Some sixteenth-century Christians took the Lord to be teaching here that the earth neither rotates on its axis nor goes around the sun; and they were mistaken.

So we can't identify our understanding or grasp of the teaching of Scripture with the teaching of Scripture; hence we can't automatically assume that conflict between what we see as the teaching of Scripture, and what we seem to have learned in some other way must always be resolved in favor of the former. Sadly enough, we have no guarantee that on every point our grasp of what Scripture teaches is correct; hence it is possible that our grasp of the teaching of Scripture be corrected or improved by what we learn in some other way-by way of science, for example. But neither, of course, can we identify either the current deliverances of reason or our best contemporary science (or philosophy, or history, or literary criticism, or intellectual efforts of any kind) with the truth.

No doubt what reason, taken broadly, teaches is by and large reliable; this is, I should think, a consequence of the fact that we have been created in the image of God. Of course we must reckon with the fall and its noetic effects; but the sensible view here, overall, is that the deliverances of reason are for the most part reliable. Perhaps they are most reliable with respect to such common everyday judgments as that there are people here, that it is cold outside, that the pointer points to 4, that I had breakfast this morning, that 2+1=3, and so on; perhaps they are less reliable when it comes to matters near the limits of our abilities, as with certain questions in set theory, or in areas for which our faculties don't seem to be primarily designed, as perhaps in the world of quantum mechanics. By and large, however, and over enormous swatches of cognitive territory, reason is reliable.

Still, we can't simply embrace

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properties, and behavior of his body, for example: namely, that it was dead and then later on alive. It thus tells us that some of the things in the cosmos behaved very differently on this occasion from the way in which they ordinarily behave. The same goes, of course, for the Ascension of Christ, and for the many other miracles reported in Scripture.

So we can't start, I think, by declaring that the teachings of contemporary science cannot conflict with the deliverances of the faith; obviously they can. We can't sensibly decide in advance what topics Scripture can or does speak on: instead we must look and see. And in fact it speaks on an enormous variety of topics and questions-some having to do with origin, governance, status and the like, but many more having to do with what happened within the cosmos at a particular place and time, and hence with what also falls within the province of science.

It speaks of history, of miracles, of communications from the Lord, of what people did and didn't do, of battles, healings, deaths, resurrections, and a thousand other things.

Let's look a little deeper. As everyone knows, there are various intellectual or cognitive powers, belief-producing mechanisms or powers, various sources of belief and knowledge. For example, there are perceptions, memory, induction, and testimony, or what we learn from others. There is also reason, taken narrowly as the source of logic and mathematics, and reason taken more broadly as including perception, testimony and both inductive and deductive processes; it is reason taken this broader way that is the source of

current science (or current anything else either) as the truth. We can't identify the teaching of Scripture with our grasp of it because serious and sensible Christians disagree as to what Scripture teaches; we can't identify the current teachings of science with truth, because the current teachings of science change. And they don't change just by the accumulation of new facts. A few years back, the dominant view among astronomers and cosmologists was that the universe is infinitely old; at present the prevailing

opinion is that the universe began some 16 billion years ago; but now there are straws in the wind suggesting a step back towards the idea that there was no beginning or think of the enormous changes from nineteenth- to twentieth-century physics.

A prevailing attitude at the end of the nineteenth century was that physics was pretty well accomplished; there were a few loose ends here and there to tie up and a few mopping up operations left to do, but the fundamental lineaments and characteristics of physical reality had been described. And we all know what happened next.

As I said above, we can't automatically assume that when there is a conflict between science and our grasp of the teaching of Scripture, it is science that is wrong and must give way. But the same holds vice versa; when there is a conflict between our grasp of the teaching of Scripture and current science, we can't assume that it is our interpretation of Scripture that is at fault. It

could be that, but it doesn't have to be; it could be because of some mistake or flaw in current science.

The attitude I mean to reject was expressed by a group of serious Christians as far back as 1832, when deep time was first being discovered; "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible," they said, "we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault. To return to the great poet McGonagall, When faith and reason clash, This faith must go to smash.

This attitude-the belief that when there is a conflict, the problem must inevi-

tably lie with our interpretation of Scripture, so that the correct course is always to modify that understanding in such a way as to accommodate current science-is every bit as deplorable as the opposite error. No doubt science can correct our grasp of Scripture; but Scripture can also correct current science. If, for example, current science were to return to the view that the world has no beginning, and is infinitely old, then current science would be wrong.

So what, precisely, must we do

in such a situation? Which do we go with faith or reason? More exactly, which do we go with, our grasp of Scripture or current science? I don't know of any infallible rule, or even any pretty reliable general recipe. All we can do is weigh and evaluate the relative warrant, the relative backing or strength, of the conflicting teachings. We must do our best to apprehend both the teachings of Scripture and the deliverances of reason; in either case we will have much more warrant for some apparent teachings than for others. It may be hard to see just what the Lord proposes to teach us in the Song of Solomon or Old Testament genealogies; it is vastly easier to see what he proposes to teach us in the Gospel accounts of Christ's resurrection from the dead. On the other side, it is clear that

among the deliverances of reason is the proposition that the earth is round rather than flat; it is enormously harder to be sure, however, that contemporary quantum mechanics, taken realistically, has things right. We must make as careful an estimate as we can of the degrees of warrant of the conflicting doctrines; we may then make a judgment as to where the balance of probability lies, or alternatively, we may suspend judgment. After an,

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of some than of others-both because of the scientific evidence against some of them, and because some are much more clearly the teachings of Scripture than others. I do not mean to endorse the view that all of these propositions are true: but it isn't just silly or irrational to do so.

One need not be a fanatic, or a Flat Either, or an ignorant Fundamentalist in order to hold it. In my judgment the view is mistaken, because I take the evidence for an old earth to be strong and the warrant for the view that the Lord teaches that the earth is young to be relatively weak. But these judgments are not simply obvious, or inevitable, or such that anyone with any sense will automatically be obliged to agree.

Faith and Evolution

So I can properly correct my view as to what reason teaches by appealing to my understanding of Scripture; and I can properly correct my understanding of Scripture by appealing to the teachings of reason. It is of the first importance, however, that we correctly identify the relevant teachings of reason. Here I want to turn directly to the present problem, the apparent disparity between what Scripture and science teach us About the origin and development of life. Like any good Christian Reformed preacher, I have three points here. First, I shall argue that the theory of evolution is by no means religiously or theologically neutral. Second, I want to ask how we Christians should in fact think about evolution; how probable is it, all things considered, that the Grand Evolutionary Hypothesis is true? And third, I want to make a remark about how, as I see it, our intellectuals and academics should serve us, the Christian community, in this area.

A. Evolution religiously neutral?

According to a popular contemporary myth, science is a cool, reasoned, wholly dispassionate attempt to figure out the truth about

ourselves and our world, entirely independent of religion, or ideology, or moral convictions, or theological commitments. I believe this is deeply mistaken. Following Augustine (and Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd, Harry Jellema, Henry Stob and other Reformed thinkers), I believe that there is conflict, a battle between the Civitas Dei, the City of God, and the City of the World. As a matter of fact, what we have, I think, is a three-way battle. On the one hand there is Perennial Naturalism, a view going back to the ancient world, a view according to which there is no God, nature is all there is, and mankind is to be understood as a part of nature. Second, there is what I shall call 'Enlightenment Humanism': we could also call it 'Enlightenment Subjectivism' or 'Enlightenment Antirealism': this way of thinking goes back substantially to the great eighteenthcentury enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. According to its central tenet, it is really we human beings, we men and women, who structure the world, who are responsible for its fundamental outline and lineaments. Naturally enough, a view as startling as this comes in several forms. According to Jean Paul Sartre and his existentialist friends, we do this world-structuring freely and individually; according to Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers we do it communally and by way of language; according to Kant himself it is done by the transcendental ego which, oddly enough, is neither one nor many, being itself the source of the one-many structure of the world. So two of the parties to this three-way contest are Perennial Naturalism and Enlightenment Humanism; the third party, of course, is Christian theism.

Of course there are many unthinking and ill-conceived combinations, much blurring of lines, many cross currents and eddies, many halfway houses, much halting between two opinions. Nevertheless I think these are the three basic contemporary

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we don't have to have a view on all these matters. Let me illustrate from the topic under discussion. Consider that list of apparent teachings Of Genesis: that God has created the world, that the earth is young, that human beings And many different kinds of plants and animals were separately created, and that there was an original human pair whose sin has afflicted both human nature and some of the rest of the world. At least one of these claims-the claim that the universe is young-is very hard to square with a variety of types of scientific evidence: geological, paleontological, cosmological and so on. Nonetheless a sensible person might be convinced, after careful and prayerful study of the Scriptures, that what the Lord teaches there implies that this evidence is misleading and that as a matter of fact the earth really is very young. So far as I can see, there is nothing to rule this out as automatically pathological or irrational or irresponsible or stupid.

And of course this sort of view can be developed in more subtle and nuanced detail. For example, the above teachings may be graded with respect to the probability that they really are what the Lord intends us to learn from early Genesis. Most clear, perhaps, is that God created the world, so that it and everything in it depends upon him and neither it nor anything in it has existed for an infinite stretch of time? Next clearest, perhaps, is that there was an original human pair who sinned and through whose sinning disaster befell both man and nature; for this is attested to not only here but in many other places in Scripture. That humankind was separately created is perhaps less clearly taught; that many other kinds of living beings were separately created might be still less clearly taught; that the earth is young, still less clearly taught.

One who accepted all of these theses ought to be much more confident

Western ways of looking at reality, three basically religious ways of viewing ourselves and the world.

The conflict is real, and of profound importance. The stakes, furthermore, are high; this is a battle for men's souls.

Now it would be excessively naive to think that contemporary science is religiously and theologically neutral, standing serenely above this battle and wholly irrelevant to it. Perhaps parts of science are like that: mathematics, for example, and perhaps physics, or parts of physicsalthough even in these areas there are connections. Other parts are obviously and deeply involved in this battle: and the closer the science in question is to what is distinctively human, the deeper the involvement.

To turn to the bit of science in question, the theory of evolution plays a fascinating and crucial role in contemporary Western culture.

The enormous controversy about it is what is most striking, a controversy that goes back to Darwin and continues full force today. Evolution is the regular subject of courtroom drama; one such trial-the spectacular Scopes trial of 1925-has been made the subject of an extremely popular film. Fundamentalists regard evolution as the work of the Devil.

In academia, on the other hand, it is an idol of the contemporary tribe; it serves as a shibboleth, a litmus test distinguishing the ignorant and bigoted fundamentalist goats front the properly acculturated and scientifically receptive sheep. Apparently this litimus test extends far beyond the confines of this terrestrial globe: according to the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, "If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet? Indeed many of the experts-for example, Dawkins, William Provine, Stephen Gould-display a sort of revulsion at the very idea of special

creation by God, as if this idea is not merely not good science, but somehow a bit obscene, or at least unseemly; it borders on the immoral; it is worthy of disdain and contempt.

In some circles, confessing to finding evolution attractive will get you disapproval and ostracism and may lose you your job; in others, confessing doubts about evolution will have the same doleful effect. In Darwin's day, some suggested that it was all well and good to discuss evolution in the universities and among the cognoscenti; they thought public discussion unwise, however; for it would be a shame if the lower classes found out about it. Now, ironically enough, the 'shoe is sometimes on the other foot; it is [he devotees of evolution who sometimes express the fear that public discussion of doubts and difficulties with evolution could have harmful political effects.

So why the entire furor? The answer is obvious: evolution has deep religious connections; deep connections with how we understand ourselves at the most fundamental level.

Many evangelicals and fundamentalists see in it a threat to the faith; they don't want it taught to their children, at any rate as scientifically established fact, and they see acceptance of it as corroding proper acceptance of the Bible. On the other side, among the secularists, evolution functions as a myth, in a technical sense of that term: a shared way of understanding ourselves at the deep level of religion, a deep interpretation of ourselves to ourselves, a way of telling us why we are here, where we come from, and where we are going.

It was serving in this capacity when Richard Dawkins (according to Peter Medawar, "one of the most brilliant of the rising generation of biologists") leaned over and remarked to A. J. Ayer at one of those elegant, candle-lit, bibulous Oxford dinners that he couldn't imagine being an atheist before 1859 (the year Darwin's Origin of Species was published);

"although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin," said he, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."(Let me recommend Dawkins' book to you: it is brilliantly written, unfailingly fascinating, and utterly wrongheaded. It was second on the British best-seller list for some considerable time, second only to Mamie Jenkins' Hip and Thigh Diet.) Dawkins goes on: Evolution was functioning in that same mythic capacity in the remark of the famous zoologist G. G. Simpson: after posing the question "What is man?" he answers, "The Point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely. "Of course it also functions in that capacity in serving as a litmus test to distinguish the ignorant fundamentalists from the properly enlightened cognoscenti; it functions in the same way in many of the debates, in and out of the courts, as to whether it should be taught in the schools, whether other views should be given equal time, and the like.

Thus Michael Ruse: "the fight against creationism is a fight for all knowledge, and that battle can be won if we all work to see that Darwinism, which has had a great past, has an even greater future."

The essential point here is really Dawkins' point: Darwinism, the Grand Evolutionary Story, makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. What he means is simple enough. If you are Christian, or a theist of some other kind, you have a ready answer to the question, how did it all happen? How is it that there are all the kinds of floras and faunas we behold; how did they all get here? The answer, of course, is that they have been created by the Lord.

But if you are not a believer in God, things are enormously more difficult.

How did all these things get here?

How did life get started and how did it come to assume its present multi-

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cient Earth Thesis, as we may call it. Second, there is the claim that life has progressed from relatively simple to relatively complex forms of life. In the beginning there was relatively simple unicellular life, perhaps of the sort represented by bacteria and blue green algae, or perhaps still simpler unknown forms of life. (Although bacteria are simple compared to some other living beings, they are in fact enormously complex creatures.) Then more complex unicellular life, then relatively simple multicellular life such as seagoing worms, coral, and jelly fish, then fish, then amphibia, then reptiles, birds, mammals, and finally, as the culmination of the whole process, human beings: the Progress Thesis, as we humans may like to call it (jelly fish might have a different view as to where to whole process culminates). Third, there is the Common Ancestry Thesis: that life originated at only one place on earth, all subsequent life being related by descent to those original living creatures-the claim that, as Stephen Could puts it, there is a "tree of evolutionary descent linking all organisms by ties of genealogy."

According to the Common Ancestry Thesis, we are literally cousins of all living things-horses, oak trees and even poison ivy-distant cousins, no doubt, but still cousins. (This is much easier to imagine for some of us than for others.) Fourth, there is the claim that there is a (naturalistic) explanation of this development of fife from simple to complex forms; call this thesis Darwinism, because according to the most popular and well-known suggestions, the evolutionary mechanism would be natural selection operating on random genetic mutation (due to copy error or ultra violet radiation or other causes); and this is similar to Darwin's proposals. Finally, there is the claim that life itself developed from non-living matter without any special creative activity of God but just by virtue of the ordinary laws of physics

and chemistry: call this the Naturalistic Origins Thesis. These five theses are of course importantly different from each other. They are also logically independent in pairs, except for the third and fourth theses: the fourth entails the third, in that you can't sensibly propose a mechanism or an explanation for evolution without agreeing that evolution has indeed occurred. The combination of all five of these theses is what I have been calling 'The Grand Evolutionary Story'; the Common Ancestry Thesis together with Darwinism (remember, Darwinism isn't the view that the mechanism driving evolution is just what Darwin says it is) is what one most naturally thinks of as the Theory of Evolution.

So how shall we think of these five theses? First, let me remind you once more that I am no expert in this area. And second, let me say that, as I see it, the empirical or scientific evidence for these five different claims differs enormously in quality and quantity. There is excellent evidence for an ancient earth: a whole series of interlocking different kinds of evidence, some of which is marshaled by Howard van Till in The Fourth Day. Given the strength of this evidence, one would need powerful evidence on the other side-from Scriptural considerations, say in order to hold sensibly that the earth is young. There is less evidence, but still good evidence in the fossil record for the Progress Thesis, the claim that there were bacteria before fish, fish before reptiles, reptiles before mammals and mice before men (or wombats before women, for the feminists in the crowd). The third and fourth theses, the Common Ancestry and Darwinian these, are what is commonly and popularly identified with evolution; I shall return to them in a moment. The fourth thesis, of course, is no more likely than the third, since it includes the third and proposes a mechanism to account for it. Finally, there is the fifth the-

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farious forms? It seems monumentally implausible to think these forms just popped into existence; that goes contrary to all our experience. So how did it happen? Atheism and Secularism need an answer to this question. And the Grand Evolutionary Story gives the answer: somehow life arose from nonliving matter by way of purely natural means and in accord with the fundamental laws of physics; and once life started, all the vast profusion of contemporary plant and animal life arose from those early ancestors by way of common descent, driven by random variation and natural selection. I said earlier that we can't automatically identify the deliverances of reason with the teaching of current science because the teaching of current science keeps changing. Here we have another reason for resisting that identification: a good deal more than reason goes into the acceptance of such a theory as the Grand Evolutionary Story. For the northeast, evolution is the only game in town; it is an essential part of any reasonably complete monotheistic way of thinking; hence the devotion to it, the suggestions that it shouldn't be discussed in public, and the venom, the theological odium with which dissent is greeted. B. The Likelihood of Evolution Of course the fact that evolution makes it possible to be a fulfilled atheist doesn't show either that the theory isn't true or that there isn't powerful evidence for it. Well then, how likely is it that this theory is true? Suppose we think about the question from an explicitly theistic and Christian perspective; but suppose we temporarily set to one side the evidence, whatever. Exactly it is, from early Genesis. From this perspective, how good is the evidence for the theory of evolution?

The first thing to see is that a number of different large-scale claims fall under this general rubric of evolution. First, there is the claim that the earth is very old, perhaps some 4.5 billion years old: The An-

sis, the Naturalistic Origins Thesis, the claim that life arose by naturalistic means. This seems to me to be for the most part mere arrogant bluster; given our present state of knowledge, I believe it is vastly less probable, on our present evidence, than is its denial. Darwin thought this claim very chancy; discoveries since Darwin and in particular recent discoveries in molecular biology make it much less likely than it was in Darwin's day. I can't summarize the evidence and the difficulties here.

Now return to evolution more narrowly so-called: the Common Ancestry Thesis and the Darwinian Thesis. Contemporary intellectual orthodoxy is summarized by the 1979 edition of the New Encyclopedia Britannica, according to which "evolution is accepted by all biologists and natural selection is recognized as its cause.... Objections ... have come from theological and, for a time, from political standpoints" (Vol. 7). It goes on to add that "Darwin did two things; he showed that evolution was in fact contradicting Scriptural legends of creation and that its cause, natural selection, was automatic, with no room for divine guidance or design."

According to most of the experts, furthermore, evolution, taken as the Thesis of Common Ancestry, is not something about which there can be sensible difference of opinion. Here is a random selection of claims of certainty on the part of the experts.

Evolution is certain, says Francisco J. Ayala, as certain as "the roundness of the earth, the motions of the planets, and the molecular constitution of Matter. According to Stephen J. Gould, evolution is an established fact, not a mere theory; and no sensible person who was acquainted with the evidence could demur. According to Richard Dawkins, the theory of evolution is as certainly true as that the earth goes around the sun.

This comparison with Copernicus apparently suggests itself to many; according to Philip Spieth, "A century

and a quarter after the publication of the Origin of Species, biologists can say with confidence that universal genealogical relatedness is a conclusion of science that is as firmly established as the revolution of the earth about the sun. " Michael Ruse, trumpets, or perhaps screams, that evolution is Fact, FACT, FACT!" If you venture to suggest doubts about evolution, you are likely to be called ignorant or stupid or worse. In fact this isn't merely likely; you have already been so-called: in a recent review in the New York Times, Richard Dawkins claims that "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." (Dawkins indulgently adds that "You are probably not stupid, insane or wicked, and ignorance is not a crime....")

Well then, how should a serious Christian think about the Common Ancestry and Darwinian Theses?

The first and most obvious thing, of course is that a Christian holds that all plants and animals, past as well as present, have been created by the Lord. Now suppose we set to one side what we take to be the best understanding of early Genesis.

Then the next thing to see is that God could have accomplished this creating in a thousand different ways. It was entirely within his power to create life in a way corresponding to the Grand Evolutionary scenario: it was within his power to create matter and energy, as in the Big Bang, together with laws for its behavior, in such a way that the outcome would be first, life's coming into existence three or four billion years ago, and then the various higher forms of life, culminating, as we like to think, in humankind. This is a semideistic view of God and his workings: he starts everything off and sits back to watch it develop. (One who held this view could also hold that God constantly sustains the world in exis-

tence-hence the view is only semideistic-and even that any given causal transaction in the universe requires specific divine concurrent activity.)

On the other hand, of course, God could have done things very differently. He has created matter and energy with their tendencies to behave in certain ways-ways summed up in the laws of physics-but perhaps these laws are not such that given enough time, life would automatically arise. Perhaps he did something different and special in the creation of life. Perhaps he did something different and special in creating the various kinds of animals and plants.

Perhaps he did something different and special in the creation of human beings. Perhaps in these cases his action with respect to what he has created was different from the ways in which he ordinarily treats them.

How shall we decide which of these is initially the more likely? That is not an easy question. It is important to remember, however, that the Lord has not merely left the Cosmos to develop according to an initial creation and an initial set of physical laws. According to Scripture, he has often intervened in the working of his cosmos. This isn't a good way of putting the matter (because of its deistic suggestions); it is better to say that he has often treated what he has created in a way different from the way in which he ordinarily treats it. There are miracles reported in Scripture, for example; and, towering above all, there is the unthinkable gift of salvation for humankind by way of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, his son. According to Scripture, God has often treated what he has made in a way different from the way in which he ordinarily treats it; there is therefore no initial edge to the idea that he would be more likely to have created life in all its variety in the broadly deistic way. In fact it looks to me as if there is an initial probability on the other side; it is a bit more probable, before we look at

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made each of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modem features, increasing cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larger body size? Did he create to mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?

Here we could add a couple of other commonly cited kinds of evidence: (a) we along with other animals display vestigial organs (appendix, coccyx, muscles that move ears and nose); it is suggested that the best explanation is evolution. (b) There is alleged evidence from biochemistry: according to the authors of a popular college textbook, "All organisms ... employ DNA, and most use the citric acid cycle, cytochromes, and so forth. It seems inconceivable that the biochemistry of living things would be so similar if all life did not develop from a single common ancestral group.

There is also (c) the fact that human embryos during their development display some of the characteristics of simpler forms of life (for example, at a certain stage they display gilllike structures). Finally, (d) there is the fact that certain patterns of geographical distribution-that there are orchids and alligators only in the American south and in China, for example-are susceptible to a nice evolutionary explanation.

Suppose we briefly consider the last four first. The arguments from vestigial organs, geographical distribution and embryology are suggestive, but of course nowhere near conclusive. As for the similarity in biochemistry of all life, this is reasonably probably on the hypothesis of special creation; hence not much by way of evidence against it, hence not much by way of evidence for evolution.

Turning to the evidence Gould develops, it too is suggestive, but far from conclusive; some of it, furthermore, is seriously flawed. First, those

famous British moths didn't produce a new species; there were both dark and light moths around before, the dark ones coming to predominate when the industrial revolution deposited a layer of soot on trees, making the light moths more visible to predators. More broadly, while there is wide agreement that there is such a thing as microevolution, the question is whether we can extrapolate to macroevolution, with the claim that enough microevolution can account for the enormous differences between, say, bacteria and human beings. There is some experiential reason to think not; there seems to be a sort of envelope of limited variability surrounding a species and its near relatives. Artificial selection can produce several different kinds of fruit flies and several different kinds of dogs, but, starting with fruit flies, what it produces is only more fruit flies. As plants or animals are bred in certain direction, a sort of barrier is encountered; further selective breeding brings about sterility or a reversion to earlier forms. Partisans of evolution suggest that, in nature, genetic mutation of one sort or another can appropriately augment the reservoir of genetic variation. That it can do so sufficiently, however, is not known; and the assertion that it does is a sort of Ptolemaic epicycle attaching to the theory.

Next, there is the argument from the fossil record; but as Gould himself points out, the fossil record shows very few transitional forms.

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record," he says, "persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils." Nearly all species appear for the first time in the fossil record fully formed, without the vast chains of intermediary forms evolution would suggest. Gradualistic evolutionists

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the scientific evidence, that the Lord created life and some of its forms-in particular, human life-specially.

From this perspective, then, how shall we evaluate the evidence for evolution? Despite the claims of Ayala, Dawkins, Gould, Simpson and the other experts, I think the evidence here has to be rated as ambiguous and inconclusive. The two hypotheses to be compared are (1) the claim that God has created us in such a way that (a) all of contemporary plants and animals are related by common ancestry, and (b) the mechanism driving evolution is natural selection working on random genetic variation and (2) the claim that God created mankind as well as many kinds of plants and animals separately and specially, in such a way that the thesis of common ancestry is false. Which of these is the more probable, given the empirical evidence and the theistic context? I think the second, the special creation thesis, is somewhat more probable with respect to the evidence (given theism) than the first.

There isn't the space, here, for more than the merest hand waving with respect to marshalling and evaluating the evidence. But according to Stephen Jay Gould, certainly a leading contemporary spokesman, Second, Gould mentions homologies: "Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones," he asks, "unless we all inherited them from a common ancestor?" Third, he says, there is the fossil record: transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common- ..but they are not entirely wanting.... For that matter, what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human, Australopithecus afrarensis, with its apelike palite, its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape's of the same body size but a full 1000 cubic centimeters below ours? If God

claim that the fossil record is woefully incomplete. Gould, Eldredge and others have a different response to this difficulty: punctuated equilibriumism, according to which long periods of evolutionary stasis are interrupted by relatively brief periods of very rapid evolution. This response helps the theory accommodate some of the fossil data, but at the cost of another Ptolemaic epicycle and still more epicycles are required to account for puzzling discoveries in molecular biology during the last twenty years. And as for the argument from homologies, this too is suggestive, but far from decisive. First, there are of course many examples of architectural similarity that are not attributed to common ancestry, as in the case of the Tasmanian wolf and the European wolf; the anatomical givens are by no means conclusive proof of common ancestry. And secondly, God created several different kinds of animals; what would prevent him from using similar structures?

But perhaps the most important difficulty lies in a slightly different direction. Consider the mammalian eye: a marvelous and highly complex instrument, resembling a telescope of the highest quality, with a lens, an adjustable focus, a variable diaphragm for controlling the amount of and optical corrections for spherical and chromatic aberration. And here is the problem: how does the lens, for example, get developed by the proposed means-random genetic variation and natural selection-when at the same time there has to be development of the optic nerve, the relevant muscles, the retina, the rods and cones, and many other delicate and complicated structures, all of which have to be adjusted to each other in such a way that they can work together? Indeed, what is involved isn't, of course, just the eye; it is the whole visual system, including the relevant parts of the brain. Many different organs and suborgans have to be developed together, and it is

hard to envisage a series of mutations which is such that each member of the series has adaptive value, is also a step on the way to the eye, and is such that the last member is an animal with such an eye.

eyes, and trace through the space in question all the paths that lead from this form to forms with eyes.

The chief problem is that the vast majority of these paths contain long sections with adjacent points such

We can consider the problem a bit more abstractly. Think of a sort of space, in which the points are organic forms (possible organisms) and in which neighboring forms are so related that one could have originated from the other with some minimum probability by way of random genetic mutation. Imagine starting with a population of animals without

that there would be no adaptive advantage in going from one point to the next, so that, on Darwinian assumptions, none of them could be the path in fact taken. How could the eye have evolved in this way, so that each point on its path through that space would be adaptive and a step on the way to the eye? (Perhaps it is possible that some of these sec-

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stretch where natural selection is operative.) Darwin himself wrote, "To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances ... could have been formed by natural selection seems absurd in the highest degree."

"When I think of the eye, I shudder" he said (3-4). And the complexity of the eye is enormously greater than was known in Darwin's time. We

are never, of course, given the actual explanation of the evolution of the eye, the actual evolutionary history of the eye (or brain or hand or whatever). That would take the form: in that original population of eyeless life forms, genes A,An mutated (due to some perhaps unspecified cause), leading to some structural and functional change which was adaptively beneficial; the bearers of A,-An thus had an advantage and came to dominate the population. Then genes B,Bn mutated in an individual or two, and the same thing happened again; then gene C,-Cn.. etc. Nor are we even given any possibilities of these Sorts. (We couldn't be, since, for most genes, we don't know enough about their functions.) We are instead treated to broad brush scenarios at the macroscopic level: perhaps reptiles gradually developed feathers, and wings, and warm-bloodedness, and the other features of birds. We are given possible evolutionary histories, not of the detailed genetic sort mentioned above, but broad macroscopic scenarios: what Gould calls "just-so stories."

And the real problem is that we don't know how to evaluate these suggestions. To know how to do that (in the case of the eye, say), we should have to start with some population of animals without eyes; and then we should have to know the rate at which mutations occur for that population; the proportion of those mutations that are on one of those paths through that space to the condition of having eyes; the proportion of those that are adaptive, and, at each stage, given the sort of environment enjoyed by the organisms at that stage, the rate at which such adaptive modifications would have spread through the population in question. Then we'd have to compare our results with the time available to evaluate the probability of the suggestion in question. But we don't know what these rates and proportions are. No doubt we can't

know what they are, given the scarcity of operable time-machines; still, the fact is we don't know them. And hence we don't really know whether evolution is so much as biologically possible: maybe there is no path through that space. It is epistemically possible that evolution has occurred: that is, we don't know that it hasn't; for all we know, it has. But it doesn't follow that it is biologically possible. (Whether every even number is the sum of two primes is an open question; hence it is epistemically possible that every even number is the sum of two primes, and also epistemically possible that some even numbers are not the sum of two primes; but one or the other of those epistemic possibilities is in fact mathematically impossible.)

Assuming that it is biologically possible, furthermore, we don't know that it is not prohibitively improbable (in the statistical sense), given the time available. But then (given the Christian faith and leaving to one side our evaluation of the evidence from early Genesis) the right attitude towards the claim of universal common descent is, I think, one of certain interested but wary skepticism.

It ispossible (epistemically possible) that this is how things happened; God could have done it that way; but the evidence is ambiguous. That it impossible is clear; that it happened is doubtful; that it is certain, however, is ridiculous.

But then what about all those exuberant cries of certainty from Gould, Ayala, Dawkins, Simpson and the other experts? What about those claims that evolution, universal common ancestry, is a rock-ribbed certainty, to be compared with the fact that the earth is round and goes around the sun? What we have here is at best enormous exaggeration.

But then what accounts for the fact that these claims are made by such intelligent luminaries as the above?

There are at least two reasons. First, there is the cultural and religious,

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tions could be traversed by way of steps that were not adaptive and were fixed by genetic drift; but the probability of the population's crossing such stretches will be much less than that of its crossing a similar

the mythic function of the doctrine; evolution helps make it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

From a naturalistic point of view, this is the only answer in sight to the question "How did it all happen?

How did all this amazing profusion of life get here?" From a nontheistic point of view, the evolutionary hypothesis is the only game in town.

According to the thesis of universal common descent, life arose in just one place; then there was constant development by way of evolutionary mechanisms from that time to the present, this resulting in the profusion of life we presently see. On the alternative hypothesis, different forms of life arose independently of eachother; on that suggestion there would be many different genetic trees, the creatures adorning one of these trees genetically unrelated to those on another. From a nontheistic perspective, the first hypothesis will be by far the more probable, if only because of the extraordinary difficulty in seeing how life could arise even once by any ordinary mechanisms which operate today. That it should arise many different times and at different levels of complexity in this way, is quite incredible. From a naturalist perspective, furthermore, many of the arguments for evolution are much more powerful than from a theistic perspective. (For example, given that life arose naturalistically, it is indeed significant that all life employs the same genetic code.) So from a naturalistic, nontheistic perspective the evolutionary hypothesis will be vastly more probable than alternatives. Many leaders in the field of evolutionary biologists, or course, are naturalists-Gould, Dawkins, and Stabbings, for example; and according to William Provine, "very few truly religious evolutionary biologists remain. Most are atheists, and many have been driven there by their understanding of the evolutionary process and other science.

If Provine is right or nearly right, it

becomes easier to see why we hear this insistence that the evolutionary hypothesis is certain. It is also easy to see how this attitude is passed on to graduate students, and, indeed, how accepting the view that evolution is certain is itself adaptive for life in graduate school and academia generally.

There is a second and related circumstance at work here. We are sometimes told that natural science is natural science. So far it is hard to object: but how shall we take the term 'natural' here? It could mean that natural science is science devoted to the study of nature. Fair enough. But it is also taken to mean that natural science involves a methodological naturalism or provisional atheism: no hypothesis according to which God has done this or that can qualify as a scientific hypothesis. It would be interesting to look into this matter: is there really any compelling or even decent reason for thus restricting our study of nature? But suppose we irenically concede, for the moment, that natural science doesn't or shouldn't invoke hypotheses essentially involving God. Suppose we restrict our explanatory materials to the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry; suppose we reject divine special creation or other hypotheses about God as scientific hypotheses. Perhaps indeed the Lord has engaged in special creation, so we say, but that he has (if he has) is not something with which natural science can deal. So far as natural science goes, therefore, an acceptable hypothesis must appeal only to the laws that govern the ordinary, day-to-day working of the cosmos.

As natural scientists we must eschew the supernatural-although, of course, we don't mean for a moment to embrace naturalism.

Well, suppose we adopt this attitude. Then perhaps it looks as if by far the most probable of all the properly scientific hypotheses is that of evolution by common ancestry:

it is hard to think of any other real possibility. The only alternatives, apparently, would be creatures popping into existence fully formed; and that is wholly contrary to our experience.

Of all the scientifically acceptable explanatory hypotheses, therefore, evolution seems by far the most probable. But if this hypothesis is vastly more probable than any of its rivals, then it must be certain, or nearly so.

But to reason this way is to fall into confusion compounded. In the first place, we aren't just given that one or another of these hypotheses is in fact correct. Granted: if we knew that one or another of those scientifically acceptable hypotheses were in fact correct, then perhaps this one would be certain; but of course we don't know that. One real possibility is that we don't have a very good idea how it all happened, just as we may not have a very good idea as to what terrorist organization has perpetrated a particular bombing. And secondly, this reasoning involves confusion between the claim that of all of those scientifically acceptable hypotheses, that of common ancestry is by far the most plausible, with the vastly more contentious claim that of all the acceptable hypotheses whatever (now placing no restrictions on their kind) this hypothesis is by far the most probable. Christians in particular ought to be alive to the vast difference between these claims; confounding them leads to nothing but confusion.

From a Christian perspective, it is dubious, with respect to our present evidence, that the Common Ancestry Thesis is true. No doubt there has been much by way of microevolution: Ridley's gulls are an interesting and dramatic case in point. But it isn't particularly likely, given the Christian faith and the biological evidence, that God created all the flora and fauna by way of some mechanism involving common ancestry. My main point, however, is that Avala, Gould,

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complished it. Perhaps it was by broadly evolutionary means, but then again perhaps not. At the moment, 'perhaps not' seems the better answer. Returning to methodological naturalism, if indeed natural science is essentially restricted in this way, if such a restriction is a part of the very essence of science, then what we need here, of course, is not natural science, but a broader inquiry that can include all that we know, including the truths that God has created life on earth and could have done it in many different ways. "Unnatural Science," "Creation Science," "Theistic Science"-call it what you will: what we need when we want to know how to think about the origin and development of contemporary life is what is most plausible from a Christian point of View. What we need is a scientific account of life that isn't restricted by that methodological naturalism. C. What Should Christian Intellectuals Tell the Rest of Us Alternatively, how can Christian intellectuals-scientists, philosophers, historians, literary and art critics, Christian thinkers of every sort-how can they best serve the Christian community in an area like this? How can they-and since we are they, how can we-best serve the Christian community, the Reformed community of which we are a part, and, more importantly, the broader general Christian community? One thing our experts can do for us is help us avoid rejecting evolution for stupid reasons. The early literature of Creation -Science, so called, is littered with arguments of that eminently rejectable sort. Here is such an argument.

But I’d like to suggest, with all the diffidence I can muster, that there is something better to do here-or at any rate something that should be done in addition to this. And the essence of the matter is fairly simple, despite the daunting complexity that arises when we descend to the nittygritty level where the real work has to be done. The first thing to see, as

I said before, is that Christianity is indeed engaged in a conflict, a battle.

There is indeed a battle between the Christian community and the forces of unbelief. This contest rages in many areas of contemporary culturethe courts and in the so-called media-but perhaps most particularly in academia. And the second thing to see is that important cultural forces such as science are not neutral with respect to this conflict-though of course certain parts of contemporary science and many contemporary scientists might very well be. It is of the first importance that we discern in detail just how contemporary science-and contemporary history, literary criticism and so on-is involved in the struggle. This is a complicated many-sided matter; it varies from discipline to discipline, and from area to area within a given discipline. One of our chief tasks, therefore, must be that of cultural criticism. We must test the spirits, not automatically welcome them in because of their great academic prestige. Academic prestige, wide, even nearly unanimous acceptance in academia, declarations of certainty by important scientists-none of these is a guarantee that what is proposed is true, or a genuine deliverance of reason, or plausible from a theistic point of view. Indeed, none is a guarantee that what is proposed is not animated by a spirit wholly antithetical to Christianity. We must discern the religious and Ideological connections; we can't automatically take the word of the experts, because their word might be dead wrong from Finally, in all the areas of academic endeavor, we Christians must think about the matter at hand from a Christian perspective; we need Theistic Science.

Perhaps the discipline in question, as ordinarily practiced, involves a methodological naturalism; if so, then what we need, finally, is not answers to our questions from that perspective, valuable in some ways as it may be. What we really need are answers

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Simpson, Stebbins and their coterie are wildly mistaken in claiming that the Grand Evolutionary Hypothesis is certain. And hence the source of this claim has to be looked for elsewhere than in sober scientific evidence. So it could be that the best scientific hypothesis was evolution by common descent-i.e., of all the hypotheses that conform to methodological naturalism, it is the best. But of course what we really want to know is not which hypothesis is the best from some artificially adopted standpoint of naturalism, but what the best hypothesis is overall. We Want to know what the best hypothesis is, not which of some limited class; is best-particularly if the class in question specifically excludes what we hold to be the basic truth of the matter. It could be that the best scientific hypothesis (again supposing that a scientific hypothesis must be naturalistic in the above sense) isn't even a strong competitor in that derby.

Judgements here, of course, may differ widely between believer in God and non-believers in God. What for the former is at best a methodological restriction is for the latter the sober metaphysical truth: her naturalism is not merely provisional and methodological, but, as she sees it, settled and fundamental. But believers in God see the matter differently.

The believer in God, unlike her naturalistic counterpart, is free to look at the evidence for the Grand Evolutionary Scheme and follows it where it leads, revising that scheme if the evidence is insufficient. She has a freedom not available to the naturalist. The latter accepts the Grand Evolutionary Scheme because from a naturalistic point of view this scheme is the only visible answer to the question what is the explanation of the presence of all these marvelously multifarious forms of life? The Christian, on the other hand, knows that creation is the Lord's; and she isn't blinkered by a priori dogmas as to how the Lord must have ac-

to our questions from the perspective of all that we know-what we about God, and what we know by faith, by way of revelation, as well as know in other ways. In many areas, this means that Christians must rework the area in question from this perspective. This idea may be shocking but it is not new. Reformed Christians have long recognized that science and scholarship are by no means religiously neutral. In a way this is our distinctive thread in the tapestry of Christianity, our instrument in the great symphony Christianity. This recognition underlay the establishment of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880; it also underlay the establishment of Calvin College. Our forebears recognized the need for the sort of work and inquiry I've been mentioned to do something about it. What we need from our scientists and other academics, then, is both cultural criticism and Christian Science. We must admit, however, that it is our lack of real progress

that is striking. Of course there are good reasons for this. To carry out this task with the depth, the course of competence it requires is, first of all, enormously difficult. However, it is not just the difficulty of this enterprise that accounts for our lackluster performance. Just as important is a whole set of historical or sociological conditions. You may have noticed that at present the Western Christian community isolated in the twentiethcentury Western world. We Christians who go on to become professional scientists and scholars attend twentieth-century graduate schools and universities. And questions about the bearing of Christianity on these disciplines and the questions within them do not enjoy much by way of prestige and esteem in these universities. There are no courses at Harvard entitled "Molecular Biology and the Christian View of Man." At Oxford they don't teach a course called "Origins of Life from a Christian Perspective." One can't write his

Ph.D. thesis on these subjects. The National Science Foundation won't look favorably on them. Working on these questions is not a good way to get tenure at a typical university; and if you are job hunting you would be ill-advised to advertise yourself as proposing to specialize in them.

The entire structure of contemporary university life is such as to discourage serious work on these questions.

This is therefore a matter of uncommon difficulty. So far as I know, however, no one in authority has promised us a rose garden; and it is also a matter of absolutely crucial importance to the health of the Christian community. It is worthy of the very best we can muster; it demands powerful, patient, unstinting and tireless effort. But its rewards match its demands; it is exciting, absorbing and crucially important. Most of all, however, it needs to be done. I therefore commend it to you.

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PATRIC SANDRI visual communication / illustration

Italian Dramatic Criticism of the Renaissanc This article was originally published in European Theories of the Drama. Barrett H. Clark. Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd Company, 1918.

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HE Italian Renaissance, bringing with it as it did a re-birth of interest in the art and literature of antiquity, is the starting point of modern literary criticism. After the discovery of the ancient texts, commentators, translators, editors were not wanting, and it was not long before they began to expound theories of their own. The Ars Poetica of Horace had been the basis of what was written on the subject of the drama between the Augustan period and the early Renaissance. Donatus and Diomedes both quote largely from it, and most of their ideas were based upon it. Aristotle, on the other hand, was practically unknown; his influence in classical antiquity was, according to Spingarn, "so far as it is possible to judge, very slight." The manuscript of the Poetics was preserved in the East. The first Oriental version was translated from the Syriac into Arabic (about 935 A.D.) by Abu-Baschar.

In the twelfth century AverroĂŤs made an abridged version; this in turn was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century by a German of the name of Hermann, and by Mantinus of Tortosa in Spain in the fourteenth. One of the extremely rare references to Aristotle is found in Roger Bacon; Petrarch just mentions him.

Giorgio Valla published his Latin

translation of the Poetics at Venice in1498. This was followed by the Aldine edition of the original Greek text in 1508. In 1536 Allessandro de' Pazzi published the Greek original together with a revised Latin text, and in 1548 Robortello published the first commentary (with a Latin translation).

Bernardo Segni, in 1549, was the first to publish an Italian translation.

Among the earliest treatises on the art of poetry was that of Vida, whose De Arte Poetica appeared in 1527; contrary to practically every other work of similar title, this influential poem contains no reference to the drama. Two years later, however, Trissino published the first four books of his Poetica, but not until 1563, when two books were added, did he consider the drama. Dolce's translation of Horace in 1535 was followed the next year by the vernacular Poetica of Daniello, whose few references to tragedy and comedy, based upon Horace and Aristotle, are the first of their kind to appear in the Italian language. The same year saw Pazzi's edition and Trincaveli's Greek text.

From this time on, the influence of Aristotle as an arbiter in the art of poetry was to spread. Robortello's In Librum Aristotelis de Arte Poetica Explicationes (1548) is the first complete commentary on the Poetics. Segni's translation was published the next year. In

1550 appeared Maggi's Explicationes (written with Lombardi), similar to the commentary of Robortello. Both are diffuse, detailed, and pedantic, and rarely depart from what the authors understood, or misunderstood, in Aristotle. Muzio [Mutio] published an Arte Poetica in 1551. Varchi in his Lezzioni (1553) upheld the Aristotelian ideals of tragedy. The Discorso sulle Comedie e sulle Tragedie of the famous novelist Giraldi Cintio, which was written in 1543, but not published until 1554, carried on the Aristotelian tradition begun by Daniello. This was to continue in one form or another throughout the Renaissance and be taken up later in France. Minturno's two treatises, De Poeta (1559) and Arte Poetica (1564), the first in Latin, the second in Italian, were the fullest discussions of the theory of poetry and drama yet written. The influence of Aristotle and Horace is everywhere evident, but, the Italian critic expounded and amplified after his own manner. The Commentarii of Vettori [Victorius], printed in 1560, was another Latin treatise explaining the Poetics.

The following year Julius Caesar Scaliger, one of the most influential theorists since antiquity, published his Latin work, Poetices Libri Septem. As Scaliger had lived in France for some years (his book was published at Lyons) and was acquainted with many

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one reason because it contained the first formulation of the unity of place, supposed to have been derived from Aristotle. The immediate effect of this was to start the endless discussion in France of the famous "three Unities."

Jean de la Taille, in 1572, was the first to insist on them in that country.

Castelvetro was likewise the first to consider a play as limited and directly affected by the stage representation.

The Italian critics from the time of Castelvetro to the end of the century, carried on discussions of varying degrees of importance, though none of them exerted an influence equal to that of Scaliger, Castelvetro or Minturno.

Piccolomini's edition of the Poetics was published in 1575, Viperano's De Arte Poetica in 1579. Patrizzi's Della

Poetica (1586), Tasso's Discorsi dell' Arte Poetica (1587), Denores' Poetica (1588), Buonamici's Discorsi Poetici (1597) Ingegnari's Poesia Rappresentativa (1598), and Summo's Discorsi Poetici (1600), testify to the prodigious activity of the period.

Such are the outstanding works which treat in greater or less degree the theory of the drama. If we add the prefaces and prologues to the plays of Cecchi, Giraldi Cintio, Gelli, Aretino, and Il Lasca (the Gelosia, Strega, and L'Arzigoglio in particular) and the references in the works of Speroni, Luisino, Partenio, Fracastoro, Capriano, Michele, Beni, and Zinano, the list of writers on the subject of the drama is nearly exhausted.

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contemporary writers, his influence was widespread, though not so much so during the sixteenth as the seventeenth century. The Poetics of Scaliger, which was an "attempt to reconcile Aristotle's Poetics, not only with the precepts of Horace and the definitions of the Latin grammarians, but with the whole practice of Latin tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry," is a long, erudite and dogmatic treatise in which the canons of Aristotle are narrowed and confined to rules of the strictest sort. In 1563 the last two parts of Trissino's Poetica appeared. Castelvetro was the next to enter the field of criticism. His Poetica (a commentary on and translation of Aristotle's Poetics) was published in 1570. This work was of prime importance, for

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