Zetzel, 'Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9510
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9510-zetzel-wisdom
@@@@95.10.23, Law, Wisdom, Authority and Grammar
Vivien Law, Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh
Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 170. $49.95. ISBN
0-521-47113-3.
Reviewed by James E.G. Zetzel -- Columbia University
zetzel@columbia.edu
The Roman ars grammatica is, for the most part, not a
source of great delight to the modern reader. The methods of
instruction used are extremely traditional and fairly relentless:
progressing from letter to syllable to word, from the parts of
speech to barbarism and solecism, books like those of Donatus or
Diomedes or the string of commentaries on Donatus that stretches
from late antiquity through the ninth century and beyond are
serious and functional works. The grammatical tradition may be
made to yield fascinating insights into the social world of late
antique education, as Robert Kaster has done in Guardians of
Language, but in themselves the texts, for the most part, are
anything but fascinating, and the few exceptions to the constant
morphological didacticism--at the beginning of the tradition, the
curious archaisms collected by Julius Romanus and included in his
grammar by Charisius, and at the end the extensive discussion of
syntax based on the Greek grammatical tradition in Priscian--are
of great interest precisely because of their rarity. For the most
part, however, then as now, grammar is--grammar.
Within the predictable medieval tradition of grammatical works
based on, or commenting on, Donatus' artes, however, one
author stands out for sheer strangeness, the mysterius Virgilius
Maro, who was probably Irish and probably writing in the middle
of the seventh century. His Epitomae and Epistolae
are formally based on the ars maior and ars minor
of Donatus; but within that framework, everything is unexpected.
Virgilius makes up words; the authorities he cites are either
fictitious (at least, both unknown and improbable) or endowed
with works or statements that could not possibly be theirs;
instead of the normal austere and tedious lists of forms, there
are reminiscences, conversations, and debates. Terrentius and
Galbungus are found arguing for fourteen days and nights over the
vocative of ego; there are two lists (which do not match
one another) of the twelve kinds of Latin, of which only one is
that familiar to the average student of the language; the history
of the grammarians begins with a Donatus--which would be at least
some link to the normal grammatical tradition, if Virgilius'
Donatus had not come from Troy to Rome, known Romulus, and lived
for a thousand years.
What is one to make of an author like this? For a long time,
it was thought that Virgilius' oddity was the result of sheer
ignorance, that he was a benighted figure of the dark ages who
did not understand the grammatical tradition at all. Paul Lehmann
then proposed an alternative explanation, that the work is a
parody of the grammatical tradition, a far more appealing
approach. In this brief study of Virgilius, Vivien Law, an expert
on the medieval grammatical tradition, attempts to go further, to
argue that beneath the lunatic and parodic exterior lurks a
serious purpose, that Virgilius is offering a concealed plea for
multiplicity and plurality, a hidden revolt against the
increasing dogmatism and narrowness of the early medieval church.
Law argues that the works of Virgilius are both too long and
too complex to be simply parody, and that the unusual mixture of
traditions and genres within his works suggests that he is
concerned with more than just grammar. In her first chapter, she
gives examples of the extraordinary allusiveness of his language:
his plays on the meaning of names drawn from St. Jerome's
exegesis of biblical names, his oblique references to the church
fathers and to the grammatical tradition. She also draws
attention to his inventions of technical terminology:
vidare is coined from videre to indicate the
difference between seeing with the mind's eye and normal ocular
vision; fonum is used to indicate the word as a formal
unit as opposed to verbum, the word as a semantic unit,
and quassum is similarly distinguished from
sententia. She concludes from this (21) that Virgilius is
a serious metalinguistic thinker and--from the fact that
Virgilius uses these distinctions consistently without ever
making two of the three explicit--that the reader is supposed to
find such hidden distinctions a sign that there is further
meaning hidden in the text.
To find that hidden meaning, Law turns in the succeeding
chapters to the traditions of wisdom literature. Virgilius, she
points out in Chapter 2, is preoccupied with wisdom, and indeed
his first chapter, instead of being "De Voce" as in Donatus, is
"De Sapientia". She rightly emphasizes the importance of wisdom
in many popular forms of medieval literature (e.g. riddles, the
Disticha Catonis, and the like), and the concern with the
nature of divine wisdom and our access to it in theological
literature as well. Of particular importance are Virgilius'
constant references to cosmology and to creation, which appear
not only in his own voice, but in his quotations from some eleven
different "sources". He is also concerned, as she shows in
Chapter 3, with avarice as an obstacle to the acquisition of
wisdom. In Chapter 4, she relates this material to the
ecclesiastical controversies about the means of acquiring wisdom,
and to the growing dogmatism that required individuals to see in
the teaching of the church the sole source of truth and wisdom.
"To speak in the seventh century of a plurality of routes to the
truth, to stress the power of the individual to attain wisdom by
his own efforts, was to challence the position adopted by the
Western Church" (49). But Virgilius, as Law shows, emphasizes in
his teaching the themes of plurality and difference, the various
types of wisdom, and the importance of filosophia; he is
less interested in the transmission of a fixed doctrine than in
the nature of man himself.
An instance of Virgilius' indifference to church doctrine is
discussed in Chapter 5. By the seventh century, ecclesiastical
dogma in the west had settled on an analysis of the human being
as bipartite, divided into body and soul; the alternative (which
became viewed as heretical) was tripartite--body, soul, and
spirit. Law argues that Virgilius uses both types of division,
and that his use, in his discussion of "celestial Latin" in
Epit. 15, of his own coinage spiridon (he never
uses spiritus) for the spirit is a covert plea for
doctrinal multiplicity. She further argues that the use of the
symbols of fire and sun--one of the lists of Latins is entirely
based on the word ignis--is extremely important in
Virgilius, and links him with a whole set of esoteric traditions.
"All Virgilius' preoccupations--intellectual pluralism, seeing
with the mind's eye, the fire of the spirit, the sustained effort
needed to reach one's goal--are shared with the traditional paths
of inner development" (76).
Following this statement of her major thesis, Law argues (Ch.
6) that the Epistolae are in part evidence for Virgilius'
dismay that his covert message of plurality in the
Epitomae was not understood or not well received, and is
made more explicit in Epist. 3, while the inconsistent
views he expresses in the Epistolae on the theme of
authority are meant to undermine the very notion of authority
itself. She then turns in Chapter 7 to one of the central
features of Virgilius' style and argument, his outrageous
language, and links it to the traditional need to conceal
mysteries. She offers a careful discussion of the notion of
scinderatio fonorum `the scrambling of words' in
Virgilius, a detailed analysis of the Twelve Latins, partly in
terms of mystical or neo-Pythagorean models, and compares
Virgilius' discussion of nonsense words to Jerome's insertion of
Hebrew words--which would have appeared nonsensical to most
readers--into Latin text. She contrasts the secrecy and
hermeticism of Virgilius with the traditional openness of
grammatical writing, and argues that his work is a reflection of
the obligation, in the esoteric tradition, to conceal mysteries.
Chapter 8 and the conclusion both argue that Virgilius' text is
deliberately difficult, an enigma by choice; she compares his
ideas, as she has reconstructed them, to those of Isidore before
him and Aldhelm after him, and views Virgilius as an anti-Isidore
and Aldhelm as an anti-Virgilius. The book concludes with two
appendices, giving translations of the debate on the vocative of
ego from Epist. 2 and the catalogue of grammarians
from Epit. 15.
Law's attempt to find some sense amidst the lunacy of
Virgilius' writings is stimulating and praiseworthy, and some of
what she says is genuinely valuable. The explanation of
Virgilius' proper names through the use of Jerome, the
exploration of an ecclesiastical context, not just a grammatical
one, for his ideas, the emphasis--absolutely right, so far as I
can see--on the importance of creation and cosmology in
Virgilius--all these are valuable. That he is making in some way
a plea for variety, multiplicity, and plurality against the
narrow dogmatism of his day is something I find very appealing as
an interpretation, and that he should take the ars
grammatica--one of the most restrictive of all literary
forms--as the vehicle for exotic and expansive argument seems to
me to harmonize entirely with the peculiar sense of humor
revealed by his writing.
Nevertheless, there are serious problems with Law's
interpretation. One of them is unavoidable, and she is aware of
it: once it is asserted that Virgilius has written an esoteric
text the true meaning of which is found in hints and riddles,
then there is no possible way to disprove the hypothesis--and
therefore there is no possible way to prove it either. Law's
interpretation takes inconsistency and hidden messages as the key
to the reading of Virgilius, and asserts that the primary message
of the text is an exhortation to plurality and multiplicity--but
that in itself means that no one interpretation can be asserted
over any other. The secret meaning can only be read by those who
know what it is already, and nowhere can Law find a key to this
secret meaning that is verifiable by any means outside her own
interpretation. Thus, even if her reading is a possible one, her
own argument shows that it is not the only possible one.
In the second place, when she moves her argument from the
suggestion that Virgilius is making an argument for pluralism and
multiplicity--which is itself ingenious and makes a great deal of
sense as at least a partial interpretation--to the suggestion
that Virgilius is conveying an esoteric and mystical message, and
draws a parallel between his purpose and that of (among others)
Qabbalah, Buddhism, the Rosicrucians and Rudolf Steiner, she
takes a step that I find very hard to follow. Some of the themes
that she identifies--fire, seeing with the mind's eye, and the
like--simply do not seem to me as important in the text or as
significant as she would wish; the only defense of her argument
for Virgilius as a mystical writer is the hermetic riddling that
she finds throughout; but that is, as I suggested above,
circular, and my own sense is that she exceeds the bounds of
probability in taking it.
Finally, there is the question of the context in which Law
places Virgilius. Although he is obviously writing in the
grammatical tradition rather than a theological one, almost
everything that she has to say deals with theology or
epistemology, and although she is surely right to identify his
debts to Jerome and Augustine, she has curiously little to say
about classical models. It is perhaps indicative of her lack of
interest in this aspect of his work that when she gives (13f.)
Jerome's etymologies for the names Julius and Aeneas in
identifying Virgilius' allusions to them, she does not even
bother to mention that these names have fairly obvious
significance in the classical tradition too. That Virgilius names
as his principal teacher one Aeneas does not lead her to mention
that there are other connections between people named Virgil and
Aeneas in the classical tradition. If Virgilius the grammarian
is, as I am quite willing to believe, alluding to theological
literature and controversy, he is also alluding to the nature of
the secular grammatical and literary tradition, to Donatus the
commentator on the Aeneid, to the author and the hero of
that poem. And it might be pointed out that the cosmological
interest that Law rightly finds in Virgilius Maro is also at home
in the tradition of commentary on the poetry of the one Virgil
all classicists know--and the one whom Virgilius Maro leaves out
of his list of the three Virgils. In this context, one might do
well to consider the ancient commentaries on the cosmological
passages of Aeneid 6 and above all the long, learned and
strange note of Pseudo-Probus on Eclogue 6.31.
By making Aeneas Virgilius' teacher, by making Donatus' home
Troy and connecting him to Romulus and giving him a life-span of
a millennium, by having the two earlier Virgils come from Troy
and Asia, and by other jokes on the content and tradition of the
Aeneid, Virgilius the grammarian is--if one wishes to take
him as a serious writer--considering the relationship of text and
commentary, of author and character: which one is the creator,
which the interpreter? And here too, as in Law's reading, it is
perfectly reasonable (given the strangeness of the text) to find
a plea for multiplicity and plurality. Virgilius is exploring the
creation of meaning as much as the creation of language, the
plurality of interpretations of text as well as the plurality of
paths to secret wisdom. But I fear that my own suggestion can no
more be proven than can Law's.
Virgilius Maro is a strange author, and Law's is a strange
interpretation; in that sense, they match one another. The virtue
of her book is that it recognizes Virgilius' greatness--and he
is, in his own peculiar way, a brilliant writer--and tries to
take him seriously. If her book draws readers to this fascinating
text, it will have done a great service; but in emphasizing a
deadly serious subtext over the wit and play of the surface, she
seems to me to lessen the literary merit of the book. The
parallels that are truly appropriate for Virgilius are not the
guides to inner wisdom and development, but books like Flann
O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds (another Irish genius with
language) or, perhaps even more, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale
Fire (which, despite the fire in its title, has nothing to do
with esoteric lore). A novel in the form of a poem with
commentary, that constantly and deliberately blurs the boundaries
between the two and between the commentator's imaginings and the
poet's words may be the clearest guide, in its structure as well
as its puns and ambiguities, to a textbook of grammar that keeps
transforming itself into autobiography and reminiscence, that
eclipses the distinction between word and world.