Coincidence of the once disparate

Is it because one is old that new elements and others remembered from the past seem to coincide? Years ago, in the 1970s, Sister M.C., then novice mistress, handed me a lovely Thames and Hudson publication on The Tree of Life. On the cover, and again inside, was a 15th century full-page painting from a Ms, German or Swiss, I think, of Adam and Eve and the Serpent on the Tree in the Garden. I might meditate on it if I wished. It was no common image; everything in it, though nominally natural, was potently significant. Eve was certainly Mary and the Church. The Serpent was neither innocent nor ugly, and it had a feminine head (reminding me now of the Glykon serpent found at Tomis or the Agathos Daimon of Alexandria). But I can't remember all the details, nor can I find my notebook in which I wrote about it, and what I wrote then I might dislike now, if I considered it personally. Even then, however, I took Sister's lending it to me as a way into the devotional mentality that had sponsored and produced it. The text of the book was Jungian, and already I was in no mood to play Bill Moyers to Joseph Campbell, but the picture was theological, to the nth degree. I had associated this kind of thought with the continuum from Boethius through Aquinus and especially in the beautiful Latin of the Victorines, some of which I had read in the year before I entered the convent, and with Chartres.
I was surprised, therefore, to discover it intact and so intense in a 15th-century Ms.
Then yesterday my lifelong friend, N.S., sent me her completed paper on Josquin's Illibata Dei in its theological and political context, in the ecclesiastical conflicts of the century following the Council of Constance. It isn't published yet, so I can't cite it, but the same learned intensity that I had discovered in the Ms painting is fully and beautifully set forth in this paper. As I was taught (and everyone is taught by a certain faculty at a certain juncture of time and academic geography), the art of the middle ages was theological and that of the 15th century was preponderantly secular, the artists more formally concerned, and none of them much engaged, intellectually (except for Albrecht Dürer), with theological philosophy. Of course, that wasn't true, but perhaps my mentors permitted one's having that impression. And I do not recall from the Norton Introduction to the History of Music reading anything about the composers as scholarly propagandists, so to speak. I suppose I thought of them as resembling the popular accounts of the lives of Romantic composers.
Once again, as several times before in my life, history leapt to life, life as strenuous as today's news. One consequence was to set me to searching for at least a draft of my explication of that Adam and Eve picture. I didn't find it, but I found a stack of notebooks of meditations and the like from 1974 to 1981, which I had put away but not destroyed, some of them as tortuous in their struggle to think properly, to make myself believe what I wrote, as anything in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son. Yes, and that was why I had read Gosse so eagerly, for the earnest struggle and its dreadful effect on one's mentality. It wasn't as if anyone was asking me to be like the Plymouth Brethren, but that I was striving so hard to come to terms with a decision that I ought not to have made, that was made out of several kinds of cowardice in the face of life. Abandonment is not abnegation, whether abnegation is itself good or bad. And I can assure the author of the excellent blog whom my mentioning Sir Thomas Browne led to his leaving me a comment (and to my enjoying his blog immensely) that I had no idea that Gosse had written on Browne, and I can't imagine what his biography of Browne might be like.
But Browne, of course, brings us to further religious and political troubles, to the middle of the 17th century and to the everlasting question, whether a spiritual life implies any religious adherence, specifically adherence to a religion of the Book. Daoism, for instance, and even the heart of Buddhism are not theistic, and Lucretius and Plotinus, finally Boethius (naming only the most famous) are spiritual philosophers. So far as there being any contradiction between the intense spiritual content of Shostakovich's music and his professed atheism, I am inclined to think that the purest spirituality is often either atheistic or agnostic. Enthused spirituality, if I may name St. Teresa as such, is less intellectual and less pure, it seems to me. That of the mature Shostakovich, not to mention Beethoven in his late quartets or Brahms or Webern (choosing my favorites), is the real thing—or, should I say, the actual thing? Browne's Religio Medici reminds me, in a limited sense, of Bishop Gore of Oxford who quietly admitted, in a single sentence, that it was at such times as he could see the existence of a personal god that "all the rest followed". I'd cite the book literally if I had it at hand.
The crux of all this, from the first philosophers who tried to grapple with the interface of deity and reason through all the remarkable history of the forced marriage of sensory experience to mental experience, of the philosophy of the five senses to that of dreams and visions and glimpses of the beyond, is perhaps the essence of intellectual history. And aesthetics? Bremond's Prière et Poésie?

The picture book with the Adam and Eve was that by Roger Cook. The printings currently accessible of Cook's title have a different front cover and an inferior reproduction (pl. 44) of the Tree of Life / of the Knowledge of Good and Evil picture reproduced in it. It is, however, evidently the same: Berthold Furtmeyer, from the Missal of the Archbishop of Salzburg, AD 1481. Nearest to it iconographically is Hugo van der Goes's painting, which, however, is more straightforward (and it has the female headed serpent).
The basic study for Chartres is The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral by Adolf Katzenellenbogen.
Panofsky's Renaissance and Renascences and E. R. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, inter alia, also influenced my thought.
There are of course also primary sources. And Abbé Bremond's essay, also in English, dated from 1918.

Thoughts intersecting

The last post, on the cottage, was chaotic, but, excluding my work, so was my life: not defined at all.
This is a good occasion to essay the intersection of two trains of thought, each of which has tributaries.
Sometime in the early 1960s, reading C. S. Lewis or Dorothy Sayers, I noticed discussion of Sir Thomas Browne (and in Sayers a whole paragraph on a performance of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins). I don't have Miss Sayers' novels in the house now, but it is not unlikely that I picked up both Browne and that concerto in her "Gaudy Night". Some authors describe furniture and railway stations to authenticate their fiction, but not a few use authors and artists. Several authors, I noticed later, seem to have owned the same famous Gramaphone Society recording of that Bach Concerto. My beloved mentor and thesis adviser at Berkeley had advised me to do something about my own prose by reading Virginia Woolf's "Common Reader". It may seem an odd choice, being idiosyncratic, but so was Sir John Beazley, of the same generation, and together they brought me to understand that writing involved more than grammatically defensible statements. Besides, I wasn't quite so dense as to attempt imitating either of them, and, but for his intervention, I might have kept writing like the worst of Miss Alcott's works for the rest of my life. I learned to pay attention to how I wrote. That it is, as T. R. Reid said in an interview last week, very hard work all who have tried it will agree.

Sometime after 1958, when it was published, I acquired a very nice C.U.P. editio minor, by John Carter, of Thomas Browne's "Urne Buriall" and "The Garden of Cyrus". The title page of the original edition was reproduced as a frontispiece:

As a budding archaeologist, I found him delightful, and I was fascinated by the interface of embryonic archaeology and, more than impressive, awe inspiring knowledge of Authors (to which, now, I'd add his familiarity with Roman coins found in England). And his prose was as lucid as enchanting, just as promised. He must have had an impressive private library, because it is the books that one lives with, I thought, then as now that become one's own, not some sort of database but a part of one's mind. To this day I haven't read all the Authors that Sir Thomas Browne knew intimately. So I was not surprised that Leslie Stephen's daughter, Virginia Woolf, in her early novel, "Night and Day", at the end of Ch. 5 (in the Hogarth Press Uniform Edition, pp. 72-73) chooses a "very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne" from which to have Denham read "a passage which he knew very nearly by heart". The young Virginia Stephen probably knew it from her father's library and used the book that she remembered, but certainly did not have in hand, since she cited it as four titles. I mentioned the Uniform Edition, because it is what I had; the American editor emended it, and her friends had caught the error immediately. I was shocked and puzzled; I did not know until years afterward how very ill she had just been in 1919. Besides, she may have recalled from girlhood reading the really puzzling "Garden of Cyrus" rather than the "Hydriotaphia".

A friend and I were discussing by e-mail what makes Tolkien more likable (to me) than C. S. Lewis, and I had said that it was that Tolkien's scholarly infrastructure was incomparably vaster and stronger and more wholly digested than Lewis's. It seems unkind to point out that Tolkien actually had children of his own to write for ("The Hobbit", anyhow), but it may be important. It was in that context that I remembered how I forgave Virginia Woolf practically any scholarly sin (rightly or not, I do not believe that she really mastered much Greek), and I had to conclude that I liked the way that she wrote, that I read her for her writing. Here, in any case, I only want to explain how it was that I located my own copies of Sir Thomas Browne and re-read (so far) the "Urne Buriall" (by now the preferable title, since the vessels shown are not what we'd today call hydrias):

In fact, I still do not know what to call them, but not, I think, 'Roman', unless chronologically speaking.

But here is the intersection of trains of thought that led me to record it here. Timothy Ferris, a science writer, has published a book, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, on which he spoke on BookTV last weekend. I listened twice. I have not yet decided to buy his book, for two reasons: he used charts projected in Powepoint, and in me he was preaching to the choir. Not only Virginia Woolf's friends had inculcated the Age of Enlightenment, as well as her father and Edmund Gosse, but, as I think I mentioned in an earlier posting, Hans Reichenbach's "Rise of Scientific Philosophy" and Karl Popper himself had helped form my mind in the 1950s. What interests me is, I suspect, a revival of the thought of my youth, opposing Liberal to Totalitarian (for example), and valuing what I might regard as a blend of Stoic and Epicurean points of view. In fact, it was just last year, if I remember rightly (time passes more quickly for the elderly), that a new translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was presented on that same BookTV. So, when I was enjoying the "Urne Buriall" again after at least twenty years, I noticed how perfectly his reading of the ancient Authors was brought to bear on the ancient cemeteries that in the 17th century were already known and how critically, as a doctor but not only as a medical doctor, he assessed the contents of burials for the evidence of the tools and ornaments and coins, or absence of coins, in them. Today he would be the perfect amateur numismatist, studying hoard evidence closely but refraining from drawing unwarranted conclusions from what he realized must be very partial evidence. In fact, medical doctors today do tend to like numismatics and epigraphy, too. I suppose I ought to find out whether Timothy Ferris used him as a witness.

Since I respect Ferris's ideas (though on looking it over I decided that I didn't like his prose so well), I am delighted if a generation that, like mine, will not be able to take prosperity for granted will be sustained by the kind of thought that sustained me. I am used to seeing Ravi Shankar revived with every new form of sound recording, but empirical thinking is not quite so marketable. It makes me wish I were not retired and might enjoy undergraduates responsive to ideas that excited and continued to inform my own mind.