The Greeks Meet the Yogis

I collect here most of the significant references to ancient Indian philosophers in Greek authors. Rather than proposing new ideas about these encounters, my goal is simply to bring these records together for the convenience of the general reader and to provide suggestions for further reading. I realize my title sounds flippant with its overgeneralized “yogis,” but I am little worse in this way than my Greek authorities.



     Knowledge of India in the West was, until the last few hundred years, fragmentary and often fabulous.  Even when a European writer did speak of the East, Asia, or the Orient it was most often with the Near East in mind.  The 1785 publication of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins marked the first translation directly from a Sanskrit text into a European language. [1]  Still, as some find they have a wandering and a curious disposition, there have been contacts, including trade, between Europe and South Asia since ancient times.
     It is likely that Herodotus had heard something of Indian sadhus when he wrote “there are other Indians, again, who kill no living creature, nor sow, nor are wont to have houses; they eat grass, and they have a grain growing naturally from the earth in its calyx, about the size of a millet-seed, which they gather with the calyx and roast and eat.  When any one of them falls sick he goes into the desert and lies there, none regarding whether he be sick or die.” [2]
     More or less reliable accounts of meetings between ancient Greeks and Indians are recorded in historical and geographical treatises in both Greek and Sanskrit.  Some Greeks were actively curious about the new philosophies they encountered and sought out and questioned those considered wise men among the Indians.  More speculatively, Indian thought appears to have influenced some Greek philosophers, particularly Pythagoreans, Cynics, Skeptics, and Neo-Platonists.
     The practices of Indian ascetics impressed many outsiders, most of all those of a similar sensibility.   Philostratus quotes the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana as saying “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the riches of all men.”  Apollonius indeed thought their wisdom surpassed that of the Greeks, saying somewhat gnomically, “I consider that your lore is profounder and much more divine than our own; and if I add nothing to my present stock of knowledge while I am with you, I shall at least have learned that I have nothing more to learn.” [3]
     Doubtless the most substantial report of India was the Indika of Megasthenes who had been an ambassador sent by Seleucus, one of Alexander’s Diadochi, to Chandragupta Maurya’s court in Pataliputra.  The book is lost, but portions are preserved by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian. Megasthenes accepts fantastic tales such as mouthless people, those with their feet backward, and others with great ears extending to the ground in which they wrap themselves to sleep.  He is, however, quite clear about the distinction between brahmins and sramaṇas, or ascetics. With the casual cosmopolitanism of the Greeks, who considered that divinity was universally the same, followers of Shiva are called Dionysians and those of Vishnu followers of Zeus. [4]  The Greeks themselves were probably ignorant of Indian sects, and the thinkers they encountered may have been Buddhists, Hindus, or Jains, and all three groups might have been called Brahmins or gymnosophists.
     In his life of Alexander Plutarch relates a story of the king’s own interaction with such sages. He had been wounded by an arrow while fighting the Malli in the Punjab. Blaming religious leaders for fomenting rebellion against him, he suppressed the resistance violently, including killing numerous holy men. Plutarch’s narration takes the form of a folktale.  Alexander summons ten gymnosophists and poses them difficult questions.  He threatens to kill them if they answer poorly but appoints one of their own number as judge. [5]
     They acquit themselves well, and the general import of the anecdote is simply to establish their credentials as wise men.  Some resemble riddles with a pleasantly unexpected answer, such as the question as to which animal is the most cunning, to which the response was “that which man has not discovered.”  The Greeks likely admired the forthrightness and attachment to virtue of the man who, when asked why he had supported Sabbas’ revolt, replied “Because I wished him either to live nobly or to die nobly.” Several of the answers seemed to be common sententiae such when declaring that the most loved man would be he that is most powerful, yet does not inspire fear.
     Perhaps the most subtle answers are those that to undermine dualities.  When asked whether the earth or the sea produced larger animals, the gymnosophist answered that earth did, since the sea was but a part of the earth.  Thus the apparent opposites are folded together harmonically. Similarly, the responses seem to harmonize life and death, day and night, god and man, while making no reference to the philosophic or theological underpinnings of their attitudes.
     The story ends with three turns of a fine dialectical wit.  “The judge declared that they had answered one worse than another."  Alexander says that, for delivering such an opinion, he must be the first to die, whereupon the sage responds, “That cannot be, O King,” said the judge, “unless thou falsely saidst that thou wouldst put to death first him who answered worst.”  Pleased, Alexander then pardons the lot and sends them off laden with gifts.  Thus the gymnosophist surprises the reader by, in effect, condemning his colleagues; Alexander turns the tables once more by saying that he must be executed; and finally, the gymnosophist uses the king’s own words to provide a happy ending.
     Arrian paraphrasing Megasthenes, tells that the Indians indicate no sign of respect but only stamped their feet when he appeared.  When asked the meaning of their action, they did not hesitate to chasten the conqueror’s ambition.  “King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’ surface as this we are standing on.  You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, traveling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others.  Ah well! You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you.” [6]
     It was not the end, apparently, of Alexander’s inquiries.  Having heard that the very wisest remain in their hermitages, he sends Onesicritus, a Cynic and follower of Diogenes, [7] to interview these wisest if the wise. The one reputed wisest of all, Dandamis would have nothing to do with the Greeks, asking only “Why did Alexander make such a long journey hither?”  Onesicritus sought then to interview another of the gymnosophists, Calanus, only to find him unwilling to speak until the Greek removed his clothes to match the Indian’s state of undress.  Calanus did accompany the Greeks for some time, though he took ill and, realizing his death was approaching asked that a funeral pyre be built whereupon he calmly reclined to be burnt. [8]
     The Indian philosophers impressed not only pagans, but Jews and Christians as well.  Philo Judaeus, the Jewish neoplatonist, who sought to harmonize Jewish and Hellenistic thought by interpreting both symbolically, observes with admirable cosmopolitanism, “And among the Indians there is the class of the gymnosophists, who . . .make their whole existence a sort of lesson in virtue.” [9]
     According to Eusebius an Indian asked Socrates about his philosophy and when he answered that he studied human life, “the Indian laughed at him, and said that no one could comprehend things human, if he were ignorant of things divine.” He does not record Socrates’ response, but he does treat Socrates as a righteous if non-Christian theist, superior to the materialist Greek thinkers.  He approvingly notes that Plato sought to make “the divine” the basis for his thought.” [10]
     Clement of Alexandria, with more understanding than many an orthodox Christian divine since, said with regard to pagan philosophers “all [peoples], in my opinion, are illuminated by the dawn of Light.”  His ethnocentrism destabilized by attachment to Christianity, he argues that much of Greek philosophy was derived from “barbarians,” including Jews, Egyptians, and others. He mentions Buddhists as well. [11]
     Indians clearly had acquired a reputation for asceticism, non-materialism, and utter devotion to philosophy.  It is less evident that the specific tenets of Indian religio-philosophic thought influenced Greek writers, though Indian influence has been traced by some scholars as early as pre-Socratics. [12]   With evidence varying from the highly speculative to the highly likely, scholars have discerned South Asian concepts in a number of schools of later Greek thought.
     Pythagoreanism with its teaching of reincarnation and vegetarianism seems obviously reminiscent of similar Hindu and Buddhist doctrines.  Apollonius thought that the philosophers of the East has a Pythagorean air about them. [13]  According to Philostratus’ account the Indians specifically claimed to have influenced Pythagoreanism.
     Plotinus, according to Porphyry’s biography, wished to study with the Persian magi and the Indian gymnosophists.  The neoplatonic monad Nous has seemed to many to resemble the Atman of Advaita thought. [14] Plotinus had set out to study he teaching of the Persian and Indian sages, but the military expedition of Gordian III with whom he traveled, proved a failure and he did not reach India proper, though he may have met with Indian philosophers.
     Some see Indian influence in Diogenes whose ascetic practices were rare in pre-Christian Greece [15], though Pythagoreans and others had advocated simple, if not ascetic, life. Diogenes famously met Alexander – the encounter is one of the most well-known anecdotes of antiquity – and Diogenes’ disciple Onesicritus was selected to by the king to investigate the gymnosophists, perhaps due to a similarity of thought.
     Probably the best case for Indian influence is that of Pyrrho of Elis’s Skepticism.  Not only is Pyrrho known to have traveled to the East and conferred with philosophers there; he is also reported to have had a sort of conversion experience. “This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy, to quote Ascanius of Abdera, taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgement. He denied that anything was honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust. And so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that.” Upon his return to Greece his radically skeptical teachings included a virtual duplication of the quadrilemma that had been used for centuries by Sanskrit thinkers. [16] The Buddhist concept of avyakrta or insoluble problems according to Buddha is comparable as well, though Pyrrho’s skepticism is more thorough.
     By the third century of the Christian era Hippolytus of Rome included the Brahmins in his Refutation of All Heresies. [17]  He says, oddly, perhaps referring to mantras, that “to them the Deity is Discourse.”  Yet he also more or less accurately describes the austerities of the “Brachmans.”  Though Westerners only gained access to reliable texts of the Sanskrit masterpieces in the nineteenth century, many hundreds of years earlier Europeans had caught sight of glints and shadows of philosophical and spiritual systems from the other side of the world. In spite of imperfect transmission such news from other cultures exercised an outsize influence even in ancient times, suggesting a broader sense of what it is to be human, opening the possibility of new directions and fertilizing European thought.




1. Translations into French and German followed, and the book proved an influence on Romanticism. Blake celebrated its publication with a picture The Bramins, unfortunately now lost, which showed Wilkins and his Indian collaborators.

2. III, 100.

3. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.16. An early example, perhaps, of a late antique trend that persists today, the Westerner infatuated with “the wisdom of the East.”

4. See the account in Strabo XV, I, 39 ff.. Chandragupta himself married a Greek, daughter of Suluva. Bhavisya Purana edited by P. 18 According to the Pratisarga Parva , he “mixed the Buddhists and Yavanas [Greeks].” Other Greek embassies to India were led by Deimachus, ambassador to Bindusara, and Dionysius, ambassador to Ashoka. Ctesias was also the author of an Indika, but he relied on second-hand information, having himself gone no further than Persia.

5. Plutarch 65 ff. Curiously, the story finds its way into the Mishnah transformed into Alexander questioning the elders of the Negev. See Luitpold Wallach, “Alexander the Great and the Indian Gymnosophists in Hebrew Tradition,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Vol. 11 (1941), pp. 47-83. He notes as well that a number of ancient Greek sources claim that Jews were descended from Indian philosophers. Plutarch had earlier noted (59) that Alexander did have many gymnosophists killed for their part in fomenting rebellion.

6. Arrian, Anabasis, VII.1.5 ff.

7. Though Onesicritus’ volume How Alexander was Educated (Πῶς Ἀλέξανδρος Ἤχθη) is lost, it was known to many ancient authors and seems to have combined much factual information with a measure of myth, legend, and good story.

8. Plutarch reports (69) that the same self-sacrifice was performed by “another Indian who was in the following of Caesar at Athens; and the ‘Indian's Tomb’ is shown there to this day.”

9. Quod omnis probus liber sit (Every Good Man is Free), 74. Philo specifically praises the judgement of Calanus in sections 92-93.

10. Praeparatio evangelico 11.8. The story in Aristocles is thought an attack on a materialist or at any rate humanistic Socrates perhaps from Pythagorean critics. Many early Christian regarded Socrates as something of a proto-Christian, for instance, Justin Martyr’s First Apology 46. Augustine says he was taught by the Platonists to seek spiritual truth. Confessions 7. 20.

11. Stromata 1.15 and 1.13. Eusebius likewise Preparatio evangelico 10.5 says that the Greeks owed their philosophy to barbarians.

12. See George P. Conger’s “Did India Influence Early Greek Philosophies?” in Philosophy East and West Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1952), pp. 102-12 and Thomas C. McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. General treatments include K. Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature.

13. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.19.

14. See Ananda Coomaraswamy Vedanta and Western Tradition, Bréhier’ La Philosophie de Plotin (1928), P.M. Gregorios (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy, R.B. Harris (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy. For an up-to-date survey, see Joachim Lacrosse’s “Plotinus, Porphyry, and India: A Re-Examination,” Le philosophoire 2014/1, No 41, and J.F. Staal, Advaita and Neoplatonism: a Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy. Coomaraswamy (see, for instance,) and others have noted the similarities between Plotinus' teachings to the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta,. Though some have denied or downplayed Indian influence. See A. H. Armstrong’s The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus: An Analytical and Historical Study.

15. See J. Romm, Dog Heads and Noble Savages: Cynicism before the Cynics.

16. Diogenes Laertius IX.61. See Christopher I. Beckwith Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia and E. Flintoff, “Pyrrho and India,” Phronesis 25 (1980), 88-108. The story of the gymnosophists’ answers to riddle-like questions was thought to be Skeptic by Philip R. Bosman in “The Gymnosophist Riddle Context (Berol. P. 13044): A Cynic Text?” in Richard Kalmin Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context which also discusses various retellings of the story.

17. Ch. 21. Jean Filliozat with Jean Renou in L’Inde Classique argues that Hippolytus was familiar with the teachings of the Maitreya Upanishad. See "La doctrine brahmanique à Rome au IIIè siècle" in Les relations extérieures de l’Inde, vol. 2.

The Artist as Demiurge: Seligmann on Space

This essay introduces the Seligmann Center’s publication of the fourth of Kurt Seligmann’s New School lectures. They are available from the Center or through me for $15 apiece. Each includes a reproduction of Seligmann’s typescript together with scholarly and artistic responses.

Unattributed quotations are from Seligmnn's lecture.



     Kurt Seligmann’s lecture “The Quest of Space” opens by noting the distinction between the physical space of the two dimensional canvas and the imaginative space created by the artist. He then proceeds to discuss the relations between these and the space of lived experience. Though Seligmann considers historical techniques for achieving the illusion of three dimensions, his essential interest is not in photorealistic verisimilitude but rather the potential for art to create an autonomous zone, no longer dependent on observed reality but subject only to the creator’s vision.
     Having posed in this way the fundamental challenge of visual invention, he conducts a painter’s tour through art history making cogent comments on cave paintings, Italian Renaissance, and modern works. Many of his observations are suggestive, even impressionistic, inviting further speculation rather than making dogmatic statements. His account contrasts the unframed floating images of palaeolithic art with the ancient Near Eastern works with which the artist “overcomes his awe of the boundless by magico-plastic means.” These poles, which might be termed the realistic and the magical, define the issue for Seligmann. Pragmatic rather than dogmatic in his general assumptions, he allows for the claims of expressive theories such as those promoted by the Romantics and functional theories in which the most important element is an effect on the consumer such as didactic art and pure entertainment, yet his own orientation is closer to formalist theories that focus on qualities in the work itself such as those of aestheticists and New Critics.
     He discusses a succession of artistic practices, medieval, Renaissance, academic, impressionist, and Surrealist, providing flashes of fresh understanding more often than not, but always pursuing his grander theme. Though the question seems at times in his exposition a technical matter, for Seligmann artistic creation of space reenacts the creation of the universe described in the opening line of Genesis. Using concepts derived more from philosophic and Hermetic sources than Hebrew ones, he seeks to establish the artist as an independent quasi-divine demiurge whose creations are self-justifying. Spurning the concept of artistic creation as imitation of reality and also the Surrealist faith in the integrity of the unconscious and of chance, he asserts the autonomy of the imagination.
     In this emphasis he distances himself from many earlier writers. The most widespread view, dominant from Plato until recent times, regards art as mimesis of the perceived world, but Seligmann specifically opposes the sufficiency of imitation. For him realism misses the point; its pursuit abdicates the potential of art and, in the crushing phrase he used in “Artist, Canvas, Reality,” realism is “the lowest of tastes.” When he lectured on “Space” he maintained that art is always artificial, “a world in itself . . . alluding to reality, a symbol of reality, a mirage of the thought rather of the real, than of the reality itself.” The greatest medieval paintings are “artifices in the image of creation which was the work of the greatest of all artificers, God.”
     In realistic cave paintings, on the other hand, as there are “no limiting edges,” there can therefore be no distinction between the world and the objet d’art, and this requisite artificiality remains still out of grasp. By attempting to mirror what we see, the realistic artist forecloses the possibility of a more profound truth. For Seligmann the move from applying images to available rock surfaces without any “frame” to “the invention of the four edges of a painting” is “most important.” Within a defined space the artist may create a work which “stands for the universe,” in effect, a new cosmos.
     He contrasts the random “realism” of cave paintings that reflects the mundane vision available to all eyes with ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art works which, he argues, create a “safety zone” in which people are protected from chaos. We moderns, having emerged from the long era of faith stretching from archaic times until the nineteenth century, may yet take refuge in the similarly “foolhardy optimism” of magic which, like religion, promises an intelligible, orderly, and significant cosmos. An accurate vision of the whole would indicate the interrelationships of all parts as a sort of unity in variety akin to that of a multi-faceted diamond. To explore these linkages between micro- and macrocosm is the artist’s task.
     Seligmann dissented not only from the traditional theories of art as imitation, but also from Surrealist doctrine and practice which valued chance and the unconscious. He is surely challenging Breton when he condemns “haphazardness,” declaring “conception cannot reconcile itself with chance.” Further, “Artist Canvas Reality” made clear his reliance on conscious “Mind” in conceiving new art. Reluctant to identify with any other theoretical formulation, he considers Space itself to be in exile in 1953 (just as he and many of his friends had been), yet he predicts a rebirth of this “artistic space” in spite of the fact that “the plastic means used by the surrealists seem to be hostile to any deep and clear space construction.”
     The upshot of his rejection at once of the traditional and academic view and of his generation’s leading avant-garde formation is his judgement that “the boldest works of our time are . . . eclectic” and among these he must surely include his own. In “Artist Canvas Reality” Seligmann had described art as a “mysterious transubstantiation” using the language of Roman Catholic ritual to imply the quasi-divine status of the artist. He notes that the artist can create “a well understood world order to which everything the big and the small, the distant and the close submits.” “The work of art,” he goes on, seeks thus to render visible the “intercourse between the limited and the limitless.” In this way “boundless time and the time of human history reflect one another.” The system works, as he notes in his lecture on “Magic” because art, like mysticism or magic (including the kabbalah), reveals that “all is contained in all,” the universal in every the particular.
     Seligmann’s idea of art is closely allied with his interest in magic and the occult. The written tradition originates with certain passages in Plato (who elsewhere endorsed the imitation theory) and continues through Longinus, spreading with Neoplatonism, and becoming dominant with the Romantics. In the Ion and elsewhere Plato speaks of the artist as god-like, divinely inspired. The idea of the creator as demiurge rooted in passages of Plato is later critical to mystical texts which in turn underlay occult thought including that of the Hermetic Corpus which Seligmann found so significant. Plato’s Timaeus argues that the universe is so orderly and beautiful that is must surely be the product of a demiurge, that is to say, a craftsman or artist whose work is purposive, rational, and benevolent, the intentional product of mind (nous), a term Seligmann employs similarly. According to Seligmann the Persian deity Mazda “carved out” a portion of space-time “in which one can live.” Through imitation of this supreme intellect people may fulfil their highest destiny.
     Neoplatonism sustained these ideas. According to Plotinus "every particular thing is the image within matter of the Intellectual Principle which itself images the Divine Being." Such theories reentered European culture with vigor during the Renaissance through the publication of the Corpus Hermeticum and the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. From this theory arise the complex multiple meanings of such paintings as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. What Ficino called “natural magic” to distinguish it from black magic relies on the mystic connections between natural phenomena, their mental representation, and the design of the cosmos.
     In specific terms, for Seligmann this means that “the small expresses the large,” a principle echoing the Hermetic microcosm/macrocosm relationship. The Smaragdine Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and passed down by Arabic authors, asserts “that which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below.” For Seligmann this identity is “the fundamental justification for magic.” Such interconnectedness also underlies symbolic and metaphorical associations of the sort critically important for seventeenth century iconography such as one sees in baroque title pages and emblem books and in the imagery of Metaphysical poetry.
     The conception of the artist as demiurge underlies Seligmann’s fascination with magic, hardly the magic of parlor tricks or Satanism, but rather the linking of above and below, inside and outside, the painting in a frame and the world outside. It is not through the realism of superficial resemblance but rather through a symbolic system of correspondences that the artist mounts to the sublime. For Seligmann the Egyptian deity Thoth, a figure closely identified with Hermes Trismegistus, is an important prototype of the artist. In “Space” he refers to Thoth’s act of creation through laughter. Perhaps ripples of that cosmic laughter may be seen in the carnivalesque costumes and ribands so frequent in Seligmann’s oeuvre.

Keats' "Thing of Beauty"

If this essay sprawls a bit, perhaps it has been influenced by the poem it examines. I certainly share with Keats his love of love and of poetry and his passionate quest for the liberation of the mind. Such confessions would be out of place in an academic journal, but then, why do any of us, professors included, read literature?


     Keats is outstanding among the Romantic poets for his sensual imagery and utter dedication to beauty. Yet one hardly thinks of him as an aesthetic theoretician. In fact his vastly suggestive concept of negative capability specifically recommends suspending rationalization. [1] According to Keats, the role of poetry is not only to convey the sensual delight of what he called “the Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” but, with the consciousness sobered by knowledge of suffering, to push into the “dark passages” beyond. To the skeptical young writer, even a visionary poet can know no more than that “We are in a Mist . . . We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery,’” [2] Keats thought in images and his passionate notions of art are grandly and elaborately if unsystematically set forth in Endymion.
     To Keats even before his fatal illness, life was tenable only through the cultivation of aesthetic experience. As readers we can relish Keats’ precise and perfect images, enjoying them as the poet enjoyed a sunset or a passage of Spenser. But such pleasure falls short of “balance,” [3] in which one embraces the cosmos as a whole, suffering as well as delight, pain as well as joy. By articulating oppositions such as fantasy/reality, art/life, love/loneliness, and dream/waking Keats pursues the same quest as does his hero Endymion to overcome these dualities in what might variously be called enlightenment, liberation, or immortality.
     "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." The opening line of Keats' Endymion is known to a great many people unaware of its source. Though the rushing passion of the poet's sentiment is clear and the idea may pass as a truism, its claim that beauty is immortal is highly problematic. In fact this apparent statement of belief turns out to be instead the central question in Keats’ very original treatment of Endymion’s story. What seems at first a confident axiom unravels as the poem progresses. Even before the author presents contradictions and tensions, the reader might wonder how aesthetic pleasure can be objectively defined. By whom? And is it the objet d'art itself that is eternal? Surely it has no significant existence apart from the human consumer whose "forever" is circumscribed by individual mortality. Even considering humanity as a whole, Keats' participation in the Romantic revival of Hellenism is sufficient reminder of the rise and fall of enthusiasm for specific styles, periods, and works. Is his temporal claim simply a figure of speech for the intensity of his appreciation?
     With all these questions suspended, Keats proceeds to characterize the effects he considers characteristic of beauty. To him beauty creates a "bower quiet" and "a sleep" not only "full of sweet dreams" but also "health" and even "quiet breathing." (I, 4-5) Its charm generates "a flowery band to bind us to the earth." (I, 7) Though these are positive terms for the author, it is nonetheless true that to speak of sleep and dreams suggests that beauty is an illusory escape or at best an analgesic for those in the throes of life, a sort of narcotic to get one through the day. The fanciful mention of bodily dramatically enacts human physical vulnerability and seems a poignant wish-fulfilment fantasy. The following passage only restates the problem. A catalogue of the woes of life is succeeded by the beauties first of nature and then of art. To the poet both kinds of beauty constitute "an endless fountain of Immortal drink/ Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink." (I, 24) The terms of the problem are clear: the poem explores whether art can compensate for human limitations such as weakness, suffering, and mortality.
     Keats, even before his own final illness, had felt, as Buddha, Plato, and Christ before him that suffering is the inevitably dominant note in human life. At the very outset he catalogues the many woes of humankind’s “unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways,” (I, 11) beginning with depression. [4] Endymion is introduced as an exemplar of every excellence, yet even then the discerning might note “a lurking trouble in his nether lip.” (I, 179) The reader later encounters Glaucus for whom to be born is to be “pierc’d and stung/ With new-born life!” III, 237) Life is torture (I, 919), a “den of helpless discontent.” (I,928) The poem is replete with expressions such as “weary life” (I, 710) and “the troubled sea of the mind.” (I, 452 and 979) Consciousness results in misery; awakening feels like drowning. (II, 282) We are condemned to lead in “dull, uninspired, snail-paced lives” (IV, 25) while starving and freezing. (I, 191) Thus “wayworn” one must seek after “the diamond path” (II, 651-2) though it be as elusive as the “golden butterfly upon whose wings/ There must be surely character’d strange things.” (II, 61-2)
     The suffering human can obtain temporary relief through the contemplation of beauty. When cast into the subterranean realm, Endymion’s loss of earthly sights is detailed in one of Keats’ wonderful catalogues.


He cannot see the heavens, nor the flow
Of rivers, nor hill-flowers running wild
In pink and purple chequer, nor, up-pil’d,
The cloudy rack slow journeying in the west,
Like herded elephants; nor felt, nor prest
Cool grass, nor tasted the fresh slumberous air. (II, 285-90)


He appeals to Diana’s love of wilderness.


Within my breast there lives a choking flame—
O let me cool it among the zephyr-boughs!
A homeward fever parches up my tongue—
O let me slake it at the running springs!
Upon my ear a noisy nothing rings—
O let me once more hear the linnet’s note!
Before mine eyes thick films and shadows float—
O let me ’noint them with the heaven’s light!
Dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white?
O think how sweet to me the freshening sluice!
Dost thou now please thy thirst with berry-juice?
O think how this dry palate would rejoice!
If in soft slumber thou dost hear my voice,
Oh think how I should love a bed of flowers!—
Young goddess! let me see my native bowers!
Deliver me from this rapacious deep! (II, 317-332)


     Keats’ description of natural sights dramatically conveys his appreciation of the creation and his conviction that such visions can ameliorate life’s pain.


Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: (I, 13-19)


     A number of such brimming and glorious lists occur later including the description of the sea floor (III, 123-136) and of flowers (IV, 575-577). He clearly felt, and it is surely more a matter of feeling than reasoning, that enjoyment of the natural world provides access to the sublime.
     Yet for Keats the contemplation of landscape was in fact only an antechamber to enlightenment, as it reached only the “Chamber of Maiden-Thought,” giving deep pleasure, but providing insufficient inspiration to be fully satisfying. A “thing of beauty” in nature seems to deliver only impermanent rewards, falling well short of Keats’ longed-for goal.
     In fact, in spite of the poet’s delight in creation, throughout the poem fantasy and dream bear initially positive associations, while reality, life, and waking are fraught with pain and peril. With its pessimistic implication that open eyes mean an anguished heart, this pattern suggests that even with the relief of sleep, only temporary escape from suffering is available. A breath of poppies leads to “enchantment” “yet it was but a dream.” (I, 567-574) Though sleep is a delicious relief, one cannot sleep forever. (II, 705-707) A “sweet dream” must soon vanish “like a spark” and fall “into nothing.” (I, 675-678) The poppies, however, lead to a vision of Cynthia whom he instantly loves. She, he finds, possesses qualities unmatched by the natural world which cannot provide even a metaphor for her excellence.

Whence came that high perfection of all sweetness?
Speak, stubborn earth, and tell me where, O Where
Hast thou a symbol of her golden hair? (I, 608-610)


     The significance of love between humans as an initial step toward philosophic enlightenment is, of course, familiar from the Plato as well as from such neo-Platonic texts as Ficino’s Commentary on the Symposium and Pico della Mirandola’s Platonic Discourse on Love. Keats certainly employs this philosophic though he likely derived more from Shelley than from earlier writers. In Endymion the central narrative conflict is the shepherd’s love for Cynthia. To the poet the sight of the beloved has such power that he feels

the bars
That kept my spirit in are burst—that I
Am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky! (II, 185-187)


     The opening lines of Book II celebrate “the sovereign power of love” and imply that love can confer immortality, though the evidence is unconvincing: the claim that “Troilus and Cressid” are well- remembered while the violence of the Trojan War fades from memory (II, 12O) and that Odysseus (who, after all, had a love story himself) and Alexander are forgotten, but not Juliet or Hero. It is Love who asks Endymion “What, not yet/ Escap’d from dull mortality’s harsh net?” (III, 905) Neptune’s devotees address Cytherea (Aphrodite) celebrating her power to “cast away” not only “gloom” but also “all death-shadows” (III, 980), and she responds by promising Endymion immortality. (III, 1021) The naiad episode in Book III with whom he drinks “from Pleasure’s nipple” (II, 869) demonstrates that, like the beauty of landscape, sexual pleasure itself, while intoxicating and powerful, does not provide a permanent solution to life’s anxiety.
      Art can be said to combine the charm of nature, dreams, and love, the individually inadequate recourses for surcease of suffering. Partaking of the quality of beauty available in each of these as well as the fictional license of dream and the passion of love, poetry may seem the likeliest healer of the human condition. At the very outset heroic narrative is said to provide relief from life’s rigors. (I, 20-21) It is conflated with love in “the path of love and poesy.” (II, 38) In particular the poets of antiquity are so great as to create an “eternal Spring” unavailable to modern artists. (II, 250, see also II, 720) As he had done in his introduction, Keats apologizes for his own poem.

O ’tis a very sin
For one so weak to venture his poor verse
In such a place as this. (III, 936-938)


     Endymion’s “higher hope” (I, 774) to join in “fellowship divine” (I, 777) is in part fulfilled by art. When one hears “old songs” (I, 787), “prophesyings” (I, 789), one thinks of Orpheus. (I, 794)


that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit’s. (I, 795-7)


Apart from whatever shortcomings may limit contemporary art, it, like love, brings at best not bliss but a more refined sort of suffering.


O did he ever live, that lonely man,
Who lov’d—and music slew not? ’Tis the pest
Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest;
That things of delicate and tenderest worth
Are swallow’d all, and made a seared dearth,
By one consuming flame: it doth immerse
And suffocate true blessings in a curse.
Half-happy, by comparison of bliss,
Is miserable. (II, 364-372)


     While the “crown” (I, 800) of our “entanglements” (I, 798) is “love and friendship” (I, 801) with love at the “tip-top,” (I, 805) one hopes in the end for a mystic union. The poet seeks ultimately for “that completed form of all completeness” (I, 606) and even love here falls short.
     Nonetheless, since he writes, Keats implicitly seeks a solution in art. With imagination he may employ the symbols and even the assumptions of past ages in the service of his own quest. Here the deities of the ancient world provide images particularly powerful for a poet who had rejected Christianity. [6] Endymion contains not only theophanies of Bacchus, Diana, Aphrodite, and Pan as well as Cynthia, but also several pictures of mortals caught between the divine and the human including Endymion himself, Glaucus, Adonis, and the naiad. As gods represent ultimate reality, these provide a language for Keats’ most profound formulation of a cure for suffering.
     When Bacchus appears, he is a more monumental version of Pan, lord of wild animals and of nature generally, master even of Brahma (IV, 265) yet his votary remains lost in grief. (IV, 278) Finding it impossible to flee from sorrow, she decides she must instead embrace it, declaring “of all the world I love thee [suffering] best.” (IV, 284) The god, for all his ecstatic rituals, remains in the bonds of the cycle of birth and death.
     Pan is addressed by the rural assembly in the first book as a lord of creation overshadowing “eternal whispers, glooms, the birth, life, death” of animate nature. (II, 232-234) In praise of Pan Keats launches one of the finest catalogues of concrete sensual images of the whole poem. (I, 247 ff.), yet the reader notes the intrusion of ”glooms” between “eternal whispers” and “birth,” succeeded then by “solemn,” “dreary,” “desolate,” leading up to Pan’s “melancholy” at the loss of Syrinx. [7] This implies in mythic narrative the same analysis of heartsickness the reader has seen elsewhere. Nature is grandly magnificent, but cannot reliably eliminate pain. Love, while likewise potent, is also likewise undependable.
     Yet the mythic language does allow for triumph in the end. Though it is presented as a dream within a myth within a poem, Endymion becomes an immortal.


[Endymion] Would at high Jove’s empyreal footstool win
An immortality, and how espouse
Jove’s daughter, and be reckon’d of his house. (IV, 378-380)


     When the Indian maid turns out to be Cynthia, this fortunate turn (IV, 986)n seems wholly realized, though Peona is said to return in “wonderment” (as who would not?) through the “gloomy” wood. The reader is left uncertain as to the source of that remaining ambiguity. Only in this way could Keats precisely convey the contradictions of his own all-too-human sensibility.
     The fact that this felicitous conclusion occurs in the realm of myth implies its ambiguous relation to lived experience. On the one hand, it did not happen, and thus it serves as a poignant and powerful wish, the description of which signifies the human longing toward something lacking. On the other hand, such narratives are frequently employed in sympathetic magic, with the aim of attracting to the individual the rewards the narrative gives in fullness to its hero. [8] In the end, joy and enlightenment occur only in the mind of the individual, so such imaginative exercises may be more efficacious than philosophic ratiocination in the quest for wisdom.
     Surely the mad phantasmagoria of the poem’s story is no madder than the course of our daily lives, the passions of Endymion no deeper than our own, and the shepherd’s assumption into the empyrean no less astonishing for resembling in symbolic terms the closest approach to a solution of the wisest among us of the problem of how to live a human life. Even the poem’s often criticized “incoherence” corresponds to the conflict and obscurity in the poet’s mind.



1. Letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, on 21 December, 1817.

2. Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds dated 3 May, 1818. The phrase is quoted from “Tintern Abbey” where Wordsworth suggests that the “more sublime” benefit of aesthetic experience is a “blessed mood.” In which the burthen of the mystery.

In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on. (5)

3. Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds dated 3 May, 1818.

4. Cf. Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection” and Byron’s declaration “We of the craft are all crazy.” For the latter see Marguerite Countess of Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington, p. 87.

5. ll. 37-41

6. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November, 1817, he declared his faith in beauty and emotion and added, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination.”

7. Syrinx’s subsequent metamorphosis into Pan’s proper musical instrument reminds the reader of the potential of art to provide at least a partial solution to the human predicament.

8. This is a worldwide principle of what might be called the verbal technology of hope. In one contemporary example of which I am aware, the Moroccan musician Hassan Hakmoun describes healing ceremonies in which musicians performed in the patient’s home through the night singing songs of overcoming demons that personify the illness. Hearing the victory of the narrative protagonists is thought to benefit the sufferer against the illness.

On the Proper Ends of Literary Study

I would hardly pretend to objectivity while commenting on my brother’s book, my older brother who with grace and love taught me so much about literature and life. Still, the situation to which he responds and his own position should be of interest to everyone who cares about higher education and the humanities. I refer to him as I would any other author by his surname in spite of the fact that it is identical to my own.

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, James Seaton, Cambridge University Press.

     We can only welcome the grand synthesizers who are willing to survey the greater range of a topic and audacious enough to draw conclusions from a bigger mass of data than any individual could fully digest. For without such ambition we would lack Gibbon, Vico, Marx, Frazer and Spengler. In Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, Seaton considers the entire history of literary criticism in English as well as its sources in Greek antiquity. He proposes a new analysis and argues passionately and cogently for his own approach to literature. In doing so, he reminds those of us outside the halls of academia of the current state of the discipline in our better universities.
      Apart from the grand scope of his project and his style -- clear, readable, learned, often passionate or drily witty -- Seaton is to be applauded for fighting the good fight on behalf of literature itself, though by his account he is engaged in something of a rearguard action. Those outside the profession as practiced in major research universities are likely to be unaware of the extent to which contemporary literary studies are dominated what is called “cultural criticism” and other forms of “Theory.” Seaton devastatingly demonstrates the derangement produced by the rise of this vogue, now perhaps just past its crest, in his analysis of two books presently used as college texts, but his savage indictment is better understood once one is acquainted with his idea of the proper uses of literature, what he calls “the humanistic alternative.”
     According to Seaton literary critics fall into one of three schools: Platonists, neoplatonists, and Aristotelians. For him the last of these options is the most fruitful and correct, the one he also calls “humanistic.” Other analysts have divided the world into Platonists and Aristotelians, but here these terms are redefined . For Seaton a Platonist is one who, like Plato in the Republic, is suspicious of the appeal of literature because stories and poetry may encourage erroneous ideas. While for Plato, correct ideas are those derived from philosophic reflection and discussion, other “Platonists” in this sense might look to other sources of truth such as religious revelation or some variety of Marxist doctrine.
     A neo-Platonist, in this framework, is any reader who regards the author (most commonly, a poet) as the purveyor of truth due to privileged access to some higher reality. The idea Socrates articulates in the Ion that a poet is given divine inspiration reappears powerfully among the Romantics and more modern aesthetic cultists. Whereas for the Platonist literary truth was undependable, the neoplatonist regards the poet as a prophet indeed whose words arrive from some higher realm, be it the divine, the unconscious, or simply the imagination. [1]
     The third alternative, labeled humanistic by Seaton is based on the comment in Aristotle’s Poetics that literature can teach how a certain sort of person is likely to behave. In other words, literature teaches us about other people in terms not of certainties, but of probabilities. “The humanistic tradition in literary criticism remains Aristotelian both in its view of literature as a source of insight about human life and in its willingness to judge grand theory by the norms of common sense.” (73) In its simpler forms, this is likely to seem familiar to most students including university graduates in majors other than English. After all, most often classroom discussion is largely centered on thematics, the text’s relation to lived experience, whether the characters behave in ways that illuminate life outside the page. Furthermore, though “the humanist tradition . . .turns to works of literature for insight into human life” (176), its exposition is always tentative, conditional, subject to qualification and change, part of a continuing reflection on human life by humans, each with a limited view.
     According to Seaton’s account this apparently unexceptionable approach to literature is very nearly passé, barely represented in the academic discussions of today in which a variety of poststructuralists and cultural critics now possess all but hegemonic power. I can myself recall from decades in the past research papers by soi-disant Derrideans who exercised prodigious ingenuity before pulling the predictable rabbit from the hat and demonstrating that the author was in fact saying the opposite of what seemed to be the point. One might learn something from a subtle exercise of this sort, but, like any inquiry which leads always to an identical result, its charms wear rapidly thin. Seaton most directly engages this sort of shallow “Theory” in his devastating analysis of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and a casebook on Austen’s Emma.
     I will leave readers to savor Seaton’s assault on the NATC in full and will summarize only his treatment of the second of these books. Alistair Duckworth’s edition of Emma provides ten essays to accompany the novel: five commenting on Austen’s book itself as well as an essay on each of the approaches included. These are Gender criticism, Marxist criticism, cultural criticism, New Historicism, and Feminist Criticism. The gender critic criticizes the ideal of manhood represented in the novel, praising it for rejecting the contemporary fashion, but condemning it for reverting to an old-fashioned formula in its place, presumably in this way failing to anticipate the critic’s own ideal. In a similarly half-hearted manner, the feminist concedes Austen’s mild assertion of the rights of women while castigating her for, believe it or not, her “failure to envisage a female community across social barriers.” (63-4) The Marxist is disappointed that Austen “fails to admit to admit that ‘impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system’” (64) You get the idea. Each of these essays basically seeks to prove that the novel portrays unequal relations between sexes, classes, and other groups. This is hardly surprising since the story is set in a society where such differences are highly significant. One might well criticize a work that somehow avoided reflecting society in such a fundamental way.
     Apart from the fact that the critics’ findings are trivial and miss the many possible fruitful readings of the novel; they are also all much of a piece. One could have objected to the pigeon-holes in an older volume of this sort which might have featured a New Critic, a Marxist, a Freudian, and a Jungian, but at least there would have been some variety. Such tiresome sameness is particularly pernicious in a textbook directed at students who might be persuaded that this sort of vapid play represents the entire range of possible literary studies. But what value is there is lamenting Austen’s lack of twenty-first century political correctness even once? [2] The Marxist (and his colleagues) seem to differ from Engels who condemned ideologically driven fiction, what he called the Tendenzroman, while noting that the novels of the royalist Balzac contain more data on French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.” [3]
     While applauding this first-rate book for its polemic purposes as well as its own sound ideas and well-wrought style, I have my own strictures. This book treats only literature, intentionally eschewing the other arts. This may be linked to Seaton’s scant consideration of form. Though form has been a constituent element of literature since the days when it all was oral, both as a signifying code and for its own beauty, we would suspect Seaton reads only to educate himself about human affairs were it not that he makes so many casual yet appreciative comments on the writers he discusses. The inclusion of visual art or music would have made it much more difficult to keep form in the background.
     Form is deeply related to beauty, the sensation of pleasure which has always been considered an end of art. One may avoid fetishizing beauty without neglecting it. Surely if we pick up War and Peace for another go-round, our own motive has much in common with that of the Ibo women who gather about open fires in the evening to compose “moon songs.” We, like Shakespeare’s audience and those who habitually watch Breaking Bad, seek primarily pleasure, entertainment, an agreeable way to pass the time. We have evolved to excel in symbolic manipulation; it is little wonder that we find recreation in practicing our greatest skill.
     For some works of art pleasure, whether formal beauty or amusement, may be the chief end at which the artist aims. Others may foreground description, either human or landscape. Some may primarily seek to move the reader to tears or laughter or some more complex emotion. If the writer or reader wishes to privilege theme, the result will be didacticism in some form, however indirect. (Actually, all popular and oral forms lend themselves to this sort of approach and the Horatian formula grants it importance equal to pleasure.)
     Seaton’s discussion of moral imagination in Trilling (113-115) seems to suggest that the end of literary consumption should be a heightened sense of right and wrong within oneself and in society at large such that one would be more likely to discern the specious from the true in social schemes. Does anyone really think that literature professors, those of the old school at any rate, are equipped to lead more moral lives than other people? A good deal of our impression of the authors of great works is that their lives are as messy of not a bit more than most peoples’. The notion that the literati, if only they were to read in a humanistic manner, would be more politically sophisticated than their neighbors’ seems not only unlikely, but it sounds dangerously close to the sort of elitism Seaton consistently deplores.
     He argues that the greatness of Trilling and Edmund Wilson rests on their ability to bring “insights gleaned from fiction, poetry, and plays to bear on moral, cultural, and social issues.” (143) This view would suggest that literature is a sort of educational aid to the understanding of other things. If Arnold was right in declaring that the critic must “see the object as it really is,” (144) how does that lead to the apparently more important secondary revelations outside the text? He rightly points out that just as researchers in the natural sciences can claim no particular qualification when commenting on moral or political issues, those in the humanities have no authority in questions of chemistry or physics. (175) It remains to be demonstrated that experts in literature have special access to the truth about morality or politics. Surely they are expert in the treatment of aesthetic texts and in that field alone just as the creators’ expertise is solely as artists.
     In any event, information that can inform judgments about human affairs both individual and social is available from a number of sources, both in direct experience and in non-literary texts. Literature in my opinion differs from other forms of discourse in that it more accurately represents human consciousness in a rich range of ways: by recognizing the drive for pleasure that animates all living things, by admitting the irrational, conflicted, and unknown motives that often govern behavior, by foregrounding sense impressions, which is the principal way in which we enlarge our knowledge, and finally, by its capacity for investigating unanswerable questions, mysteries like love and sex, death and aggression, and ultimate reality. (Seaton is very suspicious of granting significance to metaphysical claims by writers in spite of the fact that religion in a broad sense is one of the most common and enduring themes.) Only works of art can imply an entire world-view. We do not find the depth and meaning in these areas from theologians or psychologists or medical doctors or encyclopedists that is available from Homer and Dante and Cervantes.
     Somehow I think Seaton would largely agree. I know that we read in much the same manner. His own analysis stresses that a critic need not be always correct or even consistent to make meaningful comments on literature. In this volume he has not only set forth an original and useful description of literary history. He demonstrates in his own sensibility the humanistic values that have been traditionally associated with literary study while doing battle against those who would dismantle the discipline. The book is at once a pleasure to read and a record of the author's own pleasures in reading. No better authority is needed to demonstrate the value of a lifetime of treating literature as something that really matters.
     The book, incidentally, sells for $90. Why can print-on-demand service produce equally handsome volumes for five percent of that price? It is certainly not due to royalties or advertising budget. Ask your library (a university library would be the best bet) to buy a copy.

 

1. Recall the situationist slogan from Paris 1968: L’imagination au pouvoir!

2. Seaton says that this expression was originally used solemnly and now “half-ironically.” [192] I believe that I first heard it used in a self-mocking manner about 1971 by leftists and only later -- from those with little actual experience in the movements of the sixties -- in more serious usage as a real standard of behavior.

3. Letter to Margaret Harkness. In an earlier letter to Laura Lafargue, Engels expresses the same admiration for Balzac referring to the conservative author’s “revolutionary dialectic,”, in contrast to the consciously leftist writers: “all the Vaulabelles, Capefigues, Louis Blancs, et tutti quanti.” Both letters are included in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art ( Moscow: Progress, 1976. P. 93). Marx, too, thought Balzac, with Cervantes, the greatest of novelists and planned to write a book on him. Fielding was another of his favorites. (Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, p. 439)