The Bohemian Poetry of Ernest Hemingway

 

 All 88 of Hemingway’s poems, including juvenilia, are contained in a modern edition edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis and readily available for borrowing online at https://archive.org/details/88poems0000hemi.

 

     Ernest Hemingway’s poetry is likely to be read primarily by those, diminishing in number these last few decades, who sufficiently favor his fiction to seek even relatively insubstantial new light that might illuminate his novels and stories.  The lyric oeuvre is slender, all right.  His editor has eked out eighty-eight short bits by including high school compositions, while he published maybe twenty-five poems during his life, including others in letters.  Apart from the small quantity of work, even a Hemingway enthusiast would be unlikely to make any great claims for these pieces, many of which seem to have been taken lightly by their own author.  Yet they are revealing in a way that tells less about Hemingway as an individual than about the nature of the modern avant-garde, the values and uses of an artistic bohemia, and the development of the concept of “hip.” 

     Reading these poems with a bit of distance from their composition, one conceives not so much a specific persona behind them, but rather a type, the young and rebellious artist.  While, of course, a good many details have dated, the flavor, the tone has much in common with the readings I have attended my entire life from hearing the Beats at Chicago’s Big Table Readings sixty years ago through my Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series lasting twenty-one years in the Hudson Valley.  Poetry on the page tends to differ from that which is meant to be performed, but, even apart from these generic differences, Hemingway’s poems exemplify the attitudes that have come to be associated not with art as a whole, but with an artistic “underground.”

     Though the literary historian more commonly views the expatriate writers of the ‘twenties as individuals, they contributed as well to a collective scene that celebrated the values associated with artistic bohemias: experimentalism in art and radicalism in politics and morals.  Such milieux, while in part traceable far back in time, have been well-defined since the Romantic Age.  While each artist produced individual works with unique characteristics, many also contributed or assented to the formation of a counter-cultural paradigm. 

     Readings by writers who consider themselves adversaries of the established culture take place not at universities but in cafes, bars, and living room salons.  A goal at such gatherings, apart from the delectation of art, is the creation of a community sub-culture.  For the last two hundred years such milieux have been called bohemias. [1]  Radicalism in these settings not only suggests challenges to social, political, religious, and aesthetic orthodoxies both as proposals and as pure style.  The writers’ posture of revolt appeals to the expected readership all though it may be detached from any possibility of actual adoption. 

     An embattled contrarian protest in fact derives its energy and drama from its not being accepted by the majority.  The desire to “épater les bourgeois” [2] can be a motive in itself, with the potential to inspire both Baudelaire’s in-your-face dandyism, Whitman’s casual open-collared workman’s dress, or  punk safety-pin in the ear.  I recall observing at the first live poetry readings I attended that the greatest audience response was regularly generated by transgressive lines, either sexually explicit, politically revolutionary, or aesthetically outré.  Fifty years later, at one of my own Poetry on the Loose events, an artist displayed his naked rear as part of his performance.  The gesture was meant to offend, a direct descendant of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, though in Jarry’s time the opening word was sufficient to cause the play to be banned.

     An ambience similar to such live venues may be constructed from the content of journals as well.  Hemingway published many of his poems in “little magazines” which cultivated the creation of a community of those critical of the majority culture such as Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review and Der Querschnitt, founded by Alfred Flechtheim and later edited by Hans von Wedderkop.

     The very name of The Little Review highlights its dissent from social norms.  The first issue proclaims the journal’s intention to pursue “that untrammeled liberty which is the life of Art.”  In case any reader should mistake the editor’s intentions, she later included the slogan “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste” beneath the title. [3]  She serialized Joyce’s Ulysses, losing a censorship trial over the excerpts. [4]  The poet whose work appeared in The Little Review most often was the outrageous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven whose work was often highly sexual as well as seeming to some incoherent.  In its pages frequent contributor Emma Goldman advocated not only anarchism but sexual freedom as well.

     Though European and focused centrally on visual art with oblique and satiric references to politics, Der Querschnitt also insisted on its radical loyalties, publicizing innovative artists such as Klee, Chagall, and Max Ernst whose “Dada est mort, vive dada!” appeared in January of 1921.  The editors included coverage of boxing tournaments as well as of the most significant developments in art.  Its tone is suggested by the claim in its subscription promotion in 1923 that the journal had correspondents in “the great centers of Europe and America and among Negroes and Eskimos.”  It published as poetry Salvation Army songs and the “the war cry of the famous All Blacks', the Maori hakka, of New Zealand’s Rugby team” in the same issue with a song about Jesse James from Harry Archer’s musical revue. [5]

     Hemingway’s poetic contributions to these journals were in many ways discontinuous from his fiction, but most exhibit the characteristics of bohemian art: transgressive material: sexual, political, religious, and aesthetic, suggesting a general bent toward the Dionysiac in preference to the Apollonian in spite of a certain cynicism, and an insider hipness implying a coterie with privileged insight.  While the poem’s editor Nicholas Gerogiannis says that “the poems reveal Hemingway himself rather than a fictional counterpart” [6], their persona is in fact less the author as an individual than a projection of the generic bohemian artist.  The significance of the poetry’s outlaw pose is evident in the title of the earliest collection of his poetry, The Suppressed Poems of Ernest Hemingway. [7]

     The same emphasis is sounded when Hemingway refers to his poems in Querschnitt as “dirty,” writing to John Dos Passos “the ‘Schnitt also publishing a book of my dirty poems . . . Have you got any dirty poems you want me to sign? Jeeze I wish you were here to write a few good prurient poems for me because that is now my only source of income.” [8]  His off-hand attitude distinguishes these poems from the center of his serious literary work.  After this claim that the poems are merely a source of income and asking Dos Passos to contribute, he jocularly implies that his wife Hadley was the author of some of them. 

     In spite of this off-handed attitude, Hemingway thought enough of many of his poems to retain them, revise them, and to publish a good many during his life.  Still, they have found few admirers (though Wallace Stevens was one), particularly in contrast to his enormous popular success and substantial critical reputation toward the end of his life.  Many are occasional and seem very casual, tossed off while doing his more significant work.  Others are written for those in his personal circle, including allusions meaningless to the general public.  A good share are satirical or otherwise humorous, even whimsical.  Perhaps the most pervasive attitude they project is a devil-may-care, insouciant bohemianism, reflecting transgressive attitudes in a cheeky rebellion more willing to sound flippant than grave. 

     The simplest device to indicate transgressive counter-cultural attitudes is the use of vulgar language.  Taboos which have since diminished were through Hemingway’s life strict enough that his use of obscene, scatological, and racist language was still shocking.  Now that politicians and celebrities routinely use formerly tabooed expressions, it is difficult to realize the offense originally caused by words such as “cunts,” (“Sequel”).  He managed to include “shit,” “fuck,” and cocksuckers,” all in a single poem, “The Defense of Luxembourg.”  Whereas other writers pushing the boundaries of censorship were quite serious about their themes – D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and even, I would include, Henry Miller, Hemingway seems to indulge in what looks like juvenile play.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” everything is “the shit” and his style is half Gertrude Stein and half restroom graffiti: “Home is where the art is, home is where the fart is,/ let us fart and artless fart in  the home.”  In “The Road to Avallon” he makes, perhaps, a bit more sense.

 

Dogs must shit as well as men
            I like dogs better
           Say: Amen

 

     He likewise engages in ethnic jibes, referring, for instance, to “wops” in “d’Annunzio,”  “nigger” in “The Road to Avallon,” and making thoughtless remarks about Jews in “[The rail ends do not meet . . .].”  Worse, he ridicules Dorothy Parker’s suicide attempts in “To a Tragic Poetess” and Scott Fitzgerald’s chronic depression in “Lines to be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritime).”  (He spoke of his own depression in “Black-Ass Poem After Talking to Pamela Churchill” with greater gravitas, a somber tone, and old-fashioned prosody.)   

     He repeatedly implies a free attitude toward sexual relations, joking about gonorrhea in “Oklahoma,” and declaring “FOR THE HARLOT HAS A HARDLOT.”  When he announces an intention to aim at monogamy since he is “in love,” he sounds still ecstatic.

 

I’m off’n wild wimmen

An Cognac

An Sinnin’

For I’m in loOOOOOOOve.

 

     The ethnocentrism implied by his use of racial epithets does not extend to conventional patriotism.  In the poems concerning war, a deep cynicism prevails.  In “To Good Guys Dead” he says, “they sucked us in.”  His “Riparto d’Assalto” is almost reminiscent of Wilfred Owen, apart from its more casual structure and image of “a “warm and soft and sleepy whore.”

 

Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride --

To splintered pines on the Grappa side

At Asalone, where the truck-load died.

 

A similar attitude is evident in “Champs d’Honneur” which notes “Soldiers never do die well” and proceeds then to specifics.

 

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch

     All the world roars red and black,

Soldiers smother in a ditch;

     Choking through the whole attack. 

 

Never nationalistic, his poems about war insist on drunkenness and death as in “To Chink Whose Trade is Soldiering,” and “[Some day when you are picked up . . .]”. 

     The seriousness of what might seem political poems in part do not survive the general tone.  One poem, “[In a Magazine . . .]”, which describes police brutality, mingles that theme with belligerence toward the “Hun,” though the persona notes that he prefers his adversaries “unarmed.”   A poem dedicated “To Will Davies” (poet and “Super-tramp” William Henry Davies) seems to address an unequal justice system, capital punishment, and racism, but concludes with a distracting throwaway jocular reference to performer Bert Williams.  His observations on America often go no deeper than playful fancy, as when he says “They read the Saturday Evening Post./ And believe in Santa Claus.” and “they wear B. V. D.’s all the year round” in “I Like Americans by a foreigner.”

     Hemingway also defines his counter-cultural pose with irreligious remarks.  In “Chapter Heading” he says he “has danced to devils’ tunes” before “shivering home to pray,” thus serving “one master in the night,/ Another in the day.”  The church is for him an occasion for a joke.  In “[God is away for the summer . . .]” he whimsically comments that the minister’s summer vacation has caused to absence of the divine, and his “Neothomist Poem” includes a line-break pause worthy of a stand-up comedian: “The Lord is my shelter, I shall not/ want him for long.”  He later glossed the bit by saying it described “the temporary embracing of the church by literary gents.” [10]

     While making a show of spurning conventional proprieties in language, religion, patriotism, sexuality, and even, on occasion, human sympathy, he adopted avant-garde rhetoric, closely imitating Gertrude Stein whose work was ridiculed by many, though the criticism only increased her celebrity.  In a comment on his description of the Lausanne Peace Conference published as “They All Made Peace – What is Peace?” in The Little Review, he called Stein’s style “invaluable for analysing anything” yet referred to his own poem as “a joke.” [11]  In spite of this claim to levity, how own mature prose style uses repetitions and simple language doubtless linked to her influence.  In “The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers” he imitates Stein, though sounding careless and flippant while she often seemed measured and quite serious.

 

Home is where the art is,

home is where the fart is,

let us fart and artless fart in the home.

 

Stein’s importance is all the more impressive since Hemingway’s sexism led him to discount other “poetesses” in “The Lady Poets With Footnotes” which dismisses the leading female poets of the day. 

    It may be that Stein’s position as doyenne of the avant-garde attracted Hemingway at least as much as her specific model.  His poems include a number of friendly references to Ezra Pound though his fiction owes nothing whatever to the older poet.  In “The Soul of Spain . . .” published in Querschnitt he claims that “We have done a monument to Ezra,” in “The Age Demanded” he tropes on “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” and in “Kipling” and “[I think that I have never trod . . .]” he includes Provençal envois as a gesture toward Pound. 

     As the role of Pound suggests, what Hemingway valued was in part the coterie character of the literary set with its “hip” insider references.  He considered the smallness of the small magazines that published his work as evidence of their integrity, and he defended those in which he appeared against their rivals.  When Pound was trying to convince Robert McAlmon of the Dial to publish Eliot’s “The Wasteland” he also submitted Hemingway’s “Killed Piave – July 8 – 1918,” the rejection of which generated made Hemingway an enemy of the journal.

     The bohemian attitude led him in any event to discount critics in general, particularly what he perceived as establishment critics whom he attacked not with an aesthetic defense, but by impugning their virility.  Thus, Edmund Wilson’s 1930 introduction to In Our Time elicited his observation in “[Little Mr. Wilson . . .]” that in Wilson’s “pedantic” novel I Thought of Daisy “no one liked to screw,” and a general complaint about “All the ball-less critics/ all their cuntless wives.”  Contrasting the vigorous creative type with the effete intellectual, he insists in “Poem” that his life experience has given him something “that cannot be taken from us by an article/ or abolished by a critical agreement of professors.”  

 

We’ll write books.

They will not read them

but their children may

if they have children

 

In “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]’’ he wrote, “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”

     Hemingway’s attitude in these poems is not only anti-academic, it is flippant.  The irreverence and willful immaturity of many of his lines justify the use of the term “smart-alecky.”  Consider, for instance, this excerpt from “[Little drops of grain alcohol . . .]”: “Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses/ better to see to kiss the critics’ asses.”  Or this from “[And everything the author knows . . . ].”

 

And everything the author knows

He shows and shows and shows and shows

his underclothes

are more important than the sum.

 

Or, in “Part Two of The Soul of Spain . . .”, “The wind blows and it does not snows look at the bull with his bloody nose.”  

     His “Valentine” with the line “stick them up your asses, lads” was published in the final number of The Little Review for which Margaret Anderson, in a gambit to overtop avant-gardism itself, had specifically asked for manuscripts which were not literature.  Yet some of his poems are far less bohemian.  Those addressed to his wife Mary, for instance, sound almost sincere: “First Poem to Mary in London,“ “Poem to Mary (Second Poem),” “Poem to Miss Mary, and “Travel Poem.”  Several if the war poems such as Captives” are similarly straightforward as is his lighter bit “To Crazy Christian” about his cat.  Some poems -- “Flat Roofs” and “Bird of Night” -- come to mind) are unironic Imagism.  “On Weddynge Gyftes” is a piece of journalistic entertainment.

     Nonetheless, the bent of his 88 Poems is predominately bohemian.  The poems are significant in establishing an adversarial relation to the received ideas of his day by mocking patriotism, religion, sexual morality, and the traditional standards for art.  He practiced rigorous rewriting for his fiction; he said he had rewritten the ending to Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times [12] and pronounced that “the only writing is rewriting” [13] most often approached his poetry in a casual fashion, because that off-handedness was a central part of his poems’ significance.  He found in bohemia a subculture that would support his artistic ambitions and he established his credibility within it by rebelling against social norms of every sort.  The themes that dominated his major fiction are largely suppressed, though both combat and bullfighting are themes of the poetry.  The primary meaning, though, was to present his bona fides for membership in the artistic bohemia of his age, reinforcing the gap between writers and the general public and fostering an attitude of hipness, implying the superiority of their subcultural view.     

      

 

    

1.  Popularized by Henri Murger's stories Scènes de la vie de bohème (1845), the term is first used in English in chapter 65 of Thackery’s Vanity Fair which appeared in Punch in July 1848. 

 

2.  Often attributed to Baudelaire, the term and very similar expressions were used by a number of writers including in 1854 by Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny in Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique (p. 85), in 1855 by Privat d’Anglemont (in the form “Je les ai épatés, les bourgeois”) in Paris Anecdote (1855) p. 282), and in 1860 by Alexandre Dumas (père) in Le père la ruine, p. 186.

3.  The line first appears in October of 1917. 

 

4.  Ten years later, Random House invited another prosecution by importing the book.  Though the case had to be pursued to the Supreme Court, it was decided in the most significant censorship litigation for a generation to be publishable, Judge Woolsey drily commenting “nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

 

5.  Volume V, no. 4.

 

6.  Introduction, 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, xi.

 

7.  Published in 1929 Paris by The Library of Living Poetry.  It is undoubtedly the implication of naughtiness in the title that caused this collection to be pirated in the fifties and again in the seventies.

 

8.  Letter of 22 April, 1925 in Selected Letters ed. Carlos Baker (p. 158).

 

9.  In Nicholas Gerogiannis’ edition of Hemingway’s complete poems, 88 Poems, those which are untitled are identified by the opening words followed by an ellipsis and enclosed in brackets.

 

10.  Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Homecoming, note 50, p. 234.

 

11.  See 88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, 141.  This poem was nonetheless admired by Louis Zukovsky who included it in his “Program: Objectivist 1931” manifesto as a model worthy of imitation. 

 

12.  George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway” quoted William A. Glasser, “A Farewell to Arms,” The Sewanee Review Vol. 74, No. 2 (Spring, 1966).

 

13. “Art of Fiction No. 21,” the Paris Review, issue 18, 1958.

 

Another Look at Vachel Lindsay

 

     Once upon a time, when I was too old for nursery rhymes and young yet for T. S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay was one of my favorite poets.  Along with works like Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” Byron’s "The Destruction of Sennacherib," and the works of Edgar Allan Poe (my favorite was “Ulalume”), I relished Lindsay’s strident rhythms.  Alone, I would read aloud “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” or “The Congo” for the sake of sound, hardly noticing themes.  By high school I had abandoned him in favor of the High Modernists of his era, reproducing the evolution of taste that led to the diminution of Lindsay’s reputation in the ‘twenties.  Lindsay’s pounding cadences which had seemed innovative, even avant-garde, seemed suddenly vulgar, and his work was discounted and then ignored.  Renewed interest was nearly always defensive. 

     Attempts to rehabilitate him could sound almost apologetic.  One friendly critic argued for a “redefinition” of Lindsay’s significance taking into account the total body of his work, “even if such a survey decided that no reassessment of Lindsay’s literary merit was justified.” [1]  Another, recognizing that his literary reputation was “dead,” asks  “might he be taken as in any sense now a serious poet?” [2]  Because “Lindsay is not seen much these days,” vanished from anthologies and textbooks, a scholar must remind readers that he “was once considered a giant of ‘The New Poetry,’ one of the handful of major poets in the second or third decades of this century who seemed capable of shaping the American idiom in verse for the modern age.” [3]  Yet another concedes, while making a plea for portions of his work, that he was himself “largely responsible for the decline in his reputation,” since his “critical judgement” was “deficient,” resulting in the fact that “none of his books is free of shoddy.” Not to mention the “slovenly proofreading.”  [4]

    Yet when new his work had been greeted in The Little Review as “perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color,” and Lindsay was proposed to be “the next great American poet.”  To this critic the obstacle to Lindsay’s recognition was not his playing to the masses, but, on the contrary, his advanced technique.  “Like every artist who creates a new form,” she observed, he must “educate his public.” [5] In 1920 future British poet laureate John Masefield called him “the best American poet.” [6]

     The respect the poet received from critics was more than matched by popular acclaim.  Whereas he had tramped across the country in 1906 and 1912, he now sold out large halls before paying audiences.  A literary historian notes that “during the early 1920’s Vachel Lindsay was undoubtedly the most widely known and popular of contemporary American poets.” [7]  He himself was uneasy with aspects of his celebrity.  Having coined the term “the Higher Vaudeville” to describe his more sensationally bombastic pieces, he was then chagrined to find that his audience knew nothing of his other work.  Referring to bookings at intellectual centers such as universities, he noted that he had been “frosted in Boston and hissed at Bryn Mawr” [8] and observed that “most schools do not want me but once.” [9]  He complained that he did not wish to be “the ‘Casey At-The-Bat’ of American poetry.” [10]

     Though Lindsay was well aware of the tensions between popular art and high art, he felt he could lure the less refined masses into enlightenment and progress by convincing them it was all a lark.  He thus cultivated “a sort of rag-time manner that deceives them into thinking they are at the vaudeville.” [11]  Since he considered that he was slipping art to his readers or listeners without their quite knowing that it is good for them, he sometimes called the Higher Vaudeville the Higher Irony. [12]  In this way he differed from proletarian authors like the Wobblies’ T-Bone Slim (Matti Valentin Huhta) or the Communists’ Mike Gold who considered their own aesthetics to be those of the masses.

     Lindsay for his part rejected other innovators of his own time.  He dismissed imagism as an “Aesthetic Aristocracy singing on an island to one another while the people perish.” [13]  For him cubism in painting was a trend that would rapidly be forgotten. [14]   Though he was called “the jazz poet,” he had no taste for jazz which he, as an opponent of alcohol, associated with drink.  He wrote at a time when the split between popular art and high art was becoming ever greater and commodified mass culture was replacing traditional folk culture.  Many artists, the Symbolists and the High Modernists in poetry as well as Dadaists and Surrealists, reacted defensively, producing defiantly unpopular work, sometimes intentionally obscurantist, while Lindsay went out of his way to use demotic idiom..

     Lindsay’s “Gospel of Beauty” was entirely bound up with his concepts of reforming American culture.  A devotee of what he called “the new localism,” his “Gospel of Beauty” was one not only with “the love of the hearth and the Village.” but also with “the love of God.”  Eschewing “art for art’s sake,” for him a “theory of aesthetics” and a “theory of the new Localism” were portions of the same system. [15]  Beneath his artistic practice lay a vision of social justice, and beneath that a vaguely Swedenborgian mysticism of his own invention.  Even his apparently political “Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket” concludes with a wholly spiritual motive.

 

Come, let us vote against our human nature,

Crying to God in all the polling places

To heal our everlasting sinfulness

And make us sages with transfigured faces.

 

In this way he advances in the twentieth century Whitman’s vision of a spiritual democracy by using language to uplift, unite, and enlighten his fellow countrymen.

     His work is problematic in the first place because his search for a popular idiom was driven less by his innate verbal genius as by his ambition to have an effect on society, to advance his program to bring America around to a mystical socialism more exotic than the existing American varieties, among them the Christian socialism of Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance (and brother of Edward Bellamy, whose Looking Backward inspired the Nationalist Clubs); the populist partisanship of Julius Wayland’s Appeal to Reason (published in Girard Kansas), and the perennial socialist campaigning of Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas.  Even these trends, more palatable to some Americans than the I. W. W. with its heavy immigrant membership and willingness to sanction violence, however, were extirpated with the vigorous suppression of all shades of anti-capitalist activity.  Lindsay’s visions had by the mid-twentieth century, long seemed obsolete.

     Whatever assessment one may make of the aesthetic value of Lindsay’s oeuvre, he has an undeniable place in several sub-narratives of American literature.  In both performance poetry and in Tendenzdichtung his place is secure next to Carl Sandburg, another once-celebrated poet now neglected for being accessible even to ill-educated readers.   His unique style of recitation, chanting and singing, stretching and compressing words, is fortunately preserved in recordings made during the last of the eighteen years he toured the country.  [16] 

     Lindsay did write a good deal apart from his declamatory poems.  He composed a number of quieter lyrics in conventional forms meant to be read in calmer fashion.  The contemplative “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” doubtless due to its theme, was highly popular despite being quieter than his poem to “John Brown.”  Lyrics like “On the Garden Wall” and “Shakespeare” which lack Lindsay’s fiery energy, are palpably second-rate.  “The City of Glass” is pretty in the manner of a Maxfield Parrish print.  “Buddha,” while otherwise unremarkable, may engage the reader’s attention through its topic.

     In addition to his poetry, Lindsay produced prose pieces detailing his “Gospel of Beauty” and his wanderings on the open road, a treatment of the art of cinema, short stories, a novel too strange for most readers, visual art and photography, all neglected today. 

     His book on movies The Art of the Moving Picture first came out in 1915.  Its date alone makes it a groundbreaking work, and Lindsay was a serious filmgoer.  Every page of his study is filled with specific examples of stories, sequences, and actors to illustrate his points, in spite of the fact that feature length films were still in their infancy.  His respect for popular entertainment anticipates Gilbert Seldes’ study The Seven Lively Arts which productively treats comic strips, vaudeville, circuses, and other popular entertainments as art.  His larger schemes such as the division of films into those focusing on action, intimacy, or splendor may no longer seem useful, though at least it does foreground the visual character of the medium, but many of his comments are insightful.  His book is replete with clever and provocative observations such as his comparison of Mary Pickford with a figure in Botticelli. [17]

     Lindsay had considered his novel The Golden Book of Springfield likely to prove the chef d’oeuvre of his career.  He said shortly before its release “I am making it the one thought of my life, and hope when it is done, it will be the one book of my life.”  Buoyed by optimism about his visionary project, he said “I feel younger, and may sail to the end of the world, yet!” [18] yet a short time later he noted sadly of The Golden Book “I am afraid it is a failure.” [19]  The book indeed proved to be a popular and critical failure, by some accounts the starting point of the depression that led to his suicide.  It has found few readers since and has been pronounced unreadable by some who approached it.  It is utopian and yet dystopian, socialist yet individualist, realistic and fantastic.  In the rapid changes from 1918 to 2018, from “prognostication” to future incarnations, never knowing when the book itself will come flying through the air, it is little wonder that many find Lindsay’s most ambitious project a dizzying mess.

     Even Lindsay’s more sympathetic critics have regularly qualified their praise until it nearly vanishes.  Even during his heyday, when Time magazine saluted him as “a true poet,” its critic added that, “a great deal of his work will probably last much longer than some of our elaborately sophisticated cognoscenti believe.” [20]  The scholarly consensus since has been cooler yet.  Virtually every mildly positive comment on him sounds defensive, apologetic, hedged about with qualifications.  One if his most acute defenders focuses quite rightly on Lindsay’s his role as a reformer, moralist, and shaper of a new American culture rather noting a specifically artistic legacy.  ““Perhaps we can again value his vision of America, the words, rhythms, and experiences of the many, sung or sounded with imagination and authenticity.”  When read aloud, Lindsay might still afford a a glimpse of “Lindsay’s vision of America . . . a rich, troubling, musical, and fantastic view of our culture. [21]

     This praise follows Lindsay’s own preference for a social rather than aesthetic role.  Anticipating the publication of The Golden Book of Springfield he wrote “I hardly see myself as a poet any more. I see myself as a kind of a forecaster and maker of dreams in Springfield.” The goal of leading his fellow-citizens to a more enlightened way of life had always underlain his work; the Higher Vaudeville gave him a huge audience and with it an income for a time, but he recognized as well as the critics the limits of such work.  Like a good deal of spoken word today, orally performed poems are generally free of contradictions, mysteries, and ambiguities; they are typically simple enough to be digested at first hearing.  The dramatic spectacle of recitation does not survive the occasion, however exciting the live show may have been. 

     In the end another look at Vachel Lindsay may only remind readers of the twenty-first century that more than one lineage may be accommodated in literary history.  The coexistence of a variety of genres can only enrich American literature.  Vachel Lindsay’s bombastic performance pieces are, in their own way, beautiful and significant as are the blues lyrics of Robert Johnson, toasts like “the Signifying Monkey,” the Wobbly songs of Ralph Chaplin, Baxter Black’s cowboy poetry, and raps by Tupac Shakur.  Lindsay’s intention to push toward a new vision of America is fundamentally a spiritual and a social program, best measured against fellow American dreamers from the nineteenth century Owenites and Fourierists, through Bellamy’s Looking Backward, to the Haight-Ashbury communalists of the ‘sixties and beyond.  He is worth remembering if only for having made Johnny Appleseed an American saint.

 

1.  Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

2.  Edwin H. Cady, “Vachel Lindsay Across the Chasm” in Indiana University Bookman 5 (1960).

3.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24.  Note the article’s title.

4.  Albert Edmund Trombly, “Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel Lindsay” in the Southwest Review Vol. 47, No. 4 (autumn 1962), pp. 294-302.

5. “Eunice Tietjens’ review of The Congo and Other Poems in The Little Review April 1914 (I,4).

6.  The English and American Muse,” The Bookman, Volume 57 (February 1920).

7.  Trombly’s article (cited in note 5).

8.  Handwritten 1919 marginal note on Lindsay’s copy of “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence.”  Repeated in a July 20, 1919 letter to Sara Teasdale.

9.  April 21, 1919 letter to A. J. Armstrong,

10.  June 16, 1927 letter to Frederic Melcher, quoted in the Vachel Lindsay number of the Indiana University Bookman, no. 5, December 1960, p. 41. 

11.  Letter of Vachel Lindsay to Jessie B. Rittenhouse, quoted in Jessie B. Rittenhouse My House of Life, p. 316. 

12.  See Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

13.  “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence” p. 6.

14.  The Golden Book of Springfield, p. 13.

15.  Letter to Witter Bynner April 6, 1912.

16.   A rich selection of Lindsay’s performances is available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lindsay.php. 

17.  On p.28

18.  Both phrases are in a May 30, 1919, letter to Sara Teasdale.

19.  December 7, 1920 letter to Sara Teasdale.

20.  In a review of Lindsay’s Collected Poems, July 09, 1923.

21.  John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24. 

Notes on Recent Reading 46 (Kleist, Didion, Soupault)

The Prince of Homburg (Kleist)

     To me the most striking thing about this play is not the prominence of an extreme military code of discipline not irrelevant to the author’s family, for centuries prominent in the Prussian army.  The Prince wins a great victory, but, due to his love-dreaminess, violates orders.  For this he is condemned to die.  In the end the Elector pardons him buts finds him (temporarily) too scrupulous to accept this mercy.  We may be reminded of a samurai story, though for Kleist the whole tension is, I suppose, between heart and mind.  Among the numerous complications even this thread of the plot engenders are the questions of whether the Elector had been sincere (he certainly seemed to be) when threatening the firing squad and what role the unanimous petition from other soldiers may have had.  The most dramatic and radical questions arise with the final words of the play in which the Prince, who had been subjected to a mock execution, asks if he is dreaming and Kottwitz replies “Ein Traum, was sonst," causing the protagonist to fall into unconsciousness again. 

     Perhaps the most emotionally powerful portion of the play is the pathetic passage in which the noble and courageous warrior is reduced by fear of death to abject begging. 

     The play has been justly compared to Shakespeare’s late romances for its hovering between comedy and tragedy and its magical resolution. 

 

 

 

A Book of Common Prayer (Didion)

     In Joan Didion’s reports from Central America in the New York Review of Books, later the basis for her 1983 book Salvador, the revolutionary crisis was unforgettably described.  There can be little doubt that her fierce images and ideological restraint informed the opinion of at least the American intelligentsia.  Before the violence, supported always by a pernicious US influence, became so widespread, she had depicted a fictional banana republic in her 1977 novel, set in a Boca Grande that is strikingly reminiscent of O. Henry’s Anchuria in Cabbages and Kings.   The utter and complete corruption, the domination by wealth and guns, the oligarchy that always governs in spite of democratic and left-wing charades, are historically accurate and unfortunately remain the norm in Central America.  Even when revolutionaries came to power they turned into the tyrants their younger selves had despised. 

     That society, though, is purely the setting, establishing the tone of cynical self-absorption that is normal in Boca Grande, within which the drifting Americans, in particular the distrait Charlotte Douglas, pass their time.  The narrator Grace Strasser-Mendana, who, like everyone else, has no political values, is practically the only realistic dependable observer, her accuracy buttressed by her scientific training.  Yet in the last line she reflects, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

     Marin comes across with very little personality, hardly even a true believer, so dulled she is in defensive insouciance.  She seems purely a reflection of the then-current news of the Symbionese Liberation Army (though the originals were more touching and true and finally tragic).  I would have thought that there might have been room for a few manifestations of idealism or nobility from the Boca Grande guerilleros as well.  Ah well, once again, history has vindicated cynicism.

     For me the best passages were those in which the characters tossed aggressive verbal barbs amongst themselves, getting nowhere at all.  At times they sounded almost like Ronald Firbank characters.  Good fun there.

 

 

 

Lost Profiles (Soupault)

     The subtitle of this slim 1963 volume, “Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism,” is better justified than the title itself.  The old avant-garde has been canonized and what had once been rebellious groupings apart from the prior artistic power structure have now becomes standard art history.  Which is not to say boring.  Here one may find reminiscences of Breton, Crevel, and Reverdy from a central figure in Paris Dada and a co-founder of Surrealism (though he was expelled for refusing to join the Communist Party).  He conveys the ambience of the early twentieth century counterculture, emphasizing rebellion and the role of scandal.  Those who came of age in the sixties might find his account of the scenes of his youth particularly engaging. 

     He records portraits of Apollinaire, Henri Rousseau, and some less likely figures such as Proust and Joyce as well as an appreciative piece on Baudelaire.

     This edition was translated by Alan Bernheimer with a pleasant afterword by Ron Padgett and published by City Lights.

 

 

The Charm of the Underdetermined in “Maiden in the Mor Lay”

Though glossed versions are readily available, I have appended the text of "Maiden in the Mor Lay." 

     If medieval English poetry had a hit parade, “Maiden in the mor lay” would be near the top.  Since it was first published in 1907 this mysterious poem has enjoyed great popularity and has been frequently reprinted and anthologized. [1]  It survived, as is often the case with such lyrics, by merest chance.  The poem was recorded in a manuscript containing miscellaneous works on a single rectangular vellum page glued into the flyleaf of a codex, one of twelve poems or fragments called the Rawlinson lyrics.  The exact number is uncertain because some verses are apparently first lines only, meant perhaps like a title to remind the reader of a song, or written in written in compressed style to save space.  Among these poems, recorded most likely by whimsical chance, is one of the most well-known and controversial of medieval English lyrics “Maiden in the mor lay.”  The poem’s obscurity, mentioned by virtually all commentators, has not limited its popularity; it is surely one of the most well-known lyrics of its time, and its interpretation has generated a considerable literature.

     The diversity of critical opinion indicates the poem’s beguiling underdetermination.   Often with substantial reason, the “maiden” has been identified with the Virgin Mary, with Mary Magdalene, with a human lover, a deity or water spirit, and ultimately with the Great Mother. [1]  The more polemical researchers claim an exclusive validity for a single interpretation, ignoring the characteristically poetic quality of polysemy.  My own favorite among the range of learned speculations is Peter Dronke’s which combines pre-Christian animism, the maiden a sort of “water-sprite,” and convincingly suggests that the verses were accompanied by a performative routine involving dance and mime.

     My receptivity to Dronke’s reading is primarily determined by my impression of the text and not by research, though it seems plausible.  Though spirits of the type called “nixies” were more common in Continental Germanic territories, pagan festivals were known to be centered at the sites of English wells. [3]  The poem itself, though, must be the most persuasive evidence.  The maiden is unquestionably supernatural.  Her enigmatic passivity and ethereal diet indicate her otherworldly character -- her simple being is represented as portentous.  She need take no action. 

     The question and answer form resembles a catechism as well as indicating the popular origin of the poem.  The speaker is inquiring into a mystery the bottom which may never be seen.  Yet it is unlikely to be the Christian myth operating here.  The Rawlinson lyrics written on the same page seem all to have been secular and this particular one was included in the Bishop of Ossory’s list of “lewd” songs whose lyrics he proposed replacing with more pious Latin verses of his own invention. [4]  Though images such as the rose and the lily certainly have Christian associations, no definitely Christian references or symbols appear in “Maiden in the mor lay.” 

     The mythic figure at the center of the poem is sufficiently underdetermined, in fact, that further details of the situation are unrecoverable.  The maiden is not described, as most romantic love-objects are, in terms of her beauty, nor is she said to be perfect or immaculate as Mary often is.  The reader is left with only a mystery, but it is one many find beguiling.  The cryptic woman at the well carries simultaneous associations woth a number of pre-Christian and Christian figures while never being wholly identified with any.  At the same time she represents far broader semantic territory: the other, the female, the uncontrollable, the marvelous.  In fact, a significant amount of the poem’s original appeal may have been its affording a visionary glimpse, an amazing sight enjoyable because so extraordinary.  If the experience is in part a theophany, it is also akin to the pleasure of a 1950s filmgoer watching aliens in a science fiction movie or a visitor to the curiosities of a carnival side-show. 

     In fact because of the minimal information the poem offers and its continued questioning signaling that the scene is enigmatic even to its narrator, the repetitions and the hypnotic rhymes make all the greater an impression.  The reader or listener is placed in the position of an initiate only part way through the ritual, moved more by wonder than understanding.  Information is lacking, just as it is in life.

     While the complex of woman, water, and welcome vegetation links these late medieval lines to the earth mother goddesses of the Neolithic Age, [5] the passage of time does not merely cause the initial significance to fade, instead, it becomes crowded with new and ever-richer connotations.  The field of meaning grows complex indeed, and its silences and absences can influence reception as much as its explicit content.  The scholarly intention to establish a unitary reading flows contrary to the artistic construction of a web of partial insight in which suggestivity matters more than any conclusion.  If such a problematic vision is then couched in melodious form, rhythmic and rhyming, and performed by skilled professionals to delight an idle hour, it reflects what is perhaps the deepest insight available to mortals.  When presented in an artful and diverting form, it accomplishes thereby the ends of art.  Exhaustive interpretation could only impoverish this song.

 

 

 

1.  Appearing first edited by Wilhelm Heuser in Anglia, the poem’s exposure grew immensely when it was included in Kenneth Sisam’s 1921 anthology Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose and in many anthologies and textbooks since.

2.   D. W.  Robertson in “Historical Criticism,” (English Institute Essays 1950, ed. A. S. Downer, 3-31) used the poem as an example of the value of “patristic exegesis” which emphasizes the importance of traditional Christian symbology in medieval literature.  E. Talbot Donaldson (in Speaking of Chaucer, 150-152) criticizes Robertson ‘s “patristic” reading, suggesting a more naturalistic interpretation.  E. M. W. Tillyard preferred to see her as Mary Magdalene, or alternatively as Mary of Egypt (The Secular Lyric in Middle English, 159) and Joseph C. Harris seconded the view in “'Maiden in the mor lay' and the medieval Magdalene tradition,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971): 59-87.  Associations with pagan practices, such as “sacred dances of the ancient nature tradition,” are emphasized by John Speirs in Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (62-64) and by Peter Dronke in The Medieval Lyric, 195-196 and R. A. Waldron, Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature, 226.

3.  See, for instance, Charles Read Baskervill, “Dramatic Aspects of Medieval Folk Festivals in England,”  Studies in Philology , Jan., 1920, Vol. 17, No. 1, 19-87.  Baskervill cites a monastic fifteenth century source that draws on earlier descriptions of celebrations for St. John's Eve at which “it was customary to feast and drink, to engage in dancing and in base ludi conducive to lechery, to build bonfires, to carry torches through the fields, and to roll flaming wheels down the hill.”  According to Baskervill “Well worship” “played an important part in Anglo-Saxon worship.”  He mentions as well church condemnation of quasi-pagan gatherings held “on the moor” in Durham. (68-69)

4.  See Richard L. Greene, “’The Maid of the Moor' in the Red Book of Ossory,” Speculum Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1952), 504-506.

5.  The literature includes the groundbreaking Mother Right (Mutterrecht) by Johann Jakob Bachofen, the Jungian Erich Neumann’s Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Die große Mutter. Der Archetyp des grossen Weiblichen) and Marija Gimbutas’ works.

 

In the mor lay,
Sevenyst fulle
Sevenist fulle.
Maiden in the mor lay,
In the mor lay,
Sevenistes fulle ant a day.
 
Welle was hire mete:
Wat was hire mete?
The primerole ant the,
The primerole ant the,
Welle was hire mete:
Wat was hire mete?
The primerole ant the violet.
 
Welle was hire dryng:
Wat was hire dryng?
The chelde water of the,
The chelde water of the,
Welle was hire dryng:
What was hire dryng?
The chelde water of the welle spring.
 
Welle was hire bour:
Wat was hire bour?
The red rose an te,
The red rose an te,
Welle was hire bour:
Wat was hire bour?
The rede rose an te lilie flour.

A Survey of Early Christian Heresies

 

I approach this topic neither as an ecclesiastical historian nor as a theologian, but as a literary critic.  Whether a given human belief is objectively “true,” it is always meaningful as an image, a symbol, a shadowing forth of character and desire.  In the ferment of the early centuries of Christianity, as the new belief supplanted ancient practices, a range of opinion blossomed, fascinating both as speculation and as spectacle.  In the mere listing of the names of heretical schools I find an incantatory power.  A romance, too, lingers about the ghosts of a thousand lost causes.  May this minimal survey summon a whiff of such old and wandering spirits momentarily reanimated, perhaps, by the reader’s sympathetic mind!

 

      Theological essays find few readers today even among believers.  The issues that once aroused fierce passions, energetic contentions, and, at times, persecution and war, seem to make little difference in the contemporary world.  As increasing numbers abandon organized religion altogether, the differences among sects or even belief systems seem less significant than what they share.  An expanded sense of “many mansions” informs the more liberal even among many whose creeds demand exclusivity.  The details of belief that once meant everything now seem all but inconsequential.

     In the Christian church’s early centuries, before the great councils that formed an orthodoxy of settled dogma, great ferment surrounded theological issues.  The word heresy is derived from αἵρεσις, meaning “choice” or “thing chosen,” originally with no anathema attached.  In the beginning before the enforcement of uniformity in the Christian community there was a broad spectrum of views from which to select that most fitting to the devotee’s spiritual needs,  Due to relentless persecution by those espousing majority views, most of the writing by these early heretics have vanished and their views can only be reconstructed with the aid of the hostile arguments of their opponents, most significantly Irenaeus in the second century and Epiphanius two hundred years later. 

     Amid the confusing proliferation of beliefs during this period, several common areas of controversy emerged.  Gnostics at first questioned the authority of the god of the Hebrew scriptures.  The everlasting punishments of hell remained a minority opinion for centuries.  For half a millennium and more clerics debated the enigmatic concept of the Trinity and, in particular, the exact nature of Christ.

    Most dramatically transgressing the orthodoxy that eventually coalesced were the sects labeled Gnostic.  Some were associated with Judaism, some with Christianity, and some with paganism, yet the common name may be justified by certain characteristics.  In the gnostic view, more dualistic than Christianity, the material world is inherently sinful, the creation not of the Supreme Being but of a demiurge.   The devotee’s goal is enlightenment and passions are considered obstacles to knowledge rather than sins.  Neoplatonism contributed substantially to gnostic cosmologies and the movement tended to veer (like Tibetan Buddhism) toward the esoteric and the mystical, including the construction of layers of mystical beings between humanity and the true god.

     Among the gnostic peculiarities was a particular interest in Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, who was regarded as a forerunner of Christ and was made a model of wisdom and a culture hero, responsible, according to Josephus, for many inventions and discoveries.  The gnostics were prone to the elaboration of complex cosmological schemes unsupported by Hebrew scripture.  In the Apocryphon of John attributed to the apostle (2^nd c. C.E.) Ultimate Reality is the Monad, an utterly transcendent deity, who produces as a “first thought” an Aeon, or emanation of the divine, a female (or sometimes androgynous) entity called Barbelo.  A series of further Aeons are then created, one of whom, Sophia of Epinoia (“wisdom of thought or insight”) goes rogue, creating a demiurge called Yaltabaoth without the Monad’s oversight.  Sophia realizes the transgressive character of Yaltabaoth and conceals its existence, thus causing the created world to be ignorant of its source the Monad. 

     Related sects propounded a variety of such creative systems.  The Archontics and Borborites imagined eight archon-governed heavens; the seventh ruled by Sabaoth, the Hebrew god whom they depicted as an ass or a hog.  According to Epiphanius they used menstrual blood and semen in their eucharist. 

     The significance of similar trends in early Christian thought is apparent in the fact that the gnostic theologian Valentinus was, according to Tertullian, at one time considered for the position of bishop.   His numerous followers opposed the efforts of their opponents to expel them from Christian communities.  Valentinus claimed to be transmitting an esoteric doctrine that had passed from Paul the Apostle through Theudas to him.  Valentinus described the Aeons and emanations and the world’s fall through the action of Sophia, importing Platonic terms to distinguish spiritual and material worlds. 

     The Gospel of Truth is a Valentinian apocryphal text that attributes the creation to the Aeons and characterizes Christ’s crucifixion as Error’s attempt to maintain ignorance.  The book also contains an exposition of the esoteric name of Christ, an example of the numerology and esoteric analysis of letters that became common in later Gnosticism.  The Marcosians, for instance, built on earlier Hebrew and Pythagorean systems to investigate the mystic meaning of numbers, using, in particular, the method of isopsephy, adding the figures associated with the letters of a word to get a significant sum.  A student of Valentinus named Colarbasus maintained that study of the esoteric implications of the Greek alphabet could reveal all truth. 

     Basilides led another second century gnostic cult which is said to have followed the Pythagoreans (and more distant Hindus and Buddhists) in proposing metempsychosis.  Like other gnostics Basilides considered that salvation was a matter of knowledge rather than faith, and that souls advanced through a series of lives.  Thus his followers thought that Christian martyrs were simply working out the bad karma of an earlier life and were thus unworthy of praise.   

    Similar ideas were also circulating under the name of Marcion of Sinope, a second century evangelist who claimed to be the transmitter of the doctrines of St. Paul whom he considered the only true apostle.  Having been taught by a certain Cerdo, a follower of Simon Magus (who was himself said to fly).  Marcion, too, distinguished a supreme being associated with Christ’s unbounded love from a lesser creator called Yahweh by the Jews ruling the temporal world.  Marcion produced a book, the Antitheses, which sought to demonstrate the incompatibility of the two by contrasting parallel passages of Hebrew and Greek scriptures.  For him Christ was fully divine and his appearance before people was an illusion, a view called Docetism.  For a considerable time Marcionite congregations spread and flourished, for a time rivaling the orthodox.

     Jewish texts prior to a few hundred years B. C. E. promise no afterlife; the strongest hints of such a notion are in Daniel, a book atypical in language and content.  Many early Christians expected the Apocalypse to overtake the world at any moment, rendering any individual death incidental, but passages such as “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46) clearly anticipate individual judgement resulting in rewards or retribution.   According to a recent study (Bart Ehrman’s Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife), the idea of heaven and hell, absent in mainstream Jewish thought in which body and soul were identified and the end of one implied the end of the other, actually derived from Greek influence.  

     The fact is that belief in eternal punishment after death was a minority opinion in early Christianity.  For influential theologians such as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa hell was a temporary purgation which purified the soul prior to its entry into heaven.  Of the six major schools of thought in early Christianity, four (those centered in Alexandria, Antioch, Caesarea, and Edessa) were universalist, that is, they believed in the ultimate salvation of every soul.  This belief was founded on passages such as “For the Lord will not cast off for ever” (Lamentations 3:31) and “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22)  The dogma of a permanent hell did not appear until the pseudo-Athanasian Creed and universalism is not condemned until the Second Council of Constantinople in 533 C. E.   Belief in universal salvation (or apokatastasis) persisted, for instance in the work of St. Isaac the Syrian during the 7^th century and never really vanished in spite of the church’s opposition, resulting in the nineteenth century founding of the American Universalist Church. 

     The most tangled and perplexing disputes arose over the character of the Trinity and in particular the nature of Christ.  Those defending what came to be orthodox interpretations had to confront two paradoxes: first, the claim that Christianity is monotheistic while recognizing three divine persons, and, second, the claim that Christ is both god and human at the same time.  A great range of interpretations sought to make sense of this unique and ungainly concept.  A good many gods had been thought to appear in human form while remaining fully gods, a sort of disguise that in Christianity became the heresy of Docetism, the notion that Christ on earth was a sort of illusion, only appearing to be like other people while in fact omnipotent and unlimited.  On the other hand, the Audians thought that not Christ alone but god himself had a physical human form and thus were also called Anthropomorphites. 

     The problems of this complex of conundrums were evaded by those called Monarchianists who urged the sole power of God the Father.  Some asserted an Adoptionist view (also called psilanthropist), claiming that Christ was a virtuous mortal who had been selected by God as his agent.  Among these were the vegetarian Ebionites and the Valentinian gnostics who followed Theodotus’ teaching that, while Christ was born of a virgin, he had received the Holy Spirit only at the time of his baptism and had become wholly divine only upon his resurrection.    Other Monarchianists favored the Modalism of Sabellius who argued that God was a single person and that the three “persons” are in fact only three “modes,” aspects or roles of one agent.  As this view maintains Christ’s total divinity, he cannot have suffered or died as people do. 

     The most influential heretic who privileged God the Father over Christ was Arius, a writer from Cyrenaica (today Libya) who thought that Christ had not always existed and does not share the essence or nature of God the Father but is instead one of his works.  This group itself split into a more moderate faction, sometimes labeled semi-Arians, that described Christ’s nature as “similar” to God the Father or “homoiousian” and those who maintained that there was no likeness, the Anomoeans (also called Heterousians).  Varieties of Arianism were adopted by the Germanic tribes and persisted until the late seventh century. 

     In the fourth century Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople argued against the divinity of the Holy Spirit, saying that it had been created by the Son.  The supporters of this view were called Pneumatomachi, “those who battle the spirit” in the Hellespont area and Tropici in Egypt. 

     Monophysites for whom Christ had only a single divine nature lasted far longer, indeed into the present day (as the Miaphysites of the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian Orthodox churches).    So-called “real” Monophysites adhered to the teaching of Eutyches of Constantinople that Christ’s unitary nature combined human and divine, but the divine so dominated as to absorb or transmute the human element.  Some, favoring the view of Severus the Great that while Christ’s body was corruptible, he nonetheless had a single nature, were known as “verbal” Monophysites.  Endless regional political relationships as well as philosophical hair-splitting resulted in the Acephali, the Agnoetae, the Aphthartodocetae, the Apollinarians.  In the sixth century Monophysitism dominated the eastern empire under the patronage of Justinian’s wife Theodora though the emperor himself was a Chalcedonian. 

     Though the Sabellians, Monarchians and Pneumatomachoi considered the orthodox Trinitarians to be in fact “Tritheists,” believing in three gods (a view common among Muslims and Jews today), at the Council of Chalcedon the Homoousians, those for whom God and Christ had the same essence, won the day, defeating Monophysitism, Modalism, Arianism, and Homoiousianism, and defining acceptable belief on the issue until the Reformation.

     This unsystematic overview omits more than it contains.  There were those who welcomed new prophets, for instance, such as the followers of Montanus and his female sybils, called Cataphrygians, whose activities included ecstatic gatherings.  The Ascitae, for instance, danced around burst wine-skins, recalling practices of Pentecostals, Shakers, and Hasidim. 

     Outsiders of all sorts are often accused of antinomianism and especially with sexual transgressions, Such claims are often made with little or no evidence, yet unconventional sexual practices (sometimes exploitative) are common among cults.  Moderns will never know, for instance whether the Nicolaitians (who are actually mentioned in the Christian testament) indeed practiced promiscuity.  Epiphanius may have been maligning Deacon Nicolas when he quoted him as saying "Unless one copulates every day, he cannot have eternal life." Did the Carpocratians and the Phibionites also practice free love?  Today the  truth is obscure, impossibly jumbled with polemical propaganda. 

     The corpus of pseudepigrapha has increased significantly even in the last century.  The Gospel of Thomas, in which Christ dances with his followers like Krishna with the gopis, had long attracted attention.    The Gospel of Mary, a second century text, narrates the exchanges of a certain Mary, variously identified as the Mother of Christ, as Christ’s sister, and as Mary Magdelene, with skeptical disciples including Peter and Andrew.  In the Sethian gnostic Gospel of Judas it appears Judas is the sole confidant of Christ to whom he conveys an esoteric message: that liberation is not enabled by his death which, like animal sacrifice and the “cannibalistic” Eucharist, is abhorrent to a benevolent deity, but is rather available within each soul through contemplative practices.   

     Many have seen a kind of philosophia perennis underlying religious traditions in widely separated  parts of the world, particularly in the records of mystics.  Yet spiritual experience is not independent of individual sensibility and even taste.  Each heretical opinion reflects not so much a hermeneutic approach to scriptural authority as a style of approach to the holy.

     The gnostics begin with revulsion, conceiving of the creation as a thing of evil, gone wrong from the start, requiring the most rigorous efforts to overcome while promising a potential reward in the end of enlightenment.   The Aeons and the rest of the imagined cosmic machinery seem like baroque, over-elaborate decoration similar to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite dreaming up nine orders of angels or the fourteen  worlds of the Puranas and the Atharva Veda. 

     Clearly those who reject the notion that eternal punishment awaits the unrighteous after death are motivated by their loving kindness, which cannot conceive of an utterly punitive deity.

     The Christological disputes arise from subjective spiritual experience.  In Christianity the equivalent of enlightenment is to locate in oneself what George Fox called “that of God in every man.”  Some, such as Meister Eckhart, find at times what feels like a total identification.  For others the divine remains largely Other, to be propitiated with prescribed ceremony.  These opposed extremes allow as well countless intermediate positions. 

     Enforcement of orthodoxy has mercifully become far less common than it once was, yet the living ferment of religious experience within Christianity at any rate seems torpid today, focused mainly on political issues of ethics.  The breadth of spiritual choice, meanwhile, has enlarged with the popularity of New Age and exotic beliefs, and the earnest adoption of other people’s rituals.  Perhaps the most reasonable of arguments for the existence of god, the argument from desire, maintains that since all people everywhere seek god, it would be absurd if no such thing exists.  Yet the splitting of sects in every tradition indicates that a conviction of Ultimate Reality is only a beginning of a definition, not of the divine in itself, but of the individual’s spiritual desire.