Philology
the love of the word
Text
studies was an ancient
science, some three and a half thousand years old when I came upon the
scene. It had been brought into the West by scholars
fleeing Constantinople after 1453, and is said to have been responsible
for a Renaissance in learning and the arts. The practice of
recovering and clarifying ancient texts culminated in the nineteenth
century as the science called philology. It was based on the
notion that poetry demands a thorough understanding of the language it
is written in, and that the peculiarly human gift of language itself is
not going to be appreciated except through its literary
monuments. Philology treated
poets with great reverence and conceived poetry's higher, ennobling
purpose as the very basis of civilization. Before I left
Arkansas, I chanced upon The Sounds
and History of the German Language by Eduard Prokosch
(1916). It began with the elements of phonetics and then traced
what one might today call the development of German phonology. I
do not think it at all treated grammar or vocabulary, but it was the
most absorbing book I had ever read. It constituted my
introduction to serious study.
Only some years later was I to learn how the
Ancients set language mastery (rhetoric) as the main component of
education. They presumably imagined that if one can learn to talk
straight, then one has to think straight, too. Already as a boy I
must have concluded, either independently or from my mother's example,
that I was cognitively dependent on language. I never became an
accomplished linguist in any of the word's various senses, but I am
acutely aware that encounter with other languages develops my mind, and
to this day I find reading more interesting if the text is in a
language with which I am not too familiar. I respond powerfully
to the printed word. Though I am easily moved by music, song
touches me more sweetly.
The German Romantic poets knew how through
language to stir the most profound feelings. While their irony
maintains critical distance, it only sharpens the sentimental
pangs. The Romantic appeal to a young man can scarcely be
exaggerated. I remember especially Ludwig Tieck's Novellen and
those of his contemporaries, Heinrich Heine's sardonic ditties, his
knowing transfiguration of history. Such writers offered me a
first perspective on my own English tradition, but
also on European philosophical developments from the British
empiricists to the solipsism of Fichte and Schleiermacher. In
sum, I became convinced that the mind is, for all practical purposes,
reality.
This recognition, leading directly toward the highest intellect,
seems to be the principle that underlies humanity. In its more
pallid form we may call it Platonism; it is the central teaching of the
Old Testament, "Against thee alone have I sinned" (Ps. 51, 4); and of
the New, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, my
brethren, ye have done it unto me" (Matt.25,50). Augustine made
straight thinking fundamental to Christianity. He simply called
it recta ratio, declaring
such pettifoggery as Arianism, Donatism, even Manichaeism, to be
heresies. As the underpinning of law, we understand the crime
as against the state, not against the victim; just as common sense
holds us to principle and abjures anecdotalism. As I came of age,
this
supremacy of the idea dawned on me as the light of German
Romanticism. It culminates of course, in deity.
If you
take pleasure in material things, well then be sure you acknowledge
their Maker, lest your own pleasure displease Him. If you take
pleasure in people, then be sure your love for them goes to their
Maker. People themselves are so very
changeable. In their Maker they remain constant; apart from Him
they flutter and die. So love them in Him, and if you can, take
them along to Him. Say to them: Let's love Him. He
made all these people we love, and is not far from them. He did
not just make them and run away. They come from Him and are still
in Him. Now look here: if you ever get just an inkling of
the truth, lo, right there He is. He is the very core of
your heart, a heart wandered away from Him. Return, you
silly wobblers, come back to your own heart and stick with Him who made
you. Stand with Him and you stand steady. Rest in Him and
be at peace. Why go down all these bumpy roads? Where are
you headed, anyway? The good things you love all come from
Him. Insofar as they go back to Him they are sweet.
But insofar as the things that come from Him are enjoyed apart from
Him, unnaturally, they only naturally turn bitter.
Augustinus, Confessions Book IV
No doubt this insight drew
me to the faithful Augustinian Martin Luther; I deeply sympathized with
his lashing out against rules and regulations, and with his brusque
dismissal of any notion of human merit.
As to the other German with whom I spent much
of my life and whom I so like to quote, Wolfgang Goethe, I am not aware
he had any such strong influence on my own thinking. I
shamefacedly admit how I came in my middle years to identify with
Goethe, so that his thinking may have become so much a part of me that
I don't even know it. Still, at my present remove I find Goethe
more companion than guide, and think him too narcissistic to declare
"Against thee alone have I sinned." I still read him, gladly
learn from him, puzzle over him, use his words to justify my present
self-description.