The Revelation of Imagination From Homer and the

Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante 1st

Edition William Franke install download

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-revelation-of-imagination-from-
homer-and-the-bible-through-virgil-and-augustine-to-dante-1st-
edition-william-franke/

Download more ebook from https://ebookmeta.com

We believe these products will be a great fit for you. Click
the link to download now, or visit ebookmeta.com
to discover even more!

Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes

1st Edition Jessica Wolfe

https://ebookmeta.com/product/homer-and-the-question-of-strife-
from-erasmus-to-hobbes-1st-edition-jessica-wolfe/

Biblical The Empyrean according to Dante 2023rd Edition

Bible Beau

https://ebookmeta.com/product/biblical-the-empyrean-according-to-
dante-2023rd-edition-bible-beau/

Christianity and the Triumph of Humor From Dante to

David Javerbaum Bernard Schweizer

https://ebookmeta.com/product/christianity-and-the-triumph-of-
humor-from-dante-to-david-javerbaum-bernard-schweizer/

Atlas of Small Intestinal Disorders Integrated Case

Presentation 1st Edition Cheng Tang Chiu Hsiu Po Wang
Yang Yuan Chen

https://ebookmeta.com/product/atlas-of-small-intestinal-
disorders-integrated-case-presentation-1st-edition-cheng-tang-
chiu-hsiu-po-wang-yang-yuan-chen/
Mathematical Modelling 1st Edition Simon Serovajsky

https://ebookmeta.com/product/mathematical-modelling-1st-edition-
simon-serovajsky/

A Field Guide to Tropical Reef Fishes of the Indo

Pacific Covers 1 670 Species in Australia Indonesia
Malaysia Vietnam and the Philippines with 2 000
illustrations Allen Gerald R
https://ebookmeta.com/product/a-field-guide-to-tropical-reef-
fishes-of-the-indo-pacific-covers-1-670-species-in-australia-
indonesia-malaysia-vietnam-and-the-philippines-
with-2-000-illustrations-allen-gerald-r/

Social Marketing Principles and Practice for Delivering

Global Change 4th Edition Gerard Hastings

https://ebookmeta.com/product/social-marketing-principles-and-
practice-for-delivering-global-change-4th-edition-gerard-
hastings/

Machine Learning A First Course for Engineers and

Scientists draft 1st Edition Andreas Lindholm Niklas
Wahlström Fredrik Lindsten Thomas B Schön

https://ebookmeta.com/product/machine-learning-a-first-course-
for-engineers-and-scientists-draft-1st-edition-andreas-lindholm-
niklas-wahlstrom-fredrik-lindsten-thomas-b-schon/

Securing Development Public Finance and the Security

Sector 1st Edition Bernard Harborne

https://ebookmeta.com/product/securing-development-public-
finance-and-the-security-sector-1st-edition-bernard-harborne/
Gender Judging and the Courts in Africa Selected
Studies 1st Edition J. Jarpa Dawuni (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/gender-judging-and-the-courts-in-
africa-selected-studies-1st-edition-j-jarpa-dawuni-editor/
The Revelation
of Imagination
The Revelation
of Imagination
From Homer and the Bible through
Virgil and Augustine to Dante

William Franke

northwestern university press

evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www​.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2015. All rights

reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication Data

Franke, William, author.
The revelation of imagination : from Homer and the Bible through Virgil and
Augustine to Dante / William Franke.
pages cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8101-3119-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3182-8
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-3120-0 (ebook)
1. Revelation in literature. 2. Religion and literature. 3. Bible as literature.
4. Homer. Odyssey. 5. Virgil. Aeneis. 6. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo.
Confessiones. 7. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. Inferno. I. Title.
PN49.F653 2015
809.93382—dc23
2015017407

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-​­1992.
For Margaret Doody
 Contents

Preface xi
The Approach
The Argument
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Involved Knowing: On the Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities 3
I. Method and Truth in the Humanities
II. Contextual-​­Relational Knowing versus Scientific Objectivity
III. Vicissitudes of the Liberal Arts in the History of Education

Chapter 1
Humanities Tradition and the Bible 29
I. The Bible as Exemplary Humanities Text
II. The Genesis Myth: Existence as Revelation
Layers of Tradition in the Creation Story
Creation by the Word—­T heory and Theology
III. The Exodus Epic: History and Ritual
IV. Prophecy as Inspired Interpretation of History
Oracular Form and Poetic Power in Isaiah
The Raptures of Isaiah: Their Influence Down to Jesus and Beyond
From Prophecy to Apocalyptic
V. Writings and Revelation
Existential Crisis in Ecclesiastes
The Song of the Senses
Theoretical-​­T heological Conclusion
VI. Gospel as Personal Knowing
The Gospels Begin from Easter
Chapter 2
Homer’s Musings and the Divine Muse 99
Preamble: Epic Song as Invention and Revelation
I. The Telemachy: Growing Up and Growing with the Gods
(Odyssey 1–­4)
II. Secularization: The Struggle for Human Autonomy against
Invasive Divinity (Odyssey 5–­8)
III. Narrative Identity and the Revelation of the End
(Odyssey 9–­12)
Nekuia: Visit to the Underworld
IV. Gods and Guidance: Freedom and Slavery of Mind (Odyssey 13–­16)
V. From Anonymous Disguise to Named Identity (Odyssey 17–­19)
VI. Human Vengeance and the Signs of Divine Justice (Odyssey 20–­24)

Chapter 3
Virgil’s Invention of History as Prophecy 165
I. The Secondariness of Virgilian Epic and Its Unprecedented
Originality
II. A Man or a Destiny (Aeneid 1)
III. Ashes of Ilium and Odyssean Wanderings (Aeneid 2–3)
IV. Love Tragedy and Epic Destiny (Aeneid 4–5)
V. Descent to the Dead and Conversion to Life (Aeneid 6 and 8)
The Original Site of the Future: Pallanteum-​­Arcadia
Prophecy and Poiesis in the Aeneid
VI. War and Tragedy and the Fate of the Spoken (Aeneid 7, 9–­12)

Chapter 4
Augustine’s Discovery of Reading as Revelation 237
I. The Act of Invocation and the Personalization of
Prophecy (Prologue, Confessions 1.i–­v)
II. The Story of a Life in Language (Confessions 1–2)
III. Growth of the Self in and through the Word (Confessions 3–4)
IV. Conversion by the Book
Interpretive and Philosophical Conversion (Confessions 5–­7)
Complete Moral and Existential Conversion (Confessions 8–­9)
V. Syntheses of Mind and Time—­in Language (Confessions 10–11)
Speculations of Memory
Time and Eternity
Beginning in the Word
What Is Time? The Enigma of the Present
VI. Legere: Reading as Binding Things Together in Unity
(Confessions 12–13)
Chapter 5
Dante’s Poetics of Revelation 307
I. Introduction: The Coordinates of Divine Vision
The Visit to the World of the Dead as the Origin of Apocalyptic Prophecy
The First-​­Person Protagonist and the Address to the Reader
Dante’s Journey and the Augustinian Itinerary through Self to God
Didactic Poem and Summa of Truth
The Figural Method of Representation
Poetry as Prophetic Vision of History
History, Eschatology, Apocalypse
II. The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading (Inferno 1–­8)
III. Deep Hermeneutics of Complicity and Conversion (Inferno 8–­17)
Linguistic Self-​­Interpretation and Sins of Rhetorical Violence
(Inferno 13–­17)
IV. Dante’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Prophetic Voice
and Vision in the Malebolge (Inferno 18–­25)
Pitfalls of Prophecy (Inferno 19–­23)
Writing and (Anti-​­)Revelation (Inferno 24–­25)
V. Discursive Traps: False Transcendence and Bad Faith (Inferno 26–­30)
VI. Freezing of Signification in “Dead Poetry” (Inferno 31–­34)

Conclusion
Canonicity, Creativity, and the Unlimited Vision of Literature,
or Theology of Literature as Meta-Critique of Epistemology 375

Index 397
 Preface

The Approach

The humanities represent a special kind of knowledge involving interpre-

tation and judgment that is vital to our existence both individually and
together in society. Their mission has been variously defined in the course
of history, and the curriculum has altered accordingly. I attempt to focus on
what is enduring and perennial rather than accommodated to the agenda of
the moment. The humanities embody a kind of wisdom or philosophy and, I
believe, something of a “revelation” that I have wanted to bring to conscious
reflection in detailed readings of some of the most thought-​­provoking texts
of the Western intellectual tradition.
This book grows out of a lecture course on “Great Books of the Western
Tradition” that I have given at Vanderbilt University beginning in the 1990s
and into the ensuing millennium. The course frames readings of represen-
tative classic works of literature within a general theory of the humanities
that I developed under the influence of German hermeneutic thought about
the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) conjugated with French linguis-
tic and critical theory. This theoretical background is married to a vision of
poetry as prophecy and even as prayer, which is itself the result of crossing an
enthusiasm for English Protestant poets—­particularly Blake, Milton, Spenser,
and Herbert—­with a passion for Dante and the Italian Catholic tradition
through Vico and Manzoni. My approach has been nurtured, furthermore,
by assiduous cultivation of Greek paideia and of the Latin rhetorical tradi-
tion as matrices of the artes liberales.
Drawing on these backgrounds, the book endeavors not only to offer
re-​­actualized readings of representative humanities texts: in addition, these
literary-​­critical meditations are linked together by an overarching argument
concerning the peculiar nature of knowledge in the humanities. The book
reflects philosophically on what constitutes vital insight and ultimately the
experience of truth in this domain of culture. This reflection outlines, most
importantly, a way of articulating the connection of humanities knowledge
with what may, in various senses, be called “divine revelation.” Such rev-
elation entails the sort of inspiration to which poets since Homer have laid
claim, as well as that proper to revealed religion in the Bible. Both kinds of
inspiration have traditionally been designated in different, but related, senses

xi
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

as “prophetic.” A hybrid approach to the notion of prophecy, therefore, is

central to the argument of the book.
The book can be read as critical interpretation and commentary on a core
selection of classic humanities texts—­but also as a philosophical theory that
ponders the claim of imaginative literature to become prophetic revelation.
In the latter respect, it consists not so much in abstract propositions about
prophetic poetry as in thoughtful formulations of the theoretical premises
inherent and operative in the practice of prophecy in these poems. The book
is bound to be taken in one or the other of these directions by different types
of readers, depending on what they are looking for and on how they are
trained and accustomed to read and think. The ambiguity itself, however,
between exegesis and theory serves to point us toward what lies beyond this
very distinction and at its origin—­to what can be neither simply read by tra-
ditional philological methods nor be directly thought out by the conceptual
methods of philosophy, but must rather be “revealed.”
This is why we require a kind of theology of literature (or literary the-
ology), though one that can only be critical: not any positive, dogmatic
system, but rather an opening to the infinite “space of literature” and to its
untrammeled exploration by the imagination. When poetry attains to this
level of prophetic revelation, literature provides, in effect, what I call a meta-​
c­ ritique of epistemology—­a reflection on the foundations of knowledge that
precedes and surpasses all possible philosophical analysis. Such critique
shows why all rational grounding of knowledge fails to reach the sources of
our insight and of our very being. At this depth, origins can only be imag-
ined. The imagination is called in to take over in grounding—­or at least in
backgrounding—­knowledge, where critical reason runs up against limits that
it cannot surpass.
The ground covered here corresponds to only the first semester of the
Great Books sequence that I have taught at Vanderbilt. I plan eventually to
prepare for publication a sequel, the working title of which is “Mythopoi-
esis in a Scientific Age.” It takes up the study of representative humanities
texts from the Renaissance, beginning with Hamlet, and moves through the
modern and contemporary periods. These works are placed in a theoretical
framework that complements the one used in the present volume for reading
ancient and medieval literature and extends it toward a more comprehensive
philosophy of revelation in the humanities.1

1. This aim, meanwhile, although not abandoned, has been displaced and dif-
ferently fulfilled by Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake
of Dante (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016]); Poetry and Apoca-
lypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009); and Poetics of Revelation: From Ancient Theological Hermeneutics
to Modern Linguistic Epistemologies (in course of preparation).
Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

In the present volume I attempt to draw from the best of what thinkers
and scholars have written in commenting on these works in order to re-​
p
­ ropose sometimes familiar interpretations from an angle that brings out
why they are enduringly important and illuminating. With regard to classics
of this stature, it is often most worthwhile to concentrate on understand-
ing what they have long been appreciated for in a way that elucidates why
they continue to be relevant for us today rather than to strain to present
only views that are purportedly brand-​­new. When these works are actually
grasped in their pertinence to our present situation and its questions, then
their meaning originates in our own reading of them informed by tradition
and imagination. On this basis, our interpretations are “original” in the sense
that matters most.

The Argument

In its central argument, the book demonstrates that literature of this order—­
literature that aspires to become the conscience and indeed the consciousness
of a whole civilization, or even of civilization as a whole—­is essentially “pro-
phetic.” Such literature endeavors to reveal the heart of human life and history
in a perspective that is never past. However beholden to tradition it may be,
this perspective is always original because it draws from and even helps to
constitute the original source of inspiration that invents a history and a human
identity in the first place. Past, present, and future are but interchangeable
vantage points on a disclosure of truth that remains the origin of the world
within which such truth has been articulated, into which it speaks, and upon
which it can continue to work transformatively into the future. At this level
of originality—­which is not to be confounded with mere novelty, although it
opens the greatest opportunities for innovation—­every insight, whether cast
in the mode of the past, present, or future, can have a “prophetic” bearing:
it can become what in poetic tradition has often been styled “divine vision.”
Literature expressing such insight can and should, I argue, be understood
as “revelation” still today. Poetry that attains to this height of prophetic vision
asks to be embraced as a species of revealed understanding or awareness
that reaches beyond all rationally grounded knowledge in order to sound its
sources in the creative springs of reason itself. This outlook, then, is implic-
itly a literary theology: it claims that inspired poetry can open up a kind
of comprehensive vision of—­or relation to—­reality as a whole and thereby
fathom its normally inaccessible depths. Such vision peers into the world in
its creative emergence and calls to be understood as, in effect, a participating
in the mind of God.
However, it is only the limits and impossibility of objective sight and
knowledge of God that frees the imagination to explore unfettered its own
sources and the grounds of all that is—­and thus to inhabit and animate the
xiv Preface and Acknowledgments

theological dimension of the infinite. So what we have to do with here is

more precisely a critical negative theology of literature. Positive theological
doctrines and images serve as metaphorical means for interpreting otherwise
unfathomable heights and depths of experience and for scrutinizing (or at
least relating to) the otherwise impenetrable enigma of existence.
Such, in barest abstract, is the thesis that will be developed here in five
steps corresponding to five epoch-​­making works in the Western intellectual
tradition. Each chapter presents a global reading of the work in question.
In each case, poetry, or more exactly poiesis, is revealed as prophecy, and
the meaning of both of these terms is renegotiated through recognizing their
intrinsic relationship. Virgil stands at the center of this renegotiation and
Dante at its culmination, while the Bible serves as its matrix. Homer’s Odys-
sey and Augustine’s Confessions are less obviously prophetic-​­poetic texts,
and yet the crucial lineaments of the whole tradition emerge into clarity by
reading them in this light. The light from Troy and that radiating from Jeru-
salem and eventually Rome, for all their decisive differences, blend into one
light as refracted through these chief beacons of the Western humanities.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go in the first place to all the students who have engaged with
me in adventurous study and reflection on these and other humanities texts.
I thank particularly my former teaching assistants in the Comparative Lit-
erature Program at Vanderbilt University—­many now professors in their
own right—­who have been invaluable partners in dialogue: Gian Balsamo,
Claudia Baracchi, Alan Bourassa, Donald Holman, Madalena Vucicozici,
Rachel Roth, Ken Himmelman, Lara Newborn, Laura Matter, Patricia Cre-
spo, Michael Reid, Scott Hubbard, Xiaolun Qi, Shaun Haskins, and Jennifer
Krause. I dedicate this book to all those who have been my students—­and at
the same time my teachers—­in the humanities, but especially to the one who
was our leader in crucially formative years.
Throughout the book, translations not otherwise attributed are my own.
Versions of some segments from the chapters have been previously pub-
lished as articles in periodical literature or in collections of essays. My thanks
are due to the publishers for permission to reprint in revised form material
from the following:

1. “Involved Knowing: On the Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities.” The

European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 16, no. 4 (2011): 449–­69 (http://​
www​.tandfonline​.com).
2. “From the Bible as Literature to Literature as Theology: A Theological Read-
ing of Genesis as a Humanities Text.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 29, no. 2
(2012): 28–­45.
Preface and Acknowledgments xv

3. “The Exodus Epic: Universalization of History through Ritual.” In Universal-

ity and History: The Foundations of Core, ed. Don Thompson, Darrel Colson,
and J. Scott Lee, 59–­70. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002.
4. “Prophecy as a Genre of Revelation: Synergisms of Inspiration and Imagina-
tion in the Book of Isaiah.” Theology 114, no. 5 (2011): 340–­52.
5. “Gospel as Personal Knowing: Theological Reflections on Not Just a Literary
Genre.” Theology Today 68, no. 4 (2011): 413–­23.
6. “Writings and Revelation: Literary Theology in the Bible.” Theology and Lit-
erature 28, no. 4 (2014): 1–­16.
7. “Homer’s Musings and the Divine Muse: Epic Song as Invention and Revela-
tion.” Religion and Literature 43, no. 3 (2011): 1–­29.
8. “Virgil, History, and Prophecy.” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 73–­88.
9. “On Doing the Truth in Time: The Aeneid’s Invention of Poetic Prophecy.”
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 19, no. 1 (2011): 53–­63.
10. “The Secondariness of Virgilian Epic and Its Unprecedented Originality.” Col-
lege Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 40, no. 1 (2013): 11–­31.
11. “War and Tragedy and the Fate of the Spoken: Virgil’s Secularization of
Prophecy.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 41, no. 4
(2014): 25–­40.
12. “Augustine’s Confessions and the Transcendental Ground of Consciousness:
or How Literary Narrative Becomes Prophetic Revelation.” Philosophy and
Literature 38, no. 1 (2014): 204–­22.
13. “The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading: Introduction to the
Inferno as a Humanities Text.” In Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context,
ed. Bainard Cowen and J. Scott Lee, 75–­82. Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America, 2002.
14. “Dante’s Inferno and the Poetic Revelation of Prophetic Truth.” Philosophy
and Literature 33, no. 2 (2009): 252–­66.
15. “Paradoxical Prophecy: Dante’s Strategy of Self-​­Subversion in the Inferno.”
Italica 90, no. 3 (2013): 343–­64.
16. “Deep Hermeneutics of Complicity and Conversion in Inferno IX–­XVII.”
University of Toronto Quarterly 82, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 1–­19.
17. “Dante’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Prophetic Voice and Vision
in the Malebolge (Inferno XVIII–­XXV).” Philosophy and Literature 36, no. 1
(2012): 111–­21.
18. “The Death and Damnation of Poetry in Inferno XXXI–­XXXIV: Ugolino and
Narrative as an Instrument of Revenge.” Romance Studies 28, no. 1 (2010):
27–­35.
19. “Canonicity, Creativity, and the Unlimited Revelation of Literature.” Partial
Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 12, no. 1 (2014): 1–­24.
The Revelation
of Imagination
 Introduction

Involved Knowing
On the Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities

I. Method and Truth in the Humanities

What kind of knowledge, if any, do the humanities represent? Posing epis-

temological questions concerning the nature and conditions of knowledge
in the disciplines that come under this rubric might seem hopelessly remote
from probing classic works of literature and their remarkably rich and reve-
latory contents. Yet theoretical awareness and self-​­reflectiveness are integral
to almost any authentic knowledge and insight in this domain. To begin,
therefore, with some broad theoretical considerations concerning the study
of the humanities is already a way of embarking on them.1
The question of the kind of knowledge the humanities entail might be
approached through exploring either the history or the method of these dis-
ciplines. Logically, the question of method demands to be taken up first. But
even to speak of “method” in the humanities betrays an, in some ways, inap-
propriate bias. For knowledge in the humanities is not per se methodical. To
the extent that we feel the need to establish at the outset the right method
of research, our conception of the humanities is under the sway of the sci-
entific disciplines with which they share the liberal arts curriculum in our
academic institutions of higher learning. While in science a sound method
supposedly guarantees true results and is theoretically necessary to arrive at
certainty of the truth, the experience of truth in the humanities, for example,

1. In introducing a special issue of Daedalus 138 (2009) dedicated to “Reflect-

ing on the Humanities,” the editors Patricia Meyer Spacks and Leslie Berlowitz
similarly write: “The essays assembled here enact as well as reflect the humani-
ties” (5).

3
4 Involved Knowing

in and through a work of art, may be more likely to come about rather as an
epiphany and in the most unmethodical, incalculable ways.2
Not cognitive knowledge alone but aesthetic sensibility and moral feel-
ing, emotional empathy and imaginative vision, along with many other
types of intelligence and awareness, are intrinsic to all that is known in the
humanities. This means that knowledge in the humanities is contextual and
relational, and therefore also historical and even personal. A unique personal
history is necessarily the context for all knowledge that is one’s own and that
can truly be called human knowledge. Given this inextricably historical char-
acter of humanities knowledge, history and method are closely intertwined
and practically inseparable.
There are a few verses by the eighteenth-​­century English poet William
Blake which for me personally, since undergraduate days, have stood out as a
sort of motto over the gate of entry into the field of the humanities:

For a tear is an intellectual thing

And a sigh is the sword of an angel king
And the bitter groan of the martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.3

It is enough to hang on to just the first verse for its suggestiveness concern-
ing what may be considered the objective of the kind of study undertaken
in the humanities, namely, the attempt to learn to think with and through
feelings and in light of images, and to cultivate what in tradition has often
been called “the intelligence of the heart.” In putting it that way, I am echoing
the seventeenth-​­century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote that
the heart has its reasons which reason does not understand (“Le coeur a ses
raisons, que la raison ne connaît point,” Pensées 277, Brunschvicg ed.). Our
objective, in other words, less like the Bible’s and more like Plato’s, is to attain
to that kind of thinking—­or approach that level of understanding—­where
knowledge and love are one, or where the will’s desire for the good coincides
with the intellect’s passion for truth. And if we also heed the aesthetic aspects
of this intelligence, we can state further that both of these longings—­desire
for the good and passion for the true—­coalesce in the love of the beautiful.
That truth and goodness unite in beauty is a seminal idea, for example,
in “The Oldest System-​­Program of German Idealism,” which is attributed

2. This contrast between the experience of truth in the humanities and method-
ical knowing in science is a fulcrum for Hans-​­Georg Gadamer’s humanities-​­based
“hermeneutic” philosophy in Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1960), translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall as Truth and Method
(New York: Crossroad, 1989), 2nd ed. rev.
3. William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David
W. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
Involved Knowing 5

variously to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin: “Finally the idea that unites
all, the idea of beauty, this word taken in its higher Platonic sense. I am now
persuaded that the highest act of reason, the act in which it comprehends all
ideas, is an aesthetic act and that truth and goodness are kin to each other
only in beauty.”4 Such wholeness of vision, in which our faculties of theoreti-
cal cognition, moral discernment, and aesthetic appreciation interpenetrate,
has been a hallmark of the humanities throughout their history.
I state the objectives in what are, admittedly, somewhat lofty and elusive
terms partly because of a doubt as to whether objectives can or should be
stated very fully or precisely at the outset of any study in the humanities. The
requirement of fixing one’s objectives before one even begins belongs rather
to the methodology of science as a technology for achieving practical aims
and—­even more problematically—­expresses the demands of an information-​
c­ razy culture based on clear-​­cut bites of unambiguous data. Such a culture
actually preserves little or nothing of the genuine scientific spirit of search
for knowledge by experience and through inquiry into the unknown, but
only the mechanical, calculating aspects of science as exploited in technolo-
gies of mass production. Such mindless applications are unlike real scientific
endeavor, which is nothing if not a richly human enterprise.
The very procedure of specifying objectives and positing methodical steps
to achieving them entails assumptions that are not altogether appropriate
to learning in the humanities—­nor even to actual scientific discovery. The
ideal of total clarity and transparency of aims demanded by at least a certain
interpretation of scientific method and procedure abstracts from the tempo-
rality of human understanding and inquiry and from the way in which all
human knowledge is embedded in experience in time and, more concretely,
in the histories of persons. In its specifically human meaning and dimension,
the goal of all our experience remains perpetually a mystery beholden to a
time beyond time and beyond scientific comprehension. It is a time when all
things shall be revealed and “all flesh shall see it together” (Isaiah 40: 5), as
intimated by the biblical voice that is so pervasively infused all through the
Western humanities tradition.
For the sake of conformity to the unrelenting demand to define objectives,
we might say, for instance, that the objective of study of the humanities is to
develop critical thinking. We cannot help but hope that precisely that will
come about. Nevertheless, our ultimate goal is not to acquire another power
or to hone another skill to enable us better to dominate the information that

4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979),

235. “Zuletzt die Idee, die alle vereinigt, die Idee der Schönheit, das Wort in
höherem platonischen Sinne genommen. Ich bin nun überzeugt, daß der höchste
Akt der Vernunft, der, indem sie alle Ideen umfaßt, ein ästhetischer Akt ist und
daß Wahrheit und Güte nur in der Schönheit verschwistert sind.” Hölderlin fur-
ther elaborates on this idea in a lyrical vein in Hyperion.
6 Involved Knowing

occupies such a large place in our culture and consciousness, but rather to
open up new worlds of experience, that is, to open ourselves up—­in Blake’s
words, once again—­to “infinite worlds of delight,” to “Eternity ever expand-
ing in the bosom of God, which is the Human Imagination” (Blake, Jerusalem
5: 20).
Study of the humanities does not aim to give us just another capability for
manipulating the world after our own designs, so as to make it conform yet
more conveniently to our wishes or “objectives”: it aims to give us another
world, in fact, infinite worlds. Rather than striving to achieve preconceived
objectives, we advance toward human intelligence through an intensely ener-
getic letting be, and in doing so we ourselves are changed. Our objective is
to respond fully to the possibilities of being human as they have been medi-
ated to us, among other ways, by “great books” of our tradition. What we,
in the end, most profoundly desire belongs to the search itself rather than
being just its goal or result. We need not to know exactly what we want
out of it in order to genuinely—­and most profitably—­study the humani-
ties. For the goal of human endeavor conceived as its potential fulfillment
belongs to the mystery in question: it is to be freshly discovered and revised
all along the way rather than being determined and presupposed from the
outset.
Indeed, our question must be not what do we want out of this type of
study and out of the texts that we study in it so much as: What do they want
of us? This involves treating our texts as partners in dialogue rather than just
as specimens for analysis. Only in this way do we allow them to effectively
make their claim upon us. Only so can we respond to the possibilities of
human being as they have been construed and conveyed to us by presump-
tive “great books,” ones that have gained recognition as monumental classic
works of our tradition. We interrogate them in order to be ourselves inter-
rogated. The question is: What do these works call us to be and see and do?
What do they invite and challenge and enable us to become?
Human existence has, and indeed is, a multiplicity of possibilities which
call for realization. We are constantly contemplating these possibilities for
our own lives as we work through the possibilities for human existence that
are represented in our readings in the humanities. My proximate goal as ped-
agogue is to mediate (or, as Socrates would say, play the midwife) in allowing
these texts to speak to us, to waken us to the sense of the possibilities for
existence that are in us and which we are. One can be qualified for doing
this only by virtue of one’s own experience of these texts matured through a
long-​­standing, exacting discipline and devotion to the study of the humani-
ties. The pedagogue’s knowledge of the matter of the humanities is not
different in kind from the beginning student’s, but it has been painstakingly
trained in ways that may prove to be of service in leading others down the
path of discovery of the human and imaginative worlds embodied in these
texts.
Involved Knowing 7

II. Contextual-​­Relational Knowing versus Scientific Objectivity

What, then, are the humanities? In terms of academic disciplines, one straight-
forward, inevitable answer, given the usual structure of university instruction,
is that they are the third division in the threefold breakdown of the liberal arts
curriculum: science / social sciences / humanities. This approach, however,
can cause distortions in our understanding of the humanities by allowing
them to fall under the shadow cast over the liberal arts curriculum as a whole
by the monolith of the scientific paradigm. Humanities in this scheme tend to
be treated by assimilation as a further field for the application of the scientific
method of knowing. Christened thus “the human sciences”—­literally les sci-
ences humaines, as they are called in French, or “the sciences of the spirit,”
die Geisteswissenschaften, as German says—­the objective of the humanities
would seem to be to extend knowledge by adapting the methods of natural
science to a different kind of subject matter—­no longer nature or numbers,
but “humanity” in the full breadth of its creative self-​­expression in history
and culture. The tendency to treat the humanities as a peculiar, less exact, less
potent, less certain, less reliable, and less lucid kind of scientific pursuit is very
strong in the academy. For we think we know what scientific knowledge is
and believe that we can define it.5
Yet, understood according to the scientific paradigm, the humanities are
denatured. For humanity is not an object. We are human—­in all the irreduc-
ible facets of our subjectivity. A common way of expressing the presumed
privilege and superiority of scientific knowledge is to state that science is
“objective knowledge.” However, human beings cannot be known as objects.
To gain knowledge of human beings, one must actually participate in human
experience and know it from within, personally, as a subject, rather than
only analyze it detachedly and objectively from without. Indeed, all human
knowledge is necessarily self-​­knowledge, at the same time as it is knowl-
edge of whatever type of objects. The ancient motto “know thyself” (γνῶθι
σεαυτόν) inscribed over the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, as recorded by Pausa-
nias in his second-​­century a.d. Description of Greece (10.24.1), expresses in
the form of an injunction a condition that is fundamental and imperative to
all genuinely human knowing: in all knowledge in the humanities, we experi-
ence ourselves. This includes our possible selves—­that is, the possibilities for
our existence. In fact, the possibilities for existence and self-​­understanding
available in our culture today have, to a considerable extent, been forged by
works such as those studied in our humanities curriculum. We can, therefore,

5. See, for example, the keynote address by Edward O. Wilson, “How to Unify
Knowledge,” with its argument that “all of knowledge . . . can be united by a
continuous skein of cause-​­and-​­effect explanation,” in Unity of Knowledge: The
Convergence of Natural and Human Science, ed. Antonio R. Damasio (New
York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2001).
8 Involved Knowing

extend our understanding of why we think and feel the way we do about
things by discovering the attitudes and insights that define our intellectual
horizons in their emergence in these texts. Only this awareness enables us
either to refuse or to freely choose such perspectives.
Scientists themselves today generally recognize the naivety of belief in
objective knowledge, but we seem not to be in possession of any clear and
convincing alternative to it. Due to lack of understanding of the nature of
the knowledge proper to the humanities, we no longer know what genuine
knowledge is, if it is not “objective” in the scientific sense. We can only imag-
ine that the alternative must be subjective and arbitrary ideas that are really
not worthy to be honored with the name of “knowledge” at all. We have
become progressively less aware of the traditional sort of pursuit of knowl-
edge as an endeavor to assimilate oneself to the true and real by identification
with universal human ideals, yet such was the nature of knowing practiced as
a spiritual exercise for millennia before the advent of science in the modern
sense.6 Accordingly, we can aim through this type of study to come back into
touch with ancient and medieval approaches to human learning that had not
yet forgotten this broader meaning of knowledge in relation to the subject
that knows—­what used to be called the “soul”—­as an integral part of being
in and belonging to a cosmos from which the individual had not yet been
extracted and expelled.
All that is being said here about human knowing actually applies, only a
little less directly and obviously, to scientific knowing as well, for science, too,
is nothing if not a human activity of knowing. Rather than understanding the
humanities as “human sciences,” we can just as well understand the sciences
as human endeavors. While science likes to abstract from this inescapable
human element—­from the fact that, whenever knowledge takes place, there
is always someone who knows—­the humanities dwell upon and accentuate
precisely this human factor. They bring forward into the light of truth the
human conditions surrounding all knowledge, including scientific knowl-
edge. And, in this light, it is clear that the objectivity of science comes at the
expense of an awareness of the humanly contingent conditions and contexts

6. Pierre Hadot’s Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: A. Michel,

2002 [1981]), translated by Michael Chase as Philosophy as a Way of Life:
Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007 [1995]), represents a seminal effort to recuperate this ancient
approach to knowledge. Hadot is joined in this endeavor by Giovanni Reale,
Sagezza antica: Terapia per i mali dell’uomo d’oggi (Milan: Raffaello Cortina,
1995); Jean Greisch, Expérience philosophique, exercices spirituels et thérapie de
l’âme (Paris: Institut Catholique de Paris, 1996); André-​­Jean Voelke, La Philoso-
phie comme thérapie de l’âme: Etudes de philosophie hellénistique (Paris: Cerf,
1994); and Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in
Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Involved Knowing 9

that impinge upon every actual instance of knowing. To express cognizance

in its wholeness as an all-​­embracing awareness of the circumambient condi-
tions of knowing, which include also the being of the knower, beyond the
narrow focus on objects of science or scientia, the ancients used the term
sapientia or “wisdom.” Knowledge, not just of facts but also of oneself and
one’s limitations, and of the meaning of the world in relation to oneself, is
the goal of the humanities expressed in this term “wisdom.” The better part
of wisdom is knowing that in knowing anything at all humanly, we always
know also ourselves, including our limits and our possible selves in their
scarcely fathomable variety.
All this is to say that the humanities consist in relational or personal
knowing more than in objective, methodological knowledge. In other words,
we ourselves are involved in what we know, and this character of personal
involvement is crucial to the nature of such knowing. This applies, I would
suggest, to all knowledge, in the humanities and in the sciences alike, with
the difference that in the humanities we do not try to eliminate—­or, at least,
to limit as much as possible—­this personal involvement that underpins our
knowing. Instead, this irreducibly personal dimension is opened up and
explored and developed in the course of interpreting, for example, a paint-
ing or a poem or a prayer. The humanities thus attain a more comprehensive
point of view, and in the end we need to understand science, too, as funda-
mentally a human undertaking that is dependent on imagination and the
poetry of its discoveries in order to be meaningful.7
In fact, science, or its ancestor “natural philosophy,” in a direct line of
descent, began as poetry. The earliest Greek philosophers, the “physicists” of
Ionia on the Anatolian coast in Asia Minor in the sixth century b.c., think-
ers such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes (of the Milesian school), and
Heraclitus of Ephesus, together with those active at the other rim of the
Greek world in the colonies of the southern Italian peninsula, including Par-
menides of Elea, Pythagoras of Crotone, and Empedocles of Agrigento, wrote
their observations on nature and the world wholly or partly in verse (or at
least in highly poetic, metrical prose) and, in effect, as poems of the uni-
verse, artworks expressing its intrinsic Logos. This serves as a reminder of
the originally poetical character of science at its earliest stages. Conversely,
the first poems are, at the same time, essays in natural philosophy, typically in
mythic form. Mythologies in Greece and the world over represent the earliest

7. Among philosophers and scientists reconnecting science with humanities

matrices are Jean-​­Marie Besnier, Hervé Le Guyader, Etienne Klein, and Heinz
Wismann, La Science en jeu (Arles, Fr.: Actes sud, 2010). Wismann argues that
modern science, in abandoning substance for function, derives from Christian
paradigms of Incarnation and Eucharist, in which substance is constituted by
relations.
10 Involved Knowing

attempts to formulate a comprehensive understanding of the world in which

humans live: they constitute the earliest encyclopedias of knowledge.
The fact that knowledge is assembled into encyclopedic form, particularly
in epic poetry, hints at the holistic character of knowledge in the humanities.
Etymologically, the word “encyclopaedia” contains the notion of a cycle or
comprehensive circle of subjects of study, in addition to the idea of the edu-
cation of children, paedeia in Greek. It is by comprehending matters in their
furthest ramifications and implications, and in their widest contexts, that the
type of knowledge characteristic of the humanities fulfills itself. As the ency-
clopedic model suggests, humanities knowledge strives to be knowledge in
the round that encompasses things whole. Emblematic of this is the fact that
the epic poems constituting the backbone of traditional humanities classics
are all works that in various ways are encyclopedic in scope.
The basis of education in the ancient Greek world from the sixth cen-
tury b.c. was Homer. The first prerequisite to being a cultivated individual
was knowing Homer by heart. Homer was generally esteemed to be the
source and sum of all knowledge and wisdom. Ancient philosophers such as
Numenius and Porphyry relay the widespread conviction that Homer was
a philosopher. This qualification included his being also a theologian, one
who revealed sublime and even divine truths in the manner of Plato. More-
over, according to Quintilian, he was “familiar with all the arts” (Institutio
oratoria 12, 11, 21). Even as late as the Reformation, the humanist Philipp
Melanchthon (1497–­1560) states that the description of Achilles’s shield in
book 18 of the Iliad laid the foundations for astronomy and philosophy. The
Iliad was traditionally read as an instruction manual for kings and princes,
with invaluable lessons on such matters as war and statecraft. The Odyssey,
on the other hand, was studied and revered as an authoritative encyclopedia
of information about domestic life and all the arts appertaining thereto. Thus,
between them, the Homeric poems were considered to contain the whole of
knowledge of the most necessary sort. Seen this way, the poems laid claim
to being a compendium of all the arts and sciences, as well as of the deepest
philosophical and theological sources of wisdom.8
The philosophical allegorization of epic that had grown up around Homer
already in antiquity continued especially with relation to Virgil in the Mid-
dle Ages. In the Neoplatonic tradition of Macrobius and Servius, Virgil was

8. A guide throughout my discussion of the ancient and medieval tradition

of the liberal arts is Ernst Robert Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und Lateinsi-
ches Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1948), 206, trans. Willard R. Trask as European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Bollingen, 1952). I have
also profited particularly from Roland Barthes, “L’Ancienne rhétorique: Aide
mémoire,” Communications 16 (1970): 172–­223, and from Henri Irénée Mar-
rou, “Les Arts libéraux dans l’antiquité classique,” in Arts libéraux et philosophie
au moyen âge (Montréal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1967).
Involved Knowing 11

viewed as a universal polymath and magician, the master of all knowledge,

natural and supernatural.9 This example of the epic poet was to be emulated
in subsequent literary history most completely by Dante, who endeavored to
gather into the encyclopedic form of his poem, the Divine Comedy, essen-
tially all that was known of human history and culture and to frame it within
a comprehensive knowledge of the whole of the cosmos bound together
by an intuition of its final Ground, God. This work even includes frequent
excursuses on current scientific topics such as embryology, meteorology, the
astronomy of moon spots, geometrics, and optics. Dante’s own model, of
course, to an even greater extent than Virgil, was the Bible. Holy Writ had
an even stronger claim to be deemed the paragon of encyclopedias. For the
Christian Middle Ages this book was the book, the very archetype of the
Book, containing all possible books—­ at least virtually—­ in its purported
character as a total, unified system of knowledge. As a revelation of the Mind
of God, the Bible was held to express the original template for the entire
Creation.
An incomparably important predecessor to Dante in his totalizing syn-
thesis of traditions by the power and originality of his literary form is Saint
Augustine. Augustine’s Confessions, like Dante’s Commedia, represent a sort
of summa of fundamental philosophical and theological knowledge in the
form of an autobiographical narrative. Augustine also wrote other encyclo-
pedic works, including a theological interpretation of universal history: his
De civitate Dei (The City of God). But most interesting to us in the pres-
ent context is not the system of doctrines that he was to lay out from the
Christian vantage point he finally attained through his conversion so much
as the autobiographically recorded path that he followed in order to reach
his theological vision. The way the two sorts of knowledge, the personal and
the systematic, fit together and indeed fuse in tradition, as again in Dante’s
visionary journey through the three realms of the afterlife, is itself highly
instructive concerning the nature of knowledge in the humanities—­not to
mention in any possible science whatsoever. The personal and poetic search
along the path of their respective intellectual-​­existential journeys is clearly
indispensable to the doctrinal knowledge that is ultimately gained by both
Dante and Augustine alike.
The universality of poetry, its being the original form of expression of
all knowledge, is grounded in the facts that all knowledge is humanly sit-
uated and that every human situation can be sounded by poetry. In every

9. Macrobius, Saturnalia (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1994), trans. Percival Vaughan

Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), and Servius, In Virgilii
Carmina Commentarii, ed. Georgius Thilo and Hermannus Hagen (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1961), in the fourth century are important sources for this view of
Virgil. See Domenico Comparetti, Virgilio nel medioevo I (Livorno, 1895), rpt.
ed. Giorgio Pasquale (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1955).
12 Involved Knowing

instance, knowledge belongs to someone endowed with a particular disposi-

tion and placed in specific circumstances. As such, this knowledge can best
be expressed by poetry. While science in the modern epoch has tended to dic-
tate paradigms to all disciplines, historically the liberal arts and knowledge
generally emerge rather from religious and artistic modes of experience that
almost always find expression first in poetic genres. Poetry, as the affectively
charged representation of a world, embodies, at the earliest stages of culture,
the sort of universality that tends to be accorded only to science later on—­at
least in the age of the technological domination of society and of its forms
of communication. Giambattista Vico, with his Scienza nuova (1744), was
instrumental to the modern rediscovery of “poetic sapience” at the origins
of human culture as the most universal, all-​­embracing form of knowledge.
Vico’s “new science” in some sense echoes Aristotle, who already in antiq-
uity, from quite a different type of scientific perspective, had underscored the
preeminent capability of poetry to disclose the universal, in which alone true
knowledge consists (Poetics 1451b).
This means, for example, that the fundamental importance and basic
human interest of astronomy—­its universal value—­might be captured more
effectively by a poem than by any astrophysical formula. The words of a
poetic text like Psalm 8 communicate the overwhelming wonder of a human
being in the face of the mystery of the universe. And just that feeling of awe,
in all its immediacy, is what lies at the source of all meaningful astronomical
inquiry:

When I consider the heavens,

the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained,
What is man that thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man, that thou visitest him?

Admittedly, it is possible to obtain from astronomical science much more

precise information about the stars and their properties than what is given in
these verses. But does that added technical knowledge—­for instance, statis-
tics concerning the stars’ orbits and material densities—­enhance the human
being’s actual experience of cognitive encounter with the phenomena of the
heavens? Does it heighten the sense of belonging to an infinitely fascinating
cosmos and the rapt wonderment through which the heavens are perceived
as divinely made, or as participating in and as manifesting the mystery of
Creation? It certainly could. The technical precisions of modern knowledge
of astronomy are nothing if not awe-​­inspiring. Still, those who love science
will not overlook its human dimension and rootedness. Otherwise, we risk
suffering an immense human loss for the sake of a merely instrumental gain
of “technical” expertise. Knowledge, humanly considered, is valuable in pro-
portion to the intensity and richness of the relationships it enables.
Involved Knowing 13

In stressing the human significance and originally poetical character of

all knowledge, whether personal or systematic, I wish to valorize scientific
inquiry and research in a new and vigorous way rather than to diminish or
disparage it. Science is without doubt one of the most thought-​­provoking
gnoseological adventures of the human race in modern times and, in certain
respects, of all time. It is the apotheosis of the speculative odyssey that began
in Greece in the sixth century b.c. with the first recorded meditations of the
pre-​­Socratic philosophers on the general nature of things.10 The incalculable
complexity and order of Creation, as it has been progressively discovered by
the more and more powerful instruments of science—­from the microscope
to the atomic particle accelerator to the laser beam—­fill those who consider
it with amazement and coerce minds like Newton’s and Einstein’s, not to
mention many more of humbler capacity, to see evidence that God does not
just play dice with the universe. Yet, in order to be this provocative revela-
tion of the infinitely rich and intricate mystery of existence, science needs to
retain a sense of the human significance of what it discovers through probing
by means of its methods and instruments ever further the facts and the very
matter of nature.
Consideration of how epic poetry and pre-​­Socratic philosophy served as
matrices for proto-​­scientific patterns of thinking makes it clear that the his-
tory of science emerges from the history of the humanities. Accordingly, my
purpose is not at all to denigrate science but rather to integrate it into the
whole spectrum of human knowledge so as to bring out its original unity
with human culture broadly construed. The predominant tendency to view
all the various disciplines of the liberal arts as species or subspecies of scien-
tific knowledge, more or less rigorous and pure, is practically irresistible. It is
one more symptom of the cultural hegemony that science has achieved in our
technocratically managed, technologically driven and dependent civilization.
However, I am proposing that we can equally well view the humanities and
their pursuit of a wisdom that reflects understanding oneself in relation to the
general order or disorder of things as embodying the spirit that pervades the
entire gamut of the liberal arts. By inducing to empathetic participation in the
experience of discovery rather than inculcating a detached domination over
positively given fields of objects, the humanities most fully realize the values
and virtues of all forms of liberal learning, including the scientific.
Typically, the sciences objectify. They bring into sharp focus a certain field
of objects, yet they can tend to block out the human situation that is com-
prehended by the peripheral vision characteristic of the humanities with their
sensitivity to the unfocused, background factors that count so much in deter-
mining the overall significance of any experience. In human knowing, there
is always a subject who cannot be completely focused as object, but who is

10. The far-​­reaching destiny of this adventure is profoundly traced by Martin

Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
14 Involved Knowing

indirectly expressed in countless ways—­as intimated, for example, by the

tenor of a discourse and the affective nuances of its language, or as conveyed
by color and perspective in painting, or by subtle orchestration of emotional
tonalities in music. And this is poetry. In humanities studies, we always need
to ask what the human meaning and value of a given form or instance of
knowledge is, for that is what makes it matter to human beings. Some sort of
subjective view and knowledge of the world is expressed even in performance
of a musical instrument, or in the choreographing of a dance, or in the craft-
ing of artifacts.11
An example from classical poetry can serve to illustrate the ineradicably
relational and personal aspects of knowledge that loom into the foreground
in humanities texts. Homer recounts with pathos the drama of the encounter
between Hector and Andromache, in which Andromache pleads with her
husband not to go out to battle, where he is going to be killed by Achilles and
so leave her a widow and her son an orphan. Like any human experience,
this encounter is not per se a fully determinate object of knowledge, a dis-
crete entity, one and the same for all concerned. Andromache’s predicament
is apprehended through her personal history and is expressed in terms of
personal symbols: they are first her own, and then they belong to any reader
who becomes involved in interpreting her story. As its appropriations in later
literature, for example, by Baudelaire in “Le Cygne” (“Andromaque, je pense
à vous . . .”) suggest, this drama is bound to mean something different to
every individual. Homer’s Andromache pleads movingly with Hector:

“Dearest,
your own great strength will be your death, and you have no pity
on your little son, nor on me, ill-​­starred, who soon must be your widow;
for presently the Achaians, gathering together,
will set upon you and kill you; and for me it would be far better
to sink into the earth when I have lost you, for there is no other
consolation for me after you have gone to your destiny—­
only grief; since I have no father, no honoured mother.
It was brilliant Achilleus who slew my father, Eëtion,
when he stormed the strong-​­founded citadel of the Kilikians,

11. Particularly feminist criticism has pointed in this direction, for example,
Hilary Rose, “Hand, Brain and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural
Sciences,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9, no. 1 (1983); and
Sarah Harding and Merrill Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Per-
spectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983). Along comparable lines, Kenneth L. Wilson and Flo-
rin Lowndes propound an “integrative epistemology” in “Heart-​­Thinking: An
Archetypal Epistemology for the Humanities and the Sciences,” International
Humanities Journal 1 (2003): 1–­12.
Involved Knowing 15

Thebe of the towering gates. He killed Eëtion

but did not strip his armour, for his heart respected the dead man,
but burned the body in all its elaborate war-​­gear
and piled a grave mound over it, and the nymphs of the mountains,
daughters of Zeus of the aegis, planted elm trees about it.
And they who were my seven brothers in the great house all went
upon a single day down into the house of the death god,
for swift-​­footed brilliant Achilleus slaughtered all of them
as they were tending their white sheep and their lumbering oxen;
and when he had led my mother, who was queen under wooded Plakos,
here, along with all his other possessions, Achilleus
released her again, accepting ransom beyond count, but Artemis
of the showering arrows struck her down in the halls of her father.
Hektor, thus you are father to me, and my honoured mother,
you are my brother, and you it is who are my young husband.
Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart,
that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow,
but draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city
is openest to attack, and where the wall may be mounted.”
(Iliad 6.404–­34, Lattimore trans.)

Everyone experiences the scene described by Andromache in a personal

way, as projected onto their own existence. Each of us has our own horizon
of possibilities, past and future, and each of us understands Andromache’s
predicament by reference to what for us personally would constitute loss of
that which is most vital to us—­the central relationship or core or unifying
concern of our lives. Understanding the experience of others entails mapping
its crucial features onto the coordinates of our own personal experience. In
this sense, human experience calls to be understood from the inside rather
than only as an object of analysis.
Just such a pitiful portrait of the widow of a fallen warrior being led
away captive, like Andromache, recurs only a little later in the Odyssey. The
bard Demodocus’s singing of the tragedy of Troy causes Odysseus, in dis-
guise among the Phaeacians, to break into torrential weeping, “As a woman
wails embracing her husband who has fallen before his own city and people,
defending the city and its children from the day of doom” (Odyssey 8.521–­
31, Cook trans.). Odysseus is moved by these heart-​­rending tales to divulge
his identity and even to elaborate it poetically in the riveting recital of his
travels related in books 9 through 12. This moment demonstrates how he
is provoked and changed personally through representations in poetry—­by
which means he then continues to forge his own legendary persona.
Odysseus’s harrowing and transformative tears in reaction to poetic
images turn up again at a later stage in tradition in Aeneas’s contemplation,
on a temple in Carthage, of murals representing the already legendary battles
16 Involved Knowing

before Troy’s gates. Aeneas discovers here the “tears of things” (“lacrimae
rerum”), which speak of universal human experiences that are communicated,
especially by poetry and art, across languages and cultures. By representing
the “tears of things,” and thus treating objects as subjects, poetry expresses
and actually contributes to “making” things what they really are, humanly
and affectively. It is in some such sense that Blake, too, can speak of a tear
as an “intellectual thing.” By freeing the subjective valences of things that
are cemented into representations of objects, poetry releases their affects to
flow from age to age. It becomes thereby the medium of a transmission of
experience through intelligible symbols that reveal humanity to itself in a per-
spective that is constitutive of its history. The history evoked here is that of
the human heart or mind and of how it is “touched by mortal things” (“sunt
lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt,” Aeneid 1.462).
To this extent, the process of knowledge in the humanities is closer to the
activity of reading than to direct, sensorial perception. Classical science tends
to understand all knowledge on the model of the perception of an object. The
object to be known is what it is wholly apart from the knower and the ques-
tion of who he or she is. Knowers simply open their “eyes” and perceive what
is objectively in front of them. In reading, on the other hand, the text in front
of the reader’s eyes does not become known, except as it is assimilated into
the reader’s own interior world: it is reformulated in the reader’s memory and
imagination, and this subjects the text to all manner of influences from the
reader’s own individual existence and personal concerns.
Indeed all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, when approached
from the distinctive point of view of the humanities, is in crucial ways more
like reading than like sensory perception. For all knowledge is humanly con-
ditioned and situated. Traditionally, science has wished to forget, or at least
to delimit, the effects of this situatedness by an intense, narrow focus on the
object alone. However, a subject is the condition of possibility of having an
object in the first place. “Subject” and “object” are nothing if not correlative
terms. The subject is constantly reading himself or herself into the object, and
this encounter and interaction with the object in turn is necessary to consti-
tute the subject.12
Today, more than ever, we need a broader perspective than that of the hard
sciences taken in and for themselves, a perspective that recognizes aspects of
reality that cannot be objectified and subjected to scientific scrutiny without
distortion. After all, why is technology increasingly achieving dominion over
the earth and destroying the physical, together with the human, environ-
ment in so many appalling ways? The name “Chernobyl,” conjuring up the
specter of a transcontinental nuclear disaster, is perhaps most apt to suggest

12. The philosophical underpinnings of such awareness are investigated espe-

cially by phenomenological currents of thought and criticism in the wake of
Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-​­Ponty.
Involved Knowing 17

some of the more sensational aspects of this pervasive catastrophe. But there
are “accidents” all the time, such as calamitous oceanic oil slicks, that prove
disastrous for the earth, and these are relatively isolated incidents compared
with the constant polluting every day that accumulates and exacerbates,
among other problems, the greenhouse effect threatening to make our planet
uninhabitable. We see everywhere, moreover, the deliberate, rampant ravag-
ing of the natural environment by urbanization, the defacing and complete
disappearance of coastlines crammed with construction, or again the all-​­too-​
c­ onspicuous eyesore of river banks heaped with the wreckage and waste of
industrial production and consumption.
Such spectacles appall our sight. However, this tragedy occurs even earlier
and more insidiously within the human spirit that endures subjection to a
view of the natural world as consisting in mere material objects available for
manipulation, with loss of the human dimension—­and a fortiori the divine
one—­which characterizes the world as it is revealed in innumerable works
of the tradition of the humanities. The effects of this crisis of the spirit have
become manifest over and over again in the arts and culture of the twentieth
century and beyond—­for example, in Dada and surrealism, in existential-
ism, in the ecology movement, in religious revivals east and west, including
“new age” religions and naturist cults. All in various ways represent a revolt
against the invincible automatization that implacably advances in the ever
more highly technologized civilization of our present historical era—­the dis-
turbing aftermath of the second millennium and troubled embarkation upon
the third.13
Because the outlook of science and technology can view only objects, it
eclipses the dimension of the infinite and indefinable that is present in what-
ever is human—­for example, in the infinite value of a single human life. All
that can be specified as an object never adds up to the human individual, nor
can it begin to exhaust the mystery of personal identity, not to mention that
of the divine person of which the human is held traditionally to be a reflection
or “image.” Science cannot pick it up on the radar screen or stethoscope or X-​
­ray machine or electroencephalograph. For it is no object but rather belongs
irreducibly to the being of a subject. The light of science can make perceptible
only objects, but objects can be objects only in relation to subjects, which a

13. A peculiarly prescient philosophical reflection on this catastrophe is found

in Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze
(Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), trans. as “The Question Concerning Technology,” in
Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). It is developed
into an ecological philosophy by his student, Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verant-
wortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt:
Insel, 1979), trans. H. Jonas and David Herr as The Imperative Responsibility:
In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984).
18 Involved Knowing

certain conventional, mainstream science tends, nevertheless, inevitably to

reduce to the status of just objects among other objects.14 Poetry, conversely,
tends to animate objects, to treat all things as subjects. The sea takes on per-
sonality as Neptune, trees are inhabited by nymphs named dryads, the air by
sprites, heaven and earth become Uranos and Gaia, “the hills leap like rams,”
and “the earth rejoices in the Lord,” at the sound of his coming.
As these quotations and allusions illustrate, humanities texts are almost
without exception also religious texts.15 This is the case at least in the sense
that they take some sort of stand concerning the whence and wherefore of
human existence, but often also more specifically through the express imag-
ination of divinity. For humanity does not exclude divinity but is defined
rather in relation to it. Humanity, from earliest times in virtually all known
cultures, has conceived of itself vis-​­à-​­vis some form of divinity. In one way
or another, virtually all the classic works of the humanities tradition hap-
pen to propose what may be understood as profoundly religious visions
of life.16
Although religion may mean very different things, this ineluctable involve-
ment with religion in some guise is even more evident close to the origins of
the humanities tradition. Homer is the source book of Greek religion at a
stage when religion is undifferentiated from myth. Virgil elaborates a theo-
logical justification of the political empire of Rome, a theodicy—­even as he
simultaneously questions and undermines it. Dante adopts classical tradition
and programmatically Christianizes it by reinterpreting classical figures and
myths as anticipations and foreshadowings of revealed Christian truth. The
calling or summons to fullness of human vision and experience is conceived
in all these texts as issuing from some kind of at least quasi-​­divine source
such as the poet’s Muse. The Bible and Augustine’s Confessions, finally, are
religious classics par excellence. This apparent inseparability of humanity

14. This paradigm of science, of course, is increasingly outdated and contested,

even within the sciences themselves, beginning perhaps most vigorously from the
life sciences. Some insights into the paradigm shift can be gleaned from David
Ray Griffin, ed., The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals (New
York: SUNY Press, 1988).
15. Overtly anti-​­religious works such as Nietzsche’s The Antichrist or Freud’s
The Future of an Illusion attack specific forms of religiosity and propose alter-
native ways of envisioning and relating to life as a whole, and in this sense they
are still, at least negatively, “religious” in their scope of vision. For a compelling
religious reading of atheist philosophers Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, see Merold
Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1998).
16. Examples of how this is being rediscovered by critical theory in our
“post-​­secular age” can be found in Mark Knight and Louise Lee, eds., Religion,
Literature, and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds (London: Continuum, 2010).
Involved Knowing 19

and divinity calls for elucidation—­it constitutes a vital topic for reflection
within studies in the humanities.
To sum up what has been said here on the threshold of this study in the
humanities: we are involved in what we know. Science necessarily forgets and
abstracts from this subjective condition of all our knowledge in the interests
of universality, objectivity, and disinterestedness. But note the contradiction.
Science, too, stems from human interest, and it never transcends this starting
point as its indispensable condition.17 Science is no less humanly involved
than any other type of knowledge, even though for methodological reasons
it undertakes to filter and separate out this human element from its object of
study. Humanities studies, in contrast, move this human element on to cen-
ter stage: they underscore the human conditionedness of all knowledge and
therewith also its generally subjective dimensions and aspects.
The point here is not to diminish the importance nor to challenge the
integrity of science but rather to see science in its essential unity with human
concerns and endeavors. For this purpose, we can do no better than to turn
to the history of education. Having characterized the specificity of human
knowledge in descriptive terms, most succinctly as “involved” knowing,
and having brought out its resistance to being measured by the standards of
scientific method, we must now open a deeper perspective into the histori-
cal development of this sort of knowledge. In doing so, we will continue to
view the knowledge specific to the humanities in its relation to the scien-
tific knowledge that apparently contrasts with human knowing but actually
develops only within and from it. Science and its methods can become a
threat to human knowing only if the distinctive character of knowledge in the
humanities is not understood and respected.

III. Vicissitudes of the Liberal Arts in the History of Education

When we lengthen our historical perspective and take a look at how human-
ities, arts, and science have positioned themselves relative to one another
throughout the history of education in the Occident, what we find is an
original inseparability and virtual indifferentiation of science (episteme) and
art (techne). Originally, the Greek word for “art,” τέχνη, meant all types of
human activity as rational—­that is, inasmuch as they involve some form of
knowing. Medicine thus qualifies as a prime example of an “art,” since it is
based on knowledge of the microcosm of the human body and its humors in
relation to the harmonies of the macrocosm, or the universe as a whole. This
is certainly what it was for its ancient founders, eminently Hippocrates (fifth

17. Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntniss und Interesse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968),

trans. as Knowledge and Human Interests (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 1987).
20 Involved Knowing

century b.c.).18 The same goes for astronomy and even mathematics. In fact,
Aristotle writes of “mathematical arts” and “poetic science.” The two, science
and art, are so much a part of the same thing that the Greek words for them
can be used sometimes interchangeably.
This near equivalence is preserved at least covertly and unconsciously today
in our word “technology.” Although technology seems to us to be automati-
cally associated with science, so that we speak in one breath of “science and
technology,” this word tellingly sinks its roots back into the Greek word for
“art”—­namely, techne. On reflection, this need not surprise us, since science
and its objectivity are necessarily rooted in human concern and involvement
such as the arts express with peculiar translucency and power. Even a physical
object or artifact reveals itself to us only in relation to our existence, with its
specific exigencies and interests, as for something, as defined by a network of
relations that confer its being and human meaning upon it, and to this extent
even physical science cannot escape a certain measure of “art.” Whether they
are considered scientific or artistic, human modes of knowing are also modes
of relating; they express an existential relationship to the things with which
they are concerned.19 Arts and sciences are indeed in this sense one and have,
accordingly, been joined in the curriculum of the liberal arts since antiquity.
The sort of knowledge that characterizes the humanities as at once
techne and episteme, as both art and science, has been pursued throughout
the history of education under the heading of the “liberal arts.” Liberal arts
programs embrace both science and humanities. This is so because both are
pursued together as essentially human forms of intellectual development and
enrichment of persons. In this frame of general education, all knowledge is
seen as fundamentally human, and in this sense the liberal arts as a whole can
be understood as hinging on the humanities: all are ultimately for the sake
of the development of the human individual. This orientation of the arts and
sciences becomes especially perspicuous in a historical perspective.

18. Andrzej Szczeklik, Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine, trans. Antonia

Lloyd-​­Jones, foreword by Czesław Miłosz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005) revives this outlook from within the practice of medicine today. The same
challenge is taken up also by Edmund D. Pellegrino in his numerous works on
medical humanities, bioethics, and the philosophy of medicine, starting from A
Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice: Toward a Philosophy and Ethic of the
Healing Professions, coauthored with David C. Thomasma (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981).
19. Martin Heidegger’s analysis of human existence (Dasein, Being-​­there) as
Being-​­in-​­the-​­world is based on relation to worldly beings’ readiness-​­to-​­hand
(Zuhandenheit), or their being adapted to use, as prior to their presence-​­at-​­hand
(Vorhandenheit), or their just being objectively there, provides a penetrating phil-
osophical elucidation of this ontological condition. See Sein und Zeit (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1963 [1927]), 69–­76 and 106, trans. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson,
Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
Involved Knowing 21

The traditional canon of the liberal arts as it came to be fixed in late antiq-
uity for the whole of the Middle Ages, embraces seven disciplines: Grammar,
Rhetoric, Dialectics, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy.20 The first
three of these disciplines were grouped together and known as the Trivium.
All are in various ways language arts and cultivate verbal skills. The four
remaining disciplines—­making up the Quadrivium—­are all quantitative in
nature instead. Music, too, was treated as a science of numbers and propor-
tions and even as a pure mathematics: it was every bit as quantitative—­or
abstract and exact—­as astronomy, which concerned measurements of heav-
enly bodies and their motions.

The Seven Liberal Arts

Trivium Quadrivium
Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectics Arithmetic, Geometry, Music,
Astronomy
(verbal arts) (quantitative arts)

Speculation on the rank and sequence of the various liberal arts was rife
from ancient times, all through the Middle Ages, and on into the Renais-
sance. Indeed it remains in different guises a burning issue still today. At stake
here is the selection and valuation of the types of study the young are trained
in, and thus the basic outlook imparted to mature individuals—­the very men-
tality imprinted by a civilization on those whose minds it forms and nurtures.
One idea that was frequently broached from early on is that the language arts
constitute the necessary basis for all further learning. The word thus assumes
a leading role as the enabling factor and the originating source of knowledge.
Grammar, the art of writing, accordingly, was conceived as the foundation
of all the arts and, consequently, of all knowledge. It could even be taken to
reveal the origins and essences of things themselves. Theological support for
this idea was found in the biblical doctrine of Creation by the Word (Genesis
1 and John 1:1–­3), which declares the divine Word to be at the very origin
of the existence of all things. One great champion of grammar, for example,
Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, in his encyclopedic Etymologiarum,
analyzed the names of things etymologically in order to discover inherent in
them the intrinsic natures of the things named. In this perspective, the com-
plex interconnections between love (amor), death (mors), and bitter (amer)
could all be found written into the respective (Latin) words for these things,
the names of which seem to suggest their intimate relations. All reality in this
manner was conceived of as revealed immanently in language.

20. This roster was established especially by Martianus Capella’s On the Mar-
riage of Philology and Mercury (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, 439 a.d.),
which became a standard textbook in the Middle Ages.
22 Involved Knowing

According to another variant, the integrating factor of all knowledge and

education could be found in the art of persuasion, namely, rhetoric. Thus
Quintilian—­following Cicero’s ethical-​­philosophical slanting of the art of
oratory—­exalted the perfect orator or rhetorician as the consummate mas-
ter of all fields of knowledge. In the same manner, the third member of the
Trivium, dialectics, the art of discerning the truth by logical analysis, was
considered by philosophers in the lineage of Plato as furnishing the only reli-
able criterion of true knowledge as against opinion. All of these views make
the Trivium, or one particular branch of it, primary as the noblest part and
the true basis of all learning.
However, it was also possible to emphasize rather the preliminary status of
the first three disciplines in the series in order to claim greater prestige for the
Quadrivium as comprising the higher disciplines furnishing substantive knowl-
edge, for which the verbal disciplines were considered as merely a propaedeutic.
More generally, this reflects the split between linguistic and mathematical
approaches to learning that has created tensions in every age, just as it contin-
ues to do still today. Plato, for example, took mathematics as the model of true
knowledge and associated poetry with illusory images. On his authority, ever
since antiquity, philosophy has often asserted its hegemony over poetry, which
is charged with purveying merely pleasing fictions or even malicious lies. The
battle between literature-​­based, poetic knowledge and more logically rigorous
and rational forms of knowledge is perennial. Plato’s banishment of the poets
from his ideal Republic (book 10), on grounds that their representations are
too far removed from the truth, set a precedent that history has frequently
repeated. In the high Middle Ages, a predominantly rhetorical culture based
on literary study was again challenged by the newer proto-​­scientific and sys-
tematic reasoning that asserted itself in the shape of Scholasticism. Humanities
learning, which flourished, for example, in the school of Chartres during the
twelfth century, was eventually superseded by the dialectical theology emanat-
ing from the University of Paris in the thirteenth century.21
The pattern of conflict between proponents of classical literary tradition
and advocates of various forms of rational critique continued in the Renais-
sance. A great age for this debate is reached with the humanism of the Italian
Renaissance. Scholars such as Coluccio Salutati (1331–­ 1406), Leonardo
Bruni (1370–­1444), and Giovanni Pontano (1426–­1503) attempted to recu-
perate the sense of all knowledge as fundamentally poetic in nature.22 The

21. John Marenbon, “Humanism, Scholasticism and the School of Chartres,”

International Journal of the Classical Tradition 6, no. 4 (2000): 569–­77; R. W.
Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, I, Foundations
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
22. A powerful contemporary proponent of this philosophical tradition is
Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).
Involved Knowing 23

pendulum swings back again with the founding of modern science, emblem-
atically in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620). This work establishes
a logic of scientific inquiry on the basis of observation and experimentation
guided by the principle of induction. No less influentially, René Descartes’s
Discourse on Method (1637) rejects the whole tradition of learning handed
down in words from generation to generation in order to begin building the
impregnable edifice of certain, deductive knowledge anew on the foundation
of the individual inquirer’s own clear and distinct perceptions. Indeed, the
whole history of education can be viewed schematically as playing out the
tensions between poetic or literary learning and culture, on the one hand, and
technical, scientific types of knowledge on the other. While Plato (429–­347
b.c.) banishes most poets from his Republic, for other ancient thinkers, like
the almost exactly contemporary Isocrates (436–­338 b.c.), poets are the key
educators, those who are able to lead the soul through images to truth. The
tensions between the more humanistic and the more scientific orientation of
studies today—­felt acutely, for example, at the level of university budgetary
allocations—­are the prolongation of this ancient rivalry that turns sometimes
into deadly strife.
Just as hotly debated as the relative rank among the various liberal arts
was their place, as a group, within the overall order of knowledge. Were the
liberal arts, taken together, to serve as preparation for some higher type of
study, such as philosophy or theology, or law, or could they be considered
to be an end in themselves, even the ultimate attainment of knowledge or
culture, and hence, at least in the medieval view, of human perfection? Hugh
of St. Victor, followed by Thomas Aquinas, makes the artes a propaedeu-
tic for philosophy, while for Saint Bonaventure all arts and sciences depend
directly on theology and ultimately on revelation for their unity, clarity, and
completeness.23 The idea of taking theology as “the ultimate ‘social science’ ”
is not without its advocates still today. John Milbank argues indeed that
theology, as God’s imparted self-​­knowledge, must lay claim to being solely
capable, on its own terms, of discerning completely the truth concerning the
universe and human beings’ existence within it and thus to being the one
form of knowledge that can correctly position all the others.24
Efforts to co-​­opt the liberal arts into some other program of education for
which they would serve as a foundation began early. However, the intention

23. Hugh of St. Victor, Eruditio Didascalica, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 176, ed.
J.-​­P. Migne (Turnholti: Brepols, 1862); Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad
theologiam, ed. Sister Emma Thérèse Healy (Saint Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan
Institute, 1955), 2nd ed.
24. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason
(London: Blackwell, 2006 [1990]), 6. See also Milbank’s “The Conflict of the
Faculties: Theology and the Economy of the Sciences,” in The Future of Love:
Essays in Political Theology (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2009), 301–­15.
24 Involved Knowing

was not necessarily to instrumentalize the liberal arts, so that their practical
value could be cashed out for purposes extraneous to themselves, so much as
to continue in their spirit of liberal learning for its own sake carried over into
further spheres of intellectual endeavor or of concrete life. For Galen (c. 130–­
c. 210 a.d.), in the tradition of Hippocrates, the arts were preparatory to the
study of medicine, but medicine entailed a complete and even a contempla-
tive knowledge of the general order of the cosmos. For Vitruvius, in the first
century b.c., the arts readied the student for studying architecture, which
was conceived of as the all-​­embracing framework of knowledge, since the
works and activities of all the arts and sciences, and of civilization as a whole,
needed to be situated somewhere within the spaces defined by architecture.
Similar sorts of subordination of the liberal arts have occurred for religious
motives in the myriad syntheses since antiquity of Judeo-​­Christian with clas-
sical Greco-​­Roman tradition. For Philo, Clement, and Origen in the first and
second centuries in Alexandria, as well as for church fathers in the Roman
tradition up to Carolingian times, and then particularly for Alcuin (735–­
804), the liberal arts were the necessary prerequisite for advanced studies in
philosophy and theology. Already this might suggest, at least ambiguously,
their being understood as techniques valuable for their utility in application
to some purpose beyond themselves. But this is certainly not the understand-
ing of their nature that is most proper to the liberal arts as such—­unless
we understand them as being integrated in this way into the highest, omni-​
c­omprehensive forms of knowledge represented by medicine, architecture,
philosophy, or theology, and thus as participating in the ultimate ends of
humanity.
Inherent in the very words artes liberales is the idea that these studies are
essentially not subservient but free and autonomous and valuable for their
own sake quite apart from their professional and pragmatic applications.
Aristotle so defines them in book 8, chapter 2 of the Politics. In Seneca’s state-
ment, famous in antiquity, the artes liberales are those arts whose purpose is
not to make money (Letter 88). This notion, at its purest, involves a sort of
contemplative ideal, whereby knowledge taken for itself is esteemed as the
highest value for humans. Aristotle established this value of knowledge for its
own sake by defining metaphysics as “first philosophy” and explaining that
its being studied for the sake of nothing else beyond itself was the greatest
distinction and honor possible for any type of knowing (Metaphysics, book
1, chapter 2). In this perspective, the highest form of human life is the intel-
lectual one, quite independently of any instrumental value that the uses of the
intellect may have. The act of intellection, coinciding with love—­in essence
a purely intellectual act for Plato—­is the most perfect human activity, and to
achieve it is to participate even in divinity in the Platonic and especially the
Neoplatonic conception.
The liberal arts, when studied for their own sake, thus partake of the
kind of knowing considered as in itself the supreme realization of being
Involved Knowing 25

human. The idea of their forming a continuum with philosophy and

theology—­each of which, in its own way, also claims to be first and final
knowledge—­actually validates the ideal that the liberal arts should incar-
nate knowledge as an end in itself. Taken in their radical freedom as liberal
study, the “humanities” tend to transcend all given frameworks and all set
definitions of human ends and purposes. They thereby open knowledge
to speculative scrutiny and to creative reinvention. Such speculative pur-
suit of knowledge in the humanities opens up and probes the question of
what lies beyond—­or at least of what globally determines—­the horizon
of the human. In this sense, liberal studies can be understood as intrinsi-
cally philosophical and even as implicitly theological. The free exercise of
knowledge in any field whatsoever (whether geometry or music or gram-
mar) is a way of contemplating the general order of things from a particular
perspective: every aspect or dimension of the cosmos reveals, from a cer-
tain angle of vision, the nature of the entire ensemble. In this outlook, the
ultimate ground or raison d’être of all things can be fathomed analogically
through each specific kind of liberal study in relation to some special sub-
ject matter. Each subject is pursued freely and as unlimited in its potential
for illuminating and fulfilling individuals by relating them to reality as a
whole.
Without this dimension of a vocation to free contemplation of all that
is, the personal and human character of all real, concrete knowledge would
be eclipsed: it would become instrumentalized and would serve merely as a
tool for some extrinsic and pragmatic purpose bound inevitably to material
interests. Indeed, the dominant tendency in modern times is to construe the
liberal arts as serviceable tools or as preparatory exercises. Math and science,
as well as English, can be necessary and useful training for further technical
and professional specialization. College catalogs typically state that training
in the study of the liberal arts is “fundamental” because it is “the basis of all
professional study” (Vanderbilt University Catalogue, 1991).
This type of statement can easily be misleading and risks marginalizing
the spirit of the humanities, which—­ properly understood—­ animates the
whole spectrum of the liberal arts. Unless it is made clear that the liberal
arts prepare for professional study only indirectly by forging whole indi-
viduals capable of applying their talents in whatever ways they choose and
by instilling in them the pure passion to learn, this view reflects the demise
of belief in liberal learning and in the intellectual life it enables as itself the
highest activity of which a human being is capable. It eventually leads to the
abandonment of study of the liberal arts for other types of “training,” which
will undoubtedly be proved by statistics to be more effective preparation for
careers in our ever more technical working world. Nevertheless, such results
and their implications also continue to be a subject of vigorous debate. It is
often ably argued that precisely the mental flexibility of a non-​­vocational,
non-​­technical study of liberal arts is most apt to empower young minds to
26 Involved Knowing

adapt to situations and technologies that change faster than instructional

programs can be revamped.25
Science and humanities alike within the liberal arts curriculum have, since
antiquity, had as their purpose not so much technical mastery and the objec-
tive knowledge of facts as individual development and the enhancement of
human cultural life. The word in ancient Greek for education was paideia—­
the cultural forming of children.26 In German, the word for education or
culture is Bildung, and it concerns the disciplined building up of persons into
full realization of their human potential. Science is part of this. It belongs to
the concerted program of development of the whole individual. Only in this
context do the sciences remain connected with and mindful of their own final
meaning and purpose. To this extent, the humanities have set the tone for the
liberal arts since earliest times. It was never completely forgotten in antiq-
uity that the humanities, or more broadly the liberal arts, according to their
most proper calling, were to be viewed as a kind of haute culture without
further purpose or ulterior motives—­the priceless culture of a free person.
For Cicero, the art of living, ars vivendi, was the only one worth learning. By
their own original conception, all the liberal arts are valuable to the extent
that they teach—­together with whatever specific technical instruction—­this
art of living.
For Augustine, in his challenging dialogue De ordine, written at Cassacia-
cum in 386 a.d., shortly after his conversion to Christianity and while he was
still very close to his first profession as a teacher of rhetoric, all the liberal arts
are taught “partly for their use in life, partly for knowledge and contempla-
tion of things” (“artes illae omnes liberales, partim ad usum vitae, partim ad
cognitionem rerum contemplationemque discantur”). It is, moreover, “very
difficult to pursue them except for someone who ingeniously from very youth
has been constantly and insistently devoted to their practice” (“usum earum
assequi difficillimum est nisi ei qui ab ipsa pueritia ingeniosissimus instantis-
sime atque constantissime operam dederit”).27

25. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense

of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1997) for contemporary perspectives on the continuing value of classical educa-
tion, as well as on the need for adaptations. Not For Profit: Why Democracy
Needs the Humanities (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010) accen-
tuates and updates her case. Harry R. Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul: Does
Liberal Education Have a Future? (New York: Public Affairs, 2007) is a clarion
call to defend this model of education.
26. Werner Jaeger, Paedeia: Die Formung des grieschichen Menschen (Berlin:
W. de Gruyter, 1934), trans. Gilbert Highet as Paedeia: The Ideals of Greek Cul-
ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).
27. Augustine, De ordine, ed. Silvano Borruso (South Bend: St. Augustine’s
Press, 2007), 2.16.44.
Involved Knowing 27

Drawing particularly on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Augustine por-

trays reason (and by implication philosophy) as the origin of the liberal arts
and of human society in general. Building on this foundation, reason recog-
nizes itself at work in the creation of the sciences and is led by this critical
reflection to self-​­knowledge and eventually to the knowledge of God and his
providence as the ground of reason itself and as the supreme rational prin-
ciple governing the universe.
Augustine’s system of the order of knowledge gears it all consistently
toward self-​­ knowledge and intellectual “conversion.”28 The theological
implications of this kind of knowledge are insisted on throughout the De
ordine, which has been recognized as the first philosophical exposition of the
systematic unity and progression of the seven liberal arts.29 For Augustine,
all studies in every domain of nature and culture illuminate the nature and
freedom of the divine reason beyond human ken that is manifest analogi-
cally in the order of things throughout the universe. The ultimate aim of such
study is nothing less than the blessed life, as Augustine makes explicit in the
contemporaneous dialogue De vita beata (386).30
Accordingly, each liberal art should be understood not just as a separate
discipline unto itself but as a way of contemplating the universe as a whole
and so of seeing each kind of knowledge in relation to all the others. Each
liberal art is open to every other and, in fact, to all fields of knowledge as
complementary lenses for contemplating the whole cosmos together with the
place of the individual knower within it. All knowledge is relational and
without intrinsic limits—­and, in this sense, ultimately “religious” in scope
and tenor. Liberal arts do not just add a few enticing ornaments of a more
frivolous kind to the technical training that would be the real business of
higher education. They are rather the soul of education as it has been under-
stood throughout the Western tradition. They offer an initiation into a whole
approach to living through awareness of self as vitally related to others in the
overall order of things in the universe.
Transmitting Augustine’s vision, John Scott Eriugena (c. 810–­ c. 877)
underscores the speculative purport of liberal learning and its leading to an
all-​­encompassing theological wisdom. He conceives of “the seven disciplines

28. Michael Patrick Foley, The “De ordine” of St. Augustine (Ann Arbor,
Mich.: UMI, 2006).
29. Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique: Con-
tribution à l’histoire de l’éducation et de la culture dans l’antiquité (Paris: Vrin,
2005 [1984]), 101–­36.
30. Augustine’s seminal role in the comprehensive idea of education pro-
pounded here is further sounded by Henri I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de
la culture antique, 4th ed. (Paris: Boccard, 1958), and in Augustine and Liberal
Education, ed. Kim Paffenroth and Kevin L. Hughes (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate,
2000).
28 Involved Knowing

which philosophers call liberal” as “symbols of the plenitude of intelligible

contemplation, in which God and creatures are most purely known” (“Septem
disciplinas, quas philosophi liberales appellant, intelligibilis contemplativae
plenitudinis, qua Deus et creatura purissime cognoscitur, significationes esse
astruit”). He affirms that, “just as many waters from diverse sources flow
together and run into the bed of a single river, so the natural and liberal disci-
plines are gathered and run together into one and the same figure of internal
contemplation, that supreme fountain of all wisdom, which is Christ, thence
to meander among diverse theological speculations” (“Ut enim multae aquae
ex diversis fontibus in unius fluminis alveum confluunt atque decurrunt,
ita naturales et liberales disciplinae in una eademque internae contempla-
tionis significatione adunantur, quem summus fons totius sapientiae, qui est
Christus, undique per diversas theologiae speculationes insinuate”).31 Such
contemplation of the intrinsic unity of knowledge as a whole was the Augus-
tinian legacy that would continue to develop throughout the Middle Ages,
particularly from the Carolingian Renaissance forward.32
The humanities in this view emerge as the lifeblood of the liberal arts.
We have at least glimpsed a perspective hailing from antiquity in which lib-
eral education in the humanities appears as the vital center of all learning
rather than as peripheral and as merely preparatory to vocational training.
Of course, this latter goal may also be achieved at the same time and in the
best way. We have seen emerge, on counts both of method and history, the
claim of the humanities to be an autonomous form of universal knowing. The
humanities offer their own kind of wisdom, which is not to be supplanted
by any technique or system: it has proved to be indispensable to the work-
ing and to the very sense of the whole system of knowledge as it has evolved
down to our own modern predicament. Humanities knowledge even stakes a
claim to being considered the pinnacle of this whole edifice of knowledge—­a
claim that great books courses aim to test and defend. These reflections must
suffice to suggest preliminarily the paramount importance of this traditional
form of cultivation to the health and development of a humanity that exceeds
the dimensions of all possible objects of scientific analysis and opens upon
the mystery and infinity of all that is—­upon what from age to age has been
conceived of persistently in terms of “the divine.”

31. Eriugena, Super caelestem hierarchiam I, in Patrologia latina 122, pp. 139–­
40. Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina (Paris: J. P. Migne, 1844–­64).
32. Marie-​­Thérèse d’Alverny, “La sagesse et ses sept filles: Recherches sur les
allégories de la philosophie et des arts libéraux du IXe au XIIe siècle,” in Mélanges
dédiés à la mémoire de Félix Grat (Paris: Pecqer-​­Grat, 1946), 1: 245–­78.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
It singed it right froo. I sawed it singing with its long beard.
And when it had singed all the song, it ran away—for to get along to
look for the man, oo know. And the crocodile got along after it—for
to bite it, oo know. And the mouse got along after the crocodile.”
“Wasn’t the crocodile running?”
“He wasn’t running,” said Bruno, “and he wasn’t crawling. He went
struggling along like a portmanteau. And he held his chin ever so
high in the air——”
“What did he do that for?”
“‘Cause he hadn’t got a toofache!” said Bruno. “Can’t oo make out
nuffin wizout I ‘splain it? Why, if he’d had a toofache, a course he’d
have held his head down—like this—and he’d have put a lot of warm
blankets round it!”
“Did he have any blankets?”
“Course he had blankets,” said Bruno. “Does oo think crocodiles goes
walks wisout blankets? And he frowned with his eyebrows. And the
goat was welly flightened at his eyebrows.”
“I’d never be afraid of eyebrows.”
“I should think oo would, though, if they’d got a crocodile fastened
to them, like these had!”
And so the man jamp, and he jamp, and at last he got right out of
the hole.
And he runned away—for to look for the goat, oo know. And he
heard the lion grunting.
And its mouth were like a large cupboard. And it had plenty of room
in its mouth. And the lion runned after the man—for to eat him, oo
know. And the mouse runned after the lion.
“And first he caught the crocodile, and then he didn’t catch the lion.
And when he’d caught the crocodile, what does oo think he did
—‘cause he’d got pincers in his pocket? Why, he wrenched out that
crocodile’s toof!”
“Which tooth?”
“The toof he were going to bite the goat with, a course!”
“And what became of the man?”
“Well, the lion springed at him. But it came so slow, it were three
weeks in the air——”
“Did the man wait for it all that time?”
“Course he didn’t. He sold his house, and he packed up his things,
while the lion were coming. And he went and he lived in another
town. So the lion ate the wrong man.”
Lewis Carroll.
 The Bluebottle Who Went Courting

A gay young Bluebottle went out courting.

And first he flew into the king’s palace to woo the king’s
daughter.
Now, she was the most beautiful princess in all the world, and had a
thousand suitors at her feet.
So the Bluebottle came and settled on her hand, and sang:
“Zum, zum, zoo,
I want to marry you!”

But the princess didn’t understand the song. She only saw a great
bluebottle fly, and she tried to flick it off her hand. But the Bluebottle
sat fast. Then the princess cried out:
“Here’s a great horrid fly on my hand, and it won’t move! Quick!
some one take it away!”
At that, you may be sure, all the suitors came running up, and made
grabs at the Bluebottle; and the cleverest of them caught him
between his finger and thumb and nearly crushed the life out of him.
But he managed to wriggle free, and in his flight he flew at the king
himself and settled right on the tip of the royal nose.
Then the king gave a terrific snort and hit the Bluebottle such a blow
that if it hadn’t just missed him he would certainly have been killed.
By this time, I can tell you, the Bluebottle was in such a state that
he didn’t know whether he was on his head or his heels. So he
buzzed round and round the room, and was chased from one
courtier to the other, and dashed his wings against the window-
panes, and at last the king threw his scepter at him, and the scepter
hit the fattest duchess in the room, and bounded off and struck the
Bluebottle on the head.
You may fancy how that confused the poor thing! And so he flew
into the fireplace, and got his left wing scorched, and he only just
managed to crawl up the chimney by the skin of his teeth.
But a maiden bluebottle, who was distantly related to his family,
nursed his wing for him, and so pretty soon he was as gay as ever.
Then he said:
“Very well, if I can’t have the princess, I’ll have the next best thing.”
And so he flew into the king’s stable and sat himself down right on
the back of the princess’s favorite mare.
“Zum, zum, zoo,
I want to marry you!”

he hummed.
But the mare took not the least notice of his song. She only shifted
her feet irritably, for the Bluebottle tickled her.
“Zum, zum, zoo,
I want to marry you!”

repeated the Bluebottle, quite boldly.

At that the mare gave a flick of her tail and hit the Bluebottle slap!
bang! right in the middle of his bright azure waistcoat, so that he
was sent spinning in among the straw that littered the floor.
So there he lay, buzzing mournfully, till the maiden bluebottle came
along and rubbed him all over, and put him on his feet again.
And pretty soon he was gayer than ever, and thought how he would
go courting once more.
“Better stick to your own station,” said his lady friend.
But he only tossed his head and sniffed scornfully.
And then he put on a brand-new waistcoat and flew into the king’s
kitchen, where the princess’s favorite cat lay purring on the hearth.
And the Bluebottle lost no time at all, but crept straight into the cat’s
right ear and sang his song:
“Zum, zum, zoo,
I want to marry you!”

Now, the cat had just been dreaming the most delicious dream
about the fattest mouse you can think of, and the buzzing in her ear
just woke her up in the most exciting part.
And so, you may guess, she wasn’t in the best of tempers.
Whether she heard the Bluebottle’s proposal of marriage or not, I
really can’t say. If she did, you may be sure it didn’t please her, for
she just made a snatch with her paw and grabbed him by the leg.
Now, it would have been all up with him if the maiden relative hadn’t
flown up in the very nick of time and tickled the cat’s nose.
Very well, that made the cat sneeze so violently that she let go of
the Bluebottle’s leg, and so he flew away. But his leg was broken;
and the doctor came every day for a week, and then he sent in his
bill. And the maiden friend brought all her savings rolled up in an old
stocking of her mother’s. And so the Bluebottle paid the doctor, and
there was an end of that.
Now, would you believe it, the Bluebottle was so young and giddy
that his leg was scarcely well before he began to wonder where he
should go courting next.
“When there are so many old maids in the world,” said he, “it’s a
bachelor’s duty to look round for a wife. I do it out of charity.”
“Charity begins at home,” said his lady friend, and blushed in a
modest way.
But the Bluebottle was not the kind of person to take a hint. So he
just put on another new waistcoat, and away he flew into the
woods.
And there a fine young lady woodpecker was hopping about digging
for worms in a ladylike manner.
“Now, here is a person after my own heart,” said the Bluebottle.
“She doesn’t wait for us men to bring her food; she just helps
herself. I might do worse than marry her.”
And without a minute’s hesitation he began to buzz round and round
the woodpecker, singing his old song:
“Zum, zum, zoo,
I want to marry you!”

When the woodpecker caught sight of him, she cocked her tail in a
knowing way.
“Change of food is as good as change of air,” said she, and gave a
peck that nearly finished the Bluebottle there and then, and tore his
right wing from end to end.
So there he was, sprawling on his back with his legs curled up in
agony, for a torn wing is no trifle. And now the woodpecker would
certainly have gobbled him up; but just then the faithful maiden
friend, who had followed the Bluebottle because he was bound to
get into mischief, hurried up. When she saw the state of things, she
didn’t stop twice to think, but took a dead leaf and dropped it right
over the Bluebottle.
Now, when the woodpecker saw the maiden Bluebottle, she took her
for the bachelor, and gave another peck. But the maiden flew away
and hid behind a fern, and so the woodpecker went back to her
worms.
“Oh! Oh! I’m dead! I’m dead!” groaned the Bluebottle under the leaf.
“Nonsense!” said his lady friend. “Rubbish doesn’t die so easily!”
You see, she was severe because her pride had been hurt.
“Oh, dear, kind friend, don’t fly away and leave me!” begged the
Bluebottle meekly.
“You’ve flown away and left me often enough,” said the lady friend.
“I’ll never do it again as long as I live!” cried he.
“You couldn’t if you wanted to,” said she, and stroked the broken
wing.
“Oh, why wasn’t I content with a bluebottle bride?” groaned he.
“No lady bluebottle will look at you now,” said she, “for you’ll always
fly lame as long as you live.”
“Oh, won’t you take pity on me?” asked the poor Bluebottle, who felt
thoroughly humble by this time.
Then his lady friend put her own strong wing under his broken one.
“I’ll marry you—out of charity,” she said, and flew away with him.
 How Two Beetles Took Lodgings

O nce upon a time there was a worthy set of ants, who lived
together as happily as possible in their little town at the foot of
a fine old oak-tree.
They were honest, peaceable folk, and always did as the three
queen ants who ruled over them told them to do.
The young men stayed quietly at home until it was time for them to
get married, and the young ladies, who had nothing else to do, did
the same.
As for the working people—But here’s a curious state of things!
You’ll never find a working “man” in an ant city as long as you live,
for all the workers are females, even the soldiers, you may take my
word for that!
Well, as for these, they were at it morning, noon, and night, digging
and building and fetching food for the whole town, looking after the
eggs—of which there were so many you could never have counted
them—and seeing that all the baby ants were quite happy and
comfortable.
Now, things would have gone on very well indeed if other people
had only left these worthy ants alone. But they did not—and this is
where my story really begins.
One fine day a set of ants belonging to quite another tribe came to
the forest, and built themselves a town not far from the first.
And these ants—it grieves me to write it—were far from peaceful
and honest like their neighbors. To tell the truth, they were nothing
more nor less than robbers.
They had not been very long in the place before their soldiers—all
womenfolk, too!—made a raid on the town of the mild and harmless
ants, and carried off all the girl babies they could lay hands on. And
the moment the children were old enough to work, they were made
into slaves, and had to do all the roughest and hardest work.
Well, you may guess there was sorrow in the town of the peaceful
ants. They were too weak to fight their foes, and so they just had to
sit down and bear it as best they could.
Now, what happened once, happened again, and yet again, till at
last the harmless ants made up their minds to move and build
themselves a new city in another part of the forest.
And so they did. But it was all of no use, for the robbers followed
them, and then the same thing happened all over again. So soon as
there was a fine, fat, promising bunch of girl babies in the town, the
robbers came and carried them into slavery.
One misfortune followed fast upon another. Not long after the ants
had moved into their new town, a beetle and his wife came stalking
in, and demanded lodgings in the queen’s palace.
They were smartly dressed in blue and green coats of the latest cut,
but they carried no baggage except a tooth-brush, that stuck out of
the Beetle’s wife’s pocket. This was suspicious, and they looked so
hungry and thirsty, into the bargain, that it was not to be wondered
at that the poor queen ant pulled a long face.
“We’re traveling for pleasure,” said the Beetle’s wife, “and we shall
have much pleasure in staying here as long as we like.”
With that she walked straight up to the best bedroom, said she
hoped the sheets were aired, and went to bed, while her husband
talked pleasantly with the three queens, and ate three dozen new-
laid ants’ eggs for his supper.
The unhappy queens soon saw what kind of visitors they had got.
The Beetles made themselves at home everywhere—in the palace
and out of it—and called for whatever they wanted. The working
ants had to wait on them hand and foot. There was the Beetle’s
shaving water to be got first thing in the morning, and the Beetle’s
wife’s cup of milk fresh from the cow. For ants, you must know, keep
their cows, just as human beings do, though the milk of the ant cow
is more like sugar water than anything else we have.
Then there never was any one who could do with so many meals in
the course of a single day as that Beetle and his wife. They just ate
and drank from morning to night, and it was all the ants could do to
keep the palace larder stocked.
All the choicest morsels, the finest seeds and salads the workers
could bring fell to the Beetles’ share, while the queens got what was
left.
There was no peace and quiet in the town. The Beetles pried into
every hole and corner, spread themselves in everybody’s parlor, and
paraded the streets singing and whistling when quiet folks wanted to
rest.
But, what was worst of all, they showed never a sign of moving on.
“I thought you said you were traveling,” the bravest of the queens
ventured to remark at last.
“Why, so we were!” said the Beetles. “But one must settle down
some time or other, and your air really suits us very well.”
“Did you hear that?” whispered one young working ant to another.
The two had come to the palace with a pitcher of milk just in time to
listen to the conversation.
“They’ll never leave us,” said the second ant.
“Not unless some one takes steps,” returned the first ant.
“And, pray, whose steps, and why?” asked the second.
“You always were stupid,” said the first one, and gave her waist a
twitch—which is a way ants have when they are put out. “Now, if
some one were to take my advice,” she went on, “but there’s nobody
in all the town with two pennyworth of spirit. Nobody would take my
advice.”
“I suppose you couldn’t take it yourself?” asked the second ant, who
really was not quite as stupid as people thought.
“It never occurred to me,” said the first ant; “but now you mention
it, perhaps I might.”
And then the first ant thought and thought, and the end of it was
that she slipped out of the town so soon as her day’s work was
finished and strolled away toward the town where the robber ants
lived.
And presently a fierce old soldier-ant came marching out at the gate.
Then the little worker’s heart beat very fast, and she turned as pale
as an ant can turn.
“‘Nothing venture, nothing win,’” she said to herself, and walked
straight up to the soldier.
“Hallo! Who are you?” said the soldier.
“Oh, I’m a neighbor of yours, from Beechtown,” said the little ant.
“I’m just taking a stroll before supper.”
“A stroll before supper!” cried the soldier, staring very hard. “You
don’t seem to have much work to do over there.”
“Why, no, I can’t say I have,” said the little ant.
“But I can see by your dress you’re a servant,” said the soldier-
woman.
“So I am,” said the little ant. “But we servants of Beechtown have an
easy place. A bit of dusting now and then, and a little light
needlework; that’s all.”
“I heard a very different story only the other day,” said the soldier.
“Ah, but everything’s changed since the Beetles came,” said the little
worker. “They do all the dirty work; and, my goodness! they can
work, you may take my word for that! It’s worth something, I can
tell you, to have two fine Beetles like that in the town!”
“Aha!” thought the soldier-woman to herself, “here’s something for
us!”
And she was so taken up with thinking that she forgot to bid the
little ant good night, and there and then she marched straight back
to her town to tell the general what she had heard.
But the little ant went home well pleased with herself. And, sure
enough, what she expected would happen did happen.
The robber-ants, as soon as they heard the soldier’s story, were as
eager as possible to carry off the two Beetles who could work so
well.
And to prevent any fuss and bother, this is what they did:
They took a great pitcher of ant-cow’s milk and mixed with it a few
drops of the poison, which, as every one knows, an ant always
carries about with her in her poison-bag. Then twelve soldiers took
the pitcher to Beechtown and waited outside the gate for the Beetles
to come out. And directly they saw them coming they put down the
pitcher and hid behind a mountain of dead leaves.
But the Beetles drank up the sweet stuff till there was not a drop left
at the bottom of the pail, and immediately the poison began to
work, and both the Beetle and his wife fell back in a heap on to the
grass, and there they lay, and could stir neither hand nor foot.
The robbers, you may fancy, lost no time, bundled the pair on to a
stout rhubarb leaf, and dragged them away to their own city as fast
as they could go.
Now, scarcely had they got them there when the poison began to
wear off—for ants’ poison is not very strong, you see—and pretty
soon the Beetle’s wife sat up and pinched her husband. It was not
long before he sat up, too; and by and by those two were as clear in
their heads and as firm on their legs as any two beetles ever were.
And now there was an unpleasant surprise in store for the robber-
ants. When the Beetle’s wife had looked round a bit, she said to her
husband:
“Why, it seems comfortable enough here. I don’t think we’ll trouble
to go back to Beechtown. I think this will suit us very well.”
“Well, well, we’ll just see what the cooking’s like,” said he, and went
straight to the palace where the six queen-ants who ruled over the
robbers lived. He just said: “How-d’ye-do?” to the queens in an off-
hand way, and then he sat down and helped himself to all the dishes
he could find in the larder.
His wife, she did the same, and between them they finished all the
food there was.
And so they went on, just as they were used to doing in Beechtown,
and it did not take the robbers long to find out the mistake they had
made.
The Beetles had never done a day’s work in their lives, and they had
no notion of beginning now, just because the robbers expected it.
When they heard how they had been carried off, and why, they
thought the whole affair a very good joke, and laughed and laughed
till they grew purple in the face, and had to slap each other on the
back to keep from choking.
The robbers, you may believe me, were as angry as angry could be.
They coaxed and they threatened, but neither the Beetle nor his
wife would do a stroke of work. On the contrary, they took such a
deal of waiting upon that the robbers were driven well-nigh crazy,
and racked their brains for a way to get rid of them.
But the Beetles liked their new quarters very well, and there they
stopped.
So things went on, till at last the robbers made up their minds to
give the Beetles the slip. And one dark night, while they were
asleep, they packed their trunks and left the town. But the gate
wanted oiling, and creaked so as they swung it open that the
Beetle’s wife got nightmare and woke up.
In a minute, you may be sure, she had found out what was going
on, and had wakened her husband. Then the two crept very softly
out at the gate and kept the ants at a comfortable distance.
So the end of it all was that, though the robbers went far into the
forest, many leagues from their old town, they had no sooner
finished building the new one than in marched the Beetles, and went
on in their old way as though nothing had happened.
Now, the robbers had settled so far away from Beechtown that it
was not worth their while to come and steal the children of the
harmless ants, for they found another town nearer to hand.
And so the harmless ants lived together quite happily and peacefully
once more, and the clever little worker, to whom they owed their
good fortune, was raised to great honor and glory.
But the robbers had to make the best of the Beetles, for get rid of
them they never could. And if ever you should be passing that way,
why, I make no doubt you’ll find them there still.
 Little Tuppen

O ne day an old hen whose name was Cluck-cluck went into the
woods with her little chick Tuppen to get some blueberries to
eat. But a berry stuck fast in the little one’s throat, and he fell upon
the ground, choking and gasping. Cluck-cluck, in great fright, ran to
fetch some water for him.
She ran to the Spring and said: “My dear Spring, please give me
some water. I want it for my little chick Tuppen, who lies choking
and gasping under the blueberry-bush in the green woods.”
The Spring said: “I will give you some water if you will bring me a
cup.”
Then Cluck-cluck ran to the Oak-tree and said: “Dear Oak-tree,
please give me a cup. I want it for the Spring; and then the Spring
will give me water for my little chick Tuppen, who lies choking and
gasping under the blueberry-bush in the green woods.”
The Oak-tree said: “I will give you a cup if some one will shake my
branches.”
Then Cluck-cluck ran to Maid Marian, the wood-cutter’s child, and
said: “Dear Maid Marian, please shake the Oak-tree’s branches; and
then the Oak-tree will give me a cup, and I will give the cup to the
Spring, and the Spring will give me water for my little chick Tuppen,
who lies choking and gasping under the blueberry-bush in the green
woods.”
The wood-cutter’s child, Maid Marian, said: “I will shake the Oak-
tree’s branches if you will give me some shoes.”
Then Cluck-cluck ran to the Shoemaker and said: “Dear Shoemaker,
please give me some shoes. I want them for Maid Marian, the wood-
cutter’s child; for then Maid Marian will shake the Oak-tree’s
branches, and the Oak-tree will give me a cup, and I will give the
cup to the Spring, and the Spring will give me water for my little
chick Tuppen, who lies choking and gasping under the blueberry-
bush in the green woods.”
The Shoemaker said: “I will give you some shoes if you will give me
some leather.”
Then Cluck-cluck ran to Moo-moo, the ox, and said: “Dear Moo-moo,
please give me some leather. I want it for the Shoemaker; for then
the Shoemaker will give me some shoes, and I will give the shoes to
Maid Marian, and Maid Marian will shake the Oak-tree’s branches,
and the Oak-tree will give me a cup, and I will give the cup to the
Spring, and the Spring will give me water for my little chick Tuppen,
who lies choking and gasping under the blueberry-bush in the green
woods.”
The ox, Moo-moo, said: “I will give you some leather if you will give
me some corn.”
Then Cluck-cluck ran to the Farmer and said: “Dear Farmer, please
give me some corn. I want it for Moo-moo, the ox; for then the ox
will give me some leather, and I will give the leather to the
Shoemaker, and the Shoemaker will give me shoes, and I will give
the shoes to Maid Marian, and Maid Marian will shake the Oak-tree’s
branches, and the Oak-tree will give me a cup, and I will give the
cup to the Spring, and the Spring will give me water for my little
chick Tuppen, who lies choking and gasping under the blueberry-
bush in the green woods.”
The Farmer said: “I will give you some corn if you will give me a
plow.”
Then Cluck-cluck ran to the Blacksmith and said: “Dear Blacksmith,
please give me a plow. I want it for the Farmer; for then the Farmer
will give me some corn, and I will give the corn to the ox, and the ox
will give me leather, and I will give the leather to the Shoemaker,
and the Shoemaker will give me shoes, and I will give the shoes to
Maid Marian, and Maid Marian will shake the Oak-tree’s branches,
and the Oak-tree will give me a cup, and I will give the cup to the
Spring, and the Spring will give me water for my little chick Tuppen,
who lies choking and gasping under the blueberry-bush in the green
woods.”
The Blacksmith said: “I will give you a plow if you will give me some
iron.”
Then Cluck-cluck ran to the busy little dwarfs who live under the
mountains, and have all the iron that is found in the mines. “Dear,
dear dwarfs,” she said, “please give me some of your iron. I want it
for the Blacksmith; for then the Blacksmith will give me a plow, and
I will give the plow to the Farmer, and the Farmer will give me corn,
and I will give the corn to the ox, and the ox will give me leather,
and I will give the leather to the Shoemaker, and the Shoemaker will
give me shoes, and I will give the shoes to Maid Marian, and Maid
Marian will shake the Oak-tree’s branches, and the Oak-tree will give
me a cup, and I will give the cup to the Spring, and the Spring will
give me water for my little chick Tuppen, who lies choking and
gasping under the blueberry-bush in the green woods.”
The little dwarfs who live under the mountains had pity on poor
Cluck-cluck, and they gave her a great heap of red iron-ore from
their mines.
Then she gave the iron to the Blacksmith, and the plow to the
Farmer, and the corn to the ox, and the leather to the Shoemaker,
and the shoes to Maid Marian; and Maid Marian shook the Oak-tree,
and the Spring got the acorn cup, and Cluck-cluck carried it full of
water to her little chick Tuppen.
Then little Tuppen drank the water, and was well again, and ran
chirping and singing in the long grass as if nothing had happened to
him.
The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went
Round the World

[From “Nonsense Stories.”]

O nce upon a time, a long while ago, there were four little people
whose names were Violet, Slingsby, Guy, and Lionel; and they
all thought they should like to see the world. So they bought a large
boat to sail quite round the world by sea, and then they were to
come back on the other side by land. The boat was painted blue
with green spots, and the sail was yellow with red stripes; and,
when they set off, they only took a small cat to steer and look after
the boat, besides an elderly quangle-wangle, who had to cook the
dinner and make the tea; for which purposes they took a large
kettle.
For the first ten days they sailed on beautifully, and found plenty to
eat, as there were lots of fish; and they had only to take them out of
the sea with a long spoon, when the quangle-wangle instantly
cooked them; and the pussy-cat was fed with the bones, with which
she expressed herself pleased on the whole; so that all the party
was very happy.
During the daytime Violet chiefly occupied herself in putting salt
water into a churn, while her three brothers churned it violently in
the hope that it would turn into butter, which it seldom, if ever, did;
and in the evening they all retired into the tea-kettle, where they all
managed to sleep very comfortably, while pussy and the quangle-
wangle managed the boat.
After a time they saw some land at a distance; and, when they came
to it, they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by
earth. Besides that, it was bordered by evanescent isthmuses, with a
great gulf-stream running about all over it; so that it was perfectly
beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five hundred and three
feet high.
When they had landed, they walked about, but found, to their great
surprise, that the island was quite full of veal-cutlets and chocolate-
drops, and nothing else. So they all climbed up the single high tree
to discover, if possible, if there were any people; but having
remained on the top of the tree for a week, and not seeing anybody,
they naturally concluded that there were no inhabitants; and
accordingly, when they came down, they loaded the boat with two
thousand veal-cutlets and a million of chocolate-drops; and these
afforded them sustenance for more than a month, during which time
they pursued their voyage with the utmost delight and apathy.
After this they came to a shore where there were no less than sixty-
five great red parrots with blue tails, sitting on a rail all of a row, and
all fast asleep. And I am sorry to say that the pussy-cat and the
quangle-wangle crept softly, and bit off the tail-feathers of all the
sixty-five parrots, for which Violet reproved them both severely.
Notwithstanding which, she proceeded to insert all the feathers—two
hundred and sixty in number—in her bonnet; thereby causing it to
have a lovely and glittering appearance, highly prepossessing and
efficacious.
The next thing that happened to them was in a narrow part of the
sea, which was so entirely full of fishes that the boat could go on no
farther; so they remained there about six weeks, till they had eaten
nearly all the fishes, which were soles, and all ready cooked, and
covered with shrimp-sauce, so that there was no trouble whatever.
And as the few fishes who remained uneaten complained of the
cold, as well as of the difficulty they had in getting any sleep on
account of the extreme noise made by the arctic bears and the
tropical turnspits, which frequented the neighborhood in great
numbers, Violet most amiably knitted a small woolen frock for
several of the fishes, and Slingsby administered some opium-drops
to them; through which kindness they became quite warm, and slept
soundly.
Then they came to a country which was wholly covered with
immense orange-trees of a vast size, and quite full of fruit. So they
all landed, taking with them the tea-kettle, intending to gather some
of the oranges and place them in it. But, while they were busy about
this, a most dreadfully high wind rose, and blew out most of the
parrot-tail feathers from Violet’s bonnet. That, however, was nothing
compared with the calamity of the oranges falling down on their
heads by millions and millions, which thumped and bumped and
bumped and thumped them all so seriously that they were obliged to
run as hard as they could for their lives; besides that, the sound of
the oranges rattling on the tea-kettle was of the most fearful and
amazing nature.
Nevertheless, they got safely to the boat, although considerably
vexed and hurt; and the quangle-wangle’s right foot was so knocked
about that he had to sit with his head in his slipper for at least a
week.
This event made them all for a time rather melancholy, and perhaps
they might never have become less so had not Lionel, with a most
praiseworthy devotion and perseverance, continued to stand on one
leg, and whistle to them in a loud and lively manner; which diverted
the whole party so extremely that they gradually recovered their
spirits, and agreed that, whenever they should reach home, they
would subscribe toward a testimonial to Lionel, entirely made of
gingerbread and raspberries, as an earnest token of their sincere
and grateful infection.
After sailing on calmly for several more days they came to another
country, where they were much pleased and surprised to see a
countless multitude of white mice with red eyes, all sitting in a great
circle, slowly eating custard-pudding with the most satisfactory and
polite demeanor.
And as the four travelers were rather hungry, being tired of eating
nothing but soles and oranges for so long a period, they held a
council as to the propriety of asking the mice for some of their
pudding in a humble and affecting manner, by which they could
hardly be otherwise than gratified. It was agreed, therefore, that
Guy should go and ask the mice, which he immediately did; and the
result was, that they gave a walnut-shell only half full of custard
diluted with water. Now, this displeased Guy, who said: “Out of such
a lot of pudding as you have got, I must say, you might have spared
a somewhat larger quantity.” But no sooner had he finished speaking
than the mice turned round at once, and sneezed at him in an
appalling and vindictive manner (and it is impossible to imagine a
more scroobious and unpleasant sound than that caused by the
simultaneous sneezing of many millions of angry mice); so that Guy
rushed back to the boat, having first shied his cap into the middle of
the custard-pudding, by which means he completely spoiled the
mice’s dinner.
By and by the four children came to a country where there were no
houses, but only an incredibly innumerable number of large bottles
without corks, and of a dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color.
Each of these blue bottles contained a bluebottle fly; and all these
interesting animals live continually together in the most copious and
rural harmony; nor perhaps in many parts of the world is such
perfect and abject happiness to be found. Violet and Slingsby and
Guy and Lionel were greatly struck with this singular and instructive
settlement; and, having previously asked permission of the
bluebottle flies (which was most courteously granted), the boat was
drawn up to the shore, and they proceeded to make tea in front of
the bottles; but, as they had no tea-leaves, they merely placed some
pebbles in the hot water; and the quangle-wangle played some
tunes over it on an accordion, by which, of course, tea was made
directly, and of the very best quality.
The four children then entered into conversation with the bluebottle
flies, who discoursed in a placid and genteel manner, though with a
slightly buzzing accent, chiefly owing to the fact that they each held
a small clothes-brush between their teeth, which naturally
occasioned a fizzy, extraneous utterance.
“Why,” said Violet, “would you kindly inform us, do you reside in
bottles; and, if in bottles at all, why not, rather, in green or purple,
or, indeed, in yellow bottles?”
To which questions a very aged bluebottle fly answered: “We found
the bottles here all ready to live in; that is to say, our great-great-
great-great-great-grandfathers did, so we occupied them at once.
And, when the winter comes on, we turn the bottles upside down,
and consequently rarely feel the cold at all; and you know very well
that this could not be the case with bottles of any other color than
blue.”
“Of course it could not,” said Slingsby. “But, if we may take the
liberty of inquiring, on what do you chiefly subsist?”
“Mainly on oyster-patties,” said the bluebottle fly; “and, when these
are scarce, on raspberry vinegar and Russian leather boiled down to
a jelly.”
“How delicious!” said Guy.
To which Lionel added, “Huzz!” And all the bluebottle flies said,
“Buzz!”
At this time an elderly fly said it was the hour for the evening song
to be sung; and, on a signal being given, all the bluebottle flies
began to buzz at once in a sumptuous and sonorous manner, the
melodious and mucilaginous sounds echoing all over the waters, and
resounding across the tumultuous tops of the transitory titmice upon
the intervening and verdant mountains with a serene and sickly
suavity only known to the truly virtuous. The moon was shining
slobaciously from the star-bespangled sky, while her light irrigated
the smooth and shiny sides and wings and backs of the bluebottle
flies with a peculiar and trivial splendor, while all nature cheerfully
responded to the cerulean and conspicuous circumstances.
In many long-after years the four little travelers looked back to that
evening as one of the happiest in all their lives; and it was already
past midnight when—the sail of the boat having been set up by the
quangle-wangle, the tea-kettle and churn placed in their respective
positions, and the pussy-cat stationed at the helm—the children
each took a last and affectionate farewell of the bluebottle flies, who
walked down in a body to the water’s edge to see the travelers
embark.
As a token of parting respect and esteem, Violet made a courtesy
quite down to the ground, and stuck one of her few remaining
parrot-tail feathers into the back hair of the most pleasing of the
bluebottle flies; while Slingsby, Guy, and Lionel offered them three
small boxes, containing, respectively, black pins, dried figs, and
Epsom salts; and thus they left that happy shore forever.
Overcome by their feelings, the four little travelers instantly jumped
into the tea-kettle and fell fast asleep. But all along the shore, for
many hours, there was distinctly heard a sound of severely
suppressed sobs, and of a vague multitude of living creatures using
their pocket-handkerchiefs in a subdued simultaneous snuffle,
lingering sadly along the walloping waves as the boat sailed farther
and farther away from the land of the happy bluebottle flies.
Nothing particular occurred for some days after these events, except
that, as the travelers were passing a low tract of sand, they
perceived an unusual and gratifying spectacle; namely, a large
number of crabs and crawfish—perhaps six or seven hundred—
sitting by the waterside, and endeavoring to disentangle a vast heap
of pale pink worsted, which they moistened at intervals with a fluid
composed of lavender-water and white-wine negus.
“Can we be of any service to you, oh, crusty crabbies?” said the four
children.
“Thank you kindly,” said the crabs consecutively. “We are trying to
make some worsted mittens, but do not know how.”
On which Violet, who was perfectly acquainted with the art of
mitten-making, said to the crabs, “Do your claws unscrew, or are
they fixtures?”
“They are all made to unscrew,” said the crabs; and forthwith they
deposited a great pile of claws close to the boat, with which Violet
uncombed all the pale pink worsted, and then made the loveliest
mittens with it you can imagine. These the crabs, having resumed
and screwed on their claws, placed cheerfully upon their wrists and
walked away rapidly on their hind-legs, warbling songs with a silvery
voice and in a minor key.
After this the four little people sailed on again till they came to a
vast and wide plain of astonishing dimensions, on which nothing
whatever could be discovered at first; but, as the travelers walked
onward, there appeared in the extreme and dim distance a single
object, which on a nearer approach, and on an accurately cutaneous
inspection, seemed to be somebody in a large white wig, sitting on
an arm-chair made of sponge-cakes and oyster-shells. “It does not
quite look like a human being,” said Violet doubtfully; nor could they
make out what it really was till the quangle-wangle (who had
previously been round the world) exclaimed softly in a loud voice, “It
is the coöperative cauliflower!”
And so, in truth, it was; and they soon found that what they had
taken for an immense wig was in reality the top of the cauliflower,
and that he had no feet at all, being able to walk tolerably well with
a fluctuating and graceful movement on a single cabbage-stalk—an
accomplishment which naturally saved him the expense of stockings
and shoes.
Presently, while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him
with mingled affection and disgust, he suddenly arose, and, in a
somewhat plumdomphious manner, hurried off toward the setting
sun—his steps supported by two superincumbent confidential
cucumbers, and a large number of water-wagtails proceeding in
advance of him by three and three in a row—till he finally
disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of
sudorific sand.
So remarkable a sight, of course, impressed the four children very
deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong
sense of undeveloped asthma and a great appetite.
Shortly after this the travelers were obliged to sail directly below
some high overhanging rocks, from the top of one of which a
particularly odious little boy, dressed in rose-colored knickerbockers,
and with a pewter plate upon his head, threw an enormous pumpkin
at the boat, by which it was instantly upset.
But this upsetting was of no consequence, because all the party
knew how to swim very well; and, in fact, they preferred swimming
about till after the moon rose, when, the water growing chilly, they
sponge-taneously entered the boat. Meanwhile the quangle-wangle
threw back the pumpkin with immense force, so that it hit the rocks
where the malicious little boy in rose-colored knickerbockers was
sitting, when, being quite full of lucifer-matches, the pumpkin
exploded surreptitiously into a thousand bits; whereon the rocks
instantly took fire, and the odious little boy became unpleasantly
hotter and hotter and hotter, till his knickerbockers were turned quite
green, and his nose was burned off.
Two or three days after this had happened they came to another
place, where they found nothing at all except some wide and deep
pits full of mulberry-jam. This is the property of the tiny, yellow-
nosed apes who abound in these districts, and who store up the
mulberry-jam for their food in winter, when they mix it with pellucid
pale periwinkle-soup, and serve it out in Wedgwood china bowls,
which grow freely all over that part of the country. Only one of the
yellow-nosed apes was on the spot, and he was fast asleep; yet the
four travelers and the quangle-wangle and pussy were so terrified by
the violence and sanguinary sound of his snoring that they merely
took a small cupful of the jam, and returned to reëmbark in their
boat without delay.
What was their horror on seeing the boat (including the churn and
the tea-kettle) in the mouth of an enormous seeze pyder, an aquatic
and ferocious creature truly dreadful to behold, and, happily, only
met with in those excessive longitudes! In a moment the beautiful
boat was bitten into fifty-five thousand million hundred billion bits;
and it instantly became quite clear that Violet, Slingsby, Guy, and
Lionel could no longer preliminate their voyage by sea.
The four travelers were therefore obliged to resolve on pursuing
their wanderings by land; and, very fortunately, there happened to
pass by at that moment an elderly rhinoceros, on which they seized;
and, all four mounting on his back—the quangle-wangle sitting on
his horn, and holding on by his ears, and the pussy-cat swinging at
the end of his tail—they set off, having only four small beans and
three pounds of mashed potatoes to last through their whole
journey.
They were, however, able to catch numbers of the chickens and
turkeys and other birds who incessantly alighted on the head of the
rhinoceros for the purpose of gathering the seeds of the
rhododendron plants which grew there; and these creatures they
cooked in the most translucent and satisfactory manner by means of
a fire lighted on the end of the rhinoceros’s back. A crowd of
kangaroos and gigantic cranes accompanied them, from feelings of
curiosity and complacency; so that they were never at a loss for
company, and went onward, as it were, in a sort of profuse and
triumphant procession.
Thus in less than eighteen weeks they all arrived safely at home,
where they were received by their admiring relatives with joy
tempered with contempt, and where they finally resolved to carry
out the rest of their traveling plans at some more favorable
opportunity.
As for the rhinoceros, in token of their grateful adherence, they had
him killed and stuffed directly, and then set him up outside the door
of their father’s house as a diaphanous door-scraper.
Edward Lear.
The History of the Seven Families of the Lake
Pipple-Popple

[From “Nonsense Stories.”]

 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

I n former days—that is to say, once upon a time—there lived in the

Land of Gramble-blamble seven families. They lived by the side of
the great Lake Pipple-popple (one of the seven families, indeed,
lived in the lake), and on the outskirts of the city of Tosh, which,
excepting when it was quite dark, they could see plainly. The names
of all these places you have probably heard of; and you have only
not to look in your geography books to find out all about them.
Now, the seven families who lived on the borders of the great Lake
Pipple-popple were as follows in the next chapter.
 CHAPTER II
THE SEVEN FAMILIES

There was a family of two old parrots and seven young parrots.
There was a family of two old storks and seven young storks.
There was a family of two old geese and seven young geese.
There was a family of two old owls and seven young owls.
There was a family of two old guinea-pigs and seven young guinea-
pigs.
There was a family of two old cats and seven young cats.
And there was a family of two old fishes and seven young fishes.
 CHAPTER III
THE HABITS OF THE SEVEN FAMILIES

The parrots lived upon the soffsky-poffsky trees, which were

beautiful to behold, and covered with blue leaves; and they fed upon
fruit, artichokes, and striped beetles.
The storks walked in and out of the Lake Pipple-popple, and ate
frogs for breakfast, and buttered toast for tea; but on account of the
extreme length of their legs they could not sit down, and so they
walked about continually.
The geese, having webs to their feet, caught quantities of flies,
which they ate for dinner.
The owls anxiously looked after mice, which they caught and made
into sago-puddings.
The guinea-pigs toddled about the gardens, and ate lettuces and
Cheshire cheese.
The cats sat still in the sunshine, and fed upon sponge biscuits.
The fishes lived in the lake, and fed chiefly on boiled periwinkles.
And all these seven families lived together in the utmost fun and
felicity.
 CHAPTER IV
THE CHILDREN OF THE SEVEN FAMILIES ARE SENT AWAY

One day all the seven fathers and the seven mothers of the seven
families agreed that they would send their children out to see the
world.
So they called them all together, and gave them each eight shillings
and some good advice, some chocolate-drops, and a small green
morocco pocket-book to set down their expenses in.
They then particularly entreated them not to quarrel; and all the
parents sent off their children with a parting injunction.
“If,” said the old parrots, “you find a cherry, do not fight about who
should have it.”
“And,” said the old storks, “if you find a frog, divide it carefully into
seven bits, but on no account quarrel about it.”
And the old geese said to the seven young geese: “Whatever you
do, be sure you do not touch a plum-pudding flea.”
And the old owls said: “If you find a mouse, tear him up into seven
slices, and eat him cheerfully, but without quarreling.”
And the old guinea-pigs said: “Have a care that you eat your
lettuces, should you find any, not greedily, but calmly.”
And the old cats said: “Be particularly careful not to meddle with a
clangle-wangle if you should see one.”
And the old fishes said: “Above all things, avoid eating a blue boss-
woss, for they do not agree with fishes, and give them a pain in
their toes.”
So all the children of each family thanked their parents, and, making
in all forty-nine polite bows, they went into the wide world.
 CHAPTER V
THE HISTORY OF THE SEVEN YOUNG PARROTS

The seven young parrots had not gone far when they saw a tree
with a single cherry on it, which the oldest parrot picked instantly;
but the other six, being extremely hungry, tried to get it also. On
which all the seven began to fight; and they
scuffled,
and huffled,
and ruffled,
and shuffled,
and puffled,
and muffled,
and buffled,
and duffled,
and fluffled,
and guffled,
and bruffled, and

screamed, and shrieked, and squealed, and

squeaked, and clawed, and snapped, and bit, and bumped, and
thumped, and dumped, and flumped each other, till they were all
torn into little bits; and at last there was nothing left to record this
painful incident except the cherry and seven small green feathers.
And that was the vicious and voluble end of the seven young
parrots.
 CHAPTER VI
THE HISTORY OF THE SEVEN YOUNG STORKS

When the seven young storks set out, they walked or flew for
fourteen weeks in a straight line, and for six weeks more in a
crooked one; and after that they ran as hard as they could for one
hundred and eight miles; and after that they stood still, and made a
himmeltanious chatter-clatter-blattery noise with their bills.
About the same time they perceived a large frog, spotted with
green, and with a sky-blue stripe under each ear.
So, being hungry, they immediately flew at him, and were going to
divide him into seven pieces when they began to quarrel as to which
of his legs should be taken off first. One said this, and another said
that; and while they were all quarreling, the frog hopped away. And
when they saw that he was gone they began to
chatter-clatter,
blatter-platter,
patter-blatter,
matter-clatter,
flatter-quatter,

more violently than ever; and after they had fought for a
week they pecked each other all to little pieces, so that at last
nothing was left of any of them except their bills.
And that was the end of the seven young storks.
 CHAPTER VII
THE HISTORY OF THE SEVEN YOUNG GEESE

When the seven young geese began to travel, they went over a
large plain, on which there was but one tree, and that was a very
bad one.
So four of them went up to the top of it, and looked about them;
while the other three waddled up and down, and repeated poetry,
and their last six lessons in arithmetic, geography, and cookery.
Presently they perceived, a long way off, an object of the most
interesting and obese appearance, having a perfectly round body
exactly resembling a boiled plum-pudding, with two little wings and
a beak, and three feathers growing out of his head, and only one
leg.
So, after a time, all the seven young geese said to each other:
“Beyond all doubt this beast must be a plum-pudding flea!”
On which they incautiously began to sing aloud:
“Plum-pudding flea,
Plum-pudding flea,
Wherever you be,
Oh! come to our tree,
And listen, oh! listen, oh! listen to me!”

And no sooner had they sung this verse than the plum-pudding flea
began to hop and skip on his one leg with the most dreadful velocity,
and came straight to the tree, where he stopped, and looked about
him in a vacant and voluminous manner.
On which the seven young geese were greatly alarmed, and all of a
tremble-bemble; so one of them put out his long neck and just
touched him with the tip of his bill; but no sooner had he done this