Pieper: The Silence of Goethe

The Silence of Goethe
Josef Pieper
(St Augustine’s Press, 2009)
xii + 67 p.

Some time ago I noted the origins of this little book: Pieper, finding himself confined in a German POW camp, but with access to the complete works of Goethe, passed the time by reading the volumes in their entirety. This in itself was remarkable, but perhaps even more striking was that he then put pen to paper to write about the silence of Goethe.

Silence was a theme that attracted Pieper; another of his books, and a rather good one, is The Silence of St Thomas (the subject of which is, once again, one of the most prolific authors in history). But whereas in that case Pieper focused on what Thomas’ silence — that is, the topics he did not write about, or that he thought could not be written about — told us about his metaphysics and his theology, in this book on Goethe the themes are more modest, the silences of Goethe, like his words, not being as pregnant as those of St Thomas.

In this book Pieper reflects on what Goethe said about the relevance of silence, and of reticence more generally, to a well-lived life. It takes the form of a series of brief reflections on passages gleaned from Goethe’s works.

One of the themes that emerges is that silence is necessary for the health and flourishing of an inner life, for it is a hidden source from which one draws strength:

“What is best is the deep stillness in which, against the world, I live and grow, and gain what it cannot take from me by fire and sword.”

Or,

“There is deep meaning in the mad notion that it is necessary to act in silence in order to raise and take possession of a treasure properly; it is not permitted to say one word, no matter how much that is shocking and delightful may appear on all sides.”

This reminds me of something I once read in St John of the Cross in which he counselled his readers “never to reveal to another what God is doing in your inmost heart”, for by such revelations one risks distorting or destroying that delicate reality. And Goethe, too, seems to have felt that one should be circumspect about the highest things, lest one speak of them inadequately. Writes Pieper, “Even with his closest and dearest friends he remained silent about the most exalted things.” His friends noted that he became silent when talk turned to divine matters, saying, “Our best convictions cannot be expressed in words. Language is not capable of everything.”

Part of what Goethe understood by silence was public silence — that is, staying out of the public eye. “You live properly only if you live a hidden life.” Again, there is a certain irony here inasmuch as Goethe was forever putting his books before the public, and he was one of the best-known men in Europe, but his books were not himself, were not about himself, and so retained a kind of reticence. But it seems he enjoyed the contrast he cultivated between private reserve and public persona: “This is then the great charm of the otherwise questionable life of an author: that one is silent with one’s friends and at the same time prepared a great conversation with them which reaches out to every part of the world.”

He also maintained a prudent silence because he thought that the public did not, by and large, deserve to know his thoughts on various matters, being too preoccupied with gossip and sensation. This might be thought contemptuous, but Pieper defends him by drawing on St Thomas, who, in his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, said of the magnanimous man that “in his attitude to the throng he uses irony” and that he is rightly contemptuous of mean-spiritedness. “Such contempt is as little at odds with humility as it is at odds with truth, since no one’s just claim to honor is being injured.”

In the deepest sense, Goethe saw silence is a preparation for listening, for perceiving and receiving reality more clearly and fully. Says Pieper, “This listening silence is much deeper than the mere refraining from words and speech in human intercourse. It means a stillness, which, like a breath, has penetrated into the inmost chamber of one’s own soul. It is meant, in the Goethean “maxim”, to “deny myself as much as possible and to take up the object into myself as purely as it is possible to do”.” Pieper comments that “It is here that Goethe represents what, since Pythagoras, may be considered the silence tradition of the West”. There is a kind of hope implicit in this silence, since it waits in expectation of something true and good.

The second half of this (already very brief) volume consists of short excerpts from Goethe’s letters. Some of these continue the theme of silence, but others wander further afield. Since they present no clearly unified picture, I’ll conclude by simply quoting a few of those that struck me most forcefully.

**

“For we really ought not to speak of what we will do, of what we are doing, nor of what we have done.”

“A person who is used to silence remains silent.”

“What a person must do allows him to show what he is inwardly like. Anyone can live arbitrarily.”

“We can do no more than build a stack of wood and dry it properly. Then it will catch fire at the right time and we ourselves will be astonished by it.”

“If I had nothing to say except what people want to hear, I would be completely silent.”

“There are three kinds of reader: one who enjoys without making a judgment, a third who judges without enjoyment, and, in the middle, one who judges while enjoying and enjoys while judging. This middle one reproduces a work of art anew.”

“An individual has to give an account of himself. No one comes to his aid.”

“To see people and things exactly as they are and to say exactly what is on our mind — this is the right thing. We should not and cannot do more.”

In memoriam Josquin Desprez

Today is a good day to remember Josquin Desprez, who died on this date 496 years ago. Here is a video I made a few years ago to go along with one of my favourite of his pieces,  Mente tota (more background here).

Incidentally, I’m pretty proud of that video. The closing section, from about 3:10, turned out especially well.

And, since we are remembering Josquin today and not just celebrating him, here is the opening section of Jean Richafort’s impossibly gorgeous Requiem in memoriam Josquin Desprez:

Livy II: Rome’s Italian Wars

Ab Urbe Condita, Libri VI-X
Rome’s Italian Wars
Titus Livius
Translated from the Latin by J.C. Yardley
(Oxford, 2013) [c.20 BC]
448 p.

The first volume in this series covered the history of Rome from its legendary founding down to 390 BC, the year of Rome’s “second founding” after the city was sacked by the Gauls. This second volume continues the story for another century.

This was an important period in the history of Rome. After the Gauls sacked the city there was serious consideration given to abandoning Rome altogether, and she had, in any case, been little more than a local power up to that point. However, by the end of this period Rome was the dominant power in the region, ruling most of the Italian peninsula. The story of how this transformation came about — essentially, through a series of wars — is the central thread of Livy’s narrative in these books.

Livy remarks at the beginning of Book VI that his history will be presented henceforth “with greater clarity and certitude” than was possible for the history prior to the Gallic sacking, for the simple reason that the sacking had destroyed the records. We can therefore probably (?) be quite clear and certain that it was Camillus, the man who had led the army in the successful, last-ditch effort to drive out the Gauls, who convinced the Roman people to remain and rebuild their devastated city, and who is therefore honoured as “the second founder of Rome”.

Rome’s neighbours, seeing her in her weakened state, pressed their own advantage, and Camillus led the Roman army in a series of battles with these unneighbourly neighbours: the Volsci, Aequi, Etruscans, Latins, Tibur, Tarquinii, Falisci, Veitrae, Aurunci, and Hernici. The fact that these names are unfamiliar tells you something of how they fared; Rome was, almost invariably and certainly ultimately, victorious in these skirmishes. Her usual pattern, both now and in future, was to defeat the opposing army, subdue the population, pull down fortresses, and, in many cases, send Roman colonists to establish a permanent Roman presence in the conquered city. In some cases she granted a degree of Roman citizenship (which came in carefully graduated kinds). Defeats were seldom permanent however: we often read of Roman victories over so-and-so, but then so-and-so pops up again and again, ready for another drubbing. As we’ll see, even the Gauls, the boogeymen of the Roman psyche, came back.

Although Livy’s focus in this segment of his history is strongly focused on military affairs, we do learn about some of the principal developments in Rome’s internal politics during the rebuilding period. There had always been tension between the patricians and the plebs, and the plebs now sought greater power through a series of reforms: they wanted debt-free loans to finance the rebuilding of their homes, they wanted limits placed on the amount of land any one person could own, and they wanted the consulship to be open to plebs. They were partly successful: interest rates were reduced but not eliminated, land ownership was regulated, and the patricians granted that one of the two consuls could be a pleb (although it would be some years before a pleb was actually elected). In response, however, the patricians created several new offices, the praetorship and curale aedileships, open only to themselves. It was ever thus.

A memorable drama occurred during the rebuilding: Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, who had been trapped on the Capitol during the Gallic siege, and who had thrown down several attacking Gauls attempting to scale the Capitol, thinking himself the saviour of Rome, began to seek power for himself by giving gifts to the plebs and sowing seeds of conflict with the patricians. This aroused suspicions, first of the patricians and soon of the plebs, and he was eventually charged with aspiring to kingly power, high on the list of the worst offences a Roman citizen could commit. The Romans acted decisively: he was thrown to his death from the Tarpeian Rock, his house was razed to the ground, and patricians were henceforth barred from being named Marcus Manlius. Half measures were not the Roman way.

The Gauls returned in 349 BC, and occasioned the emergence of one of Rome’s great heroes: Marcus Valerius Corvus. The story is rather similar to that of David and Goliath: young Marcus volunteered for a one-on-one fight with a Gallic giant who was taunting the Roman army. As he approached, sword in hand, a raven is said to have descended, landed on his helmet, and then, in dramatic fashion, to have attacked the face of the Gallic foe, helping Marcus to a victory, and earning him his cognomen (corvus = raven). The Romans invested great importance in the behaviour of animals, and especially of birds (parenthetically, an entertaining history of Rome could be compiled simply by recounting all of the interventions into Roman politics and international relations made by Rome’s sacred chickens), and the good omen that attended Corvus’ rise to fame foretold good things to come, and so it proved, for it was Corvus who became the principal military leader in the conflicts which would eventually propel Rome into a major regional power, waged against a foe that was the most challenging that she had yet encountered: the Samnites.

The Samnites lived in the hilly country to the south and east of Rome. They were a reasonably wealthy people, their armies were highly disciplined and tenacious, and they were not afraid of the Romans. Rome was to wage three distinct wars against them: the First Samnite War (343-341 BC) opened the hostilities and allowed the two armies to test their strength against one another in three main battles, each of which was won by the Romans, albeit with some difficulty; the Second Samnite War (326-304 BC) was a much more serious and protracted conflict that required the Romans to occupy Samnite territory in order to secure a victory; and, finally, in the Third Samnite War (298-290 BC) the remnant Samnites joined forces with the principal powers surrounding Rome — the Gauls, the Etruscans, and the Umbrians — but even this alliance could not defeat Rome. When the dust settled, her enemies destroyed, what didn’t kill her had made her stronger: Rome was a major regional power.

Part of the reason for Rome’s consistent military success was that she invented new battlefield tactics. During the First Samnite War she deployed soldiers in the phalanx system that served the Greeks so well. However it was found that on hilly terrain the phalanx was too clumsy, and was especially vulnerable to flanking maneuvers. Therefore during the interval between the First and Second Samnite Wars, while they were fighting another campaign called the Latin War, the Romans developed the maniple system that would become their standard fighting formation for centuries: three staggered lines of small groups of men arrayed along a front. The maniple allowed tired soldiers to be replaced by fresh ones in an orderly way, and because of the reduced size of each group they could be more responsive and flexible than the phalanx had permitted.

The Second Samnite War very nearly ended in catastrophic defeat for the Romans. By cunning use of counter-intelligence the Samnites managed to lure the marching Roman army into a gorge — the Caudine Forks — where they became trapped. The Samnite leader consulted his aged father for advice about how to proceed, and the advice came back: let them all go unharmed. Balking, and thinking it must be some mistake, he sent again for advice, and this time the advice came back: kill them all. Confused, he sought clarification, and was told that only two courses were open to him: let them go and thereby make the Romans lasting friends, or kill them and thereby destroy their power to attack. This was wise advice, but he chose instead a middle course: he made the Romans surrender, but confiscated their weapons and humiliated them by making them pass under a yoke as they marched home. Predictably, this did nothing to harm Roman military might, but it did inflame Roman pride and a desire for revenge, and it wasn’t long before the Roman army was back on the field, this time with a focus and power that the Samnites would not withstand.

One of Rome’s great political and military leaders (and Roman leaders tended to be both) during this war was Papirius Cursor, a man whom Livy feels comfortable comparing to Alexander the Great. In fact, there is a very interesting digression (Book IX, 16-19) in which Livy pauses to speculate on how various Roman generals would have fared against Alexander.

Another important figure in Rome during this time was (another) Appius Claudius — in this case, the Appius who conceived and spearheaded the effort to build a major road running south from Rome so as to enable faster and more reliable transport of troops and goods into war zones and occupied territories. It was the first such thoroughfare the Romans built, and it served as the model for many such roads that would eventually cover the Empire; to this day, the road bears his name.

As I mentioned above, the Third Samnite War drew in a number of regional powers who saw it as being in their interest to contain the bourgeoning Roman power, but they proved unequal to the task. When this war ended, Rome was the sole power in central Italy, her rule extending from the Alps in the north to the southern parts of the peninsula, where, however, the Greeks retained control over some coastal regions and of Sicily. Naturally, the Romans would fight them before long, and soon another power from across the sea would enter Rome’s ambit, a power that would be her most formidable opponent yet: Carthage. But that is a tale for another time.

I greatly enjoyed reading this segment of Livy’s history. Whereas the first five books were a nice balance of internal politics and military history, in these five books the military matters moved very much into the foreground. While the long series of battles and skirmishes was sometimes confusing, Livy leavened the narrative with enough asides and personal portraits to hold my interest, and the overall arc of the story was clear. Unfortunately Books XXI-XXX of Livy’s history, covering roughly 290-220 BC, have been lost, so I will have to resume with Book XXXI, which treats of Hannibal and the Second Punic War. I’m looking forward to it.