Abstract
In this article I want to draw attention to an elemental passion that seems to have undergone substantial change over a long time in the history of our Western tradition. As you know very well, we have pursued the subject of elemental passions under the leadership of Professor Tymieniecka for many years; and, I feel, in defining its scope, as if we were at this time descending downward from the Paradiso of Dante’s Divine Comedy toward the Inferno, we find an increasing measure of cultural shift that has moved from an initial and exclusive concept of serene happiness toward the dark dungeons of depression. Clearly, light is defined on its elemental level by virtue of the existence of darkness and vice versa. But as soon as we are investigating the subject before us, for example, from a perspective of historical development, the apparently assumed balance between light and darkness is upset and strenuous efforts must be exerted to set the balance right again. These rectifying efforts are based necessarily on a value system that must be shared by those who live as a human community under these values representing the ideal that captures the elemental passion.
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Notes
Plato, The Apology of Socrates,transi. Benjamin Jowett.
Berne: Francke, 1948), pp. 201ff.
See Dagmar Thoss, Studien zum Locus Amoenus im Mittelalter. Wiener Romantische Arbeiten, Vol. X (Vienna, Stuttgart: Braumüller, 1972 ), p. 35.
Homer, Odyssey,transi. Robert Fitzgerald, Bk. V, 211.
My transi.: throughout the centuries [the locus amoenus was] the sign of a shared way of perceiving Nature and feeling in harmony with it. See Roger Dragonetti, La poétique des trouvères dans la chanson courtoise: contribution a l’étude de la rhétorique médiévale ( Brugge: De Tempel, 1960 ), p. 163.
Gottfried von Straßburg, Tristan, transi. A. T. Hatto (London: Penguin, 1987 ), p. 270.
Gottfried, p. 280.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (The First Day), transi. Mark Musa and Peter E. Bondanella.
Francis Petrarch, Sonnets to Laura,no. 333 (Ite, rime dolenti, al duro sasso), transi. Morris Bishop.
See Klaus Garber, Der locus amoenus und der locus terribili.s. Literatur und Leben,Vol. XVI n.F. (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1974), pp. 226ff.
See Garber, reference to Schirmer’s “Echo,” p. 228.
As an extreme example see Diderot’s Encyclopédie in which the entry “Christianity” refers the reader to “Cannibalism.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, transi. Walter Starkie (New York: Signet Classic, 1964 ), pp. 240–241.
Cervantes, p. 242, underlining mine.
Cervantes, p. 243.
Cervantes, p. 244.
See Garber, p. 261.
See Garber, p. 265.
My transi.: nobody takes notice of the other, everybody is occupied with himself.
See Garber, p. 269.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene,Bk.II, Canto VII (The Cave of Mammon), 8.
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Rudnick, H.H. (1995). The Locus Amoenus: On the Literary Evolution of the Relationship between the Human Being and Nature. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3298-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3298-7_2
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