Abstract
The wise fools and fabled grotesques of antiquity—Diogenes in his tub, wise Socrates, and Aesop the fabulist—were icons of satire. Aesop gave satirists the model of the ironic fable, Diogenes the public theater of scoffing, and Socrates the dialogue for debate about the scope and limitations of human reason and industry (moderated by Socrates himself). These figures exemplified age as the counterpart to youth—a chastising and correcting voice—but they also indicated child-like innocence and prodigality. If not altogether carefree, they were indifferent to material success or reputation and the social responsibilities it entailed. They lent themselves to the Christianizing of classicism for their message of moral greatness in humility. Thus, although physically or in other ways repellent, they were magisterial examples of the spiritual life. They were vessels of wisdom spilling out of the pagan past in a world overflowing with misery and vice.
Democritick: mocking, jeering, laughing at everything.
Blount’s Glossographia (1656)
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Notes
Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 14ff. On Pandora’s Box and Alciato’s barrel of hope (Emblem 46) as ambiguous symbols, see
John Horden, “The Connotation of Symbols,” The Art of the Emblem: Essays in Honor of Karl Josef Höltgen, ed. M. Bath, J. Manning, A. R. Young (New York: AMS, 1993), 74–5.
Erasmus refers to More as “Democritus Junior”; see Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991), 208–9.
Lawrence Babb, Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State College, 1951), 183 n., attributes the fame of Democritus’ melancholy to a letter allegedly written by Hippocrates: “Hippocrates had been summoned by Democritus’ anxious fellow citizens, who, because of his continual hilarity, feared that he was mad.”
Democritus’ preoccupation with such divisible things as colors and flavors was frequently linked to atomism. John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 85–6, in a section on “Atoms and mixtures” in the history of color, remarks Photius of Constantinople’s awareness of Democritean atomic theory related to color. Gage highlights the role of luminous play of color in imparting movement to church art (87–8).
See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 224–5, 319; on Copernicus and neo-Platonism, see 153ff. For the Epicurean links, see Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1989). For antique philosophies in connection with Renaissance paradoxes, see Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, esp. 430ff. For a history of atomism’s “pluralism of worlds,” see
Stephen J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982), esp. 23–141. For an overview, see
Lancelot Law Whyte, Essay on Atomism: From Democritus to 1961 (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University, 1961).
David Hedrich Hirsch, “Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory,” Studies in English Literature 31 (1991): 69–94, explores Donne’s atomism in relation to a fashion for anatomies; see Sawday’s Body Emblazoned for extensive treatment of the subject; see also
R. Grant Williams, “Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy,” English Literary History 68.3 (2001): 593–613.
E. Patricia Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning and Imagination in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1989), 151. Plato makes a similar point in the course of gently mocking the theory of flux (Cratylus 440A-B).
Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (New York: Columbia, 2008), 11.
For the legends, see Michael C. Stokes, “Heraclitus,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 3:477–81; see also the General Introduction to
Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1979).
Cited in Geoffrey Shepherd, ed., Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1965; reprint, Manchester: Manchester University, 1977), 187.
See Saxl, Panofsky, and Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964), esp. 127–214.
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia, 1989), 8, says, “Christian theology, on the other hand, considered sadness a sin. Dante set the ‘woeful people who have lost the good of the intellect’ in ‘the city of grief’ (Inferno III) …. Nevertheless, medieval monks did promote sadness.” Kristeva detects a change in attitudes to melancholy in the Middle Ages marked by increasing social and personal doubt and anxiety. She discusses the different priorities of Catholicism and Protestantism, Catholics emphasizing the “beatific vision” in Christ’s death, “underscoring that Jesus had always had the knowledge of his own resurrection (Psalms 22.29ff.). Calvin, on the other hand, insists on the formidabilis abysis into which Jesus had been thrust at the hour of his death …. Luther had already described himself personally as a melancholy being under the influence of Saturn and the devil” (Black Sun, 119). Schleiner focuses on the intersection of melancholy, madness, and sin. He points out Luther’s observation that “All sadness is from Satan” (67).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 13ff., notes that the madman was considered a fact of life in the medieval world but became in the Renaissance a figure to be reviled and locked away.
Saxl, Panofsky, and Klibansky discuss problems posed by melancholy in antiquity, including distinctions between character disposition and disease (e.g., 13–14, 51–2). They discuss the fear of lycanthropy (15); Stoic rejection of poetic madness (43ff.); symptoms of melancholy, including an obsession with being earthenware jars (47, 51); the association of melancholy with insight and prophecy (50), which they link to the Pythagorean pneuma (i.e., the idea that poorly digested food led to the rise of vapors into the brain); and the dualism of the spleen as the source of black bile as well as laughter (50). See also Lawrence Babb, “The Background of Il Penseroso,” Studies in Philology 37 (1940): 257–73; cf.
Irene Samuel, “The Brood of Folly,” Notes and Queries 203 (1958): 430–1.
Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy (London, 1971), 13.
Cf. Melancholy in Milton’s Il Penseroso, who exhibits a “sad leaden downward cast” (43). Saxl, Panofsky, and Klibansky discuss the iconography of Melencolia, 220ff. See also Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton, 1943), 151ff. The half-recumbent posture also recalls Wind’s discussion of the iconography of Night in Pagan Mysteries, 152–70; see also Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 231–47.
Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550–1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 191–200, observe a similar hand gesture in the frontispiece to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night, in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), 217.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California, 1988), 94–128. Greenblatt examines a well-known but little-discussed relationship between King Lear and Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. Harsnett attacked exorcistic frenzies apparently typical of the period, which he found theatrical, fraudulent, and sinful. This rejection of the theatrical suggests to Greenblatt a relationship between the theater and exorcism: Shakespeare shows how a construction of the mind (fiction, dream, or madness) sometimes treats madness. Greenblatt stresses the therapies of sleep and dreams (for Lear) and fiction (for Gloucester) (119–20), revealing a complex response to madness that need not regard it as sin. Schleiner stresses the medical treatment of the imagination on the troubled or maddened imagination, as in the scene between Edgar and Gloucester near Dover. Edgar had used the role of Tom O’Bedlam to work on Lear, and he fashions in Gloucester’s imagination the image of an evil spirit to rid him of the madness of ascribing human sin and folly simply to external forces (see 274–86). Thus, the theater becomes a new exorcism for the time—a catharsis, in Aristotle’s word. See also
John L. Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and “King Lear” (Athens, OH: Ohio University, 1984);
Kenneth Muir, “Samuel Harsnett and King Lear,” Review of English Studies 2 (1951): 11–21. On psychological healing in the Renaissance, see
Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1981). The role of the body (notably the stomach) in influencing humorous disposition, and as a source of introspection typically associated with melancholy, is discussed by Schoenfeldt, 1–39.
John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (London: Dent, 1911), 241. Cf. Hamlet 2.2.422–6. The word “sallet,” like the French “salade,” derived from the Latin “caelare,” to engrave in relief; but a sallet was also a drinking vessel, mixing bowl, or generic container. In its physical shape, let alone its symbolic contents, it evoked the ekphrastic shields of Homer and Virgil. The sallet also designated a generic helmet of the period. Its many associations added sense to Alciato’s Emblem 178, on war and peace, which depicts bees flying from a helmet.
This is similar to Pico’s distinction between two orders of magic, which might be viewed as extrapolations of the imaginative faculties; see Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 1984), 91.
Though indebted to Erasmus, Burton may have borrowed the anatomy metaphor from Nashe, or Greene (Anatomy of Flattery), Stubbes, or Lyly; the term was often used in literary discussion, as by Sidney, Apology for Poetry, 160. Here, Nashe identifies himself with Erasmian folly: “Read favourably, to incourage me in the firstlings of my folly, and perswade your selves I will persecute those idiots and their heires unto the third generation, that have made Arte bankerout of her ornaments, and sent Poetry a begging up and downe the Countrey. It may be my Anatomie of Absurdities may acquaint you ere long with my skill in surgery, wherein the diseases of Art more merrily discovered may make our maimed Poets put together their blankes unto the building of an Hospitall” (Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, in Elizabethan Critical Essays,1:320). (In the Anatomy of Absurditie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:336, Nashe had satirized literature and philosophy for overscrupulous pursuit of factitious knowledge.) The term “anatomy” appeared in later Puritan titles such as Anatomie of Popish Tyranny (1603), Anatomy of Arminianisme (1620), Anatomie of the Romane Clergy (1623). For discussions of the term, see Blanchard, 28ff; Jonathan Sawday, “Shapeless Elegance: Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Knowledge,” English Renaissance Prose, 194–200; Michael Keefer, “Violence and Extremity: Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller as an Anatomy of Abjection,” in Donald Beecher, ed., Critical Approaches to English Prose Fiction 1520–1640 (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1998), 198n.; R. Grant Williams, “Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge.” Burton alludes to ancient Menippean influences on the Anatomy of Melancholy:
The Satires of Juvenal, trans. Lewis Evans (London: Bohn, 1895), 104. Zeph Stewart, “Democritus and the Cynics,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 63 (1958): 179–91, suggests that the pairing of Democritus and Heraclitus derived from Menippus, and that the Cynics took special interest in keeping up Democritus’ worldview.
Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park, PA: Penn State University, 1994), 47.
Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma (Princeton: Princeton, 1993), 132.
See Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 11. Clément finds this connection between Diogenes and Democritus: “Mais si les masques de Diogène et de Démocrite peuvent être interchangeables, c’est que ce ne sont que des masques, des figures allégoriques. Il ne s’agit ni de Diogène, philosophe cynique, ni de Démocrite, philosophe matérialiste, penseur de l’atomisme. Ce Démocrite que la Renaissance utilise en couple avec Héraclite est réduit à une allégorie du rire, dans laquelle peut se fondre l’image de Diogène, ‘philosophe rare et joyeux entre mille,’ qui deviendra dans les siecles suivants le porte-parole de la démystification satirique [But if the masks of Diogenes and Democritus were interchangeable, it’s because they are only masks, allegorical figures. They are neither Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher, nor Democritus, the materialist philosopher, deviser of atomism. This Democritus, which the Renaissance uses in the company of Heraclitus, is reduced to an allegory of laughter, into which may be infused the image of Diogenes, ‘a rare and happy philosopher among a thousand,’ who would become in the following centuries the spokesman for satirical demystifications.]” (208–9). He also argues that the relationship bears further scrutiny.
Petrarch, Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, trans. and ed., Conrad H. Rawski (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana, 1991), 1:35.
William Drummond of Hawthornden, The History of Scotland from the Year 1423 Until the Year 1542 (London, 1655), 249, 251; see Saunders, 268.
Baïf’s Epitaphe de Rabelais, in Oeuvres de J. A. De Baïf, ed. C. Marty-Laveaux (Paris: Leroux, 1887), reads, “O Pluton, Rabelais reçoy,/A fin que toy qui es le Roy/De ceux qui ne rient jamais,/Tu ais un rieur desormais [O Pluto, receive Rabelais, so that you, the king of those who never laugh, from now on will have a laugher.]” (4:373). See Henri Chamard, Histoire de la Pleiade (Paris: Didier, 1961), 3:198. Cf. Greek Anthology: “Thou, Persephone, thou rulest over the unsmiling dead beneath the earth, receive the shade of Democritus with his kindly laugh; for only laughter turned away from sorrow thy mother when she was sore-hearted for thy loss” (7.59). While this epigram clearly puts Democritus’ laughter in a positive light, Epigram 58 focuses on the hilarious benefit of having one laughing subject in the underworld.
Heraclitus Junior, England’s Ichabod (London, 1651); see Kirk, 209–10, whose primary materials include many seventeenth-century Democrituses and some Heraclituses.
Peter C. Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Anti-Poetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1996), 25.
James VI of Scotland, I of England, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), ed. Edward Arber (London: English Reprints, 1869), 112.
For the holy hedonist, see Blanchard, 86. See Michael Keefer, “Agrippa’s Dilemma,” Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988): 650.
Edward Henry Blakeney, ed., Horace on the Art of Poetry: Latin Text, English Prose Translation, Introduction and Notes, Together with Ben Jonson’s English Verse Rendering (1928; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1970), 123.
A similar sentiment is expressed earlier in the Praise of Folly: “you’d need more than one Democritus to laugh at them properly” (27). Charles A. Knight, in The Literature of Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2004), 2–3, identifies a “close relationship between Democritus the laughing philosopher and Democritus the atomic theorist”: “Physical reality, he contends, is not the world as we perceive it but rather atoms and their movement. What we see is not what is. The same is true of human behavior, his laughter implies. The skeptical but observant satirist recognizes that some people are evil, but all are foolish not only because they do foolish things but because they are unaware of their folly … The satiric frame of mind, of which Democritus is an emblem, comprises complex and even paradoxical qualities. Like Democritus, the satirist is a skeptical and bemused observer.” Cf. Hadot, 106, who refers to the physics of Democritus’ atoms as one of “contemplation,” by contrast with the “violence” of modern mechanics—not intended to explain the world but to “appease souls.”
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© 2012 John L. Lepage
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Lepage, J.L. (2012). Laughing and Weeping Melancholy: Democritus and Heraclitus as Emblems. In: The Revival of Antique Philosophy in the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316660_3
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