Monday, December 10, 2012

the numina of localities and differentiated traditions

We have seen that, stated very baldly, he is concerned to show that in some sense or other all that is valuable derives from an Hellenistic norm. Supposing, for the moment, that we concede that; what then? Does it mean that the metamorphoses of Hellenistic forms demanded by the numina of this or that locality are to be regarded as aesthetically suspect? If so, then, we would indeed protest. I shall use an analogy to illustrate one ground for objection. The news of our Redemption was told to us in a Latin voice in Judeo-Hellenistic terms, we received it as Mediterranean news couched in Mediterranean forms; but when a poet of our Western seaboard expressed what that Mediterranean event meant to him, he wrote a poem, three lines at least of which are familiar to us in modernized forms:

Then the young hero stripped himself, that was God Almighty
strong and steadfast; he mounted the high gallows
proud in the sight of many, then he would loose mankind.


The MS. is in late West Saxon, but it is perhaps not without significance that a fragment of this great poem was inscribed in the old Northumbrian dialect of the seventh century on the Anglo-Celtic Ruthwell Cross in Scotland. This suggests a valid and wide appeal on this island. Neither a Jew nor a Greek nor a Roman could have had that particular dream of the rood; not a converted pharisee, nor a converted philosopher, nor a converted centurion, could have been granted that particular vision (for art, as they of Grace, follows nature), only a converted barbarian from the Celto-Teutonic north-west seaboard could offer munera of that shape. This, I have said, serves only as an analogy: the northern poem could not have been written except Mediterranean men had brought the story, but no Mediterranean man could have told the dream that the rood dreamed. He would not have known how to make that particular shape.... It takes all sort to make a world, and if it was a great labour to make the Roman people, it takes an infinite variety of endlessly and mysteriously interrelated art-forms, labour and stress past reckoning to make up the sum of beauty of the forms which human beings have made 'ad hoc and de novo' as offerings to the Maker who makes all things 'ex nihilo' as a passage in The Letters of Eric Gill reminds us. Now it is only the numina of localities and differentiated traditions that could have dictated the metamorphoses in any and every art. This remains true even if we allow the Greek miracle to be at the navel of it all.

- David Jones, 'A Note on Mr Berenson's Views' in Epoch and Artist

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