Areopagus Volume XXIV

Welcome one and all to the twenty fourth volume of Areopagus. As I write these words torrential rain is thundering against the windows and heavy fog has descended on the city. Alas, autumn has passed over those golden-red days and onto the gloom of its wintry collapse into December.

But, as Arthur Hugh Clough once wrote, say not the struggle naught availeth!

I - Classical Music

Pastime with Good Company

Henry VIII (circa 1513)

Why this piece?

For all the majesty of Baroque counterpoint, the inscrutable wonders of Medieval chant, the interlocking expressiveness of Renaissance polyphony, the experimental fervour of 20th century minimalism, or the emotional magnitude of Romantic symphonies, sometimes music doesn't have to be so spectacular, nor does it have to be described in spectacular terms.

Pastime with Good Company is, simply, a delightful song. It's catchy, jolly, rousing, and good fun. You'll find it whirling around in your head as you go about your day, perhaps with an added spring in your step. And I think it rather captures the spirit in which we imagine those great courts of the Middle Ages with all their festivals, banquets, hunts, and colourful trappings. Hence I paired it with a 1540 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hunting near Hartenfels Castle.

What style is it?

This is secular (i.e. non-religious) music. You'll notice that the lyrics are in English, a sure sign of secular music. For while Latin was the language of the church and thus of its music, vernacular (i.e. local dialects, whether English, French, or Italian say) was the language of secular song and dance.

Changing socio-economic conditions, as Europe shifted from the Medieval to the Renaissance, provided new opportunities for such secular music. Courts like those of Henry VIII himself, which were getting wealthier and filled with a growing bourgeousie, created a demand for entertainment. And with this new market, so to speak, the Renaissance Era in music (1400-1600, roughly) encompassed the more frequent production and development of secular music by serious composers.

Of course, folk songs are as old as music itself, long played throughout the Middle Ages by those great travelling singer-songwriters, the troubadors and minstrels. Their music - made for the common people and intended for entertainment above all - was simple, tuneful, and jolly. That is to say, it was distinct from the much more formal and complex works of religious music, which for centuries had been the primary sphere of serious composition. Another key difference was instrumentation, for secular music was usually accompanied by flutes, harps, and drums, while religious music had remained essentially vocal. It was as the next step in this time-honoured, popular traditon that Pastime with Good Company took its place; an elevation from the tavern to the court, from the village fairs to the royal hunt. But, thanks to that memorable tune, it became something like a smash hit; Pastime with Good Company was popular not just in England but right across Europe throughout the Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

It's also important to remember that music in those days wasn't written like it is now. The idea that a composer would write down the exact way that a piece of music should be played didn't really appear until the 18th century. Hence there are different versions of this song. This is a rather lovely version for four voices; here it is performed by a solo singer; and here is an exquisite brass band interpretation. Enjoy.

Who was Henry VIII?

Well, King Henry VIII of England (reigned 1509-1547) probably needs little introduction. His break with the Catholic Church in Rome was nothing short of a revolutionary moment in history. But, politics and those famous six wives aside, Pastime with Good Company gives us a sense of his early reign, when the burgeoning English kingdom was filled with such festivities as his music suggests.

II - Historical Figure

Diogenes of Sinope

Cynic or Saint?

Who was he?

Diogenes (412-404 B.C.) was an Ancient Greek philosopher from the city of Sinope, on the northern coast of modern-day Turkey. He was banished from the city of his birth when he and his father were caught out in a scheme to debase the currency; they had been reducing the quantity of gold and silver in coins, embezzling it for themselves.

Diogenes eventually settled in Athens. There he met Antisthenes, the founder of Cynicism. It is from this ancient philosophy that our words cynic, cynical, and cynicism come. But, like epicurean, their modern meaning represents a narrow and misleading version of the original.

Cynicism, as understood by Antisthenes and Diogenes, was more a way of life than a set of beliefs, inasmuch as those two things can be separated. But that was the idea: many people went about preaching these high philosophical ideals of virtue, but few truly lived by them. And so at the core of Cynicism lay the principle of natural dignity, one with which we should all live in accordance, and from which wealth and prestige and social practices only distance us. Outwardly, however, that took the form of protest; an open refutation of society.

And so Diogenes, perhaps having experienced something of a revelation after his Sinopean sins, set out to live a life of extremist virtue, exposing by his every action and word the inconsistencies, injusticies, hypocricies, and flaws of Athenian society. He lived in a clay barrel in the middle of the city and survived by begging. One of the earliest anecdotes about his unusual behaviour relates how somebody came across Diogenes begging in front of a statue. When asked why he was doing such a preposterous thing, Diogenes replied, "so I can get used to being ignored."

Indeed, he was rather fond of a witty remark:

As ever, beneath the outward show of caustic wit was concealed a deep philosophical conviction about the fundamental dignity of humanity and how much it had been corrupted by the trivialities and artifice of society. Diogenes was also fond of what might be called practical jokes, though ones which were perhaps closer to philosophical performance art. For he once went about Athens in broad daylight with a lantern. This caused quite a stir. And when the people asked him why, Diogenes replied, "I am looking for an honest man."

Another story relates how Diogenes saw a young boy cupping his hands to drink from the river. Astonished, he threw away his bowl at once, exclaiming that he had not been living in true poverty as there was still one possession he did not truly need.

At some point later in his life Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold into slavery. There's an anecdote about that, too:

So he ended up in the city state of Corinth - where he would die - and it was during his time there that Diogenes' most famous interaction occurred; perhaps the ultimate statement of his Cynic philosophy. For Alexander the Great had arrived in Corinth, at that point the most powerful man in all of Greece, and so statesmen and philosophers flocked around him to pay their respects. One did not come - the famous Diogenes, of whom Alexander had heard much. So Alexander went to find this strange old man renowned for his voluntary poverty. He did, and said to Diogenes that he would give him anything he wanted - riches, fame, armies, cities. Diogenes said that all he wanted was for Alexander to "stand a little out my light", for he was blocking the sun.

While this story in particular has provoked a great deal of respect for Diogenes and his disregard of authority, it's worth remembering that both during his lifetime and afterwards he was a deeply controversial figures. For much of his behaviour was gratuitously offensive. From disrupting the lectures of Socrates to public nudity (and worse), it seemed to many that Diogenes' Cynical philosophy was needlessly aggressive. They argued that it was easy to criticise society, but far harder to actually improve it. Diogenes had simply opted for the former, choosing to give up rather than show any faith and make an effort.

Right or wrong, Diogenes' personal brand of Cynicism - the precursor to more refined Stoicism a few decades later - was certainly memorable. And these surviving anecdotes from his unique lifestyle give us cause to ponder no less than it did those who lived alongside him two thousand years ago.

III - Painting

The Human Condition

René Magritte (1933)

Why this painting?

It's simple, rather funny, and incredibly thought-provoking. Sometimes a painting doesn't require complexity or even context. The Human Condition can be understood on its own merits. A straightforward concept, and one to which we can all relate. What's most remarkable, however, is that even Magritte could surely not have foreseen the frightful accuracy with which this painted predicted the future. For how many of us, upon seeing something interesting, will take out our phones and photograph it rather than actually looking at it through our own eyes?

But there's something else going on here. Magritte isn't simply lamenting that humans live through art or photography rather than the things itself; he's also pointing out that art isn't the thing itself. We immediately perceive that the view depicted on the canvas is hidden behind it. But, of course, it isn't. The canvas is just another part of the painting, as a single plain of colours, no different from the curtains of the floor; there isn't anything behind it. And yet, intuitively, we think there must be. Magritte is getting at the fundamental abstractness of art. That even when it looks familiar, even when it looks like the real world, is isn't, nor can it ever be.

Who was René Magritte?

René Magritte (1898-1967), born in Belgium, was part of that generation whose lives were irrevocably scarred by the First World War. Even though he did not fight in it, the socio-cultural repercussions were almost inconceivably wide-ranging and are still being felt to this day. He was caught up in them right after the event. Another pivotal moment in his life was personal tragedy: when Magritte was just thirteen his mother committed suicide.

Having being interested in art from a young age, Magritte started out as something of a Neo-Impressionist. Soon enough he was exposed to the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, which sent him down a new creative path. After briefly working in a wallpaper factory he moved to Paris and fell in with the Surrealist artistic circles there, led by Andre Breton and including de Chirico himself. Magritte flourished, perhaps ranking only behind the great Salvador Dalí in the ranks of the Surrealist artists.

His art was, above all, about art itself. And while such self-awareness can easily lead to pretentious navel-gazing of the sort that puts so many people off the modern art world, Magritte approached it with a keen sense of humour. It was his simple, conceptual style (perfectly evidenced by The Human Condition) which captured the imagination of so many young artists. We can count Pop Art, Minimalist Art, and Conceptual Art as just a few of the movements who owe their origins to Magritte.

What style is it?

Magritte was a Surrealist painter; so much is obvious. And though Surrealism is ostensibly but one of the many experimental movements in art during the first half of the 20th century, it stands rather apart from them. Whereas Expressionism and Cubism and abstract art moved away from being representational (the depiction of reality as we perceive it), Surrealism didn't really do that. Its hallmarks, clear in the work of Magritte and Dali, are good draughstmanship, linear perspective, and three-dimensional forms. No different, then, from painters of the 19th century and before.

See, while abstract art made no effort to create anything "recognisable" with its splashes or blocks of colour and its strange shapes, Surrealism was more subtle. Its power was to take something familiar - the world as we see it, painted as it so often has been - and to question reality within that framework. Surrealism leads to an intuitive discomfort, as our brains wrestle with the strangeness of something that should be normal. And so it was by using the old-fashioned methods of representational art that Magritte worked his engrossing, thought-provoking magic.

Magritte also made three more paintings with the same title and general idea between 1935 and 1945, though each tells a slightly different story:

IV - Architectural Masterpiece

Neuschwanstein Castle

Fantasy or Fiction?

Fact-File

Neuschwanstein is rather deceptive. Although it has the appearance of a Medieval castle, it's not. And it isn't even a defensive fortification; rather, it's a private residential palace built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He commissioned Neuschwanstein in 1868, having decided on a dramatic escarpment among the rolling green hills just north of the Alps. There had once been a real Medieval fortification there - it was demolished to make room for this new megastructure.

King Ludwig was friends with and a great admirer of the composer Richard Wagner, who even in his own lifetime was a titan of music and of culture generally. And so, inspired by the extraordinary emotional and spiritual depth of Wagner's operas, King Ludwig wanted to construct a physical testament to them: this would be, by every account, the ultimate Romantic castle.

It was a major project and wasn't finished when King Ludwig died in 1886. It was thereafter opened to the public and has since become one of Germany's major tourist attractions. Neuschwanstein is now most famous for being the castle that inspired Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle.

Why is it a masterpiece?

Few buildings better embody the architectural trends of the 19th century than Neuschwanstein. For the story of architecture in 19th century Europe is one of historicism. Each decade brought with it the next revival of another old style, whether Gothic, Baroque, Romanesque, Byzantine, or some combination of the lot. It was an era in which modern construction methods were used to recreate the great achievements of the past.

And so Neuschwanstein, even beyond its status as a self-evident marvel of design, is really the perfect example of that historicist phase in European architecture. It is grand, extravagant, and eclectic; it was made to delight and to impress; it drew directly on the appearance of older styles and reworked them into a fantastical dream of a building.

And yet it was this sort of thing which paved the way for modern architecture as we know it today. For a generation of architects towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries became fed up with all this retrospective, historicist fantasising. While we can look at Neuschwanstein with the rose-tinted glasses of an intervening century or more, there were many critics even during its construction who lamented Ludwig's castle as a gratuitous and overly sentimental.

We can perhaps understand why they didn't like it so much. A style of architecture which was once ineluctably tied to function - turrets, towers, crenellated walls, battlements, and all; these were strictly military, defensive things - had been zombified into a royal pleasure palace. It wasn't authentic, they argued. And, in a sense, they were right. From a certain point of view Neuschwanstein is frivolous, inauthentic, and backwards looking.

But Neuschwannstein is, ultimately, a testament to the importance of aesthetics in architecture. For buildings are not just places that we use, neutral canvasses of function whose shape and appearance have no bearing on our beheaviour. Quite the opposite: they have a profound effect on how we feel. Neuschwanstein, even though a purely aesthetic creation, is proof enough of this. For just as King Ludwig was inspired by the music of Wagner to create something deeply expressive and dream-like, so many millions around the world have been delighted and inspired by its turrets and towers soaring into the Bavarian sky.

V - Rhetoric

Apophasis

This is one of those rhetorical devices which proves beyond doubt that the Greeks and Romans were no less scurrilous, sly, and sneaky than we are when it comes to argument and debate. Apophasis is where the speaker mentions something by saying they don't want to mention it. We see this all the time, in politics or in everyday conversation.

It can be used negatively, either to gently remind people of an individual's past actions or flaws without seeming overly critical (or, perhaps, to let their imagination do the work for you), as when Cicero said of Catiline:

And it can be done wittily, too, as when Ronald Reagan said this while campaigning at the age of seventy three:

Or it can be positive, referring to the achievements or virtues either of the speaker or the subject. This might be used to brag in an ironic way, as when Robert Downey Jr said in Iron Man:

Or it can formulate a sense of righteous indignation, like John Milton:

Of course, the most famous recent example of apophasis was when former US President Donald Trump said:

Apophasis is a tricky rhetorical device. Used poorly it can simply make you seem childish, if not bitter, sneaky, self-important, and lacking in ideas. Used well, however, it can be incredibly funny and - if used with extreme prudence - a rather effective, if not slightly underhand, method of ad hominem persuasion. If it was good enough for Cicero... right?

VI - Writing

"Fancy" Words

People often criticise the use of so-called "fancy" words in writing. We are advised to keep it simple and to avoid the "ten dollar" words, as Hemingway famously called them. I think this is, for the most part, excellent advice. But the great Roman orator Quintilian knew that using simple words was not always enough. Language can (and often should, though that depends on you) take more than its most rudimentary form:

But reaching beyond simplicity is very risky. A profusion of pretty words can obscure good thoughts. Worse, it can make up for a lack of any meaning whatsoever. This habit, called circumlocution, was itself criticised by Quintilian. It’s writing at its worst; and it still exists. For many are guilty of what Paul Graham rather dryly described:

He’s quite right. But the emphasis here must be on trying to impress people rather than writing fancily. There’s really nothing wrong with so-called “fancy” words, as long as you use them properly. The pursuit of absolute understandability, of absolute function, can, I think, demean good writing. This excerpt from Quintilian reads like a direct criticism of aggressive simplicity:

The term “fancy” is itself rather loaded. Fanciful means frivolous and unnecessary. But some words are quite lovely to read and hear. Some get at concepts or ideas or feelings which would otherwise require a great many awkward shorter words. I don’t think that makes them “fancy”. And if it makes your writing more enjoyable, more beautiful, then that lends itself better to perspicuity and function than dull but effective prose.

By virtue of being less well-used, “fancy” words can often impart greater meaning than their everyday equivalents. This is most obviously true of adjectives. How often do you hear something or someone described as brilliant, amazing, awful, terrible, excellent, great, bad, awesome, good, cool, or nice? These words don’t hit. Which is fine, because they are simple indicators of quality. But the English language has several hundred thousand words. It would be a great shame to ignore a linguistic inheritance of such depth, texture, and variety. The point here being that such words are far from fancy; they can be very useful.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

In the old days... is not always what it seems

It is tempting to imagine that, in times gone by, people were far more polite than they are now. We might be drawn to think that in the past, when some great person (in the sense of influential and admired by at least some of the population) died, there would have been unanimous respect from all sides. But that has rarely been the case.

This isn't a justification of such behaviour. Rather, it's simply to point that there's nothing particularly 21st century about irreverent, disrespectful reactions to the death of notable people. Back in the 6th century B.C. the Athenian lawgiver Solon forbade anyone to speak ill of the dead, which suggests there may have been some problems with insults directed at those lately passed.

And here is a poem written by the great (the greatest) British satirist, Johnathan Swift, in 1722 He is most famous for Gulliver's Travels, but Swift's other work deserves equal attention. He continued on from the example set by the Roman satirist Juvenal, whose brand of bitter, caustic satire has been termed Juvenalian, in contrast to Horatian satire, named for the Roman poet Horace and his gentler, jollier, lighter parodies. For example, in A Modest Proposal Swift suggested that the masses of poor Irish Catholics should sell their children to the rich as food. It was a searing critique of contemporary attitudes to the poor and of British foreign policy in Ireland generally.

This particular work, euphemestically entitled A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General, was written after the death of John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough, a long serving British statesman and general. Even the title itself reads like an attack of sentimental and sycophantic elegies written in the Duke of Marlborough's memory.

As you can see, Swift was rather brutal. But that's beside the point here - that it's important not to idealise the past, not to forget that our ancestors were, so very often, just like us.

Question of the Week

Last week's question to test your critical thinking was:

Can war ever be justified?

Unsurprisingly, this question generated some deeply thoughtful responses. Alicja S said this:

While Erin M offered a musation on the shades of grey that shroud any talk of war:

And here was Matt O's answer, in which he pointed out the way violence can corrupt the very thing we might seek to protect:

While Ashim D offered a reply I should have expected:

This week's question to test your critical thinking is:

What makes a joke funny?

And that's all

The rain may still be hammering at the windows and the fog may still be laying thickly around, but it's been a rather evocative evening all told. Writing the Areopagus has certainly made it a little brighter. Until next week.

Yours,

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