Ebook: Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics

The notion of a harmonious universe is one of man’s most cherished beliefs. It was taught by Pythagoras as early as the sixth century B.C., and remained a basic premise in Western philosophy, science, and art almost to our own day. This book demonstrates the pervasiveness of this concept in the renaissance. The theory of cosmos, expressed as universal harmony or as a tetrad, was prominent in the period and strongly conditioned its esthetics. Unless we understand this, much of the meaning and beauty of Elizabethan poetry will be lost.

The universe as conceived by Pythagoras was carefully constructed. Our earth stood fixed at the center. Ranging outward from it were the spheres of the planets, with the sun as the midmost of seven. Beyond them shone the stars, distributed around the underside of a single delimiting sphere. And outside all, secure in an unchanging empyrean, reigned a benevolent God. Throughout His creation the pattern of the tetrad persisted, so that there were four elements, four seasons, four humours, four ages of man. The traditional sciences taught in the universities—mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy—derived from a study of these cosmic arrangements. To those who believed in it, the logic and symmetry of such a system brought welcome reassurance.

In this book the author recapitulates the extensive lore connected with Pythagoras. He recounts the legendary life of Pythagoras and describes his school at Croton, and he discusses the materials from which the renaissance drew its information about Pythagorean doctrine. The second section of the book reconstructs the many facets of this doctrine, while the final section shows its influence on renaissance poetics. Specifically, there are chapters which develop the assumptions that the poet is a maker acting in likeness of the creating godhead, that metaphor depends upon correspondences between the various levels of creation, and that the poem serves as a microcosm in literary form.

Finally, the author expresses his conviction that unless we accept the viability of a divinely-ordered universe, as did the sixteenth-century poet, we shall misinterpret much of the best writing in our language. Today's reader is predisposed to read in a different way. He is likely to follow the words of a poem from beginning to end and respond to these phenomena in an affective fashion, thinking that then he has read the work once and for all. But with a good deal of Elizabethan poetry, this first reading is just a preliminary. The reader must go further and consider the poem as a totality, a literary microcosm. Only then can he place each incident and each character and each metaphor in proper context, so that each part is integrally related to an inclusive whole. This totality in turn gives an added dimension of meaning to each of its constituent parts.

Professor Heninger’s learning coupled with his warm enthusiasm is persuasive. He introduces the reader not only to Pythagoras but to a host of other classical, medieval, and renaissance figures—from Plato and Aristotle through St. Augustine and Macrobius down to Sidney and Spenser. For students in esthetics, in comparative literature, in the history of science and of philosophy, and in all related fields this book gathers together a wealth of information and shows its assimilation in renaissance thought. Equally important, it suggests fresh points of departure for further research and criticism.

S. K. Heninger, Jr., holds a Ph.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins University and has taught at Duke University and at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), where he was also Chairman of the English Department. He is currently Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has written A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology, has edited the Hekatompathia of Thomas Watson and a volume of selections from the poetry of Edmund Spenser, and has contributed numerous articles and reviews to scholarly journals.