Job, Boethius, and epic truth (review)

Reviews 133 Astell, Ann W., Job, Boethius, and epic truth, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1994; cloth; pp. xv, 240; R.R.P. US$36.25. This provocative book is concerned to challenge the orthodoxy that the Middle Ages produced no secondary epics. Although perhaps a third of the volume has appeared earlier as articles, the present text succeeds in its purpose of integrating the writer's previous readings of works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Malory and Milton into the main later theme: that many of the works classified as 'romance' have taken Job and Boethius as their models in their emphasis on the spiritually significant. The newer parts are concerned with the antecedent and framing thesis: that the Middle Ages were correct in singling out the enigmatic Book of Job as a biblical counterpart to the epics of antiquity. Thus, from the sixth century, we have both the Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great and also Isidore of Seville's description of the Book of Job as heroic in both subject and form, just like the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, because they 'conveyed the same message, taught the same truth' (p. 3.). The author sees the influence of translatio and imitatio in the concern with 'the truth of the epic matter'. This definition of epic truth is shown to have begun as early as the fifth century B.C., in the thought of Plato and Socrates, then to have passed through specific philosophical schools: atomist, stoic, neoplatonist. Thus epic truth has become the knowledge of a person's own self as enjoined by the Delphic Oracle's 'Know thyself. The words of Plato's Phaedrus receive further endorsement from those of Seneca (ca. A.D. 37): 'Hoc videlicet dicit ilia Pythicis oraculis adscripta vox: NOSCE TE. ... Quid est homo? Imbecillum corpus etfragile ... ad omnis fortunae contumelias proiectum' (Ep. Mor., IT). Seen from the perspective of this answer, the tragic action at Troy and the long suffering of Odysseus on his voyages indicate eloquently that man's corporeal and mortal nature are models of God's purpose and of man's virtue under testing. And, by the time of Numenius, Odysseus had become 'a religious symbol, a type of the soul on its homeward journey' (p. 10). The recensions of Homer's tale became concerned to rewrite his myths with emphasis on the moral, rational, and spiritual aspects of human nature as a means to self-knowledge and to know the universal causes of things. Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae (A.D. 525) would give summary expression to this tradition of Homeric rewritings and forge a link 134 Reviews with the complementary Old Testament text, the Book of Job. This assimilation would also be made by both Saint Gregory the Great (ca A.D. 540-604) in his Moralia in Job, and by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his thirteenth-century commentary on Job. Gregory had also used an extended allegory of martial combat to interpret the straggle between Job and Satan. Saint Jerome, also, saw Job as a kind of heroic poem, combining the didactic and the dramatic, a complex view with which Bede would concur. Astell also contends that in chivalric romance Job presents the various forms of medieval knighthood: spiritual warrior, patron of wayfarers and seekers, the penitent knight returning to lost virtue, and, finally, a despairing sinner such as Spenser's Redcrosse Knight. Her concluding section illustrates how Milton's great works may be seen 'as an exegetical trilogy inspired by Protestant theology' affording the reader self-knowledge. The core of this book is in Chapter 2, 'Boethius and epic truth', and Chapter 3, 'Job and heroic virtue'. Thefirstconcludes that 'true perception depends on recall of forgotten memories' and the joining of 'external images with internal forms'. The latter sees the Christian hero as 'an authentic human being and a saint' (p. 96). Thus the true hero and saint may be found to be a sufferer who, Job-like, transfers finally to 'true certainty', as Job did. While the thesis may seem to be somewhat simplistic and to over-ride more medieval genres, the ideas behind it are powerful and they illustrate well the heroism behind...