Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity by James Miller (review)

90Rocky Mountain Review we all acknowledge as clearly as McKeon does. His readings of a variety of texts from the seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries are fresh and imaginative. Even where his readings are similar to those of earlier Marxist critics (in discussing power struggles in Pamela, for example), he goes well beyond what earlier critics have said. His readings of Don Quixote and Pilgrim 's Progress are especially helpful, and his discussion of the conflict between Richardson and Fielding, and his argument that they reverse positions later in their careers, is new and intriguing. McKeon's tripartite, dialectical argument unnecessarily controls the shape of his text. The book is divided and subdivided into triads, as he strains for a structural version of the dialectical pattern. It becomes more than a "subliminal presence" (1), intruding without adding significantly to his argument. More problematic are the split between historical background and literary analysis and the lack of analysis of novels. Over half the book is devoted to background before the significant texts are introduced in part three. While the third chapter of each of the first two parts (a split in itself) offers some analysis of texts, they are pre-novel genres. And in part three, only the works of Richardson and Fielding certainly, Defoe and Swift problematically, are novels. The historical analysis is not as well integrated with the literary as it might be. Because we can so readily identify and date the first instances of the novel, we tend to ask both generic and historical questions about it. Genre critics (like E. M. Forster, Aspects ofthe Novel) sometimes blatantly dismiss historical considerations. Historical critics, on the other hand, (like Ian Watt) usually attempt also to define by adducing evidence that points to major features of the new form ("formal realism"). McKeon's approach is fervently historical, but he does not define the novel in this traditional way. His Marxist readings work equally well with pre-novelistic narratives and novels, implying that the novel is not so much a distinctive new literary form asjust a narrative variant. If McKeon has not "defined" the novel as a new genre, however, he has told us a great deal about its (and its predecessor narratives') social, historical nature . The Origins ofthe English Novel makes an important contribution to our understanding of the dominant narrative form of the modern world. JOHN E. LOFTIS University ofNorthern Colorado JAMES MILLER. Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. 652 p. This massive book is a remarkable compendium of leading ideas and visions, philosophical, religious, and poetic, that distinguished major schools and movements in the later Hellenic, the Hellenistic-Roman, and the Patristic Christian periods. It is therefore an important work for the attention (and pleasure) of scholars concerned with Classical Antiquity, with the European Middle Ages, and/or with the dimming and dark times between; but it must also delight all persons interested in literature, philosophy, or theology. By past specialization James Miller belongs to "English' ' ; by present occupation (at the University of Western Ontario) he holds a joint appointment in English, Classical Studies, and Philosophy; and by his ambition and success as Book Reviews91 what he calls a "historian of visions" (15) he and this book must be ranked alongside Werner Jaeger and Paideia, Erich Auerbach and Mimesis, Arthur Lovejoy and The Great Chain of Being (to all of which Miller acknowledges debt, to all of whom he owns intellectual kinship). His purpose is to follow the image and the spectator of the cosmic dance from Timaeus in Plato's late dialogue through Platonist, anti-Platonist, Platonizing, and Neoplatonist figures as diverse as the Jew Philo of Alexandria, the anonymous Gnostic author of the Acts ofJohn, Plotinus, Emperor Julian "the Apostate," the Greek Fathers of the Church Sts. Gregory Nazianzus and Basil, the wizard Proclus, and angelologist par excellence, Pseudo-Dionysius. On the way he also treats shrewdly and with nice humor "Despisers of the Dance" in a long section (151-86) on Epicurean, Stoic, and Cynic critiques of the optimism, worldly or otherworldly , of the Platonic mainstream. Much of his vast matter is difficult...