S h o r t Es s ay

Pa s s a ge t o Arc a d i a

M i c ha e l E d wa rd Mo o r e
Department of History, University of Iowa, Iowa.

Abstract In the poetry of Theocritus and Virgil, the pastoral landscape of Arcadia
was developed as an ideal region of benevolent nature, shepherds and hunters, and the
ardent springs of poetry. In Virgilian nature, close to the sources of art and scholarship,
meditation could be practiced, and awareness of ultimate reality achieved. During
the Middle Ages, a severe kind of Arcadia was brought to life in monasteries
and hermitages. In the Renaissance, Arcadia was further developed as a realm of
humanistic study, combining solitude in nature with book learning. Arcadia was later
reimagined as a distant classical landscape of the arts and humanities. In late
modernity, the humanities are challenged by the norms of totalizing reason, and a
sense of historical closure. Drawing upon an anonymous journal, the author seeks
passage to Arcadia.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 132–141.

doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.12

To understand! It is – not to die.

Auguste Rodin

In a well-known painting of Poussin, several figures wearing ancient dress stand

solemnly before a tomb bearing the legend Et in Arcadia Ego. According to the
commentary of Erwin Panofsky, these figures are inhabitants of Arcadia, and
the mysterious inscription means: ‘even in Arcadia, I [death] exist’. Life itself,
even the utopian life of Arcadia, is evanescent. Melancholy invades the rustic
charm of a utopian landscape, as a limitation of hope. Arcadia is mortal,
transitory, distant. The painting has a tragic sensibility, and invites the viewer to
pensiveness (Panofsky, 1936).

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 Passage to Arcadia

Utopian hope is usually imagined to be like a star shining in the darkness of

the future. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann argued that Christian hope cannot
be encountered in the present moment, but only as a promise regarding the
future (Moltmann, 1991, 30). At the extreme, as with Derrida, utopian hope
takes the form of agonized invocations of a future that can never arrive (Caputo,
2007). To speak of a passage to Arcadia, however, is not to speak of an
imagined future, but of a possible past – and a possible present moment, or
presence of the past. One should think of a star that shines in the darkness of
the past, rather than the future. The basic question I am asking concerns the
possibility of the presence of the past. The present age takes its character from
a limited number of successful projects and victorious powers. Extensive riches
of the past have been abandoned or deliberately destroyed, and we seem to find
ourselves without alternatives, confined to the ‘totalizing reason of the
metanarratives of modernity’ (Autiero, 2008). Power and wealth shape the
world, and as Pierre Hadot says, in a recent work on Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, the course of history often appears to be dominated by small numbers
of men without scruples (Hadot, 2008, 270). For Goethe, this fact should
convince the artist to turn toward the world, for otherwise there is a danger that
what is most precious will be erased from our hearts. Intellectuals may avoid the
danger of unreal isolation by turning toward the world, and finding a way to
serve others. In order to go beyond the limitations of modernity, the arts and
humanities can also try to reestablish contact with cultural and spiritual
alternatives of the past, no matter how difficult or ambiguous. Hans-Georg
Gadamer referred to the ‘variety of voices in which the echo of the past is
heard’. By listening to those voices, Gadamer suggested, ‘we have, as it were, a
new experience of history’ (Gadamer, 2004, 285).
Is it still possible to rediscover the meaning of the humanities, even if only in
some limited form? According to a beautiful passage in Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht’s The Powers of Philology, sometimes the humanities scholar can
do little more than point to an object from the past. But even a restrained
gesture of this kind can bridge ‘the temporal distance that separates us from
the desired past’. In fact, the scholar may overcome the threshold of death and
learn to speak to the dead (Gumbrecht, 2003, 65–66).
Arcadia, as a space of contemplation and scholarship, seems to lie in ruins. Its
inscriptions have been eroded by the rain and sunlight of centuries. However,
the rough appearance of all such ruins, the scarred surface and patina of old
statues, are signs of survival and continued presence rather than of destruction.
The patina confirms the intense presence of the past, and is a sign of endurance
(Philippot, 1996). Fragments are eloquent expressions of beauty and the tragic
element of time. Passage to Arcadia would require a philosophy of patina and
fragment. These are qualities of historical presence.
It began with the landscapes of Theocritus (fl. 270 BCE) – a wilderness of
nymphs’ caves, sweetly scented rushes, larksong, and bees humming over the

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waters of a brook. Here shepherds wearing goatskins lived close to the sources
of music and the origins of culture, and aimed amusing jokes at distracted
passers-by. The shepherd with his flute inhabited nature as the ultimate region
of poetry. This is where Theocritus located his own complex garlands of
language, asserting the claims of verse in contrast to the sophistication and
nervous bustle of the city of Alexandria. Far away, the Idylls suggested, gods
and nymphs could be encountered in the forested mountains of Sicily, with all
the intensity of divine and human longing (Theocritus, 1982).
Centuries later, in the Bucolics, Virgil (70–19 BCE) adopted the pastoral
themes of Theocritus, transferring the setting from Sicily to Arcadia, while
retaining many of the same characters and elements (see Curtius, 1973, 190).
The Arcadia of Virgil, like the Sicily of Theocritus, was still a land of shepherds,
music and desire, brought to life as an image of the very poetry that conveyed it.
Virgil took the landscape and name of Arcadia from a region in the central
Peloponnese, said to be the aboriginal home of humanity, for the Arcadians had
lived in those mountains since before the birth of the moon (Pausanius, 1998).
The Arcadians were said to retain savage customs. Their country was haunted
by the god Pan, who could sometimes be heard playing his syrinx in the hills.
By evoking Arcadia as an ideal space of poetic thought, Virgil thereby
added to Theocritus a further dimension of deep antiquity, connecting his poetry
to the historical and religious legacy of Greece. With that stroke, nature itself
came into view as a vital space of art and meditation. Seated on soft grass, the
gentle protagonists admired the trees coming into leaf, nunc frondent silvae
(Virgil, 1828, 17). Trees, meadows and rivers gained a contemplative
significance.
In the Georgics Virgil explored a country of farms and gardens, where
the fruit of every kind of tree could flourish alongside sacred groves,
nemorumque sacrorum, and where wild cherries could be cultivated and
made abundant (Virgil, 1828, 87). As in the Bucolics, Virgil found still more:
this was not simply a setting for rural arts and agriculture but a utopian place
of retreat from urban life and the dangers of political violence and civil war
(Demandt, 2000, 167–194). Arcadian nature made it possible to experience
spiritual events of great importance, and to achieve philosophical wisdom, as
illustrated by Virgil in Georgics 2: ‘Fortunate the man who has been able to
investigate the causes of things and to set beneath his feet all fears, inexorable
fate, the roar of greedy Acheron. Fortunate, too, the man who knows the gods
of the countryside, Pan and aged Silvanus and the sister nymphs’ (quoted
in Biagio Conti, 1994, 271–272). With a sudden disclosure of being, the
beautiful landscape offers revelation, insight into the meaning of nature, and
liberation from the fear of death. Arcadia promises ecstatic, unmediated
forms of knowing.

***
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Frankfurt, 8 July 2009. How we would like to awaken the belovéd dead! Our
hands full of flowers, we would love to greet them again and see their dear
faces. Archaeology of Arcadia (the ruins in our minds). To discover Arcadia
would be to find again the antiquity of antiquity. The day is dark grey, with a
steady rain drenching the Plane trees outside, a continuous sound of gushing
water, like a baroque fountain y there ought to be a statue of Neptune reclining
with his trident among the wet leaves, and stone Dolphins leaping through the
branches. Antiquitas interiora: the ruins within us.

***

Arcadia disappeared during the Middle Ages, not to reemerge until the
Renaissance. Medieval thinkers could not afford to wander in this unnerving
region of forests and pastures, gleaming with pagan divinity and sick with
human love and longing. Christian thinkers such as Jerome and Augustine
rejected all the poetry of Horace and Virgil. Arcadia was remembered only once,
late in the eleventh century, by Marbod, bishop of Rennes. Panofsky found this
surprising in a medieval author: ‘Marbod’s attitude is rather unusual y in a
period practically estranged from the classical conception of otium, meaning the
blissful state of a mind entirely belonging to and satisfied with itself’ (Panofsky,
1936, 229). In the medieval world, contemplation of nature was replaced by
contemplation of God, and philosophical reflection by routines of prayer.
Panofsky’s picture relies on a familiar mythic image of the Middle Ages. As
argued by Giuseppe Mazzotta, there is a persistent myth of an age when nothing
happened, when the flow of history was frozen. The mentality of Europe was
immobilized in gothic structures, while the cultural legacy of antiquity was
despised and forgotten. Such an image of the Middle Ages provides a fixed
point in the Narrative of the West, a ‘perpetual anachronism, an immutable,
closed off space’ (Mazzotta, 1993, 16). This is the dark, rusted Age of Faith, the
age of monarchy, fear and ritual.
We might instead consider the medieval monastery to be the severe, stone-built
Arcadia of the Middle Ages – a space walled off from the world, where ancient
ascetic practices were revived as a way of returning to a golden age (Lohse, 1969).
The wilderness, loca deserta, was a terrain of mind and body, where salvation was
sought in solitude, penance and contemplation (Festugière, 1961). Emulating
John the Baptist, the early desert hermits wore the same goatskins as the
shepherds of Arcadia, and likewise lived in the presence of divine and daemonic
forces. The hermits selected beautiful forests and sublime crags for their retreats.
As early monasteries flourished along the Mediterranean coast of Gaul, the
monks absorbed ascetic and spiritual practices of the ancient philosophical
schools. At once nostalgic and aristocratic, these monasteries provided a haven
from the bustling life of cities, and from the political disasters of post-Roman
Europe. There the learned and well-born undertook the vita solitaria.

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The monks rediscovered a tradition known to Pythagoras and Marcus

Aurelius, which linked philosophical reflection to withdrawal into a distant
charming landscape, the locus amoenus (Hadot, 1998, 316). For the Christian
monk and bishop Gregory Nazianzus, philosophia would mean ‘breaking from
the world y by concerning [oneself], amid things below, with things above,
and winning, where all is unstable and fluctuating, the things that are stable
and that abide’ (quoted in Pelikan, 1993, 181). Monastic life, like the ancient
philosophical life, was a preparation for death. Monks nevertheless began
to establish libraries. At Marseilles and Lérins, the monks exchanged
letters, cultivated scholarship and otium, read books and contemplated the
azure sea.

***

Hurricane Creek, 10 March 2005. The sun rose at about seven, and we
got up from the tent to find the land covered in hoarfrost. It was cloudy and
very cold, but we hopped about to get warm and began our day. There came a
steady promise of sunlight, which we awaited faithfully. As the frost melted
away we hung our gear to dry, and made our way down to Hurricane
Creek, where I sprawled on a flat outcrop of stone, and took off my shirt to
sunbathe and read. By ten o’clock it was warm, and I washed in the ice-cold
water. As I lay at length, naked in the sun, it suddenly seemed like a blessing
to have a body, as a passage of awareness. That night it was pitch dark
and we built a campfire. I wrote a letter to Czeslaw Milosz, which I sent by
salamander.

***

The hermits and monks of antiquity were perceived as dressing in the manner of
philosophers, as though the philosophical life had been transferred from the
Platonic Academy, which closed its doors in 529, to St Benedict’s Montecassino,
founded in the same year. Throughout the Middle Ages monks claimed that
their form of life was philosophically in tune with the cosmic order of nature.
It was a life of self-discipline and scholarship; the contemplative life, vita
contemplativa. This placid form of life, close to nature and devoted to reflection
and study, was later adopted by scholars of the Renaissance, along with late
medieval practices of asceticism and reclusion. The humanists admired
St Jerome as a figure who had combined great scholarship with ascetic
seclusion (Kantorowicz, 1965).
Thus came Petrarch’s discovery of Arcadia in the Vaucluse: ‘while everyone
else sought the palace, I sought the woods, or sat quietly in my own room
among my books’ (quoted in Wilkins, 1961, 239). Petrarch’s love for the
solitude of gentle rural landscapes was part of a search for self-realization that

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retained the form of holy leisure, otium. This medieval ideal was now combined
with scholarship in antiquity, poetry-writing and the practice of meditation in a
freely chosen solitude (Hoff, 1938). Petrarch’s poetry was rich and unusual, and
he undertook the study of ancient authors with a passionate style, yet still
compatible with his traditional religious piety. He developed his love of retreat
and seclusion in his remarkable book On the Solitary Life. Exploring the
phenomenon of solitude throughout the ages, he declares the solitude of a
shepherd to be something secure and excellent. He admired Virgil’s Arcadia and
the poetical character Alexis, living ‘alone among the mountains and the woods’
(Petrarch, 1924, 158). Petrarch emulated Virgil with his own Bucolicum
Carmen, and chose to live in the Vaucluse as a new kind of monk (Mazzotta,
1993, 153). Of himself he once wrote: ‘What then am I? A learner, but hardly
even that; a lover of the woods, a solitary wanderer, wont to utter insipid words
amid tall birches, or ply a frail pen, presumptuously and audaciously, in the
shade of a tender laurel’ – the laurel of Laura often appeared in his solitude
(Wilkins, 1961, 180).
After the Renaissance, the arcadian landscape of poetry became a favored
symbol of scholarship in the humanities, indicating a classical realm of arts
and letters. Travellers such as Winckelmann and Goethe visited the sites of the
ancient world, hoping to immerse themselves in the origins of culture. Goethe’s
Italian Journey took as its motto: ‘I was also in Arcadia! Auch Ich in Arkadien!’
(Goethe, 1994, 7). Goethe’s journey was a real and imaginary return to a place
he had never been. Arcadia had become a land of serene contemplation and
artistic mastery.
American artists and authors likewise flocked to Italy in the hope of finding
something ancient and steadfast, and to see the monuments of artistic mastery
(Brooks, 1958). We can follow this trail to Walden Pond, with its Virgilian
setting. Henry David Thoreau admired Goethe’s Italian Journey. Thoreau’s
Arcadian experiment was overshadowed, perhaps, by the stark contrast
between Virgil’s pleasant landscapes and Thoreau’s awareness of a menacing
modern world (Seybold, 1951; Robinson, 2004). But the surrounding world had
always menaced Arcadia.
‘The Italian Renaissance contained within it all the positive forces to which
we owe modern culture: liberation of thought, disrespect for authorities, victory
of education over the arrogance of ancestry, enthusiasm for science y
unfettering of the individual, a passion for truthfulness’, wrote Friedrich
Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche, 1996, 113). Nietzsche
believed that northern Germans of the Reformation period wanted only to
stamp out the culture, science and arts of the Renaissance. The Reformation
was a reaction against Renaissance culture, when the Germans ‘with their
stiff-necked northern forcefulness y reversed the direction in which men were
going’ (Nietzsche, 1996, 114). Perhaps the so-called work ethic is a legacy of
the Protestant annihilation of the Renaissance ideal of otium.

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 Moore

In the context of modernity, Arcadia was often seen as an unreal flight from
reality, rather than a mode of contemplation or art (Highet, 1949, 163). Study
of the humanities, in general, is at times portrayed as artificial and capricious.
A sense of dejection and animosity was lurking after the Second World War.
Against the possibility of the freedom of culture, as expressed in the philosophy
of Ernst Cassirer, came a sense of anxiety and absolute historicity in the writings
of Heidegger, which came with a rejection of personal responsibility for others
or for history itself, since ‘all is destiny’ (Cassirer, 1979, 229; Safranski,
1998, 334). Ever since Heidegger, contemporary thinkers, such as Marcel
Detienne, have reacted passionately against accepting antiquity as a model or
source of culture (Detienne, 2009). Like a second reformation, contemporary
theory would discipline the western imagination, in effect locking the exits of
modernity.

***

Patina and Fragment: The sculptor Auguste Rodin admired the contemplative
character and dense shadows of ancient art. He came to believe, after studying
the Venus of Melos in the Louvre Museum, that in order to understand the
accomplishments of ancient Greek sculpture, one must recognize that ‘the
Antique and Nature are bound by the same mystery’ (Rodin, 1912, 11).
A beautiful woman had posed for the god. Venus was a revelatory and ardent
work, from which an artist could learn that ‘except through confining oneself
to the observation of reality, constant, scrupulous, and ever more profound, no
one can accomplish anything y nothing will take the place of persevering
study’ (Rodin, 1912, 7–9). According to Rodin, the abraded surface and
fragmentation of the statue were due to its centuries-long endurance, and this
endurance was due to its continuous presence as an artistic achievement.
Otherwise, the statue would have been lost in temporality, ‘doomed to all the
poverties, to all the discords’ of time (Rodin, 1912, 6).
Nature and antiquity are bound together. Arcadia may still exist as a real
presence, as an intrigue of antiquity, in the continued survival of the humanities
and nature. At the same time, if we care for others, if only one or two persons at
a time, we experience ‘utopia, transcendence’ (Lévinas, 1998, 230). Passage to
Arcadia – the presence of antiquity, with the patina of great age; meditation in
nature, faithful regard for reality. In opening ourselves to sources of this kind,
we may learn the value of Husserl’s dictum ‘back to the things themselves’
(Kolakowski, 2001). Orphic disclosure. Crossing the barriers of death and time.

***

Maria Laach, 30 May 2009. Like a newborn lamb awakening on frosty ground,
I came to myself with a sudden start. Standing at the edge of the woods, I was

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 Passage to Arcadia

aware of golden wheat fields and distant meadows, flowing over conical
volcanic hills. Four villages with tile roofs, each cradled in its own valley.
Farther off, a ruined tower atop a steep forested crag. Or perhaps not ruined,
perhaps not even old y Slender dragonflies hovered like blue needles above
the grass.

Bless the weakness of my hands,

to write
Bless the weirdness of my mind,
to know
Bless the thinly-blowing wind
that is my soul.

About t he Auth o r

Michael Edward Moore received his PhD from the University of Michigan and
is a member of the History department at the University of Iowa. His work
has been supported by fellowships at the Library of Congress, Trinity College
Library in Dublin, and the Max-Planck Institute in Frankfurt. He has written
widely on early medieval politics and law, the history of humanism, and
scholarly traditions from the Middle Ages to the present.

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