Universal Harmony Research Articles

L'armonia del Ribera

The young Ribera seems to have had some relationship to Bernardo Strozzi and the Capuchin Fathers. However, the dominant iconology in Ribera's works seems to come from the tradition of local Evangelism, as in Luis de Molina, with a focus on the imitation of Christ in mildness and humility, and with the main sources being St. Matthew and St. Augustine. By reconstructing this coherent iconology, Ribera's images of physical decay are not to be considered apart from those of beauty, in accordance with the Augustinian assertion of the relative beauty of all creation since it derives its existence and form from God, nor from the assertion of a higher universal harmony, where all things fit into their proper place. What we see as ugly comes, if anything, from limiting our attention to what is particular.

The Metaphysics of Love (review)

Reviews 77t« Metaphysics of Love, by A. J. Smith; 349 pp. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1985, $39.50. A. J. Smith proposes "to follow out a crisis of our European engagement with love by contrasting some writings in which love acutely poses such issues as the relation of the body to the mind and spirit . . ." (p. 2). "AU the writings considered here," he goes on, "are shaped by the momentous assumption that human love in some way rehearses a universal condition" (p. 3). Such a quest strikes one as perilous, considering the huge amount of material already ground out on the amatory tradition in European culture. Is it possible to offer anything new? Also, one has the queasy suspicion that this will be yet another academic abstract discussion of love, barren of the least hint that what is being talked about is a human emotion. This disquietude is allayed early when Smith compares passages from the giants at both ends of the tradition, Dante and Milton. We are offered fresh and instructive discriminations. We see in a new way Dante's movement toward repose at the still center, and Milton's toward a universal harmony in which the individual is forever in dynamic action. Dante's vision reveals love as a force which transcends humanity to reach pure illumination of spirit, whereas Milton shows love as incarnating itself "to prove the worth of our human nature" (p. 326). In turn, the two giants are carefully differentiated from Ficino and the Florentine Neoplatonists. This book is rich in comparing and bringing into clear focus figures that tend to be lodged in somnolent assumptions. Smith dislodged my lazy association of Spenser with Neoplatonism by showing how much he looks forward to Donne. Some of my encrusted notions about Donne were cracked by his remarkable discussion of "The Ecstasy," profitable even after the fine insights of such critics as Bennett and Williamson. Another excellence of the book is that Smith's general propositions are derived from a broad learning, an unusual variety of example. He activates figures that for many of us are only shadows or inert names: Riquier, Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle. For the first time, I was persuaded that Michelangelo is worthy of close attention as a poet who shaped his own metaphysic of love in 181 182Philosophy and Literature the ardent poems to Vittora Colonna, a metaphysic far from supine Petrarchanizing . It is a pleasure to discover that in this book love is not subjected to the processes of academic desiccation. Smith's close and intense analysis of the Paulo and Francesca passage clarifies for us the "mimetic textures" that compel the reader's feelings. We are brought to see the odd, particular fervor of the lines, the Italian on the lips and tongue. Here and elsewhere he proves to be a critic who does not shrink from showing that he is moved. Given the profit and pleasure provided by this book, it seems almost churlish to suggest that his discussion of Vaughan is something of a blemish. He attempts at tedious length to establish that Vaughan is not a dunderhead with intermittent spasms of imagination, but a thinking metaphysical poet who sees the universe as "an organism of love," a poet for whom "right seeing and feeling follow right understanding" (p. 278). I am bleakly persuaded, I suppose , but remain mutedly scandalized that he would give Vaughan twice as much space as Donne or Herbert. Professor Smith does not provide the excitations of more modish iconoclasting and deconstructing critics, but his thoughtful discriminations oppose lazy readings and are delightful to one's reason and sensibility. Whitman CollegeWalter E. Broman Roman Jakobson: Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy; xiv & 208 pp. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, $29.50 cloth, $12.95 paper. In 1982 I had the sad privilege of reporting the recent death of Roman Jakobson to a gathering of New Zealand linguists, having just heard the news at a linguistic conference in Sydney. The way this news was spread says something about the man. All linguists and literary theorists, whatever their specialty, will acknowledge Jakobson's massive and fundamental sixty-year...

Galileo and God's Creation

Previous articleNext article No AccessGalileo and God's CreationWinifred Lovell WisanWinifred Lovell Wisan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 77, Number 3Sep., 1986 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/354206 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1986 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Natacha Fabbri Questioning Fludd, Kepler and Galileo: Mersenne’s Harmonious Universe, (Feb 2019): 201–232.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02765-0_10 John Neu One Hundred Twelfth Critical Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences, Isis 78, no.55 (Oct 2015): 5–274.https://doi.org/10.1086/354631

The Ultimate Realization of the Confucian Ideal Universal Harmony as Seen by China’s Revolutionary Thinker Li Dazhao (1889–1927)

The Ultimate Realization of the Confucian Ideal Universal Harmony as Seen by China’s Revolutionary Thinker Li Dazhao (1889–1927)

D'Alembert et la théorie harmonique de Rameau

Françoise Escal : Music and science. D'Alembert v. Rameau. The scholastic tradition made a clear distinction between the art of composition and theoretical speculation ; Rameau for the first time tried to unify them. In his opinion, music is not an art but above all a science. Starting from Sauveur's discovery of the series of harmonics, Rameau proceeded to a mathematical rationalisation of the properties of sound. Harmony, which generates arithmetical, geometrical and harmonic proportions, thus becomes the model for other sciences and for arts based on calculation, such as architecture. Rameau soon identified musical harmony with universal harmony. D'Alembert opposed this all-embracing conception and in the Discours préliminaire to his Elements de musique..., took issue with each aspect of Rameau's theory and asserted the autonomy of art in relation to science.

The Esthetics of Non-Classical Science

The theory of beauty has always rested on the representation of the infinite, understood in its finite expression and perceptible through the senses. The relationship of beauty to truth, of art to science, is inevitably modified with the new way of treating the infinite in the modern conception of the world. Non-classical science works with the notions of “infinitely large” and “infinitely small,” modifying their meanings in terms of experimental observations. We put these words in quotation marks because the Whole may be considered as finite or infinite according to the angle from which it is viewed: the “infinitely small” only becomes so in determined circumstances, for example, when we consider the extended and discrete elements of space and time in a macroscopic approximation, as infinitely small elements of perpetual motion. Modern science studies these two poles of being—the Whole and its parts—in their interaction, admitting the dependence of macroscopic and even cosmic processes with regard to the processes being created in infinitely small spheres (or, according to another interpretation, finite but extremely small). However, as characteristic of our time as these concepts are—most often hypothetical—they nonetheless express a very old historical tradition that contemporary retrospection, turned toward classical science and the past of science in general, allows us to discern very clearly. All the culture of the past was dominated by the principle of the authority of the Whole over its parts. In peripatetic cosmology and physics, individual processes depended on the cosmic harmony of the center and frontiers of the universe, on the spheres and places toward which bodies tend. This authority of the general law, of universal harmony, of the system hinging on individual processes, is confirmed in Aristotle's Physics, but not only there: we find it in almost all the thinkers of antiquity. On the plane of general logic, it received expression in the Hegelian concept of the true infinite, a concept constituting to a high degree the philosophical equivalent of classical science. In Hegel's time, this last was already drawing away somewhat from the idea of an absolute and strict subordination of elementary processes to integrating systems and general laws, laws being realized through the probability of microprocesses, thus statistical laws, and whose exact application ignored individual acts, for example, the mechanism of molecules in thermodynamics. The statistical theory of heat has rendered continual a discrete microcosm—for the movement of individual molecules it substituted the average speed of the molecules—and continual laws became supreme points determining macroscopic processes. These laws had a differential nature. In other words, they prescribed the defined relationships between the infinitely small increases in size. Also, the schema of the classic law consisted in defining infinitely small processes by an infinitely large integral legality because of the number of processes. The infinitely true of Hegel is the actual infinite being realized in each of its finite elements; it is the subjection of the finite element to the infinite.

The ‘Hortus Palatinus’ at Heidelberg and the reformation of the World part II: culture as science

Abstract In the first part of this essay I attempted to present the iconography of the Hortus Palatinus 1 (figure 1), constructed by the architect and engineer, Salomon de Caus, for the Palatine Elector, Frederick V, during the period 1612 to 1620. This garden has attracted attention on account of its complexity and rarity as a German example of Renaissance gardening. In my description of its iconography I argued for something much more; namely for the existence of a programme which guided the whole composition. What this was I only hinted at, but in the process of doing so I mentioned both the importance of mechanics for its creator, particularly as derived from the ancient text of Hero, and the conviction that the demonstration of mechanical laws would be seen to underwrite belief in universal harmony. I touched upon the way that de Caus utilized mythological symbolism to portray moral questions in a mechanical-musical context. I alluded to the conceptual congruity underlying beliefs in the possibility of essentialist or Adamic language, insofar as it promised an immediate portrayal of truth, and of essentialist music, which as the imitation of the ‘voice of nature’ promised an immediate and harmonically organized portrayal of empirical laws. I pointed out the importance for de Caus of the Euclidean, Platonic, and Pythagorean traditions regarding belief in the vitality of ‘number’, and described how he had utilized this Vitruvian tradition in the Hortus Palatinus to generate proportions for the construction of an encyclopaedic display of a ‘botanical cosmos’. Finally, I mentioned the fundamental intellectual problem — of describing spatially complex or dynamic systems — encountered in Renaissance use of proportional laws as explanatory schemata, and I touched upon the ways that hierarchical, sequential, and miraculous analogies, related to the acquisition of knowledge and the ascent of the soul, were put forward in the hope of overcoming that problem.

Number symbolism in the renaissance lute rose

In this article Robin Headlam Wells argues that the renaissance luthier adapted the decorative motifs which his instrument inherited from its Islamic origins in order to express the idea of armony. Despite their apparent variety most renaissance lute roses are based on two figures: the hexagram and the tetragram. According to the familiar body of Pythagorean doctrine transmitted throug Plato to the Middle Ages and the Re aissance, the numbers six and four were of profound significance. The author here suggests that, as the renaissance cosmographer represented the idea of a harmonious universe by means of number expressed diagrammatically, so the luthier e ployed geo etry to symbolize the principle of discordia concors. The vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of Number and given us not only the notion of time, but also the means of research into the nature of the Universe. Plato, Timaeus

The Role of Rimbaud in Char's Poetry

René Char acknowledges that his major poetic precursor is Arthur Rimbaud. Char is esthetically indebted to Rimbaud for his creative vision, teleology, and practice. The numerous thematic affinities between these two poets include a humanized harmonious universe, the attitude of revolt, the obligation of anguish, the poet as the initiator of action, and the concepts of poetic activity, love, experience, risk, man, nature. The poetic matter of their creative worlds is identical, but Char brings the necessary corrective of faith in human expression to Rimbaud's immature reliance on verbal expression. Where Rimbaud fails to synthesize the fragments, Char succeeds. It is Char's understanding of Rimbaud's work that enables him to evolve a poetic based first on life and second on theory. Char does not merely humanize the cosmos; he goes on to poeticize man. Technical similarities are equally numerous, but Char is disciplined; he rejects the equation of the act and expression in favor of an evocation of the activity through the effect of spontaneity, his theories of pulverization and crispation. Char overcomes Rimbaud's limits and frustrations and succeeds in fulfilling his vision.

King Lear: The Unnatural Nuptial Breach

Shakespeare's King Lear clearly offers an inquiry into nature-into the nature of man and his relation to the natural order.1 In Elizabethan England that relationship was one wherein man functioned within a social order governed by the natural laws of a harmoniously ordered universe. Thus if man's actions threatened the social order, they assumed cosmic significance by threatening the balanced stability of the entire natural order. In King Lear those responsible for maintaining that order abdicated their duties; consequently, nature responded with punitive measures to reintegrate mankind and his social order with the demands of a harmonious universe.2 Lear's arbitrary and foolish division of his kingdom between his two older daughters represented a serious disruption of that harmonious universe wherein a king ruled the social order by divine, and hence natural, right. As a king, it was not Lear's prerogative to abandon his rule for a life of irresponsible security; he could not abandon his royal obligations without disturbing the natural order. The late eclipses in the sun and the moon portend no good for us, old Gloucester mused. Those phenomena were but cosmic auguries of the social disruptions which were to plague Lear's realm. Unknowingly, Edmund ironically predicted the unnatural disintegration which would rend the kingdom: promise you, the effects he writes of succeed unhappily, as of unnaturalness between the child and parent; death, dearth, dissolutions of ancient amities; divisions of state, menaces and maledictions against king and nobles; needless diflidences, banishment of friends, dissipation of cohorts, breaches, and I know not what (I. ii. I55-i63)3. All of the evils that Edmund enumerated were indeed to convulse the social order within Lear's kingdom. Children did unnaturally reject parents, dissolutions of ancient amities bred deaths, and maledictions against kings and nobles did divide the state. Shakespeare's manipulation of these elements in King Lear is obvious. What is not so obvious-and critics have neglected the subject-is the playwright's use of unnatural nuptial breaches for gaining perceptive insights into the play and its Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare's audience readily recognized the family as the smallest social unit of the larger social order. Friars, monks, and preachers had indoctrinated them with this basic tenet of Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology.

Braggadocchio and Spenser's Golden World Concept: The Function of Unregenerative Comedy

'For the phrase Nature Redeemed I am indebted to Eric LaGuardia's Nature Redeemed: The Imitation of Order in Three Renaissance Poems (London, 1966). By focusing on Renaissance conception of universal harmony which involves suppressing the demonic and releasing the divine in nature, LaGuardia points to thematic interest in the problem of having nature resemble the divine order without letting the heavenly take the place of the earthly. (See his introductory chapter.) He sees the Garden of Adonis as defining a natural order perfected by harmony of the divine principle of eternal order and the natural principle of generation, growth, and mutability. The problem is to conceive of natural, human world untainted by corruption in either its physical, moral or ethical order. By Golden World I do not wish to indicate putative world wholly contained within the poem-though I think the poem manifests thematic concern to figure forth related concept (see LaGuardia's emphasis on natural order). Paul J. Alpers in The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1967) has adequately decried the notion of the poem as literal world, or as the container of one. However, he has not paid sufficient attention to the poem's meaningfulness, let alone whatever thematic intent it may embody. Alpers only tells us that Spenser's concern is with human experience seen under the aspect of man's relation to God, p. 9. After the word experience, however, his statement fails to be very sensible. He has neglected to provide adequate definitions and relationships. So I find LaGuaxdia's rendition considerably more satisfying; nor has Alpers clearly invalidated it or caused it to be incompatible with his basic rhetorical emphasis. As I see it, Spenser's concern for the Golden World becomes complex

Spenser's Epithalamion: The Harmonious Universe of Love

Spenser's Epithalamion: The Harmonious Universe of Love

The Cosmology of Praise: Smart's Jubilate Agno

Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, like many other poems of its period, celebrates God's goodness to men and the plenitude of His creation. But one need only compare it with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works similar in theme—the quasi-scientific treatises of John Ray, William Derham, and Thomas Burnet, or James Thomson's The Seasons—to see how urgent and personally felt Smart's hymn of praise is. It was Smart's belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent—in effect, God sings the universe into being—and the poet's duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and His creation is necessary for the physical continuation of the universe, Smart's concern with the multitude of animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, and even planets in the Jubilate is much more than a rambling appreciation of them. He invokes them as models for men. For, in fulfilling their proper natures, the Lobster, the Hornet, and the Wild Beet contribute naturally to the universal harmony what man must contribute voluntarily, namely praise to the Creator of all.

Marlowe and Shakespeare

9%~~ 4 tsQdeserve to be considered together. I do not believe that this is so because, as is commonly stated, Marlowe laid the foundations for Shakespeare's dramatic artistry, but rather because these two men represent diametrically opposed reactions to the complex of Elizabethan life, each in his own way forging a poetically valid vision of reality beyond the comprehension of the other. Born in the same year, both were of humble origins, springing from the merchant classes just beginning to emerge as an important element in English life, one the son of a master shoemaker of Canterbury, the other of a Warwickshire farmer and petty merchant. Both made their mark upon the public stage, the one coming with an MA. from Cambridge and the other from what still remains the source of controversy among scholars, but which may well have been a stint of teaching in the provinces.' Both confronted, as no dramatist ever had before them, the crucial issues of man's position in the universe at a time in history when old conceptions of universal harmony, order, and degree were breaking down under the pressure of an awakening and expanding world. It was a time of new social mobility reflected in the very rise from obscurity of these poets themselves. Faced with cosmic problems in an age of flux and uncertainty, Marlowe and Shakespeare developed in contrary directions, so that the plays of each man seem to mirror to a consummate degree an opposing reaction to the Renaissance world in which both lived. Marlowe begins his career upon the public stage with the most optimistic of Elizabethan plays, the first part of Tamburlaine, with its triumphant glorification of human potential, singing the thirst for power as the highest attribute of man:

Galileo's Attempt at a Cosmogony

Previous articleNext article No AccessGalileo's Attempt at a CosmogonyS. SamburskyS. Sambursky Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 53, Number 4Dec., 1962 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/349632 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1962 History of Science Society, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Natacha Fabbri Questioning Fludd, Kepler and Galileo: Mersenne’s Harmonious Universe, (Feb 2019): 201–232.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02765-0_10Winifred L. Wisan The new science of motion: A study of Galileo's De motu locali, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 13, no.2-32-3 (Jan 1974): 103–306.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00327483Stillman Drake Galileo'S ‘Platonic’ Cosmogony and Kepler's Prodromus, Journal for the History of Astronomy 4, no.33 (Jul 2016): 174–191.https://doi.org/10.1177/002182867300400304Harry Woolf, and Aleida Cattell Eighty-Eighth Critical Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (To 1 January 1963), Isis 54, no.44 (Oct 2015): 515–667.https://doi.org/10.1086/349789

Grundtvig og de latinske salmer

Grundtvig og de latinske salmer

"Truth is Truest Poesy": The Influence of the New Philosophy on Abraham Cowley

Because of his well-known enthusiasm for Bacon, Hobbes, and the Royal Society, Abraham Cowley has been accused of betraying his art to science, in complicity with men who refused to take poetry seriously or who were contemptuous of the imagination. He has been maligned as a passionless player with words, duped by the new science and rationalism, who sold his poetic birthright for a mess of Hobbesian pottage.' The charge is a libel. It would have seemed incredible to Cowley that concern with physical phenomena or suspicion of empty words might ever be equated with renunciation of the poet's mission to transcend space and time. There was no insidious attack on the imagination in his assertions that poets deal in apparent fictions and natural philosophers in demonstrable facts. He believed he had learned from Hobbes that the imagination could bridge the two. For him the world of physical phenomena was one of the two worlds with which the imagination of the poet had to work. The other was that of myth, what the mind adds of its own. Behind both was reality, the harmonious universe conceived in the mind of God and occasionally to be glimpsed by men. Hence, for him the philosopher-scientist was a kind of poet, and the poet had at least to be aware of the world being examined by the scientists. The poet's function was to create, or at least to suggest, the unity of that world, to remind men of its wonder and their own position in it. Thus,

The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification

The current insistence upon a new poetic mythology to serve as a unifying reference frame for human experience and thought has recently provoked from Bertrand H. Bronson a brilliant defense of the eighteenth-century use of personified abstractions.1 Bronson properly recognizes in the eighteenth-century affection for personification a reflection of the emotional power lent to universals by the mathematicism that had created a sense of an ordered universe operating by simple and general laws. To the unity of this “view of the world so comprehensive and assured as to enable us to state common experience in general terms” he has opposed the fragmentary world of modern naturalism which requires expression by fragmentary concrete symbols. The neoclassicist conceived the norm to be the universal, which particulars struggle to fashion, and therefore he sought, in the highest forms of his art, to express himself in terms equally eternal and comprehensive as the laws of nature. Personification satisfied the desire for the grandeur of generality; “labored particularities” in themselves distract from the largeness of thought, for “great thoughts are always general.” Bronson's paper is salutary, for we have too long and too uncritically scorned what one modern critic has called “those allegorical capitals which the age affected.” We are indeed misguided in judging on the basis of our own responses, conditioned by our own civilization alone, that the personified abstraction was but a literary convention sterile of emotional force in the eighteenth century. And in relating personification to the emotional excitation the age received from the contemplation of a harmonious universe, Bronson has supplied us with the proper framework for a more nearly accurate reading of much eighteenth-century poetry.

The Corporate Idea and the Body Politic in the Middle Ages

The social thought of the Middle Ages, which undertook to comprehend and scientifically to formulate the nature and foundation of all human society, proceeded from the principle of a single and uniform but articulate whole. The idea of an organic conception of all human society in its entirety was as familiar to the mediaeval mind as the notion of an atomistic or mechanistic constrution of human associations was alien to that mind. Aside from issuing into a distinct and definite theory of “public law,” the mediaeval efforts to understand mankind in its entirety and to treat every form of human society as an organic unity were the starting points of a novel philosophy of law and state which brought about a new and glorious development of legal, social, and political ideas. This development was fully in line with the professed aim of the mediaeval spirit, namely the spiritual and moral education of die western world. It had for its core the doctrine of the Church, and for its goal the elaboration of an integrated outlook on all of human life. In die fields of legal, social, and political speculation this development was greatly enhanced by the collaboration of theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Here, as elsewhere, die mediaeval mind displayed and, on the whole, preserved that high degree of unity of thought and purpose which had its roots not only in that commonly shared conception of a single harmonious universe governed by one infinitely wise God, but also in the conviction that all first premises of right thought or right action were divinely revealed truths rather than discoveries made by human reason alone.

Farm Chemurgic Conference in St. Louis

OVER 250 members and guests, representing agriculture, science, and industry, met for the eleventh annual conference of the Farm Chemurgic Council at the Hotel Statler in St. Louis, March 18 through 20, to re-evaluate the progress of chemurgy and to reaffirm their faith in this movement which has the objective of increasing farm income through the industrial utilization of farm products. and Peace Striking a keynote for the conference with his opening address Science and Peace, at the luncheon Monday noon, President Wheeler McMillen, editor of The Farm Journal, contrasted the achievements of science with the failures of statesmanship as evidenced by recurring wars. After examining the methods of each, Mr. McMillen concluded that science has conquered hunger while statesmanship has not. Emulation by statesmen of the scientists' search for the laws of universal harmony was pointed out as the road to peace. Among the speakers on the three-day program which included papers on ...