THE SEMI-IMAGINATIVE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE
(MYTH AND RELIGION)
Vico's doctrine of mythology, while no less original and profound than
that of poetry, is also, like the latter, not entirely lucid: for the
relations between poetry and myth are so close that the shadow cast
upon the one must of necessity extend to some degree over the other.
In proceeding to inquire, as we have hitherto done and shall
continue to do, into the state of contemporary knowledge of the
several sciences and problems with which Vico set out to deal, we
may briefly recall _à propos_ of the study of mythology not only the
great literary collections of myths formed during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, of which Boccaccio had already given an example
in the fourteenth century, but also the learned defences of the two
explanatory theories, already known to classical antiquity and not
entirely unknown in the Middle Ages. These were, first, the theory
of myth as allegory of philosophical truths (moral, political and so
forth), and secondly, the theory of myth as the history of actual
persons and events, adorned by the fancy which made heroes into gods
(Euhemerism). The former tendency inspired among other works the
_Mythologiae sive explanationis fabularum libri decem_ of Natale Conti
(1568) and Bacon's _De sapientia veterum_ (1609); in which, however,
this system had been advanced with a certain hesitation, and with
the explicit caution that, even if it were not valid as historical
interpretation, it would always be of value as moralisation (_aut
antiquitatem illustrabimus aut res ipsas:_ "we shall explain either
antiquity or the facts themselves"). The latter was authoritatively
represented by John Leclerc (Clericus), the learned Dutch Genevese for
whom Vico expressed so much respect and gratitude for the attention he
had deigned to bestow upon his _Diritto universale._ His edition of
Hesiod's _Theogony_ marked an epoch in the study of mythology, and he
was followed among others by Banier, author of the work _Les Fables
expliquées par l'histoire_(1735). A third system, also not without some
ancient precedent, derived myths from particular nations, the Egyptians
or the Hebrews, or from the original works of individual philosophers
and poets. This view, when it neither resolved itself into a pure and
simple historical supposition as to the origin of some or all myths,
nor appealed to divine revelation, clearly involved the theory that
myth is not an eternal form but a contingent product of the mind, born
at a certain time and capable of dying or already dead.
Vico strongly opposed the first and third of these views of mythology,
namely the allegorical theory and that of historical derivation.
On the allegorical view, he mentions Bacon's treatise, which had
stimulated him to the study of the subject, out which he considered
"more ingenious than sound": on the other school, which regarded myths
as sacred history altered and corrupted by the Gentiles and especially
by the Greeks, he refers to Vossius's _De theologia gentili_ (1642)
and to a dissertation by Daniel Huet. Myths or fables do not contain
esoteric wisdom, that is to say, rational concepts, subtly concealed by
the veil of fable: hence they are not allegorical. Allegory implies on
the one hand the concept or thing signified, on the other the fable
or medium of concealment, and between the two, the art by which both
are kept in equilibrium. But myths cannot be split up into these three
moments, nor even into a thing signified and a thing which signifies
it: their meaning is univocal. The theory also implies that a believer
in the content does not believe in the form: but the makers of myths
believed fully and ingenuously in their own work. Once, for instance,
that first divine fable was created, the myth than which none greater
was ever afterwards invented, that of Jupiter, king and father of gods
and men, in the act of thundering, the very men who had invented him
believed in him, and with their religion of terror feared, reverenced
and worshipped him.
Myth, in a word, is not fable but history of such a kind as could
be constructed by primitive minds, and strictly considered by them
as an account of actual fact. The philosophers who arose later made
use of myths to expound their doctrines in an allegorical manner; or
deceived themselves into thinking that they found them there owing to
the feeling of veneration which attaches to antiquity, and increases
as our comprehension of it diminishes; or thought it expedient to make
use of such things for political purposes, like Plato Homerising, and
at the same time Platonising Homer: and in doing this they turned the
myths into fables, which they were not originally, and are essentially
not. Thus we may say that the philosophers and students of mythology
who indulged in such strange fancies about the legends were the real
poets, while the primitive poets or myth-makers were the true students,
and intended to narrate the actual facts of their time. For the same
reason, namely, because myth is an essential part of poetic or barbaric
wisdom, and, as such, a spontaneous product of all times and places,
it cannot be attributed to one single nation as its inventor, from
which it passed to others; as if it were a particular discovery of a
particular man or the object of revelation.
This doctrine, superior as it is to the allegorical and historical
theories, is another aspect of Vico's vindication of the non-logical
forms of knowledge as against the intellectualism which denied
them and merely represented them either as artificial forms or as
due to supernatural causes. Nor does the opinion seem acceptable
which attaches Vico to the Neo-Euhemeristic school. He does not
indeed explicitly combat this school, and we may even grant that he
presents certain superficial resemblances to it: but together with
the resemblances there is this radical difference, that for Vico the
stories are not alterations of actual history, but are essentially
history; their supposed alteration is the actual truth as it appeared
to the primitive mind.
Vico did not and could not give a more precise determination of the
nature of myth, precisely because owing to the fluctuating character
of his concept of poetry, itself he was not in a position to lay down
the boundary between the two forms. He talks generally of poetry and
myth as distinct things, but he does not establish the distinction.
And yet Vico was familiar enough with the concept which supplies
this distinctive criterion, and had enunciated it: but instead of
using it for his doctrine of mythology, he had made of it one or
more of his various definitions of poetry. That "poetic character,"
that "imaginative universal" whose introduction into aesthetic as
the explanatory principle of poetry causes so many insuperable
difficulties, is really the definition of mythology, and as such
provides the science of mythology with the true principle that is
required. If the concept of accomplishing great labours for the common
welfare cannot be disengaged from the idea of a particular man who
accomplished one of these labours, this concept becomes for instance
the myth of Hercules: and Hercules is at once an individual man who
does individual actions, and kills the Lernaean hydra and the Nemean
lion or cleanses the stables of Augeas, and also a concept: just as
the concept of beneficent and glorious labour is at once a concept and
Hercules: a universal and an imaginary idea: an imaginative universal.
Again, that sublime task which Vico declared proper to poetry, the task
of giving life to inanimate objects, belongs properly not to poetry
but to myth. Mythology, embodying its concepts in images, which are
always individual things, at last animates them like living beings.
Thus primitive man, ignorant of the cause of lightning and therefore
not possessing the scientific definition of it, was led by the
mythological tendency to conceive the sky as a vast living being, who,
like man himself when, in the grip of his fierce passions, he shouted,
muttered or roared, spoke and meant something by his speech. It is
mythology again, not poetry, whose origin must be traced to "poverty,"
to the weakness of men's minds and their inability to deal with the
problems they would solve, in their incapacity for thinking in rational
universals and expressing themselves in accurate language, whence
arose imaginative universals and metonymy, synecdoche and metaphor
of all kinds. The contradictions we have seen in the imaginative
universal which make it incapable of acting as the foundation of an
aesthetic doctrine are quite in keeping in the doctrine of myth: for
myth consists precisely of these contradictions: it is a concept
trying to be an image and an image trying to be a concept, and hence a
kind of poverty, or even of powerful impotence,--a contrast, a mental
transition where white no longer exists and black has not yet come
into being. Finally, poetic wisdom, that is, the theology, science,
cosmography, geography, astronomy and the whole system of other ideas
and beliefs of primitive nations as Vico describes them, was really
mythology, not, as he says, poetry, for the good reason, given by
himself, that these things were their history: and poetry is poetry and
not history, even more or less imaginary history. The Homeric poems are
poetry in so far as they express the aspirations of Hellenism: the same
poems, in so far as they were recited and heard as accounts of actual
facts, are history: the two things being forms of mental products
which, though they seem to be materially united in a single work, are
not for that reason to be identified.
All this was both seen and not seen, or rather, sometimes realised and
sometimes overlooked, by Vico: and hence he cannot be said to have
succeeded in determining satisfactorily the distinction, and solving
the problem of the relation, between mythology and poetry. Another
problem of importance relating to the science of mythology, and still
the subject of controversy, namely, the question whether myth belongs
to philosophy or to history, might be supposed to have been decisively
solved by Vico: since he repeats over and over again that myths contain
the historical judgments of primitive peoples, not the philosophical.
But in reality when we examine the point closely it appears that he
neither solved the problem nor even propounded it. The historical
judgments of which Vico is speaking are contrasted strictly not with
philosophical judgments in general but with the "mystical judgments
of the earliest philosophy" and the "judgments of analogy" which the
writers criticised by Vico found in mythology. Thus on the one hand his
words repeat the criticism of the allegorical theory and, on the other,
controvert that fallacious method of historical interpretation which
ascribes the ideas and customs of to-day to the nations of antiquity.
The fact is that Vico's theory is just as much in agreement with the
theory connecting myth with philosophy as with that which connects it
with history; and as much with the eclecticism which admits both these
elements as with the speculative view which also admits them both, but
because philosophy and history both in themselves and as constituents
of myth are at bottom one and the same.
Considered as "poverty," myth must be superseded. In the natural
effort of the human mind to rejoin God, the true One, from whom it
has come, and its inability owing to the exuberant animal nature of
primitive man to make use of the faculty, buried as it is beneath his
too keen senses, of abstracting from subjects their properties and
universal forms,--in these circumstances, it constructs for itself
fanciful unities, imaginary genera or myths: but in its subsequent
progress and development, it gradually resolves the imaginary genera
into intelligible genera, poetic universals into rational, and sets
itself free from mythology. Thus the error of myth passes into the
truth of philosophy. Vico knew and employed a concept of error, error
properly so called, which proceeds from the will, not from thought,
which is never in error as regards itself, "for the mind is always
put under compulsion by truth, since we can never lose sight of God"
(_mens enim semper a vero urgetur quia numquam aspectu amittere
possumus Deum_); the error which consists in the arbitrary conjunction
of unmeaning words, "but words very often, by the will of him who
is lying, escape the force of truth and desert the mind, or even do
violence to the mind and turn away from God" (_verba autem saepissime
veri vim voluntate mentientis eludunt ac mentem deserunt, immo menti
vim aciunt et Deo absistunt_); the error, in a word, which exists when,
in his own powerful language, "though men speak with their mouth,
they have nothing in their minds; since within their minds there is
falsity, which is nothing." But he also knows that error is never
pure error, simply because there is no such thing as a false idea and
falsity consists only in the wrong combination of ideas, and therefore
it always contains truth, and every fable has a certain element of
truth. Hence, far from despising fables, Vico recognised their value
as embryonic forms so to speak of stored-up knowledge or of what will
one day develop into philosophy. The poets (which means, in Vico's new
sense of the word, myth-makers) are the senses (that is, in its new
meaning, rudimentary and imperfect philosophy): the philosophers are
the intellect of mankind, that is the more highly developed philosophy
which derives from the former. The idea of God evolves by degrees from
the God who strikes the imagination of the isolated man, to the God
of the family, _divi parentum,_ the God of a social class or country,
_divi patrii,_ the God of nations, and finally to the God "who is
Jupiter to all men," the God of humanity. The fables stimulated Plato
to understand the three divine punishments which not men but only gods
could inflict, oblivion, infamy and remorse: the passage through the
lower world suggested to him the concept of the purgatorial journey
by which the soul is purified of passions, and the arrival in Elysium
suggested the journey of union by which the mind comes to unite itself
with God by the contemplation of the eternal divine ideas.
From the similes and metaphors of the poets Aesop drew the examples
and fables by which he gave advice: and the instance founded upon
a single case which satisfies an untutored mind developed into
induction, drawing its validity from several similar cases, as taught
dialectically by Socrates, and thence the syllogism invented by
Aristotle, which cannot exist without a universal. The etymologies
of words reveal the truths observed by primitive man and deposited
by him in his language: for instance the fact, laboriously proved by
modern philosophers, that the senses themselves create the so-called
sensible qualities is already suggested in the Latin word _olfacere,_
which implies the idea that the sense of smell "makes" the odour. Vico
attaches such importance to this connexion between poetic universals
and rational universals, between myth and philosophy, that he is led
to assert that such judgments of philosophers as cannot find parallel
or precedent in poetic and popular wisdom must be wrong. Here we have
another meaning sometimes assigned by him to the relation of philosophy
to philology: namely, a reciprocal confirmation of common wisdom by
esoteric wisdom and _vice versa,_ both of which are united in the idea
of an everlasting philosophy of man.
Simultaneously with his theory of myth and its relation to philosophy,
Vico expounds his theory of religion, and the relation it bears to
philosophy. Two thoughts on this subject are to be found up and down
the New Science. The first is, that religion arises in the phase of
weakness and savagery from the mind's need to allay its desire to
understand more or less the phenomena of nature and man; for instance,
to explain lightning. The second is, that religion is produced in
the mind by fear of the person who threatens by lightning. We might
describe these two views as theories respectively of the theoretical
and practical origin of religion; and since according to Vico's
doctrine man consists of nothing but intellect and will, clearly
religion can have no other origin than these two. Now, setting aside
religion in its practical aspect, to be discussed later, religion in
its theoretical aspect is surely nothing else than the imaginative
universal, poetic animism, or myth. To it belongs the institution
which Vico calls divination; that is, the methods of collecting and
interpreting the language of Jupiter, the "real words," gestures and
signs of God, formed as imaginative universals and created by the
animating fancy. And as from myth come science and philosophy, so in
like manner from divination comes the knowledge of ground and cause,
philosophic or scientific prediction.
In this way Vico escaped the prejudice which was beginning to prevail
in his time--we may recall Van Dale's history of ancient oracles,
popularised by Fontenelle, and Banier's book already mentioned--and
was to be so powerful for a century, of considering religions as
"some one else's imposture": whereas, he says, they were really due
to "one's own credulity." The man who refused to admit the artificial
origin of myth could not admit it of religion. But just as he denied
no less the supernatural or revealed origin of myth, so at the same
time he proclaimed neither more nor less than the natural, even
the human, origin of religions; and--a fact especially worthy of
notice--placed this origin in an inadequate form of the mind, namely
the semi-imaginative form identical with mythology. Nor need we
attach weight to certain brief and incidental remarks which seem to
contradict this theory, as when he says that religion precedes not only
philosophy but language itself, which presupposes the consciousness
of some community between man and man: such equivocations are due to
the invariable confusedness of his method and his habitual lack of
clearness. The identification of religion with myth, and its human
origin, are ideas not only emphatically expressed, but essential to
Vico's whole system. It is a human origin which in his own words
does not exclude a different concept of religion, namely as revealed
and hence of supernatural origin. In fact he always separates
poetic theology, which is mythology, and natural theology, which is
metaphysics or philosophy, from revealed theology. But this last
concept is admitted by him not because it is connected with the others
and derived from a principle common to them, but simply because Vico
asserted its existence no less than theirs. The human origin, poetic
theology, followed by metaphysical theology, is the form valid for
the Gentile portion of mankind, that is the whole human race except
the Hebrew people with its privilege of revelation. The motives that
led Vico to maintain this dualism and the annoying inconsistencies
in which it compelled him to rest will be seen later on in their own
place. But precisely because Vico left this dualism without mediation,
we must in expounding his thought hold fast both terms of the dualism:
and for the time being we will confine ourselves to the merely human
origin--religion as a product of the theoretical needs of man in a
condition of comparative moral poverty. This conception has only an
indirect connexion with Bruno's view of religion as a thing necessary
to the ignorant and undeveloped mob, and with Campanula's theory
of natural or permanent religion, an eternal rational philosophy
coinciding with a Christianity freed from its abuses. Its parallels
in contemporary authors are few and distant: even when they mention
it in passing, they grasp it only in a superficial way and propound
it without connecting it at all with their other ideas: they attack
religion as a form of ignorance, and omit the wisdom of the ignorance,
or religion as truth.