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Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes and the Continuity of Ancient Modes of Allegoresis in Seventeenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

A. M. Cinquemani
A. M. Cinquemani*
Affiliation:
State University or New York New Paltz
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Abstract

Henry Reynolds' Mythomystes revives the ancient Greek notion that myth is the allegorical expression of natural philosophy. While Reynolds acknowledges the common Renaissance practice of moral and psychological al-legoresis, he insists that the truth-seeking exegete must read the ancient myths as “meere matter of Nature.” Most of the examples of allegoresis in Mythomystes reflect the interpretations of the pre-Socratic philosophers, while the divine sense of the Narcissus commentary recalls the eschatology implied in some of Plato's myths. In method Reynolds' allegoreses are syncretic, like those of Philo and Origen, and etymological, like those of the Stoics. Involved in the syncretism is a sort of Euhemerism that ascribes Hebraic mortality to otherwise pagan gods. A spatial, rather than a temporal, typology is also part of Reynolds' method. The etymologies in Mythomystes resemble those in Cicero's De Natura Deorum. Though Reynolds' theory, practice, and method of allegoresis are ancient, his concern with knowledge of the secrets of nature, like Bacon's, is modern. However, Reynolds' instrument, mythological allegoresis, seeks to recover: Bacon's, induction, to discover.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 5 , October 1970 , pp. 1041 - 1049
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 1041 J. E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Bloomington, Ind., 1957), i, xxi. Mythomystes is reproduced in Spingarn; however, I shall refer to the original text in this paper.

Note 2 in page 1041 Mythomystes wherein a Short Survay is Taken of the Nalvre and Valve of Trve Poesy and Depth of the Ancients above ovr Moderne Poets. To which is annexed the Tale of Narcissus briefly mythologized (London, 1632), p. 52.

Note 3 in page 1041 In “Allegory and Anti-Pagan Sentiment in the Seventeenth Century,” Mythology & the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, 3rd ed. (New York, 1963), pp. 251–59. The standard study of the De Sapientia Veterum is Charles W. Lemmi, The Classical Deities in Bacon (Baltimore, Md., 1933).

Note 4 in page 1041 Mythe el allégorie (Aubier, 1958), p. 104.

Note 5 in page 1042 Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Oxford, 1948), frag. 2, p. 91.

Note 6 in page 1042 Ibid., frag. 2, p. 140. See Erwin Panofsky, “Die Erzählung lung von ‘Hercules am Scheidewege’ in derantiken Literatur,” Hercules am Scheidewege (Leipzig and Berlin, 1930), pp. 42—52.

Note 7 in page 1042 Cited by Pépin, p. 99.

Note 8 in page 1042 Psychological allegoresis is the principal mode of the Platonic and Neoplatonic allegorical tradition and is to be found in the I sis and Osiris of Plutarch, in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, in the Enneads of Plotinus, in the De antra nympharum of Porphyry, in Iamblichus, Proclus, Julian, Macrobius, and Boethius. Jean Seznec, in his Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York, 1953), p. 85, holds that “the Neoplatonists revive [moral allegoresis], but they use it on a broader scale and in a different spirit. They apply it not only to Homer but to all religious traditions, including foreign cults: the entire universe is for them nothing but a great myth, endowed with spiritual meaning.”

Note 9 in page 1042 Mythomysles, p. 62.

Note 10 in page 1043 Freeman, frag. 5, p. 140.

Note 11 in page 1043 Mythomystes, p. 107.

Note 12 in page 1043 De Daedalis Plateensibus, 7. Cf. Vincenzo Cartari, Le imagini de i dei de gli Anlichi (1581), where this reading is ascribed to Eusebius.

Note 13 in page 1043 Geography, trans. H. L. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1917), p. 99 (1.2.20) ; Odyssey x.190.

Note 14 in page 1044 Mythomystes, p. 108.

Note 15 in page 1044 See Marcus' introd. to Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis, trans. R. Marcus (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1953).

Note 16 in page 1044 Plato, trans. H. Meyerhoff (New York, 1958), i, 207.

Note 17 in page 1044 Reynolds' humanist sources may have supplied him with this “hybrid doctrine,” which, according to Seznec (p. 104), far from being “the secret of the lost wisdom of antiquity,” had been “inherited from the last defenders of paganism” by the Church Fathers.

Note 18 in page 1044 Contra Celsum, trans. H. Chadwick (Cambridge, Eng., 1953), p. 213 (iv.38).

Note 19 in page 1044 Though a native sort of scriptural allegoresis may have sprung up among the Palestinian Jews quite independent of the tradition of Greek allegoresis: see the later chapters in Pépin.

Note 20 in page 1045 Trans. R. Marcus (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1953), p. 150. Words in parentheses are interpolations of Marcus.

Note 21 in page 1045 Trans. R. Marcus, pp. 279–80.

Note 22 in page 1045 The tradition of Euhemerism goes back not only to Euhemerus but to Hecateus of Teos (fl. 323–285 B.C.), who described the gods as deified benefactors of mankind. Following somewhat closely in their steps was Philo of Byblos (1st century), whose Sanchuniathon applied Euhemeristic techniques to the study of the Phoenician gods. Historical exegesis (of which Euhemerism is a part) is practiced in part by Ennius, Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Lucian, and Paleophatos. See Pépin, pp. 217 ff. See also Jean Seznec, passim, and P. Alphandéry, “L'Evhémérisme et les débuts de l'histoire des religions au Moyen Age,” Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, 109 (1934), 1–27.

Note 23 in page 1045 “Euhemerism: A Medieval Interpretation of Classical Paganism,” Speculum, 2 (1927), 398. There was, at the same time, a sympathetic relationship between the mystery cults and Christianity. See Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, trans. Brian Battershaw (London and New York, 1963), esp. pp. 281–386.

Note 24 in page 1045 Book of Wisdom xv.20–21: Douay-Challoner text.

Note 25 in page 1045 Cohortatio ad Gentes iv.55.

Note 26 in page 1045 Ad Nationes ii.13–17.

Note 27 in page 1045 Chronicon i.13.

Note 28 in page 1045 Diuinae lnstilutiones i.14 ff.

Note 29 in page 1045 Etymologiae viii.ll.

Note 30 in page 1046 City of God, trans. John Healey (London and New York, 1945), p. 210 (vii.xviii),p. 251 (viii.xxvi).

Note 31 in page 1046 Trans. R. B. Burke, 2 vols. (New York, 1928), i, 54–55 (ii.ix).

Note 32 in page 1047 See J. R. Darbyshire, “Typology,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, xiii, 500–04.

Note 33 in page 1047 Mythomystes, pp. 74–75, 76. Cf. J. L, Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York, 1955), passim, and Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1948), p. 232.

Note 34 in page 1047 Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Against the Mathematicians; Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; Attic Nights; De Natura Deornm; also Galen, Historia Philosopha, Institutio Logica.

Note 35 in page 1047 Though forms of Stoic allegoresis are to be found in the Confessions of St. Augustine (Varro sections), in the Allegoriae Homericae of the pseudo-Heraclitus, in the Dissertations of Maximus Tyrius, and in the De Natura Deorum of Cornutus. Regarding the exegetical method of Cornutus, E. Vernon Arnold, in Roman Stoicism (Cambridge, Eng., 1911), p. 112, notes that by “means of etymology and allegory, all that is incredible or offensive in the old legends of the gods is metamorphosed into a rationalistic explanation of the phenomena of the universe. Thus Zeus is the soul of the universe, because he is the cause of life in all living things, Zeus being derived from . . . ‘live.‘ Apollo is the sun, and Artemis the moon: Prometheus the providence that rules the universe. Pan is the universe. Cronos consumes all his offspring except Zeus, for time consumes all except what is eternal. Hera, the air (”Hpa from ocqo) is sister and wife of Zeus, because the elements of fire and air are intimately associated.“ See also Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (Garden City, N. Y., 1955), passim.

Note 36 in page 1048 Trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1933),p. 183 (ii.xxiv),pp. 191,193 (ii.xxviii).

Note 37 in page 1048 Arnold, p. 151. See also E. Zeller, Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics (London, 1892), pp. 354–70.

Note 38 in page 1048 Stoic Logic (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953), p. 17 et passim.

Note 39 in page 1048 Ibid., pp. 33–36. Reynolds' “Stoic” allegoresis may just as well be cabalist in inspiration. In the Sefer Yezirah, for example, it would seem that the key to Being lies in Hebrew, the study of the letters that somehow reveal something of the nature of the En-Sof. However, cabalism seems not to have had a direct bearing upon Reynolds' thought, except in the nebulous form that it has for him in its derivation from Pico. Or wemightcallhisetymologicalallegoreses“Goropian,” as Arnold Williams suggests (Expositor, p. 230): “The linguistic interests of the commentators appear most strongly in their penchant for etymologies. The commentators were the inheritors of a tradition stemming from Plato's Cratylus, according to which the etymology of the word gives a glimpse into the true nature of the thing. The commentators thus seek to establish connections between the forms of words and their intellectual content. Their etymological methods are of the sort linguists call ‘Goropian,‘ named after Goropius Becanus.” But the Stoics come before Plato, Goropius, and the cabalists.