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The
Brownstone Journal >>
Issues >> Vol.
X Spring 2001
The Failure of Sapienta et Fortitudo:
Shortcomings in the Evaluation of Heroes
Jonathan Gelb (CAS XX) is a junior
in the College of Arts and Sciences, majoring in English with
a minor in Latin. The author dedicates this paper to Professor
Robert Levine, in spite of his infamous topos of humility.
Nam heroes appellantur viri quasi aerii et caelo digni propter
sapientiam et fortitudinem.
Men are called heroes for on account of wisdom and strength
they are worthy of heaven.
-Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi 1.39.9
Hero’s meaning in history reflects, to paraphrase Jung, “inherited
numberless encounters of collective unconsciousness,” and is
defined in the archetypical literary theory of Ernst Curtius,
in his citation of Isidore of Seville, as “[men who] on account
of wisdom and strength are worthy of heaven” (Isidori Hispalensis
Episcopi 1.39.9). Though the Germanic warrior classes in Beowulf
probably never encountered a Greek or Roman hero in the lays
of mead-hall scops, most scholars of Beowulf criticism believe
the Beowulf poet was an early Christian monk knowledgeable in
classical heroic poetry. R.E. Kaske writes, “There seems hardly
any room for doubt, then, that sapientia et fortitudo as an
heroic ideal was familiar in the literature and the ways of
thought… to have been available to the poet of Beowulf, and
that there is no a priori unlikelihood about his having known
and used the theme” (424). The sapientia et fortitudo ideal,
recognizable to the author of Beowulf, would also be familiar
to the Gawain poet, since classical texts occupied the curricula
of medieval scholars, as is apparent in the works of Chaucer.
Yet, the fact that Gawain is “essentially a passive agent, fighting
only when he must and totally dependent on the will of God,”
(Mills 484) while Beowulf is “the splendid blonde bestie prowling
about avidly in search of spoil and victory” (Nietzsche 41)
demonstrates the failure of the sapientia et fortitudo ideal.
This ideal disregards that neither Beowulf nor Sir Gawain is
purely either heathen or Christian. Recognizing the influence
of disparate cultures, an ideal of the noble and the Christian
more aptly describes the heterogeneity of the two poems.
There are two Beowulfs: one Christian, the other heathen, and
each struggles with the other, as did Jacob and Esau, inside
the very body of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Though Germanic gods
never impose themselves upon the pages of Beowulf, Scripture
scarcely breaks into the verse and only early chapters of Genesis
are mentioned. The words “God,” “Almighty,” “Eternal,” et cetera
run throughout Beowulf in Old English, but skepticism toward
their significance is almost unavoidable since only seventy-seven
lines after Hrothgar’s scop sings of the glory of God’s Creation
of the World (92-8), the Ring-Danes take part in idol worship:
“they prepared sacrifice in temples,/ war-idol offerings, said
old words aloud” (175-6). A monotheistic God hovers superficially
above the lines of the poemi, but most critics regard this as
alien to the genre. Names of pagan deities of the Germanic pantheon
would better suit Beowulf since the poets of its Norse analogues
followed this convention. Christian elements, however sparse,
are present, which Wormald attributes to a rhetorical objective
of the Christian composer of this poem. Conversion, in eighth-century
England, was a topic of some delicacy and while “the Anglo-Saxon
aristocracy was willing to accept a new God…it was not prepared
to jettison the memory or example of those who had worshiped
the old” (Wormald 67).
While both poem deal with the aristocracy, noblemen in Beowulf
are heathen warriors, not knights of the feudal court, and each
of these two character types seem to be governed by a different
overriding force, the motor and consequence of their culture,
making them unavoidably distinct. R.H. Bowers writes, “chivalry
always paid formal respect to Christianity” (339), and in that
sense Sir Gawain and the Green Knight cannot escape a self-imposed
Christian ethic that necessarily follows it into what some critics
have called a secular poem (relative to more religious ones).
Where Wormald would claim the original purpose of Beowulf seems
to have been to inspire and to instruct, “the fundamental purpose
of Middle English romance is entertainment, not didactic instruction,
although it properly adds enough moralizing or sentiment to
give a poem ballast and protect it against a puritan charge
that it lacks utilitas” (Bowers 341).
Beowulf is a man strong enough to “[come] from combat bloodied
by enemies where [he] crushed down five,/ killed a tribe of
giants, and on the waves at night/ slew water-beasts; no easy
task” (419-422), and wise enough to deserve what Hrothgar says
of him:
No man wiser
have I ever heard speak so young in years;
great in your strength, mature in thought,
and wise in your speeches.
1843-46
Gawain, in quest of the Green Chapel, demonstrates a bravery
and skill in combat similar to Beowulf’s:
T’were a marvel if he met not some monstrous foe,
so fierce and forbidding that fight he must.
Now serpents he wars, now savage wolves.
Now with wild men of the woods, that watched from the rocks.
Both with bulls and with bears, and with boars besides,
And giants that came gibbering from jagged steeps.
716-23
Sir Gawain, however, is not overwhelmed by heroic feat in the
same way Beowulf is: for Gawain, moral strength figures as the
predominant heroic virtue. “For ever five-fold in five-fold
fashion/ Was Gawain in good works, as gold unalloyed,/ Devoid
of all villainy, with virtues adorned/ in sight” (693-5). Gawain
is as much–if not more so–the paragon of social eloquence as
he is “Gawain the glorious...that never fell back on field in
face of foe” (2271). He is called the “father of fine manners”
(919). Lady de Hautdesert says of him: “Sir Gawain you are,/
Whom all the world worships, whereso you ride;/ Your honor,
your courtesy are highest acclaimed/ By lords and by ladies,
by all living men” (1226-9). The problem arises, however, when
Beowulf said to be wise and courageous for battling ferocious
beasts and Gawain described as having these qualities as well
for grappling with, and overcoming, sin and temptation are both
called “hero.”
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that language
evolves through processes similar to vital evolution: mutation
(and misuse). Literature is the medium through which evolution
of language becomes perceptible and palpable. After applying
etymological analysis to particular words (e.g. good, bad, noble,
evil). Nietzsche came to believe that language, during the rise
of Christianity, took the opposite sense, in some cases, of
its original meaning. “The powerful and noble [became] on the
contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the
accursed, and damned” (Nietzsche 34). As a consequence of transvaluation
imposed upon society by the rise of a new religion, the ideals
no longer reflected values of the old Roman nobility, who over
several centuries came to be outnumbered by foreigners and slaves,
but values of those once oppressed by the nobles. The change
in what qualifies as “heroic” may exemplify a differentiation
between the values of a society now adapting hero to their culture.
Applying Nietzsche’s theory regarding transvaluation to Beowulf
and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight demonstrates that the difference
between Beowulf and Sir Gawain is fundamental: that these heroes
stem from societies that uphold such different ideals of heroic
virtue as to make them incompatible: that attempting to reconcile
their similarities on the basis that both poems supposedly depict
the ideal of sapientia et fortitudo would be counterproductive.
The mode of valuation through which Beowulf views his adversities
is what Nietzsche would call “noble;” “He desires his enemy
for himself, as his mark of distinction” (Nietzsche 39). Mere
survival holds no enticement for Beowulf; heroic triumph is
another matter, as Beowulf says. “Tonight I will do/ a heroic
deed or else I will serve/ my last day of life here in this
mead hall” (693-38). “Winning at all costs,” though, would fail
to describe Beowulf’s philosophy: Winning only becomes glorious
when the competitor against whom he fights is honorable and
evenly matched in skill.
No poorer I hold my strength in a fight,
My work in battle, than Grendel does his;
And so I will not kill him by sword,
Shear off his life, though I easily might.
He does not know the warrior’s arts.
677-81
“Fierce” and “ferocious” might describe enemies of Beowulf,
but they hardly do justice to the large green man, “full of
demonic energy as old Karamazov, yet,...as jolly as a Dickensian
Christmas host” (Lewis 222) that erupts into King Arthur’s court
during a New Year’s Day dinner. Perhaps the absurdity of having
an enemy that looks like the Green Knight caused Gawain and
Arthur to underestimate their opponent, as Arthur says to Gawain
what would be a common-place in the comics of Gary Larson: “If
you rule [the ax] aright, then readily, I know,/ You shall stand
the stroke it will strike after” (373-4). Gawain ruled the ax
aright, but this brought no end to the Christmas game. The Green
Knight’s reciprocal ax strokes might have severed little of
Gawain’s skin tissue, but the blows to his ego wounded him mortally.
At the Green Chapel, Gawain says to his adversary, “I shall
grudge not the guerdon, grim though it prove:/ Bestow but one
stroke, and I shall stand still” (2251-52), when the ax falls,
however, Gawain’s “shoulders shrank a little from the sharp
iron” (2267), to which the Green Knight comments, “Now you flee
for fear and have felt no harm:/ Such news of that knight I
have never heard yet!” (2273-4)
While it is said, in some circles, first impressions count most,
Beowulf and Gawain seem to weigh the relative significance of
first impressions on different scales. Beowulf greets Hrothgar
openly, revealing his identity: “Hail, Hrothgar...I am Hygelac’s
thane and kinsman;/ mighty deeds have I done in my youth” (407-9),
whereas Gawain, thought to be the noblest of Round Table knights,
strong in mind and body, masks his identity behind words of
either humility or deceit: “I am the weakest, well I know, and
of wit feeblest:/ And the loss of my life would be least of
any” (354-5). Throughout the poem Gawain relies on wit in situations
Beowulf would have otherwise overcome by use of sword or bare
hands, but while Beowulf is at risk of losing his life, Gawain
was never in mortal danger. Gawain’s ability to withstand seduction
by Lady de Hautdesert whose “body and her bearing were beyond
praise,/ And excelled the queen [Guenevere] herself” (944-5)
while not insulting her in the process, “Thus she tested his
temper and tried many a time/ Whatever her true intent, to entice
him to sin,/ But so fair was his defense that no fault appeared”
(1549-51), would call upon uncommon tact. It seems Nietzsche
would categorize Gawain’s sapienta as belonging to behavior
of the man of ressentiment, the man in which Christian valuation
originated, whereas what he calls noble behavior, that governed
by sentiments characteristic of thought and feeling common to
men existing in the age before Christianity, seems to correspond
to Beowulf:
While the noble man lives in trust and openness, the man of
ressentiment is neither naive...nor straightforward with himself.
His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places; ...He understands
how to keep silent, ...how to wait, how to be provisionally
self-deprecating and humble. [He] is bound to become eventually
cleverer than any noble.
Nietzsche 38
The distinction between the Christian and noble sapientia et
fortitudo ideal is so acute that Nietzsche argues the modes
were inversions of each other. Isidore of Seville, a man unavoidably
immersed in Christian morality, might have invested “noble”
heroes with Christian values. The paradox runs deeper: Nietzsche
himself, while shaping society’s values through his works, was
shaped by values embedded in his era and culture. Such is the
human condition. Knowing where to draw the line is a difficult
philosophical problem. Self-awareness, consciousness, reason
and “reasonable” dialectic has served in the past as the means
by which to make a claim. At the very least, Isidore’s formulation
lacks specificity, “provid[ing] room for the Christian ideal
hero of the eleventh century. The knights who, like Roland and
his comrades, fell in battle against the infidels were also
“worthy of heaven” (Curtius 175), and at the very most, Isidore’s
Etymologia is an amalgam of classical and Christian ideals.ii
The ideal of sapientia et fortitudo, would be better represented
in the work of a poet–in any age–whose outlooks, beliefs, and
purposes for writing parallel more exactly those of Greco-Roman
epic poets. The problem, then, involves determining which (if
any) Greco-Roman epic poets fell exactly in line with their
own outlooks, beliefs and purposes for writing. Literature is
rife with ambiguities. This aside, it is possible to do with
Beowulf what would be impossible (or difficult) to do with Sir
Gawain, to categorize Beowulf. The Odyssey, and Aeneid together
on the basis that all three poems deal in a serious manner with
the fate of a nation, the history of an ancestral lineage, the
struggle and turmoil, victory and triumph, and defeat of a culture.
This seems to demonstrate that it is not necessarily the character
whose ancestral roots lead to classical heroes who behaves like
a classical hero. Isidore of Seville’s terms for hero, however,
do not obstruct Gawain from attaining heroic stature, which
presents a problem for those trying to distinguish between classical
and Christian heroes. The process of sifting one heroic type
from another is an arduous and challenging task. The old formula,
sapientia et fortitudo–like a sieve that no longer separates
fine particles from coarse–is a broad and ineffective definition,
and it hinders, rather than serves, its purpose.iii Drawing
a distinction between literary heroes of the noble mode of valuation
from those of the Christian might serve in a way to better the
process of sifting classical heroes–of those closely related–from
Christian.
End Notes
i Id est: When Beowulf blames himself, as king of the Geats,
for awakening the dragon, as he somehow angered God, having
“broken the old law... with dark thoughts strange to his mind”
(2329-2332); the Geats believe victory in war rests in the hands
of the Almighty, “at once the fight/ was decided against me,
except that God saved me” (2858-9); “God ruled the deeds/ of
every man, as He still does now” (2858-9) et cetera.
ii His use of words like “caelo,” which could neither refer
to the Christian notion of Heaven or the Elysian Fields in the
words of Homer and Virgil, the heaven Anchises speaks of in
book six of Aeneid: “caelum..spiritus intus alit” (6.725-7),
seems to express the concept of heroes but fails to differentiate
between qualities of a classical hero and a Christian one.
iii Although archetypes are general and generalized concepts,
universally applicable but put in terms limiting enough to effect
meaningfulness, definitions, which change with time more frequently
than expressions of collective unconsciousness, tend to be and
need to be put in terms as or more precise than archetypes.
TBJ
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Mills, M. “Christian Significance and Romance Tradition in Sir
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Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter
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