[In the following essay, Makin explains how Ezra Pound made use of Eriugena's concepts in his own work.]

“That Irishman” (“Scotus ille”), as some of his contemporaries knew him,¹ was born at some time in the early ninth century.² He left Ireland before the year 847, when he was to be found at the royal court of Charles the Bald, successor on the throne of France to Louis the Debonair. From the epithets applied to him (“scholasticus et eruditus”) it has been supposed that he taught at the Palace School.

He is next heard of at Laon, where (with another Irishman called Martin) he represented the only noteworthy understanding of Greek in the West of his time. It is possible that his retirement to Laon was connected with events that had taken place while Erigena was still at the Palace School: he had been invited by certain ecclesiastical notables to confute the unruly monk Godescalc, whose independent spirituality is evident in Pound's “Psychology and Troubadours,”³ and who had written in favor of predestination. Erigena was the wrong person to bring into such a controversy; he overreached himself in the opposite direction, and his De praedestinatione was condemned at the Council of Valence (a.d. 855) and the Council of Langres (859).

It is likely that this disgrace made Erigena determine to build his faith on more solid foundations, and the means to this, he considered, was Greek. The language was almost unknown to his period; Erigena saw in the Greek Fathers an untapped source of spiritual wisdom. At Laon he must have devoted himself to the language, for when Charles the Bald, who remained his personal patron, invited him to make a new translation of the famous manuscript of Dionysius the Areopagite, he produced a work that was a long way ahead of the standards of his time. He went on to translate Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and Epiphanius. He retained a preference for the Greek Fathers, and his greatest original work, the De divisione naturae, was profoundly influenced by them.

Pound, it has often been said,⁴ telescopes time, but he was always at least as much interested in Erigena's historical function—his action within a context—as in his philosophy. He became interested in Erigena in the 1930s and discussed him with Santayana;⁵ he told Eliot that if he could get hold of recent publications he could “write quite a chunk.”⁶ But Erigena had already appeared in the ABC of Reading of 1934,⁷ and in Canto XXXVI of the same year, where the interest is at least half historical:

Erigena was not understood in his time
‘which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him’
And they went looking for Manichaeans
And found, so far as I can make out, no Manichaeans
So they dug for, and damned Scotus Erigena.(8)

This condemnation is not the one that happened after the affair of the De praedestinatione; this one took place some three hundred years after Erigena's death, in 1210. In that year there took place a violent reaction against the rise of Aristotelianism in the University of Paris, and there fell at the hands of the Council of Paris not only Amaury de Bène and his disciples, but also everything they were reading, including Siger de Brabant, Aristotle himself, and even Erigena's De divisione naturae.⁹ The letter from Honorius III confirming the condemnation gives an idea of the atmosphere prevailing in the Church: “siquidem est quidam liber perifisis intitulatur [i.e., the Periphyseon or De divisione naturae of Erigena] inventus, totus scatens vermibus heretice pravitatis … Vobis … mandamus … ad nos, si secure fieri poterit, sine dilatione mitatis solempniter comburendum. …”¹⁰

The desire solemnly to burn everything that disturbed it was simultaneously being manifested by the Church in the south of France, where in 1209 Honorius III's predecessor had preached the Albigensian Crusade. The movement against the Albigensians made unprecedented use of burning at the stake, and paved the way for the Inquisition. There is considerable suggestion in Pound's works of a connection between Scotus Erigena and the heretics; it is strangely foreshadowed by the chronicler Albéric des Trois-fontaines, who notes after Honorius' letter that the De divisione naturae “incurs condemnation on account of the new Albigensians and false theologians who, by misunderstanding, pervert words which were perhaps rightly uttered in their time and understood simply by the ancients; and from them they confirm their heresy.”¹¹

It will be observed that the chronology is off. Erigena lived three hundred years before Amaury de Bène and the Albigensians. But Pound considers that some awareness of the Greek gods hung on in Provence and Languedoc after the death of the Roman Empire, and ultimately gave rise both to the troubadours and to the Albigensians, who were accused of being Manichaeans.¹² And we find that he constantly connects Provence, the troubadours, the supposed “Manichaeans,” and Scotus Erigena: “Chaucer uses French art, the art of Provence, the verse art come from the troubadours. In his world there had lived both Guillaume Poitiers and Scotus Erigena. …”¹³ Again: “Civilization went on. I reiterate that the cultural level is the determinant. Civilization had been in Italy. It had hung on in Provence and the Exarchate after Romulus Augustulus. A conspiracy of intelligence outlasted the hash of the political map. Avicenna, Scotus Erigena in Provence. …”¹⁴ Similarly: “‘Il sait vivre,’ said Brancusi of Léger. This must also be said of the catachumens before they pass the third door. It is quite useless for me to refer men to Provence, or to speculate on Erigena in the market place. …”¹⁵ And again:

and they dug him up out of sepulture
soi disantly looking for Manichaeans.
Les Albigeois, a problem of history.(16)

Erigena, the suggestion is, was in Provence, where he picked up the awareness of the Hellenic cuts; hence his continuing preference for the Greek Fathers. I have not come across this story anywhere, and it is probably apocryphal, like much of the material surrounding Erigena. Still, the Palace School to which the Irishman is supposed to have been attached seems to have followed Charles the Bald around his kingdom;¹⁷ it is possible that it came to rest at some period in Provence. Certainly Erigena would have had a close affinity for Hellenic religion, with its ubiquitous gods, as we shall see when we come to his philosophy. And when Pound points out that Erigena had “Greek tags in his verses,”¹⁸ obviously this is not, as has been suggested,¹⁹ simply a mark of prestige in Pound's eyes but rather points to the nature of the philosopher's sensibilities. Greece was in Provence, Pound suggests, and Provence in Erigena. The verses are, as it happens,

                                        excellent verses
in fact an excellent poet(20)

—or, as Dom Cappuyns remarks, “most of the Erigenian verse contains something to surprise; especially the knowledge of the Greek language that it shows.”²¹

But Pound, we have noticed, refers to the digging up of Erigena's body: “and they dug him up out of sepulture.” This story is not apocryphal, but a mistake by Pound; it was Amaury de Bène whose bones were exhumed and scattered in 1210. The function of the story in the Cantos is obvious: it is another case where the few men who constitute the “little light from the borders” of history²² are pitted against the “enormous organized cowardice.”²³ The Church authorities, whom Pound refers to scathingly as the “police”²⁴ “probably murdered Erigena,” he says,²⁵ and then dug him up at the time of his condemnation, three hundred years later. Pound explicitly connects this “police” activity with the Albigensian Crusade, and its leader, the fanatic Simon de Montfort: “so they dug up his bones in the time of De Montfort / (Simon).²⁶

Boris de Rachewiltz in fact maintains that Erigena was exhumed (though the connection is never clearly made in the Cantos)²⁷ in order “to discover in Erigena's remains the bone luz and, by its removal, to prevent his resurrection on judgment day: ‘the bone luz, I think was his take off’ and later, ‘or the bone luz / as the grain seed’” (Canto LXXX). According to Rachewiltz, “In Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, I, 20, mention is made of ‘a certain very small bone called luz …, which is incorruptible, which is not destroyed by fire but is preserved unimpaired, and from which, as a plant produces a seed, our body will come to life again as in the resurrection of the dead.’”²⁸

Erigena, then, was removed from the philosophical map. But his “second wing,” the translation of Dionysius the Areopagite, went on to exert an unparalleled influence on Western Christianity. It inspired men like Albertus Magnus (used by Cavalcanti) and Saint Bonaventure,²⁹ both of whom furthered, in Pound's eyes, the Hellenic tradition of awareness.³⁰ With the works of Saint Augustine, it probably did more than any other work to effect the change in Christianity whose result was that “Dante's god has nothing to do with the Jehovah of the Old Testament.”³¹ And it brought in the Hellenic element from Plato and Plotinus.

Erigena's own work, the De divisione naturae, was well-nigh buried by the papal anger. Still, it exercised a kind of “underground influence,” as Gilson says,³² and among those who used its rare manuscripts were men who themselves did a great deal in the millenial fight “against thickness and fatness.”³³ Pound connects Saint Anselm with Erigena, for their common “hilaritas” and for other spiritual resemblances.³⁴ When he does so, we also find the names Rémusat and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Charles de Rémusat wrote a series of books on philosophers of “natural religion” (Lord Herbert de Cherbury, 1874, and Saint Anselme de Cantorbéry, 1853); in the latter he points to several propositions from Erigena's De divisione naturae that he finds echoed in Saint Anselm.³⁵

But Saint Anselm belongs to the period before the De divisione was condemned, to the prescholastic epoch that Dom Cappuyns calls “the golden age of Erigenian influence.”³⁶ To this period also belongs Richard of Saint Victor, whom Pound connects with Erigena; Richard's predecessor at the Abbey of Saint Victor, Hugh, was the “commentator par excellence of the Celestial Hierarchy” of Dionysius the Areopagite, and there are traces of Erigena's own doctrines in Hugh's work.³⁷ After this time the De divisione itself disappears from view, to be resurrected only by those Renaissance “Serendipity hunters,” the Neoplatonists³⁸ who in Pound's view did so much to break the bogey of the monotheistic state religion. Giordano Bruno was influenced by the De divisione. Nicholas Cusanus read it; his annotated copy is today in the British Museum; he said it was the kind of work that should be kept from the eyes of the ignorant, who would only misunderstand it.⁴⁰ In view of the wrath that the book occasioned in the Middle Ages, it seems possible that he was right.

ERIUGENA PHILOSOPHUS

The work of Scotus Erigena has always been surrounded by a fog of ignorance and fear. Even his name is a lame compromise established only in the seventeenth century; it means “John the Irish Irishman.” It is a compound of “Ioannes” (the only personal name that has come down to us), “Scottus” (born in Scottia, ancient name of Ireland), and “Eriugena” (born in Erin, another name for Ireland). One of the few certainties about the philosopher is that he was never called Ioannes Scottus Eriugena in his own time.⁴¹

Much sympathetic labor has been devoted in recent years to clearing the obscurities around him; it is even possible, for all I know, that Pound's wish will be granted:

Scotus Erigena held that: Authority comes from right reason. I suppose he thought himself a good catholic.

This page can stand in lieu of an Agony Column. I still invite correspondence as to the trial of Erigena and his condemnation centuries after his death.

I can still see a Catholic renaissance or the Church “taken seriously once again” if Rome chose to dig up the records, if Rome chose to say the trial was a mistrial, if Rome chose to say that Scotus was heretical because of some pother about the segments of the trinity but that on “Authority” he was sound, a son faithful etc.⁴²

Many baseless ideas that have gathered round the Irishman continue to circulate. Of these ideas, some are anecdote, some theology; as we have seen, Pound has swallowed his fair share of the anecdotes. But he has done this to give life (at some level of his mind) to a man whose theology he understood perfectly.

Pound's vision of a struggle between the “little light along the borders” and “the immense organized cowardice” is in few fields more justified than in the understanding of Scotus Erigena. Erigena's works have always been available to those who would take the trouble to look them up; yet few have read him before adding their weight to the stories current through the centuries since the year 1210. The Council of Paris and Honorius III held that Erigena was a rationalist, for example, and this view of him has persisted: one who would erect the product of his own ratiocination as adequate confutation of anything. This basis of this idea is chiefly the statement that Pound paraphrases as

‘Authority comes from right reason,
                                        never the other way on’(43)

and that Erigena had stated as “Auctoritas siquidem ex uera ratione processit, ratio uero nequaquam ex auctoritate.”⁴⁴ Let us consider what this statement means.

Erigena was led to some questioning of the value of Authority, as it was then conceived, by the very depth of his learning in the Church Fathers. He observed that the Fathers sometimes contradicted each other. For a clear exposition of the Church's theology, therefore, it was necessary to establish some kind of relative valuation of their wisdom. But on what basis? In a case where one Father contradicts another, given that all the Fathers base themselves ultimately on Scripture and divine inspiration, how can one establish a priority? Erigena was not prepared to let the matter rest in vague reassurances, which, as Pound remarks above, have the ultimate effect that no one “takes the Church seriously”; if all the Fathers are right, when they don't agree, all are meaningless.⁴⁵

Erigena's answer to the problem—that reason has precedence over authorities—is easy to misinterpret. The Council of Paris did so, by lumping his book with Amaury de Bène whose reliance on reasoning “in form” seems to have been excessively facile.⁴⁶ But there is no reason to suppose that what Erigena meant by “reason” was classic dialectics, with the prize for human wisdom to the most brilliant QED. Such a view would have been hopelessly in conflict with his complete acceptance of Scripture.

But again, “acceptance of Scripture” is not something that can be understood simply, because Scripture can be accepted in many ways. Erigena prays: “O Lord Jesus, I ask of you no other reward, no other blessing, no other joy than that of understanding in a pure manner, without any error due to false speculation, the words inspired by your Holy Spirit.”⁴⁷ He is aware that this understanding in some sense involves the understanding of the whole of nature, since the words of Scripture “are wrapped up in figurative expressions borrowed from the perceptible world,” so that Scripture becomes a kind of poem: “veluti quaedam poetria sanctam Scripturam … conformat.”⁴⁸

It is, therefore, rather meaningless for Dom Cappuyns to say that Erigena accepts the authority of Scripture and of the living tradition of the Church, translating in these senses Erigena's terms “divina auctoritas” and “fides catholica.”⁴⁹ Erigena emphatically sets aside all trammels on the workings of the human conscience other than the inspiration which comes from God: “So do not let any authority frighten you away from the things which the rational deduction from right contemplation teaches you. For true authority does not conflict with right reason, nor right reason with true authority, since there is no doubt but that both flow from the same source, the Wisdom of God.”⁵⁰ After all, says Erigena, “it seems to me that true authority is nothing else but the truth that has been discovered by the power of reason and set down in writing by the Holy Fathers for the use of posterity.”⁵¹

One might be surprised to find Pound, the poet who more than any other has perceived the currents of our time before they manifested themselves, involved in a question that seems such pure “mediaevalism”’ Wyndham Lewis no doubt would have offered the more practical suggestion of putting a bomb under the Holy See. But Pound, it seems to me, realized that this question was fundamental for the twentieth century. It was not just a question of reasserting the claims of reason, since reason itself had been erected by post-mediaeval Europe into a god at least as powerful as authority. We shall find in fact that at every point where Pound puts forward Erigena's synthesis, he attacks not only the blinkers of Authority but also the other easy way out, the Reason of Bossuet and Descartes.

Civilized Christianity has never stood higher than in Erigena's “Authority comes from right reason.” That is Xtianity which Leibniz cd. have accepted. Bossuet was no nearer the human level of decency than the Times leader writers in our day. A tumid rhetorical parasite, hardly better than N. M. Butler.

And, as I said to the Reverendo the day before yesterday, “Not that I want to prove Aquinas wrong. I merely think him unsound.”

The shallow mind that wants to blur or obliterate the distinction between faith (intuition) and reason.

M. Descartes … as usual.

Mlle. X. “Mais moi, M. Descartes, qui ne pense pas?”⁵²

The process of “explanation” has traditionally been a syllogism, as Crombie explains, and the starting point is an assumption: “The basic doctrine, formulated by Plato and Aristotle and carried to its consequences by Euclid, was that science could be established deductively by starting from certain irreducible postulates, which could not themselves be proved but were grasped by intuition; they could not be overthrown or even modified or limited by any result of scientific investigation. Among these were the laws of logic and the axioms of geometry. In accordance with the doctrine, the Greeks aimed at using a strictly axiomatic method for all scientific problems. When setting out to explain something, their first task was to look for premises from which to deduce it. They began, as explained by Plato, with certain assumptions or ‘hypotheses,’ and ‘making these their starting-point, they proceed to travel through the remainder of the subject and arrive at last, with perfect unanimity, at that which they have proposed as the subject of investigation.’”⁵³

Pound, in the passage quoted above, provides a critique of this method. Descartes wished to explain why he existed (or how he knew he existed—the syllogism is always reversible). He looked for an irreducible postulate, found “I am thinking,” then connected it to “I exist” with a truncated syllogism. Pound points out that the “irreducible postulate” requires proof as much as what Descartes set out to prove.

Unless, that is, the definition of “being” is “awareness of thinking,” but if it is, we are working inside a closed system provided by the language, and the whole exercise has only therapeutic value: “You may assert in vindication of values registered in idiom itself that the man who ‘isn't all there’ has only a partial existence. But we are by that time playing with language? as valuable as playing tennis to keep oneself limber.”⁵⁴

Criticism of the Euclidian method has more than an abstract philosophical value. It affects most of our established assumptions about process in the universe. It has a bearing on the methodology of science. Noel Stock has claimed, for instance, that in defining science as the sorting of things into organic categories, Pound showed his ignorance of the inductive-deductive methods of modern scientific research.⁵⁵ But not only has modern physics shown that “causality” in its Aristotelian sense is not an adequate reflection of nature in its fundamental aspects, which may, for example, show randomness; recent work in the philosophy of science has further suggested that it is not even an adequate reflection of the way the scientist's mind works.⁵⁶

More important than its failures in science, which can usually look after itself, are the effects in philosophy of the inductive-deductive method. There is for instance British empiricism, which has concerned itself for some hundreds of years with the question, Do we “know” anything about the “outside world”? With the syllogism as its method, it has always started from the “irreducible postulate” that our only knowledge of the outside world comes through our senses. The result has demonstrated what Pound calls “the incapacity of abstract statement to retain meaning or utility,”⁵⁷ and recent research in linguistics has suggested that the postulate itself is questionable.

On the one hand, Pound has attacked the worship of Reason; on the other, he has attacked the Authority that Western religion has used as its chief defense against reason. He also attacks “the shallow mind that wants to blur or obliterate the distinction between faith (intuition) and reason”—the guilty person in this instance being Saint Thomas Aquinas.⁵⁸ He it is who is qualified elsewhere by Pound as “an empty noise in a bungless barrel,” propagator of the “kind of NON-thought that one would expect of the class dunce.”⁵⁹ Now Pound's deflating wit is not called forth in this way except against persons who have sinned deeply against the light. Aquinas is frequently set in opposition to Erigena, in

‘Authority comes from right reason,
                              never the other way on’
Hence the delay in condemning him
Aquinas head down in a vacuum,(60)

and again in Canto C, where Aquinas' sin is specified,

          Until Rémusat: ‘Has not,’ ‘Aquinas has not
‘bien rendue compte
          des connaissances à priori.’
‘Want to load’ (Cocteau)
          all the rest of it onto you.’
          Erigena,
          Anselm,
          Cherbury,
          Rémusat, …(61)

Thomas Aquinas attempted to treat the basic tenets of Catholic Christianity like the irreducible assumptions of the Greek logical system and on them to build a structure of human knowledge with the aid of the syllogism alone.⁶² In this he might appear at first sight to take plenty of cognizance of a priori knowledge and to separate most excellently faith (intuition) from reason. In appearance, his method is exactly like that of Erigena, who as Crombie says,⁶³ built the whole structure of his ontology with the double process of resolutio (induction, Greek analysis) and compositio (deduction, Greek synthesis).

The difference is that Aquinas relied insufficiently on divine grace in the building of his structure: he assumed that once the basic postulates of faith were established, the philosopher had no longer need of anything but his own skill in ratiocination. Pound's view would be that a man may make a fool of himself if he fails to adjust at every point his categories to his perception of what is in nature—if he fails to keep the human or organic proportion and allows abstract words to set him thinking in nonexistent absolutes. Man's reason, said Scotus Erigena, must follow the arduous path of speculation “until, with the frequent and laborious study of divine Scripture leading, helping and cooperating with him, and with divine grace moving towards this, returning he reaches the contemplation of truth that he lost by the first fall of man; reaching it he delights in it, delighting in it remains in it and remaining in it is at rest.⁶⁴

Or, as Pound puts it, paraphrasing Aristotle, you must proceed by going to your techne (art), then to seauton (yourself), then back to techne and so on.⁶⁵ The idea is the same in Confucius, who “collected the Odes to keep his followers from abstract discussion,”⁶⁶ for the odes would constantly refocus their minds on nature.

This combination of Aristotle and Confucius is in fact for Pound the area of the disease and its cure: “The sick part of our philosophy is ‘greek splitting,’ a term which I will shortly re-explain. The Confucian is totalitarian.”⁶⁷ Pound has observed that “the Confucian will find most terms of Greek philosophy and most Greek aphorisms lacking in some essential; they have three parts of a necessary four, or four parts where five are needed, nice car, no carburetor. …”⁶⁸ He seems to find it difficult to decide Aristotle's part in this:

Aquinas head down in a vacuum,
                              Aristotle which way in a vacuum?
                              not quite in a vacuum.(69)

The reason is that Aristotle as he has affected the Western world has been harmful in his deficiencies, but his works as he left them may have been adequate: “The curse of European thought appeared between the Nichomachean notes and the Magna Moralia. Aristotle (as recorded in the earlier record) began his list of mental processes with TeXne, techne, and the damned college parrots omitted it. This was done almost before the poor bloke was cold in his coffin.”⁷⁰

I would point to the effects of “Greek splitting” by comparing a passage from Pound on Aristotle with this passage from a recent philosophical thesis:

Under “Specimens of sense” at the beginning, Austin lists (1.11) “What-is-the-meaning-of (the word) ‘word’?” and under “Specimens of nonsense” (1.21) “What is the-meaning-of-a-word?” 1.11 is a perfectly straightforward specific question capable of a specific answer; but Austin describes 1.21 as a spurious question because it is a case of asking about “Nothing in particular”: an illegitimate extension of a legitimate question. The spurious nature of the question is illustrated by consideration of a parallel case. It can properly be asked “What is the point of doing x?” when x is some specific thing (e.g., Austin cites “standing on one's head”), but to go on to ask “What is the point of doing anything—not anything in particular, but just anything?” is to pose an unanswerable pseudo question.⁷¹

This analysis fails to account for the fact that the proscribed sentences have meaning, taking meaning as “functional value”; it simply declines the attempt to describe and distinguish the relative value of them as types of human behavior. Pound puts this type of philosophical activity in its true place:

The “danger” of Aristotle arises partly from his not putting certain statements in the purely lexicographical form. The “danger” for the reader, or class, being largely that of losing time in useless discussion. For example ii.3. Nobody deliberates about things eternal, such as the order of the universe.

If this is put as statement about the use of the verb (BOULUETAI), it does not lead to useless yatter.

Lorenzo Valla wd. have written. Whatever mental processes we indulge in re the eternal etc. we do not use the verb BOULEUOMAI in such cases. We do not … etc. spend time deciding whether, but we observe that.⁷²

In his essay on Mencius, Pound says that the answer to “Greek splitting” is mythology, which “tries to find an expression for reality without over-simplification, and without scission, you can examine a living animal, but at a certain point dissection is compatible only with death.”⁷³ Mythology is probably right for the Greek world; Pound has attempted to make it right for ours, by writing the Cantos. The “immense organized cowardice” has always, he says, tried to “remove the mythologies before they establish clean values.”⁷⁴

For Scotus Erigena mythology was equivalent to Scripture, which he saw as a huge divinely inspired poem, with, necessarily, the organic nature of a poem. For Confucius, the odes had this function. But if we look for a simple answer to the conflict between the two extremes of Reason and Authority, we shall probably not find it stated explicitly. Pound says the answer is in China.⁷⁵ Perhaps it is in the word li, which means “rites,” and which Séraphim Couvreur defines as a “step or action, what is done to serve the spirits and to obtain the benevolence of the heavens. … In philosophy, it designates one of the four virtues that Meng Tseu (Bk. VI ch.I.6) says are innate in the heart of all men. It is the virtue he defines as the natural feeling of what is right and of respect.”⁷⁶

If we follow this idea of li or “rites” through Pound's works, we find a very interesting complex. Scotus Erigena, Brancusi on Léger, and the Hellenic mystery cults of the Albigensians seem to be its chief nodes:

1. Mang-I-tze asked about filiality. [Confucius] said: Don't disobey.*

*P[authier] expands the single word wei to mean: s'opposer aux principes de la raison, making the statement equivalent to Gilson's statement of Erigena: Authority comes from right reason—anticipating the “rites” (light and dish of fecundity) a few lines further down.⁷⁷

“Rites” is defined: “This word li³ contains something of the idea in the French “il sait vivre.”⁷⁸ Which is paraphrased thus: “The proper man studies so that he arrive at proceeding in the process. [Very much: pour savoir vivre. Really learn how to live, up to the hilt].”⁷⁹

But as so often in Pound, the real definition is an event, whose meaning we can get at through the juxtaposition of persons: “‘Il sait vivre,’ said Brancusi of Léger. This must also be said of the catachumens before they pass the third door. It is quite useless for me to refer men to Provence, or to speculate on Erigena in the market place.”⁸⁰ So writes Pound.

Perhaps, as a solution to the whole problem, this seems vague and inadequate. To me it seems a complete justification of the ideogram as a method of communication: neither expressible lump of meaning defines what we want, but the two together create an inexpressible third, and in that area is the answer. What we call logical prose sometimes has this effect, especially when the writer realizes that he is reduced to the illogical expedient of saying “neither this, nor that,” as Reade does here:

Reason itself demands our reverence for what is above reason; it does not, however, demand blind subservience to patristic utterances, or to the bare letter of the Scriptures, any more than it encourages us to put our trust in petty dialectic. … To force [Erigena] into a rigid dilemna of reason and authority is likely to be an anachronism only less regrettable than the proposal to enlist him on the side of the Nominalists or the Realists. A mind like his refuses to be imprisoned in any such antithesis. What he believes in is the illumination of the mind with a heavenly radiance, as easily dimmed by ratio in one way as by auctoritas in another.⁸¹

THE DIVINE UNIVERSE

Ezra Pound's mind, “as Ixion, unstill, ever turning,” came to rest at Pisa with the help of nature. The “ant's forefoot” was a manifestation; like everything else in nature, it partook of divinity.⁸² In Erigena's formulation, “all things that are, are lights,”⁸³ which Pound uses as “omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt, or whatever.”⁸⁴ The point is fundamental to Pound's view of the world; perhaps it is worth finding out why he chooses Erigena's words to express it.

First, the context: Erigena's phrase comes from his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, who begins his work by quoting Saint James on the “Father of Lights.”⁸⁵ Erigena comments:

This is the threefold light and the threefold goodness, three substances in one essence, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God, one goodness, one light diffused into all things that are, so that they may subsist in essence, radiating light in all things that are, so that all things may be turned towards love and consideration of its beauty, overshadowing all things that are, so that all things may enjoy the fullness of its perfection, and in it all things are one. Thus all lights descend from the Father of Lights.

But perhaps someone will say: How are all things, that are, lights? [Quomodo omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt?]⁸⁶

The “someone” suggests that only intellectual and rational things should be talked of in this way, to which Erigena replies that since the Father created all things in his wisdom, which equals light, all things are lights. This argument is perhaps a little too grammatical for our tastes, but Saint Anselm also got there, as Pound says, “by sheer grammar.”⁸⁷

The point is the getting there; that is, to a universe which is Neoplatonic, which is “one stupendous yet graded theophania.”⁸⁸ God is light, and his creations are lights, because the act of creation is merely “theophany,” “god-showing.” According to Erigena, when God is said to create things he merely manifests a part of himself;⁸⁹ he cannot be creating in the usual sense of the word, because creating (in Erigena's physics) involves movement, and to say that God has anywhere to move to is to say he lacks something.⁹⁰ If creation is self-manifestation, then, as Gilson says, “this conception of the creative act entails a correlative notion of the nature of created things. A manifestation of the divine light, the world would cease to be if God ceased to radiate.”⁹¹ This I find a very beautiful conception.

It does not, as theologians hasten to add, imply that God is no more than his creatures. “The traditional accusation against the De Divisione Naturae—surely one of the most remarkable books in the world—is that of Pantheism. … Now in the De Divisione Naturae there is a rich abundance of statements that seem to point in that direction … Yet … the universe, as he conceived it, is one stupendous yet graded theophania. God is in omnibus and supra omnia, revealed in all His creatures, yet eternally transcending them all. They who declare that God is thus degraded below Himself must be prepared to deny that Jesus was God as well as man.”⁹²

In this last remark, Reade has pointed to the reason Pound needed Erigena's conception. That the universe should consist of God, on the one hand, and man, on the other, of tyrant and puppet, is a concept repugnant to Pound. For this reason he is not at all interested in the Hellenic tyrant Zeus and has waged continuous war on what he terms the “Semitic element” in Christianity, namely, the Jehovah of the Old Testament. Like Zielinski, he makes a profound distinction between those religions which are theocratic, “god-ruled,” and those in which men became gods and gods men, the “theanthropic” religions, which see the deities walking the earth.⁹³

What Pound needed from Erigena was a statement of this god-man continuity. It could be figured in a number of ways. The ideogram ming figures it as a radiation of light in Pound's definition:

… The sun and moon, the total light process, the radiation, reception and reflection of light, hence, the intelligence. Bright, brightness, shining. Refer to Scotus Erigena, Grosseteste and the notes on light in my Cavalcanti.⁹⁴

We have already referred to Erigena's radiated world; it is interesting to compare Grosseteste's version, as related in Pound's Cavalcanti essay: “Light is a corporeal substance which is very subtle and approaches the incorporeal. Its characteristic properties are to engender itself perpetually and to diffuse itself instantaneously about a point in a spherical manner. … This extremely attenuated substance is also the stuff of which all things are made; it is the first corporeal form and that which certain people call corporeity.”⁹⁵

The continuity between god and man could be figured by anything that emphasized sufficiently its unbrokenness—by Pythagoras' “silk cords of the sunlight,” with their suggestion of music,⁹⁶ or by Dante's “this light / as a river,”⁹⁷ which echoes Erigena in the De divisione naturae: “As indeed the whole river flows principally from its spring, and the water which first arose in the spring, to whatever length it is stretched out, pours along its bed continuously and without any break. … From thence is all goodness. …”⁹⁸

But, as Reade mentioned, the theophany is graded. For that reason Pound emphasizes the different functions within the Trinity,⁹⁹ as Erigena had in the passage which concludes that “all things are lights”: “The Father of lights is the heavenly Father, the first and innermost light, from which the true light his Word (by which all things are made, and in which all things become substantial), that is to say the Only Son, is born, and from whom (I mean the Father) proceeds, coessential with Him and the Word, the Holy Spirit, the spirit of the Father and the Son, in whom and through whom the gifts of grace are distributed to all things.”¹⁰⁰

There are distinctions to be made even within the Trinity. Pound holds that “unless a term is left meaning one particular thing …, all metaphysical thought degenerates into a soup,”¹⁰¹ and that “the Aquinian universe, the grades of divine intelligence and/or goodness or goodwill present in graduated degrees throughout this universe, gave the thinker, any thinker, something to measure by.”¹⁰² Again,

Quand vos venetz al som de Pescalina
                                                                                                                                            gradations
These are distinctions in clarity
ming                    …                    these are distinctions.(103)

The river of the divine flowing therefore has steps in it:

Barley, rice, cotton, tax-free
                                                                                                                        with hilaritas.
Letizia, Dante, Canto 18
Virtù enters.
                    Buona da sè volontà.
Lume non è, se non dal sereno
                              stone to stone, as a river descending.(104)

The chief importance of these gradations to Pound was to reconcile a fundamentally benevolent universe with the undeniable existence of evil. In this he was in violent opposition to that Indian tradition—obvious, for example, in Whitman and less so in Emerson—which claims that “Everything is beautiful / in its own way”:

A stupidity which effaces the scale and grade of evil can give nothing to civilization.

You can perhaps define fanaticism as loss of the sense of gradations. Protestant sects are largely without a scale of values.¹⁰⁵

As well as the concept of a divinely radiated world, Erigena has two other parts to contribute to Pound's ideogram of the paradiso terrestre.¹⁰⁶ There is his part in the crystal image, which moves in the later cantos like a satellite around the river image (or vice versa): the flowing river, in moments of divine metamorphosis, becomes “the wave in the stone” or solid crystal (“That the crystal wave mount to flood surge”).¹⁰⁷ Erigena in his commentaries on Dionysius' Celestial Hierarchy discusses whether the divine thrones are made of crystal: Yes, crystal, says Pound,

Belasco or Topaze, and not have it sqush,
a ‘throne,’ something God can sit on
                                        without having it sqush;
With Greek tags in his excellent verses, Erigena,
In reign of Carolus Calvus.(108)

And as this delightful suggestion itself contains a certain hilarity, it seems natural to end this investigation of Erigena in Pound by mentioning the “hilaritas” we saw in the ideogram. There is a beautiful Italian prayer reprinted in the Guide to Kulchur. It recalls that happy saint Saint Francis, both because it is addressed half to the sun and because of “l'ilarità del Tuo Volto.”¹⁰⁹ The gods themselves are gods

‘By Hilaritas’, said Gemisto, ‘by hilaritas: gods;
                                        and by speed in communication.(110)

Or, “A man's paradise is his good nature.”¹¹¹ This delight is the essential antidote to the “Hindoo” and Plotinian bellyache.¹¹² Hence the beautiful processions in the Cantos; hence the interest in the canons who danced in church at Auxerre;¹¹³ hence the arresting “Religion? With no dancing girls at the altar? REligion?”¹¹⁴

Now, Ioannes Scottus Eriugena was, if tales be true, whilom court jester to King Charles the Bald,¹¹⁵ and Pound draws a delightful picture of the “Oirishman”¹¹⁶ at court in Paris:

lux enim
                    ignis est accidens and,
wrote the prete in his edition of Scotus:
Hilaritas                    the virtue hilaritas
the queen stitched King Carolus' shirts or whatever
while Erigena put Greek tags in his excellent verses
                                        in fact an excellent poet, Paris
                                        toujours Pari'

(Charles le Chauve)¹¹⁷

This is what “Calvin never blacked out / en l'Isle”: the wine (Dionisia) and the women (? Eleutheria) of Paris,¹¹⁸ of “entrez donc, mais entrez, / c'est la maison de tout le monde,” where

three small boys on three bicycles
                    smacked her young fanny in passing
before she recovered from the surprise of the first swat(119)

—and where the Oirishman wrote his excellent verses.

Notes

1. Maieul Cappuyns, Jean Scot Erigène (Paris and Louvain, 1933), pp. 4, 59.

2. This account of Erigena's life is taken chiefly from Erigena's Periphyseon (De divisione naturae), ed. I. P. Sheldon-Williams (Dublin, 1968), book I, introduction. The best account of his background and development is in Cappuyns' Erigène.

3. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New York, 1968), pp. 98-99.

4. For example, by Clark Mixon Emery, Ideas into Action (Coral Gables, Fla., 1958), pp. 23-26.

5. Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London, 1970), p. 373.

6. Ezra Pound, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1971), p. 334; to T. S. Eliot, 18 January 1940.

7. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 2d ed. (London, 1961), p. 101.

8. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London, 1964), Canto XXXVI, p. 185. Hereafter referred to simply by canto and page number.

9. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 248.

10. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 248, note.

11. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 250.

12. Pound, Spirit, p. 90; Ezra Pound, “Kulchur,” A Guide to Kulchur (London, 1966), p. 263; and Ezra Pound, “Terra Italica,” in New Review (Winter, 1931-1932), quoted by Noel Stock, Poet in Exile: Ezra Pound (Manchester, 1964), p. 23.

13. Pound, ABC, p. 101.

14. Pound, Kulchur, p. 263.

15. Pound, Kulchur, p. 145.

16. Canto LXXIV, p. 456.

17. C. F. M. de Rémusat, Abélard (Paris, 1845), p. 312; Cappuyns, in Erigène, concedes that it is possible that Erigena taught at the Palace School, pp. 64 ff., and describes the movements of the School, pp. 50, 65.

18. Canto LXXV, p. 582; Canto LXXVII, p. 607.

19. Stock, Life, p. 373.

20. Canto LXXXIII, p. 563.

21. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 78.

22. Canto XCII, p. 654. For the exhumation of Amaury de Bène, see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), p. 451, note; the mistake was first shown by Achilles Fang in an unpublished Harvard dissertation in 1958.

23. Canto XCV, p. 679.

24. Pound, Kulchur, p. 294-95.

25. Canto CV, p. 775.

26. Canto LXXXIII, p. 563.

27. The two instances of luz in the cantos given by Boris de Rachewiltz (“Pagan and Magic Elements in Ezra Pound's Works,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. E. Hesse [London, 1969]) seem to be the only ones (Canto LXXX, pp. 531, 546).

28. Rachewiltz, “Magic Elements,” p. 191.

29. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 251; for Cavalcanti's use of Albertus Magnus, see Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. and introd. T. S. Eliot (London, 1954), pp. 158, 178; and also especially J. E. Shaw, Cavalcanti's Theory of Love (Toronto, 1949), footnotes passim.

30. Pound, Essays, p. 158.

31. Ezra Pound, Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization, ed. Noel Stock (Chicago, 1960), p. 133.

32. Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York and London, 1955), p. 128.

33. Canto LXXIV, p. 458.

34. Canto XCVIII, pp. 714, 720.

35. C. F. M. de Rémusat, Saint Anselme de Cantorbéry (Paris, 1853), pp. 487-88. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 242, notes, however, that J. Dräseke “has shown, twenty-five years ago, how illusory are the correspondences pointed out by C. de Rémusat.”

36. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 245.

37. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 246; for the connections between Richard and Erigena in Pound, see Canto LXXXV, p. 582, for example.

38. See Pound, Kulchur, p. 263.

39. Mario del Pra, Scoto Eriugena, 2d ed. (Milan, 1951), in his bibliography cites L'Eriugena e Bruno (Palermo, 1907) but omits the author.

40. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 250. In Erigena, De divisione, ed. Sheldon-Williams, I, 17, the latter mentions that Raymond Klibansky has identified Cusanus' handwriting on the MS.

41. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 7.

42. Pound, Kulchur, p. 75.

43. Canto XXXVI, p. 185.

44. Erigena, De divisione, ed. Sheldon-Williams, I, 198.

45. For all this, see Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 284.

46. See Gilson, Christian Philosophy, p. 241.

47. Erigena, De divisione, 5.38 (Migne, Patrologia latina, vol. 122, 1010B-C).

48. Cappuyns, Erigène, p. 292; quoting Erigena's De divisione, 1.64, 2.29 (Migne, 509A, 706A-B); Erigena, Super ierarchiam caelestem, 2.1 (Migne, 146B).

49. Cappuyns, Erigène, pp. 280-281.

50. Erigena, De divisione, ed. Sheldon-Williams, p. 193.

51. Erigena, De divisione, ed. Sheldon-Williams, p. 199.

52. Pound, Kulchur, p. 164; for the deletions from the published text see Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London, 1963), A45.

53. A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700 (Oxford, 1953), p. 7.

54. Pound, Kulchur, p. 165.

55. Stock, Exile, p. 139.

56. For example, Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 3d ed. (London, 1968), p. 31: “The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it.”

57. Ezra Pound, “Freedom de Facto,” Agenda, 9, nos. 2-3 (Spring-Summer 1971), p. 23.

58. Pound, Kulchur, p. 165.

59. See Stock, Life, p. 342.

60. Canto XXXVI, p. 185.

61. Canto C, p. 748 (sic); i.e., perhaps, “They want to persuade you not only of the basic intuitions of religion but also of their own rationalistic superstructures”; see the distinctions made in Pound, Essays, pp. 431-432.

62. See Gilson, Christian Philosophy, pp. 361 ff.

63. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste, p. 29.

64. Erigena, De divisione, 4.2 (Migne, 744B).

65. Canto LXXXV, p. 582.

66. Ezra Pound, Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects (New York, 1969), p. 191 (Analects, “Procedure”).

67. Pound, Impact, p. 124.

68. Pound, Confucius/Analects, p. 268 (15.XXXVI).

69. Canto XXXVI, p. 185.

70. Pound, Impact, p. 126; see also and especially pp. 166 ff.

71. Noel Makin, “The Nature of Concepts,” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Nottingham, 1970, pp. 39-40.

72. Pound, Kulchur, p. 318; see Pound's note on Confucius' remarks: “a number of them should be taken rather as lexicography” (Pound, Confucius/Analects, p. 194 [“Note to This New Version”]).

73. Pound, Impact, p. 126.

74. Canto LXXXVII, p. 606.

75. Though see Pound's attempt to define an acceptable type of authority, in Kulchur, p. 165: “We have trust in a man because we have come to regard him (in his entirety) as sapient and well-balanced.” But “this is not what Erigena meant, and in any case it does not act in contradiction to his statement, but only as an extension to it.” Pound's expression “faith (intuition)” asserts that “our only measure of truth is … our perception of truth,” as he said in 1918 (Essays, p. 431). The bulk of his remarks on authority quoted in this article come from the Guide to Kulchur of 1938. By the postwar period he may have decided that the persistent value of the Catholic Church entitled it to some authority beyond this, to judge from a footnote in Impact, p. 200, on “the distinction between A Church, an orthodoxy, and a collection of intelligent observations by individual theologians, however brilliant.”

76. Li Ki (Book of Rites), trans. Séraphim Couvreur (Ho Kien Fou, 1913), introduction.

77. Pound, Confucius/Analects, p. 198 (2.V); see Confucius, Doctrine, trans. M. G. Pauthier (Paris, 1929), p. 80.

78. Pound, Confucius/Analects, p. 230 (9.X).

79. Pound, Confucius/Analects, p. 283 (19.VII).

80. Pound, Kulchur, p. 145; on catachumens and mysteries, see that whole page, and Pound, Spirit, p. 95.

81. Cambridge Mediaeval History, V, 787.

82. Canto CXIII, p. 20; Canto LXXXIII, p. 568.

83. See Canto LXXIV, p. 456.

84. Canto LXXXIII, p. 563.

85. See Denys l'Aréopagite, La Hiérarchie célèste, ed. Roques, Heil, Gandillac (Paris, 1958), p. 70.

86. Erigena, Super ierarchiam caelestem (Migne 128B); see James, 1.17.

87. Canto CV, p. 775.

88. See following paragraph.

89. Erigena, De divisione (Migne, 633A): “The things other than God which are said to exist, are theophanies of Him, which also subsist in Him. God is therefore everything that truly is, since he makes everything and is made in everything, as St. Dionysius Areopagite says. For everything which is understood and felt is nothing other than the appearance of what is manifest, the manifestation of what is secret, the affirmation of what is denied. …”

90. Erigena, De divisione (Migne, 517A).

91. Gilson, Christian Philosophy, p. 120.

92. Cambridge Mediaeval History, V, 787.

93. Tadeusz Zielinski, La Sibylle (Paris, 1925), pp. 17-19; see Pound, Essays, p. 431 (“the gods no longer walked in men's gardens”), and Stock, Life, p. 444.

94. Pound, Confucius/Digest, p. 20 (“Terminology”).

95. Pound, Essays, p. 160, quoting Gilson's paraphrase of Grosseteste.

96. Canto XCVIII, p. 723, where ming is linked with hsien (the “tensile light”) and with non si disuna from Dante's Paradiso (La divina commedia, ed. C. A. Scartazzini, 2d rev. ed. [Milan, 1896], p. 816), 13.52 ff., which emphasizes the continuity:

    That which does not and cannot die
    Is not other than the brightness of that Idea
    That our Lord, in loving, gave birth to;
    For that living light which moves
    From his shining, which does not dis-unify itself
                        [non si disuna, see Canto XCVIII, p. 722]
    From him, nor from the love that is three in them,
    Through his goodness unites its shining,
    As if mirrored, in new subsistences,
    Eternally remaining one.

    The passage is strongly reminiscent of Erigena on the Trinity, see below; see also especially Canto LXXIV, pp. 455-456.

97. Canto CVII, p. 787:

    So that Dante's view is quite natural:
                                            this light
                                                                                    as a river
                                            in Kung, in Ocellus, Coke, Agassiz
                                                                                    hrei the flowing
                                                                                    this persistent awareness

98. Erigena, De divisione (Migne, 632C).

99. See Canto XCVIII, p. 715, and Canto CV, p. 775, quoting Saint Anselm, though perhaps the emphasis is more on distinctions outside the Trinity: Canto CV, p. 771, “non pares, not equal in dignity / rerum naturas” (the natures of things). But the basis of the theology he uses is still that the Trinity comprises the first three of the steps.

100. Erigena, Super ierarchiam caelestem (Migne, 128B).

101. Pound, Essays, p. 185.

102. Pound, Impact, p. 177.

103. Canto LXXXIV, p. 575, altering Arnaut Daniel's remarks in Dante's Purgatorio (ed. Scartazzini, p. 610), XXVI. 146, to “When you reach the top of the stair.”

104. Canto C, p. 743. I don't find letizia in Dante's Paradiso XVIII, but there is dilettanza (hilaritas), by which, Dante says, a man becomes aware that his virtute is daily advancing (Dante, Paradiso, [ed. Scartazzini, p. 870], XVIII. 58-60). The other two quotations are Paradiso, XIX.86 and 64 (ed. Scartazzini, pp. 882, 880), both highly relevant.

105. Pound, Kulchur, p. 196.

106. “Notes for Canto CXVII et seq.,” p. 32.

107. Canto XCV, p. 677.

108. Erigena, Super ierarchiam caelestem (Migne, 145C); Canto LXXXVIII, p. 616; Canto XXXVI, p. 185.

109. Pound, Kulchur, p. 141; Spirit, pp. 101-103.

110. Canto XCVIII, p. 720, p. 715.

111. Canto XCIII, p. 656; Canto XCIX, p. 728.

112. See, for example, Canto XCV, pp. 679-680, Canto XCIX, p. 729.

113. Canto LXXVII, p. 496; Rachewiltz “Magic Elements,” p. 194.

114. Canto LXXXVII, p. 611.

115. Cambridge Mediaeval History, V, 784.

116. See Canto LXXIV, p. 456:

     “sunt lumina” said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
                                                                                     “OMNIA,
     all things that are are lights”

117. Canto LXXXIII, p. 563; Canto LXXIV, p. 477.

118. Canto XCV, p. 680. My interpretation of the words “Dionisio et Eleutherio” in this passage (p. 679) is obviously at variance with that of Christine Brook-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (London, 1971), p. 40, note: “Two missionary martyrs who according to legend were decapitated in Montmartre in 273 (Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum I/31). The church of St. Denis was built on the same spot in the twelfth century. Calvin is said not to have blacked them out because the Huguenots were put to flight at the Battle of St. Denis on Nov. 10th 1567.” However, it should be noted that Saint Denis, patron saint of France, founder of the Abbaye Royale, the apostle of the Gauls and first bishop of Paris (see C. F. M. de Rémusat, Saint Anselme de Cantorbéry [Paris, 1853], p. 485) was supposed in the time of Erigena to have been one and the same person as Dionysius the Areopagite. When, therefore, the Emperor of the East, Michael the Stammerer, wished to pay a compliment to the nominal Emperor of the West, Louis the Debonair, he presented him with a manuscript of the Areopagite, supposed honor and glory of France. Erigena, of course, translated this and Pound is therefore likely to have known of this confusion of persons. Also, the whole passage of Canto XCV, pp. 679-680, is about the conflict between joie de vivre and the “Hindoo bellyache.” When, therefore, Pound says in it

     I suppose St Hilary looked at an oak-leaf.
     (vine-leaf? San Denys,
               (spelled Dionisio)
     Dionisio et Eleutherio.
     Dionisio et Eleutherio
                                   “the brace of” ‘em
     that Calvin never blacked out
                                                                                                                             en l'Isle,

     he evidently sets it up as it were of a pair of tutelary deities for the Ile-Saint-Louis, a pair compounded of the local saints and of celebrants of the Dionisian and Eleutherian festivals, a process which often took place in the popular mind (see Rémy de Gourmont, La Culture des idées, 7th ed. [Paris, 1916], p. 180). The Huguenots and the Battle of Saint Denis obviously come into the matter, but the main point is that it was joie de vivre which Calvinism never killed in Paris. Finally, for the reference to Saint Hilary, see Walter Baumann “Secretary of Nature, J. Heydon,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. E. Hesse, p. 316.

119. Canto LXXX, p. 539.