The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul. Eric McLuhan

By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable,

       Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

       Of what men choose to forget...

      Finally, “Little Gidding” performs the level of anagogy, the mystical world between inner and outer worlds; it begins:

      Midwinter spring is its own season

       Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,

       Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.

       When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,

       The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,

       In a windless cold that is the heart’s heat,

       Reflecting in a watery mirror

       A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

       And glow more intense than blaze of branch or brazier,

       Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind but Pentecostal fire

       In the dark time of the year...

      A major theme running throughout each of the four subpoems is the intersection of time (and the timeless) and place (announced in the titles): “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” “Little Gidding”—each is a geographical locale. Further, each of the four constituent poems, each Quartet, plays its themes on the same four basic instruments, such as places and elements (respectively air, earth, water, and fire), and seasons. It is the intersection of a particular space and time that transforms and purifies:

      To be conscious is not to be in time

       But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden.

       Be remembered; involved with past and future.

      In Book I of The Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian sets out the program for eloquence, which includes the study of languages and the cultivation of both Grammar and Rhetoric:

      This profession may be most briefly considered under two heads, the art of speaking correctly and the interpretation of the poets; but there is more beneath the surface than meets the eye. For the art of writing is combined with that of speaking, and correct reading precedes interpretation, while in each of these cases criticism has its work to perform. Nor is it sufficient to have read the poets only; every kind of writer must be carefully studied, not merely for the subject matter, but for the vocabulary; for words often acquire authority from their use by a particular author. Nor can such training be regarded as complete if it stop short of music, for the teacher of literature has to speak of metre and rhythm: nor again if he be ignorant of astronomy, can he understand the poets; for they, to mention no further points, frequently give their indications of time by reference to the rising and setting of the stars. Ignorance of philosophy is an equal drawback.⁵⁸

      In Book III, following Cicero (who, in his turn, continued the program of Isocrates), he presents the divisions of rhetoric and their basic characters:

      The art of oratory, as taught by most authorities, and those the best, consists of five parts: —invention, arrangement, expression, memory, and delivery or action (the two latter terms being used synonymously). But all speech expressive of purpose involves also a subject and words. If such expression is brief and contained within the limits of one sentence, it may demand nothing more, but longer speeches require much more. For not only what we say and how we say it is of importance, but also the circumstances under which we say it. It is here that the need of arrangement comes in. But it will be impossible to say everything demanded by the subject, putting each thing in its proper place, without the aid of memory. It is for this reason that memory forms the fourth department. But a delivery, which is rendered unbecoming either by voice or gesture, spoils everything and almost entirely destroys the effect of what is said. Delivery therefore must be assigned the fifth place.⁵⁹

      Both patterns are synchronic and simultaneous rather than diachronic or sequential. The simultaneity of the four senses as used by the grammarian constitutes the resonance of the logos, just as the five divisions, when used by the orator, constitute the presence of the word. This is what the linguists now call la langue, and what Eliot calls “the auditory imagination.” The auditory imagination includes both the four senses and the five divisions:

      What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.⁶⁰

      Unlike the sequential parts of a speech, the five divisions are, in fact, nothing else than the five mental faculties of man, perceived comprehensively. The logos, especially as understood by the pre-Socratics, includes them all, but rhetoric and later philosophy alike tended to fragment and specialize the logos (which was translated from Greek as ratio et oratio). Both the ideal poet and the ideal orator shared the encyclopedic training indispensable to true eloquence.

      Here are the five divisions as they appear in the work of Cicero:

      And, since all the activity and ability of an orator falls into five divisions, I learned that he must first hit upon what to say; then manage and marshal his discoveries, not merely in orderly fashion, but with a discriminating eye for the exact weight as it were of each argument; next go on to array them in the adornments of style; after that keep them guarded in his memory; and in the end deliver them with effect and charm....⁶¹

      The poets of preliteracy hold the key to tropology and to the moral and anagogical levels: mimesis. De Lubac is quite explicit about the process, though he does not use the word mimesis when he discusses the mystical experience of the last two senses of Scripture.

      First, the “trope” in “tropology” is a turning-inward. History and allegory are out there, outwardly manifested and available to the outward senses. So, after two levels of outward attention, comes the big trope, the process of interiorization:

      Now it is no longer we who are acting; it is these words, once having been introduced, which act within us, releasing the spirit of which they have been made, the meaning and sonority included within them, and which veritably become spirit and life, and action-producing words. They belong to a place beyond our mental control; there is a certain irresistible force of authority and order in them. But they have ceased to be exterior; they have become ourselves. And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us; one must understand the whole captivating, appropriating power of these two words: in nobis.⁶²

      The experience de Lubac here describes is of exactly the same pattern as the mimesis used by Homer and the oral-poetic establishment before the introduction of the alphabet.

      Mimesis is the technique of interiorization: knowing by putting-on, knowing by becoming, intellectually and emotionally, the thing known. That is, integral, interiorized knowing instead of conceptual knowing: unmediated, direct perception by the body and the emotions and the intellect of the hearer; in other words, by the hearer’s soul. Direct experience by total submergence.

      De Lubac frequently links interiorization to the moral sense (and, later, to the anagogic sense). The trope in tropology is also a turning—from symbolic theology to mystical theology.

      Gilson points out that

      ...to know is to be in a new and richer way than before, since it is essentially to cause to enter into a thing which is in the first place for itself alone what another thing is in the first place for itself alone This fact is expressed by the statement that to know a thing is a kind of becoming that thing.⁶³

      Or, as the maxim goes, “the cognitive agent is and becomes the thing known.” Proficiency with such unmediated direct perception would call for much experience of contemplation on the beholder’s part. So these mystical senses of the Scriptures