philosophy

robert graves: Some Speculations on Literature, History, and Religion

Edited by Patrick Quinn

Carcanet, #20

WE FIND the key to Graves in his own words: ''I was brought up a Protestant but renounced my faith in the Christian doctrine at the age of 15, being no longer able to subscribe intellectually to the main tenets of the Apostles' Creed.'' The parallel with Yeats is striking: both men continue to be at heart religious while rejecting any acceptable home in traditional religion. But where Yeats turned to mysticism, theosophy, and Madame Blavatsky, Graves took a more startlingly original path. Abandoning a Father God, he proclaimed his belief in a Mother Goddess - there was, he affirmed, a Creatrix before there was a Creator.

To this male celestial usurpation he traced the source of all our present woes. It was when patriarchal herdsmen from the east broke into the Aegean world 3000 years ago, bringing with them a male sun-god and overthrowing the original Triple Goddess who had hitherto reigned supreme over a matriarchal culture, that calamity came upon us. It is, for Graves, the equivalent of the Fall in Judaeo-Christian culture. Not until we return to the White Goddess, the great female inspirational principle, not until we forsake patriarchal for matriarchal society, can modern poetry and the modern world be redeemed from the crippling bondage of male rationalism. Mythic wisdom will not dwell in a civilisation dominated by logic and technology.

In the one corner, Socrates, Pericles, St. Paul, science, rationalism, sex; in the other, woman, poetry, intuition, love, creation. The Mother Goddess gives birth, the Father God is a craftsman, a planner, a director of the universe. All of Graves's thinking is shaped by these antitheses. ''Myself, I left the city long ago.''

This refers to much more than a decision to leave London for Majorca: it is a repudiation of western, rational, urban civilisation - ''what modem scientist has ever learned the technique of meditation?'' Poets (and their natural allies, women) detest philosophers as their deadly foes; Graves supports Xanthippe in her duel with that insufferable anti-poet, Socrates. Pericles joins Graves's list of villains for making Athens ''a loveless city of agnostics''. Follow such men

and where will you end up?

In a technological civilisation that demeans the moon as

merely a burnt-out satellite of

the earth, useful as a nuclear-missile target; that slights woman as the non-intellectual sex; and that degrades love into mere sexual behaviourism.

But it is when he turns his artillery upon St. Paul as the inventor of Christianity that we find Graves at his most vituperative. Graves's Paul is nasty, dishonest, almost certainly an embezzler, but worst of all the deviser of a tyrannical, patriarchal religion that has disastrously delivered the world into the hands of arrogant, desensitised men. Briefly, the elevation of Mary in Catholicism, driven by ''a hunger for the ancient Mother Goddess'', promised some hope, but with her relapse into a Church puppet, ''a new immaculate Goddess must somehow be provided for those still worthy of her''. This was the mission assigned by Graves to himself, and he deployed a vast classical and biblical scholarship in the service of what many will regard as cranky, even perverse, views. Graves is a poet and a visionary, even (especially?) in his prose writings, but, if often coat-trailingly provocative,

he is always stimulating and frequently enlightening, never a bore even if he is sometimes an irritant. It is pointless to blame him for being what he set out to be.