Numine afflatur: Die Inspiration des Dichters im Denken der Renaissance.

Christoph J. Steppich. Numine afflatur: Die Inspiration des Dichters im Denken der Renaissance.

Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002. 435 pp. + 1 col. pl. index. bibl. [euro]78. ISBN: 3-447-04531-0.

There is no talking about silence without breaking it. The question is whether there can be any writing about divine inspiration without either proving or disproving its existence, or at least its actual presence. The good old Scholastic habit of a science's proving its object first has fallen out of use, and a critic's claim that a subject should be treated congenially (which in this case would also imply a certain rhetorical elegance) always borders on the unfair. According to accepted scientific standards even such an emphatically pretentious topic may be treated in a coolly systematical, analytical way, in a kind of anatomy of divine inspiration. But is there a golden and safe middle way between those two approaches?

Numine afflatur, Christoph J. Steppich's monograph on "The Poet's Divine Inspiration in Renaissance Thought" grew out of a Ph.D. dissertation at the State University of New York, Albany, accepted in 1987. A long period of elaboration favors material enrichment, but it also endangers systematical precision and transparence. To begin with, as we are told in the introduction, the author limits the scope of his investigations to (1) the early Renaissance Italian literary theories and philosophical statements on poetical inspiration; and (2) the treatment of the topos of inspiration by the German Neo-Latin poets from the end of the fifteenth through the end of the sixteenth century. Such a choice would make perfect sense if the monograph just aimed at showing whether and to what extent the German poetical praxis was influenced by the preceding Italian theories.

But actually there are many other interesting and fundamental questions touched upon in the first part of the book that do not enter into this comparatively modest frame and remain more or less disconnected from each other. For example, the problem of poetical truth or the justification of a poet's treatment of theological topics has no substantial bearing on the second part of the book. Also, the concept of the creative poet as the image of God the Creator is hardly to be considered as part of the theory of divine inspiration, as the author seems to be suggesting. As it is, that apparently obvious division in part 1, dealing with the Italian poetical theory, and part 2, dealing with the German poetical praxis, does not help establishing a main line of argument.

Neither systematic stringency nor stylistic devices contrive to hold this lengthy book together, so it tends to fall apart into its different chapters. And some of these are quite worth looking into. Chapter 2, for instance, is an independent essay on Dante's poetical theory and on the early controversies about the Divina Commedia. To my view the most interesting part of the book is chapter 6 (with chapter 9 of the second part connected to it) that deals with Marsilio Ficino's astrological theory of emanation as applied to poetical inspiration and to the concept of genius as "daemon geniturae." Owing to the somewhat repetitive style, the second part of the monograph can be read independently. It contains valuable information on the relations between Italian and German humanism--ranging between admiration, imitation, and a certain sense of rivalry--and on the self-estimation of German Neo-Latin humanists as poets. Students of authors like Conrad Celtis, Joachim Vadian, or other German humanist poets will also appreciate the numerous and informative footnotes and the rich bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

But anybody wanting to learn what "divine inspiration" means (to Italian philosophers, to German poets, or to whoever claims to participate in it or prays to receive it) will have to gather the answers as they are scattered rather randomly throughout the book: it is a guarantee of poetical truth; it is the poet's claim on creative independence; it is a gift, a task, and a destiny; it is a nonreligious form of piety; it is spiritual nobility and distinction by birth. Yet there is another aspect to it, which is passed by unmentioned in this book: as the mark of genius it is also a boast under a very transparent veil of modesty, namely the promise of a stylistic excellence next to perfection.

ELISABETH BLUM

Universitat Munster