Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

Katona Gábor: Twentieth Century Critical Bias Concerning the Choice of a Dominating Philosophical Influence in idney's Defence

104 "The poet is a metaphoric Melker, the reader is a metaphoric poet; language is a metaphor of logos, nature is a metaphor of God:

... every second term of every pair is a figuring forth, by the art of imitation of the first term. To say, therefore, that Sidney ontologizes metaphor means that he posits all creativity as productive of metaphor and all creating as metaphoric."^ Ernst Cassirer writes about the heightened awareness of metaphoric creation in Qf) the Renaissance. Bergvall claims that the emphasis on Platonic and Neoplatonic thinking in the Defence "has been a "salutary counterbalance" to an earlier insistence on the Aristotelian inheritance."-*

1 Nevertheless, almost every critic, perhaps Levao and DeNeef being the only significant exceptions, detects a dominating cultural influence^ either Platonic or Aristotelian, in the Defence. When Bergvall refers to Miles Leland's distiction between Clementine, i.e. Augustinian and Florentine Neoplatonism-^, he believes that similarly to Melanchton's writings on rhetoric the Defence belongs to the tradition of the former school. It is important that Colet and More sided with the Augustinian line of thought. John Dee may have been the only man of reputation in England, whose interests were clearly gnostic as well as hermetic, and Sidney had a low opinion of him. It seems to be a logical conclusion that there is one dominating influence in the Defence and it is Augustinian Piantonism. Unfortunately, Bergvall jumps to this conclusion all too hurriedly^, and forgets that Sidney's writing marks the coming of age of a self-supporting theory of literature. Even when he serves "Protestant cultural propaganda", Sidney transcends this bias. In his estimation of Sidney's interpretation of the Platonic heritage, DeNeef is more careful than Bergvall: "If Sidney is working in a tradition that is basically Augustinian, regardless of his direct sources, than one might ask why he calls the text metaphoric rather than allegorical of figurative. Both terms have long traditions in defining poetry, particularly in "defences" of poetry. In line with my earlier argument, I can only suggest that Sidney's intentions in the Apology is to ontologize metaphor.^

4 In Italian Neoplatonism, perpetually moving imagination is restricted to the sphere of opinion (doxa) as opposed to real knowledge (episteme). Calvin, however, claims that the imagination is the only uncorrupted instrument of knowledge.^ Empirical knowledge and imagination transform and purify each other. Transcending Neoplatonic gnosticism, Sidney preserves the dignified status of the imagination as the instrument of poetic inspiration. While "infected will" reduces conscience to a state of chaos, "erected wit" of which inspiration is the core, creates a new order of existence on a higher