The Drunken Silenus

The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality by Morgan Meis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is an extended personal meditation on Peter Paul Rubens's painting of the drunken Silenus.

Silenus was the tutor of Dionysus (whom the Romans called Bacchus), the dying and rising Graeco-Roman god of wine. Silenus was also the leader of the Satyrs, the half-human, half-goat companions of Dionysus. Silenus is shown as a fat old man, and, in contrast to his companions, his drunkenness is not the drunkenness of frenzied excess; in Rubens's painting it is the semi-conscious stumbling drunkenness of one who drinks to forget.

What made me want to read this book in the first place was the appearance of Silenus, Dionysus and their retinue in C.S. Lewis's children's novel Prince Caspian. And while this book doesn't explain it, it certainly gives more of the background.

Morgan Meis takes us on a journey, starting with the life and times of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), going back to ancient Greece, when the cult of Dionysus flourished, and forward to the time of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who had his own view of Silenus, whom he regarded as the father of Greek tragedy.

Meis examines the significance of Silenus against the historical background of each of these periods with an intertwining of history, biography, art history, philosophy and religion, with a great deal of personal speculation thrown in. None of these is treated in a formal academic way; there are no footnotes or other references, though there is a short bibliography at the end. But this broad, comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach does present Silenus, and Rubens himself, in a more holistic way than, say, a purely art-historical approach would do. The only fault I could find with this approach is that at times Meis tends to become too verbose and repetitious.

I found the book stimulating. It stimulates an interest in all these topics. One does not necessarily have to accept all Meis's speculations, but one can treat them as a starting point for one's own. Rubens painted the drunken Silenus at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, and the book would be interesting to anyone interested in that period, or art of that period.

One regret is that I could not find a decent reproduction of the painting online, and none is included in the book. The ones I could find online lacked the detail that is described in the book, and a full-colour reproduction would have been a useful additions.

In addition to being tutor to Dionysus, Silenus was a philosopher and a prophet, and when the legendary King Midas asked him what was the best thing for man, Silenus answered that the best thing for man was never to have been born, and the next best thing, having been born, was to die.

That's a pretty pessimistic outlook on life, and makes me wonder, even more, why C.S. Lewis would include him in a book written for children, even though he doesn't mention that side of Silenus. According to Meis, however, Nietzsche liked it:

The Greeks, Nietzsche thinks, the ancient Greeks— the Greeks of the satyr plays and the music in the forest, the Greeks who came before the classical period of Plato and the brilliant days of Greek rationalism, the Greeks before that, the ones who danced the Sicinnis dance and celebrated their secret rites—those Greeks were bold enough to make a health of their pessimism. They were strong, thought Nietzsche, tremendous in their ability to think that pessimism all the way through. Nay, to live that pessimism all the way through. That’s the way Nietzsche thought about it.

For Meis, the tragedy of Silenus is that he is immortal without being fully divine; he cannot die although at times he longs to do so. This is reminiscent of Tolkien's elves, for whom death is "the gift of Illuvatar", for which they envy men.

Faced with such a fate, it is perhaps unsurprising that Silenus should seek refuge in liquor. Again, as Meis puts it:

Silenus is, after all, somewhere between dying and not dying. He is not fully immortal like Dionysus, he isn’t a true god, nor is he fully mortal like King Midas, since he must always exist in order to be the attendant of Dionysus as Dionysus is perennially born and then torn apart and then reborn and then torn apart again. And Silenus is also, we should mention again, extremely drunk in the painting. And one of the key aspects of being very drunk, as everyone knows, is that you are conscious without being all the way conscious. You are there without being all the way there. You are present while at the same being absent. You are moving around without going anywhere.

For C.S. Lewis, however, even Dionysus, though a god, is not the True God. He is a creature, created, not begotten, and it is only in Christ that both Dionysus and Silenus find true fulfilment. In Prince Caspian Silenus is still tipsy, and still falls off his donkey, but it is the tipsiness of revelling rather than the drunkenness of oblivion.

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